On shadow libraries, legal documents, and judicial skepticism.

Today's links Reverse centaurs are the answer to the AI paradox: Not what the machine does, but who it does it to. Hey look at this: Delights to delectate. Object permanence: Themepunks; Data is a liability; Alexa for landlords; Qanon is the Protocols of the Elders of Zio. 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. Reverse centaurs are the answer to the AI paradox (permalink) My latest Locus column is "Reverse Centaurs," and it sets out to unravel a paradox: how is that some AI's users describe their experience as a hellish ordeal, while others delight in the ways that AI is changing their lives for the better? https://locusmag.com/2025/09/commentary-cory-doctorow-reverse-centaurs/ The answer is contained in the concept of "centaurs" and "reverse centaurs," found in automation theory: https://pluralistic.net/2025/05/27/rancid-vibe-coding/#class-war A "centaur" is a human being who is assisted by a machine (a human head on a strong and tireless body). A reverse centaur is a machine that uses a human being as its assistant (a frail and vulnerable person being puppeteered by an uncaring, relentless machine). Let me give you an example: remember at the start of the summer, when Hearst published a summer reading guide that was full of nonexistent books that had been "hallucinated" by a chatbot? https://www.npr.org/2025/05/20/nx-s1-5405022/fake-summer-reading-list-ai 404 Media's Jason Koebler got in touch with the guy whose byline appeared on the list, and he was hugely embarrassed and contrite: https://www.404media.co/chicago-sun-times-prints-ai-generated-summer-reading-list-with-books-that-dont-exist/ But in a followup story, Koebler noticed something that the first round of dunks and memes about this poor guy had missed: this same writer had his name on many of these "best of the summer" lists in this supplement. He was practically the sole author of an entire 64-page insert: https://www.404media.co/viral-ai-generated-summer-guide-printed-by-chicago-sun-times-was-made-by-magazine-giant-hearst/ And that's where it gets interesting. Koebler got his start in journalism as an intern at the Washington Monthly, where he worked on lists like these: https://www.404media.co/podcast-ai-slop-summer/ When Koebler was doing this work, he'd be part of a team of three interns, overseen by an experienced journalist, backstopped by an extensive fact-checking department. Those little lists take a surprising amount of work, if you really care about their quality. The freelance writer who authored this giant summer reading guide with all its lists had been tasked with doing the work of literally dozens of writers, editors and fact-checkers. We don't know whether his boss told him he had to use AI, but there's no way one writer could do all that work without AI. In other words, that writer's job wasn't to write the article. His job was to be the "human in the loop" for an AI that wrote the articles, but on a schedule and with a workload that precluded his being able to do a good job. It's more true to say that his job was to be the AI's "accountability sink" (in the memorable phrasing of Dan Davies): he was being paid to take the blame for the AI's mistakes. He was, in other words, a reverse centaur. Now, I am a freelance writer as well, and not so long ago, I wanted to quote something smart I'd heard on a podcast in an article, but I couldn't remember where I heard it. So I downloaded Whisper, an open source AI transcription model from Openai, to my laptop. I threw the last 30 hours' worth of audio that I'd listened to at it, and worked away on other stuff for an hour or two. When I checked again, I had a folder full of pretty reliable transcripts. I searched the text, found the quote, and opened the audio to the supplied timecode to double-check it. I was a centaur. I got to decide how to use the AI, and I only had to use it in ways that made my work better and more satisfying. This, I think, is the explanation for the paradox of AI: the AI users who are being immiserated and precaratized by bosses who have been convinced to fire their colleagues and pile their work on the terrorized survivors of the layoffs hate the AI, because it makes their life worse in every way. Whereas the people who choose when and how to use AI – the centaurs – are only using AI to the extent that it is useful, and throwing it away when it's not. They may make poor choices about the AI, but those choices are theirs, they are not imposed