And Denying That Has Corroded Public Discourse

Today's links A weekend's worth of links: Short hits for a long weekend. Object permanence: Floppy disk CD sleeves; Rules for radicals; California's preventable fires; Muppet Haunted Mansion; Wells Fargo steals rescued Nazi loot; Texas abortion release. 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. A weekend's worth of links (permalink) Did you know that it's possible to cut a hole in any cube such that an identical cube can fit inside it? Really! It's called "Rupert's Property." Further, all Platonic solids are Rupert! Except one, newly discovered shape, which cannot fit inside itself. What is this eldritch polygon called? A Nopeterhedron! https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.18475 "Nopeterhedron" is the best coinage I've heard in months, which makes it a natural to open this week's linkdump, a collection of the links that piled up this week without making it into my newsletter. This is my 33d Saturday linkdump – here's the previous 31 editions: https://pluralistic.net/tag/linkdump/ Speaking of eldritch geometry? Perhaps you've heard that Donald Trump plans to add a 90,000 sqft ballroom to the (55,000 sqft) White House. As Kate "McMansion Hell" Wagner writes for The Nation, this is a totally bullshit story floated by Trump and a notorious reactionary starchitect, and to call it a "plan" is to do unforgiveable violence to the noble art of planning: https://www.thenation.com/article/culture/white-house-ballroom-mccrery-postmodernism/ Wagner is both my favorite architecture critic and the only architecture critic I read. That's because she's every bit as talented a writer as she is a perspicacious architecture critic. What's more, she's a versatile writer. She doesn't just write these sober-but-scathing, erudite pieces for The Nation; she has, for many years, invented the genre of snarky Zillow annotations, which are convulsively funny and trenchant: https://mcmansionhell.com/ At the Electronic Frontier Foundation, we often find ourselves at the center of in big political legal fights; for example, we were the first group to sue Musk and DOGE: https://www.eff.org/press/releases/eff-sues-opm-doge-and-musk-endangering-privacy-millions Knowing that I'm part of this stuff helps me get through tough times – but I'm also so glad that we get to step in and defend brilliant writers like Wagner, as we did a few years ago, when Zillow tried to use legal bullying tactics to make her stop being mean to their shitty houses: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2017/06/mcmansion-hell-responds-zillows-unfounded-legal-claims If this kind of stuff excites you as much as it excites me and you're in the Bay Area, get thee to the EFF Awards (or tune into the livestream) and watch us honor this year's winners: Just Futures Law, Erie Meyer, and the Software Freedom Law Center, India: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2025/08/join-your-fellow-digital-rights-supporters-eff-awards-september-10 So much of the activity that EFF defends involves writing. The web was written into existence, after all, both by the coders who hacked it together and the writers who filled it up. I've always wanted to be a writer, since I was six years old, and I'm so lucky to have grown up through an era is which the significance of the written word has continuously expanded. I was equally lucky to have writing teachers who permanently, profoundly shaped my relationship with the written word. I've had many of those, but none were so foundational as Harriet Wolff, the longest-serving English teacher at Toronto's first alternative school, SEED School, whence I graduated after a mere seven years of instruction. Harriet was a big part of why I spent seven years getting a four year diploma. She was such a brilliant English teacher, and presided over such an excellent writing workshop, that I felt like I still had so much to learn from high school, even after I'd amassed enough credits to graduate, so I just stuck around. Harriet died this summer: https://obituaries.thestar.com/obituary/harriet-wolff-1093038534 We hadn't spoken much over the past decade, though she did come to my wedding and was every bit as charming and wonderful as I'd remembered her. Despite not having spoken to her in many years, hardly a day went by without my thinking of her and the many lessons she imparted to me. Harriet took a very broad view of what could be good writing. Though she wasn't much of a science fiction fan, she always took my sf stories seriously – as seriously as she took the more "literary" fiction and poetry submitted by my peers. She kept a filing cabinet full of mimeographs and photocopies, each excellent examples of various forms of writing. Over the years, she handed me everything from Joan Didion essays to