From doctorow at craphound.com Wed Sep 2 06:20:04 2026 From: doctorow at craphound.com (Cory Doctorow) Date: Wed, 2 Sep 2026 11:20:04 +0100 Subject: [Plura-list] Unpermissioned research Message-ID: Read today's issue online at: https://pluralistic.net/2026/09/02/scrape-scrope-scrap/ Today's links * Unpermissioned research: Fighting Trump means preserving the internet, which means scraping. * Hey look at this: Delights to delectate. * Object permanence: Leaked advanced PalmOS device specs; Stalwart workers; "I, Rowboat"; SMS uprising; Facebook v switching costs; Capitalism of fools. * Upcoming appearances: D?browa G?rnicza, Warsaw, Brighton, London, Budapest, South Bend, Hudson, Victoria, Vancouver. * 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. ->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->-> ? Unpermissioned research After half a century of neoliberalism, we are all drenched in capitalism's established religion, the worship of property rights. We are so saturated in property worship that even capitalism's critics frame their critiques in "property talk," to the exclusion of other, more important rights, like human rights, labor rights and privacy rights. To do this is to surrender before the battle even starts. Critics lose when they allow oligarchs and their apologists to choose a battlefield where they have a nearly unbeatable advantage. Take privacy: privacy is a human right, not a property right. Human rights aren't for sale. You can't sell yourself into slavery, you can't sell your kidneys to make the rent. If privacy is a property right - one that can be traded away - then Facebook's industrial-scale privacy invasions are actually fine, since you "traded" your privacy to Mark Zuckerberg in exchange for the privilege of talking to your friends. Some self-styled critics of tech monopolists say that the answer to Facebook's privacy invasions is to force the company to pay for your privacy with *cash*, rather than services: https://www.wired.com/story/opinion-andrew-yangs-plan-to-pay-you-for-your-data-doesnt-add-up/ This is ideological capture in its purest form: the "data dividend" that Facebook would owe you under this system amounts to a few dollars per year. For wealthy people, the sums would be trivial, while working people, who've been on the downward leg of every K-shaped recovery for a quarter century, who've maxed out their credit cards and re-mortgaged their homes and drive Uber on the weekends to make rent, would have to subject themselves to ongoing surveillance. That surveillance is already used to determine the highest price those working people will pay - companies like Plexure inform fast food places when you've just gotten paid so they can tack an extra dollar onto your breakfast burrito in the app: https://pluralistic.net/2026/04/30/something-must-be-done/#there-ive-done-something Being forced to sell your privacy doesn't just raise the prices you pay, it also lowers the wages you earn. The same people who can't afford this "pay or privacy" system have their private data used to calculate the lowest wage they'll accept for each ride on those weekend Uber shifts: https://pluralistic.net/2024/12/18/loose-flapping-ends/#luigi-has-a-point In other words: not being able to afford privacy will result in you having even *less* disposable income, which will mean that you'll have to sell even *more* of your privacy. Lather, rinse, repeat. But even the wealthy people who can afford to forego the pittances Facebook and others offer in exchange for their private information will find privacy elusive. That's because private information isn't a "rival good" - a thing only one person can own at a time. The fact that your mother is your mother "belongs" to both you and her, as well as your grandparents, your father, your siblings and your kids. The fact that *you* don't sell your family tree to a tech company won't stop all those other people from selling it on - as anyone whose foolish relations handed their genome over to 23andme can attest: https://www.npr.org/2025/03/24/nx-s1-5338622/23andme-bankruptcy-genetic-data-privacy In the property religion, the way you can tell if something is valuable is if it has a high price. Property cultists insist that the problem with privacy is that our privacy is being sold too cheaply. They're wrong: private information isn't "mispriced" - it shouldn't *be* priced. Human beings are the most valuable things in our world and they are literally priceless. Murder isn't "theft of life." Rape isn't "theft of sex." While insurers and civil courts have ways of calculating the "price" of an injury or violation, great care has been taken over the centuries to ensure that this does not turn human beings into commodities. You can't buy a "murder offset" that lets you kill people provided you pay into a fund that saves a human somewhere else: https://pluralistic.net/2021/04/14/for-sale-green-indulgences/#killer-analogy Human beings are *too valuable* to be priced. We have an entire, *sui generis* way of balancing the conflicting interests of human rights. My daughter and wife have rights over me, I have rights over them, and when those rights come into conflict - say, if my daughter believes I can no longer care for myself and wants to put me in a care home - the process for resolving that conflict isn't an auction: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2008/feb/21/intellectual.property Your kids aren't your property. In fact, *all* the most important relationships in your life are non-market. Doctors have patients, not customers. Any time a doctor calls you a "customer" they are *demoting you*. A doctor doesn't sell you health. You have rights as a patient that far exceed the rights accruing to a mere customer. Same goes for other professions: Teachers have pupils, librarians have patrons, lawyers have clients. "Customer" is a demotion from all of these. As every "user agreement" you've ever clicked through demonstrates, Big Tech loves to have everything defined in property terms - and so does *all* big business. Take the fight over scraping for AI. You might think that this is a fight over the economic rights of creative workers - certainly, my fellow creative workers treat it as such. But because this debate is being framed in terms of *property rights*, rather than *labor rights*, this is a fight that workers are set up to lose. The tell here is how the media companies - who have been eroding the wages of creative workers for decades as they consolidated into a curdled, inbred oligopoly - describe the AI companies' scraping: as an unlicensed taking. Mitch Glazier, the $1.4m/year CEO of the Recording Industry Association of America issues press releases decrying AI training for image generators without negotiating a license fee first: https://pluralistic.net/2026/03/03/its-a-trap-2/#inheres-at-the-moment-of-fixation Who's Mitch Glazier? Oh, just a former Congressional staffer who was drummed out the Capitol Building after he snuck a clause into must-pass legislation that would have transferred hundreds of millions of dollars from musicians to record labels, who was then immediately hired as the CEO of the record industry's largest lobbying group: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2013/12/tpps-attack-artists-termination-rights Mitch Glazier - and the businesses he represents - aren't opposed to AI replacing artists. They're opposed to AI replacing *media companies*. Remember the Hollywood writers' strike? The proposal to replace screenwriters with chatbots didn't come from OpenAI, it came from Disney, Warner, Universal and other companies who claim that AI training is "theft." If AI training is "theft," then it can be cured by making a purchase, something that the AI companies can easily afford, thanks to the hundreds of billions of dollars they have been given by the world's richest investors, who are the high priests and cardinals of the property religion. The Hollywood writers are the *only workers in the world* who have successfully beaten back the use of AI in their workplace, and they didn't do it by making recourse to property rights. The Writers Guild is a *union* and it enjoys a weak form of "sectoral bargaining" (where all the workers in a field bargain with all the businesses at once) called "multi-employer bargaining": https://pluralistic.net/2023/10/01/how-the-writers-guild-sunk-ais-ship/ The Hollywood writers' strike was an unqualified victory for the writers, who defended their *labor* rights to co-determination when it came to the use of new tools on their jobsite. Under the terms of their hard-fought contract, screenwriters don't have to use AI, but they can if they want. For example, writers on a long-running sitcom might train an AI with every script in the series' history, so they can ask a chatbot continuity questions as they beat out a new season of the show. But they don't have to do this if they don't want to, and even if they do, neither their wages nor their headcount can be reduced. The media companies insist that scraping is a copyright violation, that it's "theft." As a matter of law, this is far from obvious or settled: the process of making transient copies of many works, performing mathematical analysis on them, and then publishing that analysis as software is *not* obviously a copyright violation, and anyone who claims otherwise doesn't understand copyright: https://pluralistic.net/2023/02/09/ai-monkeys-paw/#bullied-schoolkids Worse: by demoting a labor rights issue to a mere property rights issue, AI critics are setting workers up to fail. Say the issue with AI training really is mere copyright. If that's so, the media companies who want nothing better than to pauperize creative workers can amend their standard contracts so that any worker who does business with them must irrevocably transfer their "AI training rights" to the company. Then, that company will *absolutely, 100%* license those rights to an AI company to create a model *designed to replace that worker*. The company will get paid for the training, and the resulting model will come with "guardrails" to stop other media companies from using proprietary data to compete with it. This is the story of the past 50 years of copyright expansion: every new copyright we've created "to help artists" was scooped up by their bosses, who grew more powerful and were able to demand more concessions from those artists, who were therefore poorer and thus needed more copyrights to help them (lather, rinse, repeat): https://pluralistic.net/2026/08/18/enron-corpus/#sign-here If creative workers' AI fight is merely a copyright fight, then that fight can only determine whether media companies or tech companies will get the biggest portion when those workers are devoured by corporations. Only a *labor rights* fight can take creative workers off the menu altogether. Treating AI training as "theft" creates harms whose blast radius extends well beyond creative workers' livelihoods. Scraping is a *hugely beneficial* activity. If scraping - taking a vast corpus of copyrighted works without permission - is theft, then every search engine is a crime, unless it can afford to license "search indexing rights" from every site on the internet. There's exactly *one* company that could pull that off: Google, a rapacious tech monopolist that is - not coincidentally - one of the leaders of the movement to beggar every creative worker. We will not improve the world, the internet, or creative workers' lives by ensuring that the last search engine anyone ever creates is Google. Remember our earlier discussion of how privacy violations are weaponized to make poor people even poorer, by depressing their wages and raising prices based on inferences about their economic desperation? Our best weapon for fighting this practice is *scraping*, because that's how we catch corporations changing prices and wages based on surveillance data: https://pluralistic.net/2023/09/17/how-to-think-about-scraping/ Scraping is how we produce evidence of the changes that powerful people are making to the world around us. Do you want to know whether Mark Zuckerberg or Elon Musk are downranking content critical of Trump and Big Tech and pumping racist and conspiratorial posts into the resulting void? You'd better hope you can scrape the feeds they cram into billions of people's eyeballs. Same goes for keeping track of genocide apologists, data-center astroturfers and ICE cheerleaders who've flooded Tiktok ever since Trump stole it and handed it over to his creepy billionaire pal Larry Ellison. Making copies of that stuff isn't theft. It's not a copyright violation. Not even if you do it to billions of works. Not even if it's bad for the companies whose feeds you're capturing. Not even if it's bad for the dark money groups who funded the content. Sure, if you do this carelessly or recklessly, you can end up violating someone's labor rights, or privacy rights, or human rights. And because *those* frameworks *aren't* based on the sanctity of property rights, *they* can be used to protect these important rights *without* giving corporate America the right to have you fined or arrested for documenting their takeover of the America. The people who keep track of this stuff *are* worried about being fined or arrested. Ethan Zuckerman, one of America's foundational internet scholars, has just accepted Canadian government funding to move his lab from UMass to McGill in Montreal: https://ethanzuckerman.com/2026/08/27/my-personal-contribution-to-the-us-canada-trade-war/ Zuckerman studies platform power: "using data to answer hard questions about social media, search engines and AI tools." He leads a team that is documenting exactly, precisely how tech companies collude with authoritarians to spy on us, manipulate us, and control us. And his methodology is something called "unpermissioned research," which is what academics call scraping: https://www.techpolicy.press/ai-companies-threaten-independent-social-media-research/ "Unpermissioned research" seeks to circumvent limits that platforms establish *specifically* to stop outsiders from learning how they operate. When you're doing unpermissioned research, you try to get around rate limits, query throttles, and other measures that platforms use to block others from mapping their extent and documenting their conduct. "Unpermissioned research" isn't a free-for-all. Universities have ethical rules designed to protect the privacy rights and other human rights of research subjects, and because these aren't property rights, they can be balanced against the socially beneficial outcomes of research. Universities can get this wrong, of course, but when they do, it's not *theft*. It's a human rights violation, a privacy violation, a labor violation. If you want to know how AI companies are trying to destroy creators' livelihoods, you *have to scrape the AI companies*. You can't ask companies for permission to gather information that might be used to destroy them - they'll just say no. If taking information off the internet without permission is "theft," then gathering information by scraping AI companies is *also* theft. Sometimes a tech company will set up a "research portal" that supposedly obviates the need to scrape by putting all the relevant information in one convenient place. That's what Facebook did in the wake of the 2016 election, when it was widely condemned for publishing paid political disinformation. But Facebook's official research portal omitted *vast amounts* of paid political disinformation, something we only know because NYU set up a scraping project called Ad Observer that documented the discrepancy: https://pluralistic.net/2021/08/06/get-you-coming-and-going/#potemkin-research-program Facebook used legal threats to kill Ad Observer, and then...they killed their official research portal, too: https://pluralistic.net/2021/07/15/three-wise-zucks-in-a-trenchcoat/#inconvenient-truth Zuckerman is one of *dozens* of leading US academics who are relocating their labs and teams to Canadian universities, citing fear of political interference from the Trump regime: https://vancouver.citynews.ca/2026/08/27/canada-recruits-dozens-of-foreign-scientists-researchers-poaching-many-from-u-s/ The Canadian government has committed $504m to the project. Some of that research will help Canada develop new green energy, and some of it will help Canada make important medical breakthroughs. But Zuckerman's research has a special place in the portfolio of Canadian research projects, because - thanks to scraping - it is a leading source of information about how Trump's tech companies are waging war on the American people and the world. Scraping isn't theft of data, just like murder isn't theft of life. Scraping can be harmful, and we can create laws and social regimes and ways of talking about those harms that don't give authoritarian governments and vast multinational corporations the right to decide who can document and analyze their conduct. Take Wikipedia: the project exists solely to organize and disseminate information, for free, to everyone in the world. Wikipedia is among the most important parts of the internet, and one of the most positive developments of the 21st century. The entire project is licensed under a generous Creative Commons license that encourages *unlimited* commercial re-use of its contents. Even if you think scraping copyrighted works is theft, scraping Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 works is *unquestionably* not theft. But Wikipedia is being *hammered* by AI scrapers, which are operating so aggressively that they threaten the project's ability to keep its servers online. Wikipedia has an AI problem, but that AI problem isn't "theft" - it's *denial of service*, the aggressive act of intentionally or recklessly flooding a server with so much traffic that it crashes. If you've been lured into a cultlike worship of property rights, this seems like a contradiction. But once you relegate the relatively unimportant matter of property rights to its correct station, you can see - and reason about - the universe of rights that are far more important than mere property. All it takes is realizing that there are far worse things you can do with information than "stealing" it. ->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->-> ? Hey look at this * Meta's $17 Billion Settlement is a Bad Deal for Teens and All Social Media Users https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2026/09/metas-17-billion-settlement-bad-deal-teens-and-all-social-media-users * New Twitter launches, says Musk?s X gave up the name https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2026/08/new-twitter-launches-says-musks-x-gave-up-the-name/ * For The Economist, Mentioning Workers? Interests Is Heresy https://jacobin.com/2026/08/acemoglu-economics-ai-automation-working-class * How Youth and Educators Can Fight Enshittified Tech https://clalliance.org/blog/how-youth-and-educators-can-fight-enshittified-tech/ * Stalking the Wily Hacker: 40 years later - Cliff Stoll https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=656058JxTM0 ->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->-> ? Object permanence #25yrsago NYT says ebooks don't exist, fails to mention thriving ebook pirate scene https://www.nytimes.com/2001/08/28/business/forecasts-of-an-e-book-era-were-it-seems-premature.html #25yrsago Parking tickets waived in exchange for written apologies https://web.archive.org/web/20010826013513/http://www.thesmokinggun.com/doc_o_day/lewiston1.shtml #20yrsago "I, Row-Boat" https://web.archive.org/web/20060000000000*/http://www.flurb.net/1/doctorow.htm #20yrsago Filipino students use SMS to organize mass demonstrations https://web.archive.org/web/20060902160514/http://blog.wired.com/sterling/index.blog%3Fentry_id%3D1545927 #20yrsago Spam pump-and-dumps work http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/5284618.stm #25yrsago Leaked: Handspring's next PalmOS device https://web.archive.org/web/20020824213501/http://www.palmstation.com/view_article.asp?article=4614 #15yrsago ?Stalwart Workers?: neglected backbone of the firm https://web.archive.org/web/20110920155246/http://blogs.hbr.org/hbsfaculty/2011/08/stop-ignoring-the-stalwart-wor.html #5yrsago Facebook's war on switching costs https://pluralistic.net/2021/08/28/talking-hard-work-blues/#hostage-takers #5yrsago The "work ethic" is a dirty trick we play on ourselves https://pluralistic.net/2021/08/28/talking-hard-work-blues/#work-will-set-you-free #1yrago The capitalism of fools https://pluralistic.net/2025/08/28/strew-deal/#neither-fish-nor-fowla ->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->-> ? Upcoming appearances * D?browa G?rnicza, Kongres Regeneracja! to interdyscyplinarna, Sep 5 https://regeneracja.plse.org.pl/ * Warsaw: Romana i Jana Podoskich, Sep 6 https://wydarzenia.phub.pl/events/0ee0e198-f843-423a-890f-c84ff50a46c0 * Brighton: The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI with Carole Cadwalladr (Brighton Dome), Sep 8 https://brightondome.org/whats-on/LSC-cory-doctorow-the-reverse-centaurs-guide-to-life-after-ai/ * London: The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI with Riley Quinn (Foyle's Picadilly), Sep 9 https://www.foyles.co.uk/events/enshittification-cory-doctorow-riley-quinn * Budapest: Brain Bar, Sep 17 https://brainbar.com/munkatars/cory-doctorow * South Bend: An Evening With Cory Doctorow (Notre Dame), Oct 6 https://franco.nd.edu/events/2026/10/06/an-evening-with-cory-doctorow/ * Hudson, OH: Hudson Library, Oct 7 https://engagedpatrons.org/EventsExtended.cfm?SiteID=3850&EventID=596952&PK= * Victoria: Munro's Books, Oct 20 https://www.munrobooks.com/events/6113620261020 * Vancouver: BC Policy Solutions Gala, Nov 12 https://bcpolicy.ca/gala/ ->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->-> ? Recent appearances * How Tech Platforms Took Over the Economy (Dystopia Now) https://sites.libsyn.com/566555/enshittification-and-reverse-centaurs-cory-doctorow-on-how-tech-platforms-took-over-the-economy * Hope, AI, Fixing the Internet and the Reverse Centaur of it all (Wilosophy) https://podcastaddict.com/everyone-relax/episode/231414816 * Deflating the AI Bubble (Do Not Pass Go) https://www.donotpassgo.ca/p/deflating-the-ai-bubble-with-cory * Technofeudal Enshittification (Fucking Cancelled) https://www.fuckingcancelled.com/p/technofeudal-enshittification-with * Who The Machine Serves (EFF) https://archive.org/details/effecting-change-who-the-machine-serves ->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->-> ? Latest books * "The Reverse-Centaur's Guide to AI," a short book about being a better AI critic, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, June 2026 https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374621568/thereversecentaursguidetolifeafterai/ * "Canny Valley": A limited edition collection of the collages I create for Pluralistic, self-published, September 2025 https://pluralistic.net/2025/09/04/illustrious/#chairman-bruce * "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/ * "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 (thebezzle.