Today's links The worst possible antitrust outcome: Hope you like enshittification. Hey look at this: Delights to delectate. Object permanence: Amazon drivers hang phones from trees; DVD Jon v Windows DRM; Chevron's dirty tricks. Upcoming appearances: Where to find me. Recent appearances: Where I've been. Latest books: You keep readin' em, I'll keep writin' 'em. Upcoming books: Like I said, I'll keep writin' 'em. Colophon: All the rest. The worst possible antitrust outcome (permalink) Well, fuck. Last year, Google lost an antitrust case to Biden's DoJ. The DoJ lawyers beat Google like a drum, proving beyond a shadow of a doubt that Google had deliberately sought to create and maintain a monopoly over search, and that they'd used that monopoly to make search materially worse, while locking competitors out of the market. In other words, the company that controls 90% of search attained that control by illegal means, and, having thus illegitimately become the first port of call for the information-seeking world, had deliberately worsened its product to make more money: https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/24/naming-names/#prabhakar-raghavan That Google lost that case was a minor miracle. First, because for 40 years, the richest, most terrible people in the world have been running a literal re-education camp for judges where they get luxe rooms and fancy meals and lectures about how monopolies are good, actually: https://pluralistic.net/2021/08/13/post-bork-era/#manne-down But second, because Judge Amit Mehta decided that the Google case should be shrouded in mystery, suppressing the publication of key exhibits and banning phones, cameras and laptops from the courtroom, with the effect that virtually no one even noticed that the most important antitrust case in tech history, a genuine trial of the century, was underway: https://www.promarket.org/2023/10/27/google-monopolizes-judicial-system-information-with-trial-secrecy/ This is really important. The government doesn't have to win an antitrust trial in order to create competition. As the saying goes, "the process is the punishment." Bill Gates was so personally humiliated by his catastrophic performance at his deposition for the Microsoft antitrust trial that he elected not to force-choke the nascent Google, lest he be put back in the deposition chair: https://pluralistic.net/2020/09/12/whats-a-murder/#miros-tilde-1 a But Judge Mehta turned his courtroom into a Star Chamber, a black hole whence no embarrassing information about Google's wicked deeds could emerge. That meant that the only punishment Google would have to bear from this trial would come after the government won its case, when the judge decided on a punishment (the term of art is "remedy") for Google. Yesterday, he handed down that remedy and it is as bad as it could be. In fact, it is likely the worst possible remedy for this case: https://gizmodo.com/google-wont-have-to-sell-chrome-browser-after-all-but-theres-a-catch-2000652304 Let's start with what's not in this remedy. Google will not be forced to sell off any of its divisions – not Chrome, not Android. Despite the fact that the judge found that Google's vertical integration with the world's dominant mobile operating system and browser were a key factor in its monopolization, Mehta decided to leave the Google octopus with all its limbs intact: https://pluralistic.net/2024/11/19/breaking-up-is-hard-to-do/#shiny-and-chrome Google won't be forced to offer users a "choice screen" when they set up their Android accounts, to give browsers other than Chrome a fair shake: https://pluralistic.net/2024/08/12/defaults-matter/#make-up-your-mind-already Nor will Google be prevented from bribing competitors to stay out of the search market. One of the facts established in the verdict was that Google had been slipping Apple more than $20b/year in exchange for which, Apple forbore from making a competing search engine. This exposed every Safari and iOS user to Google surveillance, while insulating Google from the threat of an Apple competitor. And then