especially sharp op-eds from Time Magazine, along with tons of fiction. Harriet taught me how to criticize fiction, as a means of improving my understand of what I was doing with my writing, and as a way of exposing other writers to new ways of squeezing their own big, numinous, irreducible feelings out of their fingertips and out onto the page. She was the first person I called when I sold my first story, at 17, and I still remember standing on the lawn of my parents' house, cordless phone in one hand and acceptance letter in the other, and basking in her approval. Harriet was a tough critiquer. Like many of the writers in her workshop, I had what you might call "glibness privilege" – a facility with words that I could use to paper over poor characterization or plotting. Whenever I'd do this, she'd fix me with her stare and say, "Cory, this is merely clever." I have used that phrase countless times – both in relation to my own work and into the work of my students. Though Harriet was unsparing in her critiques, they never stung, because she always treated the writers in her workshop as her peers in a lifelong journey to improve our craft. She'd come out for cigarettes with us, and she came to every house party I invited her to, bringing a good, inexpensive bottle of wine and finding a sofa to sit on and discuss writing an literature. She invited me to Christmas dinner one year when I was alone for the holidays and introduced me to Yorkshire pudding, still one of my favorite dishes (though none has ever matched the pleasure of eating that first one from her oven). Harriet apparently told her family that she didn't want a memorial, though from emails with her former students, I know that there might end up being something planned in Toronto. After all, memorials are for the living as much as for the dead. It's unlikely I'll be home for that one, but of course, the best way to memorialize Harriet is in writing. For Harriet, writing was a big, big church, and every kind of writing was worth serious attention. I always thought of the web as a very Wolffian innovation, because it exposed so many kinds of audiences to so many kinds of writers. There's Kate Wagner's acerbic Zillow annotations, of course, but also so much more. One of the web writers I've followed since the start is Kevin Kelly, who went from The Whole Earth Review to serving as Wired's first executive editor. Over the years, Kevin has blazed new trails for those of us who write in public, publishing many seminal pieces online. But Kevin was and is a print guy, who has blazed new trails in self-publishing, producing books that are both brilliant and beautifully wrought artifacts, like his giant, three-volume set of photos of "Vanishing Asia": https://vanishing.asia/the-making-of-vanishing-asia/ This week, Kelly published one of his famous soup-to-nuts guides to a subject: "Everything I Know about Self-Publishing": https://kk.org/thetechnium/everything-i-know-about-self-publishing/ It's a long, thoughtful, and extremely practical guide that is full of advice on everything from printing to promo. I've self-published several volumes, and I learned a lot. One very important writer who's trying something new this summer – to wonderful effect – is Hilary J Allen, a business law professor at American University. During the first cryptocurrency bubble, Allen wrote some of the sharpest critiques of fintech, dubbing it "Shadow Banking 2.0": https://pluralistic.net/2022/03/02/shadow-banking-2-point-oh/#leverage Allen also coined the term "driverless finance," a devastatingly apt description of the crypto bro's desire for a financial system with no governance, which she expounded upon in a critical book: https://driverlessfinancebook.com/ This summer, Allen has serialized "FinTech Dystopia," which she called "A summer beach read about Silicon Valley ruining things." Chapter 9 dropped this week, "Let’s Get Skeptical": https://fintechdystopia.com/chapters/chapter9.html It's a tremendous read, and while it mostly concerns itself with summarizing her arguments against the claims of fintech boosters, there's an absolutely jaw-dropped section on Neom, the doomed Saudi megaproject to build a massive "linear city" in the desert: More than 21,000 workers (primarily from India, Bangladesh, and Nepal) are reported to have died working on NEOM and related projects in Saudi Arabia since 2017, with more than 20,000 indigenous people reported to have been forcibly displaced to make room for the development. Allen offers these statistics as part of her critique of the "Abundance agenda," which focuses on overregulation as the main impediment to a better world. Like Allen, I'm not afraid to criticize bad regulation, but also like Allen, I'm keenly aware of the terrible harms that arise out of a totally unregulated system. The same goes