Today's links Stock buybacks are stock swindles: Raising the value of a stock without raising the value of the company. Hey look at this: Delights to delectate. Object permanence: Marshmellow longtermism; Physicists are not epidemiologists; CO asphyxiation accounts for half of Hurricane Laura deaths. 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. Stock buybacks are stock swindles (permalink) Trump's doing a lot of oligarch shit, and while some of it very visible and obvious, other moves, like throwing the door open to "stock buybacks" are technical and obscure, but it's worth paying attention to this, because this form of stock swindle stands to make billionaires a lot richer (and thus more powerful). American companies are headed for the stock buying-backest year on record, having already pissed away $1.1 trillion in 2025: https://www.baystreet.ca/stockstowatch/21522/Stock-Buybacks-Surpass-1-Trillion So what's a stock buyback, then? On the surface, it's pretty straightforward: during a stock buyback, the company uses its cash reserves to buy its own stock. When they do this, the supply of shares goes down, so the price per share goes up. Say a company has issued 1,000 shares, and they're selling at $1,000 per share. That company has a "market cap" of $1,000,000 (1,000 x 1,000). Now the company takes $500,000 out of its bank account and buys half of those shares. Now you have a million-dollar company with only 500 shares, so each of those shares is now worth $2,000 (1,000,000/500 = 2,000). Why is this so bad? Let's start with what capitalism's advocates claim about the power of markets. Markets, they say, are a kind of alchemist's crucible, a vessel that transforms self-interest to a public good. Capitalism's theory is that if we let people pursue their own profit, they will chase efficiency, because anything that lowers costs will leave more profit for capitalists to reap. But as those capitalists discover better, more productive ways to get goods and services to market, they face competition, who force them to accept lower profits, which makes everything cheaper and more abundant for us. That means that even the greediest capitalists have to find new ways to increase efficiency in order to recapture their profits. Lather, rinse, repeat, and capitalism can make more material abundance available that we can dream of. This isn't just what capitalists say – it's also the thesis of Chapter One of The Communist Manifesto: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/31/books/review/a-spectre-haunting-china-mieville.html?unlocked_article_code=1.j08.a1xP.KLkhosG_PxkP&smid=url-share Marx and Engels were seriously impressed by the productive power of capitalism, but they had a prescient suspicion that capitalists hate capitalism, and would do whatever they could to interrupt this process. After all, if you can prevent competitors from entering the market, you can innovate just once, find a new way to make something that's cheaper and better, and never share those profits with your customers or workers, because you won't have to outbid your competitors. The alchemical reaction is halted at the point where capitalists are rewarded for their efficiency, and they are never forced to repeat that performance. Monopoly isn't the only way that capitalists can thwart this transformation of greed into abundance. The finance sector is awash in illegal scams that let capitalists get rich without increasing efficiency or making anyone except for themselves better off. Take "wash-trading": this is when a seller buys their own products, sometimes using an alias, other times using a shill. The idea is to trick people into thinking that something is valuable and liquid (that is, that you can easily find buyers for it), when it is really worthless and undesirable. Remember all those multi-million-dollar NFT sales? Almost every one was a wash trade, a way to pump and dump. The problem here isn't just that the buyer is getting defrauded. It's also that the seller is being "allocated capital" (getting money) that gives them power – power to decide what else should be bought and sold in our society. Remember the alchemy theory of markets: if you're a productive capital allocator (if you make things that lots of people desire), you are given more capital to allocate further. This is the market's "invisible hand": elevating the people with proven track records to positions of power over their neighbors and their society, on the basis that they have shown themselves capable of enriching us all, because (the theory goes), capitalism rewards people whose greed translates into a common benefit. As Adam Smith wrote: It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker, that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest. We address ourselves, not to their humanity but to their self-love, and never talk to them of our own necessities but of their advantages. Wash trading creates misallocations of capital. It makes stupid people rich, and lets them allocate capital to projects that make us all worse off. The whole theory of markets – the reason we're all supposed to leave money that we could all use to make ourselves better off in the hands of the wealthy – is that wealth is the payoff for efficiency, and we are all better off when the most efficient allocators make investment decisions. Modern theorists of capitalism tell us that this isn't alchemy, it's computing. The market is a giant "information-processing" system that incorporates trillions of "price signals" (how much we are willing to spend and how much we are willing to accept, for goods, services and labor). The market processes all these signals to direct allocation and production, ensuring that shortages are met with increases in supply, and that overproduction is tamped down by falling prices, and that inefficiencies provoke investment in process improvements. Which brings me back to stock buybacks. Stock buybacks are a way to make a company's shares more valuable, even as the company itself becomes less valuable. Think of it this way: imagine you've got a company with 1,000 shares, worth $1,000 each, and this company has $500,000 in the bank. The company is valued at $1,000,000 (1,000 x $1,000), and half of that valuation is based on its cash reserves ($500,000 in the bank), which means the other half must be reflected in the company's physical plant and "intangibles" (knowledge, contracts, efficient team structures, copyrights, patents, etc). The company announces a stock buyback: they will withdraw the $500,000 from its bank account and buy half the shares. The company is now $500,000 poorer, which means that its shares should go down in value. After all, that $500,000 is capital that could have been mobilized to make the company more profitable: it could have been spent to hire new people, do R&D, or buy machines that lower the price of making the company's products. That $500,000 represented the company's future growth potential, and the company has just pissed away that potential. This is a company whose future growth has gotten much more expensive, because it will have to borrow in order to fund any expansion. Its shares should be worth less than before. By zeroing out its cash reserves, the company has actually reduced its value by more than the value of those reserves, because it is now stuck in place, forced to fund expansion with debt rather than capital. It is at risk from "shocks" like higher rents or higher energy prices. It's a brittle, hollow vessel for the intangibles that made up the other $500,000 in valuation before the buyback. It will be worse at turning those intangibles into profits in the future. But the buyback hasn't reduced the price of the company's shares: it has doubled that price. The company has made its shares more valuable while making itself less valuable. If you think that markets are a computer that calculates efficient allocation based on prices, this should freak you the fuck out, because as we all know, the iron law of computing is "garbage in, garbage out." The company is feeding an objectively – and grossly – false price signal into the computer's input hopper. That's why stock buybacks were illegal until 1982, when Ronald Reagan's SEC changed its Rule 10-b to legitimize this form of stock manipulation and turn stock swindlers into billionaires: https://pluralistic.net/2024/09/09/low-wage-100/#executive-excess