there's Google's data. Google is the world's most prolific surveiller, and the company boasts to investors about the advantage that its 24/7 spying confers on it in the search market, because Google knows so much about us and can therefore tailor our results. Even if this is true – a big if – it's nevertheless a fucking nightmare. Google has stolen every fact about our lives, in service to propping up a monopoly that lets it steal our money, too. Any remedy worth the name would have required Google to delete ("disgorge," in law-speak) all that data: https://pluralistic.net/2024/08/07/revealed-preferences/#extinguish-v-improve Some people in the antitrust world didn't see it that way. Out of a misguided kind of privacy nihilism, they called for Google to be forced to share the data it stole from us, so that potential competitors could tune their search tools on the monopolist's population-scale privacy violations. And that is what the court has ordered. As punishment for being convinced of obtaining and maintaining a monopoly, Google will be forced to share sensitive data with lots of other search engines. This will not secure competition for search, but it will certainly democratize human rights violations at scale. Doubtless there will be loopholes in this data-sharing order. Google will have the right to hold back some of its data (that is, our data) if it is deemed "sensitive." This isn't so much a loophole as is a loopchasm. I'll bet you a testicle⹋ that Google will slap a "sensitive" label on any data that might be the least bit useful to its competitors. ⹋not one of mine This means that even if you like data-sharing as a remedy, you won't actually get the benefit you were hoping for. Instead, Google competitors will spend the next decade in court, fighting to get Google to comply with this order. That's the main reason that we force monopolists to break up after they lose antitrust cases. We could put a bunch of conditions on how they operate, but figuring out whether they're adhering to those conditions and punishing them when they don't is expensive, labor-intensive and time consuming. This data-sharing wheeze is easy to do malicious compliance for, and hard to enforce. It is not an "administrable" policy: https://locusmag.com/2022/03/cory-doctorow-vertically-challenged/ This is all downside. If Google complies with the order, it will constitute a privacy breach on a scale never before seen. If they don't comply with the order, it will starve competitors of the one tiny drop of hope that Judge Mehta squeezed out of his pen. It's a catastrophe. An utter, total catastrophe. It has zero redeeming qualities. Hope you like enshittification, folks, because Judge Mehta just handed Google an eternal licence to enshittify the entire fucking internet. It's impossible to overstate how fucking terrible Mehta's reasoning in this decision is. The Economic Liberties project calls it "judicial cowardice" and compared the ruling to "finding someone guilty for bank robbery and then sentencing him to write a thank you note": https://www.economicliberties.us/press-release/doj-states-must-appeal-judge-mehtas-act-of-judicial-cowardice-letting-google-keep-its-monopoly-power/ Matt Stoller says it's typical of today's "lawlessness, incoherence and deference to big business": https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/a-judge-lets-google-get-away-with David Dayen's scorching analysis in The American Prospect calls it "embarassing": https://prospect.org/justice/2025-09-03-embarrassing-ruling-allows-google-search-monopoly/ Dayen points out the many ways in which Mehta ignored his own findings, ignored the Supreme Court. Mehta wrote: This court, however, need not decide this issue, because there are independent reasons that remedies designed to eliminate the defendant’s monopoly—i.e., structural remedies—are inappropriate in this case. Which, as Dayen points out is literally a federal judge deciding to ignore the law "because reasons." Dayen says that he doesn't see why Google would even bother appealing this ruling: "since