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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 07.04.2026 à 09:20

Pluralistic: Switzerland's Goldilocks fiber (07 Apr 2026)


Today's links

  • Switzerland's Goldilocks fiber: Public provision is a layered question.
  • Hey look at this: Delights to delectate.
  • Object permanence: EU appoints henhouse fox (copyright); Emacs x Tron: Legacy; Spammer v dead man's AOL account; Scott Walker's pork fountain; "No toilets, try Amazon"; Iceland falls (x Panama Papers); Rooms in Milanese sewers; China bans Panama Papers; "Parent Hacks"; "The Nameless City"; Phishing the world's top breach expert.
  • Upcoming appearances: Toronto, Montreal, Toronto, San Francisco, London, Berlin, NYC, Hay-on-Wye, London.
  • 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 vintage idyllic picture-postcard view of Lucerne, Switzerland; it features an impressive lakeside building and two elegant span bridges, with snow-capped Alps in the background. The image has been altered: a 'code waterfall' effect (as seen in the credit sequences of the Wachowskis' 'Matrix' movies) cascades down over the mountains and streaks across the water of the lake. Three massive fiber optic bundles rear up out of the harbor, their cut tips glowing white. The Swiss flag atop the lakeside building is haloed with radiant glowing streaks.

Switzerland's Goldilocks fiber (permalink)

If you live in Switzerland you can get a 25Gbit fiber link to your home. That's 25Gbit symmetrical – upload and download. On a dedicated connection that's yours and yours alone. From multiple providers. And you can switch providers with the click of a mouse. It's the ne plus ultra, magnifico, wunderschön:

https://www.init7.net/de/internet/fiber7/

In a fascinating blog post, Stefan Schüller unpacks how this came to pass, in Switzerland, a country known for its impassable mountains and its impossible national telco (Swisscom):

https://sschueller.github.io/posts/the-free-market-lie/

Schüller describes the Swiss system as a kind of Goldilocks approach that's midway between two failed systems: the American "free market" system and the German state provision system.

Most people in the US can't get fiber at all, and if you can get it, it's probably 1Gbit, and available from a single provider (that's nearly my situation in Los Angeles, where I can buy 2Gbit symmetrical fiber from AT&T, who run a shared connection on old Worldcom fiber they've lit up). Some (very foolish) people say that Starlink represents a competitive alternative to fiber. This is nonsense – first, because Starlink is another natural monopoly (how many competing satellite constellations can we cram into stable orbits before they start smashing into each other?), and second, because satellite is millions of times slower than fiber:

https://www.somebits.com/weblog/tech/bad/starlink-nov-2022-data-caps.html

In Germany, most people also have a single fiber provider, and the connection they get is shared, and caps out at 1-2Gbit.

Meanwhile, the Swiss can get connections that are far faster, and cheaper. How did they do it?

For starters, the Swiss recognized what any Simcity player knows: fiber is a "natural monopoly." It doesn't make any sense to build multiple, competing fiber networks – any more than it would make sense to build multiple, competing sewer systems or electric grids.

In the US, private fiber providers get city permits to dig up the roads and lay their network. If you have two competing networks, they dig up the road twice.

You'd think that the (more regulated) Germans would lay a single network, but they, too, have multiple, competing networks. German regulators have a complex set of priorities and constraints: to encourage competition, they promote the idea of competing networks in competing trenches, often just meters apart (rather than on competing services running over the same fiber and/or fiber run through the same conduit – pipe – laid in a single trench).

This makes setting up fiber extremely capital-intensive, so Germany backstops this system with "essential facilities sharing" – a rule that requires the incumbent (formerly state-owned, now partially state-owned) Deutsche Telekom to offer space in its conduit to smaller ISPs that want to thread their own fiber from their data-centers to their customers' homes. This is a good idea in theory – but in practice, DT has largely captured its regulators and so it is free to place all kinds of administrative hurdles in the paths of competitors seeking to use its lines.

The result is that Germans can get fiber from multiple, heavily capitalized network providers who overbuilt redundant systems under the city streets, squandering capital digging trenches that they could have spent on providing faster and/or cheaper connections.

Meanwhile, in the US, they leave this all up to "the market" (though, of course, there's no way "the market" could get fiber laid down without public participation, because the clearing price for privately negotiated licenses to dig up every street in town is "infinity"). The US is dominated by a cartel of massive incumbents: there's AT&T (formerly a regulated monopoly that was so entangled with the US government that it was effectively a for-profit state enterprise) and the cable giants, Comcast and Charter, who divide up the country into exclusive territories like the Pope dividing up the "New World."

These companies generally enjoy regional monopolies, which means they're less interested in making profits (money you get by mobilizing capital) than they are from extracting rent (money you get from sweating assets). For example, when Frontier went bankrupt in 2020, we got to look at its internal bookkeeping system, and learned that the company treated 1m customers who had no alternative carriers as special assets because it could charge them more for worse service and poor maintenance:

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

This means that US fiber networks tend to be underbuilt (the opposite of Germany's overbuilt networks), meaning that even if you're buying "gigabit" fiber, you're probably sharing that one gig connection with your whole block or neighborhood, so you only get your nominal throughput at weird hours when all the other subscribers aren't streaming Netflix.

(Note that there are cities in the US with a better situation; particularly cities served by Ting, which is owned by Hover, the amazing domain registry. Ting operates an excellent mobile carrier and a fiber networks in many cities. If you are lucky enough to have Ting as an option, then you should treasure that option.)

So, that's Germany and America. What did they do in Switzerland?

For starters, they ran a four-strand, dedicated line (an insulated wire with four separate strands of fiber in it) to every house. That wire terminates at your wall with a "neutral, open hub." Any carrier can provide service over those four strands: Swisscom (the incumbent, majority state-owned carrier); Init7 or Salt (national, commercial carriers); or a local ISP.

Each of the strands in your neutral hub operate independently. That means that you can switch from one carrier to another with a click. You can also run two or more carriers' signal through your hub, meaning that you can try out a new carrier before canceling your old one. The carriers compete on price, speed and customer service – but they don't compete on who can actually connect your home to the internet.

The origins of this excellent system are in 2008, when Switzerland's Federal Communications Commission convened a roundtable to determine the future of the country's broadband. Incredibly, it was Swisscom that pushed for the multi-strand, dedicated fiber system, on the grounds that anything less would lead to monopolization.

I say "incredibly," because in all my travels over the past three decades, a single encounter with Swisscom stands out as the most absurd and backwards run-in I ever experienced with a telco.

It was while I was working as EFF's delegate to the United Nations in Geneva, as part of an infinitesimal coalition of digital rights group convened by James Love and Manon Ress of Knowledge Ecology International. Geneva is not a forgiving city for someone working for a cash-strapped NGO: it's a city where everyone (except you) is on a lavish expense account courtesy of a national government, or (better still) an industry body that lobbies the UN.

My usual daggy two-star hotel (which cost as much as a four-star in London) didn't have its own wifi: instead, you signed on through Swisscom, which did not offer its own payment processing. To get onto the Swisscom wifi, you had to buy a scratch-off prepaid card that was good for a certain number of hours or minutes. The hotel was always sold out of these cards.

So my normal ritual upon my arrival in Geneva was to scour the tobacco shops around the train station for scratch-off cards. Normally, this would take four or five tries – the shops would either be completely sold out, or would only have the two-hour cards (needless to say, these were a lot more expensive on a per-hour basis than the one-day and multi-day cards).

On one trip, though, all the shops were sold out of these cards, so I skipped breakfast the next morning to wait outside the doors of the Swisscom offices, which opened five minutes late (the only business in Switzerland that wasn't achingly prompt!). The clerk let me in eventually, but when I approached his counter, he made me trudge to the opposite end of the room to take a number (I was the only person in the shop).

After an ostentatious delay, the clerk called out "Numero un!" and I went up to his counter and asked for a three-day card. No dice, he was sold out. Two-day cards? Nope. One-day? Uh-uh. He only had two-hour cards, too. Literally, the Swiss national telco had run out of integers.

This incident stuck with me so durably that I wrote it into my third novel, Someone Comes To Town, Someone Leaves Town. You can hear me read that passage here:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/08/17/aura-of-benevolence/#sctt-slt

So it's frankly amazing to me to learn that Swisscom – who will forever be synonymous in my mind with the most catastrophically stupid internet delivery system imaginable – demanded this anti-monopoly fiber rollout.

But – as Schüller points out – Swisscom's foray into uncharacteristic reasonableness was short-lived. By 2020, the company had regressed to its mean, and was demanding an end to the neutral, four-strand, point-to-point system, petitioning for regulatory permission to switch to a cheaper, slower, shared hub-and-spoke system. This system wouldn't just be slower – it would also require all of Swisscom's rivals to rent access to its fiber, with Swisscom having the final say over who could compete with it and how.

This went all the way to the Swiss federal courts, who ruled that Swisscom had failed to demonstrate "sufficient technological or economic grounds" for the change and fined the company CHF18m for wasting everyone's time with this stupid idea (that is, "violating Swiss competition law"). And so it is that, in 2026, you can get 25Gbit symmetrical fiber throughout Switzerland. Wunderschön!

Schüller closes out his piece with a set of recommendations for countries hoping to replicate Switzerland's broadband miracle: open access to physical infrastructure; point-to-point service; neutral fiber standards; municipal fiber; and strong antitrust enforcement to keep the incumbent carriers in line.

These are great recommendations; they address the contradiction of regulated monopoly telcoms provision. On the one hand, these networks are natural monopolies, and they can only exist with extensive government intervention (at a minimum, to clear the way for poles, trenches and conduit for the physical fiber).

On the other hand, telcoms (especially broadband) play an important role in the political realm, because broadband connections are essential to civic and political engagement. You can't turn people out for a protest, or run an election campaign, a referendum, a ballot initiative, a regulatory notice-and-comment campaign, or even a campaign to get people to a public meeting or listening session without broadband.

This means that state-provided broadband is an incredibly tempting target for political corruption and regulatory capture. Think of all the terrible things that governments are doing with broadband regulation today, like Trump demanding that service providers turn over the identities and locations of his political enemies so that ICE can hunt them down and kidnap or murder them; or "age verification" systems that accumulate mountains of easily raided personal information on adults and children.

Do you want Trump's FCC chairman Brendan Carr setting content moderation policies for your internet connection? The guy who wants to pull TV and radio stations' broadcast licenses if they criticize Trump and Israel's catastrophic Iran war?

https://www.techdirt.com/2026/03/17/brendan-carr-pretends-to-be-tough-demands-broadcasters-support-disastrous-war/

Do you want your local ISP being run by your mayor? I mean, sure, there are some reasonable mayors out there, but imagine if your ISP was managed by Eric Adams, Boris Johnson…or Rob Ford:

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

Saying that broadband should be run "like a utility," raises more questions than it answers. I, too, want broadband run "like a utility," but that doesn't mean that I want the whole show to be provided solely by my federal or municipal government. A "utility" model for broadband should mean running conduit to every home in town, with point-to-point connections that deliver broadband via a municipally owned network – but not just that.

The municipal network should also offer "essential facilities sharing" in two forms: first, they should allow anyone to set up an ISP by renting shelf-space in the municipal data-center and installing their own switches that can provide internet to anyone in town. This would let large and small companies set up ISPs, as well as co-ops and nonprofits, or even tinkerers wanting to provide access to a group of friends. Beyond that, the city should rent space in the conduit itself, to support point-to-point links beyond those offered by the city – for example, between a university campus and an offsite supercomputing center, or two buildings owned by the same company, or even as a parallel set of fiber connections run by someone who's fed up with getting their internet service from Eric Adams.

This is a "pluralized" utility model: one that involves the city in providing infrastructure at several layers, as well as a "public option" – but which doesn't allow a city that's in thrall to Moms For Liberty to decide what you can say on the internet.

This principle generalizes beyond internet provision, too. Many people have observed that social media, with its strong "network effects" (meaning its value increases as more people use it), could be a "natural monopoly" and want a social media "utility." I can see the reasoning there, but if there's one thing we've learned from zuckermuskian legacy social media, it's that centralized control over speech forums is a moral hazard and an attractive nuisance. It's a political prize beyond measure, and it attracts all sorts of skullduggerous bids to suborn it and harness it to some political faction.

