Today's links Canny Valley: My little art-book is here! Hey look at this: Delights to delectate. Object permanence: Ballmer throws a chair; Bruce Sterling on Singapore; RIP David Graeber; Big Car warns of lethal Right to Repair. 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. Canny Valley (permalink) I've spent every evening this week painstakingly unpacking, numbering and signing 500 copies of my very first art-book, a strange and sturdy little volume called Canny Valley. Canny Valley collects 80 of the best collages I've made for my Pluralistic newsletter, where I publish 5-6 essays every week, usually headed by a strange, humorous and/or grotesque image made up of public domain sources and Creative Commons works. These images are made from open access sources, and they are themselves open access, licensed Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike, which means you can take them, remix them, even sell them, all without my permission. I never thought I'd become a visual artist, but as I've grappled with the daily challenge of figuring out how to illustrate my furious editorials about contemporary techno-politics, especially "enshittification," I've discovered a deep satisfaction from my deep dives into historical archives of illustration, and, of course, the remixing that comes afterward. Over the years, many readers have asked whether I would ever collect these in a book. Then I ran into Creative Commons CEO Anna Tumadóttir and we brainstormed ideas for donor gifts in honor of Creative Commons' 25th anniversary. My first novel was the first book ever released under a CC license, and while CC has gone on to bigger and better things (without CC there'd be no Wikipedia!), I never forget that my own artistic career and CC's trajectory are co-terminal: https://craphound.com/down/download/ Talking with Anna, I hit on the idea of making a beautiful little book of my favorite illustrations from Pluralistic. Anna thought CC could use about 400 of these, and all the printers I talked to offered me a pretty great quantity break at 500, so I decided I'd do it, and offer the excess 100 copies as premiums in my next Kickstarter, for the enshittification book: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/doctorow/enshittification-the-drm-free-audiobook/ That Kickstarter is going really well – about to break $100,000! – and as I type these words, there are only five copies of Canny Valley up for grabs. I'm pretty sure they'll be gone long before the campaign closes in ten days. Of course, the fact that you can't get a physical copy of the book doesn't mean that you can't get access to all its media. Here's the full set of all 238 collages, in high-rez, for your plundering pleasure: https://www.flickr.com/photos/doctorow/albums/72177720316719208 But there is one part of this book that's not online: my pal and mentor Bruce Sterling, a cyberpunk legend turned electronic art impressario turned assemblage sculptor, wrote me a brilliant foreword for Canny Valley. Bruce gave me the go-ahead to license this CC BY 4.0 as well, and so I'm reproducing it below. Having spent several days now handling hundreds of these books, I have to say, I am indecently pleased with how they turned out, which is all down to other people. My friend John Berry, a legendary book designer and typographer, laid it out: https://johndberry.com/ And the folks at LA's best comics shop, Secret Headquarters, hooked me up with an incredible printer, the 100+ year old Pasadena institution Typecraft: https://www.typecraft.com/live2/who-we-are.html Typecraft ran this on a gorgeous Indigo printer on 100lb Mohawk paper that just drank the ink. The PVA glue in the binding will last a century, and the matte coat cover doesn't pick up smudges or fingerprints. It's a stunning little artifact. This has been so much fun (and such a success) that I imagine I'll do future volumes in the years to come. In the meantime, enjoy Bruce's intro, and join me in basking in the fact that "enshittification" has made Webster's: https://bsky.app/profile/merriam-webster.com/post/3lxxhhxo4nc2e INTRODUCTION by Bruce Sterling In 1970 a robotics professor named Masahiro Mori discovered a new problem in aesthetics. He called this "bukimi no tani genshō." The Japanese robots he built were functional, so the "bukimi no tani" situation was not an engineering problem. It was a deep and basic problem in the human perception