At root, stock buybacks are just wash-trading, the company buying its own shares to move their price, without doing anything to justify that price movement. Before Reagan legalized stock buybacks, companies returned capital to their investors through dividends. Why would companies prefer buybacks to dividends? Because corporate executives hold tons of shares in their employer's company, and it's much better for them to push those share prices higher even as they gut the company's ability to function. So why should you care about this? After all, statistically you own either very little or no stock. The richest 10% of US households own more than 93% of all stocks held by Americans: https://inequality.org/article/stock-ownership-concentration/ Your 401(k) account might see a small boost from this stock swindle, but again, statistically, that 401(k) is unmeasurably infinitesimal compared to the holdings of America's oligarchs. Stock buybacks are a way of making the stock owning class much richer, by swindling everyday investors – who don't understand that companies who drain their cash reserves are less valuable – into buying shares in the companies they loot. And that's why you should care: in the first 8 months of 2025, Trump has allowed America's oligarchs to get $1.1 trillion richer. That's money that you don't have – you won't get the lower prices and higher wages and superior goods that $1.1t would have paid for if companies had spent it on process improvements. It's money they have, which they can spend on things that make you worse off – buying everything from Twitter to the presidency. There's a lot to be furious about right now, like the masked fascist goons kidnapping our neighbors off the street, and the upside-down health system that is reviving the vaccine-controlled deadly pandemics of yesteryear. But the reason those fascist goons and antivaxers are able to decide how we all live our lives is that a very small number of very rich people converted their stolen wealth to illegitimate power, which they wield over us. Anyone who lived through the 2008 crisis knows that finance is a deadly weapon. Let the finance sector run your economy and they will steal everything and leave you jobless, homeless and hungry. Trump is a casino guy, and he knows that the only guy making money in a casino is the owner, who gets to set the odds at the machines and tables. By opening the floodgates to trillions in stock buybacks, Trump is turning us all into the suckers at the table, and turning his oligarch investors into little autocrats, with the power to degrade our lives and steal our future. Hey look at this (permalink) Five for 50 – Anil Dash https://www.anildash.com/2025/09/05/five-for-fifty/ How To Touch Grass https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/powerandmagic/how-to-touch-grass Why This Economy Feels Weird and Scary https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/why-this-economy-feels-weird-and A Navajo weaving of an integrated circuit: the 555 timer https://www.righto.com/2025/09/marilou-schultz-navajo-555-weaving.html Object permanence (permalink) #20yrsago Interview with mom who won’t pay off the RIAA shakedown https://web.archive.org/web/20051204021157/https://p2pnet.net/story/6134 #5yrsago Political ads have very small effect-sizes https://pluralistic.net/2020/09/04/elusive-mind-control/#persuadables #5yrsago CO asphyxiation accounts for half of Hurricane Laura deaths https://pluralistic.net/2020/09/04/elusive-mind-control/#co #5yrsago Trump is a salesman https://pluralistic.net/2020/09/04/elusive-mind-control/#cialdinism #5yrsago Physicists overestimate their epidemiology game https://pluralistic.net/2020/09/04/elusive-mind-control/#hubris #1yrago Marshmallow Longtermism https://pluralistic.net/2024/09/04/deferred-gratification/#selective-foresight 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 DC: Enshittification at 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. 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Today's links Why Wikipedia works: Agreeing on source notability, not facts. Hey look at this: Delights to delectate. Object permanence: Zero History; XKCD cake; Kazaa judgment. 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. Why Wikipedia works (permalink) If you've ever spent time around Wikipedians, you've doubtless heard its motto: "Wikipedia only works in practice. In theory, it's a mess." It's a delicious line, which is why I stole it for my 2017 novel Walkaway. But this is one of those lines that's too good to fact-check. The truth is that there's a theory that very neatly describes how Wikipedia works; that is, how Wikipedia is one of the best sources of information ever assembled, despite allowing tens of thousands of anonymous and pseudonymous people with no verifiable credentials to participate in a collective knowledge creating process. Nupedia, Wikipedia's immediate predecessor, tried to solve this problem by verifying its editors and establishing that they had the requisite expertise before allowing them to write encyclopedia entries in the domain of their expertise. This was an abject failure: not only was it so slow as to be indistinguishable from dormancy (Nupedia produced a mere 20 articles in its first year), but also the fact that these articles were written by experts did not mean that they were good. After all, experts disagree! Wikipedia jettisoned user-verification in favor of source verification. After all, it's impossible for a group of strangers to agree on the identity of another stranger, let alone what qualifies them to write an encyclopedia entry. Instead, Wikipedia created a process by which a source could be deemed noteworthy and reliable source, then instituted a policy that assertions appearing on Wikipedia had to be cited to a noteworthy and reliable source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Reliable_sources/Perennial_sources As I wrote for Make magazine in 2009, Wikipedia doesn't contain factual assertions so much as it contains assertions about facts: https://web.archive.org/web/20091116023225/http://www.make-digital.com/make/vol20/?pg=16 Wikipedia doesn't say "It is a true fact that Cory Doctorow is 54 years old." It says that a website called "Writers Write" published the assertion that my birthday is July 17, 1971: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cory_Doctorow#cite_note-3 There's no ready way for you to verify my birthday‡, but anyone can verify that Writers Write published this and claimed it was true. ‡ Unless, of course, you are my mother, who does read this blog. Hi, Mom! Not only did this resolve otherwise unresolvable disputes, but it's also a tactic that got more effective as the internet grew, and more noteworthy sources were digitized and made readily available. A major milestone here was the creation of the Internet Archive's Open Library, which aims to scan and index every book ever published. That meant that the citations to print sources in the footnotes of Wikipedia entries could be automatically linked to a scanned page and verified by everyone: https://blog.archive.org/2019/10/29/weaving-books-into-the-web-starting-with-wikipedia/ Wikipedia omitted a step that was considered indispensable throughout the entire history of encyclopedias – verifying facts – and replaced it with a new step – verifying sources. This maneuver is characteristic of many of the most successful online experiments: get rid of something deemed essential and replace it with a completely different process, suited to the affordances and limitations of a world-spanning, public, anonymous network. That's what eBay did in 1995, when (as Auctionweb), it created a person-to-person selling platform that neither verified the identities of buyers or sellers, nor did it use an escrow service that held money in trust until goods were received. Rather, it replaced these existing measures with a new kind of reputation system, whereby reliable sellers could be sorted from scammers by looking at their numeric scores. That's also what Kickstarter did. Kickstarter is based on a scheme first mooted by John Kelsey and Bruce Schneier in 1998, which they called "The Street Performer Protocol": https://www.schneier.