But there's a pluralized utility model for social media, too, thanks to modern, federated social media systems like Mastodon and Bluesky. These are open platforms that can support multiple, interconnected servers that all talk to one another. Unlike, say, Twitter, where you can only talk to other Twitter users, federated social media allows you to talk with anyone on any server, provided they want to talk with you.

As with fiber, a "utility" model for federated social media would feature public intervention at multiple layers of the system. Governments could (should!) run their own servers, providing the canonical source of government information. They can also provide turnkey cloud services for people who want to start their own services – and they can spin out the code that goes into these services into free/open source projects that others can use (and contribute to). Governments could support people who are trying to migrate off of legacy social media (for example, through library workshops and helplines), and pay to label and tag media (for example, media that is compliant with the public education curriculum). Governments could also offer public servers where you could sign up to get online – and because federated social media makes it easy to move your account from one server to another, it would be easy to move from that server to one run by a nonprofit, a co-op or a business:

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

Think of this pluralized utility model as being something like your city's roads. It's great for your city to provide roads, and great for them to run buses on those roads, and to create bike lanes and bike parking spots and other infrastructure. For roads to be "public," it does not follow that everything on them be licensed and operated by the municipal government: we can still have private bikes, bikeshares, regulated taxis and licensed private motor vehicles. The roads are still "public" but Boris Johnson doesn't get to decide where you can go.

A utility model needn't be all-or-nothing. As the Swiss have demonstrated, public provision of various layers of the system, combined with strong regulation, combined with a public option, can deliver a best-of-all-worlds solution.

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 Recording industry lobbyist appointed head of copyright for European Commission https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2011/04/top-music-industry-lawyer-now-eu-copyright-chief/

#15yrsago How emacs got into Tron: Legacy https://web.archive.org/web/20110407224426/http://jtnimoy.net/workviewer.php?q=178

#15yrsago Dead man’s AOL account hijacked by spammer https://ip.topicbox.com/groups/ip/T274c51b2ba843fb0-Mb6bf8853b1ed34a26b07ce44/deceasesd-father-in-law-spamming-friends-and-family-two-years-on

#15yrsago Scarring Party: megaphone songs, sea chanteys and dark vaudeville tunes https://web.archive.org/web/20110406044523/http://www.avclub.com/milwaukee/articles/the-scarring-party-losing-teeth%2C43871/

#15yrsago Snaggly table made out of computer junk https://web.archive.org/web/20110406044521/http://brcdesigns.com/furniture/binary-low-table

#15yrsago Scott Walker gives cushy $85.5K/year government job to major donor’s young, underqualified son https://web.archive.org/web/20110406040138/https://thinkprogress.org/2011/04/04/scott-walker-hires-dropout/

#15yrsago Closing down Borders sign: “No toilets, try Amazon” https://web.archive.org/web/20110406044522/https://consumerist.com/2011/04/sign-at-borders-store-closing-in-chicago-tells-customers-where-to-find-a-restroom.html

#15yrsago What is legitimate “newsgathering” and what is “piracy”? https://zunguzungu.wordpress.com/2011/04/05/why-arianna-huffington-is-bill-kellers-somali-pirate/

#10yrsago Iceland’s Prime Minister asks to dissolve Parliament https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-35966412

#10yrsago Artist installs rooms beneath Milan’s sewer entrances https://web.archive.org/web/20160406132425/https://www.biancoshock.com/borderlife.html

#10yrsago Banned on China’s Internet: all discussion of the Panama Papers https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-china-35957235

#10yrsago Google reaches into customers’ homes and bricks their gadgets https://arlogilbert.com/the-time-that-tony-fadell-sold-me-a-container-of-hummus-cb0941c762c1#.srp9ym34a

#10yrsago Middle class housing projects are the Bay Area’s future https://www.newyorker.com/culture/cultural-comment/welcome-to-the-future-middle-class-housing-projects

#10yrsago Pollster explains how Chamber of Commerce can steamroller empathetic execs into opposing progressive policies https://web.archive.org/web/20160406190524/https://gawker.com/business-execs-support-progressive-policies-but-the-ch-1768898477

#10yrsago How to write about scientists who are women https://www.doublexscience.org/the-finkbeiner-test/

#10yrsago Garden: XKCD’s latest maddening, relaxing webtoy https://xkcd.com/1663/#3978da67-1ead-45e1-a293-9c8e4918a147

#10yrsago Parent Hacks: illustrated guide is the best kind of parenting book https://memex.craphound.com/2016/04/05/parent-hacks-illustrated-guide-is-the-best-kind-of-parenting-book/

#10yrsago The Nameless City: YA graphic novel about diplomacy, hard and soft power, colonialism, bravery, and parkour https://memex.craphound.com/2016/04/05/the-nameless-city-ya-graphic-novel-about-diplomacy-hard-and-soft-power-colonialism-bravery-and-parkour/

#5yrsago How Facebook will benefit from its massive breach https://pluralistic.net/2021/04/05/zucks-oily-rags/#into-the-breach

#1yrago How the world's leading breach expert got phished https://pluralistic.net/2025/04/05/troy-hunt/#teach-a-man-to-phish

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 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/)

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

  • "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, 2027

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


Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources:

Currently writing: "The Post-American Internet," a sequel to "Enshittification," about the better world the rest of us get to have now that Trump has torched America. First draft complete. Second draft underway.

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

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

  • A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING

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

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

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

How to get Pluralistic:

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Pluralistic.net

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https://pluralistic.net/plura-list

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

https://mamot.fr/@pluralistic

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

Medium (no ads, paywalled):

https://doctorow.medium.com/

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

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 06.04.2026 à 11:04

Pluralistic: Your boss wants to use surveillance data to cut your wages (06 Apr 2026)


Today's links


A robot in an old fashioned frock coat. In one hand, he holds a giant magnifying glass. On the other stands a child laborer - a coal miner from the 1910s, squinting at the camera. Terrifying energy beams streak out of the robot's eyes into the glass and at the child. The background is an extremely dark, very roughed-up US $100 bill.

Your boss wants to use surveillance data to cut your wages (permalink)

What industry calls "personalized pricing" is really surveillance pricing: using digital tools' flexibility to change the price for each user, and using surveillance data to guess the worst price you'll accept:

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

At root, surveillance pricing allows companies to revalue both your savings and your labor. If you get charged $2 for something I only pay $1 for, the seller is essentially reaching into your bank account and revaluing the dollars in it at 50 cents apiece. If you get paid $1 for a job that I make $2 for, then the boss is valuing your labor at 50% of my labor:

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

Surveillance pricing is a key part of enshittification, relying on three of the key enshittificatory factors that have transformed this era into the enshittocene:

I. Monopoly: Surveillance pricing is undesirable to both workers and buyers, so in a competitive market, surveillance pricing would drive labor and consumption to non-surveilling rivals:

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

II. Regulatory capture: Surveillance pricing only exists because of weak regulation and weak enforcement of existing regulations. To engage in surveillance pricing, a company must first put you under surveillance, something that is only possible in the absence of effective privacy law.

In the USA, privacy law hasn't been updated since Congress passed a law in 1988 that banned video-store clerks from disclosing your VHS rentals:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/10/31/losing-the-crypto-wars/#surveillance-monopolism

In the EU, the strong privacy provisions in the GDPR have been neutralized by US tech giants who fly an Irish flag of convenience. Ireland attracts these companies by allowing them to evade their taxes, but it can only keep these companies by allowing them to break any law that gets in their way, because if Meta can pretend to be Irish this week, it could pretend to be Maltese (or Cypriot, Luxembourgeois, or Dutch) next week:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/05/15/finnegans-snooze/#dirty-old-town

What's more, competition laws in the EU and the USA ban surveillance pricing, but a half-century of lax competition law enforcement has allowed companies to routinely engage in the "unfair and deceptive methods of competition" banned in both territories.

III. Twiddling: "Twiddling" is my word for the way that digitized businesses can use computers' flexibility to alter their prices, offers, and other fundamentals on a per-user, per-session basis. It's not enough to spy on users: to engage in surveillance pricing, you have to be able to mobilize that surveillance data from instant to instant, changing the prices for every user. This can only be done once a business has been digitized:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/02/19/twiddler/

Combine monopoly, weak privacy law, weak competition law, and digitization, and you don't just make surveillance pricing possible – at that point, it's practically inevitable. This is what it means to create an enshittogenic policy environment: by arranging policy so that the most awful schemes of the worst people are the most profitable, you guarantee that those people will end up organizing commercial and labor markets.

When surveillance pricing is applied to labor, we call it "algorithmic wage discrimination," a term coined by Veena Dubal based on her research with Uber drivers:

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

Uber uses historic data on drivers to make inferences about how economically precarious they are, and then extracts a "desperation premium" from their wages. Drivers who are pickier about which rides they accept ("pickers") are offered higher wages than drivers who take any ride ("ants"):

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4331080

On the back-end, Uber is inferring that the reason an ant will accept a worse job is that they have fewer choices – they are more strapped for cash and/or have fewer options for earning a higher wage.

This is a straightforward form of algorithmic wage discrimination, using the blunt signal of how discriminating a driver is when signing onto a job to titer the subsequent wage offered to that driver. More sophisticated forms of algorithmic wage discrimination draw on external sources of data to set the price of your labor.

That's the situation for contract nurses, whose traditional brick-and-mortar staffing agencies have been replaced by nationwide apps that market themselves as "Uber for nursing." These apps use commercial surveillance data from the unregulated data-broker sector to check on how much credit card debt a nurse is carrying and whether that debt is delinquent to set a wage: the more debt you have and the more dire your indebtedness is, the lower the wage you are offered (and therefore the more debt you accumulate – lather, rinse, repeat):

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

Surveillance wages are now proliferating to other parts of the economy, as "consultancies" offer software to employers that let them set all parts of your compensation – base wage, annual raises, and bonuses – based on your perceived desperation, as derived from commercial surveillance data that has been collected about you:

https://www.marketwatch.com/story/employers-are-using-your-personal-data-to-figure-out-the-lowest-salary-youll-accept-c2b968fb

Genna Contino's Marketwatch article on the phenomenon offers a concise definition of "surveillance wages":

a system in which wages are based not on an employee’s performance or seniority, but on formulas that use their personal data, often collected without employees’ knowledge.

This means that carrying a credit-card balance, taking out a payday loan, or even discussing your indebtedness on social media can all lead to lower wages in the future. Contino references a recent report released by Dubal and tech strategist Wilneida Negrón, surveying 500 large firms, which concluded that surveillance wages are now being offered in sectors as diverse as "healthcare, customer service, logistics and retail." Customers for surveillance wage tools include "Intuit, Salesforce, Colgate-Palmolive, Amwell and Healthcare Services Group":

https://equitablegrowth.org/how-artificial-intelligence-uncouples-hard-work-from-fair-wages-through-surveillance-pay-practices-and-how-to-fix-it/

After a brief crackdown under Biden, the Trump regime has been extraordinarily welcoming to surveillance pricing companies, dropping investigations and cases against firms that engaged in the practice. A few states are stepping in to fill the gap, with New York state passing a rule requiring disclosure of surveillance pricing – a modest step that was nevertheless fought tooth-and-nail by the state's businesses.

In Colorado, a new House bill called the "Prohibit Surveillance Data to Set Prices and Wages Act" would prohibit the use of personal information in wage-setting:

https://leg.colorado.gov/bills/hb25-1264

This bill hasn't passed yet, but it's already doing useful work. Companies universally deny using surveillance data to set wages, insisting that they merely pay for consulting services that give them advice on how they could do surveillance wages – but don't actually take that advice. However, these same companies – including Uber and Lyft – are ferociously lobbying against the bill, raising an obvious question, articulated by the bill's co-sponsor Rep Javier Mabrey (D-1): if these companies don't pay surveillance wages, then "what is the problem of codifying in law that you’re not allowed to?"

Surveillance wages are a rare profitable use-case for AI, in part because surveillance wages don't need to be "correct" in order to be effective. An employee who is offered a wage that's slightly higher than the lowest sum they'd accept still represents a savings to the company's wage-bill. As ever, AI is great for fully automating tasks if you don't care whether they're done well:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/03/22/nobodys-home/#squeeze-that-hog

The fact that surveillance wages are calculated by external contractors enables employers to engage in otherwise illegal price-fixing. If all the garages in town set mechanics' wages using the same surveillance pricing tool, then a mechanic looking for a job will get the same lowball offer from all nearby employers. If those bosses were to gather around a table and fix the wage for any (or all) mechanics, that would be wildly illegal, but the fact that this is done via a software package lets the bosses claim they're not actually colluding.