from on high. A bicyclist who chooses to commute on two wheels can have a glorious ride, or they can ride like a maniac and end up eating dirt, but they are having a fundamentally different experience from, say, a gig delivery platform rider who has been given an impossible quota and is having their pay eroded by algorithmic wage discrimination: https://pluralistic.net/2024/02/29/geometry-hates-uber/#toronto-the-gullible I was very happy to put this analysis in the pages of Locus, the trade magazine for the science fiction field. The job of a science fiction writer is only incidentally to describe what a technology does – at its best, science fiction interrogates who the technology does it to and who the technology does it for. This is a political act of resistance. Margaret Thatcher's motto, after all, was "There is no alternative," by which she meant, "Stop trying to think of alternatives." The bully's trick is to present your defeat as a fait accompli: "Resistance is futile." Tech bosses practice a form of vulgar Thatcherism all the time: Mark Zuckerberg wants you to think there's no way to talk with your friends without letting him listen in; Sundar Pichai wants you to think there's no way to search the web without being spied on; Tim Cook wants you to think there's no way to have a safe and reliable computing experience without giving him a veto over which software you install; Satya Nadella wants you to think there's no way for you to edit a Word file without letting your boss compare your keystrokes-per-minute to your co-workers: https://pluralistic.net/2021/02/24/gwb-rumsfeld-monsters/#bossware And AI bosses want you to think that the only way to use these tools is to displace and immiserate labor, because that's the promise they raise investment capital on: https://pluralistic.net/2025/08/05/ex-princes-of-labor/#hyper-criti-hype AI is a bubble. If it wasn't a bubble – if it was just a bunch of computer scientists and product teams tinkering with possible uses for advancements in back-propagation, generative adversarial networks and machine learning – there wouldn't be any controversy here. A programmer who uses a chatbot to autogen a bunch of cross-browser CSS stylesheets that mostly work, after some tinkering, would maybe mention that fact over beers – but they wouldn't get sucked into a cult obsessed with outlandish scenarios in which the chatbot wakes up and turns us all into paperclips: https://firstmonday.org/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/13636 AI is a bubble. Bubbles burst. We're in for a near-total collapse of the AI investment mania. Most of these companies will fail. Many planned data-centers will never be opened. Many existing data-centers will be shuttered. When that happens, what will be left? AI is a bubble, and when bubbles burst, they sometimes leave behind a productive residue. At home, I enjoy 2GB symmetrical fiber optic internet, because AT&T was able to light up some of the dark fiber that Worldcom fraudulently raised billions for. Worldcom's CEO died in prison after scamming the finances of ordinary people, and the world would be a better place if that had never happened, but there was some productive residue left behind, and many of us are reaping the benefit today: https://locusmag.com/2023/12/commentary-cory-doctorow-what-kind-of-bubble-is-ai/ Contrast that with the cryptocurrency bubble. When that bursts, we'll still have a smattering of programmers who've had a subsidized education in cryptography and secure programming in Rust, but mostly what crypto will leave behind is bad Austrian economics and worse monkey JPEGs. Like Enron, crypto will leave nothing much behind of any value. All bubbles are bad, but some are more productive than others. When the AI bubble bursts, there will be stellar bargains on GPUs (it would be ironic if scientists snapped them up at pennies on the dollar and used them for climate modeling). We'll have a lot of technical people who are much better at applied statistics than they were a decade ago. And there will be the open source models, like Whisper, the tool I used to transcribe all those podcasts. These open source models run on commodity hardware, and while the climate costs of creating those models is terrible, they're here now, and operating them isn't especially energy-intensive. When I used Whisper to transcribe 30 hours' worth of podcasts, my laptop's fan didn't even switch on. What's more, open source hackers are doing amazing things with these tools – far more than the