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/02/paper-street-performer.pdf In the Street Performer Protocol, a provider of goods or services announces that once a set amount of funds were pledged, they will deliver something. Think of a street juggler who wows a crowd with an escalating series of impressive tricks, before calling out, "For my final trick, I will juggle eleven razor-sharp machetes with my feet – but I will only do this trick once there's $100 in my hat." Many people tried to implement this as a digital service before Kickstarter. They all foundered on a seemingly insurmountable hurdle: the sellers were raising money to make the thing they were raising money for. All the pre-Kickstarter platforms erred on the side of protecting buyers by holding onto the money until the promised goods or services were delivered. But because the seller needed the money to deliver on their promise, this repeatedly failed. It was a procedural vapor-lock: I can't do the thing until I have your money, but I can't get your money until I do the thing. So Kickstarter jettisoned the escrow step, handing campaign creators the full payout and then trusting them not to run off with the dough. The platform understood that this would allow a certain amount of fraud and failure, but deemed it worthwhile, especially after they took countermeasures to minimize backer losses, such as verifying sellers, subjecting projects to human review, and canceling any project that failed to meet its funding goals (if you need the money to do the thing, and you don't raise enough money, then you will not be able to do the thing). In the Oblique Strategies deck, Brian Eno and Peter Schmidt counsel us to "be the first person to not do something that no one else has ever thought of not doing before": https://stoney.sb.org/eno/oblique.html That's what Wikipedia did when it swapped verifying facts for agreeing on sources. It's what eBay did when it swapped validating sellers and buyers for reviews. It's what Kickstarter did when it swapped escrow for acceptable losses, project review, and setting minimum funding thresholds. Platforms may not know it, but they live by the "be the first person to not do something that no one else has ever thought of not doing before" maxim. They're forever removing seemingly load-bearing Jenga blocks to see whether the whole thing collapses. After all, it's certainly possible to omit a step and cause a catastrophe. Kickstarter competitors like Indiegogo tried omitting the funding threshold restriction, passing any amount raised to the creator, even if it was too little to complete the project, but after an initial blush of success, lost a lot of ground to Kickstarter, partly due to customers who felt burned when the project they put money into never delivered. But that's not the only problem with "be the first person to not do something that no one else has ever thought of not doing before." Often, the new measure instituted to replace a former bedrock principle turns out to have critical flaws that bad actors can discover and exploit. So eBay's success conjured up an army of "reputation farmers," who sold a series of low-value items to the public (or to one another, or to alternative accounts they operated themselves), cultivating a high reputation on the platform. Once they reached this high score, they listed a bunch of high-value items (like dozens of $1,000 laptops) and absconded with the money. And Kickstarter's payment threshold isn't that hard to game: just set a very low funding goal, and you are guaranteed your money. Sure, the funding goal has to be high enough to satisfy a human reviewer, but for many items, it's hard to know exactly what constitutes a reasonable funding threshold. Then there's Wikipedia. 25 years ago, it seemed easier for a group of strangers to agree on whether a source was noteworthy and reliable than it would be for them to agree on a fact. But while that remains true, it did open up a new avenue of attack: bad actors who wanted to slip lies and spin into Wikipedia could switch from arguing about which facts were true to arguing about which sources were reliable. That's exactly what's happening today, and it's the conflict that forms the spine of Josh Dzieza's lengthy, magisterial essay on the past, present and future of Wikipedia for The Verge: https://www.theverge.com/cs/features/717322/wikipedia-attacks-neutrality-history-jimmy-wales Dzieza describes how compelling and effective the Wikipedia "facts about facts" approach has been. It's such a sweet hack that it converted many Wikipedia vandals and trolls to editors in good standing, who switched from making Wikipedia worse to making it better. But in an age of endless culture wars, conservatives have turned their sights on Wikipedia. Conservative publications are – empirically speaking – the most falsehood-strewn and conspiratorial branch of the press: https://www.pewresearch.org/journalism/2025/06/10/the-political-gap-in-americans-news-sources/ The fact that reality has a pronounced left-wing bias means that many popular conservative publications have been disqualified as reliable sources on Wikipedia, starting with the Daily Mail in 2017. This has the Maga right spitting feathers about "anti-conservative bias on Wokeapedia," and has Maga Congresstrolls demanding that Wikipedia unmask its editors and disclose their identities, a risk formerly confined to Russia, India, China and Turkiye. The emergence of this threat in the USA is a potential game-changer for the Wikipedia Foundation, which has long relied on its US domicile – and the First Amendment – to protect the core project from political censorship. Wikipedia's status as the best, most trusted source of information on the internet has painted a crosshairs on its back: leaked Heritage Foundation slides detail a plan to force Wikipedia to unmask editors who contribute criticism of Israel to the project. The Media Research Center has called for the Big Tech monopolists – Meta, Google, Apple, Microsoft, all openly allied with Trump today – to block Wikipedia until it agrees to treat Newsmax, OANN and other conspiratorial publications as reliable sources. Ironically, one of the things the right hates most about Wikipedia is that it takes affirmative measures to identify and correct its bias, for example, by actively encouraging editorial participation by members of minorities who are underrepresented in Wikipedia's volunteer editor cohort. Right wing demagogues call this "DEI," even as they demand that the government force Wikipedia to institute DEI for conspiracy-addled right wing trolls. As the saying goes, "When you’re accustomed to privilege, equality feels like oppression." The culture war on Wikipedia isn't the only risk the project faces. Dictators around the world are obsessed with dominating Wikipedia. Dzieza describes how one anonymous editor in a Middle Eastern autocracy was summoned by the secret police, who ordered him to capitalize on his standing as a long-term Wikipedia editor to insert pro-regime materials into the encyclopedia. One of Wikipedia's great strengths is its structure. While Wikipedia started out as one of the internet's characteristic "benevolent dictator for life" projects, with founder Jimmy Wales taking on the role of "God King" of Wikipedia, Wales voluntarily walked away from his power, creating a nonprofit with an independent board (Wikimedia Foundation) and then handing his veto power over to an Arbitration Committee made up of volunteer editors. This was a rare and remarkable gesture. The internet has many of these "benevolent dictator for life" public interest projects, and nearly all of them are still controlled by their founders, who may be benevolent, but are far from perfect: https://pluralistic.net/2024/12/10/bdfl/#high-on-your-own-supply It's all the more remarkable that the internet's most prominent self-deposing benevolent dictator is Jimmy Wales, a self-professed, Ayn Rand-reading libertarian. While many of self-described leftist benevolent dictators who preside over other key pieces of internet infrastructure decided that their projects needed the long-term control of their founders, it was Wales, a libertarian, who decided that a project of so much collective importance should have collective rule. But while Wales has stepped down as Wikipedia's God King (and its "single throat to choke" by the world's dictators and thin-skinned billionaires), there is something of his unique genius in the ethos of the project, and its ability