This is a common practice in other forms of price-fixing. We see it in meat, potato products, and, of course, rental accommodations (hey there, Realpage!). It's a genuinely stupid ruse based on the absurd idea that "it's not a crime if we do it with an app":

https://pluralistic.net/2025/01/25/potatotrac/#carbo-loading

Speaking of crimes that are implausibly deniable when undertaken with an app: surveillance wages also allow employers to offer lower wages to women and brown and Black people while maintaining the pretense that they're in compliance with laws banning gender and racial discrimination.

In the wider economy, women and racialized people are already offered lower wages and – thanks to the legacy of racial discrimination in employment and housing – are more likely to be indebted:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/06/06/the-rents-too-damned-high/

By tapping into data brokers' dossiers that reveal the economic precarity of jobseekers, surveillance pricing allows employers to systematically lower the wages of women and Black and brown people, who have the highest incidence of indebtedness, while still claiming to offer race- and gender-blind wages. This is a phenomenon that Patrick Ball calls "empiricism washing": first, move the illegal racist discrimination into an algorithm, then insist that "numbers can't be racist."

But this isn't just about lowering wages at the bottom of the employment market. In recent history, the employers most eager to illegally lower their workers' wages are tech bosses, who had to pay massive fines for illegally colluding on "no poach" agreements to suppress the earning power of high-paid computer programmers:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Tech_Employee_Antitrust_Litigation

(This is why the tech industry is so horny for AI – tech bosses can't wait to fire a ton of programmers and use the resulting terror to force down the wages of the remaining tech workers:)

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

Which means that the very programmers who write and maintain the surveillance wage software used on the rest of us are especially likely to have the tools they created turned on them.

Hey look at this (permalink)


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

Object permanence (permalink)

#20yrsago Arthur C Clarke fights Buddhist monks over Daylight Savings Time http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/south_asia/4865972.stm

#20yrsago What parts of the .COM space are registered? https://web.archive.org/web/20060411133458/https://www.yafla.com/dforbes/2006/03/29.html

#20yrsago Bomb squad called out to “defuse” life-size Super Mario power-ups https://web.archive.org/web/20060405034455/http://www.recordpub.com/article.php?pathToFile=archive/04012006/news/&file=_news1.txt&article=1&tD=04012006

#20yrsago Poems showing the absurdities of English spelling https://web.archive.org/web/20060405223008/https://www.spellingsociety.org/news/media/poems.php

#20yrsago Isaac Newton’s alchemical “chymistry” notebook scans https://web.archive.org/web/20060612203137/http://webapp1.dlib.indiana.edu/newton/index.jsp

#20yrsago Poems showing the absurdities of English spelling https://web.archive.org/web/20060405223008/https://www.spellingsociety.org/news/media/poems.php

#20yrsago Isaac Newton’s alchemical “chymistry” notebook scans https://web.archive.org/web/20060612203137/http://webapp1.dlib.indiana.edu/newton/index.jsp

#15yrsago Misleading government stats and the innumerate media who repeat them https://www.badscience.net/2011/04/anarchy-for-the-uk-ish/

#15yrsago US Customs’ domain-seizure program blocks free speech, leaves alleged pirates largely unscathed https://torrentfreak.com/us-governments-pirate-domain-seizures-failed-miserably-110403/

#15yrsago Misleading government stats and the innumerate media who repeat them https://www.badscience.net/2011/04/anarchy-for-the-uk-ish/

#15yrsago US Customs’ domain-seizure program blocks free speech, leaves alleged pirates largely unscathed https://torrentfreak.com/us-governments-pirate-domain-seizures-failed-miserably-110403/

#10yrsago Panama Papers: Largest leak in history reveals political and business elite hiding trillions in offshore havens https://www.theguardian.com/news/2016/apr/03/the-panama-papers-how-the-worlds-rich-and-famous-hide-their-money-offshore

#10yrsago America’s teachers are being trained in a harsh interrogation technique that produces false confessions https://web.archive.org/web/20160404143447/https://www.alternet.org/education/why-are-k-12-school-leaders-being-trained-coercive-interrogation-techniques

#10yrsago LA’s new rule: homeless people are only allowed to own one trashcan’s worth of things https://www.latimes.com/local/california/la-me-apartments-demolished-20160402-story.html
#10yrsago Save Netflix! https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2016/04/save-netflix

#10yrsago The TSA spent $1.4M on an app to tell it who gets a random search https://kevin.burke.dev/kevin/tsa-randomizer-app-cost-336000/

#10yrsago Iceland’s Prime Minister says he won’t resign, mass demonstrations gain momentum https://icelandmonitor.mbl.is/news/politics_and_society/2016/03/31/anti_government_demo_planned_for_monday/

#10yrsago Panama Papers reveal the tax-avoidance strategies of David Cameron’s father https://www.theguardian.com/news/2016/apr/04/panama-papers-david-cameron-father-tax-bahamas

#10yrsago Studio sculpts giant coin, photographs it alongside normal objects to make them look tiny https://skrekkogle.com/projects/50c/

#5yrsago China's antitrust surge https://pluralistic.net/2021/04/03/ambulatory-wallets/#sectoral-balances

#5yrsago Consumerism won't defeat Georgia's Jim Crow https://pluralistic.net/2021/04/03/ambulatory-wallets/#christmas-voting-turkeys

#1yrago End-stage capitalism https://pluralistic.net/2025/04/04/anything-that-cant-go-on/#forever-eventually-stops

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 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/)

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

  • "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, 2027

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


Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources:

Currently writing: "The Post-American Internet," a sequel to "Enshittification," about the better world the rest of us get to have now that Trump has torched America. First draft complete. Second draft underway.

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

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

  • A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING

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

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

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

How to get Pluralistic:

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

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

ISSN: 3066-764X

Publié le 04.04.2026 à 09:49

Pluralistic: EU ready to cave to Trump on tech (04 Apr 2026)


Today's links


The EU flag. The field has been turned from blue to orange. In the center of the circle of stars is Trump's open, hooting gob. Behind the orange field we see the faded traces of a printed circuit board.

EU ready to cave to Trump on tech (permalink)

Crises precipitate change. That's no reason to induce a crisis, but you'd be a fool to let a crisis go to waste. Donald Trump is the greatest crisis of our young century, and the EU looks set to squander the opportunity, to its own terrible detriment.

For more than a decade, it's been clear that the American internet was not fit for purpose. The whistleblowers Mark Klein and Edward Snowden revealed that the US had weaponized its status as the world's transoceanic fiber-optic hub to spy on the entire planet:

https://doctorow.medium.com/https-pluralistic-net-2025-11-26-difficult-multipolarism-eurostack-5a527c32f149

US tech giants flouted privacy laws, gleefully plundering the world's cash and data with products that they remorselessly enshittified:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/01/30/zucksauce/#gandersauce

American companies repurposed their over-the-air software update capabilities to remotely brick expensive machinery in service to geopolitical priorities:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/05/08/about-those-kill-switched-ukrainian-tractors/

Then Trump and his tech companies started attacking key public institutions around the world, shutting down access for senior judges who attempted to hold Trump's international authoritarian allies to account for their crimes:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/10/20/post-american-internet/#huawei-with-american-characteristics

If Trump wants to steal Greenland, he doesn't need tanks or missiles. He can just tell Microsoft and Oracle to brick the entire Danish state and all of its key firms, blocking their access to their email archives, files, databases, and other key administrative tools. If Denmark still holds out, Trump can brick all their tractors, smart speakers, and phones. If Denmark still won't give up Greenland, Trump could blackhole all Danish IP addresses for the world's majority of transoceanic fiber. At the click of a mouse, Trump could shut down the world's supply of Lego, Ozempic, and delicious, lethally strong black licorice.

Now, these latent offensive capabilities were obvious long before Trump, but the presidents who weaponized them in the pre-Trump era did so in subtle and deniable ways, or under a state of exception (e.g. in response to spectacular terrorist attacks or in the immediate aftermath of the Russian invasion of Ukraine) that let bystanders assure themselves that this wouldn't become a routine policy.

After all, America profited so much from the status quo in which America and its trading partners all pretended that US tech wouldn't be weaponized for geopolitical aims, so a US president would be a fool to shatter the illusion. And even if the president was so emotionally incontinent that he demanded the naked weaponization of America's defective, boobytrapped tech exports, the power blocs that the president relies on would stop him, because they are so marinated in the rich broth that America drained from the world using Big Tech.

This is "status quo bias" in action. No one wants to let go of the vine they're swinging from until they have a new vine firmly in their grasp – but you can't reach the next vine unless you release your death-grip on your current one. So it was that, year after year, the world allowed itself to become more dependent on America's easily weaponizable tech, making the tech both more dangerous and harder to escape.

Enter Trump (a crisis) (and crises precipitate change). Under Trump, the illusion of a safe interdependence crumbled. Every day, in new and increasingly alarming ways, Trump makes it clear that America doesn't have allies or trading partners, only adversaries and rivals. Every day, Trump proves to the world that American tech isn't merely untrustworthy – it's a live, dire, urgent danger to your state, your companies, and your people. The best time to get shut of the American internet was 15 years ago. The second best time is right fucking now.

NOW!

The result is the burgeoning movement to build a "post-American internet." In Canada, PM Mark Carney's announcement of a "rupture" has the country rethinking its deep connections to the American internet and asking what it could do to escape it:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/01/27/i-want-to-do-it/#now-make-me-do-it

Europe, meanwhile, has multiple, advanced, well-funded initiatives to leave the American internet behind and migrate to a post-American internet, like "Eurostack" and the European Digital Infrastructure Consortium:

https://digital-strategy.ec.europa.eu/en/policies/edic

But status quo bias exerts a powerful gravity. A reactionary counterrevolution is being waged in the European Commission – the permanent bureaucracy that executes Europe's laws and regulations. Within the EC, an ascendant faction has announced plans for a "dialogue" with representatives from the Trump regime to let them direct the enforcement of the Digital Markets Act (DMA) and Digital Services Act (DSA), Europe's landmark 2024 anti-Big Tech regulations:

https://www.politico.eu/article/fatal-decision-eu-slammed-for-caving-to-us-pressure-on-digital-rules/

The DMA and DSA require America's tech giants to open up their platforms in ways that would halt the plunder of Europeans' private data and cash. US tech giants have flatly refused to comply with these rules, relying on Trump to get them out of any obligations under EU law:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/09/26/empty-threats/#500-million-affluent-consumers

That's a sound bet. After all, the last thing Trump did before his inauguration was publicly announce his intention to destroy any country that attempted to enforce these laws:

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/23/us/politics/trump-davos-europe-tariffs.html

He's making good on his threats. He's already sanctioned a group of officials who helped draft the DSA:

https://www.npr.org/2025/12/24/nx-s1-5655855/trump-administration-bars-5-europeans-from-entry-to-the-u-s-over-alleged-censorship

And he's ordered his tech companies to turn over the private emails and messages of other European officials, so he can identify the ones most dangerous to US tech plunder and sanction them, too:

https://www.politico.eu/article/us-congress-judiciary-committee-big-tech-private-communication-eu-officials/

The quislings and appeasers in the Commission who've been spooked by Trump's belligerence (or tempted by offers of cushy jobs in Big Tech after they leave public service) are selling out the EU's future. Caving to Trump won't make him more favorably disposed to Europe or Europeans. Trump treats every capitulation as a sign of weakness that signals that he can safely ignore his end of the bargain and demand twice as much. For Trump, the "art of the deal" can be summed up in one word: reneging.

Within the EU, there's fury at the Commission's announcement of "dialogue." As Politico's Milena Wälde reports, lawmakers like Alexandra Geese (Greens) say that this is a move that eliminates the "sovereign path for Europe" by letting tech giants "grade their own homework." She calls it a "fatal decision for our companies and our democracy."