giant corporations that released them ever anticipated. These "toy" models were released as a way to entice programmers into specializing in cloud systems operated by the big tech companies, but it turns out that these standalone models can do amazing things, and aren't just a demo for a big, doomed foundation model: https://pluralistic.net/2023/08/18/openwashing/#you-keep-using-that-word-i-do-not-think-it-means-what-you-think-it-means It doesn't matter what happens to Openai; Whisper is here to stay. It's already being rolled into other standard tools – the latest version of ffmpeg integrates Whisper and can autogen captions: https://www.theregister.com/2025/08/28/ffmpeg_8_huffman/ The things these open source standalone models can do will only expand, and they will become a given for our computing applications. Your computer or phone will be able to transcribe audio and do cool image-editing stuff like erasing strangers from the background of a photo as a standard feature. That's the good news. The bad news is all the damage the bubble is doing now and all the further damage that will come from its collapse. Today, we're getting the climate impact, obviously, and the immiseration of all those workers who are being reverse-centaured by an AI that can't do their job, but whose manufacturer's salesforce convinced their boss to fire them and replace them with an AI anyway. After the bubble bursts, there will be the mass incineration of everyday people's retirement savings and the knock-on effects as the whole market craters. And long after that, there will be the terrible impact on our society's ability to do things, as defunct foundation models grind to a halt, after the people they replaced are long gone and can't step in to pick up the work they fumble. We are busily filling the walls of society with digital asbestos and we'll be digging it out for generations to come. Every day the bubble persists, the harms of today and tomorrow increase. We need to burst that bubble as soon as possible. That's how I came to spend the summer writing a book for Farrar, Straus and Giroux with the working title The Reverse-Centaur's Guide to AI, whose goal is to improve the quality of AI criticism so that it inflicts maximum damage on AI swindlers and their terrible investment bubble. It'll be out in 2026, but for now, you can have a look at my Locus column: https://locusmag.com/2025/09/commentary-cory-doctorow-reverse-centaurs/ (Image: School Photos PCC, CC BY 2.0, modified) Hey look at this (permalink) Flush door handles are the car industry’s latest safety problem https://arstechnica.com/cars/2025/09/flush-door-handles-are-the-car-industrys-latest-safety-problem/ The Great Space Race(ism): How Science Fiction Predicted the Future–and How Afrofuturism Could Negate It https://escholarship.org/uc/item/3gv8r1r5 Object permanence (permalink) #20yrago Themepunks (AKA Makers) serialized for next ten weeks on Salon https://web.archive.org/web/20050914060107/http://www.salon.com/tech/feature/2005/09/12/themepunks_1/index_np.html #10yrsago Data is a liability, not an asset https://web.archive.org/web/20150911201818/https://richie.fi/blog/data-is-a-liability.html #10yrsago Missing from the computer science curriculum https://prog21.dadgum.com/210.html #5yrsago Alexa for landlords https://pluralistic.net/2020/09/11/protocols-of-qanon/#landlord-alexa #5yrsago Security Engineering, 3d edition https://pluralistic.net/2020/09/11/protocols-of-qanon/#security-engineering-v3 #5yrsago America's pandemic spiral https://pluralistic.net/2020/09/11/protocols-of-qanon/#doom-loops #5yrsago EFF vs filternet https://pluralistic.net/2020/09/11/protocols-of-qanon/#no-filternet #5yrsago Qanon is basically the Protocols of the Elders of Zion https://pluralistic.net/2020/09/11/protocols-of-qanon/#godwins-qanon #5yrsago Life as a precriminal https://pluralistic.net/2020/09/11/protocols-of-qanon/#chris-nocco Upcoming appearances (permalink) Ithaca: Enshittification at Buffalo Street Books, Sept 11 https://buffalostreetbooks.com/event/2025-09-11/cory-doctorow-tcpl-librarian-judd-karlman Ithaca: AD White keynote (Cornell), Sep 12 https://deanoffaculty.cornell.edu/events/keynote-cory-doctorow-professor-at-large/ Ithaca: Enshittification at Autumn Leaves Books, Sept 13 https://www.autumnleavesithaca.com/event-details/enshittification-why-everything-got-worse-and-what-to-do-about-it Ithaca: Radicalized Q&A (Cornell), Sept 16 https://events.cornell.edu/event/radicalized-qa-with-author-cory-doctorow Ithaca: The Counterfeiters (Dinner/Movie Night) (Cornell), Sept 17 https://adwhiteprofessors.cornell.edu/visits/cory-doctorow/ Ithaca: Communication Power, Policy, and Practice (Cornell), Sept 18 https://events.cornell.edu/event/policy-provocations-a-conversation-about-communication-power-policy-and-practice Ithaca: A Reverse-Centaur's Guide to Being a Better AI Critic (Cornell), Sept 18 https://events.cornell.edu/event/2025-nordlander-lecture-in-science-public-policy NYC: Enshittification and Renewal (Cornell Tech), Sept 19 https://www.eventbrite.com/e/enshittification-and-renewal-a-conversation-with-cory-doctorow-tickets-1563948454929 NYC: Brooklyn Book Fair, Sept 21 https://brooklynbookfestival.org/event/big-techs-big-heist-cory-doctorow-in-conversation-with-adam-becker/ DC: Enshittification with Rohit Chopra (Politics and Prose), Oct 8 https://politics-prose.com/cory-doctorow-10825 NYC: Enshittification with Lina Khan (Brooklyn Public Library), Oct 9 https://www.bklynlibrary.org/calendar/cory-doctorow-discusses-central-library-dweck-20251009-0700pm New Orleans: DeepSouthCon63, Oct 10-12 http://www.contraflowscifi.org/ Chicago: Enshittification with Anand Giridharadas (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 Seattle: Enshittification and the Rot Economy, with Ed Zitron (Clarion West), Oct 22 https://www.clarionwest.org/event/2025-deep-dives-cory-doctorow/ Madrid: Conferencia EUROPEA 4D (Virtual), Oct 28 https://4d.cat/es/conferencia/ Miami: Enshittification at Books & Books, Nov 5 https://www.eventbrite.com/e/an-evening-with-cory-doctorow-tickets-1504647263469 Recent appearances (permalink) Nerd Harder! (This Week in Tech) https://twit.tv/shows/this-week-in-tech/episodes/1047 Techtonic with Mark Hurst https://www.wfmu.org/playlists/shows/155658 Cory Doctorow DESTROYS Enshittification (QAA Podcast) https://soundcloud.com/qanonanonymous/cory-doctorow-destroys-enshitification-e338 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. FIRST DRAFT COMPLETE AND SUBMITTED. 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

The debate about prioritizing speed or safety is over and reality has made the decision for us.

Today's links Trump steals $400b from American workers: You get a noncompete, and you get a noncompete, and you get a noncompete! Hey look at this: Delights to delectate. Object permanence: Spying baby-monitors; FBI tests spy-gear at Burning Man; Little Brother optioned by Paramount; Best-paid CEOs have worst-paid workers. 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. Trump steals $400b from American workers (permalink) Trump's stolen a lot of workers' wages over the years, but this week, he has become history's greatest thief of wages, having directed his FTC to stop enforcing its ban on noncompetes "agreements," a move that will cost American workers $400 billion over the next ten years: https://prospect.org/labor/2025-09-09-trump-lets-bosses-grab-400-billion-worker-pay-noncompete-agreements/ The argument for noncompetes is this: modern industry is IP-intensive, and IP-intensive businesses need noncompetes, otherwise workers will take proprietary information with them when they walk out the door and bring it to a competitor. Who would invest in an IP-intensive firm under those circumstances? I'll tell you who would: Hollywood and Silicon Valley. These are two most IP-intensive industries in human history, both of which were incubated in California, a state whose constitution prohibits noncompetes and has done so through the entire history of those two industries. Indeed, we wouldn't have a Silicon Valley if California had noncompetes. Silicon Valley was founded by Robert Shockley, who won the Nobel Price for his role in inventing the silicon transistor (hence Silicon Valley). Shockley was a paranoid, virulent racist who couldn't produce a working chip because he was consumed by eugenic fervor and spent all his time on the road offering shares of his Nobel prize money to Black women who would agree to have their tubes tied. Lucky for (literally) everyone (except Robert Shockley), California doesn't have noncompetes, so eight of his top engineers ("The Traitorous Eight") were able to quit Shockley Semiconductor and start the first successful chip business: Fairchild Semiconductor. And then two of Fairchild's top engineers quit to found Intel: https://pluralistic.net/2021/10/24/the-traitorous-eight-and-the-battle-of-germanium-valley/ It's not just Silicon Valley that's rooted in wresting IP away from asshole control-freaks: that's Hollywood's story, too. Ever