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Millions of people worldwide have reason to be thankful that Swedish engineer Rune Elmqvist decided not to practice medicine. Although qualified as a doctor, he chose to invent medical equipment instead. In 1949, while working at Elema-Schonander (later Siemens-Elema), in Stockholm, he applied for a patent for the Mingograph, the first inkjet printer. Its movable nozzle deposited an electrostatically controlled jet of ink droplets on a spool of paper. Rune Elmqvist qualified to be a physician, but he devoted his career to developing medical equipment, like this galvanometer.Håkan Elmqvist/Wikipedia Elmqvist demonstrated the Mingograph at the First International Congress of Cardiology in Paris in 1950. It could record physiological signals from a patient’s electrocardiogram or electroencephalogram in real time, aiding doctors in diagnosing heart and brain conditions. Eight years later, he worked with cardiac surgeon Åke Senning to develop the first fully implantable pacemaker. So whether you’re running documents through an inkjet printer or living your best life due to a pacemaker, give a nod of appreciation to the inventive Dr. Elmqvist. The world’s first inkjet printer Rune Elmqvist was an inquisitive person. While still a student, he invented a specialized potentiometer to measure pH and a portable multichannel electrocardiograph. In 1940, he became head of development at the Swedish medical electronics company Elema-Schonander. Before the Mingograph, electrocardiograph machines relied on a writing stylus to trace the waveform on a moving roll of paper. But friction between the stylus and the paper prevented small changes in the electrical signal from being accurately recorded. Elmqvist’s initial design was a modified oscillograph. Traditionally, an oscillograph used a mirror to reflect a beam of light (converted from the electrical signal) onto photographic film or paper. Elmqvist swapped out the mirror for a small, moveable glass nozzle that continuously sprayed a thin stream of liquid onto a spool of paper. The electrical signal electrostatically controlled the jet. The Mingograph was originally used to record electrocardiograms of heart patients. It soon found use in many other fields.Siemens Healthineers Historical Institute By eliminating the friction of a stylus, the Mingograph (which the company marketed as the Mingograf) was able to record more detailed changes of the heartbeat. The machine had three paper-feed speeds: 10, 25, and 50 millimeters per second. The speed could be preset or changed while in operation. RELATED: The Inventions That Made Heart Disease Less Deadly An analog input jack on the Mingograph could be used to take measurements from other instruments. Researchers in disciplines far afield from medicine took advantage of this input to record pressure or sound. Phoneticians used it to examine the acoustic aspects of speech, and zoologists used it to record birdsongs. Throughout the second half of the 20th century, scientists cited the Mingograph in their research papers as an instrument for their experiments. Today, the Mingograph isn’t that widely known, but the underlying technology, inkjet printing, is ubiquitous. Inkjets dominate the home printer market, and specialized printers print DNA microarrays in labs for genomics research, create electrical traces for printed circuit boards, and much more, as Phillip W. Barth and Leslie A. Field describe in their 2024 IEEE Spectrum article “Inkjets Are for More Than Just Printing.” The world’s first implantable pacemaker Despite the influence of the Mingograph on the evolution of printing, it is arguably not Elmqvist’s most important innovation. The Mingograph helped doctors diagnose heart conditions, but it couldn’t save a patient’s life by itself. One of Elmqvist’s other inventions could and did: the first fully implantable, rechargeable pacemaker. The first implantable pacemaker [left] from 1958 had batteries that needed to be recharged once a week. The 1983 pacemaker [right] was programmable, and its batteries lasted several years.Siemens Healthineers Historical Institute Like many stories in the history of technology, this one was pushed into fruition at the urging of a woman, in this case Else-Marie Larsson. Else-Marie’s 43-year-old husband, Arne, suffered from scarring of his heart tissue due to a viral infection. His heart beat so slowly that he constantly lost consciousness, a condition known as Stokes-Adams syndrome. Else-Marie refused to accept his death sentence and searched for an alternative. After reading a newspaper article about an experimental implantable pacemaker being developed by Elmqvist and Senning at the Karolinska Hospital in Stockholm, she decided that her husband would be the perfect candidate to test it out, even though it had been tried only on animals up until that point. External pacemakers—that is, devices outside the body that regulated the heart beat by applying electricity—already existed, but they were heavy, bulky, and uncomfortable. One early model plugged directly into a wall socket, so the user risked electric shock. By comparison, Elmqvist’s pacemaker was small enough to be implanted in the body and posed no shock risk. Fully encased in an epoxy resin, the disk-shaped device had a diameter of 55 mm and a thickness of 16 mm—the dimensions of the Kiwi Shoe Polish tin in which Elmqvist molded the first prototypes. It used silicon transistors to pace a pulse with an amplitude of 2 volts and duration of 1.5 milliseconds, at a rate of 70 to 80 beats per minute (the average adult heart rate). The pacemaker ran on two rechargeable 60-milliampere-hour nickel-cadmium batteries arranged in series. A silicon diode connected the batteries to a coil antenna. A 150-kilohertz radio loop antenna outside the body charged the batteries inductively through the skin. The charge lasted about a week, but it took 12 hours to recharge. Imagine having to stay put that long. In 1958, over 30 years before this photo, Arne Larsson [right] received the first implantable pacemaker, developed by Rune Elmqvist [left] at Siemens-Elema. Åke Senning [center] performed the surgery.Sjöberg Bildbyrå/ullstein bild/Getty Images Else-Marie’s persuasion and persistence pushed Elmqvist and Senning to move from animal tests to human trials, with Arne as their first case study. During a secret operation on 8 October 1958, Senning placed the pacemaker in Arne’s abdomen wall with two leads implanted in the myocardium, a layer of muscle in the wall of the heart. The device lasted only a few hours. But its replacement, which happened to be the only spare at the time, worked perfectly for six weeks and then off and on for several more years. Arne Larsson lived another 43 years after his first pacemaker was implanted. Shown here are five of the pacemakers he received. Sjöberg Bildbyrå/ullstein bild/Getty Images Arne Larsson clearly was happy with the improvement the pacemaker made to his quality of life because he endured 25 more operations over his lifetime to replace each failing pacemaker with a new, improved iteration. He managed to outlive both Elmqvist and Senning, finally dying at the age of 86 on 28 December 2001. Thanks to the technological intervention of his numerous pacemakers, his heart never gave out. His cause of death was skin cancer. Today, more than a million people worldwide have pacemakers implanted each year, and an implanted device can last up to 15 years before needing to be replaced. (Some pacemakers in the 1980s used nuclear batteries, which could last even longer, but the radioactive material was problematic. See “The Unlikely Revival of Nuclear Batteries.”) Additionally, some pacemakers also incorporate a defibrillator to shock the heart back to a normal rhythm when it gets too far out of sync. This lifesaving device certainly has come a long way from its humble start in a shoe polish tin. Rune Elmqvist’s legacy Whenever I start researching the object of the month for Past Forward, I never know where the story will take me or how it might hit home. My dad lived with congestive heart failure for more than two decades and absolutely loved his pacemaker. He had a great relationship with his technician, Francois, and they worked together to fine-tune the device and maximize its benefits. And just like Arne Larsson, my dad died from an unrelated cause. An engineer to the core, he would have delighted in learning about the history of this fantastic invention. And he probably would have been tickled by the fact that the same person also invented the inkjet printer. My dad was not a fan of inkjets, but I’m sure he would have greatly admired Rune Elmqvist, who saw problems that needed solving and came up with elegantly engineered solutions. Part of a continuing series looking at historical artifacts that embrace the boundless potential of technology. An abridged version of this article appears in the September 2025 print issue. References There is frustratingly little documented information about the Mingograph’s origin story or functionality other than its patent. I pieced together how it worked by reading the methodology sections of various scientific papers, such as Alf Nachemson’s 1960 article in Acta Orthopaedica Scandinavica, “Lumbar Intradiscal Pressure: Experimental Studies on Post-mortem Material”; Ingemar Hjorth’s 1970 article in the Journal of Theoretical Biology, “A Comment on Graphic Displays of Bird Sounds and Analyses With a New Device, the Melograph Mona”; and Paroo Nihalani’s 1975 article in Phonetica, “Velopharyngeal Opening in the Formation of Voiced Stops in Sindhi.” Such sources reveal how this early inkjet printer moved from cardiology into other fields. Descriptions of Elmqvist’s pacemaker were much easier to find, with Mark Nicholls’s 2007 profile “Pioneers of Cardiology: Rune Elmqvist, M.D.,” in Circulation: Journal of the American Heart Association, being the main source. Siemens also pays tribute to the pacemaker on its website; see, for example, “A Lifesaver in a Plastic Cup.”