Moving to the post-American internet is hard – but it will only get harder. Sure, Europe could wait for the next crisis to let go of the Big Tech vine and grab the Eurostack one, but that next crisis will be far, far worse. The EU can't afford to wait for Trump to brick one or more of its member states to (finally, at long last) take this threat seriously:

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

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)

#10yrsago Among a Thousand Fireflies: children’s book shows the sweet, alien love stories unfolding in our own backyards https://memex.craphound.com/2016/04/01/among-a-thousand-fireflies-childrens-book-shows-the-sweet-alien-love-stories-unfolding-in-our-own-backyards/

#10yrsago After biggest bribery scandal in history, police raids and investigations https://www.smh.com.au/business/police-raids-and-more-revelations-the-fallout-of-the-unaoil-scandal-20160401-gnw9mx.html

#10yrsago Bernie Sanders’ South Bronx rally, featuring Rosario Dawson, Spike Lee, and Residente https://www.c-span.org/program/campaign-2016/senator-bernie-sanders-campaign-rally-in-south-bronx/437114

#10yrsago Freshman Missouri Rep almost made it 3 months before introducing bill urging members to say “fiscal,” not “physical” https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2016/03/31/hero-lawmaker-urges-colleagues-to-stop-saying-physical-when-they-mean-fiscal/

#10yrsago Indiana women phone the governor’s office to tell him about their periods https://web.archive.org/web/20160401170206/https://fusion.net/story/286941/periods-for-pence-indiana-women-calling-governor/

#10yrsago United pilot orders Arab-American family off his flight for “safety” https://www.nbcchicago.com/news/national-international/united-airlines-arab-american-plane/58370/

#10yrsago 33 state Democratic parties launder $26M from millionaires for Hillary https://www.counterpunch.org/2016/04/01/how-hillary-clinton-bought-the-loyalty-of-33-state-democratic-parties/

#10yrsago White SC cops pull black passenger out of car, take turns publicly cavity-searching him https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-watch/wp/2016/04/01/video-shows-white-cops-performing-roadside-cavity-search-of-black-man/

#5yrsago The zombie economy and digital arm-breakers https://pluralistic.net/2021/04/02/innovation-unlocks-markets/#digital-arm-breakers

#5yrsago Ontario's drug-dealer premier is shockingly bad at distributing vaccines https://pluralistic.net/2021/04/01/incompetent-drug-dealer/#what-a-dope

#5yrsago The zombie economy and digital arm-breakers https://pluralistic.net/2021/04/02/innovation-unlocks-markets/#digital-arm-breakers

#1yrago What's wrong with tariffs https://pluralistic.net/2025/04/02/me-or-your-lying-eyes/#spherical-cows-on-frictionless-surfaces

#1yrago What's wrong with tariffs https://pluralistic.net/2025/04/02/me-or-your-lying-eyes/#spherical-cows-on-frictionless-surfaces

#1yrago Anyone who trusts an AI therapist needs their head examined https://pluralistic.net/2025/04/01/doctor-robo-blabbermouth/#fool-me-once-etc-etc

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 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/)

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

  • "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, 2027

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


Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources:

Currently writing: "The Post-American Internet," a sequel to "Enshittification," about the better world the rest of us get to have now that Trump has torched America. First draft complete. Second draft underway.

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

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

  • A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING

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

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

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

How to get Pluralistic:

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

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https://pluralistic.net/plura-list

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

https://mamot.fr/@pluralistic

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

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

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

ISSN: 3066-764X

Publié le 02.04.2026 à 12:19

Pluralistic: It's extremely good that Claude's source-code leaked (02 Apr 2026)


Today's links


A hand-tinted picture of a 1950s Univac control room, the walls lined with computer cabinets, a male operator in a suit seated at a steel desk replete with control knobs and an oscilloscope. The image has been altered. A shiny robot is bursting out of a hole in the checked floor; the back wall bears the Anthropic logo, and the main computer cabinet now has the Claude Code logo.

It's extremely good that Claude's source-code leaked (permalink)

Anthropic's developers made an extremely basic configuration error, and as a result, the source-code for Claude Code – the company's flagship coding assistant product – has leaked and is being eagerly analyzed by many parties:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47586778

In response, Anthropic is flooding the internet with "takedown notices." These are a special kind of copyright-based censorship demand established by section 512 of the 1998 Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA 512), allowing for the removal of material without any kind of evidence, let alone a judicial order:

https://www.removepaywall.com/search?url=https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/anthropic-races-to-contain-leak-of-code-behind-claude-ai-agent-4bc5acc7

Copyright is a "strict liability" statute, meaning that you can be punished for violating copyright even if you weren't aware that you had done so. What's more, "intermediaries" – like web hosts, social media platforms, search engines, and even caching servers – can be held liable for the copyright violations their users engage in. The liability is tremendous: the DMCA provides for $150,000 per infringement.

DMCA 512 is meant to offset this strict liability. After all, there's no way for a platform to know whether one of its users is infringing copyright – even if a user uploads a popular song or video, the provider can't know whether they've licensed the work for distribution (or even if they are the creator of that work). A cumbersome system in which users would upload proof that they have such a license wouldn't just be onerous – it would still permit copyright infringement, because there's no way for an intermediary to know whether the distribution license the user provided was genuine.

As a compromise, DMCA 512 absolves intermediaries from liability, if they "expeditiously remove" material upon notice that it infringes someone's copyright. In practice, that means that anyone can send a notice to any intermediary and have anything removed from the internet. The intermediary who receives this notice can choose to ignore it, but if the notice turns out to be genuine, they can end up on the hook for $150,000 per infringement. The intermediary can also choose to allow their user to "counternotify" (dispute the accusation) and can choose to reinstate the material, but they don't have to. Just as an intermediary can't determine whether a user has the rights to the things they post, they also can't tell if the person on the other end of a takedown notice has the right to demand its removal. In practice, this means that a takedown notice, no matter how flimsy, has a very good chance of making something disappear from the internet – forever.

From the outset, DMCA 512 was the go-to tool for corporate censorship, the best way to cover up misdeeds. I first got involved in this back in 2003, when leaked email memos from Diebold's voting machine division revealed that the company knew that its voting machines were wildly insecure, but they were nevertheless selling them to local election boards across America, who were scrambling to replace their mechanical voting machines in the wake of the 2000 Bush v Gore "hanging chad" debacle, which led to Bush stealing the presidency:

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

The stakes couldn't be higher, in other words. Diebold – whose CEO was an avowed GW Bush partisan who'd promised to "deliver the votes for Bush" – was the country's leading voting machine supplier. The company knew its voting machines were defective, that they frequently crashed and lost their vote counts on election night, and that Diebold technicians were colluding with local electoral officials to secretly "estimate" the lost vote totals so that no one would hold either the official or Diebold responsible for these defective machines:

https://www.salon.com/2003/09/23/bev_harris/

Diebold sent thousands of DMCA 512 takedown notices in an attempt to suppress the leaked memos. Eventually, EFF stepped in to provide pro-bono counsel to the Online Policy Group and ended Diebold's flood:

https://www.eff.org/cases/online-policy-group-v-diebold

Diebold wasn't the last company to figure out how to abuse copyright to censor information of high public interest. There's a whole industry of shady "reputation management" companies that collect large sums in exchange for scrubbing the internet of information their clients want removed from the public eye. They specialize in sexual abusers, war criminals, torturers, and fraudsters, and their weapon of choice is the takedown notice. Jeffrey Epstein spent tens of thousands of dollars on "reputation management" services to clean up his online profile:

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/03/18/business/media/jeffrey-epstein-online.html

There are lots of ways to use the takedown system to get true information about your crimes removed from the internet. My favorite is the one employed by Eliminalia, one of the sleazier reputation laundries (even by the industry's dismal standards).

Eliminalia sets up WordPress sites and copies press articles that cast its clients in an unfavorable light to these sites, backdating them so they appear to have been published before the originals. They swap out the bylines for fictitious ones, then send takedowns to Google and other search engines to get the "infringing" stories purged from their search indices. Once the original articles have been rendered invisible to internet searchers, Eliminalia takes down their copy, and the story of their client's war crimes, rapes, or fraud disappears from the public eye:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/04/23/reputation-laundry/#dark-ops

The takedown system is so tilted in favor of censorship that it takes a massive effort to keep even the smallest piece of information online in the face of a determined adversary. In 2007, the key for AACS (a way of encrypting video for "digital rights management") leaked online. The key was a 16-digit number, the kind of thing you could fit in a crossword puzzle, but the position of the industry consortium that created the key was that this was an illegal integer. They sent hundreds of thousands of takedowns over the number, and it was only the determined action of an army of users that kept the number online:

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

The shoot-first, ask-questions-never nature of takedown notices makes for fertile ground for scammers of all kinds, but the most ironic takedown ripoffs are the Youtube copystrike blackmailers.

After Viacom sued Youtube in 2007 over copyright infringement, Google launched its own in-house copyright management system, meant to address Viacom's principal grievance in the suit. Viacom was angry that after they had something removed from Youtube, another user could re-upload it, and they'd have to send another takedown, playing Wack-a-Mole with the whole internet. Viacom didn't want a takedown system, they wanted a staydown system, whereby they could supply Google with a list of the works whose copyrights they controlled and then Youtube would prevent anyone from uploading those works.

(This was extremely funny, because Viacom admitted in court that its marketing departments would "rough up" clips of its programming and upload them to Youtube, making them appear to be pirate copies, in a bid to interest Youtube users in Viacom's shows, and sometimes Viacom's lawyers would get confused and send threatening letters to Youtube demanding that these be removed:)

https://blog.youtube/news-and-events/broadcast-yourself/

Youtube's notice-and-staydown system is Content ID, an incredibly baroque system that allows copyright holders (and people pretending to be copyright holders) to "claim" video and sound files, and block others from posting them. No one – not even the world's leading copyright experts – can figure out how to use this system to uphold copyright:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/06/27/nuke-first/#ask-questions-never

However, there is a large cohort of criminals and fraudsters who have mastered Content ID and they use it to blackmail independent artists. You see, Content ID implements a "three strikes" policy: if you are accused of three acts of copyright infringement, Youtube permanently deletes your videos and bars you from the platform. For performers who rely on Youtube to earn their living – whether through ad-revenues or sponsorships or as a promotional vehicle to sell merchandise, recordings and tickets – the "copystrike" is an existential risk.

Enter the fraudster. A fraudster can set up multiple burner Youtube accounts and file spurious copyright complaints against a creator (usually a musician). After two of these copystrikes are accepted and the performer is just one strike away from losing their livelihood, the fraudster contacts the performer and demands blackmail money to rescind the complaints, threatening to file that final strike and put the performer out of business:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/05/08/copyfraud/#beethoven-just-wrote-music

The fact that copyright – nominally a system intended to protect creative workers – is weaponized against the people it is meant to serve is ironic, but it's not unusual. Copyright law has been primarily shaped by creators' bosses – media companies like Viacom – who brandish "starving artists" as a reason to enact policies that ultimately benefit capital at the expense of labor.

That was what inspired Rebecca Giblin and me to write our 2022 book Chokepoint Capitalism: how is it that copyright has expanded in every way for 40 years (longer duration, wider scope, higher penalties), resulting in media companies that are more profitable than ever, with higher gross and net revenues, even as creative workers have grown poorer, both in total compensation and in the share of the profits they generate?

https://chokepointcapitalism.com/

The first half of Chokepoint Capitalism is a series of case studies that dissect the frauds and scams that both media and tech companies use to steal from creative workers. The second half are a series of "shovel-ready" policy proposals for new laws and rules that would actually put money in artists' pockets. Some of these policy prescriptions are copyright-related, but not all of them.

For example, we have a chapter on how the Hollywood "guild" system (which allows unionized workers to bargain with all the studios at once) has been a powerful antidote to corporate power. This is called "sectoral bargaining" and it's been illegal since 1947's Taft-Hartley Act, but the Hollywood guilds were grandfathered in. When we wrote about the power of sectoral bargaining, it was in reference to the Writers Guild's incredible triumph over the four giant talent agencies, who'd invented a scam that inverted the traditional revenue split between writer and agent, so the agencies were taking in 90% and the writers were getting just 10%:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/08/06/no-vitiated-air/#WME-CAA-next

Two years later, the Hollywood Writers struck again, this time over AI in the writers' room, securing a stunning victory over the major studios:

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

Notably, the writers strike was a labor action, not a copyright action. The writers weren't demanding a new copyright that would allow them to control whether their work could be used to train an AI. They struck for the right not to have their wages eroded by AI – to have the right to use (or not use) AI, as they saw fit, without risking their livelihoods.

