[Plura-list] Proud to be a blockhead

[Cory Doctorow]

Read today's issue online at: https://pluralistic.net/2024/12/21/blockheads-r-us/

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This is the final Pluralistic edition of 2024! Have a fantastic winter break, and I'll see you next year!

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Today's links

* Proud to be a blockhead: The true economics of creativity and communication.

* Hey look at this: Delights to delectate.

* This day in history: 2009, 2014, 2019, 2023

* 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.

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🫑 Proud to be a blockhead

This is my last Pluralistic post of the year, and rather than round up my most successful posts of the year, I figured I'd write a little about why it's impossible for me to do that, and why that is by design, and what that says about the arts, monoopolies, AI, and creative labor markets.

I started Pluralistic nearly five years ago, and from the outset, I was adamant that I wouldn't measure my success through quantitative measures. The canonical version of Pluralistic - the one that lives at pluralistic.net - has *no* metrics, no analytics, no logs, and no tracking. I don't know who visits the site. I don't know how many people visit the site. I don't know which posts are most popular, and which ones are the least popular. I *can't* know any of that.

The other versions of Pluralistic are less ascetic, but only because there's no way for me to turn off *some* metrics on those channels. The Mailman service that delivers the (tracker-free) email version of Pluralistic necessarily has a system for telling me how many subscribers I have, but I have *never* looked at that number, and have no intention of doing so. I have turned off notifications when someone signs up for the list, or resigns from it.

The commercial, surveillance-heavy channels for Pluralistic - Tumblr, Twitter - have a lot of metrics, but again, I don't consult them. Medium and Mastodon have some metrics, and again, I just pretend they don't exist.

What *do* I pay attention to? The qualitative impacts of my writing. Comments. Replies. Emails. Other bloggers who discuss it, or discussions on Metafilter, Slashdot, Reddit and Hacker News. That stuff matters to me a *lot* because I write for two reasons, which are, in order: to work out my own thinking, and; to influence other peoples' thinking.

Writing is a cognitive prosthesis for me. Working things out on the page helps me work things out in my life. And, of course, working things out on the page helps me work *more* things out on the page. Writing begets writing:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/05/09/the-memex-method/

Honestly, that is sufficient. Not in the sense that writing, without being read, would make me happy or fulfilled. Being read and being part of a community and a conversation matters *a lot* to me. But the *very act* of writing is so important to me that even if no one read me, I would still write.

This is a thing that writers aren't supposed to admit. As I wrote on this blog's fourth anniversary, the most laughably false statement about writing ever uttered is Samuel Johnson's notorious "No man but a blockhead ever wrote but for money":

https://pluralistic.net/2024/02/20/fore/#synthesis

Making art is not an "economically rational" activity. Neither is attempting to persuade other people to your point of view. These activities are not merely *intrinsically satisfying*, they are also *necessary*, at least for many of us. The long, stupid fight about copyright that started in the Napster era has rarely acknowledged this, nor has it grappled with the implications of it. On the one hand, you have copyright maximalists who say totally absurd things like, "If you don't pay for art, no one will make art, and art will disappear." This is one of those radioactively false statements whose falsity is so glaring that it can be seen from orbit.

But on the other hand, you know who knows this fact *very* well? The corporations that pay creative workers. Movie studios, record labels, publishers, games studios: they all know that they are in possession of a workforce that *has* to make art, and will continue to do so, paycheck or not, until someone pokes their eyes out or breaks their fingers. People make art because it *matters* to them, and this trait makes workers terribly exploitable. As Fobazi Ettarh writes in her seminal paper on "vocational awe," workers who care about their jobs are at a huge disadvantage in labor markets. Teachers, librarians, nurses, and yes, *artists*, are all motivated by a sense of mission that often trumps their own self-interest and well-being and their bosses know it:

https://www.inthelibrarywiththeleadpipe.org/2018/vocational-awe/

One of the most important ideas in David Graeber's magisterial book *Bullshit Jobs* is that the ground state of labor is to do a job that you are proud of and that matters to you, but late-stage capitalist alienation has gotten so grotesque that some people will actually sneer at the idea that, say, teachers should be well compensated: "Why should you get a living wage - isn't the satisfaction of helping children payment enough?"