of humanlike androids. Humble assembly robots, with their claws and swivels, those looked okay to most people. Dolls, puppets and mannequins, those also looked okay. Living people had always aesthetically looked okay to people. Especially, the pretty ones. However, between these two realms that the late Dr Mori was gamely attempting to weld together — the world of living mankind and of the pseudo-man-like machine– there was an artistic crevasse. Anything in this "Uncanny Valley" looked, and felt, severely not-okay. These overdressed robots looked and felt so eerie that their creator's skills became actively disgusting. The robots got prettier, but only up to a steep verge. Then they slid down the precipice and became zombie doppelgangers. That's also the issue with the aptly-titled "Canny Valley" art collection here. People already know how to react aesthetically to traditional graphic images. Diagrams are okay. Hand-drawn sketches and cartoons are also okay. Brush-made paintings are mostly fine. Photographs, those can get kind of dodgy. Digital collages that slice up and weld highly disparate elements like diagrams, cartoons, sketches and also photos and paintings, those trend toward the uncanny. The pixel-juggling means of digital image-manipulation are not art-traditional pencils or brushes. They do not involve the human hand, or maybe not even the human eye, or the human will. They're not fixed on paper or canvas; they're a Frankenstein mash-up landscape of tiny colored screen-dots where images can become so fried that they look and feel "cursed." They're conceptually gooey congelations, stuck in the valley mire of that which is and must be neither this-nor-that. A modern digital artist has billions of jpegs in files, folders, clouds and buckets. He's never gonna run out of weightless grist from that mill. Why would Cory Doctorow — novelist, journalist, activist, opinion columnist and so on — want to lift his typing fingers from his lettered keyboard, so as to create graphics with cut-and-paste and "lasso tools"? Cory Doctorow also has some remarkably tangled, scandalous and precarious issues to contemplate, summarize and discuss. They're not his scandalous private intrigues, though. Instead, they're scandalous public intrigues. Or, at least Cory struggles to rouse some public indignation about these intrigues, because his core topics are the tangled penthouse/slash/underground machinations of billionaire web moguls. Cory really knows really a deep dank lot about this uncanny nexus of arcane situations. He explains the shameful disasters there, but they're difficult to capture without torrents of unwieldy tech jargon. I think there are two basic reasons for this. The important motivation is his own need to express himself by some method other than words. I'm reminded here of the example of H. G. Wells, another science fiction writer turned internationally famous political pundit. HG Wells was quite a tireless and ambitious writer — so much so that he almost matched the torrential output of Cory Doctorow. But HG Wells nevertheless felt a compelling need to hand-draw cartoons. He called them "picshuas." These hundreds of "picshuas" were rarely made public. They were usually sketched in the margins of his hand-written letters. Commonly the picshuas were aimed at his second wife, the woman he had renamed "Jane." These picshuas were caricatures, or maybe rapid pen-and-ink conceptual outlines, of passing conflicts, events and situations in the life of Wells. They seemed to carry tender messages to Jane that the writer was unable or unwilling to speak aloud to her. Wells being Wells, there were always issues in his private life that might well pose a challenge to bluntly state aloud: "Oh by the way, darling, I've built a second house in the South of France where I spend my summers with a comely KGB asset, the Baroness Budberg." Even a famously glib and charming writer might feel the need to finesse that. Cory Doctorow also has some remarkably tangled, scandalous and precarious issues to contemplate, summarize and discuss. They're not his scandalous private intrigues, though. Instead, they're scandalous public intrigues. Or, at least Cory struggles to rouse some public indignation about these intrigues, because his core topics are the tangled penthouse/slash/underground machinations of billionaire web moguls. Cory really knows really a deep dank lot about this