to civilly bring together people of many irreconcilable viewpoints to collaborate on something they all value. I've known Wales for decades and count him a friend, notwithstanding the wide gap in our political philosophies. If you want to be a Wikipedian – and I hope you do – there are many ways to get started. The easiest is probably fixing punctuation errors and typos: when you come across these on a Wikipedia entry, click the edit button and just fix 'em, making sure to check off the "this is a minor edit" box before you hit submit. But for a more ambitious entree, try this method by veteran Wikipedian – and slayer of cryptocurrency bullshit – Molly White, who, in 30 brisk minutes, shows you how to go to the library, find a cool book, and use the facts you find therein to make Wikipedia a better, more complete source of knowledge: https://blog.mollywhite.net/become-a-wikipedian-transcript/ You don't have to be an expert in butterflies, hydrology or the Peloponnesian War to improve their respective entries. You just have to find a useful fact in a reliable source. Go ahead: be the latest person to do what no person (before Jimmy Wales) ever thought of not doing. (Image: penubag, CC BY-SA 3.0, modified) Hey look at this (permalink) WKRP: Johnny Fever Mix https://www.awphooey.com/wkrp Why AI Narrators Will Never Be Able to Tell a Real Human Story https://lithub.com/why-ai-narrators-will-never-be-able-to-tell-a-real-human-story/ Sugar Daddies https://prospect.org/power/sugar-daddies/ UK government trial of M365 Copilot finds no clear productivity boost https://www.theregister.com/2025/09/04/m365_copilot_uk_government/ Age Verification Is A Windfall for Big Tech—And A Death Sentence For Smaller Platforms https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2025/09/age-verification-windfall-big-tech-and-death-sentence-smaller-platforms Object permanence (permalink) #20yrsago Imagineer who designed Disneyland castle is dead, alas https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2005-sep-05-me-joerger5-story.html #20yrsago Understanding the Kazaa judgment https://weatherall.blogspot.com/2005_09_01_weatherall_archive.html#112592939140783823 #15yrsago XKCD cake https://web.archive.org/web/20100909001343/https://blog.pinkcakebox.com/xkcd-comic-wedding-cake-2010-09-05.htm #15yrsago Latest leaked draft of secret copyright treaty: US trying to cram DRM rules down the world’s throats https://www.michaelgeist.ca/2010/09/acta-dc-leak/ #15yrsago Gibson’s ZERO HISTORY: exciting adventure that wakes you to the present-day’s futurism https://memex.craphound.com/2010/09/06/gibsons-zero-history-exciting-adventure-that-wakes-you-to-the-present-days-futurism/ 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 DC: Enshittification at 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

Today's links Canny Valley: My little art-book is here! Hey look at this: Delights to delectate. Object permanence: Ballmer throws a chair; Bruce Sterling on Singapore; RIP David Graeber; Big Car warns of lethal Right to Repair. 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. Canny Valley (permalink) I've spent every evening this week painstakingly unpacking, numbering and signing 500 copies of my very first art-book, a strange and sturdy little volume called Canny Valley. Canny Valley collects 80 of the best collages I've made for my Pluralistic newsletter, where I publish 5-6 essays every week, usually headed by a strange, humorous and/or grotesque image made up of public domain sources and Creative Commons works. These images are made from open access sources, and they are themselves open access, licensed Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike, which means you can take them, remix them, even sell them, all without my permission. I never thought I'd become a visual artist, but as I've grappled with the daily challenge of figuring out how to illustrate my furious editorials about contemporary techno-politics, especially "enshittification," I've discovered a deep satisfaction from my deep dives into historical archives of illustration, and, of course, the remixing that comes afterward. Over the years, many readers have asked whether I would ever collect these in a book. Then I ran into Creative Commons CEO Anna Tumadóttir and we brainstormed ideas for donor gifts in honor of Creative Commons' 25th anniversary. My first novel was the first book ever released under a CC license, and while CC has gone on to bigger and better things (without CC there'd be no Wikipedia!), I never forget that my own artistic career and CC's trajectory are co-terminal: https://craphound.com/down/download/ Talking with Anna, I hit on the idea of making a beautiful little book of my favorite illustrations from Pluralistic. Anna thought CC could use about 400 of these, and all the printers I talked to offered me a pretty great quantity break at 500, so I decided I'd do it, and offer the excess 100 copies as premiums in my next Kickstarter, for the enshittification book: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/doctorow/enshittification-the-drm-free-audiobook/ That Kickstarter is going really well – about to break $100,000! – and as I type these words, there are only five copies of Canny Valley up for grabs. I'm pretty sure they'll be gone long before the campaign closes in ten days. Of course, the fact that you can't get a physical copy of the book doesn't mean that you can't get access to all its media. Here's the full set of all 238 collages, in high-rez, for your plundering pleasure: https://www.flickr.com/photos/doctorow/albums/72177720316719208 But there is one part of this book that's not online: my pal and mentor Bruce Sterling, a cyberpunk legend turned electronic art impressario turned assemblage sculptor, wrote me a brilliant foreword for Canny Valley. Bruce gave me the go-ahead to license this CC BY 4.0 as well, and so I'm reproducing it below. Having spent several days now handling hundreds of these books, I have to say, I am indecently pleased with how they turned out, which is all down to other people. My friend John Berry, a legendary book designer and typographer, laid it out: https://johndberry.com/ And the folks at LA's best comics shop, Secret Headquarters, hooked me up with an incredible printer, the 100+ year old Pasadena institution Typecraft: https://www.typecraft.com/live2/who-we-are.html Typecraft ran this on a gorgeous Indigo printer on 100lb Mohawk paper that just drank the ink. The PVA glue in the binding will last a century, and the matte coat cover doesn't pick up smudges or fingerprints. It's a stunning little artifact. This has been so much fun (and such a success) that I imagine I'll do future volumes in the years to come. In the meantime, enjoy Bruce's intro, and join me in basking in the fact that "enshittification" has made Webster's: https://bsky.app/profile/merriam-webster.com/post/3lxxhhxo4nc2e INTRODUCTION by Bruce Sterling In 1970 a robotics professor named Masahiro Mori discovered a new problem in aesthetics. He called this "bukimi no tani genshō." The Japanese robots he built were functional, so the "bukimi no tani" situation was not an engineering problem. It was a deep and basic problem in the human perception of humanlike androids. Humble assembly robots, with their claws and swivels, those looked okay to most people. Dolls, puppets and mannequins, those also looked okay. Living people had always aesthetically looked okay to people. Especially, the pretty ones. However, between these two realms that the late Dr Mori was gamely attempting to weld together — the world of living mankind and of the pseudo-man-like machine– there was an artistic crevasse. Anything in this "Uncanny Valley" looked, and felt, severely not-okay. These overdressed robots looked and felt so eerie that their creator's skills became actively disgusting. The robots got prettier, but only up to a steep verge. Then they slid down the precipice and became zombie doppelgangers. That's also the issue with the aptly-titled "Canny Valley" art collection here. People already know how to react aesthetically to traditional graphic images. Diagrams are okay. Hand-drawn sketches and cartoons are also okay. Brush-made paintings are mostly fine. Photographs, those can get kind of dodgy. Digital collages that slice up and weld highly disparate elements like diagrams, cartoons, sketches and also