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. 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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

Today's links By all means, tread on those people: We know you love freedom, we just wish you'd share. Hey look at this: Delights to delectate. Object permanence: The right to bear cameras; GOP wants slavery for undocumented migrants; Telepresence Nazi-punching. 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. By all means, tread on those people (permalink) Just as Martin Niemöller's "First They Came" has become our framework for understanding the rise of fascism in Nazi Germany, so, too is Wilhoit's Law the best way to understand America's decline into fascism: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_They_Came In case you're not familiar with Frank Wilhoit's amazing law, here it is: Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition, to wit: There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect. https://crookedtimber.org/2018/03/21/liberals-against-progressives/#comment-729288 The thing that makes Wilhoit's Law so apt to this moment – and to our understanding of the recent history that produced this moment – is how it connects the petty with the terrifying, the trivial with the radical, the micro with the macro. It's a way to join the dots between fascists' business dealings, their interpersonal relationships, and their political views. It describes a continuum that ranges from minor commercial grifts to martial law, and shows how tolerance for the former creates the conditions for the latter. The gross ways in which Wilhoit's Law applies are easy to understand. The dollar value of corporate wage-theft far outstrips the total dollars lost to all other forms of property crime, and yet there is virtually no enforcement against bosses who steal their workers' paychecks, while petty property crimes can result in long prison sentences (depending on your skin color and/or bank balance): https://www.opportunityinstitute.org/blog/post/organized-retail-theft-wage-theft/ Elon Musk values "free speech" and insists on his right to brand innocent people as "pedos," but he also wants the courts to destroy organizations that publish their opinions about his shitty business practices: https://www.mediamatters.org/elon-musk Fascists turn crybaby when they're imprisoned for attempting a murderous coup, but buy merch celebrating the construction of domestic concentration camps where people are locked up without trial: https://officialalligatoralcatraz.com/shop That stuff is all easy to see, but I want to draw a line between these gross violations of Wilhoit's Law and pettier practices that have been creating the conditions for the present day Wilhoit Dystopia. Take terms of service. The Federalist Society – whose law library could save a lot of space by throwing away all its books and replacing them with a framed copy of Wilhoit's Law – has long held that merely glancing at a web-page or traversing the doorway of a shop is all it takes for you to enter into a "contract" by which you surrender all of your rights. Every major corporation – and many smaller ones – now routinely seek to bind both workers and customers to garbage-novellas of onerous, unreadable legal conditions. If we accept that this is how contracts work, then this should be perfectly valid, right? By reading these words, 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. This indemnity will survive the termination of your relationship with your employer. I mean, why not? What principle – other than "in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect" – makes terms of service valid, and this invalid? Then there's binding arbitration. Corporations routinely bind their workers and customers to terms that force them to surrender their right to sue, no matter how badly they are injured through malice or gross negligence. This practice used to be illegal, until Antonin Scalia opened the hellmouth and unleashed binding arbitration on the world: https://brooklynworks.brooklaw.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1443&&context=blr There's a pretty clever hack around binding arbitration: mass arbitration, whereby lots of wronged people coordinate to file claims, which can cost a dirty corporation more than a plain old class-action suit: https://pluralistic.net/2021/06/02/arbitrary-arbitration/#petard Of course, Wilhoit's Law provides corporations with a way around this: they can reserve the right not to arbitrate and to force you into a class action suit if that's advantageous to them: 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 Heads they win, tails you lose. Or take the nature of property rights themselves. Conservatives say they revere property rights above all else, claiming that every other human right stems from the vigorous enforcement of property relations. What is private property? For that, we turn to the key grifter thinkfluencer Sir William Blackstone, and his 1768 "Commentaries on the Laws of England": That sole and despotic dominion which one man claims and exercises over the external things of the world, in