uncanny nexus of arcane situations. He explains the shameful disasters there, but they're difficult to capture without torrents of unwieldy tech jargon. So instead, he diligently clips, cuts, pastes, lassos, collages and pastiches. He might, plausibly, hire a professional artist to design his editorial cartoons for him. However, then Cory would have to verbally explain all his political analysis to this innocent graphics guy. Then Cory would also have to double-check the results of the artist and fix the inevitable newbie errors and grave misunderstandings. That effort would be three times the labor for a dogged crusader who is already working like sixty. It's more practical for him to mash-up images that resemble editorial cartoons. He can't draw. Also, although he definitely has a pronounced sense of aesthetics, it's not a aesthetic most people would consider tasteful. Cory Doctorow, from his very youth, has always had a "craphound" aesthetic. As an aesthete, Cory is the kind of guy who would collect rain-drenched punk-band flyers that had fallen off telephone poles and store them inside a 1950s cardboard kid-cereal box. I am not scolding him for this. He's always been like that. As Wells used to say about his unique "picshuas," they seemed like eccentric scribblings, but over the years, when massed-up as an oeuvre, they formed a comic burlesque of an actual life. Similarly, one isolated Doctorow collage can seem rather what-the-hell. It's trying to be "canny." If you get it, you get it. If you don't get the first one, then you can page through all of these, and at the end you will probably get it. En masse, it forms the comic burlesque of a digital left-wing cyberspatial world-of-hell. A monster-teeming Silicon Uncanny Valley of extensively raked muck. <img src="https://craphound.com/images/ai-freud.jpg" alt="Sigmund Freud's study with his famous couch. Behind the couch stands an altered version of the classic Freud portrait in which he is smoking a cigar. Freud's clothes and cigar have all been tinted in bright neon colors. His head has been replaced with the glaring red eye of HAL9000 from Kubrick's '2001: A Space Odyssey.' His legs have been replaced with a tangle of tentacles. Cryteria (modified)/https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:HAL9000.svg/CC BY 3.0/https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/deed.en | Ser Amantio di Nicolao (modified)/https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Study_with_the_couch,_Freud_Museum_London,_18M0143.jpg"/CC BY-SA 3.0/https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/deed"> There are a lot of web-comix people who like to make comic fun of the Internet, and to mock "the Industry." However, there's no other social and analytical record quite like this one. It has something of the dark affect of the hundred-year-old satirical Dada collages of Georg Schultz or Hannah Hoch. Those Dada collages look dank and horrible because they're "Dada" and pulling a stunt. These images look dank and horrible because they're analytical, revelatory and make sense. If you do not enjoy contemporary electronic politics, and instead you have somehow obtained an art degree, I might still be able to help you with my learned and well-meaning intro here. I can recommend a swell art-critical book titled "Memesthetics" by Valentina Tanni. I happen to know Dr. Tanni personally, and her book is the cat's pyjamas when it comes to semi-digital, semi-collage, appropriated, Situationiste-detournement, net.art "meme aesthetics." I promise that I could robotically mimic her, and write uncannily like her, if I somehow had to do that. I could even firmly link the graphic works of Cory Doctorow to the digital avant-garde and/or digital folk-art traditions that Valentina Tanni is eruditely and humanely discussing. Like with a lot of robots, the hard part would be getting me to stop. Cory works with care on his political meme-cartoons — because he is using them to further his own personal analysis, and to personally convince himself. They're not merely sharp and partisan memes, there to rouse one distinct viewer-emotion and make one single point. They're like digital jigsaw-puzzle landscape-sketches — unstable, semi-stolen and digital, because the realm he portrays is itself also unstable, semi-stolen and digital. The cartoons are dirty and messy because the situations he tackles are so dirty and messy. That's