wonder how it was that movies were invented at Edison Labs in New Jersey, but the film industry was incubated in California, literally as far away from Edison as you could possibly get without ending up in Mexico? In short: California got the motion picture industry because Edison was an asshole who used his patents to control what kinds of movies could be made and to suck rents out of filmmakers to license those patents. So the most ambitious filmmakers in America fled to California, where Edison couldn't easily enforce his patents, and founded Hollywood: https://www.nytimes.com/2005/08/21/weekinreview/lala-land-the-origins.html?unlocked_article_code=1.kk8.5T1M.VSaEsN5Vn9tM&smid=url-share And Hollywood stayed in Calfornia, a place where noncompetes couldn't be enforced, where "IP" could hop from one studio to another, smuggled out between the ears of writers, actors, directors, SFX wizards, prop makers, scenepainters, makeup artists, costumers, and the most creative professionals in Hollywood: accountants. Empirically speaking, the function of noncompetes is to trap good workers and good ideas in companies controlled by asshole bosses who can't get anything done. Any disinvestment that can be attributed to the absence of noncompetes is completely swamped by the dividends generated by good workers and good ideas escaping from control-freak asshole bosses and founding productive firms. As ever, money talks and bullshit walks. Today, one in 18 US workers is trapped by a noncompete, and those aren't the knowledge workers of Silicon Valley workers or Hollywood. So who is captured by this form of contractual indenture? The median US worker under noncompete is a fast-food worker stuck with the tipped minimum wage, or a pet groomer making the regular minimum wage. The function of the noncompete in America isn't to secure investment for knowledge-intensive industries – it's to stop the cashier at Wendy's from getting an extra $0.25/hour working the fry-trap at the McDonald's across the street. Noncompetes are an integral part of the conservative project, which is the substitution of individual power for democratic choice. As Dan Savage puts it, the GOP agenda is "Husbands you can't leave [ed: ending no-fault divorce], pregnancies you can't prevent or terminate [ed: banning contraception and abortion], politicians you can't vote out of office [ed: gerrymandering and voter suppression." Add to that: jobs you can't quit. It's not just noncompetes that lock workers to shitty bosses. When Biden's FTC investigated the issue, they revealed a widespread practice called "training repayment agreement provision," (TRAPs) that puts workers on the hook for thousands of dollars if they quit or get fired: https://pluralistic.net/2022/08/04/its-a-trap/#a-little-on-the-nose A TRAPped worker – often a pet-groomer at a private equity-owned giant like Petsmart – is charged $5,500 or more for three weeks of "training" that actually amount to one or two weeks of sweeping up pet-hair. But if they leave or get fired in the next three years, they have to pay back that whole amount: https://pluralistic.net/2022/08/04/its-a-trap/#a-little-on-the-nose A closely related concept is "bondage fees," which have been imposed on whole classes of workers, like doormen in NYC apartment buildings: https://pluralistic.net/2023/04/21/bondage-fees/#doorman-building These fees trap workers in dead-end jobs by forcing anyone who hires them away to pay massive fees to their former employers. It's just another way to lock workers to businesses. The irony here is that conservatives claim to worship "voluntarism" and "free choice," and insist that the virtue of markets is that they "aggregate price signals" so that companies can respond to these signals by efficiently matching demand to supply. But though conservatives say they worship free choice as an engine of economic efficiency, they understand that their ideas are so unpopular that they can only succeed if people are coerced into adopting them, hence voter suppression, gerrymandering, noncompetes, and other heads-I-win/tails-you-lose propositions. Noncompetes aren't about preventing the loss of IP – they're about preventing the loss of process knowledge, the know-how to turn ideas into products and services. Bosses love IP, because it can be alienated, hoarded and sold, while process knowledge is ineluctably vested in the bodies, minds and relations of workers. No IP law can keep employees from taking process knowledge with them on their way out the door, so