total exclusion of the right of any other individual in the universe. https://oll.libertyfund.org/pages/blackstone-on-property-1753 Corporations love the idea of their property rights, but they're not so keen on your property rights. Think of the practice of locking down digital devices – from phones to cars to tractors – so that they can't be repaired by third parties, use generic ink or parts, or load third-party apps except via an "app store": https://memex.craphound.com/2012/01/10/lockdown-the-coming-war-on-general-purpose-computing/ A device you own, but can only use in ways that its manufacturer approves of, sure doesn't sound like "sole and despotic dominion" to me. Some corporations (and their weird apologists) like to claim that, by buying their product, you've agreed not to use it except in ways that benefit their shareholders, even when that is to your own detriment: https://pluralistic.net/2024/01/12/youre-holding-it-wrong/#if-dishwashers-were-iphones Apple will say, "We've been selling iPhones for nearly 20 years now. It can't possibly come as a surprise to you that you're not allowed to install apps that we haven't approved. If that's important to you, you shouldn't have bought an iPhone." But the obvious rejoinder to this is, "People have been given sole and despotic dominion over the things they purchased since time immemorial. If the thought of your customers using their property in ways that displease you causes you to become emotionally disregulated, perhaps you shouldn't have gotten into the manufacturing business." But as indefensibly wilhoitian as Apple's behavior might be, Google has just achieved new depths of wilhoitian depravity, with a rule that says that starting soon, you will no longer be able to install apps of your choosing on your Android device unless Google first approves of them: https://9to5google.com/2025/08/25/android-apps-developer-verification/ Like Apple, Google says that this is to prevent you from accidentally installing malicious software. Like Apple, Google does put a lot of effort into preventing its customers from being remotely attacked. And, like Apple, Google will not protect you from itself: https://pluralistic.net/2023/02/05/battery-vampire/#drained When it comes to vetoing your decisions about which programs your Android device can run, Google has an irreconcilable conflict of interest. Google, after all, is a thrice-convicted monopolist who have an interest in blocking you from installing programs that interfere with its profits, under the pretense of preventing you from coming to harm. And – like Apple – Google has a track record of selling its users out to oppressive governments. Apple blocked all working privacy tools for its Chinese users at the behest of the Chinese government, while Google secretly planned to release a version of its search engine that would enforce Chinese censorship edicts and help the Chinese government spy on its people: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dragonfly_(search_engine) Google's CEO Sundar Pichai, personally gave one million dollars to Donald Trump for a seat on the dais at this year's inauguration (so did Apple CEO Tim Cook). Both men are in a position to help the self-described dictator make good on his promise to spy on and arrest Americans who disagree with his totalitarian edicts. All of this makes Google's announcement extraordinarily reckless, but also very, very wilhoitian. After all, Google jealously guards its property rights from you, but insists that your property rights need to be subordinated to its corporate priorities: "in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect." We can see this at work in the way that Google treats open source software and free software. Google's software is "open source" – for us. We have the right to look at the code and do free work for Google to identify and fix bugs in the code. But only Google gets a say in how that code is deployed on its cloud servers. They have software freedom, while we merely have software transparency: https://pluralistic.net/2025/07/14/pole-star/#gnus-not-utilitarian Big companies love to both assert their own property rights while denying you yours. Take the music industry: they are required to pay different royalties to musicians depending on whether they're "selling" music, or "licensing" music. Sales pay a fraction of the royalties of a licensing deal, so it's far better for musicians when their label licenses their music than when they sell it. When you or I click the "buy" button in an online music store, we are confronted with a "licensing agreement," that limits what we may do with our digital purchase. Things that you get automatically when you buy music in physical form – on a CD, say – are withheld through these agreements. You can't re-sell your digital purchases as used goods. You can't give them away. You can't lend them out. You can't divide them up in a divorce. You can't leave them to your kids in your will. It's not a sale, so the file isn't your property. But when the label accounts for that licensing deal to a musician, the transaction is booked as a sale, which entitles the