Today's links Autodoxing: The road to hell is paved with badly thought-through tech policy. Hey look at this: Delights to delectate. Object permanence: Shakespeare programming language; DeCSS is "pure speech"; Blue Coat sold surveillance tools to Syrian secret police; "Extraordinary Catalog of Peculiar Inventions"; Cable prices rose at double the rate of inflation for 20 years; Supercuts; Antivax x Trump. Upcoming appearances: Kilkenny, Courtenay, Vancouver, Folkestone, Oxford, Sheffield, Virtual, Oxford, Montreal. 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. Autodoxing (permalink) After 25 years of fighting for human rights amid the wreckage of bad tech policy, I'm here to tell you that the road to hell is paved with badly thought-through tech policy. The most galling thing about this wreckage is that it was both foreseeable and foreseen. Back when Sun Microsystems CEO Scott McNealy was telling the world "Privacy is dead, get over it," digital rights advocates were saying, "Not only are digital tools pretty dang good at helping you protect your privacy, but a society-wide abolition of privacy sets us up for infinite harms long into the future": https://pluralistic.net/2025/10/31/losing-the-crypto-wars/#surveillance-monopolism It wasn't just business leaders who hated privacy, it was also our political classes. Bill Clinton tried to put a backdoor into every microchip (no, really): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clipper_chip The NSA managed to enact a total prohibition on civilian access to working encryption, on the grounds that we're all safer if our spooks can spy on "bad guys" even if that means that every creep, petty crook, corporate or state-sponsored spy, and mafia can spy on us: https://pluralistic.net/2026/04/09/bernstein-2/#win-some-lose-some Even after that ban was overturned, governments encouraged the private sector to spy on us without limit, precaution or permission. Those private-sector troves of intimate, compromising data about every person alive constitute a warrantless, off-the-books surveillance system that cops, spies and government agencies can tap at will: https://pluralistic.net/2026/10/13/petards-r-us/#nobus To protect these surveillance capabilities, private firms and governments colluded to pass "anticircumvention" laws that make it illegal to reverse engineer our devices and apps to add privacy blockers to them, with the effect that every device we own and every app we use spies on us constantly: https://pluralistic.net/2024/03/12/market-failure/#car-wars At the same time, states either failed to pass new privacy laws (as in the USA, where federal consumer privacy law was last updated in 1988), or passed privacy laws that went unenforced (as in the EU, where "pretending to be Irish" allows US tech giants to flout EU privacy law): https://pluralistic.net/2023/05/15/finnegans-snooze/#dirty-old-town Our surveillance free-for-all world is objectively very bad. Over and over, companies and agencies who have been permitted to nonconsensually harvest and retain our data demonstrate that they are not capable of keeping that data safe, and no matter how badly they fuck up, nothing changes. It's been nearly a decade since Equifax doxed 148 million Americans and not only is the company still in business, they've been permitted to buy up and absorb more commercial surveillance firms. US regulators let Equifax buy Teletrack in 2021. Canadian regulators let them buy the Food Industry Credit Bureau in 2023. The same year, Brazilian regulators let Equifax buy Boa Vista Serviços. This all despite the fact that Equifax blamed its breach on shitty security practices after a string of mergers that led to it haphazardly combining databases from newly acquired surveillance companies. Data isn't the new oil. Data is the new oily rag: profitable only if you can warehouse it in vast quantities under unsafe conditions and have society pick up the bill for every conflagration: https://locusmag.com/feature/cory-doctorow-zucks-empire-of-oily-rags/ Equifax is a serial reoffender, but rather than getting the corporate death-penalty, they've been made to pay coins-down-the-back-of-the-sofa fines that amount to a fraction of a fraction of a fraction of the costs they imposed on society by amassing these vast, flaming storehouses of oily rags. Why wouldn't Equifax reoffend? Our policymakers keep demanding less privacy, not more, and their indifference to the consequences is (almost) comical. Take Malcolm Turnbull, the former Australian Prime Minister who uttered what remains, without a doubt, the single stupidest thing anyone anywhere has ever said about tech policy. Like many of his peers before, during, and since his reign, Turnbull had been trying to outlaw working encryption, insisting that every device have a Bill Clinton-esque back-door for the purpose of spying on "bad guys." When told that the laws of mathematics dictated that any measure that let Australia's cops spy on "bad guys" would also let bad guys spy on Australians, Turnbull replied, "The laws of mathematics are very commendable, but the only law that applies in Australia is the law of Australia": https://www.newscientist.com/article/2140747-laws-of-mathematics-dont-apply-here-says-australian-pm/ We could laugh Turnbull off…if he was an outlier. But while Turnbull had the world's stupidest rejoinder to the scientifically irrefutable fact that banning encryption will let bad guys hack everything, he was hardly alone in wanting to ban encryption. Banning encryption is current policy in Canada: https://blog.mozilla.org/netpolicy/2026/10/08/canadas-bill-c-22-threatens-encryption-users-privacy-and-the-security-of-digital-economies/ It's also current policy in the UK: https://pluralistic.net/2023/03/05/theyre-still-trying-to-ban-cryptography/ And in the EU: https://fightchatcontrol.eu/ The difference between Malcolm Turnbull and, say, Canadian PM Mark Carney is that Turnbull was stupid enough to try to defend his ban on encryption, while Carney simply shakes his head at his critics' naivete and continues to press forward with his catastrophic proposal to welcome every cybercriminal in the world to hack every morsel of Canadian data. When it comes to bad privacy policy, our political classes aren't content to rest on their laurels: hardly a week goes by without news of a new way to encourage (or even require) the private sector to recklessly collect and retain our data, despite the dead certainty that this data will eventually end up breaching and getting plastered all over the internet. Take "age verification" laws. There's no such thing as "age verification" – there's just spying on everyone, all the time, creating (even more) records of all of our internet activities: https://pluralistic.net/2026/05/19/shes-dead-of-course/#consensus-hallucination Every promise of "privacy preserving" age verification is bullshit: https://pluralistic.net/2025/08/14/bellovin/#wont-someone-think-of-the-cryptographers If you think kids are experiencing internet harms today, just wait until we expose them to the harms of having even more of their data harvested, stored, breached, and weaponized against them: https://pluralistic.net/2026/06/23/destroy-the-village/#to-save-it If you want to protect kids from algorithmic manipulation and targeting by bad actors, what about banning spying on kids so no one can target them? https://made-not-found-by-danah-boyd.ghost.io/no-one-paid-me-to-disagree-with-jonathan-haidt-it-was-teenagers-who-taught-me-that-he-was-wrong/ Now, at this point, you might be thinking, "How can we know who the kids are so we know who not to spy on?" You can't. In order to not spy on kids, you'd just have to not spy on anyone: https://pluralistic.net/2023/04/09/how-to-make-a-child-safe-tiktok/ "Don't spy on anyone" is the kind of thing that has a reasonable chance of enhancing online privacy. But in the time-honored tradition of "we've tried nothing and we're all out of ideas," governments keep finding ways to make digital privacy worse, for example, by procuring Flock cameras for every lamp-post: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2026/09/high-crime-lmao-how-cops-are-treating-mass-surveillance-joke And then there's UK Labour: after the success of a pilot program for an incredibly effective and safe privacy-preserving way of analyzing the country's health records for research processes, they commissioned the Goldacre Report to evaluate the possibility of making this permanent: https://pluralistic.net/2024/03/08/the-fire-of-orodruin/#are-we-the-baddies After that report was completed and had a chance to be metabolized by policymakers, Labour acted upon it…by throwing it out and handing all of the country's health data to Palantir, a serial mishandler of data and violator of privacy: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/sep/30/legal-objections-palantir-nhs-platform-handling-data Here's the scariest thing about bad privacy policy: it has a long fuse. The harms of commercial and private-sector digital surveillance can occur years or even decades after the decision to permit it. There's a straight line from the post-9/11 decision to encourage public agencies to gather, merge and warehouse data on every person in America, and the ability of ICE ethnic cleansing squads to break down people's doors and drag them off to concentration camps; just as there's a straight line from the decision to do nothing about the breach of every Social Security Number and the later theft of all Social Security data by adolescent DOGE criminals: https://www.pcmag.com/news/is-your-ssn-in-the-national-public-data-breach-heres-how-to-find-out But despite how obvious these connections are, the fact that they're separated by a lot of time and space provides our policymakers with cover for making terrible decisions with foreseeably terrible outcomes. As a society, we lack object permanence, the ability to connect acts in the past with present-day phenomena. When the press reports on a "Black October" of catastrophic, AI-fueled data breaches and hack attacks, they don't mention a generation of