Today's links Millionaire on billionaire violence: Let them fight. Hey look at this: Delights to delectate. Object permanence: Private equity vs investors; French teens who fought Nazis 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. Millionaire on billionaire violence (permalink) For the past year, I've been increasingly fascinated by a political mystery: how has antitrust enforcement become a global phenomenon after spending 40-years in a billionaire-induced coma? https://pluralistic.net/2025/06/28/mamdani/#trustbusting Political scientists will tell you that policies that billionaires hate will not ever be enacted by politicians, no matter how popular they are among the public: https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/perspectives-on-politics/article/testing-theories-of-american-politics-elites-interest-groups-and-average-citizens/62327F513959D0A304D4893B382B992B And yet, all around the world – the US (under Trump I, Biden and Trump II), Canada, the UK, the EU, Japan, South Korea, Australia, even China – governments have done more on antitrust over the past couple years than over the past four decades. Where is this coming from? My working theory basically boiled down to "enough is enough" – AKA Stein's Law: "Anything that can't go on forever eventually stops." As in: people are just so pissed off with corporate power that politicians are finally acting to curb it. But I was never very satisfied with this. There's lots of stuff that the public is furious about, which politicians aren't acting on, from climate change to taxing billionaires. Why antitrust and not all that stuff? https://pluralistic.net/2025/08/07/the-people-no-2/#water-flowing-uphill I've been mulling this over, and I got to thinking about a low-key disagreement I used to have with comrades in the digital human rights world, just before all the antitrust stuff really kicked off: https://memex.craphound.com/2019/06/04/why-is-there-so-much-antitrust-energy-for-big-tech-but-not-for-big-telco/ Back then, people on the same side as the barricades as me were deeply suspicious of antitrust. They thought that the bubbling policy revival for antitrust was a way for phone and cable companies to enlist the government to go after their adversaries in the tech world, against whom they were (badly) losing the Net Neutrality fight: https://www.techdirt.com/2019/06/04/if-big-tech-is-huge-antitrust-problem-why-are-we-ignoring-telecom/ Back then, my thesis was, Sure, maybe Big Telco is pushing for antitrust to target Big Tech, but once antitrust arises from its long slumber, it will turn on telcos – and every other concentrated industry. Tldr: I'm pretty sure that's what's happening. You see, one part of the antitrust battle boils down to a fight between rentiers and capitalists. The largest tech (and other) companies are primarily rentiers – entities that make money by owning things, rather than doing things. They make rents, at the expense of other companies' profits: https://pluralistic.net/2023/09/28/cloudalists/#cloud-capital Companies like Epic (makers of Fortnite) want to sell your kids skins and mods for their in-game avatars without giving Apple and Google 30% of every dollar that brings in, and they've got a lot of money to make that desire real: https://cdn.ca9.uscourts.gov/datastore/opinions/2025/07/31/24-6256.pdf This is millionaire-on-billionaire violence. It's gigantic corporations going to war against galactic-scale corporations. These pro-antitrust companies are the inheritors of the telcos' mantle, powerful belligerents in a Extremely Large Tech war on Big Tech. There are a lot of these large companies and they're sick of being subjected to a 30% economy-wide App Tax on all the payments they receive in-app: https://pluralistic.net/2025/05/01/its-not-the-crime/#its-the-coverup Let me be clear: I'm not saying that the only reason we're getting muscular, global anti-monopoly action is that slightly smaller corporations (who universally aspire to acquiring monopolies of their own) are fighting for their own self-interest. What I'm saying is that the coalition of everyday people who've had their lives ruined by monopolists and corporations that are stuck paying the app tax (and the 51% tax that Google/Meta take out of every ad-tech dollar, the 45-51% Amazon takes out of every e-commerce dollar, and the sums that Tiktok, Twitter and Meta extort from business customers to "boost" in order to reach their own followers) is, in combination, sufficient to awaken the antitrust giant. Members of the public are critical to this fight – we're the ones who tip the scales from one side to the other. That's why rentiers go to such great lengths to convince policymakers that they have the public on their side, whether that's Amazon trotting out "small businesses" that depend on (and get viciously fucked by) Amazon's ecommerce platform: https://thehill.com/opinion/finance/4760357-amazon-basics-antitrust/ Or leaders of groups like the NAACP who've been bribed to front for the phone companies and cable operators in the fight against Net Neutrality: https://www.techdirt.com/2017/12/19/naacp-fought-net-neutrality-until-last-week-now-suddenly-supports-idea/ All other things being equal, policymakers will simply side the deepest-pocketed, most unified corporate lobby in any fight (which is how the media companies won the Napster Wars). But when the public and one side of the corporate world is one side of an issue, policymakers understand that siding with them will get them votes and money, which is much better than just getting money (which is how we won the SOPA/PIPA fight): https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2017/01/everyone-made-themselves-hero-remembering-aaron-swartz We can really see this in the EU, where the new Digital Markets Act and Digital Services Act are going after Big Tech with both barrels, with the enthusiastic support of the EU's tech industry. That's because the EU's tech industry barely registers when placed alongside of US Big Tech, which has sucked up nearly 100% of the market oxygen by cheating (on privacy, taxes, wages, etc). Despite the farcical efforts of US tech shills like Nick Clegg (former UK Deputy Prime Minister turned Meta shill, who insisted that Facebook was "defending European cyberspace from Chinese communism"), everyone knew that US tech companies were extracting (billions of euros and the personal information of 500m Europeans) from the bloc and siphoning it off to America, after first cleansing it of any tax obligations by laundering it through Ireland and the Netherlands. If Europe still had thriving tech "national champions" – Olivetti, Nokia, Deutsche Telekom, Ericsson, etc – these companies might plausibly mount an opposition to muscular tech regulation in the EU. But these companies were crippled by predatory capital and then mostly absorbed into US Big Tech (or ground into dust). Back when I was having a friendly blog-argument with my comrades about whether tech antitrust was a Big Telco plot, I averred that it didn't really matter, because Big Tech really was terrible, and because once we'd roused antitrust enforcement from its 40-year slumber, we could wrest control of it from the telecoms monopolists who'd helped us dig it up and reanimate it. In other words: the war against the corruption brought about by corporate concentration is hard to kindle, but it's even harder to extinguish. The corporations that are fanning the flames are focused – as corporations inevitably are, to the detriment of our planet and politics – on the short term gains they stand to reap from their actions. But we can – we must – take the long view. Smashing corporate power is the key to destroying fascism and ensuring our species' survival, so our focus needs to be on building the blaze, and if some of those adding fuel to the fire happen to aspire to building monopolies of their own, then our job is to give 'em a nasty surprise when that day comes. Hey look at this (permalink) Free 3D models of every D&D monster https://www.patreon.com/cw/mz4250 Enough is enough—I dumped Google’s worsening search for Kagi https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2025/08/enough-is-enough-i-dumped-googles-worsening-search-for-kagi/ AI disagreements https://www.bloodinthemachine.com/p/ai-disagreements An Abundance of Sleaze: How a Beltway Brain Trust Sells Oligarchy to Liberals https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/an-abundance-of-sleaze-how-a-beltway Fintech Dystopia: Won’t somebody please think of the innovation? https://fintechdystopia.com/chapters/chapter6.html Object permanence (permalink) #15yrsago The Last Musketeer: whimsical, dreamlike, delightful comic https://memex.craphound.com/2010/08/08/the-last-musketeer-whimsical-dreamlike-delightful-comic/ #15yrsago Resistance: YA comic about the kids who served in the French resistance https://memex.craphound.com/2010/08/09/resistance-ya-comic-about-the-kids-who-served-in-the-french-resistance/ #5yrsago Test-proctoring software worsens systemic bias https://pluralistic.net/2020/08/09/just-dont-have-a-face/#algorithmic-bias #5yrsago Commercial real-estate's looming collapse https://pluralistic.net/2020/08/09/just-dont-have-a-face/#systemic-risk #1yrago "Carbon neutral" Bitcoin operation founded by coal plant operator wasn't actually carbon neutral https://pluralistic.net/2024/08/09/terawulf/#hunterbrook #1yrago Private equity rips off its investors, too https://pluralistic.net/2024/08/08/sucker-at-the-table/#clucks-definance Upcoming appearances (permalink) Ithaca: AD White keynote (Cornell), Sep 12 