Right now, many media companies are demanding a new copyright that would allow them to control AI training, and many creative workers have joined in this call. The media companies aren't arguing against infringing uses of AI models – they're arguing that the mere creation of such a model infringes copyright. They claim that making a transient copy of a work, analyzing that work, and publishing that analysis is a copyright infringement:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/02/09/ai-monkeys-paw/#bullied-schoolkids

Here's a good rule of thumb: any time your boss demands a new rule, you should be very skeptical about whether that rule will benefit you. It's clear that the media companies that have sued the AI giants aren't "anti-AI." They don't want to prevent AI from replacing creative workers – they just want to control how that happens.

When Disney and Universal sue Midjourney, it's not to prevent AI models from being trained on their catalogs and used to pauperize the workers whose work is in those catalogs. What these companies want is to be paid a license fee for access to their catalogs, and then they want the resulting models to be exclusive to them, and not available to competitors:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/03/03/its-a-trap-2/#inheres-at-the-moment-of-fixation

These companies are violently allergic to paying creative workers. Disney takes the position that when it buys a company like Lucasfilm, it secures the right to publish the works Lucasfilm commissioned, but not the obligation to pay the royalties that Lucasfilm owes when those works are sold:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/04/30/disney-still-must-pay/#pay-the-writer

As Theresa Nielsen Hayden quipped during the Napster Wars: "Just because you're on their side, it doesn't mean they're on your side." If these companies manage to get copyright law expanded to restrict scraping, analysis, and publication of factual information, they won't use those new powers to increase creators' pay – they'll use them the same way they've used every new copyright created in the past 40 years, to make themselves richer at the expense of artists:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/03/03/just-a-stick/#authorsbargain

The Claude Code leak is full of fascinating information about a tool that – like Diebold's voting machines – is at the very center of the most important policy debates of our time. Here's just one example: Claude is almost certainly implicated in the US missile that murdered a building full of little girls in Iran last month:

https://www.theguardian.com/news/2026/mar/26/ai-got-the-blame-for-the-iran-school-bombing-the-truth-is-far-more-worrying

Of course I see the irony. Anthropic has taken an extremely aggressive posture on copyright's "limitations and exceptions," arguing that it can train its models on any information it can find, and that it can knowingly download massive troves of infringing works for that purpose. It's darkly hilarious to see the company firehosing copyright complaints by the thousands in order to prevent the dissemination, dissection and discussion of the source-code that leaked due to the company's gross incompetence:

https://developers.slashdot.org/story/26/04/01/158240/anthropic-issues-copyright-takedown-requests-to-remove-8000-copies-of-claude-code-source-code#comments

But what's objectionable about Anthropic – and the AI sector – isn't copyright. The thing that makes these companies disgusting is their gleeful, fraudulent trumpeting about how their products will destroy the livelihoods of every kind of worker:

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

And it's their economic fraud, the inflation of a bubble that will destroy the economy when it bursts:

https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-subprime-ai-crisis-is-here/

It's their enthusiastic deployment of AI tools for mass surveillance and mass killing. (Anthropic is no exception, despite what you may have heard:)

https://www.thetechbubble.info/p/how-much-a-dollar-cost

If the media bosses get their way, and manage to make it even more illegal – and practically harder – to host, discuss, and publish facts about copyrighted works, then leaks like the Claude Code disclosures will never see the light of day. It's only because of decades of hard-fought battles to push back on this nonsense that we are able to identify and learn about the defects in Claude Code that are revealed by this source-code leak.

I'm angry about the AI industry, but not because of copyright. I'm angry at them for the reasons Cat Valente articulated so well in her "Blood Money" essay:

https://catvalente.substack.com/p/blood-money-the-anthropic-settlement

These companies' stated goals are terrible:

They took the books I wrote for children and used them to make it possible for children to not bother with reading ever again. They took the books I wrote about love to create chatbots that isolate people and prevent them from finding human love in the real world, that make it difficult for them to even stand real love, which is not always agreeable, not always positive, not always focused on end-user engagement. They took the books I wrote about hope and glitter in the face of despair and oppression and used it to make a Despair-and-Oppression generator.

These goals are entirely compatible with copyright. The New York Times is suing over AI – and they're licensing their writers' words to train an AI model:

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/29/business/media/new-york-times-amazon-ai-licensing.html

The NYT wants more copyright. You know what the NYT doesn't want? More labor rights. The NYT are vicious union-busters:

https://actionnetwork.org/letters/new-york-times-stop-union-busting

If we creative workers are going to pour our scarce resources into getting a new policy to address the threats that our bosses – and the AI companies they are morally and temperamentally indistinguishable from – represent to our livelihoods, then let that new policy be a renewed sectoral bargaining right for every worker. It was sectoral bargaining (a collective, solidaristic right) and not copyright (an individual, commercial right) that saw off AI in the Hollywood writers' strike.

Copyright positions the creative worker as a small business – an LLC with an MFA – bargaining B2B with another firm. To the extent that copyright helps us, it is largely incidental. Sure, we were able to file for a few thousand bucks per book that Anthropic downloaded from a pirate site to train its models on. But Anthropic doesn't have to use a shadow library to get those books – it can just pay our bosses to get them.

It's great that Claude Code's source is online. It's great that we have the ability to pore over, analyze and criticize this code, which has become so consequential in so many ways. It's great the copyright is weak enough that this is possible (for now).

Expanding copyright will gain little for creative workers, except for a new reason to be angry about how our audiences experience our work. Expanding labor rights will gain much, for every worker, including our audiences. It's an idea that our bosses – and AI hucksters – hate with every fiber of their beings.

Hey look at this (permalink)


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

Object permanence (permalink)

#20yrsago Desperate WI Republican congressman struggling to get by on $174K turns to copyright trolling https://web.archive.org/web/20110404001110/http://tpmdc.talkingpointsmemo.com/2011/03/gopers-demand-sean-duffy-salary-tape-be-pulled-from-the-internet.php?ref=fpblg

#15yrsago Redditor outs astroturfer with 20 accounts https://www.reddit.com/r/gaming/comments/gepnl/gamepro_g4tv_and_vgchartz_gamrfeed_have_been/

#15yrsago Britain’s back-room negotiations to establish a national, extrajudicial Internet censorship regime https://www.openrightsgroup.org/blog/minister-confirms-voluntary-site-blocking-discussions/

#15yrsago Elephantmen: Dr Moreau meets apocalyptic noir science fiction comic https://memex.craphound.com/2011/03/31/elephantmen-dr-moreau-meets-apocalyptic-noir-science-fiction-comic/

#10yrsago Bitcoin transactions could consume as much energy as Denmark by the year 2020 https://web.archive.org/web/20160401031103/https://motherboard.vice.com/read/bitcoin-could-consume-as-much-electricity-as-denmark-by-2020

#10yrsago Online casino bankrolls largest-ever, ruinously expensive war in Eve Online https://www.polygon.com/2016/3/31/11334014/eve-online-war/

#10yrsago Russia bans Polish “Communist Monopoly” board-game https://www.newsweek.com/russia-bans-polands-communist-monopoly-being-anti-russian-438972?rx=us

#10yrsago “Reputation management” companies apparently induce randos to perjure themselves by pretending to be anonymous posters https://www.techdirt.com/2016/03/31/latest-reputation-management-bogus-defamation-suits-bogus-companies-against-bogus-defendants/

#10yrsago Leak: Alaska superdelegate denies duty to represent her state’s voters in 2016 elections https://web.archive.org/web/20160717042158/http://usuncut.com/politics/alaska-superdelegate/

#10yrsago Phishers trick Mattel into transferring $3M to a Chinese bank https://www.cbsnews.com/news/mattel-vs-chinese-cyberthieves-its-no-game/

#10yrsago CNN celebrates Sanders’ six primary victories by airing a “documentary” about Jesus https://fair.org/home/as-sanders-surges-cable-news-runs-prison-reality-show-jesus-documentary/

#10yrsago Hungarian ruling party wants to ban all working cryptography https://web.archive.org/web/20160405014411/http://budapestbeacon.com/public-policy/fidesz-wants-make-encryption-software-illegal/33462

#10yrsago Embroidered toast https://www.behance.net/gallery/31502957/Everyday-bread#

#5yrsago AI has a GIGO problem https://pluralistic.net/2021/03/31/vaccine-for-the-global-south/#imagenot

#5yrsago Sacklers to use Purdue bankruptcy to escape justice https://pluralistic.net/2021/03/31/vaccine-for-the-global-south/#claims-extinguished

#5yrsago Cuba is a vaccine powerhouse https://pluralistic.net/2021/03/31/vaccine-for-the-global-south/#Soberana-Abdala

#5yrsago AT&T will lay off thousands more https://pluralistic.net/2021/03/31/vaccine-for-the-global-south/#we-dont-have-to-care

#1yrago Private-sector Trumpism https://pluralistic.net/2025/03/31/madison-square-garden/#autocrats-of-trade

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 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/)

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

  • "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, 2027

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


Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources:

Currently writing: "The Post-American Internet," a sequel to "Enshittification," about the better world the rest of us get to have now that Trump has torched America. First draft complete. Second draft underway.

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

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

  • A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING

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ISSN: 3066-764X

Publié le 01.04.2026 à 12:59

Pluralistic: Trumpismo vs minilateralism (01 Apr 2026)


Today's links


A US $100 bill. Benjamin Franklin's face has been replaced with an orange blur surmounted by yellow candy-floss hair. The '100s' have been altered to read '000' and the 'ONE HUNDRED' now reads 'NONE HUNDRED.' The Secretary of the Treasury's signature has been replaced with Trump's signature. The series of the bill reads '47.'

Trumpismo vs minilateralism (permalink)

As November Kelly has pointed out, the weirdest thing about Trumpismo is how the man seethes and rails against a game that is thoroughly rigged in America's favor, because he resents having to pretend to play the game at all:

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

Before Trump, the deal was that everyone would pretend that we had a "rules-based international order" in which every country got a fair deal, even as America cheated like hell and sucked the world dry. It's really impossible to overstate how advantageous this was to America. By pretending to be a neutral interchange spot for transoceanic fiber cables, it got to spy on the world's internet traffic:

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

By pretending to have a neutral currency, it got to exercise "dollar dominance" through which the nations of the world sent America the things they dug out of the ground or built in their factories, in exchange for America making small adjustments to a spreadsheet at the Federal Reserve. And by pretending its tech exports were neutral platforms, America got to raid the world's private data and bank accounts, spying and looting to its heart's content.

When Trump kicked off his campaign of incontinent belligerence – putting tariffs on the exports of countries populated only by penguins, trying to steal Greenland – it became impossible for the world's leaders to carry on this pretense.

This led to Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney – the world's most Davos man – standing up at this year's World Economic Forum to denounce the whole post-war settlement as a bullshit arrangement, announcing that we were in a period of "rupture" and promising a new world of "variable geometry" in which "middle powers" would exist in overlapping webs of alliances, without the USA:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/01/27/i-want-to-do-it/#now-make-me-do-it

Now, thanks to Trump's America First agenda, America's many advantages are collapsing. The dollar is in retreat, with Ethiopia revaluing its national debt in Chinese renminbi:

https://fidelpost.com/ethiopia-and-china-move-toward-final-stage-of-debt-restructuring-agreement/

Even worse: Trump's disastrous war of choice in Iran is heading for a humiliating defeat for the dollar, with Iran announcing that any peace deal will require a $2m/ship toll to pass through the Strait of Hormuz, a toll they're already collecting, payable only in renminbi:

https://www.nbcnews.com/world/iran/irans-tehran-toll-booth-forces-tankers-pay-millions-leave-strait-hormu-rcna265258

(I really hope Trump's plan to rename it the "Strait of Trump" catches on, so that his name in invoked with every tanker that traverses the strait, weakening the dollar and America's power – a very fitting legacy.)

For the past quarter-century, I've fought the US Trade Representative in various international fora, as the USTR piled all kinds of conditions America's trading partners that made it impossible to pursue any kind of technological sovereignty:

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

Every now and then, I think about how furious the USTR must be, watching Trump blunder through all the subtle traps they wove around the planet.

Take the "digital trade agenda," a set of policies that the US has made its top priority for a decade. Countries that succumbed to the digital trade agenda had to agree not to pursue "data localization" (rules that ban companies from moving or storing data about the people of your country outside of its borders), and they had to agree to duty-free status for digital exports like apps, music, games, ebooks and videos.

