Today's links Millionaire on billionaire violence: Let them fight. Hey look at this: Delights to delectate. Object permanence: Private equity vs investors; French teens who fought Nazis 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. Millionaire on billionaire violence (permalink) For the past year, I've been increasingly fascinated by a political mystery: how has antitrust enforcement become a global phenomenon after spending 40-years in a billionaire-induced coma? https://pluralistic.net/2025/06/28/mamdani/#trustbusting Political scientists will tell you that policies that billionaires hate will not ever be enacted by politicians, no matter how popular they are among the public: https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/perspectives-on-politics/article/testing-theories-of-american-politics-elites-interest-groups-and-average-citizens/62327F513959D0A304D4893B382B992B And yet, all around the world – the US (under Trump I, Biden and Trump II), Canada, the UK, the EU, Japan, South Korea, Australia, even China – governments have done more on antitrust over the past couple years than over the past four decades. Where is this coming from? My working theory basically boiled down to "enough is enough" – AKA Stein's Law: "Anything that can't go on forever eventually stops." As in: people are just so pissed off with corporate power that politicians are finally acting to curb it. But I was never very satisfied with this. There's lots of stuff that the public is furious about, which politicians aren't acting on, from climate change to taxing billionaires. Why antitrust and not all that stuff? https://pluralistic.net/2025/08/07/the-people-no-2/#water-flowing-uphill I've been mulling this over, and I got to thinking about a low-key disagreement I used to have with comrades in the digital human rights world, just before all the antitrust stuff really kicked off: https://memex.craphound.com/2019/06/04/why-is-there-so-much-antitrust-energy-for-big-tech-but-not-for-big-telco/ Back then, people on the same side as the barricades as me were deeply suspicious of antitrust. They thought that the bubbling policy revival for antitrust was a way for phone and cable companies to enlist the government to go after their adversaries in the tech world, against whom they were (badly) losing the Net Neutrality fight: https://www.techdirt.com/2019/06/04/if-big-tech-is-huge-antitrust-problem-why-are-we-ignoring-telecom/ Back then, my thesis was, Sure, maybe Big Telco is pushing for antitrust to target Big Tech, but once antitrust arises from its long slumber, it will turn on telcos – and every other concentrated industry. Tldr: I'm pretty sure that's what's happening. You see, one part of the antitrust battle boils down to a fight between rentiers and capitalists. The largest tech (and other) companies are primarily rentiers – entities that make money by owning things, rather than doing things. They make rents, at the expense of other companies' profits: https://pluralistic.net/2023/09/28/cloudalists/#cloud-capital Companies like Epic (makers of Fortnite) want to sell your kids skins and mods for their in-game avatars without giving Apple and Google 30% of every dollar that brings in, and they've got a lot of money to make that desire real: https://cdn.ca9.uscourts.gov/datastore/opinions/2025/07/31/24-6256.pdf This is millionaire-on-billionaire violence. It's gigantic corporations going to war against galactic-scale corporations. These pro-antitrust companies are the inheritors of the telcos' mantle, powerful belligerents in a Extremely Large Tech war on Big Tech. There are a lot of these large companies and they're sick of being subjected to a 30% economy-wide App Tax on all the payments they receive in-app: https://pluralistic.net/2025/05/01/its-not-the-crime/#its-the-coverup Let me be clear: I'm not saying that the only reason we're getting muscular, global anti-monopoly action is that slightly smaller corporations (who universally aspire to acquiring monopolies of their own) are fighting for their own self-interest. What I'm saying is that the coalition of everyday people who've had their lives ruined by monopolists and corporations that are stuck paying the app tax (and the 51% tax that Google/Meta take out of every ad-tech dollar, the 45-51% Amazon takes out of every e-commerce dollar, and the sums that Tiktok, Twitter and Meta extort from business customers to "boost" in order to reach their own followers) is, in combination, sufficient to awaken the antitrust giant. Members of the public are critical to this fight – we're the ones who tip the scales from one side to the other. That's why rentiers go to such great lengths to convince policymakers that they have the public on their side, whether that's Amazon trotting out "small businesses" that depend on (and get viciously fucked by) Amazon's ecommerce platform: https://thehill.com/opinion/finance/4760357-amazon-basics-antitrust/ Or leaders of groups like the NAACP who've been bribed to front for the phone companies and cable operators in the fight against Net Neutrality: https://www.techdirt.com/2017/12/19/naacp-fought-net-neutrality-until-last-week-now-suddenly-supports-idea/ All other things being equal, policymakers will simply side the deepest-pocketed, most unified corporate lobby in any fight (which is how the media companies won the Napster Wars). But when the public and one side of the corporate world is one side of an issue, policymakers understand that siding with them will get them votes and money, which is much better than just getting money (which is how we won the SOPA/PIPA fight): https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2017/01/everyone-made-themselves-hero-remembering-aaron-swartz We can really see this in the EU, where the new Digital Markets Act and Digital Services Act are going after Big Tech with both barrels, with the enthusiastic support of the EU's tech industry. That's because the EU's tech industry barely registers when placed alongside of US Big Tech, which has sucked up