Today's links Friction cannot be reduced, it can only be redistributed: The better things are for your boss, the worse they are for you. Hey look at this: Delights to delectate. Object permanence: Dr Bruce Sterling; Buddy Holly's overnight bag; Zombie postcapitalism. Upcoming appearances: Where to find me. Recent appearances: Where I've been. Latest books: You keep readin' em, I'll keep writin' 'em. Upcoming books: Like I said, I'll keep writin' 'em. Colophon: All the rest. Friction cannot be reduced, it can only be redistributed (permalink) Despite the pretensions of certain well-paid economists, political economy is not a "physics of human behavior," through which human interactions and outcomes can be quantized and precisely captured through mathematical models. For one thing, in physics, it's possible to reduce friction, whereas in political economy, friction isn't something you reduce, it's something you redistribute, typically downward, to people with less political power than you. Think about your job. If you are on a salary, your boss has to pay you even when there's no work to be done, which means that during times where there's no income, your boss still has to pay your wages, meaning that a long slow patch could kill the business. But if your boss can eliminate or reduce your wages when there's no work, the friction of figuring out how to keep your boss's business a going concern is shifted to you. Take the "tipped minimum wage," which is the minimum that a restaurateur can pay a server. The federal tipped minimum wage is $2.15/hour, which is substantially less than you can survive on. If your boss fucks up and can't fill the tables in his restaurant, he has to pay you $7.25/hour (the federal minimum wage). But if you get just one table in eight hours, where you bust your hump and earn a $41 tip, your boss gets to keep $40.90 of that money and pay you the grand sum of $58. That certainly relieves some of your boss's friction – but now you have to endure the friction of figuring out how to survive on $58. Maybe you don't fix your car and instead spend an extra hour at the start and end of your shift on a city bus. That's a lot of friction, but it's your friction. Same for the time you spend lining up at the food bank, the sleepless nights you endure because you can't see a dentist about your rotten tooth, the diabetes test-strips you do without. Of course, there's plenty of workers who don't even get the tipped minimum wage: in most of the country, "gig economy" workers aren't guaranteed any wages. If your boss – the company that made your app – fucked up by charging too much or skimping on ads or having piss-poor customer service, you can clock on for an eight-hour shift and get zero dollars, all the while being available to your boss, just in case they do get a customer. If you're a driver, you only get paid for the time when you're on a delivery or have a passenger, and you bear the expense of the rest of the hours you spend prowling the streets, waiting for a call-out. This allows gig companies to build up a giant workforce that can absorb orders when they come in, while shifting the friction of living on half-wages to the workers who only get paid on the way out to a delivery, but not on the way back. Return to office? An exercise in pure friction-shifting. The friction your boss experiences from furiously fantasizing about how lazy you're being at home is swapped for the friction you of your commute, the friction of having to reschedule deliveries that you weren't home to sign for, the friction of having to eat a packed lunch or waste your pay on overpriced, additive/grease/salt/sugar-laden quick-service food. The airline that fires most of its customer service staff shifts operational frictions onto passengers, from the friction of arriving two hours early to see one of the few check-in clerks to the friction of waiting for three hours on hold to rebook a canceled flight or find a lost bag. Southwest really takes the cake here. Remember a couple years ago when Southwest stranded one million passengers over Christmas week because its computers had all crashed? Turns out that the main thing SWA was doing with those computers was running a friction-shifting shell-game with its airplanes, pilots, flight attendants and passengers. SWA would sell tickets for more flights than it had planes, and then cancel the flights that had sold the fewest tickets: https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/10/the-courage-to-govern/#whos-in-charge That's quite a magnificent piece of friction-shifting. SWA is relieved of the friction of buying and maintaining a fleet of planes. The don't have to bear the friction of guessing which planes will and won't be full in advance. But SWA passengers get all the friction and more, when their flight is cancelled because other people – whom they have no control over – failed to buy enough tickets for it. Southwest "reduced friction" for its shareholders at the expense of its employees and customers. Other businesses "reduce friction" for one favored group at the expense of another, like Google, whose Youtube Content ID system makes it trivial to file a copyright takedown notice but hard-to-impossible to get your work reinstated when you are falsely accused: https://pluralistic.net/2024/06/27/nuke-first/#ask-questions-never That's shifting friction from large rightsholders (who can get infringing work removed without a trial) to creators (who don't get a day in court before their work is censored). Meanwhile, food delivery platforms shift friction onto restaurants, conscripting them into delivery services without their permission: https://pluralistic.net/2020/05/18/code-is-speech/#schadenpizza And onto drivers, who don't even rate the tipped minimum wage. For all that these companies come up with names for themselves like "Seamless," they are 100 percent seam, but those seams are shifted onto people without political or economic power. The MBA mind-virus turns its victims into "optimization"-obsessed zombies, but what they mean by "optimization" is that you will optimize your life to their benefit. HP uses software locks to "optimize" its printer business, forcing you to buy ink at $10,000/gallon: https://pluralistic.net/2024/09/30/life-finds-a-way/#ink-stained-wretches And Uber "optimizes" its drivers by spying on them and paying them less when the algorithm infers that they are more economically desperate: https://len-sherman.medium.com/how-uber-became-a-cash-generating-machine-ef78e7a97230 A better world is one in which the people optimize corporations and billionaires – by cutting them down to size and shattering their power. It's a world in which amassing obscene amounts of money and market power creates friction, in the form of endless regulatory and tax scrutiny. It's a world where public transit has priority and private cars are taxed for slowing the rest of us down as we go about our days. It's a world where workers are frictionless: protected from noncompete agreements and baroque wage theft schemes like those used to impoverish service and gig workers. It's a world where bosses experience friction, in the form of obligations to the workers whose labor generates their wealth. I really believe that – politically speaking – friction can't be destroyed, only redistributed. And I'm fine with that, really – provided we're redistributing it upwards. Hey look at this (permalink) I reported from an ICE action on Sansome and all I got was a face full of pepper spray https://sf.gazetteer.co/i-reported-from-an-ice-action-on-sansome-and-all-i-got-was-a-face-full-of-pepper-spray When Trump's Brain Broke https://www.unpopularfront.news/p/when-trumps-brain-broke Bank forced to rehire workers after lying about chatbot productivity, union says https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2025/08/bank-forced-to-rehire-workers-after-lying-about-chatbot-productivity-union-says/ I Made a Floppy Disk from Scratch https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TBiFGhnXsh8 America's Kryptonite https://orphansandempires.substack.com/p/americas-kryptonite Object permanence (permalink) #20yrsago Bruce Sterling gets an honorary doctorate https://web.archive.org/web/20051226234102/http://wiredblogs.tripod.com/sterling/index.blog?entry_id=1200350 #20yrsago Beastie Boys release vocals-only tracks to encourage remixers https://web.archive.org/web/20050930220256/http://www.beastieboys.com/remixers.php #20yrsago What was in Buddy Holly’s plane-crash overnight bag? https://web.archive.org/web/20051023162927/http://www.rockin50s.com/bag.htm #20yrsago Warner Music CEO calls for iPod taxes, levies — twirls moustache and cackles, clatters away on tiny, ebony hooves https://web.archive.org/web/20050910183217/http://news.com.com/Warner+Music+readies+CD-free+e-label/2100-1027_3-5841355.html #20yrsago Customers of new UK ISP get to share all Sony music on P2P https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2005/aug/22/media.newmedia #10yrsago Greece’s creditors demand casino rights, archaeological sites, selloff of EUR50B of national assets https://web.archive.org/web/20150824062007/https://www.globaljustice.org.uk/blog/2015/aug/19/greece-sale-–-and-everything-must-go #5yrsago Zombie postcapitalism https://pluralistic.net/2020/08/22/this-machine-kills-fascists/#varoufakis Upcoming appearances (permalink) Ithaca: AD White keynote (Cornell), Sep 12 https://deanoffaculty.cornell.edu/events/keynote-cory-doctorow-professor-at-large/ DC: Enshittification at Politics and Prose, Oct 8 https://politics-prose.com/cory-doctorow-10825 New Orleans: DeepSouthCon63, Oct 10-12 http://www.contraflowscifi.org/ Chicago: Enshittification with Kara Swisher (Chicago Humanities), Oct 15 https://www.oldtownschool.org/concerts/2025/10-15-2025-kara-swisher-and-cory-doctorow-on-enshittification/ San Francisco: Enshittification at Public Works (The Booksmith), Oct 20 https://app.gopassage.com/events/doctorow25 Miami: Enshittification at Books & Books, Nov 5 https://www.eventbrite.com/e/an-evening-with-cory-doctorow-tickets-1504647263469 Recent appearances (permalink) Divesting from Amazon’s Audible and the Fight for Digital Rights (Libro.fm) https://pocketcasts.com/podcasts/9349e8d0-a87f-013a-d8af-0acc26574db2/00e6cbcf-7f27-4589-a11e-93e4ab59c04b The Utopias Podcast https://www.buzzsprout.com/2272465/episodes/17650124 Tariffs vs IP Law (Firewalls Don't Stop Dragons) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LFABFe-5-uQ Latest books (permalink) "Picks and Shovels": a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about the heroic era of the PC, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), February 2025 (https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250865908/picksandshovels). "The Bezzle": a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about prison-tech and other grifts, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), February 2024 (the-bezzle.org). "The Lost Cause:" a solarpunk novel of hope in the climate emergency, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), November 2023 (http://lost-cause.org). "The Internet Con": A nonfiction book about interoperability and Big Tech (Verso) September 2023 (http://seizethemeansofcomputation.org). Signed copies at Book Soup (https://www.booksoup.com/book/9781804291245). "Red Team Blues": "A grabby, compulsive thriller that will leave you knowing more about how the world works than you did before." Tor Books http://redteamblues.com. "Chokepoint Capitalism: How to Beat Big Tech, Tame Big Content, and Get Artists Paid, with Rebecca Giblin", on how to unrig the markets for creative labor, Beacon Press/Scribe 2022 https://chokepointcapitalism.com Upcoming books (permalink) "Canny Valley": A limited edition collection of the collages I create for Pluralistic, self-published, September 2025 "Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It," Farrar, Straus, Giroux, October 7 2025 https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374619329/enshittification/ "Unauthorized Bread": a middle-grades graphic novel adapted from my novella about refugees, toasters and DRM, FirstSecond, 2026 "Enshittification, Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It" (the graphic novel), Firstsecond, 2026 "The Memex Method," Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2026 "The Reverse-Centaur's Guide to AI," a short book about being a better AI critic, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2026 Colophon (permalink) Today's top sources: Currently writing: "The Reverse Centaur's Guide to AI," a short book for Farrar, Straus and Giroux about being an effective AI critic. (1025 words yesterday, 40200 words total). A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING This work – excluding any serialized fiction – is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license. That means you can use it any way you like, including commercially, provided that you attribute it to me, Cory Doctorow, and include a link to pluralistic.net. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ Quotations and images are not included in this license; they are included either under a limitation or exception to copyright, or on the basis of a separate license. Please exercise caution. How to get Pluralistic: Blog (no ads, tracking, or data-collection): Pluralistic.net Newsletter (no ads, tracking, or data-collection): https://pluralistic.net/plura-list Mastodon (no ads, tracking, or data-collection): https://mamot.fr/@pluralistic Medium (no ads, paywalled): https://doctorow.medium.com/ Twitter (mass-scale, unrestricted, third-party surveillance and advertising): https://twitter.com/doctorow Tumblr (mass-scale, unrestricted, third-party surveillance and advertising): https://mostlysignssomeportents.tumblr.com/tagged/pluralistic "When life gives you SARS, you make sarsaparilla" -Joey "Accordion Guy" DeVilla READ CAREFULLY: By reading this, you agree, on behalf of your employer, to release me from all obligations and waivers arising from any and all NON-NEGOTIATED agreements, licenses, terms-of-service, shrinkwrap, clickwrap, browsewrap, confidentiality, non-disclosure, non-compete and acceptable use policies ("BOGUS AGREEMENTS") that I have entered into with your employer, its partners, licensors, agents and assigns, in perpetuity, without prejudice to my ongoing rights and privileges. You further represent that you have the authority to release me from any BOGUS AGREEMENTS on behalf of your employer. ISSN: 3066-764X

Today's links Radical juries: They sure hate Big Tech. Hey look at this: Delights to delectate. Object permanence: DIY TSA universal keys; Steve Jackson Games raid +20. 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. Radical juries (permalink) I don't know if you've heard, but water has started running uphill – I mean, speaking in a politico-scientific sense: https://pluralistic.net/2025/06/28/mamdani/#trustbusting By which I mean, the bedrock consensus of political science appears to have been disproved. Broadly speaking, political scientists believe that lawmakers and regulators only respond to the policy preferences of powerful people. If economic elites want a policy, that's the policy we get – no matter how unpopular it is with everyone else. Likewise, even if something is very, very popular with all of us, we won't get it if the super-rich hate it. Just take a look at the gap between public opinion and policy outcomes: most people think "capitalism does more harm than good"; most Canadians, Britons and Australians aged 18-34 think "socialism will improve the economy and well-being of citizens"; 72% of Brits support a national job guarantee; the majority of Californians support permanent rent-controls; and most people in 40 countries want CEO salaries capped at 4X that of their lowest-paid employees: https://pluralistic.net/2025/08/07/the-people-no-2/#water-flowing-uphill The inability of the public to get its way isn't just an impressionistic view – it's an empirical finding, based on a representative sample of 1,779 policy outcomes, that politicians ignore the will of the people in favor of the will of billionaires: 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 And yet, all over the world, we're seeing these irrepressible outbreaks of antitrust policy, aimed squarely at shattering corporate power: https://pluralistic.net/2025/06/28/mamdani/#trustbusting It's a mystery. There's no policy that would be harder on billionaire wealth and power than vigorous antitrust enforcement (not least because preventing corporate concentration is key to preventing regulatory capture): https://pluralistic.net/2022/06/05/regulatory-capture/ Certainly, there are a lot of merely obscenely rich people who are angry that the farcically rich people are screwing them over, and this class division between the 0.01% and the 1% has opened up some political space: https://pluralistic.net/2025/08/09/elite-disunity/#awoken-giants But that wouldn't be enough, not without the massive supermajorities of everyday people who are sick to the back teeth of being abused by corporations, and who are desperate for any outlet to strike back. Take juries. Orrick is a big corporate law firm that represents the kinds of companies that might find their future in the hands of a jury in a state or federal courthouse. Orrick periodically surveys representative samples of people who show up for jury service to get a picture of their attitude towards the kinds of companies that can afford to hire a firm like theirs: https://www.orrick.com/en/Insights/Groundbreaking-Jury-Research-Reveals-US-Jury-Attitudes-in-a-Polarized-Society Their latest report contrasts the results of a pre-pandemic 2019 survey with a 2025 survey of 1,011 jurors in California, Florida, Kansas, Illinois, Indiana, Louisiana, Minnesota, Missouri, Texas, New Jersey, and New York. They found that jurors' trust in the court system has plummeted since 2019 (67% in 2019, 48% in 2025); hostility to cops has tripled (11% to 33%); anti-corporate sentiment is way up (27% then, 45% now). The percentage of jurors who believe that they should use the courts to "sent messages to companies to improve their behavior" has risen from 58% to 62%; and 77% want to award punitive damages to "punish a corporation" (up from 69%). And jurors are notably hostile to pharma companies, energy companies and large banks, but they especially hate social media companies. It's no wonder that corporations are so desperate to take away our right to sue them, and why "binding arbitration" clauses that permanently confiscate your legal rights are now part of every corner of modern life: https://pluralistic.net/2025/08/15/dogs-breakfast/#by-clicking-this-you-agree-on-behalf-of-your-employer-to-release-me-from-all-obligations-and-waivers-arising-from-any-and-all-NON-NEGOTIATED-agreements The business lobby has been trying to take away workers' and customers' and citizens' right to seek justice in court for decades, ginning up urban legends like "A lady's coffee was too hot so McDonald's had to give her $2.7 million": https://pluralistic.net/2022/06/12/hot-coffee/#mcgeico Don't believe it. The courts are rarely on our side, but the fact that sometimes, every now and again, a jury will seize an opportunity to deliver a smidgen of justice just drives plutocrats nuts. Billionaireism is the belief that you don't owe anything to anyone else, that morality is whatever you can get away with. You don't have to be a billionaire to contract a wicked case of billionaireism – but you do have to be stinking rich to benefit from it: https://pluralistic.net/2025/08/20/billionaireism/#surveillance-infantalism Hey look at this (permalink) How Uber Became A Cash-Generating Machine https://len-sherman.medium.com/how-uber-became-a-cash-generating-machine-ef78e7a97230 Agentic Browser Security: Indirect Prompt Injection in Perplexity Comet https://brave.com/blog/comet-prompt-injection/ Burner Phone 101 https://rebeccawilliams.info/burner-phone-101/ Commonwealth Bank backtracks on AI job cuts, apologises for 'error' as call volumes rise https://www.abc.net.au/news/2025-08-21/cba-backtracks-on-ai-job-cuts-as-chatbot-lifts-call-volumes/105679492 It Took Many Years And Billions Of Dollars, But Microsoft Finally Invented A Calculator That Is Wrong Sometimes https://defector.com/it-took-many-years-and-billions-of-dollars-but-microsoft-finally-invented-a-calculator-that-is-wrong-sometimes?giftLink=50fb6d3bb4d7516dfa13deb4e27638de Object permanence (permalink) #20yrsago Google stealthily monitoring clickthroughs from search-results https://web.archive.org/web/20051119012842/http://mboffin.com/post.aspx?id=1830 #20yrsago Hunter S Thompson’s ashes in fireworks display — pics http://www.talkleft.com/story/2005/08/22/076/47806/media/Hunter-Thompson-s-Final-Blast-Off #10yrsago Make your own TSA universal luggage keys https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/trafficandcommuting/where-oh-where-did-my-luggage-go/2014/11/24/16d168c6-69da-11e4-a31c-77759fc1eacc_story.html #10yrsago Regal promises security-theater bag-searches in America’s largest cinema chain https://www.techdirt.com/2015/08/21/tsa-movies-theater-chain-looks-to-bring-security-theater-to-movie-theater/ #10yrsago Judge: City of Inglewood can’t use copyright to censor videos of council meetings https://web.archive.org/web/20150821122121/http://popehat.com/2015/08/20/californias-city-of-inglewood-cant-copyright-city-council-meetings-case-against-youtube-critic-tossed/ #10yrsago EFF-Austin panel commemorating the 20th anniversary of the Steve Jackson Games raid https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ChPS4H-nqiQ #5yrsago Facebook overrules its own fact-checkers https://pluralistic.net/2020/08/21/zuck-the-scale-thumber/#scale-thumbers #5yrsago Rewarding CEOs for failure https://pluralistic.net/2020/08/21/zuck-the-scale-thumber/#failing-up Upcoming appearances (permalink) Ithaca: AD White keynote (Cornell), Sep 12 https://deanoffaculty.cornell.edu/events/keynote-cory-doctorow-professor-at-large/ DC: Enshittification at Politics and Prose, Oct 8 https://politics-prose.com/cory-doctorow-10825 New Orleans: DeepSouthCon63, Oct 10-12 http://www.contraflowscifi.org/ Chicago: Enshittification with Kara Swisher (Chicago Humanities), Oct 15 https://www.oldtownschool.org/concerts/2025/10-15-2025-kara-swisher-and-cory-doctorow-on-enshittification/ San Francisco: Enshittification at Public Works (The Booksmith), Oct 20 https://app.gopassage.com/events/doctorow25 Miami: Enshittification at Books & Books, Nov 5 https://www.eventbrite.com/e/an-evening-with-cory-doctorow-tickets-1504647263469 Recent appearances (permalink) Divesting from Amazon’s Audible and the Fight for Digital Rights (Libro.fm) https://pocketcasts.com/podcasts/9349e8d0-a87f-013a-d8af-0acc26574db2/00e6cbcf-7f27-4589-a11e-93e4ab59c04b The Utopias Podcast https://www.buzzsprout.com/2272465/episodes/17650124 Tariffs vs IP Law (Firewalls Don't Stop Dragons) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LFABFe-5-uQ Latest books (permalink) "Picks and Shovels": a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about the heroic era of the PC, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), February 2025 (https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250865908/picksandshovels). "The Bezzle": a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about prison-tech and other grifts, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), February 2024 (the-bezzle.org). "The Lost Cause:" a solarpunk novel of hope in the climate emergency, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), November 2023 (http://lost-cause.org). "The Internet Con": A nonfiction book about interoperability and Big Tech (Verso) September 2023 (http://seizethemeansofcomputation.org). Signed copies at Book Soup (https://www.booksoup.com/book/9781804291245). "Red Team Blues": "A grabby, compulsive thriller that will leave you knowing more about how the world works than you did before." Tor Books http://redteamblues.com. "Chokepoint Capitalism: How to Beat Big Tech, Tame Big Content, and Get Artists Paid, with Rebecca Giblin", on how to unrig the markets for creative labor, Beacon Press/Scribe 2022 https://chokepointcapitalism.com Upcoming books (permalink) "Canny Valley": A limited edition collection of the collages I create for Pluralistic, self-published, September 2025 "Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It," Farrar, Straus, Giroux, October 7 2025 https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374619329/enshittification/ "Unauthorized Bread": a middle-grades graphic novel adapted from my novella about refugees, toasters and DRM, FirstSecond, 2026 "Enshittification, Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It" (the graphic novel), Firstsecond, 2026 "The Memex Method," Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2026 "The Reverse-Centaur's Guide to AI," a short book about being a better AI critic, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2026 Colophon (permalink) Today's top sources: 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. (1036 words yesterday, 39136 words total). A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING This work – excluding any serialized fiction – is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license. That means you can use it any way you like, including commercially, provided that you attribute it to me, Cory Doctorow, and include a link to pluralistic.net. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ Quotations and images are not included in this license; they are included either under a limitation or exception to copyright, or on the basis of a separate license. Please exercise caution. How to get Pluralistic: Blog (no ads, tracking, or data-collection): Pluralistic.net Newsletter (no ads, tracking, or data-collection): https://pluralistic.net/plura-list Mastodon (no ads, tracking, or data-collection): https://mamot.fr/@pluralistic Medium (no ads, paywalled): https://doctorow.medium.com/ Twitter (mass-scale, unrestricted, third-party surveillance and advertising): https://twitter.com/doctorow Tumblr (mass-scale, unrestricted, third-party surveillance and advertising): https://mostlysignssomeportents.tumblr.com/tagged/pluralistic "When life gives you SARS, you make sarsaparilla" -Joey "Accordion Guy" DeVilla READ CAREFULLY: By reading this, you agree, on behalf of your employer, to release me from all obligations and waivers arising from any and all NON-NEGOTIATED agreements, licenses, terms-of-service, shrinkwrap, clickwrap, browsewrap, confidentiality, non-disclosure, non-compete and acceptable use policies ("BOGUS AGREEMENTS") that I have entered into with your employer, its partners, licensors, agents and assigns, in perpetuity, without prejudice to my ongoing rights and privileges. You further represent that you have the authority to release me from any BOGUS AGREEMENTS on behalf of your employer. ISSN: 3066-764X