it won on almost every point." But the DoJ could appeal. If MAGA's promises about holding Big Tech to account mean anything at all, the DoJ would appeal. I'll bet you a testicle⹋ that the DoJ will not appeal. After all, Trump's DoJ now has a cash register at the reception desk, and if you write a check for a million bucks to some random MAGA influencer, they can make all charges disappear: https://pluralistic.net/2025/09/02/act-locally/#local-hero ⹋again, not one of mine And if you're waiting for Europe to jump in and act where America won't, don't hold your breath. EU Commission sources leaked to Reuters that the EU is going to drop its multi-billion euro fine against Google because they don't want to make Trump angry: https://www.reuters.com/legal/litigation/google-adtech-fine-hold-eu-awaits-lower-us-car-duties-sources-say-2025-09-02/ Sundar Pichai gave $1m to Donald Trump and got a seat on the dais at the inaguration. Trump just paid him back, 40,000 times over. Trump is a sadist, a facist, and a rapist – and he's also a remarkably cheap date. Hey look at this (permalink) Apologies: You Have Reached the End of Your Free-Trial Period of America! https://www.theatlantic.com/newsletters/archive/2025/09/america-free-trial-services/684072/?gift=jQN1t1D1nkO2TQodBiz5KLmz9qdi35_pconlf7F6jjg The Happiest Place on Earth https://ramblingreaders.org/book/442124/s/the-happiest-place-on-earth the brompton-ness of it all https://backofmind.substack.com/p/the-brompton-ness-of-it-all I am a Private Citizen Seeking to Hold My Government Accountable. Dr. Vinay Prasad, a Government Doctor, Killed My YouTube Channel. https://sciencebasedmedicine.org/vinayprasadlovescensorship/ Lawbreaking as a Method of Competition https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=5433014 Object permanence (permalink) #20yrsago DVD Jon cracks Windows streaming video DRM https://www.theregister.com/2005/09/02/dvd_jon_mediaplayer/ #15yrsago German “secure” ID cards compromised on national TV, gov’t buries head in sand https://web.archive.org/web/20100826072237/http://www.thelocal.de/sci-tech/20100824-29359.html #15yrsago Applying “ownership” to links, public domain material does more harm than good https://locusmag.com/2010/09/cory-doctorow-proprietary-interest/ #5yrago How to report on vote-by-mail https://pluralistic.net/2020/09/02/free-steven-donziger/#write-the-vote #5yrsago Amazon's weird, terrible Flex https://pluralistic.net/2020/09/02/free-steven-donziger/#chickenized-flex #5yrsago Chevron's dirty tricks against environmental lawyer https://pluralistic.net/2020/09/02/free-steven-donziger/#free-donziger #5yrsago Russia didn't hack Michigan https://pluralistic.net/2020/09/02/free-steven-donziger/#mittenski #5yrsago Amazon drivers hide phones in trees https://pluralistic.net/2020/09/02/free-steven-donziger/#phone-trees Upcoming appearances (permalink) Ithaca: AD White keynote (Cornell), Sep 12 https://deanoffaculty.cornell.edu/events/keynote-cory-doctorow-professor-at-large/ DC: Enshittification at Politics and Prose, Oct 8 https://politics-prose.com/cory-doctorow-10825 NYC: Enshittification with Lina Khan (Brooklyn Public Library), Oct 9 https://www.bklynlibrary.org/calendar/cory-doctorow-discusses-central-library-dweck-20251009-0700pm New Orleans: DeepSouthCon63, Oct 10-12 http://www.contraflowscifi.org/ Chicago: Enshittification with Anand Giridharadas (Chicago Humanities), Oct 15 https://www.oldtownschool.org/concerts/2025/10-15-2025-kara-swisher-and-cory-doctorow-on-enshittification/ San Francisco: Enshittification at Public Works (The Booksmith), Oct 20 https://app.gopassage.com/events/doctorow25 Miami: Enshittification at Books & Books, Nov 5 https://www.eventbrite.com/e/an-evening-with-cory-doctorow-tickets-1504647263469 Recent appearances (permalink) Nerd Harder! (This Week in Tech) https://twit.tv/shows/this-week-in-tech/episodes/1047 Techtonic with Mark Hurst https://www.wfmu.org/playlists/shows/155658 Cory Doctorow DESTROYS Enshittification (QAA Podcast) https://soundcloud.com/qanonanonymous/cory-doctorow-destroys-enshitification-e338 