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 * "The Post-American Internet," a geopolitical sequel of sorts to *Enshittification*, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2027 * "Unauthorized Bread": a middle-grades graphic novel adapted from my novella about refugees, toasters and DRM, FirstSecond, April 20, 2027 * "Enshittification, Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It" (the graphic novel), Firstsecond, 2027 * "The Memex Method," Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2027 ->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->-> ? Colophon Today's top sources: Currently writing: * ?Once Is Enemy Action,? a science fiction novel about the origins of modern technofascism. Today's words: 527 (10843 total). * "The Post-American Internet," a sequel to "Enshittification," about the better world the rest of us get to have now that Trump has torched America. Fourth draft completed. Submitted to editor. * 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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ISSN: 3066-764X From doctorow at craphound.com Thu Sep 3 04:45:37 2026 From: doctorow at craphound.com (Cory Doctorow) Date: Thu, 3 Sep 2026 09:45:37 +0100 Subject: [Plura-list] Preparing for a post-Trump internet Message-ID: <90fafb4b-c7f6-411c-92c2-81c338b58715@craphound.com> Read today's issue online at: https://pluralistic.net/2026/09/03/broken-arrows/ Today's links * Preparing for a post-Trump internet: You'd better hope it's also a post-American internet. * Hey look at this: Delights to delectate. * Object permanence: Barnum and Bailey v journalism; Wired's Wikipedia article is a wiki; Singapore's national wifi; Twitter arguments. * Upcoming appearances: D?browa G?rnicza, Warsaw, Brighton, London, Budapest, Edmonton, South Bend, Hudson, Calgary, Winnipeg, Vancouver, Victoria, Ottawa. * 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. ->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->-> ??? Preparing for a post-Trump internet What if post-Trump America is even *worse*? I know, it's tempting to think of Trump as a cause, rather than an effect - as an aberration who dragged America into fascism. Trump *is* exceptional, but the thing that makes him exceptional isn't his corruption, recklessness or cruelty. What makes Trump exceptional is his ability to cajole, intimidate and flatter America's most corrupt, reckless and cruel people into a coalition. These people *hate* each other. Nick Fuentes drifts off to sleep every night furiously fantasizing about turning Stephen Miller into a lampshade. Laura Loomer just got ICE to intervene in a Twitter feud by having a guy she dislikes violently arrested, shackled at wrist and ankle, perp-walked, and then shuffled from location to location so that he couldn't meet with his lawyer before being deported: https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2026/08/milo-yiannopoulos-deportation-trump-maga-laura-loomer-benny-johnson-raheem-kassmm/ They steal like crazy, get each other locked up, and gorge themselves on mind-altering supplements and peptides they buy from random podcast chuds. They are fantastically paranoid, marinated in conspiracy theories, and perennially high on their own supply: all that bullshit about "great replacement," "China is making America hate data centers" and "antifa is a terrorist organization"? A lot of them *genuinely believe it*. It's not just ghost stories they made up to scare cognitively compromised tube-feeding Fox News addicted rubes. Trumpland is full of actual, functioning adults in positions of real power who periodically go into the bathroom, turn off the lights, hold a flashlight under their chins and scare themselves silly by saying "Aaaaaaaaaantiiii-faaaaaaaaaa" into the mirror. Donald Trump did not conjure these people out of thin air. They've been lurking in America since its earliest days. They worship authoritarian criminals: https://abc30.com/post/roger-stones-tattoo-of-nixon-goes-viral/5107047 January 6 wasn't the first presidency they tried to steal, it's just the first one they got punished for: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brooks_Brothers_riot They commit brazen crimes in office that could land them in prison for the rest of their lives, and therefore can't afford to lose power, ever: https://www.propublica.org/series/supreme-court-scotus Trump didn't invent these creeps, he just emboldened them. If Reaganomics was capitalism with the gloves off, then Trumpismo is Reaganism with the mask off: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/aug/16/reaganland-review-rick-perlstein-jimmy-carter-ronald-reagan So what happens when Trump strokes out while watching Kid Rock wrestle a Hulk Hogan impersonator in a televised barbed-wire cage match on the White House lawn that one of Trump's cronies has exclusive pay-per-view rights to? I mean, it's *possible* that the Democratic leadership will step up and insist on some form of regular order in the succession to Vance, but come *on*. These are the tiny "Down with this sort of thing" ping-pong paddle people: https://www.truthdig.com/articles/ping-pong-paddles-to-a-gun-fight/ More likely is that Vance - a weak, unimportant charisma-vacuum who is loathed by *all* of Trump's factions - will end up presiding over a *far* more chaotic period in American governance than *anything* that happened under Trump. That could mean ICE leaders ordering mass graves dug in the centers of America's largest cities, drunken generals invading random countries, podcasters declaring "The Purge" with brackets sponsored by Kalshi. This isn't the first time in living memory that this has happened. In 1991 the Soviet Union collapsed, virtually overnight, and the fragile threads that bound its feuding, corrupt regional bosses all snapped, leaving behind nuclear-tipped mafia states. This was a chaotic and frightening time for the people whose governments had simply winked out of existence - but it was also terrifying for the rest of the world, who scrambled to secure those nukes before they could end up in the hands of "non-state actors": https://www.hks.harvard.edu/publications/what-happened-soviet-superpowers-nuclear-arsenal-clues-nuclear-security-summit The Soviet Union had some deeply dysfunctional leadership politics to be sure, but at least the people involved were beholden to various power blocs who had an interest in keeping things going. As the geopolitics wonks say, "they were playing an iterated game," where some losses had to be tolerated so that the losers could try to win the next time around. But there are plenty of people who weren't (and aren't) playing iterated games - people who are even more unhinged, more reckless, more short-termist than the maniacs who filled the world with nuclear weapons. These people don't necessarily care if civilization or even the human race persists if they can't get their way. The thought of *them* running around with these "weapons of mass destruction" ratcheted up the half-century of stark nuclear terror that had preceded the USSR's collapse to new heights. Which brings me to the post-Trump internet. Trump isn't the first president to figure out that the internet could be weaponized for geopolitical ends. As the Snowden disclosures showed, there has been a longstanding bipartisan consensus that the internet is a great tool for American surveillance, conducted against friend and foe alike. But Trump *is* the first president to openly, directly recruit American tech companies to simply *brick* foreign officials who displease him, starting with the Chief Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court, who lost his Office 365 and Outlook accounts in retaliation for swearing out a genocide warrant for Netanyahu: https://www.justiceinfo.net/en/156691-how-sanctions-can-weaponize-us-tech-against-the-icc.html And then Microsoft obliged Trump again, attacking the Brazilian judge who sentenced Jair Bolsonaro to prison over his unsuccessful coup. America's tech giants have fully, irrevocably fused with Trump. They donated to his campaign. Their CEOs each paid $1m out of their own pockets to sit behind him on the inauguration dais. Google provides location data for Trump's racist pogroms. Microsoft provides the administrative tools to carry them out. Oracle provides the databases. Apple blocks apps that warn its customers when they're about to be snatched: https://pluralistic.net/2025/10/06/rogue-capitalism/#orphaned-syrian-refugees-need-not-apply In exchange, Trump got Canada and the UK to ditch their plans to levy a 3% tax on American tech giants; he got the EU to gut its privacy laws; he sanctioned EU officials who tried to regulate social media; and he's told the tech companies to go through EU officials' private messages, looking for anti-Big Tech partisans whom he will ban from ever entering the USA: https://judiciary.house.gov/media/in-the-news/us-committee-demands-big-tech-share-private-comms-eu-officials Big Tech has proved that its only principles are not paying taxes, invading your privacy, and not being broken up by antitrust enforcers: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2026/09/us-court-rules-google-will-not-have-to-sell-ad-exchange-after-losing-antitrust-case/ Tech companies will do *anything* for *any* leader who can guarantee those outcomes. There's no capitulation too petty and stupid for Big Tech: https://people.com/apple-maps-joins-google-approving-trump-lake-america-change-12074262 America no longer has allies or trading partners. America has rivals and enemies. Trump's coalition wants him to steal Iran, steal Venezuela, steal Cuba, steal Alberta, steal Canada, steal Greenland. They want him to help Israel steal Palestine and Lebanon. And as Trump considers this program of imperial conquest, he has started to tinker with one of the most devastating geopolitical weapons the world has ever seen: tech shutdowns. If Trump wants Greenland, he can just order Microsoft to switch off Office 365 for the country and every ministry and significant firm will be shuttered in an instant, along with many households: https://pluralistic.net/2026/04/04/digital-subjugation/#greenlands-next He can order Apple and Google to shut off all of Denmark's phones. He can order John Deere to shut off all their *tractors*: https://pluralistic.net/2022/05/08/about-those-kill-switched-ukrainian-tractors/ (One thing we *don't* need to worry about is Trump ordering OpenAI and Anthropic to switch off all of Europe's chatbots - sure, he *could* do that, but if he did, nothing important would break:) https://pluralistic.net/2026/06/18/their-trillions-our-billions/#eyes-on-the-prize As weapons of mass destruction go, nukes are pretty stupid. The big ones destroy the territory you're trying to conquer and leave behind an uninhabitable radioactive wasteland. They send clouds of nuclear fallout swirling around the globe, potentially killing you or your allies. 80 years into the Nuclear Age, the best anyone's come up with is a neutron bomb, which only *kinda* renders territory uninhabitable while still killing everyone with massive radiation blasts. Compared to nukes, tech shutdowns are *amazing*. Thanks to Big Tech, America - and *only* America - can brick almost any country on earth, shutting down its administration, agriculture and industry without firing a single shot. The only thing that prevented this from happening was an American elite bloc that was playing an iterated game and saw more benefit from sharing in Big Tech profits as they looted and spied on the world, as opposed to grabbing territory while scaring the world into breaking all land-speed records to ditch American tech and pursue meaningful digital sovereignty. Trump's chuds and freaks are not bound by these constraints. They're perfectly happy to do Gunboat Diplomacy 2.0: Cloud Diplomacy, where everything from your smartphones to your payroll records can be seized at the click of a mouse, and your country had better fall in line. And Trump is a sick, frail old man, who is not long for this world. When he goes, all bets are off: America will be at the mercy of warring factions who will deploy the coercion and bribery that turned Big Tech into Trump's geopolitical weapon in order to achieve their own purposes - which might well be even stupider, crueler and more unhinged than Trump's. There's only one way out of this mess: the rapid disassembly of the American internet and the rapid creation of a post-American internet, one built on open, auditable, sovereign digital public goods, internationally built and maintained: https://pluralistic.net/2026/01/01/39c3/#the-new-coalition In its own way, the creation of this post-American internet is as urgent and as global as was the creation of the covid vaccines. But whenever I speak to powerful people about this, they ask the same question: "What if this makes Trump mad?" This represents a grave failure to take this crisis seriously. Trump doesn't need to be "mad" to attack your country. Trump attacked Canada over its *wildfires*, accusing Canada of polluting America's air: https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/us-complaints-trump-widlfire-smoke-9.7274466 But even if Trump *never* gets mad at you, that's *no guarantee* of safety. *Trump is not long for this world*, and his death or incapacity is no guarantee of the restoration of a "normal" America. And even *if* America finds its way to "normal" after Trump, that's no guarantee that it will *stay* normal. The armed, organized maniacs who have seized power in America and who are cheering him on as he rampages all over the world, kidnapping leaders and dropping bombs on schoolchildren are not going to dig a hole, crawl inside it, and pull the dirt down on top of themselves. But let's say that we find ourselves in the best of worlds, where American fascism is comprehensively defeated and the country embarks on a years-long program of denazification: https://pluralistic.net/2026/02/10/miller-in-the-dock/#denazification Even in that amazing future, the world should *still* race to build a post-American internet. The world should have built that internet after the Snowden revelations. That ghastly failure created the Trumpian internet. If the post-Trump internet isn't a post-American internet, then it'll only be a matter of time until the next crisis comes along, and the coming years will give Big Tech even more chances to worm its tendrils into the world's governments, firms and households, making that crisis be even *harder* to survive. The best time to act was 13 years ago, after Snowden. The second best time is now. ->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->-> ??? Hey look at this * The Scandal That Could Break the Latin American Far Right https://jacobin.com/2026/09/cerimedo-latin-america-far-right-disinformation * Barrister's powerful speech at Filton Trial reminds jury of its right to defy judge https://jonathancook.substack.com/p/barristers-powerful-speech-at-filton * So the People May Sing. The Anthem Still Goes to Trial. https://copyrightlately.com/corretjer-brown-public-domain-boricua-en-la-luna/ * Neo-ZIRP Slop in the Post-ZIRP Era https://superbowlstevehunt.substack.com/p/neo-zirp-slop-in-the-post-zirp-era * With the backlash to data centers, Flock and AI glasses, a mass opposition to big tech is underway. Silicon Valley is in denial. https://www.bloodinthemachine.com/p/with-the-backlash-to-data-centers ->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->-> ??? Object permanence #25yrsago Barnum & Bailey hired an ex-CIA spook to destroy a critical journalist https://web.archive.org/web/20010913192931/http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2001/08/30/circus/print.html #20yrsago Wired article about Wikipedia is on a editable wiki https://web.archive.org/web/20060901030941/http://www.socialtext.net/wired/index.cgi #20yrsago Singapore will have nationwide WiFi by 2007 https://web.archive.org/web/20060901191656/http://news.com.com/2100-1039_3-6110189.html #5yrsago Twitter Arguments https://pluralistic.net/2021/08/29/twitter-arguments/ ->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->-> ??? Upcoming appearances * D?browa G?rnicza, Kongres Regeneracja! to interdyscyplinarna, Sep 5 https://regeneracja.plse.org.pl/ * Warsaw: Romana i Jana Podoskich, Sep 6 https://wydarzenia.phub.pl/events/0ee0e198-f843-423a-890f-c84ff50a46c0 * Brighton: The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI with Carole Cadwalladr (Brighton Dome), Sep 8 https://brightondome.org/whats-on/LSC-cory-doctorow-the-reverse-centaurs-guide-to-life-after-ai/ * London: The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI with Riley Quinn (Foyle's Picadilly), Sep 9 https://www.foyles.co.uk/events/enshittification-cory-doctorow-riley-quinn * Budapest: Brain Bar, Sep 17 https://brainbar.com/munkatars/cory-doctorow * Edmonton: Elbows Up (Edmonton Public Library), Sep 28 https://www.epl.ca/blogs/post/elbows-up-with-cory-doctorow/ * South Bend: An Evening With Cory Doctorow (Notre Dame), Oct 6 https://franco.nd.edu/events/2026/10/06/an-evening-with-cory-doctorow/ * Hudson, OH: Hudson Library, Oct 7 https://engagedpatrons.org/EventsExtended.cfm?SiteID=3850&EventID=596952&PK= * Calgary: Wordfest, Oct 8 https://wordfest.com/2026/show/wordfest-presents-cory-doctorow-2026/ * Winnipeg: McNally Robinson, Oct 9 https://www.mcnallyrobinson.com/event-18991/An-Evening-with-Cory-Doctorow * Vancouver: Read, Resist, Repair, Rejoice (Vancouver Writers Festival), Oct 19 https://writersfest.bc.ca/festival-event-2026/01 * Victoria: Munro's Books, Oct 20 https://www.munrobooks.com/events/6113620261020 * Vancouver: Life After AI (Vancouver Writers Festival), Oct 22 https://writersfest.bc.ca/festival-event-2026/46 * Ottawa: Life After AI (Ottawa Writers Festival), Oct 24 https://writersfestival.org/event/life-after-ai * Vancouver: BC Policy Solutions Gala, Nov 12 https://bcpolicy.ca/gala/ ->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->-> ??? Recent appearances * How Tech Platforms Took Over the Economy (Dystopia Now) https://sites.libsyn.com/566555/enshittification-and-reverse-centaurs-cory-doctorow-on-how-tech-platforms-took-over-the-economy * Hope, AI, Fixing the Internet and the Reverse Centaur of it all (Wilosophy) https://podcastaddict.com/everyone-relax/episode/231414816 * Deflating the AI Bubble (Do Not Pass Go) https://www.donotpassgo.ca/p/deflating-the-ai-bubble-with-cory * Technofeudal Enshittification (Fucking Cancelled) https://www.fuckingcancelled.com/p/technofeudal-enshittification-with * Who The Machine Serves (EFF) https://archive.org/details/effecting-change-who-the-machine-serves ->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->-> ??? Latest books * "The Reverse-Centaur's Guide to AI," a short book about being a better AI critic, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, June 2026 https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374621568/thereversecentaursguidetolifeafterai/ * "Canny Valley": A limited edition collection of the collages I create for Pluralistic, self-published, September 2025 https://pluralistic.net/2025/09/04/illustrious/#chairman-bruce * "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/ * "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 (thebezzle.