the grain of his lampoon material, like the damaged amps in a punk song. A punk song that was licensed by some billionaire and then used to spy on hapless fans with surveillance-capitalism. Since that's how it goes, that's also what you're in for. You have been warned, and these collages will warn you a whole lot more. If you want to aesthetically experience some elegant, time-tested collage art that was created by a major world artist, then you should gaze in wonder at the Max Ernst masterpiece, "Une semaine de bonté" ("A Week of Kindness"). This indefinable "collage novel" aka "artist's book" was created in the troubled time of 1934. It's very uncanny rather than "canny, "and it's also capital-A great Art. As an art critic, I could balloon this essay to dreadful robotic proportions while I explain to you in detail why this weirdo mess is a lasting monument to the expressive power of collage. However, Cory Doctorow is not doing Max Ernst's dreamy, oneiric, enchanting Surrealist art. He would never do that and it wouldn't make any sense if he did. Cory did this instead. It is art, though. It is what it is, and there's nothing else like it. It's artistic expression as Cory Doctorow has a sincere need to perform that, and in twenty years it will be even more rare and interesting. It's journalism ahead of its time (a little) and with a passage of time, it will become testimonial. Bruce Sterling — Ibiza MMXXV Hey look at this (permalink) Twitter users on Enshittification https://x.com/search?q=https%3A%2F%2Ftwitter.com%2FMerriamWebster%2Fstatus%2F1963336587712057346&amp;src=typed_query&amp;f=live Introducing Structural Zero: a New Monthly Newsletter https://hrdag.org/introducing-structural-zero-a-new-monthly-newsletter/ 70 leading Canadians, civil society groups ask Carney to protect Canada's 'digital sovereignty' https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/open-letter-mark-carney-digital-sovereignty-1.7623128 AI Darwin Awards https://aidarwinawards.org/ Kraft Heinz went all-in on scale. Now it’s banking on a breakup to save its business https://www.cnn.com/2025/09/03/business/kraft-heinz-nightcap Object permanence (permalink) #20yrsago Singapore’s cool-ass hard-drive video-players https://memex.craphound.com/2005/09/03/singapores-cool-ass-hard-drive-video-players/ #20yrsago Being Poor — meditation by John Scalzi https://whatever.scalzi.com/2005/09/03/being-poor/ #20yrsago MSFT CEO: I will “fucking kill” Google — then he threw a chair https://battellemedia.com/archives/2005/09/ballmer_throws_a_chair_at_fing_google #20yrsago Massachusetts to MSFT: switch to open formats or you’re fired https://web.archive.org/web/20051001011728/http://www.boston.com/business/technology/articles/2005/09/02/state_may_drop_office_software/ #20yrsago Bruce Sterling’s Singapore wrapup https://web.archive.org/web/20051217133502/https://wiredblogs.tripod.com/sterling/index.blog?entry_id=1211240 #20yrsago Apple //e mainboards networked and boxed: the Applecrate https://web.archive.org/web/20050407173742/http://members.aol.com/MJMahon/CratePaper.html #15yrsago Jewelry made from laminated, polished cross-sections of bookshttps://littlefly.co.uk/ #15yrsago Boneless, clubfooted French Connection model invades Melbournehttps://www.flickr.com/photos/doctorow/4953586953/ #5yrsago Corporate spooks track you "to your door" https://pluralistic.net/2020/09/03/rip-david-graeber/#hyas #5yrsago Hedge fund managers trouser 64% https://pluralistic.net/2020/09/03/rip-david-graeber/#2-and-20 #5yrsago Rest in Power, David Graeber https://pluralistic.net/2020/09/03/rip-david-graeber/#rip-david-graeber #5yrsago Coronavirus is over (if we want it) https://pluralistic.net/2020/09/03/rip-david-graeber/#test-test-test #5yrsago Snowden vindicated https://pluralistic.net/2020/09/03/rip-david-graeber/#criming-spooks #5yrsago Algorithmic grading https://pluralistic.net/2020/09/03/rip-david-graeber/#computer-says-no #5yrsago Big Car says Right to Repair will MURDER YOU https://pluralistic.net/2020/09/03/rip-david-graeber/#rolling-surveillance-platforms 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 Madrid: Conferencia EUROPEA 4D (Virtual), Oct 28 https://4d.cat/es/conferencia/ Miami: Enshittification at Books & Books, Nov 5 https://www.eventbrite.com/e/an-evening-with-cory-doctorow-tickets-1504647263469 Recent appearances (permalink) Nerd Harder! (This Week in Tech) https://twit.tv/shows/this-week-in-tech/episodes/1047 