policymakers' indifference and hostility to information security: https://pluralistic.net/2026/09/12/god-in-the-box/#llms-are-fake Policymakers benefit from politics' eternal now, in which disasters simply befall us, without any history or precedent or cause. Remember the One Big Beautiful Bill? Its architects designed it to wreak its worst harms after the midterms, with Medicaid work rules and food aid restrictions starting in December, and cuts to affordable housing and rural hospitals phasing in through the year: https://www.tumblr.com/mostlysignssomeportents/832146932089700352 Black October is going to give way to Black November, Black December, Black 2027, and the Black 2030s – a string of cybersecurity catastrophes that will befall us until policymakers decide that keeping us safe is more important than making it easy for them to attack their chosen "bad guys." Here's a preview of Black November: there's a new strain of the Volta infostealer malware that uses AI tools to dox you even as it hacks you: https://www.wired.com/story/kernel-panic-volta-autodoxer-ai-infostealer-malware/ How that works: your computer gets hacked and your data gets stolen, then it gets merged with breach data from Ticketmaster, Disney, AT&T and other companies that have recklessly compiled vast troves of data on all of us, stored it insecurely, and leaked it onto the internet where it will live forever. Volta's makers prompt their LLM "to act like an intelligence analyst and produce structured citation-backed assessment of the victim." This lets the criminals prioritize their victims based on the expected return from exploiting them. It augments this dossier by combing through your Gmail as well as your Doordash and Uber Eats profiles. This merged data makes it much easier for criminals to call you up or email you (or have a chatbot call you up or email you) and trick you into giving up even more data: https://pluralistic.net/2024/02/05/cyber-dunning-kruger/#swiss-cheese-security Volta seems especially interested in younger internet users, targeting "Discord, Telegram, Steam, and Roblox sessions." Of course, once our "age verification" services breach vast, eternally persistent, detailed troves of data on young internet users, this kind of AI-supercharged malware will be able to target kids with much greater fidelity and efficacy. AI capabilities have made infostealers much worse, but the reason for that new potency lies in how AI capabilities are supercharged by breach data that is the foreseeable and foreseen consequence of generations of hostility to privacy on the part of policymakers and corporations who responded to the incentives policymakers created. We are living in the age of oily rags. For decades we fucked around with letting the private sector warehouse our data and weaken our security so that public sector agencies could plunder our data and our computers at will. Now, we keep finding out that everything is on fire. It's going to take a long time to fix this, but we can do it. We can build more secure systems. We can make it much more of a legal ball-ache for companies to gather our data in the first place, and we can legalize and promote the creation of privacy blockers for browsers, phones, computers, cars, thermostats and smart speakers. We can enact corporate death-penalties for breaches to reflect the true societal cost of warehousing our data. We can ban Flock cameras and tear down the post-9/11 "fusion centers" that neatly package up our data for use by DOGE fascists and ICE thugs. We can ban our spy agencies from hoarding defects in widely used software, and instead require them to divulge these bugs so vendors can fix them: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NOBUS And before we do any of that, we can just stop making it worse by ending the campaigns to require companies to spy on us and deliberately introduce security defects into their products. Hey look at this (permalink) ICE wants its mask back, and hired a company to ask https://blog.flokinet.is/2026/10/29/ice-wants-its-mask-back-and-hired-a-company-to-ask/ Is There Life After AI? Cory Doctorow Thinks So. https://jacobin.com/2026/10/ai-bubble-labor-copyright-competition Online censorship is crushing indie webcomics https://xtramagazine.com/culture/online-censorship-indie-webcomics-284463 Fascists Thrive On Bad Economics https://economicpopulist.substack.com/p/fascists-thrive-on-bad-economics PrivacySafe Foundation Releases Free Security Tools to Combat Global Cyber Threats https://www.einpresswire.com/article/952907125/privacysafe-foundation-releases-free-security-tools-to-combat-global-cyber-threats Object permanence (permalink) #25yrsago NY Post blames pagans from Indianapolis for spam malware https://web.archive.org/web/20011103073038/http://www.nypost.com/news/regionalnews/33077.htm #25yrsago The Shakespeare Programming Language https://web.archive.org/web/20011207071324/http://shakespearelang.sourceforge.net/report/shakespeare/ #25yrsago Appeals court: DeCSS is "pure speech" https://web.archive.org/web/20011102003502/https://www.wired.com/news/business/0,1367,48075,00.html #20yrsago Apple drops Trusted Computing https://web.archive.org/web/20070106150844/https://www.osxbook.com/book/bonus/chapter10/tpm/ #20yrsago Microsoft threatens China pull-out over jailed bloggers http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/6102180.stm #15yrsago Righthaven copyright troll’s victims send in US marshals to seize its assets https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2011/11/us-marshals-turned-loose-to-collect-6372080-from-righthaven/ #15yrsago Supercuts: rapid-cut videos that collect repetition https://web.archive.org/web/20111103190737/http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2011/11/supercut/ #15yrsago Study: why parents help their underage kids pretend to be 13 in order to use Internet sites https://firstmonday.org/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/3850/3075 #15yrsago Blue Coat “deep packet inspection” tools used by Syrian secret police and other repressive regimes https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2011/10/blue-coat-acknowledges-syrian-government-use-its-products #15yrsago Extraordinary Catalog of Peculiar Inventions: awesomely dangerous pranks from the age of fraternal lodges https://memex.craphound.com/2011/11/01/extraordinary-catalog-of-peculiar-inventions-awesomely-dangerous-pranks-from-the-age-of-fraternal-lodges/ #10yrsago Cable prices have risen at more than double the rate of inflation for 20 years https://cordcutting.com/news/cable-prices-have-risen-faster-than-inflation-for-each-of-the-past-20-years/ #10yrsago Typical English village mystified by its cult status among Chinese tourists https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-oxfordshire-37820663 #10yrsago Nebraska’s billionaire governor couldn’t preserve the death penalty through the law, so now he’s buying a ballot initiative https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2016/11/ricketts-nebraska-death-penalty/ #10yrsago Anti-vaxx conspiracy leaders back Donald Trump, claim it’s mutual https://scienceblogs.com/insolence/2016/11/02/donald-trump-and-disgraced-antivaccine-scientist-andrew-wakefield-best-buds-forever #10yrsago New, fast-spreading IoT botnet hybridizes two less-effective strains to achieve quick dominance https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2016/11/new-iot-botnet-that-borrows-from-notorious-mirai-infects-3500-devices/ #1yrago There's one thing EVERY government can do to shrink Big Tech https://pluralistic.net/2025/11/01/redistribution-vs-predistribution/#elbows-up-eurostack Upcoming appearances (permalink) Kilkenny (Kilkenomics), Nov 6-8 https://kilkenomics.com/ Courtenay: Enshittification (Sid Williams Theatre Society), Nov 10 https://www.sidwilliamstheatre.com/events/cory-doctorow-talks-enshittification/ Vancouver: BC Policy Solutions Gala, Nov 12 https://bcpolicy.ca/gala/ Folkestone Writers Festival, Nov 16 https://www.creativefolkestone.org.uk/whats-on/cory-doctorow-the-internet-is-broken-now-what/ Oxford: Ministry of the Future, Nov 23 https://ministryforthefuture.co.uk/events.html Sheffield: Reverse Centaur at Juno Books, Nov 25 https://www.outsavvy.com/event/40274/cory-doctorow-in-conversation Virtual: Enshittification, AI, and the Future of Technology (UBC Master of Educational Technology), Nov 28 https://met.ubc.ca/2026/09/met-speaker-series-cory-doctorow-enshittification-ai-and-the-future-of-technology/ Oxford: Bennett Oxford Symposium on Open Code in Science, Dec 9 https://www.bennett.ox.ac.uk/events/2026-bennett-institute-symposium/ Montreal: World Science Fiction Convention, Sep 2-6 https://montreal2027.ca/en Recent appearances (permalink) Clint Eastwood (No Gods No Mayors) https://www.patreon.com/NoGodsNoMayors/posts/clint-eastwood-173008088 Life After AI (Brain Bar) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IPPa43-n0vI Terms of Service with Clare Duffy (CNN) https://www.cnn.com/audio/podcasts/terms-of-service-with-clare-duffy/episodes/458ce968-af5d-11f0-b539-13ed2afe25f8 AI, Work, and Power (Software Engineering Daily) AI, Work, and Power https://softwareengineeringdaily.com/podcasts/cory-doctorow-on-ai-work-and-power/ AI, Corporate Power, and the Fight for Worker Control (Plutopia) https://plutopia.io/cory-doctorow-ai-corporate-power-and-the-fight-for-worker-control/ Latest books (permalink) "The Reverse-Centaur's Guide to AI," a short book about being a better AI critic, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, June 2026 https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374621568/thereversecentaursguidetolifeafterai/ "Canny Valley": A limited edition collection of the collages I create for Pluralistic, self-published, September 2025 https://pluralistic.net/2025/09/04/illustrious/#chairman-bruce "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/ "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 (thebezzle.