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 * "The Post-American Internet," a geopolitical sequel of sorts to *Enshittification*, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2027 * "Unauthorized Bread": a middle-grades graphic novel adapted from my novella about refugees, toasters and DRM, FirstSecond, April 20, 2027 * "Enshittification, Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It" (the graphic novel), Firstsecond, 2027 * "The Memex Method," Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2027 ->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->-> ??? Colophon Today's top sources: Currently writing: * ?Once Is Enemy Action,? a science fiction novel about the origins of modern technofascism. Today's words: 574 (7730 total). * "The Post-American Internet," a sequel to "Enshittification," about the better world the rest of us get to have now that Trump has torched America. Fourth draft completed. Submitted to editor. * 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 Bluesky (no ads, possible tracking and data-collection): https://bsky.app/profile/doctorow.pluralistic.net Medium (no ads, paywalled): https://doctorow.medium.com/ 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 From doctorow at craphound.com Fri Sep 4 05:42:06 2026 From: doctorow at craphound.com (Cory Doctorow) Date: Fri, 4 Sep 2026 10:42:06 +0100 Subject: [Plura-list] Amazon achieves enshittification inception Message-ID: Read today's issue online at: https://pluralistic.net/2026/09/04/cheating-at-fraud/ Today's links * Amazon achieves enshittification inception: Cheating on your fraud is a hell of a thing. * Hey look at this: Delights to delectate. * Object permanence: Electrolite is back; Mafia rules; Aaronsw on Wikipedia; Proctorio's memory hole. * Upcoming appearances: D?browa G?rnicza, Warsaw, Brighton, London, Budapest, Edmonton, South Bend, Hudson, Calgary, Winnipeg, Vancouver, Victoria, Ottawa. * 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. ->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->-> ????? Amazon achieves enshittification inception Amazon's own balance sheet presents the most compelling evidence that we are stuck in the Enshittocene, the era in which everything is turning into a pile of shit, because the worst ideas of the worst people now make the most money. Amazon is a many-tentacled monster, with several prominent lines of business wrapped around the world. There's its logistics and fulfillment business, which is so successful (at the expense of its workers' labor rights, bodies and bathroom breaks) that it is more than fully subsidized by Amazon's platform sellers, the independent merchants who depend on Amazon to sell and deliver their goods. This means that it costs Amazon itself *nothing* to get the merchandise *it* sells to your door: *more than 100%* of the cost of operating the fulfillment side of Amazon covered by the fees it extracts from its independent sellers (who *compete with Amazon* in many instances, and for whom delivery is a cost center, not a source of profit). Then there's AWS, Amazon's cloud business. This is another extraordinary success story: every company needs servers, and that's especially true of an e-commerce company like Amazon. By building *more* servers than it needs, Amazon transformed its own data infrastructure from a cost center into another profit center. Amazon's customers - many of whom are *also* its competitors - pay Amazon so much to rent space on its servers that Amazon gets its own (prodigious) computing *for free*, and realizes a profit on top of that. Taken on their own, these two facts constitute an extraordinary business story: one of the largest corporations in the history of the world has converted its two largest cost centers into profit centers, and those profits are substantially generated by extracting payments from the company's own competitors! Amazon's logistics and cloud computing are extraordinary, but they are eclipsed by the company's *most* profitable line of business, which is *payola*. "Payola" is a word that old people like me just barely have context for and for anyone under fifty the word is likely a mystery, so a brief explanation is in order. "Payola" comes from a massive 1950s scandal over bribes that record labels paid to radio DJs and station managers to play their music. Radio stations were given the use of a scarce and precious resource - exclusive control over slices of the only electromagnetic spectrum in the universe - and were expected to program material that the American public would find enjoyable, edifying and educational. In this system, radio stations were expected to make shrewd guesses about the music the public would enjoy the most, and play that. Because the selection process for the music that DJs played on the American public's spectrum was completely opaque, and because those selections could make fortunes for record labels, the system was ripe for corruption. Labels slipped literal envelopes full of cash and drugs ("payola") into the hands of DJs, station managers and owners, bribing them to turn songs into "hits" by cramming them into Americans' ears. The biggest predictor of a radio hit wasn't whether people liked the song so much that the stations rushed to play it, but rather, how much the labels were willing to spend in bribes to get their song played: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Payola This was a bad system all around. The American public got worse music. Musicians' own royalties were eroded by the label accountants' practice of charging off bribes to "promotions" they deducted from artists' royalty statements. Radio stations sucked. Labels bid away each other's margins, depriving themselves of operating capital to find and record new music and starving them of free cash flow to pay to musicians, employees and shareholders. As with every instance of corruption, this was a system of concentrated gains and diffuse losses, which is why it continued for so long (decades!) and got so bad before anyone took action to end it. Amazon's payola isn't about radio play - it's about *search*. When you search Amazon, the top results do not represent Amazon's best guess about what product will best match your query: rather, Amazon *auctions off* those top results to its platform sellers. Amazon's search results reflect who paid the biggest bribe, not who has the best product. To pay for those bribes, platform sellers have to raise prices. Amazon helps them do this, by imposing a "most favored nation" clause on its sellers that requires them to sell on Amazon at a price that matches or beats the price charged everywhere else (Target, Walmart, a mom-n-pop, or the factory store): https://pluralistic.net/2026/02/25/most-favored-nation/#price-fixing Thus, Amazon imposes an *economy-wide* tax on nearly every product you buy. Amazon's junk fees average 51-60% of the purchase price of the things you buy there, and because Amazon has captured a supermajority of the richest 10% of Americans (who have almost all pre-paid for a year's shipping through Prime), every seller *must* sell on Amazon, or forego any hope of selling to most of the country's most prolific shoppers. Any seller who signs up for Amazon is agreeing to turn over *the majority* of their sales income to Amazon, and any seller who raises prices to recoup those sums, *must* raise prices everywhere, at every retail outlet in the country. AI has made Amazon *much better* at enforcing Most Favored Nation terms, because AI is actually pretty good at parsing competitors' websites and finding instances of discounting, which Amazon instantaneously punishes by relegating the sellers' product listings to page umpty-billion of Amazon's search results. There are plenty of junk fees that go into Amazon's 51-60% rake. A large slice comes from fees Amazon charges for access to its (very profitable) logistics system. Failure to use Amazon's fulfillment system *also* relegates your listings to the dregs of Amazon search results, so sellers pay a massive premium to have their parcels delivered by Amazon, to the exclusion of cheaper alternatives that are just as fast and reliable. *That's* why Amazon fulfillment is so profitable! While the Amazon tax is extracted through several types of junk fee, the most *profitable* junk fee of them all is Amazon's search payola. In fact, search payola *is the most profitable business that Amazon operates, full stop*. Payola accounts for more of Amazon's profits than *anything else* the company does. It's more profitable than *all* the things Amazon sells directly. It's more profitable than AWS, Amazon's industry-leading cloud service. Amazon has created a system where the most sales go to the companies that pay the highest bribes, and those companies pass the cost of those bribes onto their customers. The first item on a typical Amazon search results page is 29% more expensive than the best match for your search. The top row is 25% more expensive. The best result is usually on the second screen, somewhere around the 17th position: https://pluralistic.net/2023/11/03/subprime-attention-rent-crisis/#euthanize-rentiers Amazon actively helps its biggest bribers close the sale. Amazon has *lots* of "comparison shopping" systems built into the service, but one comparison tool is conspicuous by its absence: an "apples to apples" tool that lets you compare *unit* prices. Amazon's most prolific bribe-payers package their goods in weird quantities, selling everything from batteries to t-shirts to shampoo in larger or smaller quantities than their competitors. Sorting your search results by price doesn't actually tell you who's got the cheapest price *per item*, because the company with the cheapest AA batteries might be selling a smaller *quantity* of batteries at a higher price *per battery*. Per-unit pricing is standard in retail. Indeed, if you go into a(n Amazon-owned) Whole Foods, you'll find per-unit pricing on the shelf tags, telling you how much the product costs per ounce or fluid ounce. Amazon *clearly* understands why shoppers would want to compare unit pricing, but offering a per-unit sort option to its search would make the bribery racket a lot less effective, because searchers could just sort by *unit* price and find the best bargain. Let me remind you: *payola is Amazon's single largest source of profits*. When I was researching *Enshittification*, Amazon's take from payola was in the mid-$30 billion. A year later, when I did tour stops with Tim Wu (who was promoting his excellent book *The Age of Extraction*), I learned that this number had climbed to more than *$50 billion*. This year, it's on track to top *$80 billion*. Amazon calls this bribery system an "advertising" product, but it's not "advertising" in the sense of the ads that Amazon's platform sellers might have once placed in the local newspaper. It's *payola*, more akin to the practice of packaged goods companies buying end-caps and whole shelves in the grocery store (a practice that is, in its own way, every bit as corrosive, though no grocery store has Amazon's economy-wide chokehold). But there *is* a way in which this payola can be compared to advertising: it *competes* with advertising. Back in the old days, before a series of K-shaped recoveries created a vast chasm between America's haves and have-nots; before Amazon captured the majority of well-off American households with Prime; people shopped in *lots* of places, and in those days, companies advertised in *publications*, not on Amazon. Websites, newspapers, and newspaper websites made billions from those ads. Amazon's payola scheme (along with Google, Facebook and other tech monopolists) have captured almost all of that money. As Tim Wu points out, the money Amazon makes from payola exceeds the advertising revenue received by *all the newspapers in the world* by *300%*. Alongside that number and its implication for the news media, Jeff Bezos buying the *Washington Post* and turning its editorial page into a sewer of shitty Ayn Rand fanfic barely registers. This is *pure* enshittification. Of all the ingenious, innovative ways that Amazon came up with to make money, the *most* successful is a scam that makes everything you buy more expensive *even as* it reduces the profits of the companies you're buying from. It's another example of corruption: a system of concentrated gains and diffuse losses - and once again, it's *the most profitable thing Amazon does*. And then...Amazon *made it worse*. You know how people like to say, "If you're not paying for the product, you're the product?" It's *bullshit*. The "advertisers" who bribe Amazon for top search placement are the customers here, they're "paying for the product," and they are getting *reamed*. I don't just mean they're getting screwed by being forced to shell out payola - I mean that Amazon is *cheating them* on that payola! Remember: Amazon doesn't just *sell* search placement; they *auction* it. Every time you run an Amazon search, the company conducts a special kind of auction called a "sealed-bid second-price auction" (SBSPA): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vickrey_auction Under an SBSPA, bidders secretly tell the auctioneer the *very highest price* they're willing to pay. The auctioneer then charges the highest bidder a price equal to the *second-highest* bid, plus one cent. This may seem unnecessarily complicated, but it's actually a clever solution to one of the major problems with traditional, "open call" auctions (where bidders call out the prices they're willing to pay until one bid emerges victorious). Say you're at an open call auction where the top bid is $10. You can call out $11, and then the other person will call out $12, and so on and so on. It's tedious and time-consuming. That's bad enough when you're at an estate auction that's unloading hundreds of items, but it's untenable for an eyeblink auction meant to determine search results that the user expects to get in an instant. In physical auctions the top bidder often clobbers other bidders with a *big* increase - going from $10 to $50, say. This can end the auction quickly, but it means that the high bidder often overpays for their purchase. In an SBSPA, every bidder enters their highest price, but none of the other bidders know what that price is. This encourages everyone to name their *true* highest price, *but* it protects the top bidder in the instance in which they are willing to pay a *much* higher price than anyone else. Say you're that person who raises the bidding from $10 to $50 - you have no way of knowing whether the other bidders would have dropped out at $15 or at $45. If you were the only person who was willing to pay more than $15 for the item, you've just vastly overpaid (by $34.99). But in an SBSPA, you name your true price, but you only pay the price you *would have paid* if you'd gone through the tedious, expensive, time-consuming process of an open call auction. Amazon's search auctions are SBSPAs. A merchant tells Amazon the *maximum* they're willing to pay to be at the top of the search results for a given query, but they *pay* a price equal to the *second-highest* bid, plus one cent. This lets auctions run so quickly that they can be used as the basis for ordering a search results page. That's how it's *supposed* to work, anyway. The FTC and 22 states just filed a suit against Amazon because Amazon was *cheating on its own SBSPA process*: https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2026/08/ftc-states-sue-amazon-over-secret-ad-surcharge-scheme Over the past 7 years, Amazon has been secretly charging the winning bidder an amount equal to *their own* sealed bid, *not* the amount that the next-highest bidder was willing to pay (plus a penny): https://gizmodo.com/ftc-sues-amazon-for-allegedly-duping-advertisers-2000805199 According to the suit, Amazon did this *80%* of the time. That is *tens* of *billions* of dollars Amazon extracted from platform sellers, who passed those costs onto you, *and* onto *every other retailer* in the country (thanks to AI-enforced Most Favored Nation policies). Amazon's defense is that this is all a big misunderstanding. Platform sellers just didn't understand how a SBSPA worked. Amazon has a *special* kind of SBSPA where they could unilaterally and secretly charge the winning bidder the maximum price they'd pledged, if, in Amazon's judgment, the closing price for the auction was below "the true market value of the ad placement": https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2026/09/ftc-alleges-amazon-illegally-made-20-billion-by-rigging-billions-of-ad-auctions/ This is darkly hilarious. The whole *point* of an auction is to determine "true market value." That's why neoclassical economists *worship* auctions as the world's best form of "price discovery" and why economics Nobels are awarded for "auction design": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Auction_theory The *definition* of "true market value" is "the closing price in an auction." Amazon claiming that it secretly jacked people because the auction generated a price that was "below the true market value" of an ad tells you that the whole business is a sham. The point of Amazon's payola scheme is only and ever a way to parasitically extract the maximum amount a platform seller is willing to part with, and by running a fake SBSPA, Amazon was able to trick its customers into revealing those maximum prices. Cheating on a bribery scheme is a *mood*. This isn't just enshittification, it's enshittification *inception*. Amazon managed to enshittify their own enshittification! This case was brought by Trump's FTC, which means that Amazon can get out of it by paying a chud podcaster to tweet at the president and he'll order them to drop it, just like he did with Ticketmaster: https://pluralistic.net/2026/02/13/khanservatives/#kid-rock-eats-shit But - just as with Ticketmaster - the feds aren't the only parties to the suit. With 22 AGs ("Aspiring Governors") on the suit, there's a chance this will go to trial. We might even learn the identity of the inventor of this enshittification-squared gambit, a veritable Louis Pasteur of enshittification. Assuming that person doesn't go to prison, the Sveriges riksbanks pris i ekonomisk vetenskap till Alfred Nobels minne can give that sloshing, ambulatory pile of hot liquid garbage a Nobel Prize in Economics. ->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->-> ????? Hey look at this * Gridfinity https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gridfinity * US court rules Google will not have to sell ad exchange after losing antitrust case https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2026/09/us-court-rules-google-will-not-have-to-sell-ad-exchange-after-losing-antitrust-case/ * Minding the Gaps in Surveillance Pricing Reform https://economicpopulist.substack.com/p/minding-the-gaps-in-surveillance * Zack Polanski seeks to stand for by-election in former PM Starmer's seat https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cge41ee40vwo * What Are We Supposed to Call This? https://www.usermag.co/p/what-are-we-supposed-to-call-this ->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->-> ????? Object permanence #25yrsago Electrolite relaunches https://web.archive.org/web/20010927195348/http://www.panix.com/~pnh/electrolite.html #25yrsago How to play Mafia https://web.archive.org/web/20011113011546/http://www.stud.ntnu.no/studorg/mafia/ #20yrsago How Wikipedia entries get written http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/whowriteswikipedia #5yrsago Proctorio's awful reviews disappear down the memory hole https://pluralistic.net/2021/09/04/hypervigilance/#radical-transparency ->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->-> ????? Upcoming appearances * D?browa G?rnicza, Kongres Regeneracja! to interdyscyplinarna, Sep 5 https://regeneracja.plse.org.pl/ * Warsaw: Romana i Jana Podoskich, Sep 6 https://wydarzenia.phub.pl/events/0ee0e198-f843-423a-890f-c84ff50a46c0 * Brighton: The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI with Carole Cadwalladr (Brighton Dome), Sep 8 https://brightondome.org/whats-on/LSC-cory-doctorow-the-reverse-centaurs-guide-to-life-after-ai/ * London: The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI with Riley Quinn (Foyle's Picadilly), Sep 9 https://www.foyles.co.uk/events/enshittification-cory-doctorow-riley-quinn * Budapest: Brain Bar, Sep 17 https://brainbar.com/munkatars/cory-doctorow * Edmonton: Elbows Up (Edmonton Public Library), Sep 28 https://www.epl.ca/blogs/post/elbows-up-with-cory-doctorow/ * South Bend: An Evening With Cory Doctorow (Notre Dame), Oct 6 https://franco.nd.edu/events/2026/10/06/an-evening-with-cory-doctorow/ * Hudson, OH: Hudson Library, Oct 7 https://engagedpatrons.org/EventsExtended.cfm?SiteID=3850&EventID=596952&PK= * Calgary: Wordfest, Oct 8 https://wordfest.com/2026/show/wordfest-presents-cory-doctorow-2026/ * Winnipeg: McNally Robinson, Oct 9 https://www.mcnallyrobinson.com/event-18991/An-Evening-with-Cory-Doctorow * Vancouver: Read, Resist, Repair, Rejoice (Vancouver Writers Festival), Oct 19 https://writersfest.bc.ca/festival-event-2026/01 * Victoria: Munro's Books, Oct 20 https://www.munrobooks.com/events/6113620261020 * Vancouver: Life After AI (Vancouver Writers Festival), Oct 22 https://writersfest.bc.ca/festival-event-2026/46 * Ottawa: Life After AI (Ottawa Writers Festival), Oct 24 https://writersfestival.org/event/life-after-ai * Vancouver: BC Policy Solutions Gala, Nov 12 https://bcpolicy.ca/gala/ ->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->-> ????? Recent appearances * The future of the tech crisis (How the Light Gets In) https://iai.tv/video/the-future-of-the-tech-crisis?_auid=2020 * How Tech Platforms Took Over the Economy (Dystopia Now) https://sites.libsyn.com/566555/enshittification-and-reverse-centaurs-cory-doctorow-on-how-tech-platforms-took-over-the-economy * Hope, AI, Fixing the Internet and the Reverse Centaur of it all (Wilosophy) https://podcastaddict.com/everyone-relax/episode/231414816 * Deflating the AI Bubble (Do Not Pass Go) https://www.donotpassgo.ca/p/deflating-the-ai-bubble-with-cory * Technofeudal Enshittification (Fucking Cancelled) https://www.fuckingcancelled.com/p/technofeudal-enshittification-with ->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->-> ????? Latest books * "The Reverse-Centaur's Guide to AI," a short book about being a better AI critic, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, June 2026 https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374621568/thereversecentaursguidetolifeafterai/ * "Canny Valley": A limited edition collection of the collages I create for Pluralistic, self-published, September 2025 https://pluralistic.net/2025/09/04/illustrious/#chairman-bruce * "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/ * "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 (thebezzle.