photos and paintings, those trend toward the uncanny. The pixel-juggling means of digital image-manipulation are not art-traditional pencils or brushes. They do not involve the human hand, or maybe not even the human eye, or the human will. They're not fixed on paper or canvas; they're a Frankenstein mash-up landscape of tiny colored screen-dots where images can become so fried that they look and feel "cursed." They're conceptually gooey congelations, stuck in the valley mire of that which is and must be neither this-nor-that. A modern digital artist has billions of jpegs in files, folders, clouds and buckets. He's never gonna run out of weightless grist from that mill. Why would Cory Doctorow — novelist, journalist, activist, opinion columnist and so on — want to lift his typing fingers from his lettered keyboard, so as to create graphics with cut-and-paste and "lasso tools"? Cory Doctorow also has some remarkably tangled, scandalous and precarious issues to contemplate, summarize and discuss. They're not his scandalous private intrigues, though. Instead, they're scandalous public intrigues. Or, at least Cory struggles to rouse some public indignation about these intrigues, because his core topics are the tangled penthouse/slash/underground machinations of billionaire web moguls. Cory really knows really a deep dank lot about this uncanny nexus of arcane situations. He explains the shameful disasters there, but they're difficult to capture without torrents of unwieldy tech jargon. I think there are two basic reasons for this. The important motivation is his own need to express himself by some method other than words. I'm reminded here of the example of H. G. Wells, another science fiction writer turned internationally famous political pundit. HG Wells was quite a tireless and ambitious writer — so much so that he almost matched the torrential output of Cory Doctorow. But HG Wells nevertheless felt a compelling need to hand-draw cartoons. He called them "picshuas." These hundreds of "picshuas" were rarely made public. They were usually sketched in the margins of his hand-written letters. Commonly the picshuas were aimed at his second wife, the woman he had renamed "Jane." These picshuas were caricatures, or maybe rapid pen-and-ink conceptual outlines, of passing conflicts, events and situations in the life of Wells. They seemed to carry tender messages to Jane that the writer was unable or unwilling to speak aloud to her. Wells being Wells, there were always issues in his private life that might well pose a challenge to bluntly state aloud: "Oh by the way, darling, I've built a second house in the South of France where I spend my summers with a comely KGB asset, the Baroness Budberg." Even a famously glib and charming writer might feel the need to finesse that. Cory Doctorow also has some remarkably tangled, scandalous and precarious issues to contemplate, summarize and discuss. They're not his scandalous private intrigues, though. Instead, they're scandalous public intrigues. Or, at least Cory struggles to rouse some public indignation about these intrigues, because his core topics are the tangled penthouse/slash/underground machinations of billionaire web moguls. Cory really knows really a deep dank lot about this uncanny nexus of arcane situations. He explains the shameful disasters there, but they're difficult to capture without torrents of unwieldy tech jargon. So instead, he diligently clips, cuts, pastes, lassos, collages and pastiches. He might, plausibly, hire a professional artist to design his editorial cartoons for him. However, then Cory would have to verbally explain all his political analysis to this innocent graphics guy. Then Cory would also have to double-check the results of the artist and fix the inevitable newbie errors and grave misunderstandings. That effort would be three times the labor for a dogged crusader who is already working like sixty. It's more practical for him to mash-up images that resemble editorial cartoons. He can't draw. Also, although he definitely has a pronounced sense of aesthetics, it's not a aesthetic most people would consider tasteful. Cory Doctorow, from his very youth, has always had a "craphound" aesthetic. As an aesthete, Cory is the kind of guy who would collect rain-drenched punk-band flyers that had fallen off telephone poles and store them inside a 1950s cardboard kid-cereal box. I am not scolding him for this. He's always been like that. As Wells used to say about his unique "picshuas," they seemed like eccentric scribblings, but over the years, when massed-up as an oeuvre, they formed a comic burlesque of an actual life. Similarly, one isolated Doctorow collage can seem rather what-the-hell. It's trying to be "canny." If you get it, you get it. If you don't get the first one, then you can page through all of these, and at the end you will probably get it. En masse, it forms the comic burlesque of a digital left-wing cyberspatial world-of-hell. A monster-teeming Silicon Uncanny Valley of extensively raked muck. <img src="https://craphound.com/images/ai-freud.jpg" alt="Sigmund Freud's study with his famous couch. Behind the couch stands an altered version of the classic Freud portrait in which he is smoking a cigar. Freud's clothes and cigar have all been tinted in bright neon colors. His head has been replaced with the glaring red eye of HAL9000 from Kubrick's '2001: A Space Odyssey.' His legs have been replaced with a tangle of tentacles. Cryteria (modified)/https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:HAL9000.svg/CC BY 3.0/https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/deed.en | Ser Amantio di Nicolao (modified)/https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Study_with_the_couch,_Freud_Museum_London,_18M0143.jpg"/CC BY-SA 3.0/https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/deed"> There are a lot of web-comix people who like to make comic fun of the Internet, and to mock "the Industry." However, there's no other social and analytical record quite like this one. It has something of the dark affect of the hundred-year-old satirical Dada collages of Georg Schultz or Hannah Hoch. Those Dada collages look dank and horrible because they're "Dada" and pulling a stunt. These images look dank and horrible because they're analytical, revelatory and make sense. If you do not enjoy contemporary electronic politics, and instead you have somehow obtained an art degree, I might still be able to help you with my learned and well-meaning intro here. I can recommend a swell art-critical book titled "Memesthetics" by Valentina Tanni. I happen to know Dr. Tanni personally, and her book is the cat's pyjamas when it comes to semi-digital, semi-collage, appropriated, Situationiste-detournement, net.art "meme aesthetics." I promise that I could robotically mimic her, and write uncannily like her, if I somehow had to do that. I could even firmly link the graphic works of Cory Doctorow to the digital avant-garde and/or digital folk-art traditions that Valentina Tanni is eruditely and humanely discussing. Like with a lot of robots, the hard part would be getting me to stop. Cory works with care on his political meme-cartoons — because he is using them to further his own personal analysis, and to personally convince himself. They're not merely sharp and partisan memes, there to rouse one distinct viewer-emotion and make one single point. They're like digital jigsaw-puzzle landscape-sketches — unstable, semi-stolen and digital, because the realm he portrays is itself also unstable, semi-stolen and digital. The cartoons are dirty and messy because the situations he tackles are so dirty and messy. That's the grain of his lampoon material, like the damaged amps in a punk song. A punk song that was licensed by some billionaire and then used to spy on hapless fans with surveillance-capitalism. Since that's how it goes, that's also what you're in for. You have been warned, and these collages will warn you a whole lot more. If you want to aesthetically experience some elegant, time-tested collage art that was created by a major world artist, then you should gaze in wonder at the Max Ernst masterpiece, "Une semaine de bonté" ("A Week of Kindness"). This indefinable "collage novel" aka "artist's book" was created in the troubled time of 1934. It's very uncanny rather than "canny, "and it's also capital-A great Art. As