Today's links Melissa Mendes's "The Weight": Graphic novel as emotional roller-coaster. Hey look at this: Delights to delectate. Object permanence: Windows 10 killswitch; Ashley Madison copyfraud; Ulysses pacts; "Blackheart Man." 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. Melissa Mendes's "The Weight" (permalink) The Weight is Mellia Mendes's award-winning webcomic, now collected in a massive, beautifully made graphic novel from Drawn & Quarterly. It will tear your heart out, it will send you to a dreamy world of pastoral utopianism, then it will tear your heart out. Again: https://drawnandquarterly.com/books/the-weight/ In a rural midcentury Pennsylvania farmhouse, a young woman named Marian is going into labor. Her mother is by her side, her father goes outside to find Marian's husband, Ray, who is outside, bitterly smoking a cigarette. Marian's mother tells Ray he's about to become a father. Ray snaps, "Can't I just finish my fucking cigarette?" In just a few pages of economical storytelling, illustrated with simple ink-washes, Mendes sets in motion a story of cyclic abuse, unconditional love, redemption, and tragedy. "Economical" is a strange word to apply to Mendes's book, which is a fat 574 pages long (the book is a beautiful artifact, on thick paper that drinks the ink-wash illustrations and renders them in lush, mysterious gradients; the cover stock, embossing, and other features are all gorgeous, thoughtful and understated – this is a joy to hold). But the storytelling is economical, light on dialog, with panels that flow smoothly from one to the next, conveying a dynamic gestalt at the page level, and nuance in each panel. This economy of storytelling – including some brilliantly handled jumps in the action that leap several years at the turn of a page – makes the book fly by, such that I read it all (really it feels like I drank it all) in one sitting. You can read the first 17 pages at Drawn and Quarterly's website: https://drawnandquarterly.com/books/the-weight/ Marian and Ray end up on a military base where Marian works at the PX. Edie, the baby that was born in that opening scene, grows up in the shadow of vicious, relentless physical abuse, as Ray beats and torments Marian. Naturally, Edie spends a lot of time with her friends – and away from home – and we see how the rage within her ruptures under stress, sometimes hurting her, sometimes the children around her, and sometimes both. But these scenes also paint a picture of tender, wild camaraderie, the uncomplicated and pure friendship of children, thoughtlessly intense. We see how Edie is both rooted in this place, and also anchored there, unable to imagine life away from these kids. So when Marian finally leaves Ray, fearing for her life and Edie's, we feel Edie's pain at leaving – and then her heartbreak as her mother leaps off the train they are escaping on to intercept Ray and keep Edie safe. Edie makes her way to the grandparents who haven't seen her since the day of her birth, and the second act begins. This act is a long, beautiful coming of age story, as Edie heals, nurtured in the bosom of her loving, good grandparents; the bucolic life on the farm; the friends she surrounds herself with. Mendes gives us generous – but never drawn out – peeks into Edie's life as she matures from a child, to a teen, to a young woman. A young woman in love. The third act begins with Edie at 17, pregant by the boy next door, deciding to marry him and move out of state with him to a place where a relative can give them jobs and a trailer to live in and start their family. And before long, the cycle of abuse has begun again. The Weight is a ferocious read, the sweetness of the highs there to provide texture for the bitterness of the lows. Like a strip of white paper bisecting a sheet of black, the juxtaposition of the idyllic second act with the brutality of the beginning and end makes all three acts impossibly vivid. It's a story you won't soon forget. Hey look at this (permalink) On Not Surrendering in Advance, or During, or At Any Point Thereafter https://www.meditationsinanemergency.com/on-not-surrendering-in-advance-or-during-or-at-any-point-thereafter/ Zohran Mamdani is the leader NYC needs for innovation and entrepreneurship https://www.anildash.com/2025/08/20/zohran_mamdani_is_the_nyc_innovation_leader/ RFK Jr. Cut Grants for Autism Research While Vowing to Find a Cause https://www.propublica.org/article/rfk-jr-autism-environment-research-funding Endoscopist deskilling risk after exposure to artificial intelligence in colonoscopy: a multicentre, observational study https://www.thelancet.com/journals/langas/article/PIIS2468-1253(25)00133-5/abstract stupid games, stupid prizes, slight returns https://backofmind.substack.com/p/stupid-games-stupid-prizes-slight Object permanence (permalink) #10yrsago Eat invasive species and enjoy guilt-free meat https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-08-19/invasive-species-chefs-latest-menu-offering #10yrsago Windows 10 EULA: Microsoft can killswitch your unauthorized hardware and pirate games https://www.alphr.com/microsoft/microsoft-windows-10/1001360/microsoft-can-disable-your-pirated-games-and-illegal-hardware/ #10yrsago Ashley Madison commits copyfraud in desperate bid to suppress news of its titanic leak https://web.archive.org/web/20150820170651/https://motherboard.vice.com/read/ashley-madison-sent-me-a-dmca-request-for-tweeting-two-cells-of-a-spreadsheet #10yrsago Your Android unlock pattern sucks as much as your password did https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2015/08/new-data-uncovers-the-surprising-predictability-of-android-lock-patterns/ #10yrsago Universities’ tax-exempt giga-endowments spend more on hedge fund managers than on education https://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/19/opinion/stop-universities-from-hoarding-money.html #10yrsago Science is really fucking hard https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/science-isnt-broken/ #10yrsago Ulysses pacts and spying hacks: warrant canaries and binary transparency https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/aug/20/warrant-canaries-a-subtle-hint-that-your-email-provider-is-compromised #10yrsago America does a better job of tracking bee deaths than deaths in police custody https://www.muckrock.com/news/archives/2015/aug/20/bees-not-bodies/ #10yrsago “I hope the Chinese aren’t collating the Ashley Madison data with their handy federal list of every American with a security clearance.” -Bruce Sterling https://brucesterling.tumblr.com/post/127151439198/man-those-are-some-savage-vigilantes-i-hope #10yrsago Google covertly lobbied against net neutrality in India https://www.medianama.com/2015/08/223-google-iamai-net-neutrality-india/ #5yrsago Boeing fixes the 737 Max problem https://pluralistic.net/2020/08/20/dubious-quantitative-residue/#737-8 #5yrsago College Covid app is a security dumpster-fire https://pluralistic.net/2020/08/20/dubious-quantitative-residue/#thick-description #5yrsago The Mail https://pluralistic.net/2020/08/20/dubious-quantitative-residue/#franked #1yrago Nalo Hopkinson's "Blackheart Man" https://pluralistic.net/2024/08/20/piche/#cynchin Upcoming appearances (permalink) Ithaca: AD White keynote (Cornell), Sep 12 https://deanoffaculty.cornell.edu/events/keynote-cory-doctorow-professor-at-large/ DC: Enshittification at Politics and Prose, Oct 8 https://politics-prose.com/cory-doctorow-10825 New Orleans: DeepSouthCon63, Oct 10-12 http://www.contraflowscifi.org/ Chicago: Enshittification with Kara Swisher (Chicago Humanities), Oct 15 https://www.oldtownschool.org/concerts/2025/10-15-2025-kara-swisher-and-cory-doctorow-on-enshittification/ San Francisco: Enshittification at Public Works (The Booksmith), Oct 20 https://app.gopassage.com/events/doctorow25 Miami: Enshittification at Books & Books, Nov 5 https://www.eventbrite.com/e/an-evening-with-cory-doctorow-tickets-1504647263469 Recent appearances (permalink) Divesting from Amazon’s Audible and the Fight for Digital Rights (Libro.fm) https://pocketcasts.com/podcasts/9349e8d0-a87f-013a-d8af-0acc26574db2/00e6cbcf-7f27-4589-a11e-93e4ab59c04b