The last time I used a dial-up modem came sometime around 2001. Within just a few years, dial-up had exited my life, never to return. I haven’t even had a telephone line in my house for most of my adult life. But I still feel a strong tinge of sadness to know that AOL is finally retiring the ol’ hobbyhorse. At the end of September, it’s gone. The timeline is almost on-the-nose fitting: The widespread access to the Internet AOL’s service brought in the 1990s is associated with a digital phenomenon called the Eternal September. Before AOL allowed broad access to Usenet—a precursor to today’s online discussion forums—most new users appeared each September, when new college students frequently joined the platform. Thanks to AOL, they began showing up daily starting around September 1993. The fact that AOL’s dial-up is still active in the first place highlights a truism of technology: Sometimes, the important stuff sticks around well after it’s obsolete. Why AOL is ditching dial-up now It’s no surprise that dial-up has lingered for close to a quarter-century. Despite not having needed a dial-up modem myself since the summer of 2001, I was once so passionate about dial-up that I begged to get a modem for my 13th birthday. Modems are hard to shake, and not just because we fondly remember waiting so long for them to do their thing. Originally, the telephone modem was a hack. It was pushed into public consciousness partly by Deaf users who worked around the phone industry’s monopolistic regulations to develop the teletypewriter, a system to communicate over phone lines via text. Along the way, the community invented technologies like the acoustic coupler. To make that hack function, modems had to do multiple conversions in real time—from data to audio and back again, in two directions. As I put it in a piece that compared the modem to the telegraph: The modem, at least in its telephone-based forms, represents a dance between sound and data. By translating information into an aural signal, then into current, then back into an aural signal, then back into data once again, the modulation and demodulation going on is very similar to the process used with the original telegraph, albeit done manually. Modems like this one from U.S. Robotics work by converting data to audio and back again. Jphill19/Wikimedia Commons With telegraphs, the information was input by a person, translated into electric pulses, and received by another person. Modems work the same way, just without human translators. The result of all this back and forth was that modems had to give up a hell of a lot of speed to make this all work. The need to connect over a medium built for audio meant that data was at risk of getting lost over the line. (This is why error correction was an essential part of the modem’s evolution; often data needed to be shared more than once to ensure it got through. Without error correction, dial-up modems would be even slower.) Remember that sound? It marked many users’ first experience getting online.AdventuresinHD/YouTube Telephone lines were a hugely inefficient system for data because they were built for voice and heavily compressed audio. Voices are still clear and recognizable after being compressed, but audio compression can wreak havoc on data connections. Plus, there was the problem of line access. With a call, you could not easily share a connection. That meant you couldn’t make phone calls while using dial-up, leading to some homes getting a second line. And at the Internet Service Provider level, having multiple lines got very complex, very fast. The phone industry knew this, but its initial solution, ISDN, did not take off among mainstream consumers. (A later one, DSL, had better uptake, and is likely one of the few Internet options rural users currently have.) In some areas of the United States, dial-up remains the best option—the result of decades of poor investment in Internet infrastructure. So the industry moved to other solutions to get consumers Internet—coaxial cable, which was already widespread because of cable TV, and fiber, which wasn’t. The problem is, coax never reached quite as far as telephone wires did, in part because cable television wasn’t technically a utility in the way electricity or water were. In recent years, many attempts have been made to classify Internet access as a public utility, though the most recent one was struck down by an appeals court earlier this year. The public utility regulation is important. The telephone had struggled to reach rural communities in the 1930s, and only did so after a series of regulations, including one that led to the creation of the Federal Communications Commission, were put into effect. So too did electricity, which needed a dedicated law to expand its reach. But the reach of broadband is frustratingly incomplete, as highlighted by the fact that many areas of the country are not properly covered by cellular signals. And getting new wires hung can be an immensely difficult task, in part because companies that sell fiber, like Verizon and Google, often stop investing due to the high costs. (Though, to Google’s credit, it started expanding again in 2022 after a six-year rollback.) So, in some areas of the United States, dial-up remains the best option—the result of decades of poor investment in Internet infrastructure. This, for years, has propped up companies like AOL, which has evolved numerous times since it foolishly merged with Time Warner a quarter-century ago. The first PC-based client called America Online appeared on the graphical operating system GeoWorks. This screenshot shows the DOS AOL client that was distributed with GeoWorks 2.01.Ernie Smith But AOL is not the company it was. After multiple acquisitions and spin-outs, it is now a mere subsidiary of Yahoo, and it long ago transitioned into a Web-first property. Oh, it still has subscriptions, but they’re effectively fancy analogues for unnecessary security software. And their email client, while having been defeated by the likes of Gmail years ago, still has its fans. When I posted the AOL news on social media, about 90 percent of the responses were jokes or genuine notes of respect. But there was a small contingent, maybe 5 percent, that talked about how much this was going to screw over far-flung communities. I don’t think it’s AOL’s responsibility to keep this model going forever. Instead, it looks like the job is going to fall to two companies: Microsoft, whose MSN Dial-Up Internet Access costs US $179.95 per year, and the company United Online, which still operates the longtime dial-up players Juno and NetZero. Satellite Internet is also an option, with older services like HughesNet and newer ones like Starlink picking up the slack. It’s not AOL’s fault. But AOL is the face of this failing. AOL dropping dial-up is part of a long fade-out As technologies go, the dial-up modem has not lasted quite as long as the telegram, which has been active in one form or another for 181 years. But the modem, which was first used in 1958 as part of an air-defense system, has stuck around for a good 67 years. That makes it one of the oldest pieces of computer-related technology still in modern use. To give you an idea of how old that is: 1958 is also the year that the integrated circuit, an essential building block of any modern computer, was invented. The disk platter, which became the modern hard drive, was invented a year earlier. The floppy disk came a decade later. (It should be noted that the modem itself is not dying—your smartphone has one—but the connection your landline has to your modem, the really loud one, has seen better days.) The news that AOL is dropping its service might be seen as the end of the line for dial-up, but the story of the telegram hints that this may not be the case. In 2006, much hay was made about Western Union sending its final telegram. But Western Union was never the only company sending telegrams, and another company picked up the business. You can still send a telegram via International Telegram in 2025. (It’s not cheap: A single message, sent the same day, is $34, plus 75 cents per word.) In many ways, AOL dropping the service is a sign that this already niche use case is going to get more niche. But niche use cases have a way of staying relevant, given the right audience. It’s sort of like why doctors continue to use pagers. As a Planet Money episode from two years ago noted, the additional friction of using pagers worked well with the way doctors functioned, because it ensured that they knew the messages they were getting didn’t compete with anything else. Dial-up is likely never going to totally die, unless the landline phone system itself gets knocked offline, which AT&T has admittedly been itching to do. It remains one of the cheapest options to get online, outside of drinking a single coffee at a Panera and logging onto the wifi. But AOL? While dial-up may have been the company’s primary business earlier in its life, it hasn’t really been its focus in quite a long time. AOL is now a highly diversified company, whose primary focus over the past 15 years has been advertising. It still sells subscriptions, but those subscriptions are about to lose their most important legacy feature. AOL is simply too weak to support the next generation of Internet service themselves. Their inroad to broadband was supposed to be Time Warner Cable; that didn’t work out, so they pivoted to something else, but kept around the legacy business while it was still profitable. It’s likely that emerging technologies, like Microsoft’s Airband Initiative, which relies on distributing broadband over unused “white spaces” on the television dial, stand a better shot. 5G connectivity will also likely improve over time (T-Mobile already promotes its 5G home Internet as a rural option), and perhaps more satellite-based options will emerge. Technologies don’t die. They just slowly become so irrelevant that they might as well be dead. The monoculture of the AOL login experience When I posted the announcement, hidden in an obscure link on the AOL website sent to me by a colleague, it immediately went viral on Bluesky and Mastodon. That meant I got to see a lot of people react to this news in real time. Most had the same comment: I didn’t even know it was still around. Others made modem jokes, or talked about AOL’s famously terrible customer service. What was interesting was that most people said roughly the same thing about the service. That is not the case with most online experiences, which usually reflect myriad points of views. I think it speaks to the fact that while the Internet was the ultimate monoculture killer, the experience of getting online for the first time was largely monocultural. Usually, it started with a modem connecting to a phone number and dropping us into a single familiar place. We have lost a lot of Internet Service Providers over the years. Few spark the passion and memories of America Online, a network that somehow beat out more innovative and more established players to become the onramp to the Information Superhighway, for all the good and bad that represents. AOL must be embarrassed of that history. It barely even announced its closure.
CT scanning, streaming videos, and sending images over the Internet wouldn’t be possible without the Fast Fourier transform. Commonly known as FFT, the computer algorithm designed by researchers at Princeton University and IBM is found in just about every electronic device, according to an entry in the Engineering and Technology History Wiki. Demonstrated for the first time in 1964 by IEEE Fellows John Tukey and James W. Cooley, the algorithm breaks down a signal—a series of values over time—and converts it into frequencies. FFT was 100 times faster than the existing discrete Fourier transform. The DFT also requires more memory than the FFT because it saves intermediate results while processing. The FFT has become an important tool for manipulating and analyzing signals in many areas including audio processing, telecommunications, digital broadcasting, and image analysis. It helps filter, compress, eliminate noise from, and otherwise modify signals. The 60-year-old ubiquitous computer code also has applications in today’s cutting-edge technologies such as AI, quantum computing, self-driving cars, and 5G communication systems. The FFT was commemorated with an IEEE Milestone during a ceremony held in May at Princeton University. “The Cooley-Tukey algorithm significantly accelerated the calculation of DFTs,” 2024 IEEE President Tom Coughlin said at the ceremony. “Prior methods required significantly more computations, making FFT a revolutionary breakthrough. By leveraging algebraic properties and periodicities, the FFT reduced the number of the operations, making it particularly and practically feasible for everyday tasks, replacing the less efficient analog methods.” A new mathematical tool In 1963 Tukey, a professor of mathematics and statistics at Princeton, participated in a meeting of U.S. President John F. Kennedy’s Science Advisory Committee to discuss ways to detect underground nuclear tests, according to the ETHW entry. Also attending that meeting was Richard Garwin, a physicist and engineer at IBM who played a key role in designing the first hydrogen bomb. He died in May. Read about his fascinating life in this month’s In Memoriam. Tukey told Garwin he was working on speeding up the computation of an existing method—the Fourier transform—thinking it might help with the detection. His algorithm mathematically converted a signal from its original domain, such as time or space, to a frequency domain. Garwin recognized its potential and asked IBM to select a mathematical analyst to collaborate with Tukey. That person was Cooley, a research staff member working on numerical analysis and computation projects. If the Fourier transform could be made faster, Garwin said, seismometers could be planted in the ground in countries surrounding the Soviet Union to detect nuclear explosions from atomic bomb tests, because the Soviets wouldn’t allow on-site tests, according to Cooley’s oral history in the Engineering and Technology History Wiki. A seismometer measures ground vibrations, which are converted into electrical signals and recorded as seismograms. To design sensors for underground nuclear tests, however, “you would have to process all the seismic signals, and a large part of the processing could be done by Fourier transforms,” Cooley said in his oral history. But “the computing power at the time was not enough to process all of the signals you’d need to do this.” The FFT could calculate a seismic sensor’s frequency and produce images, IEEE Life Fellow Harold S. Stone said at the Milestone event. He is an image processing researcher and Fellow emeritus at the NEC Laboratories America, in Princeton, and a former IBM researcher. Tukey and Cooley led the team that wrote the computer code that demonstrated the FFT’s power. “The demonstration of the Coley-Tukey algorithm showed that it was 100 times faster,” Stone said. “It was so fast that it could keep up with the seismic data.” Sensors using the algorithm were planted, and they detected nuclear explosions within a 15-kilometer radius from where they were detonated, according to the ETHW entry. “By leveraging algebraic properties and periodicities, the FFT reduced the number of the operations, making it particularly and practically feasible for everyday tasks, replacing the less efficient analog methods.” —2024 IEEE President Tom Coughlin In 1965 Cooley and Tukey published “An Algorithm for the Machine Calculation of Complex Fourier Series,” describing the FFT process. The seminal paper spurred development of digital signal processing technologies. For his work, Tukey was awarded a U.S. National Medal of Science in 1973. He also received the 1982 IEEE Medal of Honor for “contributions to the spectral analysis of random processes and the fast Fourier transform algorithm.” Cooley, who received the 2002 IEEE Kilby Signal Processing Medal for pioneering the FFT, was a leading figure in the field of digital signal processing. Through his involvement with the IEEE Digital Signal Processing Committee (today known as the IEEE Signal Processing Society), he helped establish terminology and suggested research directions. Although not one of the inventors, Garwin is credited with recognizing that the algorithm had wider applications, especially in scientific and engineering fields. “In today’s lingo, Garwin helped the FFT ‘go viral’ by getting Cooley and Tukey together,” Stone said. “Garwin and Tukey sought better information to forestall and prevent wars,” added Frank Anscombe, Tukey’s nephew. “The Cooley-Tukey FFT swiftly advanced this cause by giving a practical, simplifying solution for wavy data. Thanks to the FFT, a technological rubicon began to be crossed: analog-to-digital machines.” A spirit of collaboration between academia and industry Like so many innovations, the FFT came out of a collaboration between industry and academia, and it should be recognized for that, IEEE Fellow Andrea Goldsmith said at the ceremony. She explained that she regularly works with FFT in her research projects. At the time of the event, she was Princeton’s dean of engineering and applied sciences. This month she started her new position as president of Stony Brook University, in New York. “Taking the ideas we have from basic research in our university labs, talking to people in industry, and understanding how the research problems we work on can benefit industry either tomorrow or in five years or 20 years from now, is incredibly important,” she said. “Some people think of engineering as boring and dry and something that only nerds do, but there is such beauty and creativity in a lot of the innovations that we have developed, and I think the FFT is a perfect example of that.” The FFT joins more than 270 other IEEE Milestones. They are more than a marker of achievement, said IEEE Life Senior Member Bala S. Prasanna, director of IEEE Region 1. “They are a testament to human ingenuity, perseverance, and the spirit of collaboration,” Prasanna said. “These Milestones were more than just breakthroughs; they became catalysts for innovation, enabling progress in ways once thought impossible. Each one ensures that the story behind these innovations is preserved, not just as history but as inspiration for future generations.” Another ceremony was held on 11 June at the IBM Watson Research Center. Milestone plaques recognizing the FFT are on display in the lobby of Princeton’s School of Engineering and Applied Science and in the main lobby at the entrance of the IBM research center. They read: “In 1964 a computer program implementing a highly efficient Fourier analysis algorithm was demonstrated at IBM Research. Jointly developed by Princeton University and IBM collaborators, the Cooley-Tukey technique calculated discrete Fourier transforms orders of magnitude faster than had been previously demonstrated. Known as the Fast Fourier Transform (FFT), its speed impacted numerous applications including computerized tomography, audio and video compression, signal processing, and real-time data streaming.” Administered by the IEEE History Center and supported by donors, the Milestone program recognizes outstanding technical developments around the world. The IEEE Princeton Central Jersey Section sponsored the nomination.