an art critic, I could balloon this essay to dreadful robotic proportions while I explain to you in detail why this weirdo mess is a lasting monument to the expressive power of collage. However, Cory Doctorow is not doing Max Ernst's dreamy, oneiric, enchanting Surrealist art. He would never do that and it wouldn't make any sense if he did. Cory did this instead. It is art, though. It is what it is, and there's nothing else like it. It's artistic expression as Cory Doctorow has a sincere need to perform that, and in twenty years it will be even more rare and interesting. It's journalism ahead of its time (a little) and with a passage of time, it will become testimonial. Bruce Sterling — Ibiza MMXXV Hey look at this (permalink) Twitter users on Enshittification https://x.com/search?q=https%3A%2F%2Ftwitter.com%2FMerriamWebster%2Fstatus%2F1963336587712057346&amp;src=typed_query&amp;f=live Introducing Structural Zero: a New Monthly Newsletter https://hrdag.org/introducing-structural-zero-a-new-monthly-newsletter/ 70 leading Canadians, civil society groups ask Carney to protect Canada's 'digital sovereignty' https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/open-letter-mark-carney-digital-sovereignty-1.7623128 AI Darwin Awards https://aidarwinawards.org/ Kraft Heinz went all-in on scale. Now it’s banking on a breakup to save its business https://www.cnn.com/2025/09/03/business/kraft-heinz-nightcap Object permanence (permalink) #20yrsago Singapore’s cool-ass hard-drive video-players https://memex.craphound.com/2005/09/03/singapores-cool-ass-hard-drive-video-players/ #20yrsago Being Poor — meditation by John Scalzi https://whatever.scalzi.com/2005/09/03/being-poor/ #20yrsago MSFT CEO: I will “fucking kill” Google — then he threw a chair https://battellemedia.com/archives/2005/09/ballmer_throws_a_chair_at_fing_google #20yrsago Massachusetts to MSFT: switch to open formats or you’re fired https://web.archive.org/web/20051001011728/http://www.boston.com/business/technology/articles/2005/09/02/state_may_drop_office_software/ #20yrsago Bruce Sterling’s Singapore wrapup https://web.archive.org/web/20051217133502/https://wiredblogs.tripod.com/sterling/index.blog?entry_id=1211240 #20yrsago Apple //e mainboards networked and boxed: the Applecrate https://web.archive.org/web/20050407173742/http://members.aol.com/MJMahon/CratePaper.html #15yrsago Jewelry made from laminated, polished cross-sections of bookshttps://littlefly.co.uk/ #15yrsago Boneless, clubfooted French Connection model invades Melbournehttps://www.flickr.com/photos/doctorow/4953586953/ #5yrsago Corporate spooks track you "to your door" https://pluralistic.net/2020/09/03/rip-david-graeber/#hyas #5yrsago Hedge fund managers trouser 64% https://pluralistic.net/2020/09/03/rip-david-graeber/#2-and-20 #5yrsago Rest in Power, David Graeber https://pluralistic.net/2020/09/03/rip-david-graeber/#rip-david-graeber #5yrsago Coronavirus is over (if we want it) https://pluralistic.net/2020/09/03/rip-david-graeber/#test-test-test #5yrsago Snowden vindicated https://pluralistic.net/2020/09/03/rip-david-graeber/#criming-spooks #5yrsago Algorithmic grading https://pluralistic.net/2020/09/03/rip-david-graeber/#computer-says-no #5yrsago Big Car says Right to Repair will MURDER YOU https://pluralistic.net/2020/09/03/rip-david-graeber/#rolling-surveillance-platforms 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 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

Today's links The worst possible antitrust outcome: Hope you like enshittification. Hey look at this: Delights to delectate. Object permanence: Amazon drivers hang phones from trees; DVD Jon v Windows DRM; Chevron's dirty tricks. 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 worst possible antitrust outcome (permalink) Well, fuck. Last year, Google lost an antitrust case to Biden's DoJ. The DoJ lawyers beat Google like a drum, proving beyond a shadow of a doubt that Google had deliberately sought to create and maintain a monopoly over search, and that they'd used that monopoly to make search materially worse, while locking competitors out of the market. In other words, the company that controls 90% of search attained that control by illegal means, and, having thus illegitimately become the first port of call for the information-seeking world, had deliberately worsened its product to make more money: https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/24/naming-names/#prabhakar-raghavan That Google lost that case was a minor miracle. First, because for 40 years, the richest, most terrible people in the world have been running a literal re-education camp for judges where they get luxe rooms and fancy meals and lectures about how monopolies are good, actually: https://pluralistic.net/2021/08/13/post-bork-era/#manne-down But second, because Judge Amit Mehta decided that the Google case should be shrouded in mystery, suppressing the publication of key exhibits and banning phones, cameras and laptops from the courtroom, with the effect that virtually no one even noticed that the most important antitrust case in tech history, a genuine trial of the century, was underway: https://www.promarket.org/2023/10/27/google-monopolizes-judicial-system-information-with-trial-secrecy/ This is really important. The government doesn't have to win an antitrust trial in order to create competition. As the saying goes, "the process is the punishment." Bill Gates was so personally humiliated by his catastrophic performance at his deposition for the Microsoft antitrust trial that he elected not to force-choke the nascent Google, lest he be put back in the deposition chair: https://pluralistic.net/2020/09/12/whats-a-murder/#miros-tilde-1 a But Judge Mehta turned his courtroom into a Star Chamber, a black hole whence no embarrassing information about Google's wicked deeds could emerge. That meant that the only punishment Google would have to bear from this trial would come after the government won its case, when the judge decided on a punishment (the term of art is "remedy") for Google. Yesterday, he handed down that remedy and it is as bad as it could be. In fact, it is likely the worst possible remedy for this case: https://gizmodo.com/google-wont-have-to-sell-chrome-browser-after-all-but-theres-a-catch-2000652304 Let's start with what's not in this remedy. Google will not be forced to sell off any of its divisions – not Chrome, not Android. Despite the fact that the judge found that Google's vertical integration with the world's dominant mobile operating system and browser were a key factor in its monopolization, Mehta decided to leave the Google octopus with all its limbs intact: https://pluralistic.net/2024/11/19/breaking-up-is-hard-to-do/#shiny-and-chrome Google won't be forced to offer users a "choice screen" when they set up their Android accounts, to give browsers other than Chrome a fair shake: https://pluralistic.net/2024/08/12/defaults-matter/#make-up-your-mind-already Nor will Google be prevented from bribing competitors to stay out of the search market. One of the facts established in the verdict was that Google had been slipping Apple more than $20b/year in exchange for which, Apple forbore from making a competing search engine. This exposed every Safari and iOS user to Google surveillance, while insulating Google from the threat of an Apple competitor. And then there's Google's data. Google is the world's most prolific surveiller, and the company boasts to investors about the advantage that its 24/7 spying confers on it in the search market, because Google knows so much about us and can therefore tailor our results. Even if this is true – a big if – it's nevertheless a fucking nightmare. Google has stolen every fact about our lives, in service to propping up a monopoly that lets it steal our money, too. Any remedy worth the name would have required Google to delete ("disgorge," in law-speak) all that data: https://pluralistic.net/2024/08/07/revealed-preferences/#extinguish-v-improve Some people in the antitrust world didn't see it that way. Out of a misguided kind of privacy nihilism, they called for Google to be forced to share the data it stole from us, so that potential competitors could tune their search tools on the monopolist's population-scale privacy violations. And that is what the court has ordered. As punishment for being convinced of obtaining and maintaining