Today, the digital trade agenda is in tatters. Data localization is the top priority, with projects like the Eurostack and the European Digital Infrastructure Consortium breaking all land-speed records to build on-shore apps and data-centers that will keep data out of the hands of American companies and the American government:

https://digital-strategy.ec.europa.eu/en/policies/edic

And this week, duty-free status for digital assets hit the skids when a meeting of the World Trade Organization saw America's demands for a 10-year renewal of a global deal fail because Brazil wouldn't agree to it. Brazil has good reasons to mistrust the digital trade agenda, after Trump and Microsoft colluded to shut down a high court judge's online life in retaliation for passing sentence on the Trump-allied former dictator, Jair Bolsonaro:

https://home.treasury.gov/news/press-releases/sb0211

Brazil blocked the 10-year renewal of the duty-free status of digital exports, worldwide. In its place, the US got a two-year renewal – meaning that US companies' ability to export their digital products after 2028 will depend on whatever Trump does in the next two years, a period during which we know Trump is going to be a raging asshole (assuming he doesn't have a stroke first).

Even more interesting: Brazil struck a "minilateral" digital duty-free deal with 66 non-US countries, including Canada and the EU:

https://www.csmonitor.com/Editorials/the-monitors-view/2026/0331/EU-and-Canada-lean-into-a-new-world-role?icid=rss

Now, the US is a powerhouse exporter of digital goods, and has been since the start. This was such a given that in Neal Stephenson's 1992 cyberpunk classic Snow Crash, Stephenson imagined a future where the US had all but collapsed, save for the three things it did better than anyone else in the world: "music, movies and microcode":

https://www.gdcvault.com/play/1015147/Music-Movies-Microcode-High-Speed

Today, America's media and software industries are dying, and Trump is holding a pillow over their faces. He stole Tiktok and gave it to his buddy Larry Ellison, whose failson's acquisition and merger of two of the five remaining studios Trump also waved through:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/02/28/golden-mean/#reality-based-community

Game studios are ensloppifying their flagship products, alienating their most ardent customers, and are laying off thousands of programmers and artists following incestuous mergers that leave them hopelessly bloated:

https://www.blog.udonis.co/mobile-marketing/mobile-games/activision-blizzard-layoffs

Meanwhile, there's a global cultural market that's sweeping away American media: from K-pop (and K-zombies) to Heated Rivalry to Brazil funk:

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

Now, thanks to Trump, there are just a couple of years until America's wilting cultural exports will face high tariffs from markets where international media is surging.

This is how the American century ends: not with a bang, but with a Trump.

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 My new sigfile https://memex.craphound.com/2001/03/30/

#20yrsago TBL's "The Future of the Web" https://web.archive.org/web/20070706130940/http://webcast.oii.ox.ac.uk/download/oii/20060314_139/20060314_139.mp3

#20yrsago Bruce Sterling's bumper stickers https://web.archive.org/web/20060401010820/https://www.bumperactive.com/archives/000685.jsp

#15yrsago Kinect makes UAV even more autonomous https://www.suasnews.com/2011/03/mit-slam-quad-using-kinect/

#15yrsago This frozen yogurt store offers the best discounts around https://memex.craphound.com/2016/03/30/this-frozen-yogurt-store-offers-the-best-discounts-around/

#10yrsago Amazing fan-made Wonder Woman sweater pattern to download and knit https://www.ravelry.com/patterns/library/wonder-woman-2

#10yrsago Automated drug cabinets have 1400+ critical vulns that will never be patched https://www.helpnetsecurity.com/2016/03/30/1400-flaws-automated-medical-supply-system/

#10yrsago Playable records laser-etched in cheese, eggplant and ham https://web.archive.org/web/20160323075536/http://www.thevinylfactory.com/vinyl-factory-news/matthew-herbert-tortilla-edible-vinyl/

#10yrsago Up to half of the Americans killed by police have a disability https://www.theguardian.com/society/2016/mar/29/media-must-report-police-violence-towards-disabled-people

#10yrsago Judge says Citibank’s law-school loan isn’t “student debt” and can be discharged in bankruptcy https://abcnews.com/Business/judges-ruling-law-school-grads-debt-signal-seismic/story?id=37981518

#10yrsago How a street artist pulled off a 50-building mural in Cairo’s garbage-collector district https://www.nytimes.com/2016/03/29/world/middleeast/cairo-mural-garbage.html

#10yrsago CNBC’s secure password tutorial sent your password in the clear to 30 advertisers https://web.archive.org/web/20160331095151/https://motherboard.vice.com/read/cnbc-tried-and-massively-failed-to-teach-people-about-password-security

#10yrsago How DRM would kill the next Netflix (and how the W3C could save it) https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2016/03/interoperability-and-w3c-defending-future-present

#5yrsago America needs a high-fiber broadband diet https://pluralistic.net/2021/03/30/fight-for-44/#slowpokes

#5yrsago Minimum wage vs Wall Street bonuses https://pluralistic.net/2021/03/30/fight-for-44/#fight-for-44

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 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/)

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

  • "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, 2027

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


Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources:

Currently writing: "The Post-American Internet," a sequel to "Enshittification," about the better world the rest of us get to have now that Trump has torched America. First draft complete. Second draft underway.

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

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

  • A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING

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

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

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

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

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

ISSN: 3066-764X

Publié le 31.03.2026 à 12:00

Pluralistic: State Dems must stop ICE from stealing the midterms (31 Mar 2026)


Today's links


A Democratic mule, kicking out. It has kicked an ICE agent into the air. Another group of ICE agents sullenly await their turn. The background is a ballot drop-off box.

State Dems must stop ICE from stealing the midterms (permalink)

Donald Trump has announced his intention to steal the midterms with a voter suppression law that would ban the mail-in voting that he himself uses (which he claims is not fit for purpose).

This voter suppression campaign is Trump's number one policy priority, and the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility (SAVE) Act that would accomplish this is behind the shutdown and aviation chaos that has hamstrung the country for weeks:

https://www.thenation.com/article/politics/save-act-voting-rights-congress/

SAVE requires voters to show up at the polls in possession of ID like birth certificates and passports, and it will fill our polling places with armed, masked ICE agents – you know, the guys who just randomly kidnap and murder people for having accents, speaking a language other than English, or being visibly brown.

During Trump's aviation crisis, Trump heard about "Linda," a woman who called into a far right talk-radio program to suggest that ICE be deployed to American airports to backstop the TSA agents who'd stopped showing up for work on the very reasonable grounds that they hadn't been paid in a month:

https://www.thedailybeast.com/trump-may-have-got-his-ice-airport-idea-from-linda-from-arizona/

Trump loved the idea and the next thing you knew, ICE was at the airports, hanging around like a bad smell and being totally useless. It turns out that the TSA is a trained workforce, unlike ICE, who receive precisely 47 days of training as a kind of MAGA Kabbalah (Trump is the 47th president):

https://www.wired.com/story/ice-agents-frustrate-airport-employees-as-shutdown-drags-on/

ICE's uselessness at the country's airports was beyond farcical, though, as ever, The Onion found and nailed the farce in "How ICE is assisting TSA":

https://theonion.com/how-ice-is-assisting-tsa/

Overseeing the removal of shoes, belts, and abuelas

Confiscating, then brandishing dangerous items

Assuming all milling-around duties

Culling weaker travelers when lines get too long

Commiserating about failing the police academy

Drinking any shampoo that exceeds the carry-on volume limit

Simplifying the customs interview to one question about skull size

But having ICE in the airports does serve one purpose. As Steve Bannon gloated on his podcast, ICE in the airports is a way to soften people up for ICE in the polling stations. He called it a "test run" for the midterms:

https://www.ms.now/rachel-maddow-show/maddowblog/steve-bannon-calls-ice-agents-at-airports-part-of-a-test-run-for-the-midterm-elections

Writing for Jacobin, Eric Blanc points out that Democrats don't have to sit by passively while Trump – who repeatedly promised that if you voted for him in 2024, "you won't have to vote anymore" – steals an election:

https://jacobin.com/2026/03/ice-trump-election-theft-laws/

That's because America has a federal system of government, and the administration of its elections is firmly, constitutionally, unarguably in the hands of the states, and the states have large collections of highly trained, highly armed officials who can enforce their laws.

On March 13, the New Mexico state legislature passed a law banning armed federal officials from showing their fascist asses anywhere within 50 feet of a polling place or ballot drop-box:

https://www.koat.com/article/new-mexico-prohibits-armed-agents-voting-sites/70729595

Other blue states like "California, Connecticut, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, Virginia, and Washington" are contemplating similar laws.

It's a start, but as Blanc says, what the fuck are the other blue statehouses waiting for? This is a white-hot, hair-on-fire emergency. There isn't a moment to spare. This should be on the agenda for every union, at every demonstration, at every DSA and Democratic Club meeting. As Blanc says, if we wait until November to find out what Trump is going to do, it'll be too late. The time to act is now.

This is – as Blanc says – a "concrete, winnable demand that unions, student organizations, and immigrant and democracy defense groups could organize around today." And that organizing would "onboard and develop scores of new leaders in this fight nationwide."

I know where we can start. Unions across America have called for a general strike on May Day (May 1), under the banner "No work, no school, no shopping." As we rally on May Day, let defending our right to vote be at the top of our agenda. Mark your calendars:

https://www.google.com/maps/d/u/0/viewer?ref=paydayreport.com&mid=1_b8qBUINLYWeLiwpFSfUO2SmX2w6TWA&ll=37.724800549268%2C-96.94920235000001&z=4

(Image: Chad Davis, CC BY 4.0; Jami430, CC BY-SA 4.0; modified)

Hey look at this (permalink)


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

Object permanence (permalink)

#25yrsago Gobler Toys https://web.archive.org/web/20010331150924/http://www.goblertoys.com/pages/goblertoys.html

#20yrsago Power-strip with hidden GSM hardware https://web.archive.org/web/20060412201921/https://www.spy-labs.com/infinity.htm

#20yrsago I Hate DRM https://web.archive.org/web/20060406063345/https://www.ihatedrm.com/cs2/

#20yrsago GOP hopeful’s photo of “peaceful Baghdad” was really Istanbul https://web.archive.org/web/20060405225546/http://www.editorandpublisher.com/eandp/news/article_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1002274257

#20yrsago Disney using freeware Disney-inspired font in its signs https://flickr.com/photos/mrg/sets/49427/

#20yrsago Yahoo could stay in China and stop sending its users to jail https://web.archive.org/web/20060411085309/http://rconversation.blogs.com/rconversation/2006/03/yahoo_abominati.html

#20yrsago AMC CEO: why we won’t show DVD simul-release movies https://web.archive.org/web/20060426042457/https://www.wired.com/wired/archive/14.04/start.html?pg=15

#15yrsago Canadian ISPs admit that their pricing is structured to discourage Internet use https://web.archive.org/web/20110401033318/https://www.michaelgeist.ca/content/view/5711/125/

#15yrsago Science fiction growth-chart takes your kid from Tribble to Vader https://web.archive.org/web/20110331134518/http://geeky-dad.tumblr.com/post/3869493918/my-daughter-is-turning-one-soon-and-i-decided-we

#15yrsago Open access legal scholarship is 50% more likely to be cited than material published in proprietary journals https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1777090

#15yrsago Senior London cops lie to peaceful protestors, stage mass arrest https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2011/mar/28/cuts-protest-uk-uncut-fortnum

#10yrsago Cuba’s free med schools are the meritocratic institutions that America’s private system can’t match https://www.wired.com/2016/03/students-ditching-america-medical-school-cuba/

#10yrsago As criminal justice reform looms, private prison companies get into immigration detention, halfway houses, electronic monitoring, mental health https://web.archive.org/web/20160331101534/https://www.ozy.com/fast-forward/private-prisons-fight-back/66970

#10yrsago Surveillance has reversed the net’s capacity for social change https://web.archive.org/web/20160429233747/https://m.jmq.sagepub.com/content/early/2016/02/25/1077699016630255.full.pdf?ijkey=1jxrYu4cQPtA6&keytype=ref&siteid=spjmq

#10yrsago Top Trump strategist quits, writes an open letter warning America about him https://web.archive.org/web/20160330035435/http://www.xojane.com/issues/stephanie-cegielski-donald-trump-campaign-defector

#10yrsago Doctors who get pharma money prescribe brand-name drugs instead of generics https://www.propublica.org/article/doctors-who-take-company-cash-tend-to-prescribe-more-brand-name-drugs

#10yrsago GOP’s anti-abortion strategy could establish precedent for massive, corrupt regulation https://web.archive.org/web/20160329045614/http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2016/03/fans-of-economic-liberty-shouldnt-be-so-quick-to-regulate-abortion/475566/

#10yrsago Turkish government tells German ambassador to ban video satirizing president Erdoğan https://web.archive.org/web/20260316070423/https://www.spiegel.de/politik/ausland/tuerkei-verlangt-offenbar-das-extra-3-video-zu-loeschen-a-1084490.html

#5yrsago Past Performance is Not Indicative of Future Results https://pluralistic.net/2021/03/29/efficient-markets-hypothesis/#statistical-inference

#5yrsago Big Salmon's aquaturf https://pluralistic.net/2021/03/29/efficient-markets-hypothesis/#aquaturf

#5yrsago Noble Lies https://pluralistic.net/2021/03/29/efficient-markets-hypothesis/#masks-and-trade

#5yrsago Monopoly so fragile https://pluralistic.net/2021/03/29/efficient-markets-hypothesis/#too-big-to-sail

#1yrago #RedForEd rides again in LA https://pluralistic.net/2025/03/29/jane-mcalevey/#trump-is-a-scab

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 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/)

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

  • "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, 2027

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


Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources:

Currently writing: "The Post-American Internet," a sequel to "Enshittification," about the better world the rest of us get to have now that Trump has torched America. First draft complete. Second draft underway.