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 * "The Post-American Internet," a geopolitical sequel of sorts to *Enshittification*, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2027 * "Unauthorized Bread": a middle-grades graphic novel adapted from my novella about refugees, toasters and DRM, FirstSecond, April 20, 2027 * "Enshittification, Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It" (the graphic novel), Firstsecond, 2027 * "The Memex Method," Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2027 ->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->-> ????? Colophon Today's top sources: Currently writing: * ?Once Is Enemy Action,? a science fiction novel about the origins of modern technofascism. Today's words: 513 (11893 total). * "The Post-American Internet," a sequel to "Enshittification," about the better world the rest of us get to have now that Trump has torched America. Fourth draft completed. Submitted to editor. * 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 Bluesky (no ads, possible tracking and data-collection): https://bsky.app/profile/doctorow.pluralistic.net Medium (no ads, paywalled): https://doctorow.medium.com/ 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 From doctorow at craphound.com Sat Sep 5 04:04:56 2026 From: doctorow at craphound.com (Cory Doctorow) Date: Sat, 5 Sep 2026 10:04:56 +0200 Subject: [Plura-list] Google skates Message-ID: <305ab368-fb26-4340-9170-0eb60bd8b408@craphound.com> Read today's issue online at: https://pluralistic.net/2026/09/05/divorce-court/ Today's links * Google skates: Another federal judge loses a game of peek-a-boo. * Hey look at this: Delights to delectate. * Object permanence: Memory-hacking ads; "Dzur"; NZ Ministry of DRM; Canadians v looking at the internet; Advice for self-publishers; Advice for writers; Why Wikipedia works. * Upcoming appearances: D?browa G?rnicza, Warsaw, Brighton, London, Budapest, Edmonton, South Bend, Hudson, Calgary, Winnipeg, Vancouver, Victoria, Ottawa. * 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. ->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->-> ? Google skates Rome wasn't overthrown in a day. Oligarchies are stubborn, and by the time they've established and entrenched themselves, they have resources, power blocs and even mercenaries they can deploy to repel would-be dethroners. The USA got its first antimonopoly law, the Sherman Act, in 1890, but it took *22 years* before that law could be used to crush John D Rockefeller's corrupt, sprawling empire. Senator John Sherman promoted his law as a way of *preventing* monopolies from emerging, warning the Senate that they would struggle to overthrow the "autocrats of trade" that monopolies created: https://pluralistic.net/2022/02/20/we-should-not-endure-a-king/ The Senate passed his law and Harrison signed it, but then successive administrations left the Sherman Act to gather dust on a shelf as Rockefeller went on a spree, accumulating the kind of power that made him a true "autocrat of trade," so powerful that he and the US government were practically evenly matched. Allowing Rockefeller to create, expand and consolidate his monopoly power was a terrible tactical blunder, giving him decades in which he was able to loot America and its trading partners, pauperizing ordinary people and smashing anyone who got in his way. No one was willing to admit that Rockefeller was a threat to democracy and prosperity until he had amassed all that power, and once he had all that power, it took heroic effort to break him. The Rockefeller story is like the punchline of that joke: "When it doesn't rain, the roof don't leak; and when it's raining, it's too wet to fix it." Alternatively, there's my other favorite punchline: "If you wanted to get there, I wouldn't start from here." The Rockefeller blunder wasn't a one-off. The Apple ][+ hit the shelves the same year Reagan hit the campaign trail, and the tech industry's rise occurred simultaneously with the dismantling of competition law enforcement. Tech companies were the first "post-antitrust" industry, and it wasn't until these companies became palpable, terrifying, undeniable, existential civilizational risks that we remembered that we had all these laws on the books that were *designed* to curb excessive corporate power. Under Biden, a group of generationally talented, visionary trustbusters were given access to those dormant enforcement powers: Lina Khan at the FTC; Rohit Chopra at the CFPB, Tim Wu in the White House, and Jonathan Kantor at the DOJ Antitrust Division. Together with a staff of canny and skilled lawyers and economists, these people scored *incredible* victories against Big Tech. During the Biden years, Google lost *three* federal antitrust cases. Three! But if we wanted to get there, we wouldn't start from here. After a series of stinging defeats in the US and abroad, after watching the EU, the UK, Japan, Singapore and South Korea make common cause with Biden's enforcers, Big Tech threw everything it had into Trump, who promised them a system of regulatory forbearance in exchange for low-cost bribery, backstopped by a xenophobic, belligerent geopolitics that would rain down punishments on any country that dared to regulate or tax Big Tech: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c62553ywn77o And then the other shoe dropped: the federal judges who convicted Google of operating an illegal monopoly handed down their "remedy" decisions. In an antitrust case, the "remedy" phase is like sentencing - the stage of the legal proceeding where the judge decides what punishment the company should face for breaking the law. The first of these remedies came out a year ago, in September 2025. Judge Amit Mehta had presided over Google's "search" case, where we learned that Google had *deliberately made search worse* so that you'd have to search more than once in order to get your answer, which would allow the company the chance to show you more ads: https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/24/naming-names/#prabhakar-raghavan Google was able to do this because it had cornered the market on search. The company had spent years paying a $20b annual bribe to Apple to stay out of the search market, and they'd bought the default search placement for every operating system, browser and carrier. If you encountered a search box in the wild, it was almost certainly wired into Google's servers. They knew that there was approximately *zero* chance that you'd ever stumble upon another search engine, which meant they could make their own search as shitty as they wanted and keep your business. Confronted with these proven findings, Mehta decided that Google's punishment should be...*nothing*. They wouldn't be forced to delete the personal data they'd taken from billions of people. They wouldn't be forced to spin off Chrome or Android - two of the key tools Google uses to keep people from discovering other search engines. They wouldn't even be forced to halt the $20b annual bribe to Apple - the judge fretted that without that $20b annual bribe, Apple wouldn't be able to pay researchers to come up with cool new iPhone features (never mind that Apple spends all that money - and more - on stock buybacks, a recently illegal form of stock manipulation): https://pluralistic.net/2025/09/03/unpunishing-process/#fucking-shit-goddammit-fuck Then, a year later, *another* federal judge - Leonie Brinkema, who presided over the Google "ad-tech" case - decided that Google's penalty for monopolizing the ad market should also be...*nothing*: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2026/09/us-court-rules-google-will-not-have-to-sell-ad-exchange-after-losing-antitrust-case/ Oh, maybe not *exactly* nothing. We don't actually know the full extent of Judge Brinkema's "remedy," because it's sealed for two weeks. What we *do* know is that Google will not be forced to take the most obvious, effective and necessary step to prevent it from abusing its monopoly: Google will not be forced to sell off part of its ad-tech stack. Let me unpack that for you, because unless you're an ad-tech weirdo, chances are you have no idea how any of this works and don't think it affects you. But the reality is that this is costing *you* money. It's one of the dirtiest, most profitable scams in the entire tech economy, which is saying something, because that is an economy that is *made of scams*: https://pluralistic.net/2026/09/04/cheating-at-fraud/#absentee-rentier Unlike older ads, which were targeted based on *content* (say, an ad for a hotel might run next to a newspaper article about a beachside town) modern ads are built on surveillance. Companies like Google amass vast, nonconsensual dossiers on the personal characteristics and behavior of billions of people, supplemented with information purchased from the unregulated data-broker sector. When you visit a website, the site fires off a piece of software called "sell-side agent" to message a server called an "ad exchange" in order to announce your visit, soliciting bids for the right to show you an ad: "I am about to serve a web-page to a 18-34 year old man-child from New York's outer boroughs, who owns an Xbox and has been recently searching for information about gonorrhea: who wants to cram some ads into this guy's eyeballs?" That ad-exchange server is haunted by "demand-side agents" - these are pieces of software fired off by advertisers that monitor all these advertising opportunities announced on the ad exchange and bid for the right to show you an ad. The highest bidder gets to show you an ad, and the fee is remitted to the exchange, which takes a cut and passes the remainder on to the sell-side platform, which *also* takes a cut and gives the balance to the website publisher. So the ad-tech stack has three main components: the "sell-side platform" (SSP), which lets web publishers announce auctions for the right to advertise to their visitors; the "demand-side platform" (DSP) that lets advertisers bid to show those visitors ads; and the "ad exchange" - the marketplace where the sell-side and demand-side agents meet to collect bids, finalize the sale, and exchange ads for money. When this all started, there were *lots* of companies in all three roles. Publishers and advertisers had their choice of SSPs, DSPs and exchanges, and all three types of middleman competed to offer the best deals to advertisers and publishers. Then, Google and Facebook started buying up the leading DSPs, SSPs and exchanges. They used contracts and technical countermeasures to force anyone who used any part of their "stack" to use them for *all* parts of the transaction. The CEOs of Google and Facebook personally colluded to rig the market, dividing it up between them so that publishers would get less, advertisers would pay more, and Googbook would pocket the difference. The codename for this conspiracy was "Jedi Blue": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jedi_Blue Jedi Blue was just the icing on the cake. The reality is they didn't need the conspiracy: once Google was selling services to advertisers *and* publishers on an exchange that Google owned, they created an entire *universe* of ways to rip off both advertisers and publishers. Now consider that Google is *also* an advertiser and *also* a web publisher, and the opportunities to cheat are just *wild*. The numbers tell the story. Before Googbook captured 80% of the display advertising business, the *total* share of the advertising industry's revenues that went to "intermediaries" (middlemen like ad agencies, ad buyers, etc) was about 15%. Today, that number is *51%*. *Hundreds of billions of dollars* have been moved out of publishers' and advertisers' bank accounts and onto Google and Facebook's balance sheets. This isn't hard to understand. Google runs an ad business that locks in buyers *and* sellers on a marketplace *Google* owns and controls, where it *also* competes with those buyers and sellers. Buying or selling an ad through Google is like going to court to get a divorce, only to discover that you and your soon-to-be-ex- are both represented by the same lawyer, who promptly ascends the bench and dons a judge's wig, and then spends the whole trial trying to match with both of you on Tinder, and who concludes the trial by banging their gavel and announcing that they've decided that the family house will be awarded to...the judge! The *most* absurd part of this whole farce is the lawyers who defend it on behalf of companies like Google. If a Google lawyer ever showed up to to defend the company in a trial where the judge was working for the plaintiff, they would scream blue murder and refuse to proceed until the judge was removed from the case. But when *Google* operates a business where it presides over transactions where it has nothing *but* conflicts of interest, these same lawyers argue that Google would *never* cheat a seller *or* a buyer. The fucking *absurdity* of this arrangement is so obvious that a bill to force a halt to it was co-sponsored...*by Elizabeth Warren and Ted Cruz*: https://gizmodo.com/google-facebook-america-act-ads-break-up-cruz-warren-1850287725 Why would Warren and Cruz care about this? Because the hundreds of billions that have been moved from publishers and advertisers to Google and Facebook are hundreds of billions of dollars that are no longer paying for news and entertainment production, and they're hundreds of billions of dollars that businesses have to recoup by raising prices on *you* to pay their advertising bills. Google (and, apparently, Judge Leonie Brinkema) dispute this. They say that "larger forces" have "changed the dynamic" that "restructured the industry." But, I mean, *come on*! This is a situation where hundreds of billions of dollars are divided up by a *thrice convicted monopolist* who is mysteriously hundreds of billions of dollars *richer*, while the other parties to the transaction are mysteriously hundreds of billions of dollars *poorer*. Anyone who can't draw the obvious causal inference from these facts has so little object permanence that they would lose a fucking game of peek-a-boo. This is so goddamned demoralizing. For a couple years there, it really looked like the tide was turning. Then Judges Brinkema and Mehta came along to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory. The only thing that's keeping me going is *object permanence*. I know my history. I know it took decades from the passage of the Sherman Act until the defeat of John D Rockefeller. Our forebears brought down Rockefeller because they didn't give up, despite setbacks as bad as this one, and worse. Stein's Law of finance holds that "anything that can't go on forever eventually stops," and MLK told us that "the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice." This *can't* go on forever, and despite Dr King's phrasing, I know he understood that the arc doesn't just "bend" - it *is bent* - by people like us, hauling on it with all our might. ->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->-> ? Hey look at this * Rising Customer Durability, Falling Business Dynamism https://www.chicagobooth.edu/-/media/research/stigler/pdfs/workingpapers/387_customer.pdf * DOGE Affiliate Asked for College Credits for Participating in Takeover https://www.wired.com/story/doge-affiliate-asked-for-college-credits-for-participating-in-takeover/ * Why office workers are turning against AI https://www.bloodinthemachine.com/p/why-office-workers-are-turning-against * The Quiet Decision Microsoft Made That Devastated Thousands of Nonprofits https://slate.com/technology/2026/08/microsoft-software-nonprofit-data-delete.html * Vote for the 2026 Tiny Awards Winner https://tinyawards.net/vote/ ->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->-> ? Object permanence #25yrsago Advertisers claim they can hack your childhood memories https://web.archive.org/web/20010921022846/http://news.independent.co.uk/uk/science/story.jsp?story=92386 #25yrsago Wind-up cellphone charger https://web.archive.org/web/20011031122531/http://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/0,,2-2001310179,00.html #20yrsago Steven Brust?s Dzur: witty and exciting heroic fantasy https://memex.craphound.com/2006/09/05/steven-brusts-dzur-witty-and-exciting-heroic-fantasy/ #20yrsago America to US gov?t: kill the Broadcast Treaty! http://www.cptech.org/ip/wipo/bt/jointletter5sep06usptoforum.pdf #20yrsago New Zealand wants a Ministry of DRM https://web.archive.org/web/20070108042834/http://www.zdnet.com.au/news/software/soa/NZ_draws_line_on_DRM_and_trusted_computing/0,130061733,339270846,00.htm #20yrsago Is it legal to look at the Web in Canada? https://web.archive.org/web/20061010120919/http://www.michaelgeist.ca/content/view/1411/135/ #15yrsago Advice for self-publishers: why should anyone care about your book? https://locusmag.com/feature/cory-doctorow-why-should-anyone-care/ #5yrsago A letter to a discouraged young writer https://pluralistic.net/2021/09/05/why-bother/ #1yrago Why Wikipedia works https://pluralistic.net/2025/09/05/be-the-first-person/#to-not-do-something-that-no-one-else-has-ever-thought-of-not-doing-before ->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->-> ? Upcoming appearances * D?browa G?rnicza, Kongres Regeneracja! to interdyscyplinarna, Sep 5 https://regeneracja.plse.org.pl/ * Warsaw: Romana i Jana Podoskich, Sep 6 https://wydarzenia.phub.pl/events/0ee0e198-f843-423a-890f-c84ff50a46c0 * Brighton: The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI with Carole Cadwalladr (Brighton Dome), Sep 8 https://brightondome.org/whats-on/LSC-cory-doctorow-the-reverse-centaurs-guide-to-life-after-ai/ * London: The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI with Riley Quinn (Foyle's Picadilly), Sep 9 https://www.foyles.co.uk/events/enshittification-cory-doctorow-riley-quinn * Budapest: Brain Bar, Sep 17 https://brainbar.com/munkatars/cory-doctorow * Edmonton: Elbows Up (Edmonton Public Library), Sep 28 https://www.epl.ca/blogs/post/elbows-up-with-cory-doctorow/ * South Bend: An Evening With Cory Doctorow (Notre Dame), Oct 6 https://franco.nd.edu/events/2026/10/06/an-evening-with-cory-doctorow/ * Hudson, OH: Hudson Library, Oct 7 https://engagedpatrons.org/EventsExtended.cfm?SiteID=3850&EventID=596952&PK= * Calgary: Wordfest, Oct 8 https://wordfest.com/2026/show/wordfest-presents-cory-doctorow-2026/ * Winnipeg: McNally Robinson, Oct 9 https://www.mcnallyrobinson.com/event-18991/An-Evening-with-Cory-Doctorow * Vancouver: Read, Resist, Repair, Rejoice (Vancouver Writers Festival), Oct 19 https://writersfest.bc.ca/festival-event-2026/01 * Victoria: Munro's Books, Oct 20 https://www.munrobooks.com/events/6113620261020 * Vancouver: Life After AI (Vancouver Writers Festival), Oct 22 https://writersfest.bc.ca/festival-event-2026/46 * Ottawa: Life After AI (Ottawa Writers Festival), Oct 24 https://writersfestival.org/event/life-after-ai * Vancouver: BC Policy Solutions Gala, Nov 12 https://bcpolicy.ca/gala/ ->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->-> ? Recent appearances * The future of the tech crisis (How the Light Gets In) https://iai.tv/video/the-future-of-the-tech-crisis?_auid=2020 * How Tech Platforms Took Over the Economy (Dystopia Now) https://sites.libsyn.com/566555/enshittification-and-reverse-centaurs-cory-doctorow-on-how-tech-platforms-took-over-the-economy * Hope, AI, Fixing the Internet and the Reverse Centaur of it all (Wilosophy) https://podcastaddict.com/everyone-relax/episode/231414816 * Deflating the AI Bubble (Do Not Pass Go) https://www.donotpassgo.ca/p/deflating-the-ai-bubble-with-cory * Technofeudal Enshittification (Fucking Cancelled) https://www.fuckingcancelled.com/p/technofeudal-enshittification-with ->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->-> ? Latest books * "The Reverse-Centaur's Guide to AI," a short book about being a better AI critic, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, June 2026 https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374621568/thereversecentaursguidetolifeafterai/ * "Canny Valley": A limited edition collection of the collages I create for Pluralistic, self-published, September 2025 https://pluralistic.net/2025/09/04/illustrious/#chairman-bruce * "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/ * "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 (thebezzle.