nearly 100% of the market oxygen by cheating (on privacy, taxes, wages, etc). Despite the farcical efforts of US tech shills like Nick Clegg (former UK Deputy Prime Minister turned Meta shill, who insisted that Facebook was "defending European cyberspace from Chinese communism"), everyone knew that US tech companies were extracting (billions of euros and the personal information of 500m Europeans) from the bloc and siphoning it off to America, after first cleansing it of any tax obligations by laundering it through Ireland and the Netherlands. If Europe still had thriving tech "national champions" – Olivetti, Nokia, Deutsche Telekom, Ericsson, etc – these companies might plausibly mount an opposition to muscular tech regulation in the EU. But these companies were crippled by predatory capital and then mostly absorbed into US Big Tech (or ground into dust). Back when I was having a friendly blog-argument with my comrades about whether tech antitrust was a Big Telco plot, I averred that it didn't really matter, because Big Tech really was terrible, and because once we'd roused antitrust enforcement from its 40-year slumber, we could wrest control of it from the telecoms monopolists who'd helped us dig it up and reanimate it. In other words: the war against the corruption brought about by corporate concentration is hard to kindle, but it's even harder to extinguish. The corporations that are fanning the flames are focused – as corporations inevitably are, to the detriment of our planet and politics – on the short term gains they stand to reap from their actions. But we can – we must – take the long view. Smashing corporate power is the key to destroying fascism and ensuring our species' survival, so our focus needs to be on building the blaze, and if some of those adding fuel to the fire happen to aspire to building monopolies of their own, then our job is to give 'em a nasty surprise when that day comes. Hey look at this (permalink) Free 3D models of every D&D monster https://www.patreon.com/cw/mz4250 Enough is enough—I dumped Google’s worsening search for Kagi https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2025/08/enough-is-enough-i-dumped-googles-worsening-search-for-kagi/ AI disagreements https://www.bloodinthemachine.com/p/ai-disagreements An Abundance of Sleaze: How a Beltway Brain Trust Sells Oligarchy to Liberals https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/an-abundance-of-sleaze-how-a-beltway Fintech Dystopia: Won’t somebody please think of the innovation? https://fintechdystopia.com/chapters/chapter6.html Object permanence (permalink) #15yrsago The Last Musketeer: whimsical, dreamlike, delightful comic https://memex.craphound.com/2010/08/08/the-last-musketeer-whimsical-dreamlike-delightful-comic/ #15yrsago Resistance: YA comic about the kids who served in the French resistance https://memex.craphound.com/2010/08/09/resistance-ya-comic-about-the-kids-who-served-in-the-french-resistance/ #5yrsago Test-proctoring software worsens systemic bias https://pluralistic.net/2020/08/09/just-dont-have-a-face/#algorithmic-bias #5yrsago Commercial real-estate's looming collapse https://pluralistic.net/2020/08/09/just-dont-have-a-face/#systemic-risk #1yrago "Carbon neutral" Bitcoin operation founded by coal plant operator wasn't actually carbon neutral https://pluralistic.net/2024/08/09/terawulf/#hunterbrook #1yrago Private equity rips off its investors, too https://pluralistic.net/2024/08/08/sucker-at-the-table/#clucks-definance 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, 2025 http://www.contraflowscifi.org/ 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) Tariffs vs IP Law (Firewalls Don't Stop Dragons) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LFABFe-5-uQ ORG at 20: In conversation with Maria Farrell https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M9H2An_D6io Why aren't we controlling our own tech? (Co-Op Congress) https://www.youtube.com/live/GLrDwHgeCy4?si=NUWxPphk0FS_3g9J&t=4409 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. (1031 words yesterday, 25719 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 Good ideas are popular: But they're impolitic. Hey look at this: Delights to delectate. Object permanence: Slinky treadmill; Ovipositors; Peter Thiel was right. 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. Good ideas are popular (permalink) In democracies, we're told, politicians exist to reflect and enact the popular will; but the truth is, politicians' primary occupation is thwarting the will of the people, in preference to the will of a small group of wealthy, powerful people. That's an empirical finding, based on a study of 1,779 policy outcomes, which concluded that: economic elites and organized groups representing business interests have substantial independent impacts on U.S. government policy, while average citizens and mass-based interest groups have little or no independent influence. https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/perspectives-on-politics/article/testing-theories-of-american-politics-elites-interest-groups-and-average-citizens/62327F513959D0A304D4893B382B992B The policy preferences of the public would give the leadership of any mainstream party the fantods. Here's a remarkable thread where the economic anthropologist Jason Hickel summarizes recent polling on public preferences: https://x.com/jasonhickel/status/1953126243118813556 "Capitalism does more harm than good" (56% globally; 69% in France; 74% in India) https://www.edelman.com/news-awards/2020-edelman-trust-barometer In 28 of 34 countries, the majority are anti-capitalist: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/ecaf.12591 A majority of Canadians, Australians and Britons aged 18-34 believe "socialism will improve the economy and well-being of citizens": https://jacobin.com/2023/03/socialism-right-wing-think-tank-polling-support-anti-capitalism 62% of Americans aged 18-30 "hold favorable views of socialism" (61% of Democrats have a positive view of socialism vs 50% who are positive