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

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

  • A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING

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

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

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

How to get Pluralistic:

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

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

ISSN: 3066-764X

Publié le 30.03.2026 à 19:27

Pluralistic: Market participation is exhausting (30 Mar 2026)


Today's links

  • Market participation is exhausting: No one wants to be the sucker at the table.
  • Hey look at this: Delights to delectate.
  • Object permanence: EMI DRM v Brazil; "The Information"; Genome patenter v copyright troll (let them fight); Green investing isn't; Trump loves Big Tech; Kleptones' "24 Hours"; Lasermonks; Ransomware hospital; News co-ops; AI "art" sucks; Swisscom wifi is $838/24h; Millennials don't exist; Why Microsoft's chatbot turned Nazi; NYC's best dumpster-dived food; RIP Diana Wynne Jones; What really happened at the student protests in Trafalgar Square; Church-owned insurer has secret pedo priest files; Names that break databases; Reality-based communities; Hugo for websites; Cop cabs; Fake pediatrician group; Bring Your Own Bigwheeel; "How To Talk About Videogames."
  • Upcoming appearances: Montreal, London, NYC, Berlin, Hay-on-Wye, London.
  • 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.


An early 20th C painting advertising a magic show, it features a mustachioed, tuxedoed conjurer beating the Devil at poker with four aces in his hand, as a giggling demon on his shoulder whispers advice in his ear and the Devil looks chagrined. The image has been altered: the Devil now has Trump hair and orange skin. The demon perched on the magician's shoulder has the face of Adam Smith.

Market participation is exhausting (permalink)

We're a diverse species, cognitively speaking – different ways of thinking come more easily to some of us than others. I'm good at a lot of things, but I have terrible spatial sense. I can't parallel park or catch a ball, and I get lost so easily it's almost comical (it's a running joke in my family).

Luckily, I'm married to a woman with incredible spacial sense. My wife Alice can sit at one end of a basketball court and look at the scoreboard at the other end and say, "It's 1" off-center to the right and 1° off true clockwise." She'll be right. She's also a crack shot and an extremely proficient gamer (she was the first woman to play e-sports internationally, on the English Quake team).

I'm good at stuff she's not good at. I don't mind wading through personal admin and bookkeeping processes, while she finds these excruciating (and interestingly, it's reversed when it comes to work-related admin, which I find torturous and which she excels at). I love listening to audiobooks, which she can't focus on at all. She loves instrumental music, which I broadly find tedious; while I find it much easier to work while listening to music with great lyrics.

This is great. As a couple, we make up for one another's deficits and complement one another's strengths. Obviously, this is also true as a species: we all like doing different stuff in different ways, and that's good, because there is a lot of stuff to do, and it's pretty damned heterogenous. A complex, dynamic world demands a complex, dynamic response.

This is a bedrock of cybernetics, the study of systems control. The "law of requisite complexity" states, "in order to be efficaciously adaptive, the internal complexity of a system must match the external complexity it confronts":

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Variety_(cybernetics)

Cyberneticians and systems designers understand that their job is partly to design a set of controls that are as complex as the system they modulate, and partly to simplify that system to make it possible to control. Think of how you can make a database search run faster by confining it to one field in records from the past year, or how you can hold down the shift key to constrain a rectangular selection tool so it draws perfect squares.

This happens cognitively, too. Pretty much anyone can track their expenses from a work trip, but the company bookkeeper needs to have a certain "head for figures" that lets them do this all day long, for everyone's expenses, so we limit the kinds of bookkeeping we ask normies to do, and reserve the heavy lifting for specialists.

As a freelancer, I hire a bunch of people who have cognitive strengths that I lack. My accountant isn't just a person who knows more about tax law than I do – he's also someone who can manage the reconciliation of all my bookkeeping spreadsheets better than I ever could, and without the psychic trauma I experience when I try to do this on my own.

Likewise, my publisher employs copyeditors and proofreaders who find the typos that my brain just doesn't see, and when they send me back my marked-up manuscripts for review, I ask my mom to give them a pass, because she finds the typos they miss.

Sitting between me and my publishers are my agents (I have several of these, one for English-language literary deals, another for foreign rights, another for media, and yet another for speaking engagements). I love these folks, partly because the better they are at their jobs, the easier it is for me to pay my mortgage, but especially because they really enjoy doing things I hate doing: a) asking for money, and; b) haggling.

For me, haggling is (at best) embarrassing. At worst, it's humiliating. It's always exhausting. But for my agents, it's invigorating. Many's the time I've gotten on a video call with my agents after they've concluded a successful deal and they're glowing. Call it what you will: cognitive diversity, emotional diversity, neurodiversity…my agents and I have it, and it's good for all of us.

And here's the thing that makes these world-class hagglers great: they can switch it off. They're competitive as hell, they love to bargain hard, but they understand that they're playing an iterated game, and if they crush the publishers' representatives they're up against, then they'll ruin my good name.

More: when the bargaining's done and we're having a nice chat about everyday things, or getting together for dinner, they're not on. They're just normal, not wrestling over every detail. Bargaining is what they do, it's not who they are.

That doesn't just make them bearable as human beings, it also makes them better at their jobs. There's an old pal with whom I've done some creative work, and at one point I needed to pay them for their part in a project. They asked me to route the payment through their manager, and this manager assumed I was just another production hiring my buddy, and let loose with his full power at me over this payment, haggling for paperwork that would make Creative Commons releases impossible, as well as other (normal but not appropriate in this case) conditions. I emailed my pal, who emailed their manager to stand down and treat this as a friendly negotiation, whereupon Mr Hyde became Dr Jekyll and we wrapped things up in about ten minutes.

These haggler types do very well in our society, which is organized around the idea of efficient markets, where everyone is always bargaining to the last breath in order to "maximize their utility."

This ideology isn't just an observation ("society is a market"), it's also a demand ("society should be a market"). People who find aggressive haggling invigorating have taken over the operations of our civilization, and they are determined to convert everything to a marketplace, from waiting on hold for the IRS to looking for a parking place:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/10/07/markets-in-everything/#no-th-enq

The people running this game are so invigorated by haggling that they can't not haggle. They make putting a price on everything into a virtue. They want to be able to sell their kidneys. More importantly, they want to buy your kidneys.

In Sarah Wynn-Williams's Careless People, there's a memorable incident in which Sheryl Sandberg is shocked to the roots of her hair when she is told that she can't go to Mexico and buy a kidney if her child gets sick. Her child isn't even sick! She's just offended that this hypothetical situation wouldn't be resolved by bargaining:

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

For these people, cheating is just bargaining by another means. They embrace bizarre concepts like "revealed preferences," the idea that if you say you're dissatisfied with a bargain, but you accept it anyway, you have a "revealed preference" for the deal. In other words, if someone sells their kidney to Sheryl Sandberg in order to make the rent, they have a "revealed preference" for having only one kidney – and if they sell their privacy to Sheryl Sandberg in order to stay in touch with the people they love, they have a "revealed preference" for having their data extracted and exploited by Facebook:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/01/24/everything-not-mandatory/#is-prohibited

Trump is the apotheosis of this. The true "art of the deal" is just cheating. That's why he stiffed his workers, stiffed his suppliers, stiffed his backers and stiffed his base. If you can cheat and get away with it, it's not even cheating: "that makes you smart":

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

"Caveat emptor" makes sense at a yard-sale or an estate auction – but it's no way to operate a government or conduct your daily life. It's exhausting:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/04/29/cheaters-and-liars/#caveat-emptor-brainworms

Running the world on "caveat emptor" isn't just a transfer from workers to the wealthy, it's a transfer from people who are exhausted by bargaining to people who are invigorated by it. It's a way of transforming just one of the many differences in how humans think into the single most important success criterion, the major determinant of your life's chances. It's a way for the invigorated to utterly dominate the exhausted. It's the elevation of "stop hitting yourself" into political ideology.

The antidote to this is something Dan Davies calls "The Club Med theory." He argues that while mostly we sneer at inclusive holiday resorts as a way to go on vacation without having to engage with another country's culture and people, that the original value of these resorts (still present today) is the way they let you go on vacation without participating in markets:

https://backofmind.substack.com/p/the-club-med-theory

Club Med was founded by an Olympian named Gérard Blitz whose insight was that "what people seek from a holiday is not luxury or material comfort, but happiness." For Blitz, the value of an inclusive resort wasn't the open bar and the buffet, "it’s the relief from participation in the everyday economy."

As Davies points out, class differences (between guests, at least) are erased at inclusive resorts. The richest person at the resort eats and drinks the same food, goes on the same excursions, and participates in the same activities as the poorest person at the resort (yes, this is less true of today's inclusive resorts, which are full of "up-charges," representing the triumph of people who are invigorated by bargaining over people who are exhausted by it).

For Davies, the beauty of an inclusive resort is that it removes the "cognitive demands" of a market economy, which are inherently stressful: "Every transaction is a decision, and decisions cost energy."

Davies proposes that "this is quite difficult for people to understand if they have an economics degree." Why would the resort restaurants improve their food quality if they're not competing for your business? Why would servers hustle to make you happy if they're not competing for tips?

But this is not what happens. Resort-goers love the bartenders at the swim-up bar, and they are frustrated to the point of fury with the people selling necklaces, sunglasses and massages on the beach. These sellers "live or die by their ability to persuade people to part with money in exchange for goods and services." It's exhausting to be them, and it's exhausting to be approached by them.

Davies says that the best strategy to get someone to part with their money isn't necessarily to provide good service. As he learned in his stockbroker days, you can also "pester them mercilessly until they pay you to go away." In an unregulated market, you don't get a single vendor who comes around and offers you sunglasses once a day. The equilibrium of that market is to be woken from your nap or interrupted from your book every five minutes by someone who's hustling to make the rent. The economy doesn't "price in the externality" of your plummeting satisfaction with your holiday.

Davies isn't the first person to observe this. As he points out, in 1963, Galbraith wrote:

Total physical and mental inertia are highly agreeable, much more so than we allow ourselves to imagine. A beach not only permits such inertia but enforces it, thus neatly eliminating all problems of guilt.

I read Davies's short post last week and it stuck with me. The more I thought about it, the more I liked it – and the more I thought that there was something missing from it: the idea that there are some people who hate a life without bargaining. These people are invigorated by bargaining and exhausted by "total physical and mental inertia." They need to be hustling.

The people who turn up their noses at an inclusive resort aren't just people who want to have the "authentic experience" of a distant land – some of them are people who want to spend all day hustling and being hustled. People who need that energy.