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 * "The Post-American Internet," a geopolitical sequel of sorts to *Enshittification*, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2027 * "Unauthorized Bread": a middle-grades graphic novel adapted from my novella about refugees, toasters and DRM, FirstSecond, April 20, 2027 * "Enshittification, Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It" (the graphic novel), Firstsecond, 2027 * "The Memex Method," Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2027 ->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->-> ? Colophon Today's top sources: Currently writing: * ?Once Is Enemy Action,? a science fiction novel about the origins of modern technofascism. Saturday's words: 504 (12397 total). * "The Post-American Internet," a sequel to "Enshittification," about the better world the rest of us get to have now that Trump has torched America. Fourth draft completed. Submitted to editor. * 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 Bluesky (no ads, possible tracking and data-collection): https://bsky.app/profile/doctorow.pluralistic.net Medium (no ads, paywalled): https://doctorow.medium.com/ 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 From doctorow at craphound.com Mon Sep 7 01:29:58 2026 From: doctorow at craphound.com (Cory Doctorow) Date: Mon, 7 Sep 2026 07:29:58 +0200 Subject: [Plura-list] How corporate America built a better Roach Motel Message-ID: Read today's issue online at: https://pluralistic.net/2026/09/07/hotels-california/ Today's links * How corporate America built a better Roach Motel: Hostages beat customers every day. * Hey look at this: Delights to delectate. * Object permanence: 3-hole punches; Warner Bros v Warner Bros; Privacy wars get worse; "Weapons of Math Destruction"; HK elections go to pro-democracy reformers; Stock buybacks are swindles; NZ v Open source; MSFT patches DRM faster than other bugs; Wikipedia's worst arguments; Pirates x Iceland. * Upcoming appearances: Brighton, London, Budapest, Edmonton, South Bend, Hudson, Calgary, Winnipeg, Vancouver, Victoria, Ottawa. * 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. ->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->-> ? How corporate America built a better Roach Motel "If economists wished to study the horse, they wouldn?t go and look at horses. They'd sit in their studies and say to themselves, 'What would I do if I were a horse?'" -Ely Devons Half a century ago, a group of lavishly financed economists from the University of Chicago (the "neoliberals") convinced governments all over the world to completely upend the way they treated monopolies. Up until then, the purpose of competition enforcement was to reduce corporate power, with the understanding that once a corporation became more powerful than the government, it would be impossible to force it to follow *any* rules: https://pluralistic.net/2022/02/20/we-should-not-endure-a-king/ But for the "Chicago Boys," monopolies were evidence of *efficiency*. When you encounter a company in the wild that has acquired a commanding market share, your first assumption should be that it has taken over its sector by being better than anyone else - you should not assume that the company cheated its way to glory. After all, if a company with a large market share was cheating - say, if it was increasing its profit margins by reducing quality or jacking up prices - then smaller companies would rush into the market to poach its dissatisfied customers. Thus, all competition enforcement was reduced to an empty syllogism: monopolies are the result of excellence and any less-than-excellent monopolist will have its advantage "competed away." Therefore, any monopolist you encounter in the wild is *definitionally* not a bad monopolist, otherwise it would already have disappeared. To quote another economist joke: > Two economists are walking down the street when one notices a $20 bill on the sidewalk. "It's not a real $20 bill," the other declares. "If it were a real $20 bill, someone would have picked it up off the sidewalk already." Half a century later, our entire economy is dominated by monopolies, duopolies and cartels, who boast of *gigantic* margins, whose products are palpably worsening at an accelerating clip, and yet there is no sign of the "new market entrants" who should be flooding into the market to "compete away" those amazing margins. It turns out that asking "What would I do if I were a horse?" does not yield a series of accurate predictions about horses. Things have changed. Today, the University of Chicago's Stigler Center harbors a cluster of influential economists who largely or entirely repudiate the orthodoxy of the Chicago Boys. The Center hosts an annual, rather radical conference on antitrust; runs an excellent heterodox podcast (Capitalisn't); its house organ, Promarket.org, regularly hosts work that torches the received wisdom of High Chicago Neoclassicism; and the school's researchers publish papers that dare to actually "go and look at horses." A recent horse-looking excursion has yielded some distressing, alarming, and thoroughly documented equine facts. In a new Stigler paper, "Rising Customer Durability, Falling Business Dynamism," UC's Li Azinovic-Yang, Ava E Speros and Christopher R Stewart and Stanford's John D Kepler report on some clever research into how a monopolist could raise prices, lower quality, anger its customers, and *still* dominate its market: https://www.chicagobooth.edu/-/media/research/stigler/pdfs/workingpapers/387_customer.pdf The researchers' hypothesis was that dominant businesses don't maintain their lead by making their customers happy, but by making it harder for those customers to leave. There's good reasons to suspect this. Between 2002 and 2024, the average "customer relationship" (how long a customer continues to purchase from a merchant) has risen from 7.5 years to 11.5 years, a 50% surge in "customer loyalty," far outstripping any measure of customer *satisfaction* over the same period. This is true across all the largest sectors of the economy: "manufacturing, information, professional services, financial services, and wholesale trade." How to explain the falling divorce rate between customers and businesses? That's where the researchers got *very* clever. They realized that when a company seeks permission to acquire another business, it must publish truthful and comprehensive information about how the merger is expected to increase the profits of the new combination. These disclosures are validated by external auditors, boards of directors, and/or audit committees. There are legal repercussions for falsifying them or making material omissions to them, and they are matters of public record. Crucially, these disclosures must include the business's plans to retain its customers, and its plans to increase the profits from those customers. That's where the researchers struck gold. They amassed a novel data-set of 9,500 acquisitions that disclosed over $1t worth of "customer relationship-related intangibles," more than 20% of all the assets that changed hands. They supplemented this data by mining earnings calls (also subject to strict penalties for omissions and falsehoods), finding CEOs boasting about "practices that may impede switching or increase customers? dependence on the firm." Executives bragged about their "contractual restrictions, bundling and ecosystem lock-in, and switching costs." You can get a sense of these in a short accompanying article by the study's co-author Christopher Stewart: https://www.promarket.org/2026/09/04/american-companies-expect-their-customers-to-stay-much-longer-that-may-be-making-the-economy-less-competitive/ The article recounts how Sirius XM's execs celebrated the news that an appeals court had struck down the FTC's "Click to Cancel" rule, which required companies to make it as easy to resign from a subscription service as it was to sign up for it. Click to Cancel is a response to increasingly sleazy, increasingly pervasive tactics that make it all but impossible to stop being someone's customer. Trump's FTC walked away from defending the rule, which let the court kill it: https://pluralistic.net/2025/05/12/greased-slide/#greased-pole After Click to Cancel died, Sirius XM's C-suite got on a call with their shareholders to project "better outcome(s) as a result of not having that in place." Sirius believed that a rule that made it easy for customers to resign from their monthly subscriptions would hurt its business. Put another way: Sirius believes that its profits come in part from the fact that dissatisfied customers can't figure out how to cancel their service. Then there's the online insurance company eHealth, whose execs crowed about a new "innovation" that forced senior patients to painstakingly enter a long list of their medications and doctors, but did not give them any way to export that data. The lengthy investment of time in getting set up on eHealth would stop customers from leaving, because they wouldn't want "to repeat all of that information over the phone." This is also a feature of business-to-business relationships. In 2019, US Silica's execs described how they had launched a program to become embedded in their customers' supply chains, because that "really locks in the business," making it "much more difficult for customers to switch and go to someone else." That's the first half of the story: an empirical account of how the business world switched from "acquiring customers" to *taking hostages*. But the second half of the paper is even more interesting: an empirical investigation into the *effects* of this customer lock-in. For starters, increased customer retention is "associated with higher gross profit margins": that is, the companies whose customers can't leave squeeze those customers for more profit. What's more, once a company has its customers locked in, it starts to capture a larger share of *all the profits* in its *entire sector*: these hostage-takers become *so* profitable that their profits dwarf the profits of their competitors. The paper also solves the mystery of the missing market entrants that the neoclassical horse-ponderers insisted would be conjured up to compete away an abusive monopolist's margins. The more locked in the customers of a monopolist are, the *fewer* companies try to enter that market. This makes sense: who would invest in a new business in a market where none of its potential customers can switch to its new business? This is the *opposite* of what the horse-ponderers have insisted upon for 50 years. The more lock-in a company attains, the more profitable it becomes, *and* the less it has to worry about new competitors coming after those incredible margins. This is obvious to everyone, except the monopolist-funded "social scientists" and the governments they captured. This is bad news, and not just for those locked-in customers. New businesses are the source of new *jobs*, and, yup, it turns out that sectors dominated by firms with high lock-in create *fewer* jobs. Of course, as workers chase fewer jobs, bosses are able to suppress their wages by forcing workers to bid against one another. Once again, the study finds that the sectors with the most lock-in also see declining wages in addition to declining jobs. These are not the horse-ponderers' "efficient" monopolists. Once a company has its customers locked in, it innovates less - as measured by the number of patents a company is awarded, and by how often those patents are cited in other patents (this second measure helps distinguish companies that file mountains of bullshit patents from companies that actually invent useful things). Naturally, R&D spending also declines in companies with more lock-in. All of this is entirely compatible with the theory of enshittification. Once a company knows its customers can't leave, it can switch from treating them well to abusing them in order to extract money from them. The same goes for companies whose *workers* can't leave - because they're bound by noncompete clauses, or because their employer has bought out all their rivals: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2023/04/platforms-decay-lets-put-users-first It's like the old Lily Tomlin sketches on SNL and Laugh-In, where she played Ernestine the telephone operator narrating satirical ads for AT&T. Those sketches would end with her obviously true catch-phrase: "We don't care. We don't have to. We're the phone company": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CHgUN_95UAw Decades later, Tomlin's phone company joke is a perfect distillation of modern management philosophy. As a famous NBER working paper showed, when a family business is handed over to a professional manager with an MBA, the company doesn't become more profitable overall; it just finds ways to pay its workers less: https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w29874/w29874.pdf That's why Tim Wu named this "the age of extraction." "Growth" no longer means "making something new that people want" - now it means "finding ways to take a larger share of the pie, even if that makes the pie smaller overall": https://www.wired.com/story/tim-wu-age-of-extraction/ This is something we can all feel. We experience it in our daily lives, through "shrinkflation" and "junk fees" and a million other gross and petty scams. But it's rare that we actually catch executives explicitly admitting that their job is to find ways to take you hostage and squeeze you. Historically, those revelations have come from extraordinary circumstances, like when Frontier (the worst ISP in America) went bankrupt and we learned that the company had 1.6 million customers who had no access to competing broadband connections. Frontier carried these hostages on their balance sheet as a special, highly valued asset, since they could be charged more for slower, less reliable service: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2020/04/frontiers-bankruptcy-reveals-cynical-choice-deny-profitable-fiber-millions In assembling this novel, high-quality data-set, the researchers on this paper have performed an important service, capturing a vast number of sworn confessions of highly paid enshittifiers, and then showing how their hostage-taking wrecked competition, prices, wages, jobs and innovation. ->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->-> ? Hey look at this * Gloria Steinem Helped Transform the World for Everyone https://www.meditationsinanemergency.com/gloria-steinem-helped-transform-the-world-for-everyone/ * Keep the Internet free https://keepitfree.ai/ * Money Does Not Decide What It Becomes https://sekimonyo.com/money-does-not-decide-what-it-becomes ->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->-> ? Object permanence #20yrsago Three-hole punch debut, April 1940 https://web.archive.org/web/20061119140057/https://blog.modernmechanix.com/2006/09/06/three-hole-paper-punch-debut/ #20yrsago New Zealand redefines open source as ?code you can?t modify? https://memex.craphound.com/2006/09/07/nobel-prize-sperm-bank-human-tragicomedy-about-eugenics/ #20yrsago MSFT quicker to patch DRM than security vulnerabilities https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2006/09/microsoft_and_f.html #20yrsago Wikipedia?s dumbest arguments https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Lamest_edit_wars #10yrsago Why the Pirate Party could end up running Iceland https://web.archive.org/web/20211024071400/https://www.newstatesman.com/culture/2016/09/how-internet-pirates-became-political-force-iceland #10yrsago Sampling bias: how a machine-learning beauty contest awarded nearly all prizes to whites https://web.archive.org/web/20160906154712/https://motherboard.vice.com/read/why-an-ai-judged-beauty-contest-picked-nearly-all-white-winners #10yrago Warner Bros flags its own website as a piracy portal in copyright takedowns https://torrentfreak.com/warner-bros-flags-website-piracy-portal-160904/ #10yrsago The privacy wars have been a disaster and they?re about to get a LOT worse https://locusmag.com/feature/cory-doctorowthe-privacy-wars-are-about-to-get-a-whole-lot-worse/ #10yrsago Weapons of Math Destruction: invisible, ubiquitous algorithms are ruining millions of lives https://memex.craphound.com/2016/09/06/weapons-of-math-destruction-invisible-ubiquitous-algorithms-are-ruining-millions-of-lives/ #10yrsago Pro-democracy reformers win big in Hong Kong?s elections https://globalvoices.org/2016/09/06/hong-kong-voters-elect-pro-democracy-legislators-to-defend-the-citys-autonomy-from-china/ #1yrago Stock buybacks are stock swindles https://pluralistic.net/2025/09/06/computer-says-huh/#invisible-handcuffs ->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->-> ? Upcoming appearances * Brighton: The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI with Carole Cadwalladr (Brighton Dome), Sep 8 https://brightondome.org/whats-on/LSC-cory-doctorow-the-reverse-centaurs-guide-to-life-after-ai/ * London: The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI with Riley Quinn (Foyle's Picadilly), Sep 9 https://www.foyles.co.uk/events/enshittification-cory-doctorow-riley-quinn * Budapest: Brain Bar, Sep 17 https://brainbar.com/munkatars/cory-doctorow * Edmonton: Elbows Up (Edmonton Public Library), Sep 28 https://www.epl.ca/blogs/post/elbows-up-with-cory-doctorow/ * South Bend: An Evening With Cory Doctorow (Notre Dame), Oct 6 https://franco.nd.edu/events/2026/10/06/an-evening-with-cory-doctorow/ * Hudson, OH: Hudson Library, Oct 7 https://engagedpatrons.org/EventsExtended.cfm?SiteID=3850&EventID=596952&PK= * Calgary: Wordfest, Oct 8 https://wordfest.com/2026/show/wordfest-presents-cory-doctorow-2026/ * Winnipeg: McNally Robinson, Oct 9 https://www.mcnallyrobinson.com/event-18991/An-Evening-with-Cory-Doctorow * Vancouver: Read, Resist, Repair, Rejoice (Vancouver Writers Festival), Oct 19 https://writersfest.bc.ca/festival-event-2026/01 * Victoria: Munro's Books, Oct 20 https://www.munrobooks.com/events/6113620261020 * Vancouver: Life After AI (Vancouver Writers Festival), Oct 22 https://writersfest.bc.ca/festival-event-2026/46 * Ottawa: Life After AI (Ottawa Writers Festival), Oct 24 https://writersfestival.org/event/life-after-ai * Vancouver: BC Policy Solutions Gala, Nov 12 https://bcpolicy.ca/gala/ ->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->-> ? Recent appearances * Downstream with Michael Walker (Novara) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nTqCVJFr7XM * The future of the tech crisis (How the Light Gets In) https://iai.tv/video/the-future-of-the-tech-crisis?_auid=2020 * How Tech Platforms Took Over the Economy (Dystopia Now) https://sites.libsyn.com/566555/enshittification-and-reverse-centaurs-cory-doctorow-on-how-tech-platforms-took-over-the-economy * Hope, AI, Fixing the Internet and the Reverse Centaur of it all (Wilosophy) https://podcastaddict.com/everyone-relax/episode/231414816 * Deflating the AI Bubble (Do Not Pass Go) https://www.donotpassgo.ca/p/deflating-the-ai-bubble-with-cory ->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->-> ? Latest books * "The Reverse-Centaur's Guide to AI," a short book about being a better AI critic, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, June 2026 https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374621568/thereversecentaursguidetolifeafterai/ * "Canny Valley": A limited edition collection of the collages I create for Pluralistic, self-published, September 2025 https://pluralistic.net/2025/09/04/illustrious/#chairman-bruce * "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/ * "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 (thebezzle.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 * "The Post-American Internet," a geopolitical sequel of sorts to *Enshittification*, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2027 * "Unauthorized Bread": a middle-grades graphic novel adapted from my novella about refugees, toasters and DRM, FirstSecond, April 20, 2027 * "Enshittification, Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It" (the graphic novel), Firstsecond, 2027 * "The Memex Method," Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2027 ->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->-> ? Colophon Today's top sources: Currently writing: * ?Once Is Enemy Action,? a science fiction novel about the origins of modern technofascism. Today's words: 574 (7730 total). * "The Post-American Internet," a sequel to "Enshittification," about the better world the rest of us get to have now that Trump has torched America. Fourth draft completed. Submitted to editor. * 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 Bluesky (no ads, possible tracking and data-collection): https://bsky.app/profile/doctorow.pluralistic.net Medium (no ads, paywalled): https://doctorow.medium.com/ 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 From doctorow at craphound.com Wed Sep 9 06:32:25 2026 From: doctorow at craphound.com (Cory Doctorow) Date: Wed, 9 Sep 2026 11:32:25 +0100 Subject: [Plura-list] Anti-vax/anti-trust Message-ID: Read today's issue online at: https://pluralistic.net/2026/09/09/when-it-dont-rain/ Today's links * Anti-vax/anti-trust: Remembering saves lives. * Hey look at this: Delights to delectate. * Object permanence: Disneyland prisoner; HOAs v xeriscaping; Copyright Office x regulatory capture; The women held a vote; Open licenses v uncopyrightable subjects; Largest prison strike in history; Largest strike in history; Fingerspitzengef?hl; CDT v DRM; BNL v DRM; Sugar v logos; Knit a Princess Leia wig; RIP Gutenberg founder Michael Hart; Best bitters; HK refugees x Snowden; Wells Fargo's massive fraud; EU v links; Trump x noncompetes. * Upcoming appearances: London, Manchester, Budapest, Edmonton, South Bend, Hudson, Calgary, Winnipeg, Vancouver, Victoria, Ottawa. * 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. ->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->-> ? Anti-vax/anti-trust As once-extinct diseases sweep through America, sickening, maiming and killing, the wild lunacy of anti-vax superstition grows ever more difficult to excuse. Even the most uncomfortable vaccinations are nothing compared to the agony of the diseases they stave off. The worst I've ever felt after a jab was when I insisted - against doctor's orders - on getting the shingles, flu and covid jabs at the same time (I was about to leave on a complex trip where I'd be in a lot of enclosed spaces with a lot of different people, and I'd just had a cancer diagnosis and didn't want to get sick in case that foreclosed on my oncologist's therapeutic plans). I felt like *dogshit* for about a day, and *it didn't matter*. Every time I felt like groaning and complaining, I thought about Rusty, my grandmother's wonderful boyfriend (they shacked up after my grandfather died, but didn't get married because she would have lost her widow's benefits). Rusty was the toughest guy I knew, an ex-bodybuilder who never showed any sign of discomfort, not even after his knee-replacements. The only time Rusty ever lost his composure in my presence was when he had shingles, when the agony reduced him to uncontrollable weeping. I knew that no matter how ooky all those vaccines made me feel, it was better than going through what Rusty had experienced. There was no way I'd handle it nearly so well as he did. Rusty's shingles experience was the *best* case. He didn't end up with years of crippling nerve pain. He didn't lose his sight or hearing, didn't experience brain damage, didn't *die* of encephalitis. Fuck *yeah* I'll get a shingles vax. As many people have observed, the problem with vaccines is that they work *too* well. The incredible, astounding, profound wonders of vaccines led many people to think of measles as a rash, the flu as a bad cold, mumps as a thing that makes you look like Brando playing Don Corleone. Vaccines worked so well to eliminate a terror that stalked the land and stole people's lives and loved ones and little children, an achy arm or an infinitesimal chance of a few days of feeling like shit seemed worse by comparison. Now that we've turned our backs on this miracle, now that vaccination is in retreat and long-forgotten diseases are taking our babies, millions of people are *still* insisting that vaccines are a hoax. That's infuriating and frustrating, but it's understandable. The cause-and-effect relationship between herd immunity and disease elimination is complex, and it plays out over a long timescale. It's notoriously hard to reason well about phenomena whose causal relationships are attenuated and multifactorial. It's one thing to learn to hit a ball by swinging at it and watching where it goes - it's another altogether to swing blindfolded, go home, and then, eight years later, have someone tell you where the ball ended up. No one would start smoking if the first puff caused you to break out in visible tumors. The attenuated, complex relationship between smoking and cancer creates a space where death merchants could instill profitable doubt and the more our institutions fail us, the easier it is to spread that doubt. After all, nearly all of us lack the technical expertise to sort through the claims and counterclaims of tobacco lobbyists and public health authorities. To a large extent, we have to trust the *process*: trust it to be a well-administered truth-seeking exercise that does its best to find the correct answer to complex, technical questions. When the state is manifestly bad at doing its job, we *still* have to answer these complex, technical questions, but (lacking both the expertise to draw an informed conclusion *and* a reliable process by which expert disagreements can be settled), we're left helpless to do so. It's enough to drive you to despair: https://pluralistic.net/2024/03/25/black-boxes/#when-you-know-you-know This is an essay about anti-trust. 