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) "The Post-American Internet," a geopolitical sequel of sorts to Enshittification, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2027 "Unauthorized Bread": a middle-grades graphic novel adapted from my novella about refugees, toasters and DRM, FirstSecond, April 20, 2027 "Enshittification, Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It" (the graphic novel), Firstsecond, 2027 "The Memex Method," Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2027 Colophon (permalink) Today's top sources: Currently writing: “Once Is Enemy Action,” a science fiction novel about the origins of modern technofascism. Today's words: 574 (7730 total). "The Post-American Internet," a sequel to "Enshittification," about the better world the rest of us get to have now that Trump has torched America. Fourth draft completed. Submitted to editor. 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 Bluesky (no ads, possible tracking and data-collection): https://bsky.app/profile/doctorow.pluralistic.net Medium (no ads, paywalled): https://doctorow.medium.com/ Tumblr (mass-scale, unrestricted, third-party surveillance and advertising): https://mostlysignssomeportents.tumblr.com/tagged/pluralistic "When life gives you SARS, you make sarsaparilla" -Joey "Accordion Guy" DeVilla READ CAREFULLY: By reading this, you agree, on behalf of your employer, to release me from all obligations and waivers arising from any and all NON-NEGOTIATED agreements, licenses, terms-of-service, shrinkwrap, clickwrap, browsewrap, confidentiality, non-disclosure, non-compete and acceptable use policies ("BOGUS AGREEMENTS") that I have entered into with your employer, its partners, licensors, agents and assigns, in perpetuity, without prejudice to my ongoing rights and privileges. 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Today's links Voting is to politics as shopping is to boycotts: The big P only matters if the small p is in play. Hey look at this: Delights to delectate. Object permanence: Gilberto Gil v WIPO; Censored Apple wifi hacker talk; Wells Fargo crime-spree started in 1998; Stencils "may not be reproduced"; DVD Jon v Apple DRM; Unpaid diplomatic parking tickets as index of corruption; Tortured Canadian was not a terrorist; Decarbonization at a distance. Upcoming appearances: Brighton, Virtual, South Bend, Hudson, Calgary, Winnipeg, Paris, Vancouver, Victoria, Ottawa, Kilkenny, Montreal. 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. Voting is to politics as shopping is to boycotts (permalink) Here's a funny thing about the right to vote: it wasn't won by voting. From the Magna Carta to the US Constitution to the Emancipation Proclamation to 19th Amendment, voting rights (what you might call "Big P" Politics) were always downstream of protests, riots, petitions, mass movements, strikes and good, old fashioned community organizing (that is, "small p" politics). Which is to say, Big P politics matter, but to make them matter, we need a lot of small p politics. That means that democracy isn't something you do every couple of years with a ballot paper (though that's an important aspect of the process). Democracy is continuous. If you've ever wondered why your vote seems to accomplish so little, I think you can blame the near-abolition of small p politics by Big P politicians of every stripe. Indeed, Obama's genius was summoning up an army of door-knocking, phone-banking small p political activists and then euthanizing that organization after he won the election: https://newrepublic.com/article/140245/obamas-lost-army-inside-fall-grassroots-machine For Obama, the grassroots were useful for one thing: getting out the vote. The last thing he wanted was for millions of activated voters to turn into activists who'd flame him and harangue him and picket him if they didn't like his compromises. Boy, did Obama ever compromise. He let the bank executives who created the Great Financial Crisis off the hook and encouraged them to foreclose on the homes of millions of Americans, the very same public that had bailed them out: https://theweek.com/articles/624777/obamas-biggest-failure He shielded the CIA's torturers from scrutiny and prosecution: https://journals.law.harvard.edu/ilj/2009/04/obama-publishes-torture-memos-immunizes-cia-staff/ He reneged on his promise to shut down Gitmo: https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/obama-failed-close-guantanamo And his promise to hold the phone companies to account for their complicity in the NSA's mass domestic surveillance: https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/article/obama-on-mass-government-surveillance-then-and-now/ He stepped up secret drone warfare: https://www.cfr.org/articles/obamas-final-drone-strike-data And unconstitutional domestic surveillance: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2017/01/obama-expands-surveillance-powers-his-way-out Whenever I raise this, Obama's apologists come out of the woodwork to tell me that "the president isn't the Green Lantern," and that Obama couldn't act without help from Congress and the Senate, who wouldn't back his plays. I think that Trump's presidency has shown us how much power the president really has even when the legislature won't play ball. But even if you accept the Green Lantern apologetics, the fact remains that Obama could have had a clamoring army of ardent supporters in the streets, defending his agenda against recalcitrants in his own party and wreckers in the GOP. He chose not to have that army. He sent that army home. It's like Obama heard the story about post-election FDR telling civil rights leaders, "I want to do it, now make me do it," and concluded, "I don't want to do it, so I'd better not let anyone make me do it": https://www.quora.com/Did-Franklin-Roosevelt-ever-say-I-agree-with-you-I-want-to-do-it-now-make-me-do-it Of course, Trump is doing everything he can to extinguish both small p politics and Big P Politics. It's not just his wildly illegal voter suppression tactics. He's banning and prosecuting political groups, invoking anti-terror laws (which Obama supported and promised would only be used proportionately and wisely) to chase his grassroots opposition underground: https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/09/designating-antifa-as-a-domestic-terrorist-organization/ Liberals are often contemptuous of grassroots movements (cf "basket of deplorables," "Green Lantern" scolding), but the right is terrified of them. The right's political leadership is terrified of its own grassroots, and rightly so, because those people are maniacs, and they're the reason the GOP has been pushed into its most extreme positions. The right's grassroots, meanwhile, are afraid of the left's grassroots. The last thing they want is a militant, organized, mobilized base pushing Dem politicians to take the stands that are wildly and widely popular in America, from Medicare for All to an end to ICE – the Mamdani agenda, in other words. Mamdani is the anti-Obama. He shows what happens when a progressive candidate nurtures and co-governs with their base after the election, using millions of passionate, committed, everyday people to steamroller anyone who gets in the way of his agenda: https://www.nyc.gov/content/100days/pages/ Of course the downside of this is that when Mamdani reneges on his pledges, he is loudly and furiously held to account for it: https://www.thecityreporter.nyc/2026/02/19/mamdani-budget-parks-libraries/ Mamdani understood that he would be corralled into compromises if he won the mayoralty and that when he made those compromises, his base would come after him with the unmistakable fury of betrayed idealists. He also understood that any comfort he enjoyed by sidelining his base while in office would come at a price far higher than being yelled at by his supporters: it would cost him the ability to get anything done. Voting for Mamdani was important. It got him elected. But staying organized – in unions, neighborhood clubs, affinity groups, DSA chapters and mutual aid groups – is what's letting him get stuff done, and stopping him from bailing on his promises as politically infeasible. In other words, voting only matters if it's the final stage of a sustained campaign to build and mobilize popular power. Without that, voting will get you precious little. The right's leadership understands this very well, which is why they've spent years attacking unions, community organizers like Acorn, and activist institutions like Planned Parenthood. We must defend voting rights – Big P Politics – to the bitter end, but we need to defend organizing – small p politics – just as ferociously. The reduction of politics to voting is part of the 50 year neoliberal project whose foremost goal is to make you think of yourself as an atomized individual and not as a member of a polity. Turning "politics" into "voting" is absolutely in line with Margaret Thatcher's dictum that "there is no such thing as society." It's the same move that convinced workers that the answer to bad working conditions is looking your boss in the eye and threatening to change jobs (not forming a union and striking). It's also the same move that transformed "boycotts" into "shopping." Boycotts are a collective enterprise. Before a boycott takes place, small-p political groups hold meetings, organize alternatives and communicate their demands. During a boycott, organizers work to insulate participants from reprisals, like the Montgomery Bus Boycott organizers who reasoned and remonstrated with employers who disciplined workers whose participation made them late for work. And yes, as part of a boycott, you make some consumption choices. You buy X instead of Y. But "shopping" by itself isn't a boycott. You can't "vote with your wallet" (especially not when billionaires get to vote against you with their wallets): https://pluralistic.net/2025/09/13/consumption-choices/#marginal-benefits Shopping isn't politics, and while voting is Politics (Big P), it's also not politics (small p). A boycott, on the other hand, is politics. What's more, "shopping" has the same relationship to "boycotts" that "voting" has to "politics." It's a step you take, after you've laid a lot of groundwork