The Utopias Podcast https://www.buzzsprout.com/2272465/episodes/17650124 Tariffs vs IP Law (Firewalls Don't Stop Dragons) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LFABFe-5-uQ Latest books (permalink) "Picks and Shovels": a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about the heroic era of the PC, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), February 2025 (https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250865908/picksandshovels). "The Bezzle": a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about prison-tech and other grifts, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), February 2024 (the-bezzle.org). "The Lost Cause:" a solarpunk novel of hope in the climate emergency, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), November 2023 (http://lost-cause.org). "The Internet Con": A nonfiction book about interoperability and Big Tech (Verso) September 2023 (http://seizethemeansofcomputation.org). Signed copies at Book Soup (https://www.booksoup.com/book/9781804291245). "Red Team Blues": "A grabby, compulsive thriller that will leave you knowing more about how the world works than you did before." Tor Books http://redteamblues.com. "Chokepoint Capitalism: How to Beat Big Tech, Tame Big Content, and Get Artists Paid, with Rebecca Giblin", on how to unrig the markets for creative labor, Beacon Press/Scribe 2022 https://chokepointcapitalism.com Upcoming books (permalink) "Canny Valley": A limited edition collection of the collages I create for Pluralistic, self-published, September 2025 "Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It," Farrar, Straus, Giroux, October 7 2025 https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374619329/enshittification/ "Unauthorized Bread": a middle-grades graphic novel adapted from my novella about refugees, toasters and DRM, FirstSecond, 2026 "Enshittification, Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It" (the graphic novel), Firstsecond, 2026 "The Memex Method," Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2026 "The Reverse-Centaur's Guide to AI," a short book about being a better AI critic, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2026 Colophon (permalink) Today's top sources: Currently writing: "The Reverse Centaur's Guide to AI," a short book for Farrar, Straus and Giroux about being an effective AI critic. (1020 words yesterday, 38103 words total). A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING This work – excluding any serialized fiction – is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license. That means you can use it any way you like, including commercially, provided that you attribute it to me, Cory Doctorow, and include a link to pluralistic.net. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ Quotations and images are not included in this license; they are included either under a limitation or exception to copyright, or on the basis of a separate license. Please exercise caution. How to get Pluralistic: Blog (no ads, tracking, or data-collection): Pluralistic.net Newsletter (no ads, tracking, or data-collection): https://pluralistic.net/plura-list Mastodon (no ads, tracking, or data-collection): https://mamot.fr/@pluralistic Medium (no ads, paywalled): https://doctorow.medium.com/ Twitter (mass-scale, unrestricted, third-party surveillance and advertising): https://twitter.com/doctorow Tumblr (mass-scale, unrestricted, third-party surveillance and advertising): https://mostlysignssomeportents.tumblr.com/tagged/pluralistic "When life gives you SARS, you make sarsaparilla" -Joey "Accordion Guy" DeVilla READ CAREFULLY: By reading this, you agree, on behalf of your employer, to release me from all obligations and waivers arising from any and all NON-NEGOTIATED agreements, licenses, terms-of-service, shrinkwrap, clickwrap, browsewrap, confidentiality, non-disclosure, non-compete and acceptable use policies ("BOGUS AGREEMENTS") that I have entered into with your employer, its partners, licensors, agents and assigns, in perpetuity, without prejudice to my ongoing rights and privileges. You further represent that you have the authority to release me from any BOGUS AGREEMENTS on behalf of your employer. ISSN: 3066-764X

Today's links Become unoptimizable: Twiddle or be twiddled. Hey look at this: Delights to delectate. Object permanence: Penguins v Microsoft in the EU; Chastity belts are a joke; Austerity breeds Nazis, Yale says, "Prepare for death." 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. Become unoptimizable (permalink) Forget surveillance capitalism – let's talk about surveillance infantalism: the drive by the wealthy to spy on you in order to pursue the toddler's goals of getting everything they want from the people around them, without any reciprocal obligations. After the Snowden revelations, I started to wonder about something fundamental: why spy at all? https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/mar/10/nsa-gchq-technology-create-social-mobility-spy-on-citizens The answer I came up with at the time is that the ultra-rich (and the states they have suborned) have a fundamental understanding that the more unfair a society is, the less stable it is. The more unstable a state is, the more its ruling class have to expend on private security. No captain of industry wants to arise from his sarcophagus of a morning, only to discover a mob of hoi polloi building a guillotine on his lawn. As Thomas Piketty argues, there comes a point where it's cheaper to make society more fair – say, by building hospitals and schools – than it is to pay for all the gaiter-wearing gun-thugs you'll need to weed out the guillotine-building projects that spontaneously erupt under conditions of gross unfairness: https://memex.craphound.com/2014/06/24/thomas-pikettys-capital-in-the-21st-century/ Mass surveillance shifts the guillotine equilibrium in favor of being greedier, by making it cheaper to identify and neutralize incipient guillotine-builders, which means that you can raise the greediness floor without seeing a concomitant rise in your guard labor bill. And there's lots of money to be made by raising the greediness floor, the corollary of which is that any time you fail to act with sufficiently shameless greed, you leave a ton of money on the table. That's the substance of the shareholder lawsuit against Unitedhealthcare, alleging that after Luigi Mangione allegedly murdered United CEO Brian Thompson‡, United failed to screw enough patients hard enough: https://www.nbcnews.com/business/business-news/unitedhealthcare-sued-shareholders-reaction-ceos-killing-rcna205550 ‡ Luigi didn't do it. I saw him playing pinochle in Los Angeles that night, and I'll swear to it in court. But there's another way in which surveillance abets rampant billionaireism: when companies spy on us, they can change the rules of their services to increase how much we pay them, and decrease how much they pay us. When companies do this to their customers, they call it "personalized pricing" – but everyone else calls it what it is, surveillance pricing: https://pluralistic.net/2025/06/24/price-discrimination/#algorithmic-pricing When a company charges you more than someone else for the same service (say, Uber jacking up the price of a ride because your phone battery is about to die, or an airline charging you extra because they know you have a funeral to attend), they're effectively re-valuing the dollars in your bank account. The fact that the cab-ride that costs you $20 and costs someone else $15 means that your dollar is only worth $0.75. But companies also do this to the workers they pay, something Veena Dubal calls "algorthmic wage discrimination": https://pluralistic.net/2023/04/12/algorithmic-wage-discrimination/#fishers-of-men For example, the apps that hospitals use to hire contract nurses first buy their recent financial information from an unregulated data-broker, checking to see whether the nurse has a lot of credit-card debt, because if you owe a lot on your Visa, the app can offer you a lower hourly wage and you'll still take the shift: https://pluralistic.net/2024/12/18/loose-flapping-ends/#luigi-has-a-point This is re-valuing your labor. If my credit-card debt means that I get $20/hour for a shift that would pay you $25/hour, the app is saying that my hours are only worth 80% of what yours are worth. This kind of price-fixing is an example of a phenomenon I call "twiddling," which is when a company changes its underlying business logic (prices, costs, recommendations, search rankings) on a per-user, per-session basis to shift value from customers and suppliers to shareholders: https://pluralistic.net/2023/02/19/twiddler/ There's lots of kinds of twiddling: the fact that apps generate so much fine-grained, up-to-the-second