https://deanoffaculty.cornell.edu/events/keynote-cory-doctorow-professor-at-large/ DC: Enshittification at Politics and Prose, Oct 8 https://politics-prose.com/cory-doctorow-10825 New Orleans: DeepSouthCon63, Oct 10-12, 2025 http://www.contraflowscifi.org/ 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) Tariffs vs IP Law (Firewalls Don't Stop Dragons) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LFABFe-5-uQ ORG at 20: In conversation with Maria Farrell https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M9H2An_D6io Why aren't we controlling our own tech? (Co-Op Congress) https://www.youtube.com/live/GLrDwHgeCy4?si=NUWxPphk0FS_3g9J&t=4409 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. (1031 words yesterday, 25719 words total). A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING This work – excluding any serialized fiction – is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license. That means you can use it any way you like, including commercially, provided that you attribute it to me, Cory Doctorow, and include a link to pluralistic.net. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ Quotations and images are not included in this license; they are included either under a limitation or exception to copyright, or on the basis of a separate license. Please exercise caution. How to get Pluralistic: Blog (no ads, tracking, or data-collection): Pluralistic.net Newsletter (no ads, tracking, or data-collection): https://pluralistic.net/plura-list Mastodon (no ads, tracking, or data-collection): https://mamot.fr/@pluralistic Medium (no ads, paywalled): https://doctorow.medium.com/ Twitter (mass-scale, unrestricted, third-party surveillance and advertising): https://twitter.com/doctorow Tumblr (mass-scale, unrestricted, third-party surveillance and advertising): https://mostlysignssomeportents.tumblr.com/tagged/pluralistic "When life gives you SARS, you make sarsaparilla" -Joey "Accordion Guy" DeVilla READ CAREFULLY: By reading this, you agree, on behalf of your employer, to release me from all obligations and waivers arising from any and all NON-NEGOTIATED agreements, licenses, terms-of-service, shrinkwrap, clickwrap, browsewrap, confidentiality, non-disclosure, non-compete and acceptable use policies ("BOGUS AGREEMENTS") that I have entered into with your employer, its partners, licensors, agents and assigns, in perpetuity, without prejudice to my ongoing rights and privileges. You further represent that you have the authority to release me from any BOGUS AGREEMENTS on behalf of your employer. ISSN: 3066-764X

And also a reaction to OpenAI's GPT-5 release

August 8, 2025.

Putting the AI in Charge

Today's links Good ideas are popular: But they're impolitic. Hey look at this: Delights to delectate. Object permanence: Slinky treadmill; Ovipositors; Peter Thiel was right. 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. Good ideas are popular (permalink) In democracies, we're told, politicians exist to reflect and enact the popular will; but the truth is, politicians' primary occupation is thwarting the will of the people, in preference to the will of a small group of wealthy, powerful people. That's an empirical finding, based on a study of 1,779 policy outcomes, which concluded that: economic elites and organized groups representing business interests have substantial independent impacts on U.S. government policy, while average citizens and mass-based interest groups have little or no independent influence. https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/perspectives-on-politics/article/testing-theories-of-american-politics-elites-interest-groups-and-average-citizens/62327F513959D0A304D4893B382B992B The policy preferences of the public would give the leadership of any mainstream party the fantods. Here's a remarkable thread where the economic anthropologist Jason Hickel summarizes recent polling on public preferences: https://x.com/jasonhickel/status/1953126243118813556 "Capitalism does more harm than good" (56% globally; 69% in France; 74% in India) https://www.edelman.com/news-awards/2020-edelman-trust-barometer In 28 of 34 countries, the majority are anti-capitalist: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/ecaf.12591 A majority of Canadians, Australians and Britons aged 18-34 believe "socialism will improve the economy and well-being of citizens": https://jacobin.com/2023/03/socialism-right-wing-think-tank-polling-support-anti-capitalism 62% of Americans aged 18-30 "hold favorable views of socialism" (61% of Democrats have a positive view of socialism vs 50% who are positive on capitalism): https://www.cato.org/blog/81-say-they-cant-afford-pay-higher-taxes-next-year Majority of youth climate group members blame "a system that puts profit over people and planet" and 89% say that system is capitalism: https://www.climatevanguard.org/publications-all/mapping-the-global-youth-climate-movement Majority support a national job guarantee (72% UK, 78% US; 79% France): https://www.jasonhickel.org/blog/2023/11/24/how-popular-are-post-capitalist-ideas Majority of Americans support workplace democracy (unions, worker shareholders and board seats): https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/american-political-science-review/article/what-do-americans-want-from-private-government-experimental-evidence-demonstrates-that-americans-want-workplace-democracy/D9C1DBB6F95D9EEA35A34ABF016511F4 Majority of Britons support public ownership of services (education, healthcare, rail, water, postal service, parks); 64% of Americans support universal public health care; 64% support public options for internet, child care, and housing; https://www.jasonhickel.org/blog/2023/11/24/how-popular-are-post-capitalist-ideas 74% of Britons support national, permanent rent-controls; 71% of Bay Staters and 55% of Californians agree: https://www.jasonhickel.org/blog/2023/11/24/how-popular-are-post-capitalist-ideas 72% of Americans support a living wage; 87% of Britons agree: https://www.jasonhickel.org/blog/2023/11/24/how-popular-are-post-capitalist-ideas 84% of Europeans support a millionaires' tax; 69% of Americans agree: https://wid.world/document/international-attitudes-toward-global-policies-for-poverty-reduction-and-climates-change/ Majority of people in 40 countries want 4:1 maximum pay ratios for CEOs and their lowest-paid workers: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/1745691614549773 71% of Europeans want transformational reform of the UN and IMF, with proportional votes based on member-states' populations (58% of Americans agree): https://wid.world/document/international-attitudes-toward-global-policies-for-poverty-reduction-and-climates-change/ Majorities of Europeans and Americans support "compensating low-income countries for climate damages, funding renewable energy in low-income countries, and supporting low-income countries to adapt to climate change": https://wid.world/document/international-attitudes-toward-global-policies-for-poverty-reduction-and-climates-change/ 80-90% of people in medium/high-income countries want to finance this with a global tax on millionaires: https://wid.world/document/international-attitudes-toward-global-policies-for-poverty-reduction-and-climates-change/ Hickel's thread reminded of the 2023 Pew report that found that: 65% of Americans feel exhausted when thinking about politics; 63% have little/no confidence in the US political system; 4% think the US system works well: https://pluralistic.net/2023/10/18/the-people-no/#tell-ya-what-i-want-what-i-really-really-want Unsurprisingly: 87% of Americans want Congressional term limits; 79% favor age limits for Congress and the Supreme Court; 62% support automatic voter-registration for every American; 65% want to abolish the Electoral College (47% of Republicans agree!); 70% believe voters have too little influence over their representatives; 83% of Republicans say big donors call the shots (80% of Dems agree); 72% of Americans want to limit campaign contributions (75% D/71% R); 58% of Americans believe it is possible to get money out of politics. So on the one hand, this is all pretty dismal. It also makes the trend towards electing anti-democratic politicians who want to abolish elections a lot easier to understand: if you (correctly) believe you live in a world where politicians don't care about you, then why not vote for a strongman who'll punish your enemies and maybe leave you with a few more crumbs? But on the other hand, this is very exciting, because it shows us what a truly democratic world would look like (and just how different that world would be from the billionaire astroturf-dominated social media world)! If the popular will can achieve primacy, we would live in a veritable paradise! It also explains how candidates like Zohran Mamdani were able to clobber the political establishment simply by a) telling people that he would do popular things; and b) convincing them that he meant it. Suppressing popular preferences in (nominal) democracies isn't easy. It requires absolute unity of the ruling classes. Whenever the faintest crack appears in capital's unity, good policies gush out of it. That's what's happened with antitrust this decade, where the divisions between billionaire rentiers like Apple/Google and the millionaire capitalists who want to escape their 30% app tax has allowed a rush of effective antitrust enforcement to sweep the world, to the detriment of both: https://pluralistic.net/2025/06/28/mamdani/#trustbusting By not hanging together, the rich let us hang them separately. And since there is no honor among thieves – since the rich want nothing more to eat