Latest books (permalink) "Picks and Shovels": a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about the heroic era of the PC, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), February 2025 (https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250865908/picksandshovels). "The Bezzle": a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about prison-tech and other grifts, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), February 2024 (the-bezzle.org). "The Lost Cause:" a solarpunk novel of hope in the climate emergency, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), November 2023 (http://lost-cause.org). "The Internet Con": A nonfiction book about interoperability and Big Tech (Verso) September 2023 (http://seizethemeansofcomputation.org). Signed copies at Book Soup (https://www.booksoup.com/book/9781804291245). "Red Team Blues": "A grabby, compulsive thriller that will leave you knowing more about how the world works than you did before." Tor Books http://redteamblues.com. "Chokepoint Capitalism: How to Beat Big Tech, Tame Big Content, and Get Artists Paid, with Rebecca Giblin", on how to unrig the markets for creative labor, Beacon Press/Scribe 2022 https://chokepointcapitalism.com Upcoming books (permalink) "Canny Valley": A limited edition collection of the collages I create for Pluralistic, self-published, September 2025 "Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It," Farrar, Straus, Giroux, October 7 2025 https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374619329/enshittification/ "Unauthorized Bread": a middle-grades graphic novel adapted from my novella about refugees, toasters and DRM, FirstSecond, 2026 "Enshittification, Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It" (the graphic novel), Firstsecond, 2026 "The Memex Method," Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2026 "The Reverse-Centaur's Guide to AI," a short book about being a better AI critic, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2026 Colophon (permalink) Today's top sources: Currently writing: "The Reverse Centaur's Guide to AI," a short book for Farrar, Straus and Giroux about being an effective AI critic. FIRST DRAFT COMPLETE AND SUBMITTED. A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING This work – excluding any serialized fiction – is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license. That means you can use it any way you like, including commercially, provided that you attribute it to me, Cory Doctorow, and include a link to pluralistic.net. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ Quotations and images are not included in this license; they are included either under a limitation or exception to copyright, or on the basis of a separate license. Please exercise caution. How to get Pluralistic: Blog (no ads, tracking, or data-collection): Pluralistic.net Newsletter (no ads, tracking, or data-collection): https://pluralistic.net/plura-list Mastodon (no ads, tracking, or data-collection): https://mamot.fr/@pluralistic Medium (no ads, paywalled): https://doctorow.medium.com/ Twitter (mass-scale, unrestricted, third-party surveillance and advertising): https://twitter.com/doctorow Tumblr (mass-scale, unrestricted, third-party surveillance and advertising): https://mostlysignssomeportents.tumblr.com/tagged/pluralistic "When life gives you SARS, you make sarsaparilla" -Joey "Accordion Guy" DeVilla READ CAREFULLY: By reading this, you agree, on behalf of your employer, to release me from all obligations and waivers arising from any and all NON-NEGOTIATED agreements, licenses, terms-of-service, shrinkwrap, clickwrap, browsewrap, confidentiality, non-disclosure, non-compete and acceptable use policies ("BOGUS AGREEMENTS") that I have entered into with your employer, its partners, licensors, agents and assigns, in perpetuity, without prejudice to my ongoing rights and privileges. You further represent that you have the authority to release me from any BOGUS AGREEMENTS on behalf of your employer. ISSN: 3066-764X

Spoiler alert: ChatGPT won.