on capitalism): https://www.cato.org/blog/81-say-they-cant-afford-pay-higher-taxes-next-year Majority of youth climate group members blame "a system that puts profit over people and planet" and 89% say that system is capitalism: https://www.climatevanguard.org/publications-all/mapping-the-global-youth-climate-movement Majority support a national job guarantee (72% UK, 78% US; 79% France): https://www.jasonhickel.org/blog/2023/11/24/how-popular-are-post-capitalist-ideas Majority of Americans support workplace democracy (unions, worker shareholders and board seats): https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/american-political-science-review/article/what-do-americans-want-from-private-government-experimental-evidence-demonstrates-that-americans-want-workplace-democracy/D9C1DBB6F95D9EEA35A34ABF016511F4 Majority of Britons support public ownership of services (education, healthcare, rail, water, postal service, parks); 64% of Americans support universal public health care; 64% support public options for internet, child care, and housing; https://www.jasonhickel.org/blog/2023/11/24/how-popular-are-post-capitalist-ideas 74% of Britons support national, permanent rent-controls; 71% of Bay Staters and 55% of Californians agree: https://www.jasonhickel.org/blog/2023/11/24/how-popular-are-post-capitalist-ideas 72% of Americans support a living wage; 87% of Britons agree: https://www.jasonhickel.org/blog/2023/11/24/how-popular-are-post-capitalist-ideas 84% of Europeans support a millionaires' tax; 69% of Americans agree: https://wid.world/document/international-attitudes-toward-global-policies-for-poverty-reduction-and-climates-change/ Majority of people in 40 countries want 4:1 maximum pay ratios for CEOs and their lowest-paid workers: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/1745691614549773 71% of Europeans want transformational reform of the UN and IMF, with proportional votes based on member-states' populations (58% of Americans agree): https://wid.world/document/international-attitudes-toward-global-policies-for-poverty-reduction-and-climates-change/ Majorities of Europeans and Americans support "compensating low-income countries for climate damages, funding renewable energy in low-income countries, and supporting low-income countries to adapt to climate change": https://wid.world/document/international-attitudes-toward-global-policies-for-poverty-reduction-and-climates-change/ 80-90% of people in medium/high-income countries want to finance this with a global tax on millionaires: https://wid.world/document/international-attitudes-toward-global-policies-for-poverty-reduction-and-climates-change/ Hickel's thread reminded of the 2023 Pew report that found that: 65% of Americans feel exhausted when thinking about politics; 63% have little/no confidence in the US political system; 4% think the US system works well: https://pluralistic.net/2023/10/18/the-people-no/#tell-ya-what-i-want-what-i-really-really-want Unsurprisingly: 87% of Americans want Congressional term limits; 79% favor age limits for Congress and the Supreme Court; 62% support automatic voter-registration for every American; 65% want to abolish the Electoral College (47% of Republicans agree!); 70% believe voters have too little influence over their representatives; 83% of Republicans say big donors call the shots (80% of Dems agree); 72% of Americans want to limit campaign contributions (75% D/71% R); 58% of Americans believe it is possible to get money out of politics. So on the one hand, this is all pretty dismal. It also makes the trend towards electing anti-democratic politicians who want to abolish elections a lot easier to understand: if you (correctly) believe you live in a world where politicians don't care about you, then why not vote for a strongman who'll punish your enemies and maybe leave you with a few more crumbs? But on the other hand, this is very exciting, because it shows us what a truly democratic world would look like (and just how different that world would be from the billionaire astroturf-dominated social media world)! If the popular will can achieve primacy, we would live in a veritable paradise! It also explains how candidates like Zohran Mamdani were able to clobber the political establishment simply by a) telling people that he would do popular things; and b) convincing them that he meant it. Suppressing popular preferences in (nominal) democracies isn't easy. It requires absolute unity of the ruling classes. Whenever the faintest crack appears in capital's unity, good policies gush out of it. That's what's happened with antitrust this decade, where the divisions between billionaire rentiers like Apple/Google and the millionaire capitalists who want to escape their 30% app tax has allowed a rush of effective antitrust enforcement to sweep the world, to the detriment of both: https://pluralistic.net/2025/06/28/mamdani/#trustbusting By not hanging together, the rich let us hang them separately. And since there is no honor among thieves – since the rich want nothing more to eat one anothers' lunches – there is disunity aplenty for us to exploit. We just have to remember that we are the (very large) majority and act like it. (Image: Japanexperterna.se, CC BY-SA 2.0, modified) Hey look at this (permalink) It’s not just Figma https://economicpopulist.substack.com/p/its-not-just-figma These GOP Lawmakers Referred Constituents to the CFPB for Help. Then They Voted to Gut the Agency https://www.propublica.org/article/cfpb-budget-cuts-gop-darrell-issa-john-cornyn The LLMentalist Effect: how chat-based Large Language Models replicate the mechanisms of a psychic’s con https://softwarecrisis.dev/letters/llmentalist/ AI Is A Money Trap https://www.wheresyoured.at/ai-is-a-money-trap/ Precarious Employment in Precarious Futures https://www.uncannymagazine.com/article/precarious-employment-in-precarious-futures/ Object permanence (permalink) #20yrsago Charlie Stross, Hugo winner https://web.archive.org/web/20050810024249/http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2005/08/07/#hugo-thing #10yrsago Veiny, slick silicone ovipositors https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wkfFZnK5W9s #10yrsago A treadmill for Slinky toys, for your infinite Slinky-torturing pleasure https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9dinVcBEDhQ #10yrsago The Princess and the Pony, from Kate “Hark a Vagrant” Beaton https://memex.craphound.com/2015/08/07/the-princess-and-the-pony-from-kate-hark-a-vagrant-beaton/ #5yrsago Free the law https://pluralistic.net/2020/08/08/turkeys-for-christmas-party/#recap #5yrsago Google bans anticompetitive vocabularies https://pluralistic.net/2020/08/08/turkeys-for-christmas-party/#newspeak #5yrsago Peter Thiel was right https://pluralistic.net/2020/08/08/turkeys-for-christmas-party/#christmas-voting-turkeys #1yrago The Google antitrust remedy should extinguish surveillance, not democratize it https://pluralistic.net/2024/08/07/revealed-preferences/#extinguish-v-improve 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, 2025 http://www.contraflowscifi.org/ 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) Tariffs vs IP Law (Firewalls Don't Stop Dragons) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LFABFe-5-uQ ORG at 20: In conversation with Maria Farrell https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M9H2An_D6io Why aren't we controlling our own tech? (Co-Op Congress) https://www.youtube.com/live/GLrDwHgeCy4?si=NUWxPphk0FS_3g9J&t=4409 Latest books (permalink) Picks and Shovels: a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about the heroic era of the PC, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), February 2025 (https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250865908/picksandshovels). The Bezzle: a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about prison-tech and other grifts, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), February 2024 (the-bezzle.org). "The Lost Cause:" a solarpunk novel of hope in the climate emergency, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), November 2023 (http://lost-cause.org). "The Internet Con": A nonfiction book about interoperability and Big Tech (Verso) September 2023 (http://seizethemeansofcomputation.org). Signed copies at Book Soup (https://www.booksoup.com/book/9781804291245). "Red Team Blues": "A grabby, compulsive thriller that will leave you knowing more about how the world works than you did before." Tor Books http://redteamblues.com. "Chokepoint Capitalism: How to Beat Big Tech, Tame Big Content, and Get Artists Paid, with Rebecca Giblin", on how to unrig the markets for creative labor, Beacon Press/Scribe 2022 https://chokepointcapitalism.com Upcoming books (permalink) Canny Valley: A limited edition collection of the collages I create for Pluralistic, self-published, September 2025 Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It, Farrar, Straus, Giroux, October 7 2025 https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374619329/enshittification/ Unauthorized Bread: a middle-grades graphic novel adapted from my novella about refugees, toasters and DRM, FirstSecond, 2026 Enshittification, Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It (the graphic novel), Firstsecond, 2026 The Memex Method, Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2026 The Reverse-Centaur's Guide to AI, a short book about being a better AI critic, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2026 Colophon (permalink) Today's top sources: Naked Capitalism (https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/). Currently writing: "The Reverse Centaur's Guide to AI," a short book for Farrar, Straus and Giroux about being an effective AI critic. (1048 words yesterday, 23678 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 Which jobs can be replaced with AI?: Jobs that have already be degraded to the point of uselessness. Hey look at this: Delights to delectate. Object permanence: Circular batteries; Prison for file-sharing, Satanic abortions. 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. Which jobs can be replaced with AI? (permalink) I don't think AI can do your job (but I do think an AI salesman can convince your boss to fire you and replace you with an AI that can't do your job). However, there is a class of workers whose jobs can be performed perfectly by AI: workers with bullshit jobs: https://memex.craphound.com/2018/06/20/david-graebers-bullshit-jobs-why-does-the-economy-sustain-jobs-that-no-one-values/ David Graeber (RIP) identified several kinds of bullshit jobs and not all of those can be perfectly performed by an AI (for example, the flunkies that minor corporate princelings surround themselves with to demonstrate their status need to be human). But there are whole categories of job that perform functions that corporations don't want performed, like customer service rep, jobs they've spent decades degrading to the point where the people who do them have been stripped of all power and authority and serve no function except allowing a company to claim that they have a customer service department. Replacing these workers with an AI not only saves money by removing their wage-bill from the corporate overhead, but it can actually turn the former cost center into a profit center. That's what Air Canada discovered when they replaced their customer service workers with chatbots. These chatbots gave bad advice to fliers that cost them money, and in every instance except one (where the aggrieved flier was so tenacious that he chased 8 weeks' worth of internal appeals at Air Canada before escalating the matter to a regulator), Air Canada got to keep the money: https://www.forbes.com/sites/marisagarcia/2024/02/19/what-air-canada-lost-in-remarkable-lying-ai-chatbot-case/ All of this raises an obvious question: how can Air Canada (and other companies) get away with having customer service reps who are so useless that they can be swapped for defective chatbots? The answer lies in enshittification. While most people who encounter the idea