On 29 August 1949, the Soviet Union successfully tested its first nuclear weapon. Over the next year and a half, U.S. President Harry S. Truman resurrected the Office of Civilian Defense (which had been abolished at the end of World War II) and signed into law the Federal Civil Defense Act of 1950, which mobilized government agencies to plan for the aftermath of a global nuclear war. With the Cold War underway, that act kicked off a decades-long effort to ensure that at least some Americans survived nuclear armageddon. As the largest civilian federal agency with a presence throughout the country, the U.S. Post Office Department was in a unique position to monitor local radiation levels and shelter residents. By the end of 1964, approximately 1,500 postal buildings had been designated as fallout shelters, providing space and emergency supplies for 1.3 million people. Occupants were expected to remain in the shelters until the radioactivity outside was deemed safe. By 1968, about 6,000 postal employees had been trained to use radiological equipment, such as the CD V-700 pictured at top, to monitor beta and gamma radiation. And a group of postal employees organized a volunteer ham radio network to help with communications should the regular networks go down. What was civil defense in the Cold War? The basic premise of civil defense was that many people would die immediately in cities directly targeted by nuclear attacks. (Check out Alex Wellerstein’s interactive Nukemap for an estimate of casualties and impact should your hometown—or any location of your choosing—be hit.) It was the residents of other cities, suburbs, and rural communities outside the blast area that would most benefit from civil defense preparations. With enough warning, they could shelter in a shielded site and wait for the worst of the fallout to decay. Anywhere from a day or two to a few weeks after the attack, they could emerge and aid any survivors in the harder-hit areas. In 1957, a committee of the Office of Defense Mobilization drafted the report Deterrence and Survival in the Nuclear Age, for President Dwight D. Eisenhower. Better known as the Gaither Report, it called for the creation of a nationwide network of fallout shelters to protect civilians. Government publications such as The Family Fallout Shelter encouraged Americans who had the space, the resources, and the will to construct shelters for their homes. City dwellers in apartment buildings warranted only half a page in the booklet, with the suggestion to head to the basement and cooperate with other residents. This model fallout shelter from 1960 was designed for four to six people. Bettmann/Getty Images Ultimately, very few homeowners actually built a fallout shelter. But Rod Serling, creator of the television series “The Twilight Zone,” saw an opportunity for pointed social commentary. Aired in the fall of 1961, the episode “The Shelter” showed how quickly civilization (epitomized by a suburban middle-class family and their friends) broke down over decisions about who would be saved and who would not. Meanwhile, President John F. Kennedy had started to shift the national strategy from individual shelters to community shelters. At his instruction, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers began surveying existing buildings suitable for public shelters. Post offices, especially ones with basements capable of housing at least 50 people, were a natural fit. Each postmaster general was designated as the local shelter manager and granted complete authority to operate the shelter, including determining who would be admitted or excluded. The Handbook for Fallout Shelter Management gave guidance for everything from sleeping arrangements to sanitation standards. Shelters were stocked with food and water, medicine, and, of course, radiological survey instruments. What to do in case of a nuclear attack These community fallout shelters were issued a standard kit for radiation detection. The kit came in a cardboard box that contained two radiation monitors, the CD V-700 (a Geiger counter, pictured at top) and the CD V-715 (a simple ion chamber survey meter); two cigar-size CD V-742 dosimeters, to measure a person’s total exposure while wearing the device; and a charger for the dosimeters. Also included was the Handbook for Radiological Monitors, which provided instructions on how to use the equipment and report the results. Post office fallout shelters were issued standard kits for measuring radioactivity after a nuclear attack.National Postal Museum/Smithsonian Institution The shelter radiation kit included two radiation monitors, two cigar-size dosimeters, and a charger for the dosimeters. Photoquest/Getty Images In the event of an attack, the operator would take readings with the CD V-715 at selected locations in the shelter. Then, within three minutes of finishing the indoor measurements, he would go outside and take a reading at least 25 feet (7.6 meters) from the building. If the radiation level outside was high, there were procedures for decontamination upon returning to the shelter. The “protection factor” of the shelter was calculated by dividing the outside reading by the inside reading. (Today the Federal Emergency Management Agency, FEMA, recommends a PF of at least 40 for a fallout shelter.) Operators were directed to retake the measurements and recalculate the protective factor at least once every 24 hours, or more frequently if the radiation levels changed rapidly. The CD V-700 was intended for detecting beta and gamma radiation during cleanup and decontamination operations, and also for detecting any radioactive contamination of food, water, and personnel. RELATED: DIY Gamma-Ray Spectroscopy With a Raspberry Pi Pico Each station would report their dose rates to a regional control center, so that the civil defense organization could determine when people could leave their shelter, where they could go, what routes to take, and what facilities needed decontamination. But if you’ve lived through a natural or manmade disaster, you’ll know that in the immediate aftermath, communications don’t always work so well. Indeed, the Handbook for Radiological Monitors acknowledged that a nuclear attack might disrupt communications. Luckily, the U.S. Post Office Department had a backup plan. In May 1958, Postmaster General Arthur E. Summerfield made an appeal to all postal employees who happened to be licensed amateur radio operators, to form an informal network that would provide emergency communications in the event of the collapse of telephone and telegraph networks and commercial broadcasting. The result was Post Office Net (PON), a voluntary group of ham radio operators; by 1962, about 1,500 postal employees in 43 states had signed on. That year, PON was opened up to nonemployees who had the necessary license. RELATED: The Uncertain Future of Ham Radio Although PON was never activated due to a nuclear threat, it did transmit messages during other emergencies. For example, in January 1967, after an epic blizzard blanketed Illinois and Michigan with heavy snow, the Michigan PON went into action, setting up liaisons with county weather services and relaying emergency requests, such as rescuing people stranded in vehicles on Interstate 94. A 1954 civil defense fair featured a display of amateur radios. The U.S. Post Office recruited about 1,500 employees to operate a ham radio network in the event that regular communications went down. National Archives The post office retired the network on 30 June 1974 as part of its shift away from civil defense preparedness. (A volunteer civil emergency-response ham radio network still exists, under the auspices of the American Radio Relay League.) And by 1977, laboratory tests indicated that most of the food and medicine stockpiled in post office basements was no longer fit for human consumption. In 1972 the Office of Civil Defense was replaced by the Defense Civil Preparedness Agency, which was eventually folded into FEMA. And with the end of the Cold War, the civil defense program officially ended in 1994, fortunately without ever being needed for a nuclear attack. Do we still need civil defense? The idea for this column came to me last fall, when I was doing research at the Linda Hall Library, in Kansas City, Mo., and I kept coming across articles about civil defense in magazines and journals from the 1950s and ’60s. I knew that the Smithsonian’s National Postal Museum, in Washington, D.C., had several civil defense artifacts (including the CD V-700 and a great “In Time of Emergency” public service announcement record album). As a child of the late Cold War, I remember being worried by the prospect of nuclear war. But then the Cold War ended, and so did my fears. I envisioned this month’s column capturing the intriguing history of civil defense and the earnest preparations of the era. That chapter of history, I assumed, was closed. Little did I imagine that by the time I began to write this, the prospect of a nuclear attack, if not an all-out war, would suddenly become much more real. These days, I understand the complexities and nuances of nuclear weapons much better than when I was a child. But I’m just as concerned that a nuclear conflict is imminent. Here’s hoping that history repeats itself, and it does not come to that. Part of a continuing series looking at historical artifacts that embrace the boundless potential of technology. An abridged version of this article appears in the August 2025 print issue. References The November 1951 issue of Electrical Engineering summarized a civil defense conference held at the General Electric Co.’s Electronics Park in Syracuse, N.Y., earlier that year. Two hundred eighty federal, state, county, and city officials from across the United States and Canada attended, which got me thinking about the topic. Many of the government’s civil defense handbooks are available through the Internet Archive. The U.S. Postal Bulletins have also been digitized, and the USPS historian’s office wrote a great account, “The Postal Service’s Role in Civil Defense During the Cold War.” Although I’ve highlighted artifacts from the National Postal Museum, the Smithsonian Institution has many other objects across multiple museums. Eric Green has been collecting civil defense material since 1978 and has made much of it available through his virtual Civil Defense Museum. Alex Wellerstein, a historian of nuclear technology at the Stevens Institute of Technology, writes the Substack newsletter Doomsday Machines, where he gives thoughtful commentary on how we think about the end of times, in both fiction and reality. His interactive Nukemap is informative and scary.