https://memex.craphound.com/2018/06/20/david-graebers-bullshit-jobs-why-does-the-economy-sustain-jobs-that-no-one-values/

These are the most salient facts of the copyright fight: creativity is a non-economic activity, and this makes creative workers extremely vulnerable to exploitation. People make art because they *have to*. As Marx was finishing *Kapital*, he was often stuck working from home, having *pawned his trousers* so he could keep writing. The fact that artists don't respond rationally to economic incentives doesn't mean they should starve to death. Art - like nursing, teaching and librarianship - is necessary for human thriving.

No, the implication of the economic irrationality of vocational awe is this: *the only tool that can secure economic justice for workers who truly can't help but do their jobs is solidarity.* Creative workers need to be in solidarity with one another, and with our audiences - and, often, with the other workers at the corporations who bring our work to market. We are all class allies locked in struggle with the owners of both the entertainment companies and the technology companies that sit between us and our audiences (this is the thesis of Rebecca Giblin's and my 2022 book *Chokepoint Capitalism*):

https://chokepointcapitalism.com/

The idea of artistic solidarity is an old and important one. Victor Hugo, creator of the first copyright treaty - the Berne Convention - wrote movingly about how the point of securing rights for creators wasn't to allow their biological children to exploit their work after their death, but rather, to ensure that the *creative* successors of artists could build on their forebears' accomplishments. Hugo - like any other artist who has a shred of honesty and has thought about the subject for more than ten seconds - knew that he was part of a creative community and tradition, one composed of readers and writers and critics and publishing workers, and that this was a community and a tradition worth fighting for and protecting.

One of the most important and memorable interviews Rebecca and I did for our book was with Liz Pelly, one of the sharpest critics of Spotify (our chapter about how Spotify steals from musicians is the only part of the audiobook available on Spotify itself - a "Spotify Exclusive"!):

https://open.spotify.com/show/7oLW9ANweI01CVbZUyH4Xg

Pelly has just published a major, important new book about Spotify's ripoffs, called *Mood Machine*:

https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/Mood-Machine/Liz-Pelly/9781668083505

A long article in *Harper's* unpacks one of the core mechanics at the heart of Spotify's systematic theft from creative workers: the use of "ghost artists," whose generic music is cheaper than real music, which is why Spotify crams it into their playlists:

https://harpers.org/archive/2025/01/the-ghosts-in-the-machine-liz-pelly-spotify-musicians/

The subject of Ghost Artists has long been shrouded in mystery and ardent - but highly selective - denials from Spotify itself. In her article - which features leaked internal chats from Spotify - Pelly gets to the heart of the matter. Ghost artists are musicians who are recruited by shadowy companies that offer flat fees for composing and performing inoffensive muzak that can fade into the background. This is wholesaled to Spotify, which crams it into wildly popular playlists of music that people put on while they're doing something else ("Deep Focus," "100% Lounge," "Bossa Nova Dinner," "Cocktail Jazz," "Deep Sleep," "Morning Stretch")  and might therefore settle for an inferior product.

Spotify calls this "Perfect Fit Music" and it's the pink slime of music, an extruded, musiclike content that plugs a music-shaped hole in your life, without performing the communicative and aesthetic job that real music exists for.

After many dead-end leads with people involved in the musical pink slime industry, Pelly finally locates a musician who's willing to speak anonymously about his work (he asks for anonymity because he relies on the pittances he receives for making pink slime to survive). This jazz musician knows very little about where the music he's commissioned to produce ends up, which is by design. The musical pink slime industry, like all sleaze industries, is shrouded in the secrecy sought by bosses who know that they're running a racket they should be ashamed of.