Today's links All (antitrust) politics are local: From data-centers to Ticketmaster. Hey look at this: Delights to delectate. Object permanence: Pokerbot back-channels; Little Robot; How To Destroy Surveillance Capitalism. Upcoming appearances: Where to find me. Recent appearances: Where I've been. Latest books: You keep readin' em, I'll keep writin' 'em. Upcoming books: Like I said, I'll keep writin' 'em. Colophon: All the rest. All (antitrust) politics are local (permalink) The US government has abandoned antitrust. Today, companies facing antitrust jeopardy can just pay key Trumpland figures a million bucks, and they will make a discreet visit to the fifth floor of the DoJ building, have a little shufty around the Antitrust Division and the whole thing will just…go away: https://prospect.org/power/2025-08-19-doj-insider-blows-whistle-pay-to-play-antitrust-corruption/ Federally speaking, antitrust is now just another hustle. The fish rots from the head down, of course: Trump brings baseless lawsuits against media companies so that they can offer him a (colorably) legal bribe in the form of a "settlement": https://www.techdirt.com/2025/07/03/institutional-failure-cbs-wimps-out-pays-trump-16-million-bribe-to-settle-baseless-lawsuit/ This opens space for "MAGA influencer lobbyists" whose boozy back-Broom deals with antitrust targets like Hewlett-Packard Enterprises and Juniper Networks swap legal immunity for personal "consulting" payments in the millions of dollars: https://unherd.com/2025/07/the-antitrust-war-inside-maga/ But here's the thing: even though the fish rots from the head down, the world rises from the bottom up. The global wave of antitrust vigor (which swept up federal enforcers in the US, Canada, the UK, Australia, South Korea, Japan, Germany, France, Spain, the EU and China) did not start with government enforcers. Rather, these enforcers were driven forward by an unstoppable current of popular fury over corporate power. That fury is ubiquitous, and it's growing. Federal enforcement was the channel that current was forced into, but merely damming up that channel does not cause the current to abate. Right now, that rage is finding vent in municipal politics, which makes sense if you think about it, because corporate power is most vividly felt at the local level. When a billionaire rains flaming space-junk down on your home, or poisons your water with fracking, or jack's up your electricity and water bills by building a data-center, that's because a local politician has been captured by an oligarch. Very few of us are personally familiar with America's oligarch class, but a hell of a lot of us know where the mayor lives. Writing in The American Prospect, Ron Knox documents the rising wave of successful local mobilizations against corporate power: https://prospect.org/economy/2025-09-02-shifting-anti-monopoly-landscape/ In Portland, Maine, the community has risen up against the monopolist Live Nation/Ticketmaster's plan to build a 3,300 seat venue that would have destroyed the local music scene, which pulled of a miracle of mutual aid and survived the covid lockdowns and nursed itself back to health. The Maine Music Alliance and its allies won their fight by packing town meetings, circulating petitions, and bollocking their municipal representatives – you know, all the stuff that has totally stopped working at the federal level, but which still moves the needle when it comes to local politics. The Portland/Live Nation victory is a story of a couple thousand everyday people thoroughly trouncing a globe-spanning, rapacious, corporation that grossed seven billion dollars in the last quarter. Moreover, these everyday people beat Live Nation/Ticketmaster at the same moment as the feds were making noises about dropping their antitrust investigation against the company. Where the feds surrender, the people of Portland fight – and win. It's just the latest installment in a series of similar victories, including well-known ones (Queens, NY blocking a giant corporate giveaway to build a new Amazon HQ), and quieter ones, like Tuscon rejecting an Amazon data-center. Localities are fighting the fire-engine cartel (three companies that control fire-engine production and screw cities on new vehicles and maintenance): https://pdfserver.amlaw.com/legalradar/pm-59657794_complaint.pdf For a guy who loves to throw his power around, Trump has a very primitive theory of power. He thinks that illegally shuttering the National Labor Relations Board will put a lid on the generationally unprecedented support for unions among American workers. But the NLRB doesn't exist to make unions possible: unions made the NLRB possible. We have labor law because illegal unions fought so hard and terrified their bosses so much that the capital class had to sue for peace. Firing the referee doesn't end the game – it just means we don't have to play