As I try to write this article, my friend and I have six different screens attached to three types of devices. We’re working in the same room but on our own projects—separate yet together, a comfortable companionship. I had never really thought of the proliferation of screens as a peacekeeping tool until I stumbled across one of Allen B. DuMont’s 1950s dual-screen television sets. DuMont’s idea was to let two people in the same room watch different programs. It reminded me of my early childhood and my family’s one TV set, and the endless arguments with my sisters and parents over what to watch. Dad always won, and his choice was rarely mine. The DuMont Duoscopic Was 2 TVs in 1 Allen B. DuMont was a pioneer of commercial television in the United States. His eponymous company manufactured cathode-ray tubes and in 1938 introduced one of the earliest electronic TV sets. He understood how human nature and a shortage of TV screens could divide couples, siblings, and friends. Accordingly, he built at least two prototype TVs that could play two shows at once. In the 1945 prototype shown at top, DuMont retrofitted a maple-finished cabinet that originally held a single 15-inch Plymouth TV receiver to house two black-and-white 12-inch receivers. Separate audio could be played with or without earpieces. Viewers used a 10-turn dial to tune into TV channel 1 (which went off the air in 1948) and VHF channels 2 through 13. As radio was still much more popular than television, the dial also included FM from 88 to 108 megahertz, plus a few channels used for weather and aviation. The lower left drawer held a phonograph. It was an all-in-one entertainment center. To view their desired programs on the DuMont Duoscopic TV set, this family wore polarized glasses and listened through earpieces.Allen DuMont/National Museum of American History/Smithsonian In 1954, DuMont introduced a different approach. With the DuMont Duoscopic, two different channels were broadcast on a single screen. To the naked eye, the images appeared superimposed on one another. But a viewer who wore polarized glasses or looked at the screen through a polarized panel saw just one of the images. Duoscopic viewers could use an earpiece to listen to the audio of their choice. You could also use the TV set to watch a single program by selecting only one channel and playing the audio through one speaker. DuMont seemed committed to the idea that family members should spend time together, even if they were engaged in different activities. An image of the Duoscopic sent out by the Associated Press Wirephoto Service heralded “No more lonely nights for the missus.” According to the caption, she could join “Hubby,” who was already relaxing in his comfy armchair enjoying his favorite show, but now watch something of her own choosing. “Would you believe it?” a Duoscopic brochure asks. “While HE sees and hears the fights, SHE sees and hears her play…. Separate viewing and solo sound allows your family a choice.” The technology to separate and isolate the images and audio was key. The Duoscopic had two CRTs, each with its own feed, set at right angles to each other. A half-silvered mirror superimposed the two images onto a single screen, which could then be filtered with polarized glasses or screens. TV pioneer Allen B. DuMont designed and manufactured cathode ray tubes and TV sets and launched an early TV network.Science History Images/Alamy A separate box could be conveniently placed nearby to control the volume of each program. Users could toggle between the two programs with the flick of a switch. Each set came with eight earpieces with long cords. A short note in the March 1954 issue of Electrical Engineering praises the engineers who crafted the sound system to eliminate sound bleed from the speakers. It notes that a viewer “very easily could watch one television program and listen to the audio content of a second.” Or, as a United Press piece published in the Panama City News Herald suggested, part of the family could use the earpieces to watch and listen to the TV while others in the room could “read, play bridge, or just sit and brood.” I suspect the brooders were the children who still didn’t get to watch their favorite show. Of course, choice was a relative matter. In the 1950s, many U.S. television markets were lucky to have even two channels. Only in major metropolitan areas were there more programming options. The only known example of DuMont’s side-by-side version resides at the South Carolina State Museum, in Columbia. But sources indicate that DuMont planned to manufacture about 30 Duoscopics for demonstration purposes, although it’s unclear how many were actually made. (The Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History has a Duoscopic in its collections.) Alas, neither version ever went into mainstream production. Perhaps that’s because the economics didn’t make sense: Even in the early 1950s, it would have been easier and cheaper for families to simply purchase two television sets and watch them in different rooms. Who Was Early TV Pioneer Allen DuMont? DuMont is an interesting figure in the history of television because he was actively engaged in the full spectrum of the industry. Not only did he develop and manufacture receivers, he also conducted broadcasting experiments, published papers on transmission and reception, ran a television network, and produced programming. After graduating from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in 1924 with a degree in electrical engineering, DuMont worked in a plant that manufactured vacuum tubes. Four years later, he joined the De Forest Radio Co. as chief engineer. With Lee de Forest, DuMont helped design an experimental mechanical television station, but he was unconvinced by the technology and advocated for all-electric TV for its crisper image. RELATED: In 1926, TV Was Mechanical When the Radio Corporation of America acquired De Forest Radio in 1931, DuMont started his own laboratory in his basement, where he worked on improving cathode ray tubes. In 1932 he invented the “magic eye,” a vacuum tube that was a visual tuning aid in radio receivers. He sold the rights to RCA. In 1935, DuMont moved the operation to a former pickle factory in Passaic, N.J., and incorporated it as the Allen B. DuMont Laboratories. The company produced cathode ray oscilloscopes, which helped finance his experiments with television. He debuted the all-electronic DuMont 180 TV set in June 1938. It cost US $395, or almost $9,000 today—so not exactly an everyday purchase for most people. Although DuMont was quick to market, RCA and the Television Corp. of America were right on his tail. RELATED: RCA’s Lucite Phantom Teleceiver Introduced the Idea of TV Of course, if companies were going to sell televisions, consumers had to have programs to watch. So in 1939, DuMont launched his own television network, starting with station W2XWV, broadcasting from Passaic. The Federal Communications Commission licensed W2XWV as an experimental station for television research. DuMont received a commercial license and changed its call sign to WABD on 2 May 1944, three years after NBC’s and CBS’s commercial stations went into operation in New York City. Due to wartime restrictions and debates over industry standards, television remained mostly experimental during World War II. As of September 1944, there were only six stations operating—three in New York City and one each in Chicago, Los Angeles, and Philadelphia. There were approximately 7,000 TV sets in personal use. The DuMont Television Network’s variety show hosted by Jackie Gleason [left, hands raised] featured a recurring skit that later gave rise to “The Honeymooners.”Left: CBS/Getty Images; Right: Garry Winogrand/Picture Post/Hulton Archive/Getty Images While other networks focused on sports, movies, or remote broadcasts, the DuMont Television Network made its mark with live studio broadcasts. In April 1946, WABD moved its studios to the Wanamaker Department Store in Manhattan. DuMont converted the 14,200-cubic-meter (500,000-cubic-foot) auditorium into the world’s largest television studio. The network’s notable programming included “The Original Amateur Hour,” which started as a radio program; “The Johns Hopkins Science Review,” which had a surprisingly progressive take on women’s health; “Life Is Worth Living,” a devotional show hosted by Catholic Bishop Fulton Sheen (that garnered DuMont’s only Emmy Award); “Cavalcade of Stars,” a variety show hosted by Jackie Gleason that birthed “The Honeymooners”; and “Captain Video and His Video Rangers,” a children’s science fiction series, the first of its genre. My grandmother, who loved ballroom dancing, was a big fan of “The Arthur Murray Party,” a dance show hosted by Arthur’s wife, Kathryn; my mom fondly recalls Kathryn’s twirling skirts. While NBC, CBS, and the other major television players built their TV networks on their existing radio networks, DuMont was starting fresh. To raise capital for his broadcast station, he sold a half-interest in his company to Paramount Pictures in 1938. The partnership was contentious from the start. There were disputes over money, the direction of the venture, and stock. But perhaps the biggest conflict was when Paramount and some of its subsidiaries began applying for FCC licenses in the same markets as Dumont’s. This ate into the DuMont network’s advertising and revenue and its plans to expand. In August 1955, Paramount gained full control over the DuMont network and proceeded to shut it down. DuMont continued to manufacture television receivers until 1958, when he sold the business to the Emerson Radio & Phonograph Corp. Two years later, the remainder of DuMont Labs merged with the Fairchild Camera and Instrument Corp. (whose founder, Sherman Fairchild, had in 1957 helped a group of ambitious young scientists and engineers known as the “Traitorous Eight” set up Fairchild Semiconductor). Allen DuMont served as general manager of the DuMont division for a year and then became a technical consultant to Fairchild. He died in 1965. One Thing Allen DuMont Missed My family eventually got a second and then a third television, but my dad always had priority. He watched the biggest set from his recliner in the family room, while my mom made do with the smaller sets in the kitchen and bedroom. He was relaxing, while she was usually doing chores. As a family, we would watch different shows in separate places. An ad for the DuMont Duoscopic touted it as a device for household harmony: “While HE sees and hears the fights, SHE sees and hears her play.” National Museum of American History/Smithsonian These days, with so many screens on so many devices and so many programming options, we may have finally achieved DuMont’s vision of separate but together. While I was writing this piece, my friend was watching the French Open on the main TV, muted so she didn’t disturb me. She streamed the same channel on her tablet and routed the audio to her headset. We both worked on our respective laptops and procrastinated by checking messages on our phones. But there’s one aspect of human nature that DuMont’s prototypes and promotional materials failed to address—that moment when someone sees something so exciting that they just have to share it. Sarah and I were barely getting any work done in this separate-but-together setting because we kept interrupting each other with questions, comments, and the occasional tennis update. We’ve been friends too long; we can’t help but chitchat. The only way for me to actually finish this article will be to go to a room by myself with no other screens or people to distract me. Part of a continuing series looking at historical artifacts that embrace the boundless potential of technology. An abridged version of this article appears in the July 2025 print issue as “The 2-in-1 TV.” References I first learned about the Duoscopic in a short article in the March 1954 issue of Electrical Engineering, a precursor publication to Spectrum. My online research turned up several brochures and newspaper articles from the Early Television Museum, which surprisingly led me to the dual-screen DuMont at the South Carolina State Museum in my hometown of Columbia, S.C. Museum objects are primary sources, and I was fortunate to be able to visit this amazing artifact and examine it with Director of Collections Robyn Thiesbrummel. I also consulted the museum’s accession file, which gave additional information about the receiver from the time of acquisition. I took a look at Gary Newton Hess’s 1960 dissertation, An Historical Study of the Du Mont Television Network, as well as several of Allen B. DuMont’s papers published in the Proceedings of the IRE and Electrical Engineering.