The anonymous musician composes a stack of compositions on his couch, then goes into a studio for a series of one-take recordings. There's usually a rep from the PFC pink slime industry there, and the rep's feedback is always "play simpler." As the anonymous musician explains:

> That’s definitely the thing: nothing that could be even remotely challenging or offensive, really. The goal, for sure, is to be as milquetoast as possible.

This source calls the arrangement "shameful." Another musician Pelly spoke to said "it felt unethical, like some kind of money-laundering scheme." The PFC companies say that these composers and performers are just making music, the way anyone might, and releasing it under pseudonyms in a way that "has been popular across mediums for decades." But Pelly's interview subjects told her that they don't consider their work to be art:

> It feels like someone is giving you a prompt or a question, and you’re just answering it, whether it’s actually your conviction or not. Nobody I know would ever go into the studio and record music this way.

Artists who are recruited to make new pink slime are given reference links to exiting pink slime and ordered to replicate it as closely as possible. The tracks produced this way that do the best are then fed to the next group of musicians to replicate, and so on. It's the musical equivalent of feeding slaughterhouse sweepings to the next generation of livestock, a version of the gag from *Catch 22* where a patient in a body-cast has a catheter bag and an IV drip, and once a day a nurse comes and swaps them around.

Pelly reminds us that Spotify was supposed to be an answer to the painful question of the Napster era: how do we pay musicians for their labor? Spotify was sold as a way to bypass the "gatekeepers": the big three labels who own 70% of all recorded music, whose financial maltreatment of artists was seen as moral justification for file sharing ("Why buy the CD if the musician won't see any of the money from it?").

But the way that Spotify secured rights to all the popular music in the world was by handing over big equity stakes in its business to the Big Three labels, and giving them wildly preferential terms that made it impossible for independent musicians and labels to earn more than homeopathic fractions of a penny for each stream, even as Spotify became the one essential conduit for reaching an audience:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/03/16/wage-theft/#excessive-buyer-power

It turns out that getting fans to pay for music has *no necessary connection* to getting musicians paid. Vocational awe means that the fact that someone has induced a musician to make music doesn't mean that the musician is getting a fair share of what you pay for music. The same goes for every kind of art, and every field where vocational awe plays a role, from nursing to librarianship.

*Chokepoint Capitalism* tries very hard to grapple with this conundrum; the second half of the book is a series of detailed, shovel-ready policy prescriptions for labor, contract, and copyright reforms that will immediately and profoundly shift the share of income generated by creative labor from bosses to workers.

Which brings me back to this little publishing enterprise of mine, and the fact that I do it for free, and not only that, give it away under a Creative Commons Attribution license that allows you to share and republish it, for money, if you choose:

https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

I am lucky enough that I make a good living from my writing, but I'm also honest enough with myself to know just how much luck was involved with that fact, and insecure enough to live in a state of constant near-terror about what happens when my luck runs out. I came up in science fiction, and I vividly remember the writers I admired whose careers popped like soap-bubbles when Reagan deregulated the retail sector, precipitating a collapse in the grocery stores and pharmacies where "midlist" mass-market paperbacks were sold by the millions across the country:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/07/04/self-publishing/

These writers - the ones who are still alive - are living proof of the fact that you have to break our fingers to get us to stop writing. Some of them haven't had a mainstream publisher in *decades*, but they're *still* writing, and self-publishing, or publishing with small presses, and often they're doing the best work of their careers, and almost no one is seeing it, and they're *still* doing it.

Because we aren't engaged in economically rational activity. We're doing something essential - essential to us, first and foremost, and essential to the audiences and peers our work reaches and changes and challenges.

Pluralistic is, in part, a way for me too face the fear I wake up with every day, that some day, my luck will run out, as it has for nearly all the writers I've ever admired, and to reassure myself that the writing will go on doing what I need it to do for my psyche and my heart even if - when - my career regresses to the mean.