bosses want to ban them from leaving: https://pluralistic.net/2025/09/08/process-knowledge/#dance-monkey-dance Biden's FTC banned noncompetes nationwide, for nearly every category of employment, deeming them an "unfair method of competition": https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2023/03/ftc-extends-public-comment-period-its-proposed-rule-ban-noncompete-clauses-until-april-19 FTC economists estimated that killing noncompetes would result in $400b in wage gains for the American workforce over the next decade, as good workers migrated to good bosses. Of course this was challenged by the business lobby, which sued to get the rule overturned. Trump's FTC has not only declined to defend the rule in court, they've also decided to stop trying to enforce it. Trump is now the king of wage-theft, and MAGA is a relentless engine of enshittification. After all, the thesis of enshittification is that companies make their products and practices worse for suppliers, users and business customers only when they calculate that they can do so without facing punishment – from regulators, competitors, or workers. Trump's regulators are all either comatose or so captured they wear gimpsuits and leashes in public. They're not keeping companies in line. And his antitrust shops have turned into pay-for-play operations, where a $1m payment to a MAGA influencer gets your case dropped: https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/an-attempted-coup-at-the-antitrust Trump neutered the National Labor Relations Board and now he's revived indentured servitude nationwide, formalizing the idea of government-backed jobs you can't quit. If you can't quit your job or vote our your politicians, why wouldn't your boss or your elected representative just relentless fuck you over? Not merely for sadism's sake (though sadism undoubtedly plays a part here), but simply to make things better for themselves by making things worse for you? It's exactly the same logic of platform lock-in: once you can't leave, they don't have to keep you happy. Formalizing the legality of noncompetes will only lead to their monotonic spread. When Antonin Scalia greenlit binding arbitration waivers in consumer contracts, only a tiny number of companies used them, forcing customers to sign away their right to sue them no matter how badly, negligently or criminally they behaved. Today, binding arbitration has expanded into every kind of contract, even to the point where groovy, open source, decentralized, federated social media platforms are forcing it on their users: 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 Same for noncompetes: as private equity rolls up whole sectors – funeral homes, pet groomers, hospices – they will stuff noncompetes into the contracts of every employer in each industry, so no matter where a worker applies for a job, they'll have to sign a noncompete. Why wouldn't they? If workers can't leave, they'll accept worse working conditions and lower pay. The best workers will be stuck with the worst employers. And despite owing their existence to bans on noncompetes Silicon Valley and Hollywood will happily cram noncompetes down their workers' throats. If you doubt it, just read up on the "no poach" scandal, where the biggest tech and movie companies entered into a criminal conspiracy not to hire away each others' employees: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Tech_Employee_Antitrust_Litigation The conservative future, folks: jobs you can't quit, politicians you can't vote out of office, husbands you can't divorce, and pregnancies you can't prevent or terminate. Hey look at this (permalink) Nate Silver's big list of grievances https://www.garbageday.email/p/nate-silver-s-big-list-of-grievances Electronic Dance Music vs. Copyright: Law as Weaponized Culture https://drive.proton.me/urls/TVH0PW4TZ8#EM5VMl1BUlny Google admits the open web is in ‘rapid decline’ https://www.theverge.com/news/773928/google-open-web-rapid-decline Britain Owes Palestine https://www.britainowespalestine.org/ A Dramatic Reading of The Recent New York Times Dispatch from the Hamptons. https://bsky.app/profile/zohrankmamdani.bsky.social/post/3lyech7chqs2q Object permanence (permalink) #20yrsago Crooks take anti-forensic countermeasures https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg18725163-800-television-shows-scramble-forensic-evidence/ #20yrsago Recording industry demands digital radio broadcast flag