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Today's links The capitalism of fools: Trump's mirror-world New Deal. Hey look at this: Delights to delectate. Object permanence: IBM's fabric design; Nixon Cthulu; Surveillance capitalism is capitalism, with surveillance; Dismaland ad; Outdoor ed vs TB; Mathematicians' fave chalk. Upcoming appearances: Where to find me. Recent appearances: Where I've been. Latest books: You keep readin' em, I'll keep writin' 'em. Upcoming books: Like I said, I'll keep writin' 'em. Colophon: All the rest. The capitalism of fools (permalink) As Trump rails against free trade, demands public ownership stakes in corporations that receive government funds, and (selectively) enforces antitrust law, some (stupid) people are wondering, "Is Trump a communist?" In The American Prospect, David Dayen writes about the strange case of Trump's policies, which fly in the face of right wing economic orthodoxy and have the superficial trappings of a leftist economic program: https://prospect.org/economy/2025-08-28-judge-actually-existing-trump-economy/ The problem isn't that tariffs are always bad, nor is it that demanding state ownership stakes in structurally important companies that depend on public funds is bad policy. The problem is that Trump's version of these policies sucks, because everything Trump touches dies, and because he governs solely on vibes, half-remembered wisdom imparted by the last person who spoke to him, and the dying phantoms of old memories as they vanish beneath a thick bark of amyloid plaque. Take Trump's demand for a 10% stake in Intel (a course of action endorsed by no less than Bernie Sanders). Intel is a company in trouble, whose financialization has left it dependent on other companies (notably TMSC) to make its most advanced chips. The company has hollowed itself out, jettisoning both manufacturing capacity and cash reserves, pissing away the funds thus freed up on stock buybacks and dividends. Handing Trump a 10% "golden share" does nothing to improve Intel's serious structural problems. And if you take Trump at his word and accept that securing US access to advanced chips is a national security priority, Trump's Intel plan does nothing to advance that access. But it gets worse: Trump also says denying China access to these chips is a national security priority, but he greenlit Nvidia's plan to sell its top-of-the-range silicon to China in exchange for a gaudy statuette and a 15% export tax. It's possible to pursue chip manufacturing as a matter of national industrial policy, and it's even possible to achieve this goal by taking ownership stakes in key firms – because it's often easier to demand corporate change via a board seat than it is to win the court battles needed to successfully invoke the Defense Production Act. The problem is that Trumpland is uninterested in making any of that happen. They just want a smash and grab and some red meat for the base: "Look, we made Intel squeal!" Then there's the Trump tariffs. Writing in Vox EU, Lausanne prof of international business Richard Baldwin writes about the long and checkered history of using tariffs to incubate and nurture domestic production: https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2025/08/trumpian-tariffs-rerun-the-failed-strategy-of-import-substitution-industrialization.html The theory of tariffs goes like this: if we make imports more expensive by imposing a tax on them (tariffs are taxes that are paid by consumers, after all), then domestic manufacturers will build factories and start manufacturing the foreign goods we've just raised prices on. This is called "import substitution," and it really has worked, but only in a few cases. What do those cases have in common? They were part of a comprehensive program of "export discipline, state-directed credit, and careful government–business coordination": https://academic.oup.com/book/10201 In other words, tariffs only work to reshore production where there is a lot of careful planning, diligent data-collection, and review. Governments have to provide credit to key firms to get them capitalized, provide incentives, and smack nonperformers around. Basically, this is the stuff that Biden did for renewables with the energy sector, and – to a lesser extent – for silicon with the CHIPS Act. Trump's not doing any of that. He's just winging it. There's zero follow-through. It's all about appearances, soundbites, and the libidinal satisfaction of watching corporate titans bend the knee to your cult leader. This is also how Trump approaches antitrust. When it comes to corporate power, both Trump and Biden's antitrust enforcers are able to strike terror into the hearts of corporate behemoths. The difference is that the Biden administration prioritized monopolists based on how harmful they were to the American people and the American economy, whereas Trump's trustbusters target companies based on whether Trump is mad at them: https://pluralistic.net/2024/11/12/the-enemy-of-your-enemy/#is-your-enemy What's more, any company willing to hand a million or two to a top Trump enforcer can just walk away from the charges: https://prospect.org/power/2025-08-19-doj-insider-blows-whistle-pay-to-play-antitrust-corruption/ In her 2023 book Doppelganger, Naomi Klein introduces the idea of a right-wing "mirror world" that offers a conspiratorial, unhinged version of actual problems that leftists wrestle with: https://pluralistic.net/2023/09/05/not-that-naomi/#if-the-naomi-be-klein-youre-doing-just-fine For example, the antivax movement claims that pharma companies operate on the basis of unchecked greed, without regard to the harm their defective products cause to everyday people. When they talk about this, they sound an awful like leftists who are angry that the Sacklers killed a million Americans with their opiods and then walked away with billions of dollars: https://pluralistic.net/2023/12/05/third-party-nonconsensual-releases/#au-recherche-du-pedos-perdue Then there are the conspiracy theories about voting machines. Progressives have been sounding the alarm about the security defects in voting machine since the Bush v Gore years, but that doesn't mean that Venezuelan hackers stole the 2020 election for Biden: https://pluralistic.net/2021/01/11/seeing-things/#ess When anti-15-minute-city weirdos warn that automated license-plate cameras are a gift to tyrants both petty and gross, they are repeating a warning that leftists have sounded since the Patriot Act: https://locusmag.com/2023/05/commentary-cory-doctorow-the-swivel-eyed-loons-have-a-point/ The mirror-world is a world where real problems (the rampant sexual abuse of children by powerful people and authortiy figures) are met with fake solutions (shooting up pizza parlors and transferring Ghislaine Maxwell to a country-club prison): https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/czd049y2qymo Most of the people stuck in the mirror world are poor and powerless, because desperation makes you an easy mark for grifters peddling conspiracy theories. But Trump's policies on corporate power are what happens in the mirror world inhabited by the rich and powerful. Trump is risking the economic future of every person in America (except a few cronies), but that's not the only risk here. There's also the risk that reasonable people will come to view industrial policy, government stakes in publicly supported companies, and antitrust as reckless showboating, a tactic exclusively belonging to right wing nutjobs and would-be dictators. Sociologists have a name for this: they call it "schismogenesis," when a group defines itself in opposition to its rivals. Schismogenesis is progressives insisting that voting machines and pharma companies are trustworthy and that James Comey is a resistance hero: https://pluralistic.net/2021/12/18/schizmogenesis/ After we get rid of Trump, America will be in tatters. We're going to need big, muscular state action to revive the nation and rebuild its economy. We can't afford to let Trump poison the well for the very idea of state intervention in corporate activity. Hey look at this (permalink) Thinking Ahead to the Full Military Takeover of Cities https://www.hamiltonnolan.com/p/thinking-ahead-to-the-full-military Framework is working on a giant haptic touchpad, Trackpoint nub, and eGPU for its laptops https://www.theverge.com/news/766161/framework-egpu-haptic-touchpad-trackpoint-nub National says "fuck you" on the right to repair https://norightturn.blogspot.com/2025/08/national-says-fuck-you-on-right-to.html?m=1 Tax the Rich. They’ll Stay https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/political-commentary/zohran-mamdani-tax-rich-new-york-city-1235414327/ Welcome to the Free Online Tax Preparation Feedback Survey https://irsresearch.gov1.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_ewDJ6DeBj3ockGa Object permanence (permalink) #20yrsago Cops have to pay $41k for stopping man from videoing them https://web.archive.org/web/20050905015507/http://www.paed.uscourts.gov/documents/opinions/05D0847P.pdf #20yrsago Commercial music in podcasts: the end of free expression? https://memex.craphound.com/2005/08/26/commercial-music-in-podcasts-the-end-of-free-expression/ #10yrsago North Dakota cops can now use lobbyist-approved taser/pepper-spray drones https://www.thedailybeast.com/first-state-legalizes-taser-drones-for-cops-thanks-to-a-lobbyist/ #10yrsago Illinois mayor appoints failed censor to town library board https://ncac.org/news/blog/mayor-appoints-would-be-censor-to-library-board #10yrsago IBM’s lost, glorious fabric design https://collection.cooperhewitt.org/users/mepelman/visits/qtxg/87597377/ #10yrsago Former mayor of SLC suing NSA for warrantless Olympic surveillance https://www.techdirt.com/2015/08/26/prominent-salt-lake-city-residents-sue-nsa-over-mass-warrantless-surveillance-during-2002-olympics/ #10yrsago Health’s unkillable urban legend: “You must drink 8 glasses of water/day” https://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/25/upshot/no-you-do-not-have-to-drink-8-glasses-of-water-a-day.html?_r=0 #10yrsago Austin Grossman’s CROOKED: the awful, cthulhoid truth about Richard Nixon https://memex.craphound.com/2015/08/26/austin-grossmans-crooked-the-awful-cthulhoid-truth-about-richard-nixon/ #10yrsago After Katrina, FBI prioritized cellphone surveillance https://www.muckrock.com/news/archives/2015/aug/27/stingray-katrina/ #10yrsago Germany’s spy agency gave the NSA the private data of German citizens in exchange for Xkeyscore access https://www.zeit.de/digital/datenschutz/2015-08/xkeyscore-nsa-domestic-intelligence-agency #10yrsago Elaborate spear-phishing attempt against global Iranian and free speech activists, including an EFF staffer https://citizenlab.ca/2015/08/iran_two_factor_phishing/ #10yrsago Commercial for Banksy’s Dismaland https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V2NG-MgHqEk #5yrsago Outdoor education beat TB in 1907 https://pluralistic.net/2020/08/27/cult-chalk/#tb #5yrsago Hagoromo, mathematicians' cult chalk https://pluralistic.net/2020/08/27/cult-chalk/#hagoromo #5yrsago Principles for platform regulation https://pluralistic.net/2020/08/27/cult-chalk/#eff-eu #5yrsago It's blursday https://pluralistic.net/2020/08/26/destroy-surveillance-capitalism/#blursday #5yrsago Surveillance Capitalism is just capitalism, plus surveillance https://pluralistic.net/2020/08/26/destroy-surveillance-capitalism/#surveillance-monopolism Upcoming appearances (permalink) Ithaca: AD White keynote (Cornell), Sep 12 https://deanoffaculty.cornell.edu/events/keynote-cory-doctorow-professor-at-large/ DC: Enshittification at Politics and Prose, Oct 8 https://politics-prose.com/cory-doctorow-10825 New Orleans: DeepSouthCon63, Oct 10-12 http://www.contraflowscifi.org/ Chicago: Enshittification with Kara Swisher (Chicago Humanities), Oct 15 https://www.oldtownschool.org/concerts/2025/10-15-2025-kara-swisher-and-cory-doctorow-on-enshittification/ San Francisco: Enshittification at Public Works (The Booksmith), Oct 20 https://app.gopassage.com/events/doctorow25 Miami: Enshittification at Books & Books, Nov 5 https://www.eventbrite.com/e/an-evening-with-cory-doctorow-tickets-1504647263469 Recent appearances (permalink) Divesting from Amazon’s Audible and the Fight for Digital Rights (Libro.fm) https://pocketcasts.com/podcasts/9349e8d0-a87f-013a-d8af-0acc26574db2/00e6cbcf-7f27-4589-a11e-93e4ab59c04b The Utopias Podcast https://www.buzzsprout.com/2272465/episodes/17650124 Tariffs vs IP Law (Firewalls Don't Stop Dragons) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LFABFe-5-uQ Latest books (permalink) "Picks and Shovels": a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about the heroic era of the PC, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), February 2025 (https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250865908/picksandshovels). "The