of enshittification glom onto the symptoms it describes, of a three-stage process by which platforms shuttle value from users to business customers to themselves, the crux of enshittification is why this decay takes place. The answer is power: firms that enshittify must first overpower the forces that keep their enshittificatory impulses in check, like competition and regulation (these are two sides of the same coin: getting rid of competition paves the way for regulatory capture). Over decades, Air Canada has merged with the majority of its competitors and has become so structurally important to Canada – a big, geographically dispersed country with many fly-in settlements – that regulators can't really threaten it with meaningful penalties, not without threatening Canada itself. They're too big to fail, thus too big too jail, thus too big to care. That's how Air Canada was able to turn its customer service department into such a joke that it just didn't matter anymore, and so it didn't matter if it replaced those purely ornamental customer service reps with chatbots. The rise and rise of overseas call-center outsourcing paved the way for AI replacement in the same way that Walmart paved the way for Amazon. Once Walmart destroyed your town center and vaporized all the businesses that served your community, why wouldn't you shop on Amazon? Likewise: once companies replaced their customer service department with immiserated overseas call-center workers who were required to recite rote responses from a three-ring binder and were given no agency or capacity to solve your problem, why not replace them with AIs? Monopolistic firms are full of people who they don't value because they do jobs the company doesn't value (e.g. moderators on large social media services). This week, I'm at Skyboat Media studios, recording the audiobook for the Enshittification book, and so I got to talking with Gabrielle De Cuir and Stefan Rudnicki, the owners. They talked about the threat they're facing from AI audiobook "narrators," who replace directors, actors and editors with a single piece of software. There's a whole class of audiobooks where AI can be a perfect substitute – thanks to Audible, and its enshittification. Audible has waged war on unionized voice actors, replacing them with desperate newbies who will tolerate terrible working conditions, including a practice called "punch and roll" that makes actors responsible for doing their own editing when they misspeak, rather than re-recording a passage for an editor to fix later ("pickups"). There are plenty of Audible books that are recorded without a director or an editor or a proofer, meaning that inexperienced actor's mistakes and mispronunciations survive into the final product. These books, produced by the monopolist audiobook platform, with a 90%+ market share for popular fiction, are already degraded to the point of being not fit for purpose. Replacing the actors with AI barely makes a difference. AI text-to-speech is a giant improvement on existing TTS tools, and there are plenty of people who stand to benefit from this, for example, people with visual impairments. But there's no business model in selling readaloud bots to blind people – certainly not a model that recoups the hundreds of billions that has been sprayed around for AI training and operation. The AI business model relies on obliterating the wage bill of workers and replacing it with a cheaper software license. Unfortunately (for the fortunes of AI investors) the majority of workers whose wages can be readily swapped for a software license are the lowest-paid, most precarious ones, people whose jobs have already been degraded and enshittified to the point where no one will notice the difference if they are replaced with a chatbot. (Image: Cryteria, CC BY 3.0; KBetik; CC BY-SA 3.0; modified) Hey look at this (permalink) If you oppose the State of Israel, this post is not for you https://coreyrobin.com/2025/08/04/if-you-oppose-the-state-of-israel-this-post-is-not-for-you/ Vote for the 2025 Tiny Awards Winner https://tinyawards.net/vote/ In the Future All Food Will Be Cooked in a Microwave, and if You Can’t Deal With That Then You Need to Get Out of the Kitchen https://www.colincornaby.me/2025/08/in-the-future-all-food-will-be-cooked-in-a-microwave-and-if-you-cant-deal-with-that-then-you-need-to-get-out-of-the-kitchen/ Debt's Grip Now Available! https://www.creditslips.org/creditslips/2025/08/debts-grip-now-available.html No, AI is not Making Engineers 10x as Productive https://colton.dev/blog/curing-your-ai-10x-engineer-imposter-syndrome/ Object permanence (permalink) #10yrsago Why privacy activists and economists should be on the same side https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2640607 #10yrsago Universal Music’s anti-piracy ads reached new heights of crazypants gore https://www.techdirt.com/2015/08/06/universal-musics-anti-piracy-ads-even-crazier-than-you-can-imagine/ #10yrsago UK govt wants your opinion on sending file-sharers to jail for 10 years https://web.archive.org/web/20150905144030/https://www.openrightsgroup.org/campaigns/copyright-enforcement-consultation #10yrsago Robert Charles Wilson’s The Affinities: when science changes everything https://memex.craphound.com/2015/08/06/robert-charles-wilsons-the-affinities-when-science-changes-everything/ #5yrsago California DMV's $50m/year data selloff https://pluralistic.net/2020/08/07/tired-of-winning/#you-are-the-product #5yrsago Novartis's $678m bribery scandal https://pluralistic.net/2020/08/07/tired-of-winning/#novartis #5yrsago US plummets below Russia and Mexico in global misery index https://pluralistic.net/2020/08/07/tired-of-winning/#usa-usa-usa #5yrsago Satanic Abortions cut through unconstitutional abortion laws https://pluralistic.net/2020/08/07/tired-of-winning/#thyself-is-thy-master #5yrsago Restore the Office of Technology Assessment https://pluralistic.net/2020/08/07/tired-of-winning/#ota #1yrago Circular battery self-sufficiency https://pluralistic.net/2024/08/06/with-great-power/#comes-great-responsibility 