creative worker to a fraction of the royalties that they'd get from a license. Somehow, digital media exists in quantum superposition: it is a licensing deal when we click the buy button, but it is a sale when it shows up on a royalty statement. It's Schroedinger's download: https://pluralistic.net/2022/06/21/early-adopters/#heads-i-win Now, a class action suit against Amazon over this very issue has been given leave to progress to trial: https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/business/business-news/prime-video-lawsuit-movie-license-ownership-1236353127/ The plaintiffs insist that because Amazon showed them a button that said, "Buy this video" but then slapped it with licensing conditions that take away all kinds of rights (Amazon can even remotely delete your videos after you "buy" them) that they have been ripped off in a bait-and-switch. Amazon's defense is amazing. They've done what any ill-prepared fifth grader would do when called on the carpet; they quoted Webster's: Quoting Webster’s Dictionary, it said that the term means “rights to the use or services of payment” rather than perpetual ownership and that its disclosures properly warn people that they may lose access. People are increasingly pissed off with this bullshit, whereby things that you "buy" are not yours, and your access to them can be terminated at any time. The Stop Killing Games campaign is pushing for the rights of gamers to own the games they buy forever, even if the company decides to shut down its servers: https://www.stopkillinggames.com/ I've been pissed off about this bullshit since forever. It's one of the main reasons I convinced my publishers to let me sell my own ebooks and audiobooks, out of my own digital storefront. All of those books are sold, not licensed, and come without any terms or conditions: https://craphound.com/shop/ The ability to change the terms after the sale is a major source of enshittification. I call it the "Darth Vader MBA," as in "I am altering the deal. Pray I do not alter it any further": https://pluralistic.net/2023/10/26/hit-with-a-brick/#graceful-failure Naturally the ebooks and audiobooks in the Kickstarter for pre-sales of my next book, Enshittification are also sold without any terms and conditions: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/doctorow/enshittification-the-drm-free-audiobook/ Look, I don't think that personal consumption choices can fix systemic problems. You're not going to fix enshittification – let alone tyranny – by shopping, even if you're very careful: https://pluralistic.net/2025/07/31/unsatisfying-answers/#systemic-problems But that doesn't mean that there isn't a connection between the unfair bullshit that monopolies cram down our throat and the rise of fascism. It's not just that the worst enshittifiers also the biggest Trump donors, it's that Wilhoit's Law powers enshittification. Wiloitism is shot through the Maga movement. The Flu Klux Klan wants to ban you from wearing a mask for health reasons, but they will defend to the death the right of ICE brownshirts to run around in gaiters and Oakleys as they kidnap our neighbors off the streets. Conservative bedwetters will donate six figures to a Givesendgo set up by some crybaby with a viral Rumble video about getting 86'ed from a restaurant for wearing a Maga hat, but they literally want to imprison trans people for wearing clothes that don't conform to their assigned-at-birth genders. They'll piss and moan about being "canceled" because of hecklers at the speeches they give for the campus chapter of the Hitler Youth, but they experience life-threatening priapism when students who object to the Israeli genocide of Palestinians are expelled, arrested and deported. Then there's their abortion policies, which hold that personhood begins at conception, but ends at birth, and can only be re-established by forming an LLC. It's "in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect" all the way down. I'm not saying that bullshit terms of service, wage theft, binding arbitration gotchas, or victim complexes about your kids going no-contact because you won't shut the fuck up about "the illegals" at Thanksgiving are the same as the actual fascist dictatorship being born around us right now or the genocide taking place in Gaza. But I am saying that they come from the same place. The ideology of "in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect" underpins the whole ugly mess. After we defeat these fucking fascists, after the next installment of the Nuremburg trials, after these eichmenn and eichwomenn get their turns in the dock, we're going to have to figure out how to keep them firmly stuck to the scrapheap of history. For this, I propose a form of broken windows policing; zero-tolerance for any activity or conduct that implies that there are "in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect." We should treat every attempt to pull any of these scams as an inch (or a yard, or a mile) down the road to fascist collapse. We shouldn't suffer practitioners of this ideology to be in our company, to run our institutions, or to work alongside of us. We should