Bezzle": a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about prison-tech and other grifts, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), February 2024 (the-bezzle.org). "The Lost Cause:" a solarpunk novel of hope in the climate emergency, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), November 2023 (http://lost-cause.org). "The Internet Con": A nonfiction book about interoperability and Big Tech (Verso) September 2023 (http://seizethemeansofcomputation.org). Signed copies at Book Soup (https://www.booksoup.com/book/9781804291245). "Red Team Blues": "A grabby, compulsive thriller that will leave you knowing more about how the world works than you did before." Tor Books http://redteamblues.com. "Chokepoint Capitalism: How to Beat Big Tech, Tame Big Content, and Get Artists Paid, with Rebecca Giblin", on how to unrig the markets for creative labor, Beacon Press/Scribe 2022 https://chokepointcapitalism.com Upcoming books (permalink) "Canny Valley": A limited edition collection of the collages I create for Pluralistic, self-published, September 2025 "Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It," Farrar, Straus, Giroux, October 7 2025 https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374619329/enshittification/ "Unauthorized Bread": a middle-grades graphic novel adapted from my novella about refugees, toasters and DRM, FirstSecond, 2026 "Enshittification, Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It" (the graphic novel), Firstsecond, 2026 "The Memex Method," Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2026 "The Reverse-Centaur's Guide to AI," a short book about being a better AI critic, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2026 Colophon (permalink) Today's top sources: Currently writing: "The Reverse Centaur's Guide to AI," a short book for Farrar, Straus and Giroux about being an effective AI critic. (1090 words yesterday, 45491 words total). A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING This work – excluding any serialized fiction – is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license. That means you can use it any way you like, including commercially, provided that you attribute it to me, Cory Doctorow, and include a link to pluralistic.net. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ Quotations and images are not included in this license; they are included either under a limitation or exception to copyright, or on the basis of a separate license. Please exercise caution. How to get Pluralistic: Blog (no ads, tracking, or data-collection): Pluralistic.net Newsletter (no ads, tracking, or data-collection): https://pluralistic.net/plura-list Mastodon (no ads, tracking, or data-collection): https://mamot.fr/@pluralistic Medium (no ads, paywalled): https://doctorow.medium.com/ Twitter (mass-scale, unrestricted, third-party surveillance and advertising): https://twitter.com/doctorow Tumblr (mass-scale, unrestricted, third-party surveillance and advertising): 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. 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The future of the industry and how to get the most out of your AI coding assistant
Today's links By all means, tread on those people: We know you love freedom, we just wish you'd share. Hey look at this: Delights to delectate. Object permanence: The right to bear cameras; GOP wants slavery for undocumented migrants; Telepresence Nazi-punching. Upcoming appearances: Where to find me. Recent appearances: Where I've been. Latest books: You keep readin' em, I'll keep writin' 'em. Upcoming books: Like I said, I'll keep writin' 'em. Colophon: All the rest. By all means, tread on those people (permalink) Just as Martin Niemöller's "First They Came" has become our framework for understanding the rise of fascism in Nazi Germany, so, too is Wilhoit's Law the best way to understand America's decline into fascism: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_They_Came In case you're not familiar with Frank Wilhoit's amazing law, here it is: Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition, to wit: There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect. https://crookedtimber.org/2018/03/21/liberals-against-progressives/#comment-729288 The thing that makes Wilhoit's Law so apt to this moment – and to our understanding of the recent history that produced this moment – is how it connects the petty with the terrifying, the trivial with the radical, the micro with the macro. It's a way to join the dots between fascists' business dealings, their interpersonal relationships, and their political views. It describes a continuum that ranges from minor commercial grifts to martial law, and shows how tolerance for the former creates the conditions for the latter. The gross ways in which Wilhoit's Law applies are easy to understand. The dollar value of corporate wage-theft far outstrips the total dollars lost to all other forms of property crime, and yet there is virtually no enforcement against bosses who steal their workers' paychecks, while petty property crimes can result in long prison sentences (depending on your skin color and/or bank balance): https://www.opportunityinstitute.org/blog/post/organized-retail-theft-wage-theft/ Elon Musk values "free speech" and insists on his right to brand innocent people as "pedos," but he also wants the courts to destroy organizations that publish their opinions about his shitty business practices: https://www.mediamatters.org/elon-musk Fascists turn crybaby when they're imprisoned for attempting a murderous coup, but buy merch celebrating the construction of domestic concentration camps where people are locked up without trial: https://officialalligatoralcatraz.com/shop That stuff is all easy to see, but I want to draw a line between these gross violations of Wilhoit's Law and pettier practices that have been creating the conditions for the present day Wilhoit Dystopia. Take terms of service. The Federalist Society – whose law library could save a lot of space by throwing away all its books and replacing them with a framed copy of Wilhoit's Law – has long held that merely glancing at a web-page or traversing the doorway of a shop is all it takes for you to enter into a "contract" by which you surrender all of your rights. Every major corporation – and many smaller ones – now routinely seek to bind both workers and customers to garbage-novellas of onerous, unreadable legal conditions. If we accept that this is how contracts work, then this should be perfectly valid, right? By reading these words, 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. This indemnity will survive the termination of your relationship with your employer. I mean, why not? What principle – other than "in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect" – makes terms of service valid, and this invalid? Then there's binding arbitration. Corporations routinely bind their workers and customers to terms that force them to surrender their right to sue, no matter how badly they are injured through malice or gross negligence. This practice used to be illegal, until Antonin Scalia opened the hellmouth and unleashed binding arbitration on the world: https://brooklynworks.brooklaw.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1443&&context=blr There's a pretty clever hack around binding arbitration: mass arbitration, whereby lots of wronged people coordinate to file claims, which can cost a dirty corporation more than a plain old class-action suit: https://pluralistic.net/2021/06/02/arbitrary-arbitration/#petard Of course, Wilhoit's Law provides corporations with a way around this: they can reserve the right not to arbitrate and to force you into a class action suit if that's advantageous to them: https://pluralistic.net/2025/08/15/dogs-breakfast/#by-clicking-this-you-agree-on-behalf-of-your-employer-to-release-me-from-all-obligations-and-waivers-arising-from-any-and-all-NON-NEGOTIATED-agreements Heads they win, tails you lose. Or take the nature of property rights themselves. Conservatives say they revere property rights above all else, claiming that every other human right stems from the vigorous enforcement of property relations. What is private property? For that, we turn to the key grifter thinkfluencer Sir William Blackstone, and his 1768 "Commentaries on the Laws of England": That sole and despotic dominion which one man claims and exercises over the external things of the world, in total exclusion of the right of any other individual in the universe. https://oll.libertyfund.org/pages/blackstone-on-property-1753 Corporations love the idea of their property rights, but they're not so keen on your property rights. Think of the practice of locking down digital devices – from phones to cars to tractors – so that they can't be repaired by third parties, use generic ink or parts, or load third-party apps except via an "app store": https://memex.craphound.com/2012/01/10/lockdown-the-coming-war-on-general-purpose-computing/ A device you own, but can only use in ways that its manufacturer approves of, sure doesn't sound like "sole and despotic dominion" to me. Some corporations (and their weird apologists) like to claim that, by buying their product, you've agreed not to use it except in ways that benefit their shareholders, even when that is to your own detriment: https://pluralistic.net/2024/01/12/youre-holding-it-wrong/#if-dishwashers-were-iphones Apple will say, "We've been selling iPhones for nearly 20 years now. It can't possibly come as a surprise to you that you're not allowed to install apps that we haven't approved. If that's important to you, you shouldn't have bought an iPhone." But the obvious rejoinder to this is, "People have been given sole and despotic dominion over the things they purchased since time immemorial. If the thought of your customers using their property in ways that displease you causes you to become emotionally disregulated, perhaps you shouldn't have gotten into the manufacturing business." But as indefensibly wilhoitian as Apple's behavior might be, Google has just achieved new depths of wilhoitian depravity, with a rule that says that starting soon, you will no longer be able to install apps of your choosing on your Android device unless Google first approves of them: https://9to5google.com/2025/08/25/android-apps-developer-verification/ Like Apple, Google says that this is to prevent you from accidentally installing malicious software. Like Apple, Google does put a lot of effort into preventing its customers from being remotely attacked. And, like Apple, Google will not protect you from itself: https://pluralistic.net/2023/02/05/battery-vampire/#drained When it comes to vetoing your decisions about which programs your Android device can run, Google has an irreconcilable conflict of interest. Google, after all, is a thrice-convicted monopolist who have an interest in blocking you from installing programs that interfere with its profits, under the pretense of preventing you from coming to harm. And – like Apple – Google has a track record of selling its users out to oppressive governments. Apple blocked all working privacy tools for its Chinese users at the behest of the Chinese government, while Google secretly planned to release a version of its search engine that would enforce Chinese censorship edicts and help the Chinese government spy on its people: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dragonfly_(search_engine) Google's CEO Sundar Pichai, personally gave one million dollars to Donald Trump for a seat on the dais at this year's inauguration (so did Apple CEO Tim Cook). Both men are in a position to help the self-described dictator make good on his promise to spy on and arrest Americans who disagree with his totalitarian edicts. All of this makes Google's announcement extraordinarily reckless, but also very, very wilhoitian. After all, Google jealously guards its property rights from you, but insists that your property rights need to be subordinated to its corporate priorities: "in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect." We can see this at work in the way that Google treats open source software and free software. Google's software is "open source" – for us. We have the right to look at the code and do free work for Google to identify and fix bugs in the code. But only Google gets a say in how that code is deployed on its cloud servers. They have software freedom, while we merely have software transparency: https://pluralistic.net/2025/07/14/pole-star/#gnus-not-utilitarian Big companies love to both assert their own property rights while denying you yours. Take the music industry: they are required to pay different royalties to musicians depending on whether they're "selling" music, or "licensing" music. Sales pay a fraction of the