by the rules. Trump has illegally torn up the contracts of a million unionized federal workers. It's "by far the largest single action of union busting in American history": https://prospect.org/labor/2025-09-01-trump-celebrates-labor-day-as-most-anti-union-president/ And the Grinch stole Christmas. So what? The Grinch thought that the ribbons, tags, packages, boxes and bags made the Whos down in Whoville feel all Christmassy. But he had it backwards: the Whos had Christmas in their hearts, which is why they surrounded themselves with the tinsel, the trimmings and the trappings. He attacked the effect, but the cause was left intact. We have a cause. The historic highs in popular support for unions are part of a massive wave of anti-corporate anger. We see it everywhere. It's in juries, which is why corporate lawfirms are panicking at the thought of their clients falling into ordinary peoples' hands: https://pluralistic.net/2025/08/22/jury-nullification/#voir-dire And the reason we're so angry at the oligarchs is that they're so terrible. They've figured out that the only way to keep their billions is to crush democracy and replace it with fascism, which the tech PACs are doing right now, in an open scheme to end elections as means to change society: https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/monopoly-round-up-is-there-a-silicon As Matt Stoller writes, "if the voting booth isn’t a meaningful way to fix problems, people will find other mechanisms to seek redress, using uglier tactics." Which is why every fascist takeover was ultimately defeated by revolution, not elections: https://cmarmitage.substack.com/p/i-researched-every-attempt-to-stop But one place where democracy is still alive and well is at the local levels. Local races are weird and silly and bush-league, but they're also legible to people in a community that state and national elections are not. MAGA figured that out during the Biden years, packing library boards and town councils with insane chuds and culture warriors – but once decent people caught wind of it, we were able to trounce those weirdos in the next election. I love municipal politics. My 2024 solarpunk novel The Lost Cause is all about local politics as a microcosm of – and a base for – global movements to address the climate emergency: https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250865946/thelostcause/ For the past several months, I've been immersed in a seeming contradiction: global, local politics. That's because I have new all-time fave podcast, "No Gods No Mayors": https://www.patreon.com/c/NoGodsNoMayors/posts Every week, the NGNM crew profile a mayor – past, present or future, from all over the world and all through time – and prove, repeatedly, that "mayor" is the highest office to which a true oaf can aspire. NGNM has been an especially important balm for me in these brutal political times, because it scratches my burning need to think about politics, without making me think about the country's terrifying slide into fascism (it helps that Riley Quinn, November Kelly and Mattie Lubchansky, the podcast's hosts, are both infinitely charming and very, very funny). As a confirmed NGNM stan (I've started sleeping with a mayoral sash under my pillow) I am duty-bound to consider municipal politics to be funny and, generally speaking, trivial. But municipalities are also cradles of democracy, and at now that cities are the front line of the fight against Trumpism – from antitrust to militarization of our streets – I feel like my NGNM-imparted encyclopedic mayoral knowledge has prepared me to join the battle. (Image: Onbekend, CC BY-SA 4.0, modified) Hey look at this (permalink) Imgur's Community Is In Full Revolt Against Its Owner https://www.404media.co/imgurs-community-is-in-full-revolt-against-its-owner/ 1965 Cryptanalysis Training Workbook Released by the NSA https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2025/09/1965-cryptanalysis-training-workbook-released-by-the-nsa.html Process knowledge is crucial to economic development https://www.programmablemutter.com/p/process-knowledge-is-crucial-to-economic Object permanence (permalink) #20yrsago PSP’s social/technical merits and demerits https://web.archive.org/web/20050911180235/http://www.guardian.co.uk/online/story/0,,1559853,00.html #20yrsago Video-poker bots collaborate through back-channels https://web.archive.org/web/20050924164125/https://www.wired.com/wired/archive/13.09/pokerbots.html #15yrsago News stories about stupid young people make old people feel good https://web.archive.org/web/20100903144343/http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20100831/od_nm/us_elderly_news #15yrsago Gardener fighting village busybodies for the right to grow tomatoes in her front garden https://web.archive.org/web/20100903171803/http://triblocal.com/Northbrook/detail/214078.html #10yrsago Little Robot: nearly wordless kids’ comic from Zita the Spacegirl creator https://memex.craphound.com/2015/09/01/little-robot-nearly-wordless-kids-comic-from-zita-the-spacegirl-creator/ #5yrsago America's economy is cooked https://pluralistic.net/2020/09/01/cant-pay-wont-pay/#jubilee-now #5yrsago Set My Heart to Five https://pluralistic.net/2020/09/01/cant-pay-wont-pay/#robot-rights #5yrsago Podcasting "How to Destroy Surveillance Capitalism" https://pluralistic.net/2020/09/01/cant-pay-wont-pay/#htdsc Upcoming appearances (permalink) Ithaca: AD White keynote (Cornell), Sep 12 https://deanoffaculty.cornell.edu/events/keynote-cory-doctorow-professor-at-large/ DC: Enshittification at Politics and Prose, Oct 8 https://politics-prose.com/cory-doctorow-10825 NYC: Enshittification with Lina Khan (Brooklyn Public Library), Oct 9 https://www.bklynlibrary.org/calendar/cory-doctorow-discusses-central-library-dweck-20251009-0700pm New Orleans: DeepSouthCon63, Oct 10-12 http://www.contraflowscifi.org/ Chicago: Enshittification with Anand Giridharadas (Chicago Humanities), Oct 15 https://www.oldtownschool.org/concerts/2025/10-15-2025-kara-swisher-and-cory-doctorow-on-enshittification/ San Francisco: Enshittification at Public Works (The Booksmith), Oct 20 https://app.gopassage.com/events/doctorow25 Miami: Enshittification at Books & Books, Nov 5 https://www.eventbrite.com/e/an-evening-with-cory-doctorow-tickets-1504647263469 Recent appearances (permalink) Cory Doctorow DESTROYS Enshittification (QAA Podcast) https://soundcloud.com/qanonanonymous/cory-doctorow-destroys-enshitification-e338 Divesting from Amazon’s Audible and the Fight for Digital Rights (Libro.fm) https://pocketcasts.com/podcasts/9349e8d0-a87f-013a-d8af-0acc26574db2/00e6cbcf-7f27-4589-a11e-93e4ab59c04b The Utopias Podcast https://www.buzzsprout.com/2272465/episodes/17650124 Latest books (permalink) "Picks and Shovels": a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about the heroic era of the PC, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), February 2025 (https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250865908/picksandshovels). "The Bezzle": a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about prison-tech and other grifts, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), February 2024 (the-bezzle.org). "The Lost Cause:" a solarpunk novel of hope in the climate emergency, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), November 2023 (http://lost-cause.org). "The Internet Con": A nonfiction book about interoperability and Big Tech (Verso) September 2023 (http://seizethemeansofcomputation.org). Signed copies at Book Soup (https://www.booksoup.com/book/9781804291245). "Red Team Blues": "A grabby, compulsive thriller that will leave you knowing more about how the world works than you did before." Tor Books http://redteamblues.com. "Chokepoint Capitalism: How to Beat Big Tech, Tame Big Content, and Get Artists Paid, with Rebecca Giblin", on how to unrig the markets for creative labor, Beacon Press/Scribe 2022 https://chokepointcapitalism.com Upcoming books (permalink) "Canny Valley": A limited edition collection of the collages I create for Pluralistic, self-published, September 2025 "Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It," Farrar, Straus, Giroux, October 7 2025 https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374619329/enshittification/ "Unauthorized Bread": a middle-grades graphic novel adapted from my novella about refugees, toasters and DRM, FirstSecond, 2026 "Enshittification, Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It" (the graphic novel), Firstsecond, 2026 "The Memex Method," Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2026 "The Reverse-Centaur's Guide to AI," a short book about being a better AI critic, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2026 Colophon (permalink) Today's top sources: Currently writing: "The Reverse Centaur's Guide to AI," a short book for Farrar, Straus and Giroux about being an effective AI critic. (1022 words yesterday, 11212 words total). A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING This work – excluding any serialized fiction – is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license. That means you can use it any way you like, including commercially, provided that you attribute it to me, Cory Doctorow, and include a link to pluralistic.net. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ Quotations and images are not included in this license; they are included either under a limitation or exception to copyright, or on the basis of a separate license. Please exercise caution. 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You further represent that you have the authority to release me from any BOGUS AGREEMENTS on behalf of your employer. ISSN: 3066-764X

And Denying That Has Corroded Public Discourse

August 29, 2025.