for technology, of course. There's plenty of ways to use technology that is harmful, wasteful and/or cruel, but that isn't a brief against technology itself There are many ways that technology has been used (and can be used) to make things better. One of the pioneers of technology for good is Jim Fruchterman, founder of the venerable tech nonprofit Benetech, for which he was awarded a Macarthur "Genius" award. Fruchterman has just published his first book, with MIT Press, in which he sums up a lifetime's experience in finding ways to improve the world with technology. Appropriately enough, it's called Technology For Good: https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262050975/technology-for-good/ After all, technology is so marvelously flexible that there's always a countertechnology, for every abusive tech. Every 10-foot digital wall implies an 11-foot digital ladder. Last month, I wrote about Echelon, a company that makes digitally connected exercise bikes, who had pushed a mandatory update to their customers' bikes that took away functionality they got for free and sold it back to them in inferior form: https://pluralistic.net/2025/07/26/manifolds/#bark-chicken-bark Repair hero Louis Rossman – who is running a new, direct action right to repair group named Fulu – offered a $20,000 bounty to anyone who could crack the firmware on an Echelon bike and create a disenshittified software stack that restored the original functionality: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2zayHD4kfcA In short order, app engineer Ricky Witherspoon, had cracked it, and had a way to continue to use SyncSpin, his popular app for Echelon bikes, which had been shut out by Echelon's enshittification. However, as Witherspoon told 404 Media's Jason Koebler, he won't release his code, not even for a $20,000 bounty, because doing so would make him liable to a $500,000 fine, and a five-year prison sentence, under Section 1201 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act: https://www.404media.co/developer-unlocks-newly-enshittified-echelon-exercise-bikes-but-cant-legally-release-his-software/ Fulu paid Witherspoon anyway (they're good eggs). Witherspoon told Koebler: For now it’s just about spreading awareness that this is possible, and that there’s another example of egregious behavior from a company like this […] if one day releasing this was made legal, I would absolutely open source this. I can legally talk about how I did this to a certain degree, and if someone else wants to do this, they can open source it if they want to. Free/open source software is a powerful tonic against enshittification, and it has the alchemical property of transforming the products of bad companies into good utilities that everyone benefits from. One example of this is Whisper, an open source audio transcription model released by Openai. Since Whisper's release, free software hackers have made steady – even remarkable – improvements to it. I discovered Whisper earlier this summer, when I couldn't locate a quote I'd heard on a recent podcast that I wanted to reference in a column. I installed Whisper on my laptop and fed it the last 30+ hours' worth of podcasts I'd listened to. An hour later, it had fully transcribed all of them, with timecode, and had put so little load on my laptop that the fan didn't even turn on. I was able to search all that text, locate the quote, and use the timecode to find the clip and check the transcription. Whisper has turned extremely accurate transcription into a utility, something that can just be added to any program or operating system for free. I think this is going to be quietly revolutionary, bringing full-text search and captioning to audio and video as something we can just take for granted. That's already happening! FFMpeg is the gold-standard free software tool for converting, encoding and re-encoding video, and now the latest version integrates Whisper, allowing FFMpeg to subtitle your videos on the fly: https://www.theregister.com/2025/08/28/ffmpeg_8_huffman/ Whisper is an example of the "residue" that will be left behind when the AI bubble pops. All bubbles pop, after all, but not all bubbles leave behind a useful residue. When crypto dies, its residue will be a few programmers who've developed secure coding habits in Rust, but besides that, all that will be left behind is terrible Austrian economics and worse monkey JPEGs: https://pluralistic.net/2023/12/19/bubblenomics/#pop But the free/open source code generated by stupid and/or evil projects often lives on long after those projects are forgotten. And lots (most) of free/open code is written for good purposes. Take Madeline, a platform for tracking loans made by co-operatives, produced by the Seed Commons, which is now used by financial co-ops around the world, as they make "non-extractive investments in worker and community-owned businesses on the ground": https://seedcommons.org/posts/digital-infrastructure-for-a-non-extractive-economy-the-story-of-madeline Madeline (and Seed Commons) are one of those bright lights that are easy to miss in these brutal and terrifying times. And if that's not enough, there's always booze. If you're thinking of drowning your sorrows, you could do worse than to pour your brown liquor out of a decanter shaped like a giant Atari CX-10 joystick: https://atari.com/products/atari-joystick-decanter-set That's the kind of brand necrophilia that could really enhance a night's drinking. Object permanence (permalink) #20yrago 5.25″ floppies make great CD sleeves https://web.archive.org/web/20050924144644/http://www.readymademag.com/feature_18_monkey.php #20yrsago Hollywood can break down any door in Delhi https://web.archive.org/web/20050903065949/https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/archives/003943.php #20yrsago Side-band attack tips virtual Blackjack dealer’s hand https://web.archive.org/web/20051119111417/https://haacked.com/archive/2005/08/29/9748.aspx #20yrsago Judge to RIAA: Keep your “conference center” out of my court https://web.archive.org/web/20051001031307/http://www.godwinslaw.org/weblog/archive/2005/08/29/runaround-suits #15yrsago Which ebook sellers will allow publishers and writers to opt out of DRM? https://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/columns-and-blogs/cory-doctorow/article/44012-doctorow-s-first-law.html #15yrsago 10 Rules for Radicals: Lessons from rogue archivist Carl Malamud https://public.resource.org/rules/ #15yrsago Homeowners’ associations: hives of petty authoritarianism https://web.archive.org/web/20100606170504/http://theweek.com/article/index/104150/top-7-insane-homeowners-association-rules #15yrsago Lynd Ward’s wordless, Depression-era woodcut novels https://memex.craphound.com/2010/08/29/lynd-wards-wordless-depression-era-woodcut-novels/#5yrsago #10yrago Suit: Wells Fargo sent contractors to break into our house, loot family treasures rescued from Nazis https://theintercept.com/2015/08/28/wells-fargo-contractors-stole-family-heirlooms/ #10yrsago Texas doctor’s consent form for women seeking abortions https://memex.craphound.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/09/3kscWU5-2-scaled.jpg #10yrsago Spear phishers with suspected ties to Russian government spoof fake EFF domain, attack White House https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2015/08/new-spear-phishing-campaign-pretends-be-eff #10yrsago Rowlf the dog gives a dramatic reading of “Grim Grinning Ghosts.” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CPMTEJ_IAAU #5yrsago California's preventable fires https://pluralistic.net/2020/08/29/chickenized-home-to-roost/#cal-burning 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. (747 words yesterday, 46239 words total). FIRST DRAFT COMPLETE 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

August 29, 2025.

From GPT-5 to nano banana: everyone is getting access to powerful AI

Today's links The capitalism of fools: Trump's mirror-world New Deal. Hey look at this: Delights to delectate. Object permanence: IBM's fabric design; Nixon Cthulu; Surveillance capitalism is capitalism, with surveillance; Dismaland ad; Outdoor ed vs TB; Mathematicians' fave chalk. 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 capitalism of fools (permalink) As Trump rails against free trade, demands public ownership stakes in corporations that receive government funds, and (selectively) enforces antitrust law, some (stupid) people are wondering, "Is Trump a communist?" In The American Prospect, David Dayen writes about the strange case of Trump's policies, which fly in the face of right wing economic orthodoxy and have the superficial trappings of a leftist economic program: https://prospect.org/economy/2025-08-28-judge-actually-existing-trump-economy/ The problem isn't that tariffs are always bad, nor is it that demanding state ownership stakes in structurally important companies that depend on public funds is bad policy. The problem is that Trump's version of these policies sucks, because everything Trump touches dies, and because he governs solely on vibes, half-remembered wisdom imparted by the last person who spoke to him, and the dying phantoms of old memories as they vanish beneath a thick bark of amyloid plaque. Take Trump's demand for a 10% stake in Intel (a course of action endorsed by no less than Bernie Sanders). Intel is a company in trouble, whose financialization has left it dependent on other companies (notably TMSC) to make its most advanced chips. The company has hollowed itself out, jettisoning both manufacturing capacity and cash reserves, pissing away the funds thus freed up on stock buybacks and