https://web.archive.org/web/20051018100306/https://www.godwinslaw.org/weblog/archive/2005/09/09/riaas-big-push-to-copy-protect-digital-radio #20yrsago Unicef/Save the Children sell out to recording industry https://web.archive.org/web/20050914034709/http://www.promusicae.org/pdf/campana_jovenes_musica_e_internet.pdf #15yrsago TSA forces pregnant traveller into full-body scanner https://web.archive.org/web/20100910235117/https://consumerist.com/2010/09/pregnant-traveler-tsa-screeners-bullied-me-into-full-body-scan.html #10yrsago Help crowdfund a relentless tsunami of FOIA requests into America’s private prisons https://www.muckrock.com/project/the-private-prison-project-8/ #10yrsago Your baby monitor is an Internet-connected spycam vulnerable to voyeurs and crooks https://web.archive.org/web/20210505050810/https://www.rapid7.com/blog/post/2015/09/02/iotsec-disclosure-10-new-vulns-for-several-video-baby-monitors/ #10yrsago Inept copyright bot sends 2600 a legal threat over ink blotches https://www.2600.com/content/2600-accused-using-unauthorized-ink-splotches #10yrsago FBI used Burning Man to field-test new surveillance equipment https://www.muckrock.com/news/archives/2015/sep/01/burning-man-fbi-file/ #10yrsago Fury Road, hieroglyph edition https://imgur.com/gallery/you-will-ride-eternal-papyrus-chrome-you-will-ride-eternal-papyrus-chrome-BxdOcTr#/t/chrome #10yrsago Little Brother optioned by Paramount https://www.tracking-board.com/tb-exclusive-paramount-pictures-picks-up-ny-times-bestselling-ya-novel-little-brother/ #10yrsago Record street-marches in Moldova against corrupt oligarchs https://www.euractiv.com/section/europe-s-east/news/moldova-banking-scandal-fuels-biggest-protest-ever/ #5yrsago Germany's amazing new competition proposalhttps://pluralistic.net/2020/09/09/free-sample/#wunderschoen #5yrsago DRM versus human rights https://pluralistic.net/2020/09/09/free-sample/#que-viva #1yrago America's best-paid CEOs have the worst-paid employees https://pluralistic.net/2024/09/09/low-wage-100/#executive-excess Upcoming appearances (permalink) Ithaca: Enshittification at Buffalo Street Books, Sept 11 https://buffalostreetbooks.com/event/2025-09-11/cory-doctorow-tcpl-librarian-judd-karlman Ithaca: AD White keynote (Cornell), Sep 12 https://deanoffaculty.cornell.edu/events/keynote-cory-doctorow-professor-at-large/ Ithaca: Enshittification at Autumn Leaves Books, Sept 13 https://www.autumnleavesithaca.com/event-details/enshittification-why-everything-got-worse-and-what-to-do-about-it Ithaca: Radicalized Q&A (Cornell), Sept 16 https://events.cornell.edu/event/radicalized-qa-with-author-cory-doctorow Ithaca: The Counterfeiters (Dinner/Movie Night) (Cornell), Sept 17 https://adwhiteprofessors.cornell.edu/visits/cory-doctorow/ Ithaca: Communication Power, Policy, and Practice (Cornell), Sept 18 https://events.cornell.edu/event/policy-provocations-a-conversation-about-communication-power-policy-and-practice Ithaca: A Reverse-Centaur's Guide to Being a Better AI Critic (Cornell), Sept 18 https://events.cornell.edu/event/2025-nordlander-lecture-in-science-public-policy NYC: Enshittification and Renewal (Cornell Tech), Sept 19 https://www.eventbrite.com/e/enshittification-and-renewal-a-conversation-with-cory-doctorow-tickets-1563948454929 NYC: Brooklyn Book Fair, Sept 21 https://brooklynbookfestival.org/event/big-techs-big-heist-cory-doctorow-in-conversation-with-adam-becker/ DC: Enshittification with Rohit Chopra (Politics and Prose), Oct 8 https://politics-prose.com/cory-doctorow-10825 NYC: Enshittification with Lina Khan (Brooklyn Public Library), Oct 9 https://www.bklynlibrary.org/calendar/cory-doctorow-discusses-central-library-dweck-20251009-0700pm New Orleans: DeepSouthCon63, Oct 10-12 http://www.contraflowscifi.org/ Chicago: Enshittification with Anand Giridharadas (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 Madrid: Conferencia EUROPEA 4D (Virtual), Oct 28 https://4d.cat/es/conferencia/ Miami: Enshittification at Books & Books, Nov 5 https://www.eventbrite.com/e/an-evening-with-cory-doctorow-tickets-1504647263469 Recent appearances (permalink) Nerd Harder! (This Week in Tech) https://twit.tv/shows/this-week-in-tech/episodes/1047 Techtonic with Mark Hurst https://www.wfmu.org/playlists/shows/155658 Cory Doctorow DESTROYS Enshittification (QAA Podcast) https://soundcloud.com/qanonanonymous/cory-doctorow-destroys-enshitification-e338 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. FIRST DRAFT COMPLETE AND SUBMITTED. 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

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