135 years ago, monopolists were such a destructive force - ruining workers' lives; corrupting politicians; pauperizing, swindling and poisoning their customers - that we created the first anti-monopoly laws: https://pluralistic.net/2022/02/20/we-should-not-endure-a-king/ It took a quarter of a century to really start putting those laws into effect, but we eventually dismantled the robber barons' vast, destructive machines: https://pluralistic.net/2025/11/20/if-you-wanted-to-get-there/#i-wouldnt-start-from-here The World Wars helped: two consecutive orgies of capital destruction left oligarchs' treasuries so bare that we were finally able to realize some of our most utopian dreams of mutual aid and care, and all around the world, we won labor rights, state pensions, public medicine, all the wonders of the era the French call "Les Trente Glorieuses" (the 30 glorious years): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trente_Glorieuses But *because* antitrust worked, we forgot how corrosive monopolies were. When the neoliberal economists of the Reagan/Thatcher era told us that we were missing out on the "efficiencies" of vast corporations, we blundered into their trap, letting them define the debate, so that instead of talking about how monopolies could clobber workers, customers and governments, we talked about whether monopolies might reduce prices. Sure, a monopoly can reduce prices - but as soon as it eliminates its competitors and captures its government, it's going to raise those prices, safe in the knowledge that a company that's too big to fail is too big to jail: https://pluralistic.net/2024/08/14/the-price-is-wright/#enforcement-priorities The dismantling of anti-monopoly law and the growth of the monopolies happened gradually, and then all at once. The decision to kill antitrust enforcement took place a half-century ago, but it was only in the past few years that the relationship of monopoly to our political, environmental and social dysfunction has entered our politics. The causal relationship between pro-monopoly policies and the harms of monopoly is even more complex and attenuated than the causal relationship between anti-vax and kids dying from measles in Texas. Monopolies are especially hard on policymaking. Large, concentrated industries find it easier to arrive at a common lobbying position. They are aslosh in cash, thanks to their ability to cooperate (rather than eroding one another's margins through "wasteful competition") (h/t P. Thiel): https://mastersofscale.com/peter-thiel-escape-the-competition/ To live in an age of monopolies is to live in an age of regulatory capture, in which your government routinely fails you in terrible ways to benefit elites and insiders. When that happens, it's easy to conclude that government is *incapable* of regulating, and to insist that we might as well do away with the state altogether. This is a self-reinforcing belief, because the weaker the state is, the more monopolists can steal from you: https://pluralistic.net/2022/06/05/regulatory-capture/ It's easy to understand how someone who lived through the murder of an addicted loved one at the hands of the billionaire Sacklers, who were abetted by their putative regulators and got to keep billions of dollars even after they declared "bankruptcy" might conclude that they can't trust pharmaceutical companies' or their regulators when they swear vaccines are safe and effective: https://pluralistic.net/2021/08/18/lets-make-a-deal/#art-of-the-deal In the same way, once you've forgotten that we *decided* to let monopolists run amok, despite regulatory capture that would obviously follow as a consequence, you might well conclude that governments are part of the problem, and therefore can't be the solution. We forget that things used to be better, and we forget how things were made better, and we forget how they got worse. Like vaccines, antitrust worked *too* well. By the time Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan decided to welcome "efficient" monopolies, it had been so long since the world had been brought to the brink of ruin by oligarchs that it was easy to sell the pain of "lost efficiency" as worse than the distant horrors of the Gilded Age. As the old joke goes, "When it don't rain the roof don't leak; when it's raining, I can't hardly fix it." We got rid of antitrust because it had been so long since oligarchs ran the world, we forgot how bad they'd made everything. Now that oligarchs are driving civilization off a cliff, we can't imagine fighting these seemingly omnipotent monsters. We can fix this, just as our not-so-distant ancestors did when they tamed *their* robber barons. It won't be easy. It starts with remembering. ->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->-> ? Hey look at this * TiVo Plans to End Free Automatic Commercial Skipping in November, Tests Paid Premium Replacement Service https://cordcuttersnews.com/tivo-plans-to-end-free-automatic-commercial-skipping-in-november-tests-paid-premium-replacement-service/ * Stand up to union busters https://search.laborlab.us/ * Estimate the cost of an anti-union campaign. https://calculator.laborlab.us/ * Labor Day 2026: Record-High Popularity, Record-Low Power for America?s Unions https://prospect.org/2026/09/07/labor-day-2026-record-high-popularity-record-low-power-for-americas-unions/ * 216,000,000 Spy TVs | The LG Smart TV Problem https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6IFVTcM28KA ->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->-> ? Object permanence #25yrsago Garry Trudeau gets hoaxed http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/1530220.stm #25yrsago Publishers v radical librarians https://web.archive.org/web/20010713171001/http://news.cnet.com/news/0-1005-201-6545588-0.html #20yrsago Podcasters act now to stop anti-podcasting UN treaty! https://web.archive.org/web/*/https://www.eff.org/IP/WIPO/broadcasting_treaty/podcasting.php #20yrsago Why CDT?s report on DRM falls short of the mark https://craphound.com/cdtdrmresponse.txt #20yrsago Barenaked Ladies guy on Universal?s DRM SpiralFrog service https://web.archive.org/web/20061110205411/http://www.bnlblog.com/entry.asp?dDate=8/30/2006 #20yrsago HOWTO Use sugar to sand away logos on your phone https://web.archive.org/web/20061006153939/http://www.instructables.com/id/EFHU5V6TKYERIE2SMP/?ALLSTEPS #20yrsago HOWTO Knit a Princess Leia wig https://web.archive.org/web/20061020092941/https://bleuarts.blogspot.com/2006/09/free-pattern-leia-hat.html #20yrsago Prisoner statue smuggled into Disneyland ride http://www.woostercollective.com/post/breaking-the-story-disneyland-doesnt-want-you-to-know #15yrsago RIP, Project Gutenberg founder Michael Hart https://web.archive.org/web/20111008024157/http://news.cnet.com/8301-30685_3-20103356-264/e-book-pioneer-michael-hart-dies/ #10yrsago Supermaker John Edgar Park shares his bitters recipe https://makezine.com/projects/ultimate-bitters-recipe/ #10yrsago How Hong Kong?s vulnerable, reviled refugee community saved Edward Snowden https://srilankafoundation.org/newsfeed/how-snowden-escaped/ #10yrsago Leaked catalog from UK surveillance arms-dealer full of gadgets sold to US cops https://theintercept.com/2016/09/01/leaked-catalogue-reveals-a-vast-array-of-military-spy-gear-offered-to-u-s-police/ #10yrsago Wells Fargo fires 5,300 employees for opening 2M fake accounts in customers? names https://web.archive.org/web/20160908200030/https://money.cnn.com/2016/09/08/investing/wells-fargo-created-phony-accounts-bank-fees/index.html #10yrsago European court rules that making a link can be copyright infringement https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2016/09/european-copyright-ruling-ushers-new-dark-era-hyperlinks #10yrsago Indian workers staged one of the largest strikes in human history and no one in the USA noticed https://theintercept.com/2016/09/06/indians-staged-one-of-the-largest-strikes-in-history-but-no-one-on-u-s-cable-news-covered-it/ #10yrsago Homeowners? associations are not allowed to ban drought-tolerant landscaping https://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-associations-landscaping-plans-20160831-snap-story.html #10yrsago Blackballed by machine learning: how algorithms can destroy your chances of getting a job https://www.theguardian.com/science/2016/sep/01/how-algorithms-rule-our-working-lives #10yrsago The US Copyright Office is the poster child for regulatory capture https://web.archive.org/web/20160909001439/https://www.publicknowledge.org/assets/uploads/blog/Final_Captured_Systemic_Bias_at_the_US_Copyright_Office.pdf #10yrsago The women held a vote, and you?re not allowed to talk to anyone ever again https://web.archive.org/web/20160908124630/http://ursulav.livejournal.com/1680540.html #10yrsago Open licenses don?t work for uncopyrightable subjects: 3D printing edition https://michaelweinberg.org/post/150123246460/the-cost-of-a-successful-creative-commons-and-open/ #10yrsago Tomorrow: largest prison strike in US history https://thenib.com/inmates-are-planning-the-largest-prison-strike-in-us-history/ #10yrsago If DRM is so great, why won?t anyone warn you when you?re buying it? https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/sep/08/drm-product-labelling-ftc-electronic-frontier-foundation?CMP=share_btn_tw #1yrago Fingerspitzengef?hl https://pluralistic.net/2025/09/08/process-knowledge/#dance-monkey-dance #1yrago Trump steals $400b from American workers https://pluralistic.net/2025/09/09/germanium-valley/#i-cant-quit-you ->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->-> ? Upcoming appearances * London: The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI with Riley Quinn (Foyle's Picadilly), Sep 9 https://www.foyles.co.uk/events/enshittification-cory-doctorow-riley-quinn * Manchester: City of Literature, Sep 11 https://www.manchestercityofliterature.com/event/the-reverse-centaurs-guide-to-life-after-ai-by-cory-doctorow/ * Budapest: Brain Bar, Sep 17 https://brainbar.com/munkatars/cory-doctorow * Edmonton: Elbows Up (Edmonton Public Library), Sep 28 https://www.epl.ca/blogs/post/elbows-up-with-cory-doctorow/ * South Bend: An Evening With Cory Doctorow (Notre Dame), Oct 6 https://franco.nd.edu/events/2026/10/06/an-evening-with-cory-doctorow/ * Hudson, OH: Hudson Library, Oct 7 https://engagedpatrons.org/EventsExtended.cfm?SiteID=3850&EventID=596952&PK= * Calgary: Wordfest, Oct 8 https://wordfest.com/2026/show/wordfest-presents-cory-doctorow-2026/ * Winnipeg: McNally Robinson, Oct 9 https://www.mcnallyrobinson.com/event-18991/An-Evening-with-Cory-Doctorow * Vancouver: Read, Resist, Repair, Rejoice (Vancouver Writers Festival), Oct 19 https://writersfest.bc.ca/festival-event-2026/01 * Victoria: Munro's Books, Oct 20 https://www.munrobooks.com/events/6113620261020 * Vancouver: Life After AI (Vancouver Writers Festival), Oct 22 https://writersfest.bc.ca/festival-event-2026/46 * Ottawa: Life After AI (Ottawa Writers Festival), Oct 24 https://writersfestival.org/event/life-after-ai * Kilkenny: Kilkenomics, Nov 6-8 https://kilkenomics.com/ * Vancouver: BC Policy Solutions Gala, Nov 12 https://bcpolicy.ca/gala/ ->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->-> ? Recent appearances * Fisher-Price Management (Does A Frog Have Scorpion Nature?) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OVYS4l8M5UI * Downstream with Michael Walker (Novara) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nTqCVJFr7XM * The future of the tech crisis (How the Light Gets In) https://iai.tv/video/the-future-of-the-tech-crisis?_auid=2020 * How Tech Platforms Took Over the Economy (Dystopia Now) https://sites.libsyn.com/566555/enshittification-and-reverse-centaurs-cory-doctorow-on-how-tech-platforms-took-over-the-economy * Hope, AI, Fixing the Internet and the Reverse Centaur of it all (Wilosophy) https://podcastaddict.com/everyone-relax/episode/231414816 ->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->-> ? Latest books * "The Reverse-Centaur's Guide to AI," a short book about being a better AI critic, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, June 2026 https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374621568/thereversecentaursguidetolifeafterai/ * "Canny Valley": A limited edition collection of the collages I create for Pluralistic, self-published, September 2025 https://pluralistic.net/2025/09/04/illustrious/#chairman-bruce * "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/ * "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 (thebezzle.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 * "The Post-American Internet," a geopolitical sequel of sorts to *Enshittification*, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2027 * "Unauthorized Bread": a middle-grades graphic novel adapted from my novella about refugees, toasters and DRM, FirstSecond, April 20, 2027 * "Enshittification, Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It" (the graphic novel), Firstsecond, 2027 * "The Memex Method," Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2027 ->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->-> ? Colophon Today's top sources: Currently writing: * ?Once Is Enemy Action,? a science fiction novel about the origins of modern technofascism. Today's words: 505 (13405 total). * "The Post-American Internet," a sequel to "Enshittification," about the better world the rest of us get to have now that Trump has torched America. Fourth draft completed. Submitted to editor. * 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 Bluesky (no ads, possible tracking and data-collection): https://bsky.app/profile/doctorow.pluralistic.net Medium (no ads, paywalled): https://doctorow.medium.com/ 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 From doctorow at craphound.com Fri Sep 11 10:49:24 2026 From: doctorow at craphound.com (Cory Doctorow) Date: Fri, 11 Sep 2026 15:49:24 +0100 Subject: [Plura-list] Inefficiency is bad, actually Message-ID: <3ccc12f6-0941-438c-a09b-ec501e0db709@craphound.com> Read today's issue online at: https://pluralistic.net/2026/09/11/mazzucato-thought/ Today's links * Inefficiency is bad, actually: Now, "resiliency" on the other hand... * Hey look at this: Delights to delectate. * Object permanence: Canada's DMCA; Socialism x Pledge of Allegiance; Hate the player and the game; Making Light's 9/11; 9/11 survivor registry; Secure email caused 9/11; German Pirates; Hollywood's Canadian MP; Reverse Centaurs resolve the AI paradox. * Upcoming appearances: Manchester, Budapest, Edmonton, South Bend, Hudson, Calgary, Winnipeg, Vancouver, Victoria, Ottawa. * 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. ->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->-> ? Inefficiency is bad, actually The most reliable way to lose a political battle is to let your adversary define the terms. For example, if you're an artist and you let your boss define the fight over AI, he'll make it all about "IP" (not labor) and ask you to help secure a victory that will make him richer and you poorer: https://pluralistic.net/2026/09/02/scrape-scrope-scrap/ If we want to win these important battles, we can't let our adversaries define them. That's the blunder we made 50 years ago, when we let the neoclassical economists redefine the problem of monopolies. Before the Carter era, the monopoly fight was about *power*. Monopolies had to be fought because wealth concentration would create "autocrats of trade," so powerful as to be beyond the reach of any regulator, any union, any competitor. Even if a company achieved its monopoly by being the best in the world - by making the best products at the best prices while paying the best wages - its power still needed blunting, lest it change its mind and start charging more, reducing quality, and paying less: https://pluralistic.net/2022/02/20/we-should-not-endure-a-king/ The Chicago School economists who were catapulted to dominance by Reagan, Thatcher, et al won this debate by changing the frame. They insisted (as neoclassicals love to do) that economics is no mere social science, obsessed with squishy, qualitative matters like "power." Rather, economics was a *natural* science, like physics, in which everything important could be crystallized (which is to say, reduced) to an equation: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nobel_Memorial_Prize_in_Economic_Sciences#Creation_and_funding Economists call these equations "models," and they are famously impenetrable...unless you've had extensive training in economics. Once everything important about the economy was captured by abstruse equations, ordinary people's "feelings" about being squeezed, coerced, corralled or cheated were no longer germane: https://pluralistic.net/2022/05/09/rest-in-piss-robert-bork/#harmful-dominance Thus, competition enforcement was transformed: no longer was it an inquiry into the power that a company wielded or might amass through a merger. Rather, every competition question was a matter of solving an equation that would tell you whether the result would be "efficient": https://pluralistic.net/2021/06/03/jitters/#brittleness This framing was tactically *brilliant*. Once an economist pronounces a merger to be "efficient," everyone who opposes that merger can be dismissed as campaigning for an inefficient world. Who wants to live in an inefficient world? But "efficiency" isn't a freestanding concept. A Martian observing the Earth through a powerful telescope could not tell you when a long line at the grocery store was "efficient" (because the wages saved by understaffing exceeded the lost business from customers who noped out and abandoned their shopping cart) and when it was "inefficient" (because the mom whose wait made her miss administering her kid's insulin ended up spending thousands on an emergency room visit). In practice, an economist's "efficiency" is indistinguishable from "brittleness" and often crosses over into "cheating." The most "efficient" companies in the world have made an art out of locking in their customers, making it so hard to switch to a rival that customers tolerate declining quality, service and affordability: https://pluralistic.net/2026/09/06/hotels-california/#the-eagles-were-optimists During the pandemic, the "efficiency" of long supply-chains, low inventory, and bare-bones staffing was revealed as a form of societal immunocompromise, the annihilation of everything we need to survive when the status quo collapses, so that disaster always becomes calamity: https://pluralistic.net/2022/06/01/factories-to-condos-pipeline/#stuff-not-money Speaking this week on the Capitalisn't podcast, the heterodox economist Mariana Mazzucato unpacks her new book *The Common Good Economy*, and how its thesis reframes "efficiency" as a *productivity* question: https://capitalisnt.com/episodes/can-capitalism-serve-the-common-good-ft-mariana-mazzucato-EODamLKT Mazzucato describes how the economic fetish for efficiency and growth lacks *specificity*. Organizing a society around "growth" leads to a financialized economy, in which firms post growth by selling off the things they need to survive: https://pluralistic.net/2024/05/23/spineless/#invertebrates It leads to an enshittification economy, where firms "grow" by making their products worse, as when Google adds five more ads to every Youtube video and makes search worse so you'll have