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, 2025 http://www.contraflowscifi.org/ 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) Tariffs vs IP Law (Firewalls Don't Stop Dragons) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LFABFe-5-uQ ORG at 20: In conversation with Maria Farrell https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M9H2An_D6io Why aren't we controlling our own tech? (Co-Op Congress) https://www.youtube.com/live/GLrDwHgeCy4?si=NUWxPphk0FS_3g9J&t=4409 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. (1007 words yesterday, 22630 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 AI software assistants make the hardest kinds of bugs to spot: Errors that are tuned to be statistically indistinguishable from correct code. Hey look at this: Delights to delectate. Object permanence: A universal remote for killing people; Win10 spies out of the box; MacOS firmware worm; Tor exit-node subpoena, 3D tube-station maps, Papercraft Addams Family house. 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. AI software assistants make the hardest kinds of bugs to spot (permalink) It's easy to understand why some programmers love their AI assistants and others loathe them: the former group get to decide how and when they use AI tools, while the latter has AI forced upon them by bosses who hope to fire their colleagues and increase their workload. Formally, the first group are "centaurs" (people assisted by machines) and the latter are "reverse-centaurs" (people conscripted into assisting machines): https://pluralistic.net/2025/05/27/rancid-vibe-coding/#class-war Most workers have parts of their jobs they would happily automate away. I know of a programmer who uses AI to take a first pass at CSS code for formatted output. This is a notoriously tedious chore, and it's not hard to determine whether the AI got it right – just eyeball the output in a variety of browsers. If this was a chore you hated doing and someone gave you an effective tool to automate it, that would be cause for celebration. What's more, if you learned that this was only reliable for a subset of cases, you could confine your use of the AI to those cases. Likewise, many workers dream of doing something through automation that is so expensive or labor-intensive that they can't possibly do it. I'm thinking here of the film editor who extolled the virtues to me of deepfaking the eyelines of every extra in a crowd scene, which lets them change the focus of the whole scene without reassembling a couple hundred extras, rebuilding the set, etc. This is a brand new capability that increases the creative flexibility of that worker, and no wonder they love it. It's good to be a centaur! Then there's the poor reverse-centaurs. These are workers whose bosses have saddled them with a literally impossible workload and handed them an AI tool. Maybe they've been ordered to use the tool, or maybe they've been ordered to complete the job (or else) by a boss who was suggestively waggling their eyebrows at the AI tool while giving the order. Think of the freelance writer whom Hearst tasked with singlehandedly producing an entire, 64-page "best-of" summer supplement, including multiple best-of lists, who was globally humiliated when his "best books of the summer" list was chock full of imaginary books that the AI "hallucinated": https://www.404media.co/viral-ai-generated-summer-guide-printed-by-chicago-sun-times-was-made-by-magazine-giant-hearst/ No one seriously believes that this guy could have written and fact-checked all that material by himself. Nominally, he was tasked with serving as the "human in the loop" who validated the AI's output. In reality, he was the AI's fall-guy, what Dan Davies calls an "accountability sink," who absorbed the blame for the inevitable errors that arise when an employer demands that a single human sign off on the products of an error-prone automated system that operates at machine speeds. It's never fun to be a reverse centaur, but it's especially taxing to be a reverse centaur for an AI. AIs, after all, are statistical guessing programs that infer the most plausible next word based on the words that came before. Sometimes this goes badly and obviously awry, like when the AI tells you to put glue or gravel on your pizza. But more often, AI's errors are precisely, expensively calculated to blend in perfectly with the scenery. AIs are conservative. They can only output a version of the future that is predicted by the past, proceeding on a smooth, unbroken line from the way things were to the way they are presumed to be. But reality isn't smooth, it's lumpy and discontinuous. Take the names of common code libraries: these follow naming conventions that make it easy to predict what a library for a given function will be, and to guess what a given library does based on its name. But humans are messy and reality is lumpy, so these conventions are imperfectly followed. All the text-parsing libraries for a programming language may look like this: docx.text.parsing; txt.text.parsing, md.text.parsing, except for one, which defies convention by being named text.odt.parsing. Maybe someone had a brainfart and misnamed the library. Maybe the library was developed independently of everyone else's libraries and later merged. Maybe Mercury is in retrograde. Whatever the reason, the world contains many of these imperfections. Ask an LLM to write you some software and it will "hallucinate" (that is, extrapolate) libraries that don't exist, because it will assume that all text-parsing libraries follow the convention. It will assume that the library for parsing odt files is called "odt.text.parsing," and it will put a link to that nonexistent library in your code. This creates a vulnerability for AI-assisted code, called "slopsquatting," whereby an attacker predicts the names of libraries AIs are apt to hallucinate and creates libraries with those names, libraries that do what you would expect they'd do, but also inject malicious code