with other people, as part of a mass movement. I understand why shopping and voting are more attractive than boycotts and politics. Meetings suck. Hell is other people: https://locusmag.com/feature/commentary-cory-doctorow-hell-is-other-people/ But changing the system requires systemic work. Hell is other people because other people are great but it's so hard to get them to do things your way. That takes time and understanding and togetherness and arguing and forgiving. Not everyone has time or capacity for that, and at any given time, we don't all have to be doing that work. We can take turns, spelling each other off at times in our lives when we have more or less slack. But lots of us have to be in the fight, or all of us will get screwed. There aren't enough of us doing politics right now. We can tell, because our politicians are so contemptuous of the grassroots that they will sell us out without a moment's hesitation, smugly certain that they will face no consequences for doing so: https://pluralistic.net/2026/09/22/happy-chudmas/#baloney-in-our-slacks Oligarchs have it easy. Where we have to convince people to fight, they can pay or threaten people to bring them into line. But oligarchs' power is wearing thin. The data-center uprising shows how much fury there is out there, looking for a productive outlet: https://www.bloodinthemachine.com/p/with-the-backlash-to-data-centers Data centers are very bad and very visible, so they make for good targets. But data centers are only the physical extrusion of a vast, brutal, extractive system. The most important way to fight data centers is to take everyone you meet protesting one and organize with them to scare the shit out of "your" politicians so they don't dare compromise on anything. Hey look at this (permalink) The Facebook Fake-out https://www.anildash.com/2026/09/29/facebook-fake-out/ Anatomy Unzipped: John of Arderne’s Sweden Scroll (ca. 1425–35) https://publicdomainreview.org/collection/arderne-scroll/ Inside McDonald’s push to have AI price your Big Mac https://www.reuters.com/business/inside-mcdonalds-push-have-ai-price-your-big-mac-2026-09-29/ what is going on with ceiling fans https://mcmansionhell.com/post/829127919552151552/what-is-going-on-with-ceiling-fans From Shitpost to Bullshit https://www.unpopularfront.news/p/from-shitpost-to-bullshit Object permanence (permalink) #25yrsago GWB's press secretary to media: "watch what you do, watch what you say" https://web.archive.org/web/20010926223602/https://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2001/09/20010926-5.html#BillMaher-Comments#BillMaher-Comments #20yrsago Stencils kit “may not be reproduced in any form” https://web.archive.org/web/20061022000842/http://www.fairuseday.com/index.php/2006/10/01/copyright-is-broken/ #20yrsago DVD Jon selling Apple DRM to Apple’s competitors https://web.archive.org/web/20061004191106/https://featured.gigaom.com/2006/10/02/dvd-jon-fairplays-apple/ #20yrsago Unpaid diplomatic parking tickets as index of national corruption https://web.archive.org/web/20130719065306/https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2006/10/primary-sources/305203/ #20yrsago Canadian deported to Syria for torture is cleared https://www.theguardian.com/world/2006/oct/02/worlddispatch #20yrsago Gilberto Gil slams WIPO https://fromgeneva.blogspot.com/2006/09/wipo-general-assembly-impressions-from.html #20yrsago Speech given by censored Apple WiFi hacker at ToorCon https://craphound.com/cache_toorcon_2006.txt #10yrsago Company suspected of blame in Office of Personnel Management breach will help run new clearance agency https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-security-background-idUSKCN1202M6/ #10yrsago Wells Fargo started demanding fraud of its employees in 1998; Illinois cuts Wells off from state business https://www.citizen.org/wp-content/uploads/wells-fargo-king-of-cross-sell.pdf #10yrsago Google: if you support Amazon’s Echo, you’re cut off from Google Home and Chromecast https://variety.com/2016/digital/news/google-home-amazon-echo-chromecast-1201874125/ #5yrsago How the IMF loan-sharks the global south https://pluralistic.net/2021/10/02/debt-trap/#global-arm-breakers #1yrago Decarbonization at a distance https://pluralistic.net/2025/10/02/there-goes-the-sun/#carbon-shifting Upcoming appearances (permalink) https://www.epl.ca/blogs/post/elbows-up-with-cory-doctorow/ Brighton: Digital Sovereignty and the Post-American Internet (Green Party Conference), Oct 3 https://www.openrightsgroup.org/events/digital-sovereignty-and-the-post-american-internet/ Virtual: How to govern technology in a multipolar digital world (Connecting Current), Oct 6 https://connectingcurrent.tech/how-to-govern-technology-a-multipolar-digital-world/ South Bend: An Evening With Cory Doctorow (Notre Dame), Oct 6 https://franco.nd.edu/events/2026/10/06/an-evening-with-cory-doctorow/ Hudson, OH: Hudson Library, Oct 7 https://engagedpatrons.org/EventsExtended.cfm?SiteID=3850&EventID=596952&PK= Calgary: Wordfest, Oct 8 https://wordfest.com/2026/show/wordfest-presents-cory-doctorow-2026/ Winnipeg: McNally Robinson, Oct 9 https://www.mcnallyrobinson.com/event-18991/An-Evening-with-Cory-Doctorow Paris: Slow Tech Summit, Oct 15 https://slowtechsummit.com/ Vancouver: Read, Resist, Repair, Rejoice (Vancouver Writers Festival), Oct 19 https://writersfest.bc.ca/festival-event-2026/01 Victoria: Munro's Books, Oct 20 https://www.munrobooks.com/events/6113620261020 Vancouver: Life After AI (Vancouver Writers Festival), Oct 22 https://writersfest.bc.ca/festival-event-2026/46 Ottawa: Life After AI (Ottawa Writers Festival), Oct 24 https://writersfestival.org/event/life-after-ai Kilkenny (Kilkenomics), Nov 6-8 https://kilkenomics.com/ Vancouver: Enshittification (Sid Williams Theatre Society), Nov 10 https://www.sidwilliamstheatre.com/events/cory-doctorow-talks-enshittification/ Vancouver: BC Policy Solutions Gala, Nov 12 https://bcpolicy.ca/gala/ Montreal: World Science Fiction Convention, Sep 2-6 https://montreal2027.ca/en Recent appearances (permalink) Terms of Service with Clare Duffy (CNN) https://www.cnn.com/audio/podcasts/terms-of-service-with-clare-duffy/episodes/458ce968-af5d-11f0-b539-13ed2afe25f8 AI, Work, and Power (Software Engineering Daily) AI, Work, and Power https://softwareengineeringdaily.com/podcasts/cory-doctorow-on-ai-work-and-power/ AI, Corporate Power, and the Fight for Worker Control (Plutopia) https://plutopia.io/cory-doctorow-ai-corporate-power-and-the-fight-for-worker-control/ How to Think About AI—Before It’s Too Late (Daniel Solove) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_0xR3uEgGcc Could Tech Bosses Destroy Life As We Know It? (Politics JOE) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PL4VktU0SgY Latest books (permalink) "The Reverse-Centaur's Guide to AI," a short book about being a better AI critic, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, June 2026 https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374621568/thereversecentaursguidetolifeafterai/ "Canny Valley": A limited edition collection of the collages I create for Pluralistic, self-published, September 2025 https://pluralistic.net/2025/09/04/illustrious/#chairman-bruce "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/ "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 (thebezzle.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) "The Post-American Internet," a geopolitical sequel of sorts to Enshittification, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2027 "Unauthorized Bread": a middle-grades graphic novel adapted from my novella about refugees, toasters and DRM, FirstSecond, April 20, 2027 "Enshittification, Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It" (the graphic novel), Firstsecond, 2027 "The Memex Method," Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2027 Colophon (permalink) Today's top sources: Currently writing: “Once Is Enemy Action,” a science fiction novel about the origins of modern technofascism. Today's words: 509 (20770 total). "The Post-American Internet," a sequel to "Enshittification," about the better world the rest of us get to have now that Trump has torched America. Fourth draft completed. Submitted to editor. 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 Bluesky (no ads, possible tracking and data-collection): https://bsky.app/profile/doctorow.pluralistic.net Medium (no ads, paywalled): https://doctorow.medium.com/ Tumblr (mass-scale, unrestricted, third-party surveillance and advertising): https://mostlysignssomeportents.tumblr.com/tagged/pluralistic "When life gives you SARS, you make sarsaparilla" -Joey "Accordion Guy" DeVilla READ CAREFULLY: By reading this, you agree, on behalf of your employer, to release me from all obligations and waivers arising from any and all NON-NEGOTIATED agreements, licenses, terms-of-service, shrinkwrap, clickwrap, browsewrap, confidentiality, non-disclosure, non-compete and acceptable use policies ("BOGUS AGREEMENTS") that I have entered into with your employer, its partners, licensors, agents and assigns, in perpetuity, without prejudice to my ongoing rights and privileges. You further represent that you have the authority to release me from any BOGUS AGREEMENTS on behalf of your employer. ISSN: 3066-764X