one anothers' lunches – there is disunity aplenty for us to exploit. We just have to remember that we are the (very large) majority and act like it. (Image: Japanexperterna.se, CC BY-SA 2.0, modified) Hey look at this (permalink) It’s not just Figma https://economicpopulist.substack.com/p/its-not-just-figma These GOP Lawmakers Referred Constituents to the CFPB for Help. Then They Voted to Gut the Agency https://www.propublica.org/article/cfpb-budget-cuts-gop-darrell-issa-john-cornyn The LLMentalist Effect: how chat-based Large Language Models replicate the mechanisms of a psychic’s con https://softwarecrisis.dev/letters/llmentalist/ AI Is A Money Trap https://www.wheresyoured.at/ai-is-a-money-trap/ Precarious Employment in Precarious Futures https://www.uncannymagazine.com/article/precarious-employment-in-precarious-futures/ Object permanence (permalink) #20yrsago Charlie Stross, Hugo winner https://web.archive.org/web/20050810024249/http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2005/08/07/#hugo-thing #10yrsago Veiny, slick silicone ovipositors https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wkfFZnK5W9s #10yrsago A treadmill for Slinky toys, for your infinite Slinky-torturing pleasure https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9dinVcBEDhQ #10yrsago The Princess and the Pony, from Kate “Hark a Vagrant” Beaton https://memex.craphound.com/2015/08/07/the-princess-and-the-pony-from-kate-hark-a-vagrant-beaton/ #5yrsago Free the law https://pluralistic.net/2020/08/08/turkeys-for-christmas-party/#recap #5yrsago Google bans anticompetitive vocabularies https://pluralistic.net/2020/08/08/turkeys-for-christmas-party/#newspeak #5yrsago Peter Thiel was right https://pluralistic.net/2020/08/08/turkeys-for-christmas-party/#christmas-voting-turkeys #1yrago The Google antitrust remedy should extinguish surveillance, not democratize it https://pluralistic.net/2024/08/07/revealed-preferences/#extinguish-v-improve Upcoming appearances (permalink) Ithaca: AD White keynote (Cornell), Sep 12 https://deanoffaculty.cornell.edu/events/keynote-cory-doctorow-professor-at-large/ DC: Enshittification at Politics and Prose, Oct 8 https://politics-prose.com/cory-doctorow-10825 New Orleans: DeepSouthCon63, Oct 10-12, 2025 http://www.contraflowscifi.org/ 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) Tariffs vs IP Law (Firewalls Don't Stop Dragons) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LFABFe-5-uQ ORG at 20: In conversation with Maria Farrell https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M9H2An_D6io Why aren't we controlling our own tech? (Co-Op Congress) https://www.youtube.com/live/GLrDwHgeCy4?si=NUWxPphk0FS_3g9J&t=4409 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: Naked Capitalism (https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/). Currently writing: "The Reverse Centaur's Guide to AI," a short book for Farrar, Straus and Giroux about being an effective AI critic. (1048 words yesterday, 23678 words total). A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING This work – excluding any serialized fiction – is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license. That means you can use it any way you like, including commercially, provided that you attribute it to me, Cory Doctorow, and include a link to pluralistic.net. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ Quotations and images are not included in this license; they are included either under a limitation or exception to copyright, or on the basis of a separate license. Please exercise caution. How to get Pluralistic: Blog (no ads, tracking, or data-collection): Pluralistic.net Newsletter (no ads, tracking, or data-collection): https://pluralistic.net/plura-list Mastodon (no ads, tracking, or data-collection): https://mamot.fr/@pluralistic Medium (no ads, paywalled): https://doctorow.medium.com/ Twitter (mass-scale, unrestricted, third-party surveillance and advertising): https://twitter.com/doctorow Tumblr (mass-scale, unrestricted, third-party surveillance and advertising): https://mostlysignssomeportents.tumblr.com/tagged/pluralistic "When life gives you SARS, you make sarsaparilla" -Joey "Accordion Guy" DeVilla READ CAREFULLY: By reading this, you agree, on behalf of your employer, to release me from all obligations and waivers arising from any and all NON-NEGOTIATED agreements, licenses, terms-of-service, shrinkwrap, clickwrap, browsewrap, confidentiality, non-disclosure, non-compete and acceptable use policies ("BOGUS AGREEMENTS") that I have entered into with your employer, its partners, licensors, agents and assigns, in perpetuity, without prejudice to my ongoing rights and privileges. You further represent that you have the authority to release me from any BOGUS AGREEMENTS on behalf of your employer. ISSN: 3066-764X