dividends. Handing Trump a 10% "golden share" does nothing to improve Intel's serious structural problems. And if you take Trump at his word and accept that securing US access to advanced chips is a national security priority, Trump's Intel plan does nothing to advance that access. But it gets worse: Trump also says denying China access to these chips is a national security priority, but he greenlit Nvidia's plan to sell its top-of-the-range silicon to China in exchange for a gaudy statuette and a 15% export tax. It's possible to pursue chip manufacturing as a matter of national industrial policy, and it's even possible to achieve this goal by taking ownership stakes in key firms – because it's often easier to demand corporate change via a board seat than it is to win the court battles needed to successfully invoke the Defense Production Act. The problem is that Trumpland is uninterested in making any of that happen. They just want a smash and grab and some red meat for the base: "Look, we made Intel squeal!" Then there's the Trump tariffs. Writing in Vox EU, Lausanne prof of international business Richard Baldwin writes about the long and checkered history of using tariffs to incubate and nurture domestic production: https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2025/08/trumpian-tariffs-rerun-the-failed-strategy-of-import-substitution-industrialization.html The theory of tariffs goes like this: if we make imports more expensive by imposing a tax on them (tariffs are taxes that are paid by consumers, after all), then domestic manufacturers will build factories and start manufacturing the foreign goods we've just raised prices on. This is called "import substitution," and it really has worked, but only in a few cases. What do those cases have in common? They were part of a comprehensive program of "export discipline, state-directed credit, and careful government–business coordination": https://academic.oup.com/book/10201 In other words, tariffs only work to reshore production where there is a lot of careful planning, diligent data-collection, and review. Governments have to provide credit to key firms to get them capitalized, provide incentives, and smack nonperformers around. Basically, this is the stuff that Biden did for renewables with the energy sector, and – to a lesser extent – for silicon with the CHIPS Act. Trump's not doing any of that. He's just winging it. There's zero follow-through. It's all about appearances, soundbites, and the libidinal satisfaction of watching corporate titans bend the knee to your cult leader. This is also how Trump approaches antitrust. When it comes to corporate power, both Trump and Biden's antitrust enforcers are able to strike terror into the hearts of corporate behemoths. The difference is that the Biden administration prioritized monopolists based on how harmful they were to the American people and the American economy, whereas Trump's trustbusters target companies based on whether Trump is mad at them: https://pluralistic.net/2024/11/12/the-enemy-of-your-enemy/#is-your-enemy What's more, any company willing to hand a million or two to a top Trump enforcer can just walk away from the charges: https://prospect.org/power/2025-08-19-doj-insider-blows-whistle-pay-to-play-antitrust-corruption/ In her 2023 book Doppelganger, Naomi Klein introduces the idea of a right-wing "mirror world" that offers a conspiratorial, unhinged version of actual problems that leftists wrestle with: https://pluralistic.net/2023/09/05/not-that-naomi/#if-the-naomi-be-klein-youre-doing-just-fine For example, the antivax movement claims that pharma companies operate on the basis of unchecked greed, without regard to the harm their defective products cause to everyday people. When they talk about this, they sound an awful like leftists who are angry that the Sacklers killed a million Americans with their opiods and then walked away with billions of dollars: https://pluralistic.net/2023/12/05/third-party-nonconsensual-releases/#au-recherche-du-pedos-perdue Then there are the conspiracy theories about voting machines. Progressives have been sounding the alarm about the security defects in voting machine since the Bush v Gore years, but that doesn't mean that Venezuelan hackers stole the 2020 election for Biden: https://pluralistic.net/2021/01/11/seeing-things/#ess When anti-15-minute-city weirdos warn that automated license-plate cameras are a gift to tyrants both petty and gross, they are repeating a warning that leftists have sounded since the Patriot Act: https://locusmag.com/2023/05/commentary-cory-doctorow-the-swivel-eyed-loons-have-a-point/ The mirror-world is a world where real problems (the rampant sexual abuse of children by powerful people and authortiy figures) are met with fake solutions (shooting up pizza parlors and transferring