Today's links Why businesses lie about AI: Humoring the boss all the way into bankruptcy. Hey look at this: Delights to delectate. Object permanence: Vinge x NYT; Syklarov x publishers; Human hair castles; Gingrich's bot army; Accessibility v Web DRM; David Byrne x WinXP; Furries don't fuck in fursuits; AI's pogo-stick grift. Upcoming appearances: Edinburgh, Sydney, Melbourne, Brighton, London, South Bend. 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 businesses lie about AI (permalink) Neoclassical economics assumes rationality. The corollary of, "If you're so smart, why aren't you rich?" is "you're rich, so you must be very smart!" Thus it is that many people assume that if powerful, well-compensated CEOs insist that "AI is changing everything," well then, AI must be changing everything. But the evidence for this "changing everything" thesis is thin on the ground. Despite a global mania that has reduced the real, pressing need for digital sovereignty to the imaginary need to create "sovereign AI," no one can really articulate the case for "sovereign AI." If Donald Trump ordered Big Tech to turn off all of your country's chatbots tomorrow, nothing would change. Every one of your country's ministries and corporations would chug on with nary a hitch. Households, too, though perhaps a few of the younger members of those families would have to do their own homework again. (Contrast this with what would transpire if Trump directed his tech giants to switch off your country's Office 365 access, or to brick your Android and iOS phones, or to killswitch your John Deere tractors. Your country would effectively cease to exist. If "digital sovereignty" means anything, it means doing something about this urgent fact): https://pluralistic.net/2026/06/18/their-trillions-our-billions/#eyes-on-the-prize The world is full of people who insist that "AI is changing everything" but who – when pressed – have to admit that what they mean is that they're pretty sure that AI will change everything. Eventually. After we allow it to consume all the planet's energy, carbon, water and financial resources. Maybe. (They're pretty sure.) One person who's had a lot of opportunity to observe the shear between the stated business/AI situation and the real business AI situation is Nikhil Suresh from Hermit Tech, a consulting firm of "radically ethical data wizards" (that is, tech consultants). Suresh reports on his experience talking with hundreds of executives (and, more importantly, their subordinates) about what (if anything) AI is doing for business in an essay entitled "AI Mania Is Eviscerating Global Decisionmaking": https://hermit-tech.com/blog/ai-mania-is-eviscerating-global-decisionmaking Suresh has a good track record of writing trenchant, frank criticism of AI. You may know him from his 2024 essay, "I Will Fucking Piledrive You If You Mention AI Again": https://ludic.mataroa.blog/blog/i-will-fucking-piledrive-you-if-you-mention-ai-again/ Or possibly from his "Contra Ptacek's Terrible Article On AI," a stinging rebuttal to Thomas Ptacek's widely read "My AI Skeptic Friends Are All Nuts": https://ludic.mataroa.blog/blog/contra-ptaceks-terrible-article-on-ai/ While those are important pieces of critical AI realpolitik, none of them have the heft or urgency of "AI Mania Is Eviscerating Global Decisionmaking," whose thesis can be summed up with this passage from halfway through this 6,000-word article: [W]e’re facing a coordination problem around executives being honest around the AI gains they’ve witnessed – if they co-operate, they keep their jobs. If they defect, they will possibly be fired by their embarrassed peers (who have now been implicitly called liars, cowards, or incompetents) and then replaced with someone that will toe the line anyway. If they could all admit the truth at once there might be some hope, but there is no way to coordinate that event. In other words, corporate leadership is starting from the premise that AI has (or will) radically change the business, and they're working backwards from that premise to find the evidence to support this article of faith. In support of this thesis, Suresh cites "hundreds" of conversations with execs and employees who spoke to him on the condition that he would "file the serial numbers" off their stories. These, combined with his own experience consulting for large, multi-billion-dollar companies make it clear that "AI mania" is an absolutely justifiable label for the state of AI in corporate circles. Here are a few highlights from this morning's read – moments where I had to look away from my screen and read out a passage to my wife so that we could share a "holy shit" moment. A person worked for a division that "pivoted" to re-engineer its software to create interfaces that support AI agents. When it became apparent that only ten users had touched this expensive new technology, they "pivoted" again to support "agentic workflows." Why did they double down on AI agents after discovering such yawning market indifference for "agentic"? "Because every company has to do something agentic now." Suresh describes this as a literal religious mania. In the 500+ employee businesses Suresh studied, the only people who were promoted – or even spared from being fired – were people who professed "religious declarations of faith" about "the transformative power of AI." Employees who voiced honest, informed objections to AI in the workplace were passed over for promotions or targeted for layoffs. This has created a situation in which everyone – "boards, executives, employees, vendors, consultants" – has a strong incentive to lie about how much AI is delivering for their companies. Suresh says he's seen announcements from publicly traded companies about their AI triumphs that he knows for a fact never took place. Suresh says he's never seen a successful enterprise AI project: "Every single one – we have seen 0% success in a year and a half." Not one of their clients would face a business challenge if OpenAI went out of business tomorrow. The problem most companies struggle with is that they're "terminally bad at running software projects effectively." Adding AI to the mix doesn't solve this problem – it just adds a whole new range of ways that software deployment can fail. Chatbots don't help. The internally facing chatbot that's supposed to help employees figure out how to navigate the business sucks because it is only as good as its training date – the business's documentation of its own processes. Businesses suck at documenting their processes. Customer-facing chatbots also suck. They either can't solve your problem, or, when they seem to solve your problem, the "solution" goes nowhere. Suresh recounts his sole positive customer service chatbot experience: a Mitsubishi chatbot with a natural sounding, responsive voice politely took all the details of an automotive failure and promised him a callback. That callback never came, but Suresh is certain that Mitsubishi has logged this as a chatbot success story, even though the experience convinced him not to buy a Mitsubishi car. Suresh and his team at Hermit Tech now have a policy of not even asking about ongoing AI projects. They've learned that by the time an AI project has begun, no one will discuss it honestly until it reaches a crisis point. Suresh says he frequently encounters people who reflexively utter the AI catechism: "AI is changing everything." But when he presses these people for details, they admit that their organization "does not currently use LLMs for anything, and indeed, that they cannot name a single thing that has changed other than they get some use out of ChatGPT." This shear ("AI is changing everything"/"Well, OK, we're not using AI for anything") is so extreme that Suresh once met an exec who confessed to crafting an AI-centered AI strategy for a $2b/year business, even though that exec "had never even used ChatGPT or any AI tool in their life." Some people have privately admitted to Suresh that they've embraced AI in order to earn a career-boosting corporate reputation for "thought leadership." But many other people (especially nontechnical people) sincerely believe that AI is about to "change everything." As Suresh says, if you're in business with a liar, you might be able to reason with them in private – but you can't reason with a true believer. The true believers are in charge. Suresh points out that it would be very weird for the CEO of an engineering firm or a hospital to mandate "specific procedures or building techniques without explicit agreement from the professionals on staff." But when it comes to AI, business leaders will confidently demand that the skilled professionals who perform the business's core functions use AI, even if those professionals don't think it will help. As an aside: I remember the dotcom era, when the business press was full of articles about the conflict between CEOs and a new workforce that demanded the right to use the web on the job. Today, the business press is full of articles about the conflict between the workforce and CEOs who demand that they use AI. Suresh describes workers who feel they have to "AI wash" their work: "They just do the work, the same way they have for decades, and say Claude did it." To add verisimilitude to this sham, they write circular processes in which one chatbot prompts another, and then the process repeats itself in reverse, for the sole purpose of consuming AI tokens to score a high rank on corporate "token leaderboards." How to account for this wildly, expensively irrational corporate leadership? Suresh places the blame in the hypnotizing, mesmerizing power of the AI demo. For example: Hermit Tech is often engaged to set up a database product called Snowflake for its customers. Snowflake has a useless, expensive AI bolt-on called Cortex, that Snowflake itself describes as being 92% accurate under ideal circumstances (that is, at least 8% of the time, it will mislead you, perhaps very badly). Suresh describes sales meetings with execs who were lukewarm on the idea of retooling with Snowflake, but who were very interested in Cortex. Against their better judgment, Suresh and his team provided them with a Cortex demo, carefully explaining that this AI tool could not satisfy their requirements. Without fail, this resulted in the previously lukewarm customers insisting that they be allowed to purchase Cortex immediately. Sales prospects who'd been unmoved by a pitch for new technology that would result in millions in savings were hypnotized by demos of a product that was described as unsuitable and unreliable. To their credit, Hermit Tech refused to sell these customers Cortex, and stopped doing Cortex demos altogether. Suresh describes the experience of "the total 180°, that shift from ice-cold to red-hot buying frenzy" as "deeply unsettling." What's more, the Cortex demos that Suresh and co performed were, by his account, pretty uninspiring. The