into every program that incorporates them: https://www.theregister.com/2025/04/12/ai_code_suggestions_sabotage_supply_chain/ This is the hardest type of error to spot, because the AI is guessing the statistically most plausible name for the imaginary library. It's like the AI is constructing one of those spot-the-difference image puzzles on super-hard mode, swapping the fork and knife in a diner's hands from left to right and vice-versa. You couldn't generate a harder-to-spot bug if you tried. It's not like people are very good at supervising machines to begin with. "Automation blindness" is what happens when you're asked to repeatedly examine the output of a generally correct machine for a long time, and somehow remain vigilant for its errors. Humans aren't really capable of remaining vigilant for things that don't ever happen – whatever attention and neuronal capacity you initially devote to this never-come eventuality is hijacked by the things that happen all the time. This is why the TSA is so fucking amazing at spotting water-bottles on X-rays, but consistently fails to spot the bombs and guns that red team testers smuggle into checkpoints. The median TSA screener spots a hundred water bottles a day, and is (statistically) never called upon to spot something genuinely dangerous to a flight. They have put in their 10,000 hours, and then some, on spotting water bottles, and approximately zero hours on spotting stuff that we really, really don't want to see on planes. So automation blindness is already going to be a problem for any "human in the loop," from a radiologist asked to sign off on an AI's interpretation of your chest X-ray to a low-paid overseas worker remote-monitoring your Waymo…to a programmer doing endless, high-speed code-review for a chatbot. But that coder has it worse than all the other in-looped humans. That coder doesn't just have to fight automation blindness – they have to fight automation blindness and spot the subtlest of errors in this statistically indistinguishable-from-correct code. AI's are basically doing bug steganography, smuggling code defects in by carefully blending them in with correct code. At code shops around the world, the reverse centaurs are suffering. A survey of Stack Overflow users found that AI coding tools are creating history's most difficult-to-discharge technology debt in the form of "almost right" code full of these fiendishly subtle bugs: https://venturebeat.com/ai/stack-overflow-data-reveals-the-hidden-productivity-tax-of-almost-right-ai-code/ As Venturebeat reports, while usage of AI coding assistants is up (from 76% last year to 84% this year), trust in these tools is plummeting – 33%, with no bottom in sight. 45% of coders say that debugging AI code takes longer than writing the code without AI at all. Only 29% of coders believe that AI tools can solve complex code problems. Venturebeat concludes that there are code shops that "solve the 'almost right' problem" and see real dividends from AI tools. What they don't say is that the coders for whom "almost right" isn't a problem are centaurs, not reverse centaurs. They are in charge of their own production and tooling, and no one is using AI tools as a pretext for a relentless hurry-up amidst swingeing cuts to headcount. The AI bubble is driven by the promise of firing workers and replacing them with automation. Investors and AI companies are tacitly (and sometimes explicitly) betting that bosses who can fire a worker and replace them with a chatbot will pay the chatbot's maker an appreciable slice of that former worker's salary for an AI that takes them off the payroll. The people who find AI fun or useful or surprising are centaurs. They're making automation choices based on their own assessment of their needs and the AIs' capabilities. They are not the customers for AI. AI exists to replace workers, not empower them. Even if AI can make you more productive, there is no business model in increasing your pay and decreasing your hours. AI is about disciplining labor to decrease its share of an AI-using company's profits. AI exists to lower a company's wage-bill, at your expense, with the savings split between the your boss and an AI company. When Getty or the NYT or another media company sues an AI company for copyright infringement, that doesn't mean they are opposed to using AI to replace creative workers – they just want a larger slice of the creative workers' salaries in the form of a copyright license from the AI company that sells them the worker-displacing tool. They'll even tell you so. When the movie studios sued Midjourney, the RIAA (whose most powerful members are subsidiaries of the same companies that own the studios) sent out this press statement, attributed to RIAA CEO Mitch Glazier: There is a clear path forward through partnerships that both further AI innovation and foster human artistry. Unfortunately, some bad actors – like Midjourney – see only a zero-sum, winner-take-all game. Get that? The problem isn't that Midjourney wants to replace all the animation artists – it's that they didn't pay the movie studios license fees for the training data. They didn't create "partnerships." Incidentally: Mitch Glazier's last job was as a Congressional staffer who slipped an amendment into must-pass bill that killed musicians' ability to claim the rights to their work back after 35 years through "termination of transfer." This was so outrageous that Congress held a special session to reverse it and Glazier lost his job. Whereupon the RIAA hired him to run the show. AI companies are not pitching a future of AI-enabled centaurs. They're colluding with bosses to build a world of AI-shackled reverse centaurs. Some people are using AI tools (often standalone tools derived from open models, running on their own computers) to do some fun and exciting centaur stuff. But for the AI companies, these centaurs are a bug, not a feature – and they're the kind of bug that's far easier to spot and crush than the bugs that AI code-bots churn out in volumes no human can