a monopoly, Google will be forced to share sensitive data with lots of other search engines. This will not secure competition for search, but it will certainly democratize human rights violations at scale. Doubtless there will be loopholes in this data-sharing order. Google will have the right to hold back some of its data (that is, our data) if it is deemed "sensitive." This isn't so much a loophole as is a loopchasm. I'll bet you a testicle⹋ that Google will slap a "sensitive" label on any data that might be the least bit useful to its competitors. ⹋not one of mine This means that even if you like data-sharing as a remedy, you won't actually get the benefit you were hoping for. Instead, Google competitors will spend the next decade in court, fighting to get Google to comply with this order. That's the main reason that we force monopolists to break up after they lose antitrust cases. We could put a bunch of conditions on how they operate, but figuring out whether they're adhering to those conditions and punishing them when they don't is expensive, labor-intensive and time consuming. This data-sharing wheeze is easy to do malicious compliance for, and hard to enforce. It is not an "administrable" policy: https://locusmag.com/2022/03/cory-doctorow-vertically-challenged/ This is all downside. If Google complies with the order, it will constitute a privacy breach on a scale never before seen. If they don't comply with the order, it will starve competitors of the one tiny drop of hope that Judge Mehta squeezed out of his pen. It's a catastrophe. An utter, total catastrophe. It has zero redeeming qualities. Hope you like enshittification, folks, because Judge Mehta just handed Google an eternal licence to enshittify the entire fucking internet. It's impossible to overstate how fucking terrible Mehta's reasoning in this decision is. The Economic Liberties project calls it "judicial cowardice" and compared the ruling to "finding someone guilty for bank robbery and then sentencing him to write a thank you note": https://www.economicliberties.us/press-release/doj-states-must-appeal-judge-mehtas-act-of-judicial-cowardice-letting-google-keep-its-monopoly-power/ Matt Stoller says it's typical of today's "lawlessness, incoherence and deference to big business": https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/a-judge-lets-google-get-away-with David Dayen's scorching analysis in The American Prospect calls it "embarassing": https://prospect.org/justice/2025-09-03-embarrassing-ruling-allows-google-search-monopoly/ Dayen points out the many ways in which Mehta ignored his own findings, ignored the Supreme Court. Mehta wrote: This court, however, need not decide this issue, because there are independent reasons that remedies designed to eliminate the defendant’s monopoly—i.e., structural remedies—are inappropriate in this case. Which, as Dayen points out is literally a federal judge deciding to ignore the law "because reasons." Dayen says that he doesn't see why Google would even bother appealing this ruling: "since it won on almost every point." But the DoJ could appeal. If MAGA's promises about holding Big Tech to account mean anything at all, the DoJ would appeal. I'll bet you a testicle⹋ that the DoJ will not appeal. After all, Trump's DoJ now has a cash register at the reception desk, and if you write a check for a million bucks to some random MAGA influencer, they can make all charges disappear: https://pluralistic.net/2025/09/02/act-locally/#local-hero ⹋again, not one of mine And if you're waiting for Europe to jump in and act where America won't, don't hold your breath. EU Commission sources leaked to Reuters that the EU is going to drop its multi-billion euro fine against Google because they don't want to make Trump angry: https://www.reuters.com/legal/litigation/google-adtech-fine-hold-eu-awaits-lower-us-car-duties-sources-say-2025-09-02/ Sundar Pichai gave $1m to Donald Trump and got a seat on the dais at the inaguration. Trump just paid him back, 40,000 times over. Trump is a sadist, a facist, and a rapist – and he's also a remarkably cheap date. Hey look at this (permalink) Apologies: You Have Reached the End of Your Free-Trial Period of America! https://www.theatlantic.com/newsletters/archive/2025/09/america-free-trial-services/684072/?gift=jQN1t1D1nkO2TQodBiz5KLmz9qdi35_pconlf7F6jjg The Happiest Place on Earth https://ramblingreaders.org/book/442124/s/the-happiest-place-on-earth the brompton-ness of it all https://backofmind.substack.com/p/the-brompton-ness-of-it-all I am a Private Citizen Seeking to Hold My Government Accountable. Dr. Vinay Prasad, a Government Doctor, Killed My YouTube Channel. https://sciencebasedmedicine.org/vinayprasadlovescensorship/ Lawbreaking as a Method of Competition https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=5433014 Object permanence (permalink) #20yrsago DVD Jon cracks Windows streaming video DRM https://www.theregister.com/2005/09/02/dvd_jon_mediaplayer/ #15yrsago German “secure” ID cards compromised on national TV, gov’t buries head in sand https://web.archive.org/web/20100826072237/http://www.thelocal.de/sci-tech/20100824-29359.html #15yrsago Applying “ownership” to links, public domain material does more harm than good https://locusmag.com/2010/09/cory-doctorow-proprietary-interest/ #5yrago How to report on vote-by-mail https://pluralistic.net/2020/09/02/free-steven-donziger/#write-the-vote #5yrsago Amazon's weird, terrible Flex https://pluralistic.net/2020/09/02/free-steven-donziger/#chickenized-flex #5yrsago Chevron's dirty tricks against environmental lawyer https://pluralistic.net/2020/09/02/free-steven-donziger/#free-donziger #5yrsago Russia didn't hack Michigan https://pluralistic.net/2020/09/02/free-steven-donziger/#mittenski #5yrsago Amazon drivers hide phones in trees https://pluralistic.net/2020/09/02/free-steven-donziger/#phone-trees 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 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 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

Today's links All (antitrust) politics are local: From data-centers to Ticketmaster. Hey look at this: Delights to delectate. Object permanence: Pokerbot back-channels; Little Robot; How To Destroy Surveillance Capitalism. 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. All (antitrust) politics are local (permalink) The US government has abandoned antitrust. Today, companies facing antitrust jeopardy can just pay key Trumpland figures a million bucks, and they will make a discreet visit to the fifth floor of the DoJ building, have a little shufty around the Antitrust Division and the whole thing will just…go away: https://prospect.org/power/2025-08-19-doj-insider-blows-whistle-pay-to-play-antitrust-corruption/ Federally speaking, antitrust is now just another hustle. The fish rots from the head down, of course: Trump brings baseless lawsuits against media companies so that they can offer him a (colorably) legal bribe in the form of a "settlement": https://www.techdirt.com/2025/07/03/institutional-failure-cbs-wimps-out-pays-trump-16-million-bribe-to-settle-baseless-lawsuit/ This opens space for "MAGA influencer lobbyists" whose boozy back-Broom deals with antitrust targets like Hewlett-Packard Enterprises and Juniper Networks swap legal immunity for personal "consulting" payments in the millions of dollars: https://unherd.com/2025/07/the-antitrust-war-inside-maga/ But here's the thing: even though the fish rots from the head down, the world rises from the bottom up. The global wave of antitrust vigor (which swept up federal enforcers in the US, Canada, the UK, Australia, South Korea, Japan, Germany, France, Spain, the EU and China) did not start with government enforcers. Rather, these enforcers were driven forward by an unstoppable current of popular fury over corporate power. That fury is ubiquitous, and it's growing. Federal enforcement was the channel that current was forced into, but merely damming up that channel does not cause the current to abate. Right now, that rage is finding vent in municipal politics, which makes sense if you think about it, because corporate power is most vividly felt at the local level. When a billionaire rains flaming space-junk down on your home, or poisons your water with fracking, or jack's up your electricity and water bills by building a data-center, that's because a local politician