surveillance telemetry about our use of them means that zuckermuskian social media bosses can make pretty good guesses about how many ads and boosted posts they can enshittify into our feeds without us switching off the app: https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/21/potemkin-ai/#hey-guys If you were studying all this stuff in an MBA program, they'd call it "optimization." Mass surveillance allows the optimization of guard-labor, by identifying threats to the status quo for targeted enforcement, which is much cheaper and effective than indiscriminate enforcement. Commercial surveillance allows buyers to figure out the most an individual consumer will pay, and raise prices accordingly; and to calculate the lowest wage a worker will accept, and lower pay accordingly. Commercial surveillance allows companies to "optimize" their products to be nearly so enshtitified that we quit them, but not quite, maximizing the value they can shift from us to them. To be free people, we don't merely need to be ungovernable. We need to become unoptomizable. How do we do that? Well, there are lots of policies that would make it harder for the ultra-rich to "optimize" us so that we are easier to fleece and abuse, but every "optimization" starts with surveillance. After all, you treasure what you measure, and if you can't observe a worker or a customer – or a citizen getting ready to build a guillotine – you can't optimize them. That's where "privacy first" comes in. There are a lot of people angry about a lot of problems that are all rooted in the unregulated, unrestricted practice of mass surveillance by governments and their corporate partners: https://pluralistic.net/2023/12/06/privacy-first/#but-not-just-privacy Pulling together people angry about being turned into deepfake porn, people angry about parents who've gone Maga or kids who've become anorexic; Fox News cultists angry about the use of reverse warrants to identify Jan 6 rioters or Tiktok millennials quoting Osama Bin Laden; immigrants angry about ICE plundering commercial databases to locate their next victim; and people angry about online racial financial, hiring and housing discrimination makes for a hell of a coalition. If we make it illegal to spy, we make end the conditions for rampant billionaireism. We become unoptimizable. Billionaires are overgrown toddlers, after all. They don't acknowledge the humanity of others – indeed, they probably don't even believe that the rest of us are really real (we're "NPCs"): https://pluralistic.net/2025/08/18/seeing-like-a-billionaire/#npcs The point of billionaireism is to escape: to escape any mutual obligations to others, any duty to give moral consideration to your workers or your customers or the voters you're trying to hoodwink with a torrent of manipulative, dishonest media messages. It's to do whatever you want, to move fast and break things, from rocketships to the night sky. It's being able to shout down anyone who says "NO!" That's the drive behind "libertarian exit" projects, where people dying of terminal billionaireism attempt to colonize some "empty place" where they owe nothing to anyone: https://pluralistic.net/2022/06/14/this-way-to-the-egress/#terra-nullius It's why billionaires are obsessed with tunnels and skycars (escaping the inescapable geometric reality that the only way to move a lot of people through a city is on public transit): https://pluralistic.net/2025/07/24/geometry-hates-cars/#dogshit-unit-economics It's why they build luxury bunkers, so they can wait out "the Event" in comfort while the not-quite-real people on the outside rebuild civilization, whereupon they can emerge with their AR-15s, bomb-collared mercenaries, and thumb-drives full of bitcoin and assume their rightful place as Frazetta warlords with a harem in every fortress: https://pluralistic.net/2022/09/13/collapse-porn/#collapse-porn It's a life without friction, because all of that friction has been offloaded onto us, through the process of optimization. The gig economy lets a billionaireist enjoy the pleasures of round-the-clock staff without having to pay workers to sit idle. You just summon a worker whenever you want a burrito or a massage or a blunt, and they only get paid while they're "on the clock" for your task. The fact that this means that an ever-larger fraction of the world has to scramble in mounting desperation to stay clothed, fed and housed is a hell of a lot of friction, but it's not your friction. They've been optimized – to your purposes. Become unoptimizable. In a fair society, we'd have transparency for the powerful and privacy for everyone else: we'd know every time Elon Musk's jet took off and where it was going so we could surround the landing strip with angry protesters – and Musk wouldn't know a single thing about his workers, his users, or anyone else. He would experience us through the same veil of total ignorance through which he experiences his children. Hey look at this (permalink) Robinhood Tries to Rebrand Sports Betting as Investing https://gizmodo.com/robinhood-tries-to-rebrand-sports-betting-as-investing-2000645176 DOJ Insider Blows the Whistle on Pay-to-Play Antitrust Corruption https://prospect.org/power/2025-08-19-doj-insider-blows-whistle-pay-to-play-antitrust-corruption/ CEO pay at top US companies accelerates at fastest pace in four years https://archive.is/es4bc How Tea’s Founder Convinced Millions of Women to Spill Their Secrets, Then Exposed Them to the World https://www.404media.co/how-teas-founder-convinced-millions-of-women-to-spill-their-secrets-then-exposed-them-to-the-world/ The State of Independent Technology Research 2025 https://independenttechresearch.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/08/The-State-of-Independent-Technology-Research-Power-in-Numbers.pdf (h/t Dan Gillmor) Object permanence (permalink) #20yrsago Penguin-suited activists crash Microsoft’s Berlin parliament presentation https://netzpolitik.org/2005/microsoft-im-parlament/ #10yrsago LA artists who earn their livings through the Internet https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2015/08/18/magazine/23mag-culturesidebar.html?smid=tw-share&_r=0 #10yrsago MPAA loves fair use so much they don’t want to share it with the rest of the world https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2015/08/will-hollywoods-whining-thwart-better-tpp-copyright-rules #10yrsago Chastity belts were a joke, then a metaphor, then a hoax https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/everything-youve-heard-about-chastity-belts-is-a-lie #10yrsago Jeb Bush: the NSA isn’t spying on us enough https://web.archive.org/web/20150819062605/http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/jeb-bush-nsa_55d39f5fe4b055a6dab1d777?utm_hp_ref=tw&kvcommref=mostpopular #5yrsago Austerity breeds Nazis https://pluralistic.net/2020/08/19/a-band-apart/#austerity #5yrsago Yale admin: "Prepare for death" https://pluralistic.net/2020/08/19/a-band-apart/#boola-boola #5yrsago Hedge fund won't return Citi's accidental $175m deposit https://pluralistic.net/2020/08/19/a-band-apart/#keepsies #5yrsago Spikey https://pluralistic.net/2020/08/19/a-band-apart/#listen-up #5yrsago Orwell prize winner trapped in orwellian nightmare https://pluralistic.net/2020/08/19/a-band-apart/#fuck-the-algorithm #5yrsago Thomas Hawk's Talking Heads https://pluralistic.net/2020/08/19/a-band-apart/#talkingheads #5yrsago Amazon's Monopoly Tollbooth https://pluralistic.net/2020/08/19/a-band-apart/#amazon-tollbooth #1yrago Corporate Bullshit https://pluralistic.net/2024/08/19/apologetics-spotters-guide/#narratives Upcoming appearances (permalink) Ithaca: AD White keynote (Cornell), Sep 12 https://deanoffaculty.cornell.edu/events/keynote-cory-doctorow-professor-at-large/ DC: Enshittification at Politics and Prose, Oct 8 https://politics-prose.com/cory-doctorow-10825 New Orleans: DeepSouthCon63, Oct 10-12 http://www.contraflowscifi.org/ Chicago: Enshittification with Kara Swisher (Chicago Humanities), Oct 15 https://www.oldtownschool.org/concerts/2025/10-15-2025-kara-swisher-and-cory-doctorow-on-enshittification/ San Francisco: Enshittification at Public Works (The Booksmith), Oct 20 https://app.gopassage.com/events/doctorow25 Miami: Enshittification at Books & Books, Nov 5 https://www.eventbrite.com/e/an-evening-with-cory-doctorow-tickets-1504647263469 Recent appearances (permalink) Divesting from Amazon’s Audible and the Fight for Digital Rights (Libro.fm) https://pocketcasts.com/podcasts/9349e8d0-a87f-013a-d8af-0acc26574db2/00e6cbcf-7f27-4589-a11e-93e4ab59c04b The Utopias Podcast https://www.buzzsprout.com/2272465/episodes/17650124 Tariffs vs IP Law (Firewalls Don't Stop Dragons) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LFABFe-5-uQ Latest books (permalink) "Picks