Ghislaine Maxwell to a country-club prison): https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/czd049y2qymo Most of the people stuck in the mirror world are poor and powerless, because desperation makes you an easy mark for grifters peddling conspiracy theories. But Trump's policies on corporate power are what happens in the mirror world inhabited by the rich and powerful. Trump is risking the economic future of every person in America (except a few cronies), but that's not the only risk here. There's also the risk that reasonable people will come to view industrial policy, government stakes in publicly supported companies, and antitrust as reckless showboating, a tactic exclusively belonging to right wing nutjobs and would-be dictators. Sociologists have a name for this: they call it "schismogenesis," when a group defines itself in opposition to its rivals. Schismogenesis is progressives insisting that voting machines and pharma companies are trustworthy and that James Comey is a resistance hero: https://pluralistic.net/2021/12/18/schizmogenesis/ After we get rid of Trump, America will be in tatters. We're going to need big, muscular state action to revive the nation and rebuild its economy. We can't afford to let Trump poison the well for the very idea of state intervention in corporate activity. Hey look at this (permalink) Thinking Ahead to the Full Military Takeover of Cities https://www.hamiltonnolan.com/p/thinking-ahead-to-the-full-military Framework is working on a giant haptic touchpad, Trackpoint nub, and eGPU for its laptops https://www.theverge.com/news/766161/framework-egpu-haptic-touchpad-trackpoint-nub National says "fuck you" on the right to repair https://norightturn.blogspot.com/2025/08/national-says-fuck-you-on-right-to.html?m=1 Tax the Rich. They’ll Stay https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/political-commentary/zohran-mamdani-tax-rich-new-york-city-1235414327/ Welcome to the Free Online Tax Preparation Feedback Survey https://irsresearch.gov1.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_ewDJ6DeBj3ockGa Object permanence (permalink) #20yrsago Cops have to pay $41k for stopping man from videoing them https://web.archive.org/web/20050905015507/http://www.paed.uscourts.gov/documents/opinions/05D0847P.pdf #20yrsago Commercial music in podcasts: the end of free expression? https://memex.craphound.com/2005/08/26/commercial-music-in-podcasts-the-end-of-free-expression/ #10yrsago North Dakota cops can now use lobbyist-approved taser/pepper-spray drones https://www.thedailybeast.com/first-state-legalizes-taser-drones-for-cops-thanks-to-a-lobbyist/ #10yrsago Illinois mayor appoints failed censor to town library board https://ncac.org/news/blog/mayor-appoints-would-be-censor-to-library-board #10yrsago IBM’s lost, glorious fabric design https://collection.cooperhewitt.org/users/mepelman/visits/qtxg/87597377/ #10yrsago Former mayor of SLC suing NSA for warrantless Olympic surveillance https://www.techdirt.com/2015/08/26/prominent-salt-lake-city-residents-sue-nsa-over-mass-warrantless-surveillance-during-2002-olympics/ #10yrsago Health’s unkillable urban legend: “You must drink 8 glasses of water/day” https://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/25/upshot/no-you-do-not-have-to-drink-8-glasses-of-water-a-day.html?_r=0 #10yrsago Austin Grossman’s CROOKED: the awful, cthulhoid truth about Richard Nixon https://memex.craphound.com/2015/08/26/austin-grossmans-crooked-the-awful-cthulhoid-truth-about-richard-nixon/ #10yrsago After Katrina, FBI prioritized cellphone surveillance https://www.muckrock.com/news/archives/2015/aug/27/stingray-katrina/ #10yrsago Germany’s spy agency gave the NSA the private data of German citizens in exchange for Xkeyscore access https://www.zeit.de/digital/datenschutz/2015-08/xkeyscore-nsa-domestic-intelligence-agency #10yrsago Elaborate spear-phishing attempt against global Iranian and free speech activists, including an EFF staffer https://citizenlab.ca/2015/08/iran_two_factor_phishing/ #10yrsago Commercial for Banksy’s Dismaland https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V2NG-MgHqEk #5yrsago Outdoor education beat TB in 1907 https://pluralistic.net/2020/08/27/cult-chalk/#tb #5yrsago Hagoromo, mathematicians' cult chalk https://pluralistic.net/2020/08/27/cult-chalk/#hagoromo #5yrsago Principles for platform regulation https://pluralistic.net/2020/08/27/cult-chalk/#eff-eu #5yrsago It's blursday https://pluralistic.net/2020/08/26/destroy-surveillance-capitalism/#blursday #5yrsago Surveillance Capitalism is just capitalism, plus surveillance https://pluralistic.net/2020/08/26/destroy-surveillance-capitalism/#surveillance-monopolism 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. (1090 words yesterday, 45491 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