has been captured by an oligarch. Very few of us are personally familiar with America's oligarch class, but a hell of a lot of us know where the mayor lives. Writing in The American Prospect, Ron Knox documents the rising wave of successful local mobilizations against corporate power: https://prospect.org/economy/2025-09-02-shifting-anti-monopoly-landscape/ In Portland, Maine, the community has risen up against the monopolist Live Nation/Ticketmaster's plan to build a 3,300 seat venue that would have destroyed the local music scene, which pulled of a miracle of mutual aid and survived the covid lockdowns and nursed itself back to health. The Maine Music Alliance and its allies won their fight by packing town meetings, circulating petitions, and bollocking their municipal representatives – you know, all the stuff that has totally stopped working at the federal level, but which still moves the needle when it comes to local politics. The Portland/Live Nation victory is a story of a couple thousand everyday people thoroughly trouncing a globe-spanning, rapacious, corporation that grossed seven billion dollars in the last quarter. Moreover, these everyday people beat Live Nation/Ticketmaster at the same moment as the feds were making noises about dropping their antitrust investigation against the company. Where the feds surrender, the people of Portland fight – and win. It's just the latest installment in a series of similar victories, including well-known ones (Queens, NY blocking a giant corporate giveaway to build a new Amazon HQ), and quieter ones, like Tuscon rejecting an Amazon data-center. Localities are fighting the fire-engine cartel (three companies that control fire-engine production and screw cities on new vehicles and maintenance): https://pdfserver.amlaw.com/legalradar/pm-59657794_complaint.pdf For a guy who loves to throw his power around, Trump has a very primitive theory of power. He thinks that illegally shuttering the National Labor Relations Board will put a lid on the generationally unprecedented support for unions among American workers. But the NLRB doesn't exist to make unions possible: unions made the NLRB possible. We have labor law because illegal unions fought so hard and terrified their bosses so much that the capital class had to sue for peace. Firing the referee doesn't end the game – it just means we don't have to play by the rules. Trump has illegally torn up the contracts of a million unionized federal workers. It's "by far the largest single action of union busting in American history": https://prospect.org/labor/2025-09-01-trump-celebrates-labor-day-as-most-anti-union-president/ And the Grinch stole Christmas. So what? The Grinch thought that the ribbons, tags, packages, boxes and bags made the Whos down in Whoville feel all Christmassy. But he had it backwards: the Whos had Christmas in their hearts, which is why they surrounded themselves with the tinsel, the trimmings and the trappings. He attacked the effect, but the cause was left intact. We have a cause. The historic highs in popular support for unions are part of a massive wave of anti-corporate anger. We see it everywhere. It's in juries, which is why corporate lawfirms are panicking at the thought of their clients falling into ordinary peoples' hands: https://pluralistic.net/2025/08/22/jury-nullification/#voir-dire And the reason we're so angry at the oligarchs is that they're so terrible. They've figured out that the only way to keep their billions is to crush democracy and replace it with fascism, which the tech PACs are doing right now, in an open scheme to end elections as means to change society: https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/monopoly-round-up-is-there-a-silicon As Matt Stoller writes, "if the voting booth isn’t a meaningful way to fix problems, people will find other mechanisms to seek redress, using uglier tactics." Which is why every fascist takeover was ultimately defeated by revolution, not elections: https://cmarmitage.substack.com/p/i-researched-every-attempt-to-stop But one place where democracy is still alive and well is at the local levels. Local races are weird and silly and bush-league, but they're also legible to people in a community that state and national elections are not. MAGA figured that out during the Biden years, packing library boards and town councils with insane chuds and culture warriors – but once decent people caught wind of it, we were able to trounce those weirdos in the next election. I love municipal politics. My 2024 solarpunk novel The Lost Cause is all about local politics as a microcosm of – and a base for – global movements to address the climate emergency: https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250865946/thelostcause/ For the past several months, I've been immersed in a seeming contradiction: global, local politics. That's because I have new all-time fave podcast, "No Gods No Mayors": https://www.patreon.com/c/NoGodsNoMayors/posts Every week, the NGNM crew profile a mayor – past, present or future, from all over the world and all through time – and prove, repeatedly, that "mayor" is the highest office to which a true oaf can aspire. NGNM has been an especially important balm for me in these brutal political times, because it scratches my burning need to think about politics, without making me think about the country's terrifying slide into fascism (it helps that Riley Quinn, November Kelly and Mattie Lubchansky, the podcast's hosts, are both infinitely charming and very, very funny). As a confirmed NGNM stan (I've started sleeping with a mayoral sash under my pillow) I am duty-bound to consider municipal politics to be funny and, generally speaking, trivial. But municipalities are also cradles of democracy, and at now that cities are the front line of the fight against Trumpism – from antitrust to militarization of our streets – I feel like my NGNM-imparted encyclopedic mayoral knowledge has prepared me to join the battle. (Image: Onbekend, CC BY-SA 4.0, modified) Hey look at this (permalink) Imgur's Community Is In Full Revolt Against Its Owner https://www.404media.co/imgurs-community-is-in-full-revolt-against-its-owner/ 1965 Cryptanalysis Training Workbook Released by the NSA https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2025/09/1965-cryptanalysis-training-workbook-released-by-the-nsa.html Process knowledge is crucial to economic development https://www.programmablemutter.com/p/process-knowledge-is-crucial-to-economic Object permanence (permalink) #20yrsago PSP’s social/technical merits and demerits https://web.archive.org/web/20050911180235/http://www.guardian.co.uk/online/story/0,,1559853,00.html #20yrsago Video-poker bots collaborate through back-channels https://web.archive.org/web/20050924164125/https://www.wired.com/wired/archive/13.09/pokerbots.html #15yrsago News stories about stupid young people make old people feel good https://web.archive.org/web/20100903144343/http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20100831/od_nm/us_elderly_news #15yrsago Gardener fighting village busybodies for the right to grow tomatoes in her front garden https://web.archive.org/web/20100903171803/http://triblocal.com/Northbrook/detail/214078.html #10yrsago Little Robot: nearly wordless kids’ comic from Zita the Spacegirl creator https://memex.craphound.com/2015/09/01/little-robot-nearly-wordless-kids-comic-from-zita-the-spacegirl-creator/ #5yrsago America's economy is cooked https://pluralistic.net/2020/09/01/cant-pay-wont-pay/#jubilee-now #5yrsago Set My Heart to Five https://pluralistic.net/2020/09/01/cant-pay-wont-pay/#robot-rights #5yrsago Podcasting "How to Destroy Surveillance Capitalism" https://pluralistic.net/2020/09/01/cant-pay-wont-pay/#htdsc 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 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 Miami: Enshittification at Books & Books, Nov 5 https://www.eventbrite.com/e/an-evening-with-cory-doctorow-tickets-1504647263469 Recent appearances (permalink) Cory Doctorow DESTROYS Enshittification (QAA Podcast) https://soundcloud.com/qanonanonymous/cory-doctorow-destroys-enshitification-e338 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 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. (1022 words yesterday, 11212 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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