royalties of a licensing deal, so it's far better for musicians when their label licenses their music than when they sell it. When you or I click the "buy" button in an online music store, we are confronted with a "licensing agreement," that limits what we may do with our digital purchase. Things that you get automatically when you buy music in physical form – on a CD, say – are withheld through these agreements. You can't re-sell your digital purchases as used goods. You can't give them away. You can't lend them out. You can't divide them up in a divorce. You can't leave them to your kids in your will. It's not a sale, so the file isn't your property. But when the label accounts for that licensing deal to a musician, the transaction is booked as a sale, which entitles the creative worker to a fraction of the royalties that they'd get from a license. Somehow, digital media exists in quantum superposition: it is a licensing deal when we click the buy button, but it is a sale when it shows up on a royalty statement. It's Schroedinger's download: https://pluralistic.net/2022/06/21/early-adopters/#heads-i-win Now, a class action suit against Amazon over this very issue has been given leave to progress to trial: https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/business/business-news/prime-video-lawsuit-movie-license-ownership-1236353127/ The plaintiffs insist that because Amazon showed them a button that said, "Buy this video" but then slapped it with licensing conditions that take away all kinds of rights (Amazon can even remotely delete your videos after you "buy" them) that they have been ripped off in a bait-and-switch. Amazon's defense is amazing. They've done what any ill-prepared fifth grader would do when called on the carpet; they quoted Webster's: Quoting Webster’s Dictionary, it said that the term means “rights to the use or services of payment” rather than perpetual ownership and that its disclosures properly warn people that they may lose access. People are increasingly pissed off with this bullshit, whereby things that you "buy" are not yours, and your access to them can be terminated at any time. The Stop Killing Games campaign is pushing for the rights of gamers to own the games they buy forever, even if the company decides to shut down its servers: https://www.stopkillinggames.com/ I've been pissed off about this bullshit since forever. It's one of the main reasons I convinced my publishers to let me sell my own ebooks and audiobooks, out of my own digital storefront. All of those books are sold, not licensed, and come without any terms or conditions: https://craphound.com/shop/ The ability to change the terms after the sale is a major source of enshittification. I call it the "Darth Vader MBA," as in "I am altering the deal. Pray I do not alter it any further": https://pluralistic.net/2023/10/26/hit-with-a-brick/#graceful-failure Naturally the ebooks and audiobooks in the Kickstarter for pre-sales of my next book, Enshittification are also sold without any terms and conditions: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/doctorow/enshittification-the-drm-free-audiobook/ Look, I don't think that personal consumption choices can fix systemic problems. You're not going to fix enshittification – let alone tyranny – by shopping, even if you're very careful: https://pluralistic.net/2025/07/31/unsatisfying-answers/#systemic-problems But that doesn't mean that there isn't a connection between the unfair bullshit that monopolies cram down our throat and the rise of fascism. It's not just that the worst enshittifiers also the biggest Trump donors, it's that Wilhoit's Law powers enshittification. Wiloitism is shot through the Maga movement. The Flu Klux Klan wants to ban you from wearing a mask for health reasons, but they will defend to the death the right of ICE brownshirts to run around in gaiters and Oakleys as they kidnap our neighbors off the streets. Conservative bedwetters will donate six figures to a Givesendgo set up by some crybaby with a viral Rumble video about getting 86'ed from a restaurant for wearing a Maga hat, but they literally want to imprison trans people for wearing clothes that don't conform to their assigned-at-birth genders. They'll piss and moan about being "canceled" because of hecklers at the speeches they give for the campus chapter of the Hitler Youth, but they experience life-threatening priapism when students who object to the Israeli genocide of Palestinians are expelled, arrested and deported. Then there's their abortion policies, which hold that personhood begins at conception, but ends at birth, and can only be re-established by forming an LLC. It's "in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect" all the way down. I'm not saying that bullshit terms of service, wage theft, binding arbitration gotchas, or victim complexes about your kids going no-contact because you won't shut the fuck up about "the illegals" at Thanksgiving are the same as the actual fascist dictatorship being born around us right now or the genocide taking place in Gaza. But I am saying that they come from the same place. The ideology of "in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect" underpins the whole ugly mess. After we defeat these fucking fascists, after the next installment of the Nuremburg trials, after these eichmenn and eichwomenn get their turns in the dock, we're going to have to figure out how to keep them firmly stuck to the scrapheap of history. For this, I propose a form of broken windows policing; zero-tolerance for any activity or conduct that implies that there are "in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect." We should treat every attempt to pull any of these scams as an inch (or a yard, or a mile) down the road to fascist collapse. We shouldn't suffer practitioners of this ideology to be in our company, to run our institutions, or to work alongside of us. We should recognize them for the monsters they are. Hey look at this (permalink) Citizen Is Using AI to Generate Crime Alerts With No Human Review. It’s Making a Lot of Mistakes https://www.404media.co/citizen-is-using-ai-to-generate-crime-alerts-with-no-human-review-its-making-a-lot-of-mistakes/ How To Argue With An AI Booster https://www.wheresyoured.at/how-to-argue-with-an-ai-booster/ We must fight age verification with all we have https://www.usermag.co/p/we-must-fight-age-verification-with Sqinks: A Transreal Cyberpunk Love Story https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/rudyrucker/sqinks LibreOffice 25.8: a Strategic Asset for Governments and Enterprises Focused on Digital Sovereignty and Privacy https://blog.documentfoundation.org/blog/2025/08/25/libreoffice-25-8-backgrounder/ Object permanence (permalink) #20yrsago Oakland sheriffs detain people for carrying cameras https://thomashawk.com/2005/08/right-to-bear-cameras.html #10yrsago New Zealand gov’t promises secret courts for accused terrorists https://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/attorney-general-says-law-society-got-it-wrong-over-secret-courts/E5JHYBTMVSIBZ62UNGEWB4DPEA/?c_id=1&objectid=11503094 #10yrsago Platform Cooperativism: a worker-owned Uber for everything https://platformcoop.net/ #10yrsago GOP “kingmaker” proposes enslavement as an answer to undocumented migrants https://www.thedailybeast.com/iowa-gop-kingmaker-has-a-slavery-proposal-for-immigration/ #10yrsago Six years after unprovoked beating, Denver cop finally fired https://kdvr.com/news/video-evidence-determined-fate-of-denver-officer-in-excessive-force-dispute-fired-after-6-years/ #10yrsago Samsung fridges can leak your Gmail logins https://web.archive.org/web/20150825014450/https://www.pentestpartners.com/blog/hacking-defcon-23s-iot-village-samsung-fridge/ #10yrsago German student ditches apartment, buys an unlimited train pass https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2015/08/22/how-one-german-millennial-chose-to-live-on-trains-rather-than-pay-rent/ #10yrsago Ashley Madison’s founding CTO claimed he hacked competing dating site https://www.wired.com/2015/08/ashley-madison-leak-reveals-ex-cto-hacked-competing-site/ #5yrsago Telepresence Nazi-punching https://pluralistic.net/2020/08/25/anxietypunk/#smartibots #5yrsago Ballistic Kiss https://pluralistic.net/2020/08/25/anxietypunk/#bk Upcoming appearances (permalink) Ithaca: AD White keynote (Cornell), Sep 12 https://deanoffaculty.cornell.edu/events/keynote-cory-doctorow-professor-at-large/ DC: Enshittification at Politics and Prose, Oct 8 https://politics-prose.com/cory-doctorow-10825 New Orleans: DeepSouthCon63, Oct 10-12 http://www.contraflowscifi.org/ Chicago: Enshittification with Kara Swisher (Chicago Humanities), Oct 15 https://www.oldtownschool.org/concerts/2025/10-15-2025-kara-swisher-and-cory-doctorow-on-enshittification/ San Francisco: Enshittification at Public Works (The Booksmith), Oct 20 https://app.gopassage.com/events/doctorow25 Miami: Enshittification at Books & Books, Nov 5 https://www.eventbrite.com/e/an-evening-with-cory-doctorow-tickets-1504647263469 Recent appearances (permalink) Divesting from Amazon’s Audible and the Fight for Digital Rights (Libro.fm) https://pocketcasts.com/podcasts/9349e8d0-a87f-013a-d8af-0acc26574db2/00e6cbcf-7f27-4589-a11e-93e4ab59c04b The Utopias Podcast https://www.buzzsprout.com/2272465/episodes/17650124 Tariffs vs IP Law (Firewalls Don't Stop Dragons) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LFABFe-5-uQ Latest books (permalink) "Picks and Shovels": a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about the heroic era of the PC, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), February 2025 (https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250865908/picksandshovels). "The Bezzle": a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about prison-tech and other grifts, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), February 2024 (the-bezzle.org). "The Lost Cause:" a solarpunk novel of hope in the climate emergency, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), November 2023 (http://lost-cause.org). "The Internet Con": A nonfiction book about interoperability and Big Tech (Verso) September 2023 (http://seizethemeansofcomputation.org). Signed copies at Book Soup (https://www.booksoup.com/book/9781804291245). "Red Team Blues": "A grabby, compulsive thriller that will leave you knowing more about how the world works than you did before." Tor Books http://redteamblues.com. "Chokepoint Capitalism: How to Beat Big Tech, Tame Big Content, and Get Artists Paid, with Rebecca Giblin", on how to unrig the markets for creative labor, Beacon Press/Scribe 2022 https://chokepointcapitalism.com Upcoming books (permalink) "Canny Valley": A limited edition collection of the collages I create for Pluralistic, self-published, September 2025 "Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It," Farrar, Straus, Giroux, October 7 2025 https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374619329/enshittification/ "Unauthorized Bread": a middle-grades graphic novel adapted from my novella about refugees, toasters and DRM, FirstSecond, 2026 "Enshittification, Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It" (the graphic novel), Firstsecond, 2026 "The Memex Method," Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2026 "The Reverse-Centaur's Guide to AI," a short book about being a better AI critic, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2026 Colophon (permalink) Today's top sources: Currently writing: "The Reverse Centaur's Guide to AI," a short book for Farrar, Straus and Giroux about being an effective AI critic. (1019 words yesterday, 42282 words total). A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING This work – excluding any serialized fiction – is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license. That means you can use it any way you like, including commercially, provided that you attribute it to me, Cory Doctorow, and include a link to pluralistic.net. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ Quotations and images are not included in this license; they are included either under a limitation or exception to copyright, or on the basis of a separate license. Please exercise caution. How to get Pluralistic: Blog (no ads, tracking, or data-collection): Pluralistic.net Newsletter (no ads, tracking, or data-collection): https://pluralistic.net/plura-list Mastodon (no ads, tracking, or data-collection): https://mamot.fr/@pluralistic Medium (no ads, paywalled): https://doctorow.medium.com/ Twitter (mass-scale, unrestricted, third-party surveillance and advertising): https://twitter.com/doctorow Tumblr (mass-scale, unrestricted, third-party surveillance and advertising): 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