Techtonic with Mark Hurst https://www.wfmu.org/playlists/shows/155658 Cory Doctorow DESTROYS Enshittification (QAA Podcast) https://soundcloud.com/qanonanonymous/cory-doctorow-destroys-enshitification-e338 Latest books (permalink) "Picks and Shovels": a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about the heroic era of the PC, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), February 2025 (https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250865908/picksandshovels). "The Bezzle": a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about prison-tech and other grifts, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), February 2024 (the-bezzle.org). "The Lost Cause:" a solarpunk novel of hope in the climate emergency, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), November 2023 (http://lost-cause.org). "The Internet Con": A nonfiction book about interoperability and Big Tech (Verso) September 2023 (http://seizethemeansofcomputation.org). Signed copies at Book Soup (https://www.booksoup.com/book/9781804291245). "Red Team Blues": "A grabby, compulsive thriller that will leave you knowing more about how the world works than you did before." Tor Books http://redteamblues.com. "Chokepoint Capitalism: How to Beat Big Tech, Tame Big Content, and Get Artists Paid, with Rebecca Giblin", on how to unrig the markets for creative labor, Beacon Press/Scribe 2022 https://chokepointcapitalism.com Upcoming books (permalink) "Canny Valley": A limited edition collection of the collages I create for Pluralistic, self-published, September 2025 "Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It," Farrar, Straus, Giroux, October 7 2025 https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374619329/enshittification/ "Unauthorized Bread": a middle-grades graphic novel adapted from my novella about refugees, toasters and DRM, FirstSecond, 2026 "Enshittification, Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It" (the graphic novel), Firstsecond, 2026 "The Memex Method," Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2026 "The Reverse-Centaur's Guide to AI," a short book about being a better AI critic, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2026 Colophon (permalink) Today's top sources: Currently writing: "The Reverse Centaur's Guide to AI," a short book for Farrar, Straus and Giroux about being an effective AI critic. FIRST DRAFT COMPLETE AND SUBMITTED. A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING This work – excluding any serialized fiction – is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license. That means you can use it any way you like, including commercially, provided that you attribute it to me, Cory Doctorow, and include a link to pluralistic.net. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ Quotations and images are not included in this license; they are included either under a limitation or exception to copyright, or on the basis of a separate license. Please exercise caution. How to get Pluralistic: Blog (no ads, tracking, or data-collection): Pluralistic.net Newsletter (no ads, tracking, or data-collection): https://pluralistic.net/plura-list Mastodon (no ads, tracking, or data-collection): https://mamot.fr/@pluralistic Medium (no ads, paywalled): https://doctorow.medium.com/ Twitter (mass-scale, unrestricted, third-party surveillance and advertising): https://twitter.com/doctorow Tumblr (mass-scale, unrestricted, third-party surveillance and advertising): https://mostlysignssomeportents.tumblr.com/tagged/pluralistic "When life gives you SARS, you make sarsaparilla" -Joey "Accordion Guy" DeVilla READ CAREFULLY: By reading this, you agree, on behalf of your employer, to release me from all obligations and waivers arising from any and all NON-NEGOTIATED agreements, licenses, terms-of-service, shrinkwrap, clickwrap, browsewrap, confidentiality, non-disclosure, non-compete and acceptable use policies ("BOGUS AGREEMENTS") that I have entered into with your employer, its partners, licensors, agents and assigns, in perpetuity, without prejudice to my ongoing rights and privileges. You further represent that you have the authority to release me from any BOGUS AGREEMENTS on behalf of your employer. ISSN: 3066-764X

Spoiler alert: ChatGPT won.

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

And Denying That Has Corroded Public Discourse

August 29, 2025.