thing that these demos had going for them is that they showed AI actually doing something marginally useful, to execs who'd already spent millions on AI without having anything to show for their money. The spectacle of AI that does something galvanizes corporate leaders who feel like they're the only bosses who can't find a revolutionary use for AI in their businesses. This is the situation up and down the corporate org-chart. Suresh has a reader whose title is "Head of AI" at a billion-dollar firm who tells him "their job is totally fraudulent but it was the only promotion pathway remaining at the organisation." This exec is hardly alone. They're part of a cohort of executives at companies that have publicly announced "100x" productivity gains, but who confessed to Suresh that nothing of the sort has happened. Why did these companies make these claims? Because their customers were making the claims. How could you hope to sell to a company that had 100x'ed its productivity with AI unless you, too had 100x'ed your productivity? If, as a vendor, you walked into a boardroom and said that this wasn't a plausible claim, you'd be calling your sales prospect a liar, with real consequences: "getting enterprise contracts cancelled because you wanted to opine on something that doesn’t really matter to your organisation’s mission is a great way to get fired." With the state of the industry dominated by froth, lies and mutual destruction pacts, it's no wonder that companies are deploying "totally gameable metrics such as 'money spent on AI'" as a means of evaluating employees and divisions. Between true believers and people who must find ways to plausibly tout their AI usage, there is now a gigantic market for "AI solutions." At best these are just traditional tech consulting contracts, like migrating a database from Oracle to Snowflake, with some kind of ornamental AI usage around the edges so that the person who commissions the work can claim to be "procuring AI-enabled services" for the business. This isn't a harmless frippery: contracts are delayed and work is put off until the work can be made "sufficiently AI" to attain the minimum degree of buzzword compliance. Worse: every fake AI project that produces real results (because it's not really AI) adds credibility to the AI true believers, who view these projects as proof that AI can do anything, and therefore demand to know why everything isn't being done by AI. Suresh ends his essay with a long section on how to "navigate AI mania" – advice for how to smile and nod politely when you're confronted with AI bullshit, while steering clear of the worst consequences and avoiding needless fights. This looks like very sound advice for anyone in a corporate environment, but thankfully, that isn't me. Rather than summarize that advice, I want to reflect a little on two questions that Suresh's essay raises but doesn't answer. The first is why? Why are people in power such easy converts to this religious mania? I have my own theory. The most important discomfort that powerful people experience is having ego-shattering conflicts with subordinates who know how to do things they do not know how to do. The fact that you're "in charge" is hard to reconcile with the fact that the people you're nominally in charge of tell you that all your ideas are impossible, illegal, immoral, or lethal: https://pluralistic.net/2026/01/05/fisher-price-steering-wheel/#billionaire-solipsism Take that Cortex demo. Sure, Cortex is an expensive, unreliable way to address a Snowflake database. But (unlike Snowflake) Cortex is controlled via conversational, plain-language commands. With Cortex, a boss doesn't need to ask an underling to retrieve information from the company Snowflake system, an interaction that might come with unsolicited feedback about the technical or commercial incoherence of the boss's request. Cortex is the underling, except that unlike a human underling, Cortex never back-sasses you about your foolish questions. The fact that it grossly misleads you 8% of the time is a small price to pay for a life untroubled by uppity pismires who insist that your ideas be connected to base reality as they understand it. The other question Suresh implicitly raises is, "How can you reconcile the failure of AI in the enterprise with the individual claims of skilled technologists who insist that AI is helping them do great work?" The answer is that these AI users are "centaurs" – experienced workers who are assisted by automation on terms that they set for themselves: https://pluralistic.net/2025/09/11/vulgar-thatcherism/#there-is-an-alternative Thanks to their skill and experience, these workers possess discernment, the ability to tell good code from bad, and (more importantly) good uses of code-generation tools from bad. They demonstrate the adage that worker-driven automation improves quality, while capital-driven automation improves throughput: https://pluralistic.net/2026/07/28/hitl-ers/#ai-ai-oh An automation technique that requires close supervision by skilled and experienced workers isn't going to be a raw productivity powerhouse. You don't "100x" your code this way, at least, not in the sense of firing 99 of your coders and having the remaining programmer pick up all their work. Rather, an automation tool that requires the continuous and conscientious exercise of discernment will let individual practitioners improve their work in extremely satisfying and useful ways. It's a way to spend more on operations in order to produce better outputs. It's not a way to cut your workforce, realize a gigantic savings, and still produce comparable goods and services at a far lower cost. That is why some individual coders report such delight with their AI tools. They engage with those tools on their own terms, to improve their work in the ways that they, in their expert judgment, consider beneficial. No one ranks them on a "token-maximization" scoreboard. No one tells them they can't do a project if it isn't "sufficiently AI." When they set out to do a project, no one makes them prove that it couldn't be "done by AI." As ever, the most important fact about a given technology isn't "what it does," but "who it does it for" and "who it does it to." All the pathologies Suresh observes and documents so well in this piece are hypertrophied versions of the buzzword-compliance dysfunctions from previous bubbles, but at a scale never before seen. Quantity has a quality all its own. These businesses aren't just wasting billions – they're replacing skilled workers with defective chatbots. As I've written before, AI is the asbestos we're shoveling into the walls of our technological society. Our descendants will spend generations digging it out again, and the longer the bubble goes on without popping, the longer it will take to repair the damage. Hey look at this (permalink) The rent was already high. Then came the $200 work-from-home fee https://finance.yahoo.com/real-estate/articles/rent-already-high-then-came-174555709.html Families in London temporary housing told they cannot use in-built air conditioning https://www.theguardian.com/society/2026/jul/27/homeless-families-london-temporary-housing-air-conditioning The New Defcon Badges Pack a Unique Open Source Chip That Doubles as a Security Key https://www.wired.com/story/defcon-34-badge-baochip-andrew-bunnie-huang/ US government map of Africa mislabels every country at global conference https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/jul/30/government-map-mislabels-african-countries?CMP=Share_AndroidApp_Other EFF Guide to Recording Law Enforcement https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2026/07/eff-guide-recording-law-enforcement Object permanence (permalink) #25yrsago Vernor Vinge in the NYT https://www.nytimes.com/2001/08/02/technology/a-scientist-s-art-computer-fiction.html #25yrsago Why publishers should thank Syklarov https://web.archive.org/web/20011023092940/http://www.zdnet.com/zdnn/stories/comment/0,5859,2800985,00.html #25yrsago David Byrne track to be bundled with WinXP https://web.archive.org/web/20010804040357/http://www.ananova.com/news/story/sm_365899.html?menu=news.technology #20yrsago Five things about blogs that no one ever needs to say again https://web.archive.org/web/20060813090449/http://www.stevenberlinjohnson.com/2006/08/five_things_all.html #15yrsago Castles made from human hair https://inhabitat.com/artist-uses-human-hair-to-construct-a-castle-of-3000-bricks/ #15yrsago Wisconsin Democratic voters targeted with Koch-funded absentee ballot notices advising them to vote 2 days after the recall election https://www.politico.com/blogs/david-catanese/2011/08/afp-wisconsin-ballots-have-late-return-date-037977?showall #15yrsago Gingrich’s million Twitter followers: “80% dummy accounts, 10% paid followers” https://web.archive.org/web/20110812100159/https://gawker.com/5826645/most-of-newt-gingrichs-twitter-followers-are-fake #15yrsago Missouri State business-school professor leads successful campaign to ban Slaughterhouse-Five from local schools https://www.theguardian.com/books/2011/jul/29/slaughterhouse-five-banned-us-school #10yrsago Australian media accessibility group raises red flag about DRM in web standards https://hotelsantalya.net/accessiq/news/news/2016-p/08-p/concerns-raised-for-assistive-technology-development-as-w3c-debates-encrypted/ #10yrsago Reminder: the GOP has been attacking veterans and their families for years https://web.archive.org/web/20160803203106/https://crookedtimber.org/2016/08/02/trumps-indecent-proposal/ #10yrsago Isis joins Donald Trump in denouncing Khizr Khan https://web.archive.org/web/20160802161454/https://theintercept.com/2016/08/02/donald-trump-and-islamic-state-agree-no-room-for-people-like-khizr-khan/ #10yrsago Furries don’t have sex in fursuits https://www.ohjoysextoy.com/fursuits-grey-white/ #5yrsago Machine learning sucks at covid https://pluralistic.net/2021/08/02/autoquack/#gigo #1yrago AI's pogo-stick grift https://pluralistic.net/2025/08/02/inventing-the-pedestrian/#three-apis-in-a-trenchcoat Upcoming appearances (permalink) Virtual: EFFecting