Those people have a place in the world. I don't want those people trying to sell me a timeshare or trying to rope me into their MLM, but I'd love to have them negotiating on behalf of my union:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/02/05/power-of-positive-thinking/#the-socialism-of-fools

But even then, I'd want them to be like my agents, capable of stepping back from constant bargaining and to cease their remorseless seeking of advantage. I wouldn't want them to be Sandbergian would-be buyers of kidneys, full of self-serving tales of revealed preferences, caveat emptor and "that makes me smart."

As with anything, the dose makes the poison. I know lots of hustlers who are fun as hell to hang around, whom I'd trust with my life or at least my password. A lot of libertarians fit this mold: people who are truly committed to voluntarism and intrinsic generosity.

But libertarianism, like any movement, is a coalition, and within that coalition is a large group of people – people who are invigorated by bargaining – who are committed to dominating others by exhausting them. For them, bargaining isn't a cognitive demand, it's a cognitive invigorator. To the extent that they understand this, they think it's just a sign that they are born to rule. Caveat emptor. Revealed preferences. That makes me smart.

What's more, for people on the losing side of this trade, losing the bargain means being poorer, and being poorer means more cognitive demands – rationing out your pennies and eeling through the impossibly narrow gaps between payday and the day the bills are due. This produces a winner-take-all dynamic in which the losers of the bargaining game have less energy and wherewithal to bargain the next time around.

This is beautifully unpacked in (what else) a science fiction novel, Naomi Kritzer's Liberty's Daughter, a young adult novel about the teen daughter of a libertarian cult leader who is growing up on a seastead:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/11/21/podkaynes-dad-was-a-dick/#age-of-consent

Kritzer's novel beautifully plays out the "stop hitting yourself" justifications that eventually allow her libertarians to enslave others – after all, in a truly voluntaristic society, why wouldn't you have the freedom to sell yourself into slavery? And if you claim later that you're unhappy with this arrangement, tough shit – you've got a "revealed preference" for being a slave.

Caveat emptor. If you're the kind of person who gets charged up by bargaining, then you were born to rule.

If bargaining means cheating, well, "that makes you smart."

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 DIY circumcision revision (CW gross) https://web.archive.org/web/20010618005738/https://www.subgenius.com/subg-digest/v5/0206.html

#25yrsago Gen X guide to Disneyland https://web.archive.org/web/20010302143848/http://www.omnigroup.com/~cirocco/dizney/index.html

#25yrsago Hugo for best website https://web.archive.org/web/20010404222727/http://www.conjose.org/wsfs/wsfs_web.html

#20yrsago America’s worst WiFi hotels https://web.archive.org/web/20060404214142/http://www.hotelchatter.com/story/2006/3/27/21911/4235/hotels/Worst_WiFi_Hotels_2006

#20yrsago Help Peter Beagle sue the film-house that made “The Last Unicorn” https://web.archive.org/web/20060116061435/http://www.conlanpress.com/youcanhelp/

#20yrsago EMI releases Brazilian DRM CDs that totally hose their customers https://memex.craphound.com/2006/03/24/emi-releases-brazilian-drm-cds-that-totally-hose-their-customers/

#20yrsago Video reveals Belarus electoral fraud https://web.archive.org/web/20060506233026/http://www.media-ocean.de/2006/03/26/does-youtube-video-proove-election-fraud-in-belarus/

#20yrsago Kleptones new mashup double-CD free to download: “24 Hours” https://web.archive.org/web/20060810172451/http://www.kleptones.com/pages/downloads_24h.html

#20yrsago Steve Jobs, 2002: “You need the right to manage music on all devices” https://web.archive.org/web/20060509144710/http://www.songbirdnest.com/nivi/blog/jobs_france

#20yrsago Monks in Wisconsin refill printer cartridges https://web.archive.org/web/20060324043723/http://lasermonks.com/

#20yrsago DRM is Killing Music https://www.voidstar.com/node.php?id=2686

#20yrsago Swisscom WiFi at London conference centre costs $838.73/24h https://web.archive.org/web/20060329090917/https://benhammersley.com/FCE47259-78BA-4B5E-ABF2-F39B93520C85/Blog/C9043A4D-F791-4B7F-A8A7-3484779B4748.html

#20yrsago Most expensive Google ad keywords listed https://web.archive.org/web/20060325094245/http://www.cwire.org/2006/03/23/updated-highest-paying-adsense-keywords/

#20yrsago LA Times slams Marvel for trying to steal “superhero” https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2006-mar-26-ed-superhero26-story.html

#15yrsago Microsoft switches off privacy for Hotmail users in war-torn and repressive states https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2011/03/microsoft-shuts-https-hotmail-over-dozen-countries

#15yrsago Wisconsin GOP uses sunshine laws to harass prof who speculated about links with pressure group https://scholarcitizen.williamcronon.net/2011/03/24/open-records-attack-on-academic-freedom/

#15yrsago Koch-pranking Beast editor runs for Congress https://web.archive.org/web/20110326042435/http://www.murphycanhascongress.com/

#15yrsago Did Limewire shutdown really cause P2P music infringement to drop 30%? https://web.archive.org/web/20110428175101/http://copyfight.corante.com/archives/2011/03/24/cnet_and_others_get_it_wrong_miss_the_actual_story.php

#15yrsago Man who wants to patent genome gets legal threat for embedding James Joyce quote in artificial lifeform https://www.forbes.com/sites/davidewalt/2011/03/14/craig-venters-genetic-typo/

#15yrsago James Gleick’s tour-de-force: The Information, a natural history of information theory https://memex.craphound.com/2011/03/24/james-gleicks-tour-de-force-the-information-a-natural-history-of-information-theory/

#15yrsago NYT paywall sub is $100 more expensive than WSJ, Economist and Daily combined https://theunderstatement.com/post/4019228737/digital-subscription-prices-visualized-aka-the

#15yrsago RIP, Diana Wynne Jones https://www.theguardian.com/books/2011/mar/27/diana-wynne-jones-obituary

#15yrsago Front-line report from Trafalgar Square paints a radically different picture https://www.newstatesman.com/politics/2011/03/trafalgar-square-police-young

#15yrsago Deathless: Cat Valente’s beautiful fantasy of Stalinist Russia and the Siege of Leningrad https://memex.craphound.com/2011/03/28/deathless-cat-valentes-beautiful-fantasy-of-stalinist-russia-and-the-siege-of-leningrad/

#10yrsago Cop Cabs: The NYPD has at least three fake taxis on NYC’s streets https://www.muckrock.com/news/archives/2016/mar/28/nypd-taxicabs/

#10yrsago Peer-reviewed online expert system will help you if you’ve been poisoned https://www.webpoisoncontrol.org/

#10yrsago The “American College of Pediatricians” is a hate group with fewer than 200 members https://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2016/03/28/speaking-of-bad-science-never-trust-the-american-college-of-pediatricians

#10yrsago Ransomware gets a lot faster by encrypting the master file table instead of the filesystem https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/petya-ransomware-skips-the-files-and-encrypts-your-hard-drive-instead/

#10yrsago Security-conscious darkweb crime marketplaces institute world-leading authentication practices https://web.archive.org/web/20160331091155/https://motherboard.vice.com/read/some-dark-web-markets-have-better-user-security-than-gmail-instagram

#10yrsago Saudi embassy hired mafiosi to smuggle Turkish PM Erdoğan’s son out of Italy ahead of money laundering charges https://web.archive.org/web/20160311095055/https://awdnews.com/top-news/rome’s-police-spokesman-saudi-embassy-helped-erdoğan’s-son-to-escape-the-police-custody-using-a-forged-saudi-passport-and-disguised-as-an-arab-diplomat

#10yrsago Photos from Bring Your Own Bigwheel 16 https://www.jwz.org/photos/2016-03-27-bigwheel/

#10yrsago How to Talk About Videogames: a book that is serious (but never dull) about games https://memex.craphound.com/2016/03/28/how-to-talk-about-videogames-a-book-that-is-serious-but-never-dull-about-games/

#10yrsago Names that break databases https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20160325-the-names-that-break-computer-systems

#10yrsago Cops arrest public defender who was representing her client, face no discipline https://www.techdirt.com/2016/03/23/complaint-board-finds-police-officers-violated-policy-arresting-public-defender-who-demanded-they-stop-questioning-her-clients/

#10yrsago Vulnerability in recorders used by 70+ manufacturers’ CCTV systems has been known since 2014 https://web.archive.org/web/20160322204109/https://kerneronsec.com/2016/02/remote-code-execution-in-cctv-dvrs-of.html

#10yrsago Ransomware hackers steal a hospital. Again. https://krebsonsecurity.com/2016/03/hospital-declares-internet-state-of-emergency-after-ransomware-infection/

#10yrsago STUCK: Public transit’s moment arrives just as public spending disappears https://web.archive.org/web/20160327040633/https://motherboard.vice.com/read/the-immobile-masses-why-traffic-is-awful-and-public-transit-is-worse

#10yrsago East Harlem’s secret museum of gorgeous junk rescued from NYC’s trash https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/fascinating-photos-from-the-secret-trash-collection-in-a-new-york-sanitation-garage

#10yrsago Heatmaps of the human body in varying emotional states https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1321664111

#10yrsago Man exonerated after video shows unprovoked police beating, cops insist all is well https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2016/03/video-clears-texas-man-of-assaulting-cop-did-police-commit-perjury/

#10yrsago What you think about Millennials says a lot about you, nothing about them https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-HFwok9SlQQ

#10yrsago Jerks were able to turn Microsoft’s chatbot into a Nazi because it was a really crappy bot https://web.archive.org/web/20160325221619/http://motherboard.vice.com/read/how-to-make-a-not-racist-bot

#10yrsago When the antibiotics run out, maybe we can use GMO maggots to stave off infection https://link.springer.com/article/10.1186/s12896-016-0263-z

#10yrsago King Arthur’s grave was a hoax invented by cash-strapped 12th C monks https://arstechnica.com/science/2016/03/medieval-monks-used-king-arthurs-grave-as-an-attraction-to-raise-money/

#10yrsago Eating from the trash of New York’s finest grocers and restaurants https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MJmCUSb-ZVo

#10yrsago Catholic Church-owned insurer has secret files on paedophile priests https://www.theage.com.au/national/secret-archive-of-paedophile-crime-kept-by-catholic-churchs-insurers-20160317-gnlc6k.html

#10yrsago Names that break databases https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20160325-the-names-that-break-computer-systems

#10yrsago Cops arrest public defender who was representing her client, face no discipline https://www.techdirt.com/2016/03/23/complaint-board-finds-police-officers-violated-policy-arresting-public-defender-who-demanded-they-stop-questioning-her-clients/

#10yrsago Vulnerability in recorders used by 70+ manufacturers’ CCTV systems has been known since 2014 https://web.archive.org/web/20160322204109/https://kerneronsec.com/2016/02/remote-code-execution-in-cctv-dvrs-of.html

#5yrsago Dirty NYPD cops can't lose https://pluralistic.net/2021/03/26/overfitness-factor/#heads-you-lose-tails-they-win

#5yrsago Dreaming and overfitting https://pluralistic.net/2021/03/26/overfitness-factor/#dreamtime

#5yrsago Good news about news co-ops https://pluralistic.net/2021/03/25/facebook-has-a-facebook-problem/#good-news

#5yrsago Zuckerpunch https://pluralistic.net/2021/03/25/facebook-has-a-facebook-problem/#played-for-zuckers

#5yrsago Green investing is a fraud https://pluralistic.net/2021/03/24/greenwashing/#bargaining

#

1yrago Trump loves Big Tech https://pluralistic.net/2025/03/24/whats-good-for-big-tech/#is-good-for-america

#1yrago Why I don't like AI art https://pluralistic.net/2025/03/25/communicative-intent/#diluted

#1yrago The AOC-Sanders anti-oligarch tour is all about organizing https://pluralistic.net/2025/03/26/not-me-us/#the-people-no

#1yrago Reality-Based Communities https://pluralistic.net/2025/03/27/use-your-mentality/#face-up-to-reality

#1yrago Big Tech and "captive audience venues" https://pluralistic.net/2025/03/28/street-pricing/#sportball-analogies

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 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/)

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

  • "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, 2027

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


Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources:

Currently writing: "The Post-American Internet," a sequel to "Enshittification," about the better world the rest of us get to have now that Trump has torched America. First draft complete. Second draft underway.

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

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

  • A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING

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

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