It's a way for me to reaffirm the solidaristic nature of artistic activity, the connection with other writers and other readers (because I am, of course, an avid, constant reader). Commercial fortunes change. Monopolies lay waste to whole sectors and swallow up the livelihoods of people who believe in what they do like a whale straining tons of plankton through its baleen. But solidarity endures. Solidarietatis longa, vita brevis.

Happy New Year folks. See you in 2026.

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🫑 Hey look at this

* The How and the Tao of Old Time Banjo https://ia801601.us.archive.org/34/items/PatrickCostello/The%20How%20and%20the%20Tao%20of%20Old-Time%20Banjo.pdf

* The Debt Limit Should Absolutely Be Eliminated https://prospect.org/blogs-and-newsletters/tap/2024-12-19-debt-limit-should-absolutely-be-eliminated/

* Plumbing poverty: More people living without running water in US cities since global financial crisis https://phys.org/news/2024-12-plumbing-poverty-people-cities-global.html

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🫑 This day in history

#15yrsago Soviet kids’-book robots https://web.archive.org/web/20100107193522/https://ajourneyroundmyskull.blogspot.com/2009/12/mummy-was-robot-daddy-was-small-non.html

#15yrsago EFF’s ebook-buyer’s guide to privacy https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2009/12/e-book-privacy

#15yrsago Botnet runners start their own ISPs https://web.archive.org/web/20100103161911/http://threatpost.com/en_us/blogs/attackers-buying-own-data-centers-botnets-spam-122109

#15yrsago BBC’s plan to kick free/open source out of UK TV devices https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2009/dec/22/bbc-drm-cory-doctorow

#15yrsago How to Teach Physics to Your Dog: explaining quantum physics through discussions with a German shepherd https://memex.craphound.com/2009/12/22/how-to-teach-physics-to-your-dog-explaining-quantum-physics-through-discussions-with-a-german-shepherd/

#10yrsago Podcast: Happy Xmas! (guest starring Poesy) https://ia801602.us.archive.org/32/items/Cory_Doctorow_Podcast_280/Cory_Doctorow_Podcast_280_Happy_Christmas_with_Poesy.mp3

#10yrsago Homophobic pastor arrested for squeezing man’s genitals in park https://www.attitude.co.uk/news/world/anti-gay-pastor-gaylard-williams-arrested-after-squeezing-mans-genitals-283001/

#10yrsago Clever student uses red/blue masking to double exam cribsheet https://www.reddit.com/r/pics/comments/2pxxaj/told_my_students_they_could_use_a_3_x_5_notecard/

#10yrsago Dollar Store Dungeons! http://www.bladeandcrown.com/blog/2013/12/30/dollar-store-dungeons-the-project/

#10yrsago Delware school district wants kids to get signed permission before checking out YA library books https://cbldf.org/2014/12/delaware-school-district-considers-permission-slips-for-young-adult-books/

#5yrsago The 2010s were the decade of Citizens United https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2019/12/citizens-united-devastating-impact-american-politics.html

#5yrsago Kentucky’s former GOP governor pardoned a bunch of rapists and murderers on his way out of office, including a child rapist https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2019/12/20/matt-bevin-micah-schoettle-child-rapist-hymen-intact-pardon/

#5yrsago Mel Brooks on the 40th Anniversary of his "greatest film," Young Frankenstein https://www.latimes.com/entertainment/movies/la-et-mn-mel-brooks-20140909-story.html

#1yrago A year in illustration, 2023 edition https://pluralistic.net/2023/12/21/collages-r-us/#ki-bosch

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🫑 Upcoming appearances

* Picks and Shovels with Ken Liu (Boston), Feb 14
https://brooklinebooksmith.com/event/2025-02-14/cory-doctorow-ken-liu-picks-and-shovels

* Picks and Shovels with Charlie Jane Anders (Menlo Park), Feb 17
https://www.keplers.org/upcoming-events-internal/cory-doctorow

* Picks and Shovels with Wil Wheaton (Los Angeles), Feb 18
https://www.dieselbookstore.com/event/Cory-Doctorow-Wil-Wheaton-Author-signing