Change: Who the Machine Serves, Aug 12 https://www.eff.org/event/effecting-change-who-machine-serves Edinburgh International Book Festival with Jimmy Wales, Aug 17 https://www.edbookfest.co.uk/events/the-front-list-cory-doctorow-and-jimmy-wales Sydney: The Festival of Dangerous Ideas, Aug 23-24 https://festivalofdangerousideas.com/program/ Melbourne: Enshittification at the Wheeler Centre, Aug 25 https://www.wheelercentre.com/events-tickets/season-2026/cory-doctorow-enshittification Brighton: The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI with Carole Cadwalladr (Brighton Dome), Sep 8 https://brightondome.org/whats-on/LSC-cory-doctorow-the-reverse-centaurs-guide-to-life-after-ai/ London: The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI with Riley Quinn (Foyle's Picadilly), Sep 9 https://www.foyles.co.uk/events/enshittification-cory-doctorow-riley-quinn South Bend: An Evening With Cory Doctorow (Notre Dame), Oct 6 https://franco.nd.edu/events/2026/10/06/an-evening-with-cory-doctorow/ Vancouver: BC Policy Solutions Gala, Nov 12 https://bcpolicy.ca/gala/ Recent appearances (permalink) F@#$ the AI Overlords (On The Media) https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/otm/articles/f-the-ai-overlords Why AI Won't Replace Workers, But Will Crash The Economy (Smart Cookies) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rRRmUuxJolY AI and the Enshittification Era (The Weekly Show with Jon Stewart) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-dAIJRjb-Bw AI is not inevitable (Betakit) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DbiTVkq1WHo A Conversation with Lina Khan (Law and Economy Student Network) https://www.youtube.com/live/7Ak5LZllqwE Latest books (permalink) "The Reverse-Centaur's Guide to AI," a short book about being a better AI critic, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, June 2026 https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374621568/thereversecentaursguidetolifeafterai/ "Canny Valley": A limited edition collection of the collages I create for Pluralistic, self-published, September 2025 https://pluralistic.net/2025/09/04/illustrious/#chairman-bruce "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/ "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 (thebezzle.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) "The Post-American Internet," a geopolitical sequel of sorts to Enshittification, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2027 "Unauthorized Bread": a middle-grades graphic novel adapted from my novella about refugees, toasters and DRM, FirstSecond, April 20, 2027 "Enshittification, Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It" (the graphic novel), Firstsecond, 2027 "The Memex Method," Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2027 Colophon (permalink) Today's top sources: Currently writing: "The Post-American Internet," a sequel to "Enshittification," about the better world the rest of us get to have now that Trump has torched America. Fourth draft completed. Submitted to editor. 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 Bluesky (no ads, possible tracking and data-collection): https://bsky.app/profile/doctorow.pluralistic.net Medium (no ads, paywalled): https://doctorow.medium.com/ Tumblr (mass-scale, unrestricted, third-party surveillance and advertising): https://mostlysignssomeportents.tumblr.com/tagged/pluralistic "When life gives you SARS, you make sarsaparilla" -Joey "Accordion Guy" DeVilla READ CAREFULLY: By reading this, you agree, on behalf of your employer, to release me from all obligations and waivers arising from any and all NON-NEGOTIATED agreements, licenses, terms-of-service, shrinkwrap, clickwrap, browsewrap, confidentiality, non-disclosure, non-compete and acceptable use policies ("BOGUS AGREEMENTS") that I have entered into with your employer, its partners, licensors, agents and assigns, in perpetuity, without prejudice to my ongoing rights and privileges. You further represent that you have the authority to release me from any BOGUS AGREEMENTS on behalf of your employer. ISSN: 3066-764X

Today's links Technocarcinization: Enshittification is the great leveler. Hey look at this: Delights to delectate. Object permanence: Grampa's backyard Disneyland; Elizabeth Warren on monopolies; Spotify v Apple (antitrust edn); Exxon lobbyist confesses; "When the Sparrow Falls." Upcoming appearances: London, Edinburgh, Sydney, Melbourne, Brighton, London, South Bend. 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. Technocarcinization (permalink) "Carcinization" is a curious biological phenomenon: given enough time, across many environments, many species will evolve into crabs. The body-type of a crab, with its low center of gravity, sideways gait (useful for evading predators), ease of concealment and protected organs is suitable to many different environments: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carcinisation Lately, I've watched the American Big Tech platforms as they underwent their own form of technocarcinization, which is when every tech company turns into Facebook. For a long time, it seemed to me that you could make sense of the tech platforms by placing them into one of four quadrants on a 2×2 grid, in which one axis denoted "control freakishness" and the other, "surveillance." Each quadrant had its own canonical company. The most surveillant/least controlling company (top left) was Google. They would let you roam the whole wide internet and exert no control over your conduct, but would spy on you wherever you went. The least surveillant/most controlling company was Apple, who imprisoned you in its manicured walled garden, but promised never to spy on you. The non-spying/non-controlling option is free/open source tech (of course), which doesn't care what you do, and doesn't watch you do it. And the most spying, most controlling company was Facebook, a company whose products did everything they could to imprison you within their virtual walls, from which vantage they could effect maximal surveillance. I've used this comparison many times over the years. I included in my 2023 book The Internet Con, along with the joke that Tiktok's position on the grid was so far up and to the right (maximum surveillance and control) that we'd had to put its logo on the back cover. Enough people took this joke seriously and wrote in to complain that they'd gotten a misprint without the logo that we added it to the paperback: https://www.versobooks.com/products/3035-the-internet-con The grid was useful, until technocarcinization started to push all the tech companies into that top right quadrant. Apple is no longer the company that protects you from surveillance – they're the company that spies on you, having secretly added a total surveillance system to the iPhone to target ads to you: https://pluralistic.net/2022/11/14/luxury-surveillance/#liar-liar Apple can't even claim to protect you from third-party surveillance. Sure, they block Facebook from spying on you, but they have barred ICE Block, an app that tells you if there are ICE chuds hunting in your neighborhood, looking to kidnap you and send you to a concentration camp. Apple declared ICE mercenaries to be a "protected class": https://pluralistic.net/2025/10/06/rogue-capitalism/#orphaned-syrian-refugees-need-not-apply And thanks to Apple's control-freakery – which prevents you from overriding Apple's decisions about your own devices – once Apple decides to spy on you or sell you out to fascist goons, there's nothing you can do about it: https://locusmag.com/feature/cory-doctorow-neofeudalism-and-the-digital-manor/ Then there's Google, the company that ran a free-range livestock operation in which you could roam wherever you liked, because they could always find you when it was time for the slaughter. For years now, Google has been moving inexorably to the kind of control-freak nonsense that you used to only find in one of Apple's crystal prisons. For example, every year or two, Google floats a proposal to use secure hardware in your device to rat you out if you've got an ad-blocker, privacy blocker, or other aftermarket add-on that lets you choose how you experience the digital world: https://pluralistic.net/2023/08/02/self-incrimination/#wei-bai-bai It's an idea they just can't quit, despite the fact that it's fucking abominable and everyone hates it: https://pluralistic.net/2026/06/12/compelled-speech/#quishing Google used to pride itself in its ability to send you to the open web, viewing search as a conduit to other peoples' resources. Now, with AI search summaries, Google is harvesting the open web and then eating the seed corn, keeping searchers inside of Google's walled garden: https://pluralistic.net/2026/06/29/arsonist-firefighters/#im-feeling-lucky Google also took the idea of a free/open browser and ran with it, rehabilitating some discarded Apple code and turning it into Chrome, the internet's most dominant browser – by far. Now, Google is nerfing that browser's plug-in architecture in a way that blocks all kids of user-tunable options, including and especially ad-blocking: https://protonprivacy.substack.com/p/google-is-finally-killing-ublock And Google has also announced that they're going to turn Android into an iPhone, making it both technically challenging and radioactively illegal for you to install software of your choosing on your own property: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2025/08/google-will-block-sideloading-of-unverified-android-apps-starting-next-year/ Google is adopting every one of Apple's worst practices, and Apple is adopting all of Google's worst practices, and so they're both turning into Facebook: technocarcinization! What's driving this technocarcinization? Well, the obvious answer is that the more Facebooklike a company becomes, the more ways there are for it to rip you off. Surveillance can be monetized by selling your data, by ad targeting, and by surveillance-based pricing and wage-suppression: https://pluralistic.net/2026/01/21/cod-marxism/#wannamaker-slain Control lets platforms block competing