and Shovels": a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about the heroic era of the PC, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), February 2025 (https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250865908/picksandshovels). "The Bezzle": a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about prison-tech and other grifts, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), February 2024 (the-bezzle.org). "The Lost Cause:" a solarpunk novel of hope in the climate emergency, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), November 2023 (http://lost-cause.org). "The Internet Con": A nonfiction book about interoperability and Big Tech (Verso) September 2023 (http://seizethemeansofcomputation.org). Signed copies at Book Soup (https://www.booksoup.com/book/9781804291245). "Red Team Blues": "A grabby, compulsive thriller that will leave you knowing more about how the world works than you did before." Tor Books http://redteamblues.com. "Chokepoint Capitalism: How to Beat Big Tech, Tame Big Content, and Get Artists Paid, with Rebecca Giblin", on how to unrig the markets for creative labor, Beacon Press/Scribe 2022 https://chokepointcapitalism.com Upcoming books (permalink) "Canny Valley": A limited edition collection of the collages I create for Pluralistic, self-published, September 2025 "Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It," Farrar, Straus, Giroux, October 7 2025 https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374619329/enshittification/ "Unauthorized Bread": a middle-grades graphic novel adapted from my novella about refugees, toasters and DRM, FirstSecond, 2026 "Enshittification, Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It" (the graphic novel), Firstsecond, 2026 "The Memex Method," Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2026 "The Reverse-Centaur's Guide to AI," a short book about being a better AI critic, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2026 Colophon (permalink) Today's top sources: Currently writing: "The Reverse Centaur's Guide to AI," a short book for Farrar, Straus and Giroux about being an effective AI critic. (1043 words yesterday, 37083 words total). A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING This work – excluding any serialized fiction – is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license. That means you can use it any way you like, including commercially, provided that you attribute it to me, Cory Doctorow, and include a link to pluralistic.net. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ Quotations and images are not included in this license; they are included either under a limitation or exception to copyright, or on the basis of a separate license. Please exercise caution. How to get Pluralistic: Blog (no ads, tracking, or data-collection): Pluralistic.net Newsletter (no ads, tracking, or data-collection): https://pluralistic.net/plura-list Mastodon (no ads, tracking, or data-collection): https://mamot.fr/@pluralistic Medium (no ads, paywalled): https://doctorow.medium.com/ Twitter (mass-scale, unrestricted, third-party surveillance and advertising): https://twitter.com/doctorow Tumblr (mass-scale, unrestricted, third-party surveillance and advertising): https://mostlysignssomeportents.tumblr.com/tagged/pluralistic "When life gives you SARS, you make sarsaparilla" -Joey "Accordion Guy" DeVilla READ CAREFULLY: By reading this, you agree, on behalf of your employer, to release me from all obligations and waivers arising from any and all NON-NEGOTIATED agreements, licenses, terms-of-service, shrinkwrap, clickwrap, browsewrap, confidentiality, non-disclosure, non-compete and acceptable use policies ("BOGUS AGREEMENTS") that I have entered into with your employer, its partners, licensors, agents and assigns, in perpetuity, without prejudice to my ongoing rights and privileges. You further represent that you have the authority to release me from any BOGUS AGREEMENTS on behalf of your employer. ISSN: 3066-764X

Today's links Charlie Jane Anders' "Lessons in Magic and Disaster.": Families, they fuck you up (magically). Hey look at this: Delights to delectate. Object permanence: HST in space; It Plays Doom; Deserted Chinese themeparks; Banksy's Dismaland; Dollars are better than warrants; "Fuck the algorithm." 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. Charlie Jane Anders' "Lessons in Magic and Disaster." (permalink) Charlie Jane Anders' Lessons in Magic and Disaster drops today: it's a novel about queer academia, the wonder of thinking very hard about very old books, and the terror and joy of ambiguous magic. It's my kind of novel! https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250867322/lessonsinmagicanddisaster/ There's a kind of magic I love to read about – the kind where it's not entirely clear whether the person purporting to do magic is acting entirely on instinct, and neither they nor we can be entirely sure whether anything magical has actually happened. This ambiguity just tickles something in me, the part of my brain that tries to bear down on traffic lights to make them turn green, or on board-game dice to get a good roll. It's the mode of Iain Banks's The Wasp Factory and Kelly Link's Book of Love. It's a mode that Anders does superbly, and has done since her 2016 debut novel, All the Birds in the Sky: https://memex.craphound.com/2016/01/26/charlie-jane-anderss-all-the-birds-in-the-sky-smartass-soulful-novel/ That's the kind of magic at the heart of Magic and Disaster, which tells the story of Jamie, a doctoral candidate at a New England liberal arts college who is trying to hold it all together while she finishes her dissertation. For Jamie, holding it together is a tall order. Her relationship is on the rocks, her advisor is breathing down her neck, a smartass alt-right kid in her class keeps trolling her lectures, and to top it all off, her mother Sarina has withdrawn from society and is self-evidently preparing to lie down and die, out of grief and penance for the death of her wife, who died of cancer that everyone – her doctors and Sarina – downplayed until it was too late. That would be an impossible lift, except for Jamie's gift for maybe-magic – magic that might or might not be real. Certain places ("liminal spaces") call to Jamie. These are abandoned, dirty, despoiled places, ruins and dumps and littered campsites. When Jamie finds one of these places, she can improvise a ritual, using the things in her pockets and school bag as talismans that might – or might not – conjure small bumps of luck and fortune into Jamie's path. Jamie's never told anyone about the magic, but when she and Sarina have an especially bitter confrontation, it slips out. In desperation, Jamie gives her mother – a campaigning lawyer who has withdrawn from life and become a hermit – a demonstration of magic. Her mother approaches the demonstration with a lawyer's don't-bullshit-me skepticism, but something in her responds to the magic, and when Jamie leaves her, Sarina tries to bring back her dead wife, a forbidden conjuring that has disastrous consequences. Jamie had hoped to give her mother something to live for, but catastrophic magical experimentation wasn't what she had in mind. Soon, Jamie is dragged into Sarina's life, to the detriment of her relationship with Ro, a fellow academic who is rightfully suspicious of Sarina and the effect she has on Jamie. When Ro finds out about the magic, the relationship breaks, and now Jamie has to face her problems alone. Those problems keep mounting. Jamie is working on a dissertation about a 300 year old "ladies' novel" that promises to reveal some profound truth about the life of its author and her challenge to the role that she finds herself confined to as a woman, but it's slow going, and Jamie's advisor is at pains to remind her that there are dramatic changes in the offing to the university, and that Jamie had best get that thesis in soon. Meanwhile, the Men's Rights Activist bro in Jamie's class keeps upping the ante, mixing disruptive "just asking questions" behavior with thinly veiled transphobic digs (Jamie is trans, a fact that is woven around her relationship to her mother and to magic). Anders tosses a lot of differently shaped objects into the air, and then juggles them, interspersing the main action with excerpts from imaginary 18th century novels (which themselves contain imaginary parables) that serve as both a prestige and a framing device. There's a lot of queer joy in here, a hell of a lot of media theory, and some very chewy ruminations on the far-right mediasphere. There's romance and heartbreak, danger and sacrifice, and most of all, there's that ambiguous magic, which gets realer and scarier as the action goes on. This is a wonderful magic trick