recognize them for the monsters they are. Hey look at this (permalink) Citizen Is Using AI to Generate Crime Alerts With No Human Review. It’s Making a Lot of Mistakes https://www.404media.co/citizen-is-using-ai-to-generate-crime-alerts-with-no-human-review-its-making-a-lot-of-mistakes/ How To Argue With An AI Booster https://www.wheresyoured.at/how-to-argue-with-an-ai-booster/ We must fight age verification with all we have https://www.usermag.co/p/we-must-fight-age-verification-with Sqinks: A Transreal Cyberpunk Love Story https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/rudyrucker/sqinks LibreOffice 25.8: a Strategic Asset for Governments and Enterprises Focused on Digital Sovereignty and Privacy https://blog.documentfoundation.org/blog/2025/08/25/libreoffice-25-8-backgrounder/ Object permanence (permalink) #20yrsago Oakland sheriffs detain people for carrying cameras https://thomashawk.com/2005/08/right-to-bear-cameras.html #10yrsago New Zealand gov’t promises secret courts for accused terrorists https://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/attorney-general-says-law-society-got-it-wrong-over-secret-courts/E5JHYBTMVSIBZ62UNGEWB4DPEA/?c_id=1&objectid=11503094 #10yrsago Platform Cooperativism: a worker-owned Uber for everything https://platformcoop.net/ #10yrsago GOP “kingmaker” proposes enslavement as an answer to undocumented migrants https://www.thedailybeast.com/iowa-gop-kingmaker-has-a-slavery-proposal-for-immigration/ #10yrsago Six years after unprovoked beating, Denver cop finally fired https://kdvr.com/news/video-evidence-determined-fate-of-denver-officer-in-excessive-force-dispute-fired-after-6-years/ #10yrsago Samsung fridges can leak your Gmail logins https://web.archive.org/web/20150825014450/https://www.pentestpartners.com/blog/hacking-defcon-23s-iot-village-samsung-fridge/ #10yrsago German student ditches apartment, buys an unlimited train pass https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2015/08/22/how-one-german-millennial-chose-to-live-on-trains-rather-than-pay-rent/ #10yrsago Ashley Madison’s founding CTO claimed he hacked competing dating site https://www.wired.com/2015/08/ashley-madison-leak-reveals-ex-cto-hacked-competing-site/ #5yrsago Telepresence Nazi-punching https://pluralistic.net/2020/08/25/anxietypunk/#smartibots #5yrsago Ballistic Kiss https://pluralistic.net/2020/08/25/anxietypunk/#bk 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. (1019 words yesterday, 42282 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 Enshittification, the audiobook (the Kickstarter): A disenshittified audiobook about enshittification. Hey look at this: Delights to delectate. Object permanence: Open source DRM?!; Sad Puppies lose big; Meritocratic delusion. 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. Enshittification, the audiobook (the Kickstarter) (permalink) Audiobooks are hands-down the most enshittified aspect of publishing, which is why I make my own audiobooks and pre-sell them on Kickstarter, which is how I get around the fact that Amazon refuses to carry my audiobooks: http://disenshittification.org Why are audiobooks so enshittified? Because they have the two essential characteristics for enshittification: 1) They are digital, which means the rules for them can be shifted on a per-customer, per-usage basis; and 2) They are controlled by a monopoly, Amazon, whose Audible division is responsible for 90% of popular audiobook sales. https://pluralistic.net/2022/09/07/audible-exclusive/#audiblegate Amazon refuses to sell any audiobook unless it is first wrapped in the company's proprietary encryption (AKA "Digital Rights Management" or "DRM"). This DRM permanently locks Audible's audiobooks to the apps it approves, because US copyright law makes it a felony to tamper with that DRM. That means that neither the author nor the publisher can authorize you to take your Audible purchases to a rival platform, and if they try, Audible can have them imprisoned for up to five years: https://pluralistic.net/2024/01/18/descartes-delenda-est/#self-destruct-sequence-initiated Which is why none of my books are for sale on Audible. I'm not gonna submit to conditions that will let Audible take you, my reader, hostage. Not only does that make you vulnerable to whatever evil shit Amazon thinks up (remember a couple years ago, when they experimented with putting ads in the audiobooks you paid for?!), but that also makes me (and every other author) vulnerable, because if you can't leave Audible, neither can we: https://pluralistic.net/2022/07/25/can-you-hear-me-now/#acx-ripoff Which is why I do these Kickstarters for my audiobooks! Since 2013, I've either paid narrators (like Wil Wheaton and Amber Benson) to perform my books, or I've gone into Skyboat Media's studios myself, to record under the expert direction of the legendary Gabrielle de Cuir: https://skyboatmedia.com/ That's what I did this time, recording my forthcoming book Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What To Do About It in early August. Since then, I've been working with my trusty sound engineer John Taylor Williams to polish that recording to perfection. Now, I'm