catalog, let alone understand. (Image: Cryteria, CC BY 3.0, modified) Hey look at this (permalink) How 'paper terrorism' hijacked a state system with bogus claims https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2025-07-30/fake-filings-real-consequences-how-paper-terrorism-is-burying-a-state-system-with-bogus-claims The Right of Return, from Arkansas to Israel https://coreyrobin.com/2025/08/02/the-right-of-return-from-arkansas-to-israel/ We Need a Strategy to Win Zohran’s Agenda. Call It Plan Z. https://jacobin.com/2025/08/zohran-bernie-party-power-strategy/ Bottom of the Rabbit Hole https://welovetheswitch.com/theswitch/episodes/ The Ancient Order of Bali https://www.damninteresting.com/the-ancient-order-of-bali/ Object permanence (permalink) #20yrsago Napster loses $20MM on $21MM revenue in Q1 05 https://web.archive.org/web/20051112133158/http://www.macworld.co.uk/news/index.cfm?RSS&NewsID=12264 #10yrsago NSA conducted commercial espionage against Japanese government and businesses https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/asia_pacific/wikileaks-says-us-spied-on-another-ally—-this-time-japan/2015/07/31/893e1207-9b4e-4c88-80ad-c8eb79f8df2e_story.html #10yrsago Windows 10 defaults to keylogging, harvesting browser history, purchases, and covert listening https://www.bgr.com/general/windows-10-upgrade-spying-how-to-opt-out/ #10yrsago UK ECHELON journalist: “Snowden proved spies need accountability” https://theintercept.com/2015/08/03/life-unmasking-british-eavesdroppers/ #10yrsago David Cameron will publish the financial details and viewing habits of all UK porn-watchers https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2015/jul/30/cameron-promises-action-to-restrict-under18s-accessing-pornography #10yrsago Proof-of-concept firmware worm targets Apple computers https://www.wired.com/2015/08/researchers-create-first-firmware-worm-attacks-macs/ #10yrsago What happened when we got subpoenaed over our Tor exit node https://memex.craphound.com/2015/08/04/what-happened-when-we-got-subpoenaed-over-our-tor-exit-node/ #10yrsago EFF and coalition announce new Do Not Track standard for the Web https://www.eff.org/press/releases/coalition-announces-new-do-not-track-standard-web-browsing #10yrsago Trophy hunting is “hunting” the way that Big Thunder Mountain is a “train ride” https://www.flickr.com/photos/bar-art/20287603731/ #10yrsago 3D maps of London Underground stations https://www.ianvisits.co.uk/articles/3d-maps-of-every-underground-station-hijklm-14683/ #10yrsago Open “Chromecast killer” committed suicide-by-DRM https://www.techdirt.com/2015/08/04/matchstick-more-open-chromecast-destroyed-drm-announces-plans-to-return-all-funds/ #10yrsago Privatized, for-profit immigration detention centers force detainees to work for $1-3/day https://www.latimes.com/nation/immigration/la-na-detention-immigration-workers-20150803-story.html #10yrsago What happened when we got subpoenaed over our Tor exit node https://memex.craphound.com/2015/08/04/what-happened-when-we-got-subpoenaed-over-our-tor-exit-node/ #10yrsago EFF and coalition announce new Do Not Track standard for the Web https://www.eff.org/press/releases/coalition-announces-new-do-not-track-standard-web-browsing #10yrsago Trophy hunting is “hunting” the way that Big Thunder Mountain is a “train ride” https://www.flickr.com/photos/bar-art/20287603731/ #10yrsago 3D maps of London Underground stations https://www.ianvisits.co.uk/articles/3d-maps-of-every-underground-station-hijklm-14683/ #10yrsago Open “Chromecast killer” committed suicide-by-DRM https://www.techdirt.com/2015/08/04/matchstick-more-open-chromecast-destroyed-drm-announces-plans-to-return-all-funds/ #10yrsago Privatized, for-profit immigration detention centers force detainees to work for $1-3/day https://www.latimes.com/nation/immigration/la-na-detention-immigration-workers-20150803-story.html #5yrsago Papercraft Addams Family house https://pluralistic.net/2020/08/04/attack-surface-preview/#neat-sweet-petite #5yrsago Google acquires major stake in ADT https://pluralistic.net/2020/08/04/attack-surface-preview/#vertical-integration #5yrsago Jack Dorsey's interop plan https://pluralistic.net/2020/08/04/attack-surface-preview/#jack-giant-killer #5yrsago Collective Action In Tech For Black Lives Matter https://pluralistic.net/2020/08/04/attack-surface-preview/#anti-racist-tech #5yrsago Papercraft Addams Family house https://pluralistic.net/2020/08/04/attack-surface-preview/#neat-sweet-petite #5yrsago Google acquires major stake in ADT https://pluralistic.net/2020/08/04/attack-surface-preview/#vertical-integration #5yrsago Jack Dorsey's interop plan https://pluralistic.net/2020/08/04/attack-surface-preview/#jack-giant-killer #5yrsago Collective Action In Tech For Black Lives Matter https://pluralistic.net/2020/08/04/attack-surface-preview/#anti-racist-tech #5yrsago NSO Group cyberweapons targeted Togo's opposition https://pluralistic.net/2020/08/03/turnkey-authoritarianism/#nso-togo #5yrsago The sordid tale of We Charity https://pluralistic.net/2020/08/03/turnkey-authoritarianism/#we-charity #5yrsago A universal remote for killing people https://pluralistic.net/2020/08/03/turnkey-authoritarianism/#minimed Upcoming appearances (permalink) San Diego: ACM Collective Intelligence keynote, Aug 5 https://ci.acm.org/2025/speakers/cory-doctorow/ 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, 2025 http://www.contraflowscifi.org/ 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) ORG at 20: In conversation with Maria Farrell https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M9H2An_D6io Why aren't we controlling our own tech? (Co-Op Congress) https://www.youtube.com/live/GLrDwHgeCy4?si=NUWxPphk0FS_3g9J&t=4409 If We Had a Choice, Would We Invent Social Media Again? (The Agenda/TVO) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KJw38uIcmEw 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. (1079 words yesterday, 20530 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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