of a novel from a versatile author whose work includes YA space opera, hard sf adventure stories, and a wealth of brilliant short stories. It's a remarkably easy novel to read, given how much very difficult stuff Anders is doing in the writing, and it lingers long after you finish the last page. Hey look at this (permalink) Google admits anti-competitive conduct involving Google Search in Australia https://www.accc.gov.au/media-release/google-admits-anti-competitive-conduct-involving-google-search-in-australia The twilight of tech unilateralism https://www.programmablemutter.com/p/the-twilight-of-tech-unilateralism MIT report: 95% of generative AI pilots at companies are failing https://fortune.com/2025/08/18/mit-report-95-percent-generative-ai-pilots-at-companies-failing-cfo/ ‘Ad Blocking is Not Piracy’ Decision Overturned By Top German Court https://torrentfreak.com/ad-blocking-is-not-piracy-decision-overturned-by-top-german-court-250819/ Object permanence (permalink) #20yrsago US CD/DVD bootlegging is not run by organized crime https://memex.craphound.com/2005/08/18/us-cd-dvd-bootlegging-is-not-run-by-organized-crime/ #20yrsago Lem’s tensor algebra poem, annotated https://web.archive.org/web/20051107014429/http://cheesedip.com/2005/08/18/lem_love__tensor_algebra.php #20yrsago Hunter S Thompson’s ashes to be sent high on fireworks https://www.nytimes.com/2005/08/22/us/ashestofireworks-sendoff-for-an-outlaw-writer.html #20yrsago Southern Baptist guide to non-gay Disney movies https://web.archive.org/web/20050917042544/http://www.bpnews.net/bpnews.asp?ID=21416 #20yrsago ItPlaysDoom: catalog of devices capable of running Doom https://web.archive.org/web/20070226184902/http://www.itplaysdoom.com/ #10yrsago Women of the Haunted Mansion cosplayers at SDCC https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TJptS52CZIw #10yrsago Gallery of deserted Chinese amusement parks https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/gallery/2015/aug/14/china-deserted-amusement-parks-stefano-cerio #10yrsago New pornoscanners are also useless, cost $160 million https://www.politico.com/story/2015/08/airport-security-price-for-tsa-failed-body-scanners-160-million-121385.html #10yrsago Gender and sf awards: who wins and for what http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2015/08/data-books-and-bias.html #10yrsago The End of the Internet Dream: the speech that won Black Hat (and Defcon) https://web.archive.org/web/20150818104913/https://medium.com/backchannel/the-end-of-the-internet-dream-ba060b17da61 #10yrsago Piracy vs the MPAA: yet another box-office record smashed https://www.techdirt.com/2015/08/18/hollywood-keeps-breaking-box-office-records-while-still-insisting-that-internet-is-killing-movies/ #10yrsago Stephen Hawking’s speech synthesizer now free/open software https://www.wired.com/2015/08/stephen-hawking-software-open-source/ #10yrsago Defector from Kremlin’s outsourced troll army wins 1 rouble in damages https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-33972122 #10yrsago Chuck Wendig’s Zeroes: a hacker technothriller in the War Games lineage https://memex.craphound.com/2015/08/18/chuck-wendigs-zeroes-a-hacker-technothriller-in-the-war-games-lineage/ #10yrsago Dismaland: Banksy’s (?) swipe at Disneyland https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2015/aug/18/banksy-weston-super-mare-dismaland #10yrsago Giant dump of data purports to be from Ashleymadison.com https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2015/08/data-from-hack-of-ashley-madison-cheater-site-purportedly-dumped-online/ #10yrsago Iran arms deal prosecution falls apart because of warrantless laptop search https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2015/08/warrantless-airport-laptop-search-dooms-iran-arms-sales-prosecution/ #10yrsago The (real) hard problem of AI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mukaRhQTMP8 #10yrsago Airport security confiscates three year old’s fart gun https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/toddler-has-his-minions-fart-gun-confiscated-at-dublin-airport-for-posing-security-threat-10457743.html #5yrsago South Africa's copyright and human rights https://pluralistic.net/2020/08/18/fifth-pig/#3-steps #5yrsago Upbeat surveillance marketing https://pluralistic.net/2020/08/18/fifth-pig/#hikvision #5yrsago Fed cops substitute dollars for warrants https://pluralistic.net/2020/08/18/fifth-pig/#ppp #5yrsago Deindustrialization is a market failure https://pluralistic.net/2020/08/18/fifth-pig/#deindustrialization #5yrsago Mr Cook, Tear Down That Wall https://pluralistic.net/2020/08/18/fifth-pig/#no-true-scotsman #5yrsago "Fuck the algorithm" https://pluralistic.net/2020/08/18/fifth-pig/#a-levels #5yrsago The Fifth Pig https://pluralistic.net/2020/08/18/fifth-pig/#5th-pig Upcoming appearances (permalink) Ithaca: AD White keynote (Cornell), Sep 12 https://deanoffaculty.cornell.edu/events/keynote-cory-doctorow-professor-at-large/ DC: Enshittification at Politics and Prose, Oct 8 https://politics-prose.com/cory-doctorow-10825 New Orleans: DeepSouthCon63, Oct 10-12 http://www.contraflowscifi.org/ Chicago: Enshittification with Kara Swisher (Chicago Humanities), Oct 15 https://www.oldtownschool.org/concerts/2025/10-15-2025-kara-swisher-and-cory-doctorow-on-enshittification/ San Francisco: Enshittification at Public Works (The Booksmith), Oct 20 https://app.gopassage.com/events/doctorow25 Miami: Enshittification at Books & Books, Nov 5 https://www.eventbrite.com/e/an-evening-with-cory-doctorow-tickets-1504647263469 Recent appearances (permalink) Divesting from Amazon’s Audible and the Fight for Digital Rights (Libro.fm) https://pocketcasts.com/podcasts/9349e8d0-a87f-013a-d8af-0acc26574db2/00e6cbcf-7f27-4589-a11e-93e4ab59c04b The Utopias Podcast https://www.buzzsprout.com/2272465/episodes/17650124 Tariffs vs IP Law (Firewalls Don't Stop Dragons) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LFABFe-5-uQ Latest books (permalink) "Picks and Shovels": a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about the heroic era of the PC, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), February 2025 (https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250865908/picksandshovels). "The Bezzle": a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about prison-tech and other grifts, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), February 2024 (the-bezzle.org). "The Lost Cause:" a solarpunk novel of hope in the climate emergency, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), November 2023 (http://lost-cause.org). "The Internet Con": A nonfiction book about interoperability and Big Tech (Verso) September 2023 (http://seizethemeansofcomputation.org). Signed copies at Book Soup (https://www.booksoup.com/book/9781804291245). "Red Team Blues": "A grabby, compulsive thriller that will leave you knowing more about how the world works than you did before." Tor Books http://redteamblues.com. "Chokepoint Capitalism: How to Beat Big Tech, Tame Big Content, and Get Artists Paid, with Rebecca Giblin", on how to unrig the markets for creative labor, Beacon Press/Scribe 2022 https://chokepointcapitalism.com Upcoming books (permalink) "Canny Valley": A limited edition collection of the collages I create for Pluralistic, self-published, September 2025 "Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It," Farrar, Straus, Giroux, October 7 2025 https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374619329/enshittification/ "Unauthorized Bread": a middle-grades graphic novel adapted from my novella about refugees, toasters and DRM, FirstSecond, 2026 "Enshittification, Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It" (the graphic novel), Firstsecond, 2026 "The Memex Method," Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2026 "The Reverse-Centaur's Guide to AI," a short book about being a better AI critic, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2026 Colophon (permalink) Today's top sources: Currently writing: "The Reverse Centaur's Guide to AI," a short book for Farrar, Straus and Giroux about being an effective AI critic. (1022 words yesterday, 11212 words total). A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING This work – excluding any serialized fiction – is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license. That means you can use it any way you like, including commercially, provided that you attribute it to me, Cory Doctorow, and include a link to pluralistic.net. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ Quotations and images are not included in this license; they are included either under a limitation or exception to copyright, or on the basis of a separate license. Please exercise caution. 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