products, extract massive junk fees to the businesses they connect you to, and control repair and end-of-life, forcing you to replace hardware by blocking parts and independent service: https://pluralistic.net/2026/01/10/markets-are-regulations/#carney-found-a-spine It turns out that "if you're not paying for the product, you're the product" is only half-right. The other half is, "even if you pay for the product, you're the product." Pay, don't pay: companies will productize anyone they can. And thanks to our enshittogenic policy environment – where the worst ideas of the worst people make the most money – you can always be productized: https://pluralistic.net/2025/09/10/say-their-names/#object-permanence This is independent of the kind of person running the company. Facebook is run by Mark Zuckerberg, a cringe halfwit whose only successful idea was to offer Harvard bros a way of nonconsensually rating the fuckability of female undergrads. Everything he's done since was an acquisition (Whatsapp, Insta) or a flop (metaverse, Libra), or both (Oculus). Zuck owns the majority of the voting stock in the company, which means he has total control over its actions. He can ignore or fire his board members at will. He is the move fast/break things guy, whose every foolish whim can become policy that impacts billions of people. By contrast, Google and Apple are no longer run by their flamboyant founders, who were every bit as prone to folly as Zuck. They were constrained by their shareholders, which meant that the blast-radius of Steve Jobs's worst ideas (like treating his otherwise curable cancer with green juice) were confined to his own person. Today, Apple and Google are run by bloodless business sociopaths who go to enormous lengths to project an air of sober adulthood. And yet, these people – who would never be caught dead bow-hunting their own livestock or climbing into an MMA cage – have steered their companies into Facebook's quadrant on our enshittification 2×2. I think this shows just how much the enshittification of tech is a matter of the policy environment, not the personalities of the people involved. Sure, the worst people imaginable run these companies, but the reason they're able to yield to their most venal impulses and succeed is because the world has been re-arranged to make sociopathy and greed into fitness factors. We get technocarcinization because the most fit organism for a landscape without consequences is a zuckerbergian techno-crab: https://pluralistic.net/2023/07/28/microincentives-and-enshittification/ What can we do about it? Well, we're going to have to remake the landscape to punish (rather than reward) enshittification: https://pluralistic.net/2026/01/01/39c3/#the-new-coalition And in the meantime, there is one inhabitant of the 2×2 that hasn't drifted up and to the right: free and open source software. It's still snugly nestled in the low-surveillance/low-control box, and if you live in that box, your life will be much, much better for it. There's no better time to make the switch: with RAM and storage prices through the ceiling and OSes growing ever-more bloated with AI and spyware (but I repeat myself), this is the moment to rehabilitate that old computer with Linux: https://www.fosslinux.com/158206/linux-on-older-hardware-revival-guide.htm The alternative is to be tormented by crabs no matter what you're trying to do or where you're trying to get to. Hey look at this (permalink) How the AI bubble could pop and take down the global economy, according to the BIS https://www.theregister.com/ai-and-ml/2026/06/29/how-the-ai-bubble-could-pop-and-take-down-the-global-economy-according-to-the-bis/5263793 To Decarbonize Quickly, Think Beyond Electrification https://jacobin.com/2026/06/climate-electrification-homes-cars-decarbonization-tech Ireland is big tech’s lapdog – and that compromises its EU presidency https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2026/jun/30/ireland-big-tech-lapdog-eu-presidency-digital-sovereignty Beyond Denial How Oil Execs Shaped a Landmark Climate Study https://www.propublica.org/article/wedges-climate-research-bp-fossil-fuel-princeton US Supreme Court just blew up EU-US Data Transfers https://noyb.eu/en/us-supreme-court-just-blew-eu-us-data-transfers Object permanence (permalink) #15yrsago Print-on-demand and donations - report on DIY publishing business models https://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/columns-and-blogs/cory-doctorow/article/47858-with-a-little-help-heuristics.html #15yrsago Brazil rises up for free speech in 40 national demonstrations https://globalvoices.org/2011/06/30/brazil-freedom-march/ #10yrsago Grandad builds miniature backyard Disneyland https://abcnews.com/Lifestyle/grandpa-builds-disneyland-inspired-backyard-theme-park-grandkids/story?id=40276633 #10yrsago Elizabeth Warren on monopolies in America, including Apple, Google, and Amazon https://washingtonmonthly.com/2016/06/30/elizabeth-warrens-consolidation-speech-could-change-the-election/ #10yrsago White House plan to use data to shrink prison populations could be a racist dumpster fire https://www.wired.com/2016/06/white-house-mission-shrink-us-prisons-data/ #10yrsago Even if Moore's Law is "running out," there's still plenty of room at the bottom https://www.technologyreview.com/2016/05/13/245938/moores-law-is-dead-now-what/ #10yrsago Black-hat hacker handles are often advertisements https://www.wired.com/beyond-the-beyond/2016/07/web-semantics-modern-german-black-hat-hacker-handles/ #10yrsago Spotify threatens to report Apple to competition regulators over App Store rejection https://web.archive.org/web/20160630220301/https://www.recode.net/2016/6/30/12067578/spotify-apple-app-store-rejection #10yrsago Researchers find over 100 spying Tor nodes that attempt to compromise darknet sites https://www.defcon.org/html/defcon-24/dc-24-speakers.html#Noubir #5yrsago Exxon lobbyist confesses to his crimes https://pluralistic.net/2021/07/01/basilisk-tamers/#exxonknew #5yrsago When the Sparrow Falls https://pluralistic.net/2021/07/01/basilisk-tamers/#rage-against-the-machine Upcoming appearances (permalink) London: Idler Festival, Jul 11 https://www.idler.co.uk/festival/ Edinburgh International Book Festival with Jimmy Wales, Aug 17 https://www.edbookfest.co.uk/events/the-front-list-cory-doctorow-and-jimmy-wales Sydney: The Festival of Dangerous Ideas, Aug 23-24 https://festivalofdangerousideas.com/cory-doctorow/ Melbourne: Enshittification at the Wheeler Centre, Aug 25 https://www.wheelercentre.com/events-tickets/season-2026/cory-doctorow-enshittification Brighton: The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI with Carole Cadwalladr (Brighton Dome), Sep 8 https://brightondome.org/whats-on/LSC-cory-doctorow-the-reverse-centaurs-guide-to-life-after-ai/ London: The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI with Riley Quinn (Foyle's Picadilly), Sep 9 https://www.foyles.co.uk/events/enshittification-cory-doctorow-riley-quinn South Bend: An Evening With Cory Doctorow (Notre Dame), Oct 6 https://franco.nd.edu/events/2026/10/06/an-evening-with-cory-doctorow/ Recent appearances (permalink) Lawfare Daily https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T1KIwaYRs1g How to Think About AI (Organized Money) https://www.organizedmoney.fm/p/how-to-think-about-ai-with-cory-doctorow Breaking Points https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VJmUbkRqXeE A.I. Enshittifies Everything (Slate) https://slate.com/podcasts/what-next-tbd/2026/06/cory-doctorow-thinks-a-i-is-overvalued-and-overrated-and-still-a-threat A World That Just Might Work https://aworldthatjustmightwork.com/2026/06/cory-doctorow-ai-use-it-dont-buy-the-hype-dont-feed-the-bubble/ Latest books (permalink) "The Reverse-Centaur's Guide to AI," a short book about being a better AI critic, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, June 2026 https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374621568/thereversecentaursguidetolifeafterai/ "Canny Valley": A limited edition collection of the collages I create for Pluralistic, self-published, September 2025 https://pluralistic.net/2025/09/04/illustrious/#chairman-bruce "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/ "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 (thebezzle.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) "The Post-American Internet," a geopolitical sequel of sorts to Enshittification, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2027 "Unauthorized Bread": a middle-grades graphic novel adapted from my novella about refugees, toasters and DRM, FirstSecond, April 20, 2027 "Enshittification, Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It" (the graphic novel), Firstsecond, 2027 "The Memex Method," Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2027 Colophon (permalink) Today's top sources: Currently writing: "The Post-American Internet," a sequel to "Enshittification," about the better world the rest of us get to have now that Trump has torched America. Fourth draft completed. Submitted to editor. 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 Bluesky (no ads, possible tracking and data-collection): https://bsky.app/profile/doctorow.pluralistic.net Medium (no ads, paywalled): https://doctorow.medium.com/ Tumblr (mass-scale, unrestricted, third-party surveillance and advertising): https://mostlysignssomeportents.tumblr.com/tagged/pluralistic "When life gives you SARS, you make sarsaparilla" -Joey "Accordion Guy" DeVilla READ CAREFULLY: By reading this, you agree, on behalf of your employer, to release me from all obligations and waivers arising from any and all NON-NEGOTIATED agreements, licenses, terms-of-service, shrinkwrap, clickwrap, browsewrap, confidentiality, non-disclosure, non-compete and acceptable use policies ("BOGUS AGREEMENTS") that I have entered into with your employer, its partners, licensors, agents and assigns, in perpetuity, without prejudice to my ongoing rights and privileges. You further represent that you have the authority to release me from any BOGUS AGREEMENTS on behalf of your employer. ISSN: 3066-764X