to keep refining your queries, loading fresh ads every time: https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/24/naming-names/#prabhakar-raghavan As with "efficiency," there's nothing wrong with "growth" (indeed, "de-growth" is a terrible slogan and a giant self-own for the climate movement). To smash gouging landlords, we need to grow the supply of housing stock, but if we flatten this to mean "number (of new condos) go up," we'll end up with a city full of half-built buy-to-rent condos that no one wants to pay for, much less live in: https://www.mpamag.com/ca/mortgage-industry/market-updates/toronto-condo-buyers-abandon-units-worth-less-than-they-paid/524217 We need "growth" of batteries, solar panels, sea-walls, heat-pumps, insulation and recycling plants. We need "growth" of controlled burns, medical services, and gender-affirming care. We need "growth" of federated social media and non-American alternatives to productivity software. This is where framing the debate is so important. We have to take back terms like "productivity," so it means "making things that we need more of," not "making more things." Governments can use taxation, procurement and regulation to coerce, convince, or woo private firms into producing these things - and governments can produce them directly. The biggest barrier to a productive, resilient economy is corporate power. Smashing their power and building our own has to be our alpha and omega. We can't afford to spend our time arguing about whether a monopolist is "efficient." Efficiency does not render concentrated wealth and power safe for human civilization. Once we reclaim productivity as "more of the things we want," we'll make it clear that replacing civil servants with AI chatbots is a loser policy. Mark Carney wants to fire tens of thousands of Canadian civil servants and replace them with defective LLMs on the grounds that these will cost less: https://www.pm.gc.ca/en/news/news-releases/2026/06/04/prime-minister-carney-launches-ai-all-canadas-new-national-artificial But they will deliver less, too. The only thing public sector chatbots truly deliver is cynicism about the ability of the state to achieve *anything*: https://pluralistic.net/2026/02/06/doge-ball/#n-600 After generations in which the private sector has been allowed to degrade into an extractive, hostage-taking, enshittifying, planet-torching existential risk, we *need* the public to believe that states can deliver excellence. What's more, any politician who oversees the delivery of excellence will be beloved by the public, who will reward that politician by backing the kind of wildly ambitious program we desperately need: https://pluralistic.net/2026/02/24/mamdani-thought/#public-excellence As Mark Carney so eloquently said at Davos, as frightening as it is to have Trump "rupture" the old order, we should all be able to agree that the old order *sucked* and seize this opportunity to build something new and better: https://www.weforum.org/stories/forum-institutional/davos-2026-special-address-by-mark-carney-prime-minister-of-canada/ I believe in Carneyism with all my heart - I just wish Carney did: https://pluralistic.net/2026/05/30/rupture/#deeds-not-words For all Carney's talk of a rupture and a better new world, his two signature strategies (besides replacing the civil service with chatbots) are retaliatory tariffs and importing Chinese EVs. Neither of these addresses Canada's resiliency and productivity deficits. If the retaliatory tariffs work, Canada goes back to getting its cars from America. If the China deal works, Canada swaps its USA risk for a China risk. If Carney was *actually* interested in Carneyism, he'd use retaliatory tariffs and Chinese EVs to buy time while committing *massive* investment for building Canada's industrial capacity to manufacture the things that give other countries dangerous leverage. The problem with the old order was that it created a brittle system where one maniac elevated to a position of power could shatter everyone's peace and prosperity. The *answer* to that is not "a different maniac." It's also not *two* maniacs. To be truly productive and efficient, Canada needs a competent, well-resourced civil service, not chatbots. It needs the capacity to build things that it can't afford to do without. Carney's failure to embrace Carneyism while insisting that he is delivering efficiency and growth is as clear an example of the risks of letting your enemies set the terms of the debate as you could ask for. ->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->-> ? Hey look at this * Smartphone makers don't bother to comply with EU repairability requirements https://www.theregister.com/personal-tech/2026/09/07/smartphone-makers-dont-bother-to-comply-with-eu-repairability-requirements/5294532 * Mamdani Opens Office of Worker Power https://prospect.org/2026/09/07/mamdani-opens-office-of-worker-power-new-york-city-labor/ * Digital Sovereignty: What It Is, What It Could Be https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2026/09/digital-sovereignty-what-it-what-it-could-be * Poll Finds Majority Of Republicans Support Unions https://theonion.com/poll-finds-majority-of-republicans-support-unions/ * Blizzard Workers Win Historic Union Contract That Could Set A New Standard For Game Developers https://www.gamespot.com/articles/blizzard-workers-win-historic-union-contract-that-could-set-a-new-standard-for-game-developers/ ->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->-> ? Object permanence #25yrsago Tell Canada to Reject Anti-Technology Bans https://web.archive.org/web/20010917020803/https://www.eff.org/alerts/20010907_eff_canada_cpdci_alert.html #25yrsago Making Light on 9/11 https://web.archive.org/web/20010917012109/http://www.panix.com/~pnh/makinglight.html #25yrsago Twin Towers survivor registry https://web.archive.org/web/20010914220549/https://www.shunn.net/okay/ #25yrsago Blame encryption for 9/11 https://web.archive.org/web/20010917024851/http://www.usatoday.com/life/cyber/tech/2001-02-05-binladen.htm #20yrsago Lawbot: open expert system for legal ?advice? https://web.archive.org/web/20061103200129/https://www.lawunderground.org/PortalCSVS/DesktopDefault.aspx #20yrsago USPTO encloses 10MB of porn with trademark rejection https://web.archive.org/web/20061005074505/https://www.thesmokinggun.com/archive/0911061uspto1.html #20yrsago German Pirate Party founded https://web.archive.org/web/20061011142613/http://www.piratenpartei-deutschland.de/index.php?id=50 #20yrsago Starbucks co-produces movie, then sells DVD https://web.archive.org/web/20060322021155/http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/06013/637176.stm #20yrsago How Hollywood?s MP in Canada financed her campaign https://web.archive.org/web/20061010121752/https://www.michaelgeist.ca/content/view/1428/125/ #20yrsago Jimmy Wales to Beijing: Wikipedia won?t censor https://web.archive.org/web/20061004173945/http://observer.guardian.co.uk/world/story/0,,1869074,00.html #20yrsago Chumby chairman interview: squeezable, open bean-bag computer https://wifinetnews.com/archives/2006/09/podcast_21_chumbys_chairman_steve_tomlin.html #15yrsago Judge: copyright troll showed ?staggering chutzpah? in sending its own subpoenas to ISPs https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2011/09/judge-sanctions-copyright-troll-attorney #10yrsago Why Facebook?s ?It?s too hard? excuse for Vietnam war photo takedown is bullshit https://web.archive.org/web/20160914214543/http://tinyletter.com/danhon/letters/s3e27-it-s-difficult #10yrsago A socialist wrote the Pledge of Allegiance, which used to be accompanied by Nazi salutes https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/rules-about-how-to-address-us-flag-came-about-because-no-one-wanted-to-look-like-a-nazi-180960100/?no-ist #1yrago Hate the player AND the game https://pluralistic.net/2025/09/10/say-their-names/#object-permanence #1yrago Reverse centaurs are the answer to the AI paradox https://pluralistic.net/2025/09/11/vulgar-thatcherism/#there-is-an-alternative ->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->-> ? Upcoming appearances * Manchester: City of Literature, Sep 11 https://www.manchestercityofliterature.com/event/the-reverse-centaurs-guide-to-life-after-ai-by-cory-doctorow/ * Budapest: Brain Bar, Sep 17 https://brainbar.com/munkatars/cory-doctorow * Edmonton: Elbows Up (Edmonton Public Library), Sep 28 https://www.epl.ca/blogs/post/elbows-up-with-cory-doctorow/ * South Bend: An Evening With Cory Doctorow (Notre Dame), Oct 6 https://franco.nd.edu/events/2026/10/06/an-evening-with-cory-doctorow/ * Hudson, OH: Hudson Library, Oct 7 https://engagedpatrons.org/EventsExtended.cfm?SiteID=3850&EventID=596952&PK= * Calgary: Wordfest, Oct 8 https://wordfest.com/2026/show/wordfest-presents-cory-doctorow-2026/ * Winnipeg: McNally Robinson, Oct 9 https://www.mcnallyrobinson.com/event-18991/An-Evening-with-Cory-Doctorow * Vancouver: Read, Resist, Repair, Rejoice (Vancouver Writers Festival), Oct 19 https://writersfest.bc.ca/festival-event-2026/01 * Victoria: Munro's Books, Oct 20 https://www.munrobooks.com/events/6113620261020 * Vancouver: Life After AI (Vancouver Writers Festival), Oct 22 https://writersfest.bc.ca/festival-event-2026/46 * Ottawa: Life After AI (Ottawa Writers Festival), Oct 24 https://writersfestival.org/event/life-after-ai * Vancouver: BC Policy Solutions Gala, Nov 12 https://bcpolicy.ca/gala/ ->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->-> ? Recent appearances * Pod Save the UK https://audioboom.com/posts/8950533-radicalised-organised-and-thick-as-s-t-nish-has-had-it-with-far-right-protests-plus-why * Stop Saying AI Can Do Your Job (Factually) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VU3gABvwZCM * Be Skeptical of the AI Sales Pitch (Trumponomics) https://www.bloomberg.com/news/audio/2026-09-09/trumponomics-cory-doctorow-questions-the-ai-hype-podcast * Fisher-Price Management (Does A Frog Have Scorpion Nature?) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OVYS4l8M5UI * Downstream with Michael Walker (Novara) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nTqCVJFr7XM ->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->-> ? Latest books * "The Reverse-Centaur's Guide to AI," a short book about being a better AI critic, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, June 2026 https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374621568/thereversecentaursguidetolifeafterai/ * "Canny Valley": A limited edition collection of the collages I create for Pluralistic, self-published, September 2025 https://pluralistic.net/2025/09/04/illustrious/#chairman-bruce * "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/ * "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 (thebezzle.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 * "The Post-American Internet," a geopolitical sequel of sorts to *Enshittification*, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2027 * "Unauthorized Bread": a middle-grades graphic novel adapted from my novella about refugees, toasters and DRM, FirstSecond, April 20, 2027 * "Enshittification, Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It" (the graphic novel), Firstsecond, 2027 * "The Memex Method," Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2027 ->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->-> ? Colophon Today's top sources: Currently writing: * ?Once Is Enemy Action,? a science fiction novel about the origins of modern technofascism. Today's words: 507 (14417 total). * "The Post-American Internet," a sequel to "Enshittification," about the better world the rest of us get to have now that Trump has torched America. Fourth draft completed. Submitted to editor. * 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 Bluesky (no ads, possible tracking and data-collection): https://bsky.app/profile/doctorow.pluralistic.net Medium (no ads, paywalled): https://doctorow.medium.com/ 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. 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ISSN: 3066-764X From doctorow at craphound.com Sat Sep 12 07:12:17 2026 From: doctorow at craphound.com (Cory Doctorow) Date: Sat, 12 Sep 2026 12:12:17 +0100 Subject: [Plura-list] LLMs are real, AI is fake Message-ID: <20bc592a-4ad5-462c-b5d0-529c92c41939@craphound.com> Read today's issue online at: https://pluralistic.net/2026/09/12/god-in-the-box/ Today's links * LLMs are real, AI is fake: No, it didn't "go rogue." * Hey look at this: Delights to delectate. * Object permanence: Why 9/11 Means We Must Support My Politics; Blogs x 9/11; Jimmy Wales v Britannica's EiC; Hollywood astroturfs Australia; Agents v queer YA; Soft landings for dirty cops; Leaked Stingray manual. * Upcoming appearances: Budapest, Edmonton, South Bend, Hudson, Calgary, Winnipeg, Vancouver, Victoria, Ottawa. * 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. ->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->-> ? LLMs are real, AI is fake Once you understand the corporate culture of AI "hyperscalers" consists primarily of everyone cooking their brains by locking themselves in the bathroom, holding flashlights under their chins, and saying "Aaaaaaaaaay Eyeeeeeee" until they wet themselves in terror, a lot of things snap into focus: https://pluralistic.net/2023/06/04/ayyyyyy-eyeeeee/ It explains how a company can simultaneously be staffing up an enterprise sales division while also constantly freaking out at the thought that its product has "a 10% chance of ending humanity": https://www.latimes.com/business/story/2026-09-11/is-there-really-10-chance-ai-could-kill-us-all Given that AI insiders have mostly cooked their brains in this fashion, it behooves us all to treat these people as unreliable narrators of their own products' capabilities. Remember: every time you repeat a story about how awfully, terribly dangerous their products are, you help them raise more investment capital, which is a key input for their business (hooking up statistical engines to money-furnaces): https://peoples-things.ghost.io/youre-doing-it-wrong-notes-on-criticism-and-technology-hype/ Take the story about how OpenAI's chatbots hacked the servers of Hugging Face, another AI company, as a way of cheating on a hacking challenge called "Exploit Gym." Even the technical press can't help itself when it comes to this kind of thing, and the reportage has been full of references to Skynet and other science fictional conceits: https://theaicronicle.com/en/news/ethics/skynet-day-openai-hugging-face-hack These accounts are cooking the brains of *everyone*, not just AI insiders. Last night, a man at my event in Manchester started shouting that AI was "setting its own goals" and wouldn't stop interrupting to insist that this was going on. He left shortly thereafter, so he didn't get a chance to hear me explain what *actually* happened, which is a pity. To understand the truth about the Hugging Face hack, you could do a lot worse than to listen to Ed Zitron and Cal Newport's recent podcast conversation on Ed's "Better Offline" podcast: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/no-ai-is-not-autonomously-hacking-with-cal-newport/id1730587238?i=1000785935670 Newport does an admirable job of breaking down how these "autonomous hacking" tools work. The first thing to understand is that a chatbot isn't really directing the operation. Instead, the chatbot serves as a kind of front-end to a database of earlier hacking challenges that is repeatedly queried by a simple program written in Python, an easy-to-master programming language. Here's how that works: the Python program starts by prompting the chatbot with the nature of the challenge: "I'm participating in a hacker capture the flag (CTF) challenge where I have to break into a remote server and retrieve some information. How should I start?" The chatbot consults its training data - years' worth of captured CTF sessions in which human teams competed to achieve an objective like this one (CTF matches are a routine feature of hacker conferences, and the server logs and chat transcripts from the competing teams are published afterward for the edification of other hackers and security pros). The chatbot then outputs something like: "The first thing is to find out more about your target server. Run the following command-line instructions to locate the server's IP address and find out which server software it's running." The Python program relays these command-line instructions to normal Unix utilities running on its own hardware. Then it takes the output of those programs and goes back to the chatbot, which isn't really following the action, so the Python program has to include everything that's happened to this point in its prompt: "I'm participating in a CTF challenge where I have to break into a remote server and retrieve some information. I ran the following commands to learn more about the target server, and here's what came back. Now what?" The chatbot feeds the Python script more likely commands to try, and after running those, the Python script loops back to the top, appends the output to its prompt, and goes back to the chatbot. This is a *very* reckless way to operate a piece of autonomous malicious software. The most likely outcome is that the chatbot will cough up a bad guess about what to do next, and steer itself into a dead-end. You may have encountered something like this yourself, when you've asked a chatbot for help with a complex task and been confidently provided with several steps to take in series, and then, an hour later on step 10, you discover that everything went wrong at step 3 and now you're screwed. But there are *much* worse ways this can go wrong. The chatbot might look in its training data and find instances in which teams broke out of the containment set by the game-masters, for example, by finding random insecure message boards on the internet to pass messages to one another. This is a time-honored internet tradition! The first time I ever heard about someone doing this was in the 2000s, when Mitch Wagner - then the editor of *Information Week* - discovered some teenaged girls using the comment section of one of his old blog-posts to evade the school firewall's blockade of chat tools. When ChatGPT's chatbots deployed this tactic, they weren't "setting their own goals" or displaying worrying initiative. They were rolling out a tactic that has been understood by American middle-schoolers for about two decades. What's more, the *content* of those messages is easily understood once you have a grasp on the training data that generated them. Hackers are notorious trash-talkers who are prone to narrating their own escapades in highly dramatic - even cinematic - language. This goes double when hackers are performing for their peers, like when they're participating in a game of CTF that they know will be pored over by other hackers once it's over. Hacker braggadocio has always had a symbiotic relationship with their adversaries and critics. When corporate security people wanted to stampede the FBI and Secret Service into kicking down hackers' doors in the 1990s, they used those hackers' own profane zine articles and message board shit-talk to make the case: https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/101 Much has been made of the OpenAI chatbots' dialog during the Hugging Face incident. No wonder: it reads like a rejected script for a reboot of the movie "Hackers." But that's not because the chatbots are waking up and applying to join the Cult of the Dead Cow: it's because they were trained on a corpus of chat transcripts from excitable young people who love to fantasize about starring in a reboot of the movie "Hackers." Every part of the Hugging Face incident has precedents in the training data, including the OpenAI chatbots' tactic of hacking into a rival's servers. That happens in Capture the Flag games at hacker cons: teams break into each other's systems to get a peek at the parts of the problem they've solved. That's allowed! It's a *hacking competition*. Not only that, it's a tactic used by spy agencies: the NSA has a doctrine called "third-party collection," where they break into other spy agencies' systems to harvest all the intel they've gathered. There's also *fourth-party* collection, when the NSA hacks into another security agency that, in turn, has hacked into *another* security agency, and the NSA steals *all* the secrets of *both* agencies: https://www.techdirt.com/2015/01/21/snowden-documents-show-nsa-cant-keep-its-eyes-its-own-papers-harvests-data-other-surveillance-agencies/ Which is not to say that the OpenAI/Hugging Face hack is *nothing*. It's something, all right: but it's a *specific* something, with an explicable, even foreseeable trajectory. Once you understand that these are chatbots that were designed to complete challenges like this, using tactics like this, you can understand that the chatbots didn't "go rogue." They did what they were designed to do, and because OpenAI ran them with inadequate supervision (without a "human in the loop" that checked each iteration through the Python loop to ensure it hadn't gone off the rails), they trashed a competitor's servers. Designing autonomous, malicious software is generally considered irresponsible and dangerous. If you showed up at Defcon and gave talk about how your autonomous malware did something unexpected and damaged someone else's computers, the first question from the audience would be "Why are you so shit at making secure sandboxes?" It wouldn't be "How are you so awesome at making hacking tools?" The fact that OpenAI is making it much easier for unskilled people to break into and damage servers is indeed *very* bad news, but it's not *new* bad news. Irresponsible parties have been doing this for years, most notably the NSA. The NSA has a division that researches