selling that pre-selling that audiobook on a Kickstarter where you can also pre-order the hardcover, ebook, as well as an extremely limited edition art-book collecting the collages I made for my Pluralistic.net newsletter while developing the ideas behind Enshittification: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/doctorow/enshittification-the-drm-free-audiobook You can listen to a generous, one-hour sample of the entire first section of the book here: https://archive.org/download/enshittification-sample/Enshittification_Kickstarter_Promo_FMx1.mp3 The audiobooks and ebooks I sell through my Kickstarters are sold without any DRM, and also without any "terms and conditions." You are buying these books, not "licensing" them. That means you can do anything with these books that copyright law allows: sell 'em, give 'em away, lend 'em to a friend. Just don't violate copyright law and we're cool. This book, Enshittification, synthesizes all the essays, speeches and panels I've done on the subject of platform decay into a single, coherent argument designed to be accessible to everyone, even (especially) your normie friends who know that everything sucks but don't understand why and are paralyzed about what to do about it. The book's not out until October – it'll be published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux (US/Canada) and Verso (UK/Commonwealth), but it's already getting fantastic early notices. The Financial Times has already longlisted it for 2025's best business book of the year: https://www.ft.com/bookaward It's gotten starred reviews and raves from trades like Kirkus, Library Journal, and Publishers Weekly, and we've sold foreign rights in more than a dozen countries, all over the world. There's also a 2026 graphic novel edition (adapted by Koren Shadmi) coming from First Second's 23rd Street Books. Just as exciting is the Enshittification documentary, which is currently in pre-production, directed by Emily James (Just Do It), edited by Kurt Engfehr (Fahrenheit 9/11) and produced by Eve Marson (Web of Make Believe: Death, Lies and the Internet). You can pre-purchase tickets to the theatrical run and a DRM-free download here; your early support will help raise the $75,000 we need for principle photography: https://www.patreon.com/posts/one-time-137256536 We recorded a sizzle reel at the Teardown conference in Portland last spring, and Kurt's edited it into an amazing trailer: https://vimeo.com/1111178798?share=copy#t=3.009 The documentary is a road-movie, with a crew following me on tour and interviewing me and other experts on the subject (think Inconvenient Truth, but for platform decay). We've got quite a tour planned: I'll be in Boston (with Randall "XKCD" Munroe); DC (with former CFPB chair Rohit Chopra); New Orleans; Chicago (with Kara Swisher); LA (with The American Prospect's David Dayen); Calgary; San Francisco; Portland; Seattle (with Ed Zitron); Vancouver; Calgary, Montreal, Toronto, New York City (with Lina Khan); Miami; Burbank; Lisbon; London; Hay-on-Wye; and Madison, CT. Other tour dates are still being finalized – more details to follow. I developed enshittification as a series of posts on Pluralistic.net, my blog/newsletters/social media feed. Each edition of Pluralistic goes out with a graphic, usually a collage I've made from public domain and Creative Commons materials: https://www.flickr.com/photos/doctorow/albums/72177720316719208 Making these collages has turned into one of my major creative outlets, and dozens of readers have asked if I would ever do a book of them. Then, last year, I got to talking to Creative Commons CEO Anna Tumadóttir about her plans for CC's 25th anniversary and we cooked up a plan to publish a little book of my Pluralistic collages to give to major donors as a premium. Anna needed 400 of these, but my printer gives me a quantity break at 500 copies, so I'm making 100 signed, numbered copies available for backers of this Kickstarter. The books are gorgeous. Cyberpunk icon and electronic art impresario Bruce Sterling wrote me a wonderful introduction. It's designed by John D. Berry, president of the Association Typographique Internationale, a legend of type and book design: https://johndberry.com/biographical-note/ For production, I've tapped Pasadena's Typecraft, a 118-year-old printer who ran the book on 100lb Mohawk paper. It's a gorgeous little 4.75" x 6.75" paperback, and this is the only run I plan on doing (though if people like it, I might do future volumes collecting more collages). One of the things I love about these campaigns is the chance to work with so many wonderful partners. There's Skyboat Media and director Gabrielle de Cuir; editor John Taylor Williams of Wryneck Studios; Emily, Kurt and Eve working on the documentary; John Berry, Bruce Sterling and Typecraft for my art book. I'm also working with some of my favorite booksellers in the world to fulfill print book orders: in LA, I've got Secret Headquarters (the best comics shop in the world!), who'll fulfill US orders as well as worldwide orders for signed books and Canny Valley. For Canadian hardcover orders, I'm working with Winnipeg's