* Picks and Shovels with Dan Savage (Seattle), Feb 19
https://www.eventbrite.com/e/cory-doctorow-with-dan-savage-picks-and-shovels-a-martin-hench-novel-tickets-1106741957989

* Cloudfest (Europa Park), Mar 17-20
https://cloudfest.link/

* Picks and Shovels at Imagine! Belfast (Remote), Mar 24
https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/cory-doctorow-in-conversation-with-alan-meban-tickets-1106421399189

* DeepSouthCon63 (New Orleans), Oct 10-12, 2025
http://www.contraflowscifi.org/

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🫑 Recent appearances

* The Intersection of Storytelling and Technology (Grey Matter)
https://www.greymatter.show/episodes/s1e109-cory-doctorow-the-intersection-of-storytelling-and-technology

* Can we avoid the enshittification of clean-energy tech? (Volts.wtf)
https://www.volts.wtf/p/can-we-avoid-the-enshittification

* Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It (HOPE XV)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YrciT_dc2sc&list=PLcajvRZA8E0_tLLEh1COeAv-TcaDna2k1&index=32

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🫑 Latest books

* 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). Signed, personalized copies at Dark Delicacies (https://www.darkdel.com/store/p3062/Available_Feb_20th%3A_The_Bezzle_HB.html#/).

* "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). Signed, personalized copies at Dark Delicacies (https://www.darkdel.com/store/p3007/Pre-Order_Signed_Copies%3A_The_Lost_Cause_HB.html#/)

* "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. Signed copies at Dark Delicacies (US): and Forbidden Planet (UK): https://forbiddenplanet.com/385004-red-team-blues-signed-edition-hardcover/.

* "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

* "Attack Surface": The third Little Brother novel, a standalone technothriller for adults. The *Washington Post* called it "a political cyberthriller, vigorous, bold and savvy about the limits of revolution and resistance." Order signed, personalized copies from Dark Delicacies https://www.darkdel.com/store/p1840/Available_Now%3A_Attack_Surface.html

* "How to Destroy Surveillance Capitalism": an anti-monopoly pamphlet analyzing the true harms of surveillance capitalism and proposing a solution. https://onezero.medium.com/how-to-destroy-surveillance-capitalism-8135e6744d59?sk=f6cd10e54e20a07d4c6d0f3ac011af6b) (signed copies: https://www.darkdel.com/store/p2024/Available_Now%3A__How_to_Destroy_Surveillance_Capitalism.html)

* "Little Brother/Homeland": A reissue omnibus edition with a new introduction by Edward Snowden: https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250774583; personalized/signed copies here: https://www.darkdel.com/store/p1750/July%3A__Little_Brother_%26_Homeland.html

* "Poesy the Monster Slayer" a picture book about monsters, bedtime, gender, and kicking ass. Order here: https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781626723627. Get a personalized, signed copy here: https://www.darkdel.com/store/p2682/Corey_Doctorow%3A_Poesy_the_Monster_Slayer_HB.html#/.

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🫑 Upcoming books

* Picks and Shovels: a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about the heroic era of the PC, Tor Books, February 2025

* Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It, Farrar, Straus, Giroux, October 2025

* Unauthorized Bread: a middle-grades graphic novel adapted from my novella about refugees, toasters and DRM, FirstSecond, 2025

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🫑 Colophon

Today's top sources:

Currently writing:

* Enshittification: a nonfiction book about platform decay for Farrar, Straus, Giroux. Status: second pass edit underway (readaloud)

* A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING

* Picks and Shovels, a Martin Hench noir thriller about the heroic era of the PC. FORTHCOMING TOR BOOKS FEB 2025

Latest podcast:
  Daddy-Daughter Podcast 2024 https://craphound.com/overclocked/2024/12/17/daddy-daughter-podcast-2024/

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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"*When life gives you SARS, you make sarsaparilla*" -Joey "Accordion Guy" DeVilla