Today's links Friction cannot be reduced, it can only be redistributed: The better things are for your boss, the worse they are for you. Hey look at this: Delights to delectate. Object permanence: Dr Bruce Sterling; Buddy Holly's overnight bag; Zombie postcapitalism. Upcoming appearances: Where to find me. Recent appearances: Where I've been. Latest books: You keep readin' em, I'll keep writin' 'em. Upcoming books: Like I said, I'll keep writin' 'em. Colophon: All the rest. Friction cannot be reduced, it can only be redistributed (permalink) Despite the pretensions of certain well-paid economists, political economy is not a "physics of human behavior," through which human interactions and outcomes can be quantized and precisely captured through mathematical models. For one thing, in physics, it's possible to reduce friction, whereas in political economy, friction isn't something you reduce, it's something you redistribute, typically downward, to people with less political power than you. Think about your job. If you are on a salary, your boss has to pay you even when there's no work to be done, which means that during times where there's no income, your boss still has to pay your wages, meaning that a long slow patch could kill the business. But if your boss can eliminate or reduce your wages when there's no work, the friction of figuring out how to keep your boss's business a going concern is shifted to you. Take the "tipped minimum wage," which is the minimum that a restaurateur can pay a server. The federal tipped minimum wage is $2.15/hour, which is substantially less than you can survive on. If your boss fucks up and can't fill the tables in his restaurant, he has to pay you $7.25/hour (the federal minimum wage). But if you get just one table in eight hours, where you bust your hump and earn a $41 tip, your boss gets to keep $40.90 of that money and pay you the grand sum of $58. That certainly relieves some of your boss's friction – but now you have to endure the friction of figuring out how to survive on $58. Maybe you don't fix your car and instead spend an extra hour at the start and end of your shift on a city bus. That's a lot of friction, but it's your friction. Same for the time you spend lining up at the food bank, the sleepless nights you endure because you can't see a dentist about your rotten tooth, the diabetes test-strips you do without. Of course, there's plenty of workers who don't even get the tipped minimum wage: in most of the country, "gig economy" workers aren't guaranteed any wages. If your boss – the company that made your app – fucked up by charging too much or skimping on ads or having piss-poor customer service, you can clock on for an eight-hour shift and get zero dollars, all the while being available to your boss, just in case they do get a customer. If you're a driver, you only get paid for the time when you're on a delivery or have a passenger, and you bear the expense of the rest of the hours you spend prowling the streets, waiting for a call-out. This allows gig companies to build up a giant workforce that can absorb orders when they come in, while shifting the friction of living on half-wages to the workers who only get paid on the way out to a delivery, but not on the way back. Return to office? An exercise in pure friction-shifting. The friction your boss experiences from furiously fantasizing about how lazy you're being at home is swapped for the friction you of your commute, the friction of having to reschedule deliveries that you weren't home to sign for, the friction of having to eat a packed lunch or waste your pay on overpriced, additive/grease/salt/sugar-laden quick-service food. The airline that fires most of its customer service staff shifts operational frictions onto passengers, from the friction of arriving two hours early to see one of the few check-in clerks to the friction of waiting for three hours on hold to rebook a canceled flight or find a lost bag. Southwest really takes the cake here. Remember a couple years ago when Southwest stranded one million passengers over Christmas week because its computers had all crashed? Turns out that the main thing SWA was doing with those computers was running a friction-shifting shell-game with its airplanes, pilots, flight attendants and passengers. SWA would sell tickets for more flights than it had planes, and then cancel the flights that had sold the fewest tickets: https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/10/the-courage-to-govern/#whos-in-charge That's quite a magnificent piece of friction-shifting. SWA is relieved of the friction of buying and maintaining a fleet of planes. The don't have to bear the friction of guessing which planes will and won't be full in advance. But SWA passengers get all the friction and more, when their flight is cancelled because other people – whom they have no control over – failed to buy enough tickets for it. Southwest "reduced friction" for its shareholders at the expense of its employees and customers. Other businesses "reduce friction" for one favored group at the expense of another, like Google, whose Youtube Content ID system makes it trivial to file a copyright takedown notice but hard-to-impossible to get your work reinstated when you are falsely accused: https://pluralistic.net/2024/06/27/nuke-first/#ask-questions-never That's shifting friction from large rightsholders (who can get infringing work removed without a trial) to creators (who don't get a day in court before their work is censored). Meanwhile, food delivery platforms shift friction onto restaurants, conscripting them into delivery services without their permission: https://pluralistic.net/2020/05/18/code-is-speech/#schadenpizza And onto drivers, who don't even rate the tipped minimum wage. For all that these companies come up with names for themselves like "Seamless," they are 100 percent seam, but those seams are shifted onto people without political or economic power. The MBA mind-virus turns its victims into "optimization"-obsessed zombies, but what they mean by "optimization" is that you will optimize your life to their benefit. HP uses software locks to "optimize" its printer business, forcing you to buy ink at $10,000/gallon: https://pluralistic.net/2024/09/30/life-finds-a-way/#ink-stained-wretches And Uber "optimizes" its drivers by spying on them and paying them less when the algorithm infers that they are more economically desperate: https://len-sherman.medium.com/how-uber-became-a-cash-generating-machine-ef78e7a97230 A better world is one in which the people optimize corporations and billionaires – by cutting them down to size and shattering their power. It's a world in which amassing obscene amounts of money and market power creates friction, in the form of endless regulatory and tax scrutiny. It's a world where public transit has priority and private cars are taxed for slowing the rest of us down as we go about our days. It's a world where workers are frictionless: protected from noncompete agreements and baroque wage theft schemes like those used to impoverish service and gig workers. It's a world where bosses experience friction, in the form of obligations to the workers whose labor generates their wealth. I really believe that – politically speaking – friction can't be destroyed, only redistributed. And I'm fine with that, really – provided we're redistributing it upwards. Hey look at this (permalink) I reported from an ICE action on Sansome and all I got was a face full of pepper spray https://sf.gazetteer.co/i-reported-from-an-ice-action-on-sansome-and-all-i-got-was-a-face-full-of-pepper-spray When Trump's Brain Broke https://www.unpopularfront.news/p/when-trumps-brain-broke Bank forced to rehire workers after lying about chatbot productivity, union says https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2025/08/bank-forced-to-rehire-workers-after-lying-about-chatbot-productivity-union-says/ I Made a Floppy Disk from Scratch https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TBiFGhnXsh8 America's Kryptonite https://orphansandempires.substack.com/p/americas-kryptonite Object permanence (permalink) #20yrsago Bruce Sterling gets an honorary doctorate https://web.archive.org/web/20051226234102/http://wiredblogs.tripod.com/sterling/index.blog?entry_id=1200350 #20yrsago Beastie Boys release vocals-only tracks to encourage remixers https://web.archive.org/web/20050930220256/http://www.beastieboys.com/remixers.php #20yrsago What was in Buddy Holly’s plane-crash overnight bag? https://web.archive.org/web/20051023162927/http://www.rockin50s.com/bag.htm #20yrsago Warner Music CEO calls for iPod taxes, levies — twirls moustache and cackles, clatters away on tiny, ebony hooves https://web.archive.org/web/20050910183217/http://news.com.com/Warner+Music+readies+CD-free+e-label/2100-1027_3-5841355.html #20yrsago Customers of new UK ISP get to share all Sony music on P2P https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2005/aug/22/media.newmedia #10yrsago Greece’s creditors demand casino rights, archaeological sites, selloff of EUR50B of national assets https://web.archive.org/web/20150824062007/https://www.globaljustice.org.uk/blog/2015/aug/19/greece-sale-–-and-everything-must-go #5yrsago Zombie postcapitalism https://pluralistic.net/2020/08/22/this-machine-kills-fascists/#varoufakis Upcoming appearances (permalink) Ithaca: AD White keynote (Cornell), Sep 12 https://deanoffaculty.cornell.edu/events/keynote-cory-doctorow-professor-at-large/ DC: Enshittification at Politics and Prose, Oct 8 https://politics-prose.com/cory-doctorow-10825 New Orleans: DeepSouthCon63, Oct 10-12 http://www.contraflowscifi.org/ Chicago: Enshittification with Kara Swisher (Chicago Humanities), Oct 15 https://www.oldtownschool.org/concerts/2025/10-15-2025-kara-swisher-and-cory-doctorow-on-enshittification/ San Francisco: Enshittification at Public Works (The Booksmith), Oct 20 https://app.gopassage.com/events/doctorow25 Miami: Enshittification at Books & Books, Nov 5 https://www.eventbrite.com/e/an-evening-with-cory-doctorow-tickets-1504647263469 Recent appearances (permalink) Divesting from Amazon’s Audible and the Fight for Digital Rights (Libro.fm) https://pocketcasts.com/podcasts/9349e8d0-a87f-013a-d8af-0acc26574db2/00e6cbcf-7f27-4589-a11e-93e4ab59c04b The Utopias Podcast https://www.buzzsprout.com/2272465/episodes/17650124 Tariffs vs IP Law (Firewalls Don't Stop Dragons) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LFABFe-5-uQ Latest books (permalink) "Picks and Shovels": a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about the heroic era of the PC, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), February 2025 (https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250865908/picksandshovels). "The Bezzle": a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about prison-tech and other grifts, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), February 2024 (the-bezzle.org). "The Lost Cause:" a solarpunk novel of hope in the climate emergency, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), November 2023 (http://lost-cause.org). "The Internet Con": A nonfiction book about interoperability and Big Tech (Verso) September 2023 (http://seizethemeansofcomputation.org). Signed copies at Book Soup (https://www.booksoup.com/book/9781804291245). "Red Team Blues": "A grabby, compulsive thriller that will leave you knowing more about how the world works than you did before." Tor Books http://redteamblues.com. "Chokepoint Capitalism: How to Beat Big Tech, Tame Big Content, and Get Artists Paid, with Rebecca Giblin", on how to unrig the markets for creative labor, Beacon Press/Scribe 2022 https://chokepointcapitalism.com Upcoming books (permalink) "Canny Valley": A limited edition collection of the collages I create for Pluralistic, self-published, September 2025 "Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It," Farrar, Straus, Giroux, October 7 2025 https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374619329/enshittification/ "Unauthorized Bread": a middle-grades graphic novel adapted from my novella about refugees, toasters and DRM, FirstSecond, 2026 "Enshittification, Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It" (the graphic novel), Firstsecond, 2026 "The Memex Method," Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2026 "The Reverse-Centaur's Guide to AI," a short book about being a better AI critic, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2026 Colophon (permalink) Today's top sources: Currently writing: "The Reverse Centaur's Guide to AI," a short book for Farrar, Straus and Giroux about being an effective AI critic. (1025 words yesterday, 40200 words total). 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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You further represent that you have the authority to release me from any BOGUS AGREEMENTS on behalf of your employer. ISSN: 3066-764X