McNally-Robinson. For EU orders, I'm once again working with Berlin's magnificent Otherland Books. Orders in the UK will be fulfilled directly by Verso. Working with local shippers means we don't have to fuck around with the Trump tariffs. Enshittification is the product of my open-access publishing program. I don't charge anything for the essays I publish nearly every day on Pluralistic.net, and I release them under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license, which lets anyone reproduce and adapt them, including commercially. Releasing my work this way means that it gets spread far and wide, which means everything to me, and I'm so glad to see everyone from scrappy progressive news sites to Conde Nast taking my work and reprinting it widely. Readers frequently ask me how they can support my work, whether I have a Patreon or some other way to accept donations. I don't have anything like that. What I have, instead, are these books, which I can't seem to stop writing. The best way to thank me for my work is to buy the books, in any (or every) format. Selling books benefits a whole community of people who are important to my work, including my publishers and agents, and also all the people who work on publishing, fulfillment and production with me. These people don't just work on my projects, of course: they have many partners of their own. When you buy my books, you help ensure that I'll keep doing what I do – and you help all my partners keep doing what they do. And the best way to support my work is to back it on these Kickstarter campaigns. The extraordinary generosity of my Kickstarter backers since 2020 has made a huge difference to my artistic career and my family's financial stability. If you backed one of those campaigns, I thank you, sincerely. And whether you've backed before, I hope you'll consider backing this one: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/doctorow/enshittification-the-drm-free-audiobook Hey look at this (permalink) A Different Kind of Tension https://jonathanlethem.com/ Why the Internet is Turning to Shit https://www.currentaffairs.org/news/why-the-internet-is-turning-to-shit Did this Kid Use AI to Fake Research About How Great AI Is? https://skepchick.org/2025/08/did-this-kid-use-ai-to-fake-research-about-how-great-ai-is/ Is it illegal to not buy ads on X? Experts explain the FTC’s bizarre ad fight. https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2025/08/is-it-illegal-to-not-buy-ads-on-x-experts-explain-the-ftcs-bizarre-ad-fight/ Nomad Cycles: E-Bikes made with soul, not just to be sold! https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/nomadcycles/nomad-cycles-e-bikes-made-with-soul-not-just-to-be-sold Object permanence (permalink) #20yrsago Court: DMCA can’t prohibit third-party repairs https://web.archive.org/web/20050912004536/https://www.corante.com/copyfight/archives/2005/08/24/fed_circuit_smacks_down_bad_dmca_decision_re_independent_repair_techs.php #20yrsago Chinese government mandating 3-hour caps on MMO playing https://www.gamespot.com/articles/china-govt-steps-up-limits-on-online-gaming/1100-6131845/ #20yrsago ItPlaysQuake: reviews of Quake-ports on odd hardware https://web.archive.org/web/20051122053035/http://www.itplaysquake.com/ #20yrsago DRM != SSL https://memex.craphound.com/2005/08/24/drm-ssl/ #20yrsago FBI stages fake wedding, invites mobsters, arrests gift-bearing guests https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2005-aug-23-na-gang23-story.html #20yrsago What the *&^%#!? is an “open source DRM?” https://web.archive.org/web/20050903070248/https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/archives/003928.php #20yrsago Why some “piracy” can increase overall revenues https://longtail.typepad.com/the_long_tail/2005/08/just_enough_pir.html #15yrsago Play a digital version of a lost “perception-altering” Freemasonry board-game https:/www.dpoetry.com/fires/ #10yrsago The FBI kept files on author Ray Bradbury: “Definitely slanted against the United States” https://memex.craphound.com/2015/08/24/the-fbi-kept-files-on-author-ray-bradbury-definitely-slanted-against-the-united-states/ #10yrsago Car information security is a complete wreck — here’s why https://memex.craphound.com/2015/08/23/car-information-security-is-a-complete-wreck-heres-why/ #10yrsaog Sad Puppies, Rabid Puppies lose big at the Hugos https://nielsenhayden.com/makinglight/archives/016318.html #5yrsago Quantifying the meritocratic delusion https://pluralistic.net/2020/08/23/visionary-art/#meritocratic-delusion #5yrsago Chinese sf guidelines https://pluralistic.net/2020/08/24/raise-the-spirits-of-scientists/#taikonaut-futurism #5yrsago Don't use Bridgefy at protests https://pluralistic.net/2020/08/24/raise-the-spirits-of-scientists/#threat-models #5yrsago Concretizing "Main St vs Wall St" https://pluralistic.net/2020/08/24/raise-the-spirits-of-scientists/#main-st-wall-st 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. (1019 words yesterday, 422263 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 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. 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