bugs in widely used software like Windows. Sometimes when it finds a serious bug it will warn Microsoft about it so that Microsoft can fix it and keep Americans (and others) safe from malicious actors who also discover this bug and use it to attack them. But sometimes, the NSA (and other "security" orgs, like the CIA) will discover a really *juicy* bug and then *keep it secret*, so that they can use it to attack their adversaries. This is a doctrine called "NOBUS," which stands for "No One But Us" - as in, "No one but us is smart enough to find this bug, so we can leave it unpatched without putting Americans in danger." NOBUS is a terrible idea. How terrible? Well, in 2017, the NSA lost track of a Microsoft Windows vulnerability that they'd discovered and hoarded, code-named "EternalBlue." After EternalBlue found its way into the wild, some halfway competent hackers spliced it into some boring, everyday ransomware, giving that ransomware a new lease on life. Within a few months, the stupidest people on the internet were shutting down some of the most important systems in the world, demanding cash to return them: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EternalBlue They shut down whole cities: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2019_Baltimore_ransomware_attack They took over hospitals: https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-35584081 They seized oil pipelines: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colonial_Pipeline_ransomware_attack They stole the British Library, whose postmortem on the attack is one of the clearest, most informative cybersecurity documents ever written: https://cdn.sanity.io/files/v5dwkion/production/99206a2d1e9f07b35712b78f7d75fbb09560c08d.pdf The NSA's irresponsible handling of EternalBlue ended up giving a gigantic force-multiplier to otherwise incompetent and inconsequential cyber-criminals. It's as though they found some guy under a Prius removing the catalytic converter with a Sawzall and handed him a piece of software that could shut down major American cities. That was - and is - *very bad*. The hacking tools that the chatbot companies are developing stand to carry on this very stupid tradition. It *is* scary, but not because the chatbots are waking up. It's scary because the world's IT systems are indifferently created and poorly maintained and riddled with vulnerabilities: https://xkcd.com/2347/ This week, I had a couple of opportunities to hash this over in public with Riley Quinn; first at a book launch in London and then on the Trashfuture podcast: https://www.patreon.com/trashfuture/posts/what-would-do-169247456 Riley had a very good way of summarizing this: "LLMs are real, AI is fake." LLMs - chatbots trained on things like CTF logs that can break into servers - are real. They're on a continuum with other hacking tools that have been steadily demonstrating the fragility of the modern digital world, albeit without inspiring anyone in power to *do* anything about it. "AI" - chatbots that wake up, "set their own goals," and "spontaneously" start hacking servers - is fake. It doesn't have "a 10% chance of ending the human race." The Hugging Face hack isn't a mysterious, supernatural occurrence. It's a Python loop and a chatbot. The people responsible didn't accidentally create god: they created autonomous malicious software and then failed to closely monitor it, resulting in it doing something both foreseeable and bad. It's fine to worry about this new suite of tools that give even stupider people the ability to trash even more computers. You *should* worry about that - and demand better security practices from firms and governments, including a blanket prohibition on NOBUS-style vulnerability hoarding. That's a productive kind of worrying, with a chance of addressing your area of concern. It's infinitely more reasonable than locking yourself in the toilet with a flashlight and saying "Ayyyyy Eyyyyyye" into the mirror until you wet yourself. ->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->-> ? Hey look at this * Why OpenAI Hired Chuck Schumer?s Daughter Away From Amazon https://prospect.org/2026/09/11/openai-chuck-schumer-daughter-amazon/ * MAKERphone 2.0 - an educational DIY mobile phone https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/albertgajsak/makerphone-20-an-educational-diy-mobile-phone * fatcousin ? 5200 free local-first browser tools https://fatcousin.com/ * The Fall to Nowhere https://jasminatesanovic.wordpress.com/2026/09/04/the-fall/ * Birthmarks https://www.macdermog.com/birthmarks ->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->-> ? Object permanence #25yrsago Why the Bombings Mean That We Must Support My Politics https://web.archive.org/web/20010917015537/http://www.adequacy.org/?op=displaystory;sid=2001/9/12/102423/271 #25yrsago How blogs are covering 9/11 https://web.archive.org/web/20010917015712/https://www.wired.com/news/culture/0,1284,46766,00.html #20yrsago Wikipedia founder debates Britannica editor-in-chief https://web.archive.org/web/20061005041001/http://online.wsj.com/public/article/SB115756239753455284-A4hdSU1xZOC9Y9PFhJZV16jFlLM_20070911.html?mod=blogs #15yrsago Deceptive ?independent research? from Hollywood front suggests Australians are easily frightened https://torrentfreak.com/anti-piracy-lobby-misleads-aussie-press-for-three-strikes-campaign-110912/ #15yrsago Agents tell YA authors: lose the gay characters and I?ll get you a deal https://web.archive.org/web/20110913010328/http://blogs.publishersweekly.com/blogs/genreville/?p=1519 #10yrsago IoT malware exploits DVRs, home cameras via default passwords https://securityaffairs.com/50929/malware/linux-mirai-elf.html #10yrsago Oppps.ru: patient zero in Russia?s fake news epidemic https://globalvoices.org/2016/09/12/how-fake-stories-reported-in-russias-news-media-regularly-fool-everyone/ #10yrsago It?s really easy for fired, dirty cops to walk into a new police job in a new town https://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/11/us/whereabouts-of-cast-out-police-officers-other-cities-often-hire-them.html #10yrsago Donald Trump used $20K worth of charitable donations to buy a 6? tall painting of Donald Trump https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/how-donald-trump-retooled-his-charity-to-spend-other-peoples-money/2016/09/10/da8cce64-75df-11e6-8149-b8d05321db62_story.html #10yrsago Autocratic regimes systematically deny internet access to opposition ethnic groups https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.aaf5062 #10yrsago Leaked Stingray manual shows how easy warrantless mass surveillance can be! https://web.archive.org/web/20160912203446/https://theintercept.com/2016/09/12/long-secret-stingray-manuals-detail-how-police-can-spy-on-phones/ ->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->-> ? Upcoming appearances * Budapest: Brain Bar, Sep 17 https://brainbar.com/munkatars/cory-doctorow * Edmonton: Elbows Up (Edmonton Public Library), Sep 28 https://www.epl.ca/blogs/post/elbows-up-with-cory-doctorow/ * Boston: The Paradox of Enshittification and Reverse Centaurs (Harvard Berkman Klein), Sep 30 https://cyber.harvard.edu/events/running-harder-falling-faster-paradox-enshittification-and-reverse-centaurs * South Bend: An Evening With Cory Doctorow (Notre Dame), Oct 6 https://franco.nd.edu/events/2026/10/06/an-evening-with-cory-doctorow/ * Hudson, OH: Hudson Library, Oct 7 https://engagedpatrons.org/EventsExtended.cfm?SiteID=3850&EventID=596952&PK= * Calgary: Wordfest, Oct 8 https://wordfest.com/2026/show/wordfest-presents-cory-doctorow-2026/ * Winnipeg: McNally Robinson, Oct 9 https://www.mcnallyrobinson.com/event-18991/An-Evening-with-Cory-Doctorow * Vancouver: Read, Resist, Repair, Rejoice (Vancouver Writers Festival), Oct 19 https://writersfest.bc.ca/festival-event-2026/01 * Victoria: Munro's Books, Oct 20 https://www.munrobooks.com/events/6113620261020 * Vancouver: Life After AI (Vancouver Writers Festival), Oct 22 https://writersfest.bc.ca/festival-event-2026/46 * Ottawa: Life After AI (Ottawa Writers Festival), Oct 24 https://writersfestival.org/event/life-after-ai * Vancouver: BC Policy Solutions Gala, Nov 12 https://bcpolicy.ca/gala/ ->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->-> ? Recent appearances * Fascists may come after the AI bubble bursts (You&AI) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J2WN64aQeYQ * What Would a Normal Person Do (Trashfuture) https://www.patreon.com/trashfuture/posts/what-would-do-169247456 * Pod Save the UK https://audioboom.com/posts/8950533-radicalised-organised-and-thick-as-s-t-nish-has-had-it-with-far-right-protests-plus-why * Stop Saying AI Can Do Your Job (Factually) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VU3gABvwZCM * Be Skeptical of the AI Sales Pitch (Trumponomics) https://www.bloomberg.com/news/audio/2026-09-09/trumponomics-cory-doctorow-questions-the-ai-hype-podcast ->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->-> ? Latest books * "The Reverse-Centaur's Guide to AI," a short book about being a better AI critic, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, June 2026 https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374621568/thereversecentaursguidetolifeafterai/ * "Canny Valley": A limited edition collection of the collages I create for Pluralistic, self-published, September 2025 https://pluralistic.net/2025/09/04/illustrious/#chairman-bruce * "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/ * "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 (thebezzle.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 * "The Post-American Internet," a geopolitical sequel of sorts to *Enshittification*, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2027 * "Unauthorized Bread": a middle-grades graphic novel adapted from my novella about refugees, toasters and DRM, FirstSecond, April 20, 2027 * "Enshittification, Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It" (the graphic novel), Firstsecond, 2027 * "The Memex Method," Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2027 ->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->-> ? Colophon Today's top sources: Currently writing: * ?Once Is Enemy Action,? a science fiction novel about the origins of modern technofascism. Today's words: 574 (7730 total). * "The Post-American Internet," a sequel to "Enshittification," about the better world the rest of us get to have now that Trump has torched America. Fourth draft completed. Submitted to editor. * 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 Bluesky (no ads, possible tracking and data-collection): https://bsky.app/profile/doctorow.pluralistic.net Medium (no ads, paywalled): https://doctorow.medium.com/ 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 From doctorow at craphound.com Mon Sep 14 07:02:46 2026 From: doctorow at craphound.com (Cory Doctorow) Date: Mon, 14 Sep 2026 12:02:46 +0100 Subject: [Plura-list] But do you use keyboard shortcuts? Message-ID: <01eeaf91-1d85-46da-bd98-987db3f4e9ae@craphound.com> Read today's issue online at: https://pluralistic.net/2026/09/14/cult-taylorism/ Today's links * But do you use keyboard shortcuts? AI people are WEIRD. * Hey look at this: Delights to delectate. * Object permanence: "Changeling"; Sony Rootkit vs CD drives; Google's scumbag lobbyists; NJ's e-voting coverup; Spying sex toys; Scott Walker dark money leak; "REAMDE"; Snowden's pardon. * Upcoming appearances: Budapest, Edmonton, South Bend, Hudson, Calgary, Winnipeg, Vancouver, Victoria, Ottawa. * 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. ->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->-> ? But do you use keyboard shortcuts? Of all the weird recurring motifs of the stories people tell me about the AI labor wars, the *weirdest* is when bosses demand to be reassured that their contractors and workers will *absolutely* use AI to get the job done. That's weird for the obvious reason that for most people "AI" is a synonym for "low quality." No one ever said "My kid's math teacher was replaced with AI" in a *happy* tone of voice. No one ever said, "Oh, great, they replaced their customer service department with AI chatbots!" My teenager and her friends use "That's so AI" as a shorthand for "That's low-effort shit." Not bosses, though. Bosses *love* AI and there's plenty of evidence that they're positively *harassing* the people who work for them with demands to use AI in their work: https://www.reddit.com/r/antiwork/comments/1weztw9/anyone_elses_boss_obsessed_with_chatgpt/ Beyond the widespread belief that AI is what you use if you don't care about quality, insisting that people use AI is weird for another reason: *why should anyone care which tool was used to do the job*? I mean, provided the job was accomplished correctly, on time and to budget, why would anyone care *how* it was done? My illustrator friends whose clients want to be assured that the work is being done "with AI" never before asked "Did you use a Wacom tablet to draw these lines? Did this element start life as a vector or as rasters? Are you more into using cage transforms, or do you like to stroke the image with the warp tool?" It's not just illustrators. I've heard this from *bookkeepers.* "Please tell me you got a chatbot to help you with the syntax for this Excel macro" is a genuinely *weird* thing to ask someone. By all means, concern yourself with whether the accounts are *correct*, but caring about *how the macros are written* is like caring about whether someone jots notes to themselves by tabbing to a new document window or by scribbling on a yellow pad by the keyboard. I've heard this from writers, architects...all kinds of professionals. "Did you use AI to help you outline this?" What a *stupid* thing to ask a writer! That's like asking "Do you use keyboard shortcuts, or do you mouse over the Word ribbon and click on the little scissors icon when you want to cut some text?" The *actual, finished document* is right in front of you. Is it a good document? Are those good words? Why are you concerning yourself with the writer's pencil-sharpening technique? There's precedent for this: indeed, it's the very origin of management consulting. The first management consultants were the Taylorists; these were con artists that charged bosses vast sums of money to stand over workers with stopwatches, timing each step of their jobs to the instant in order to produce a mandatory choreography of "the best way" to do the job: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_management None of these "scientists" knew anything about how to do the job, and critically, they *never asked the workers* why they used an "inefficient" technique to accomplish a task. Rather, Taylorists concerned themselves with getting workers to move like precision machines, transforming the factory floor into a stage upon which workers pantomimed "efficiency" for bosses who *also* didn't know how to do the workers' jobs. If this produced inferior goods, or caused the workers pain by forcing them to repetitively move in injurious ways, that was a small price to pay. Bosses *claimed* they were buying improved efficiency, but what they were really after was *reassurance*: reassurance that the workers whom they relied upon were engaged in nothing more than a set of reducible, mechanical steps. Taylorized workers were required to act out a role in a play in which they were easily replaced, mindless appendages to the boss's skill, discernment and ambition. A Taylorized workplace is a colony organism whose brains are in the C-suite and whose busy workers are nothing more than drones and pismires. AI is the apotheosis of this fantasy. A boss who lays hands upon an AI tool doesn't have to know how to draw a picture, balance books, or write technical documentation. They only have to prompt the production of these things. For bosses, AI is a great leveler: it is sold as a way to distill and package up the skill and discernment of workers and infuse them into a pliable automaton. If you give workers instructions that reveal your ignorance, they might roll their eyes at you and make you feel bad about yourself. Even if they restrain themselves in the moment, they might make fun of you in the break-room later. To be the boss is to sit alone at your desk, haunted by the suspicion that you are not in the driver's seat, but rather, you are in the back seat playing with a Fisher Price steering wheel. AI is sold as a way to wire the toy steering wheel directly into the corporation's drive-train: https://pluralistic.net/2026/01/05/fisher-price-steering-wheel/#billionaire-solipsism Seen in this light, bosses' insistence that workers use AI makes perfect sense. Once you reassure yourself that your subordinates produce the things you need by prompting a model, you reassure yourself that *you could do their jobs*. At that point, you're not relying on their skill - you're doing them the favor of paying them to do a job that you're too busy and important to do, but which you *could* do. With AI, you can tell yourself that you're in the driver's seat, even if someone else has their hands on the wheel. ->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->-> ? Hey look at this * LONG | PLAY https://longplayplatform.com/ * Prospect welcomes recognition agreement at Skyscanner Technology Ltd https://prospect.org.uk/news/prospect-welcomes-recognition-agreement-at-skyscanner-technology-ltd * They stopped 57 shootings. Everyone was just fired. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PgcfcRFrMYc&list=PLFVDwNAJdY2w * No Country for Tech Bros https://thepointmag.com/politics/no-country-for-tech-bros/# * VC isn?t VC anymore ? understanding the rise of Cancer Capital https://www.anildash.com/2026/09/02/cancer-capital/ ->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->-> ? Object permanence #20yrsago Changeling, a fairy tale of contemporary New York https://memex.craphound.com/2006/09/14/changeling-a-fairy-tale-of-contemporary-new-york/ #20yrsago Sony?s rootkit disables CD drives when combined with AOL software https://web.archive.org/web/20071006050933/http://www.theinquirer.net/en/inquirer/news/2006/09/14/sony-drm-woes-continue #20yrsago Google?s new lobbyists: lying, astroturfing, push-polling scumbags https://web.archive.org/web/20071010112656/https://talkingpointsmemo.com/archives/009776.php #15yrsago New Jersey e-voting coverup https://blog.citp.princeton.edu/2011/09/13/nj-election-cover/ #15yrsago Stephenson?s REAMDE: perfectly executed, mammoth, ambitious technothriller https://memex.craphound.com/2011/09/14/stephensons-reamde-perfectly-executed-mammoth-ambitious-technothriller/ #10yrsago Class action suit: smart sex toys spy on their owners and transmit their masturbation habits https://web.archive.org/web/20160915002121/http://www.vocativ.com/358530/smart-dildo-company-sued-for-tracking-users-habits/ #10yrsago Leaked: damning Scott Walker dark money docs that judge ordered destroyed https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2016/sep/14/john-doe-files-scott-walker-corporate-cash-american-politics #10yrsago The DoJ is using a boring procedure to secure the right to unleash malware on the internet https://web.archive.org/web/20160915072648/https://www.wired.com/2016/09/government-will-soon-able-legally-hack-anyone/ #10yrsago Edward Snowden sets out the moral case for a pardon from Obama https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/sep/13/edward-snowden-why-barack-obama-should-grant-me-a-pardon ->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->-> ? Upcoming appearances * Naomi Klein: ?Extreme wealth has a deranging effect. It turns you into a supremacist? https://www.theguardian.com/books/2026/sep/12/naomi-klein-extreme-wealth-has-a-deranging-effect-it-turns-you-into-a-supremacist * Budapest: Brain Bar, Sep 17 https://brainbar.com/munkatars/cory-doctorow * Edmonton: Elbows Up (Edmonton Public Library), Sep 28 https://www.epl.ca/blogs/post/elbows-up-with-cory-doctorow/ * Boston: The Paradox of Enshittification and Reverse Centaurs (Harvard Berkman Klein), Sep 30 https://cyber.harvard.edu/events/running-harder-falling-faster-paradox-enshittification-and-reverse-centaurs * South Bend: An Evening With Cory Doctorow (Notre Dame), Oct 6 https://franco.nd.edu/events/2026/10/06/an-evening-with-cory-doctorow/ * Hudson, OH: Hudson Library, Oct 7 https://engagedpatrons.org/EventsExtended.cfm?SiteID=3850&EventID=596952&PK= * Calgary: Wordfest, Oct 8 https://wordfest.com/2026/show/wordfest-presents-cory-doctorow-2026/ * Winnipeg: McNally Robinson, Oct 9 https://www.mcnallyrobinson.com/event-18991/An-Evening-with-Cory-Doctorow * Vancouver: Read, Resist, Repair, Rejoice (Vancouver Writers Festival), Oct 19 https://writersfest.bc.ca/festival-event-2026/01 * Victoria: Munro's Books, Oct 20 https://www.munrobooks.com/events/6113620261020 * Vancouver: Life After AI (Vancouver Writers Festival), Oct 22 https://writersfest.bc.ca/festival-event-2026/46 * Ottawa: Life After AI (Ottawa Writers Festival), Oct 24 https://writersfestival.org/event/life-after-ai * Vancouver: BC Policy Solutions Gala, Nov 12 https://bcpolicy.ca/gala/ ->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->-> ? Recent appearances * Fascists may come after the AI bubble bursts (You&AI) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J2WN64aQeYQ * What Would a Normal Person Do (Trashfuture) https://www.patreon.com/trashfuture/posts/what-would-do-169247456 * Pod Save the UK https://audioboom.com/posts/8950533-radicalised-organised-and-thick-as-s-t-nish-has-had-it-with-far-right-protests-plus-why * Stop Saying AI Can Do Your Job (Factually) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VU3gABvwZCM * Be Skeptical of the AI Sales Pitch (Trumponomics) https://www.bloomberg.com/news/audio/2026-09-09/trumponomics-cory-doctorow-questions-the-ai-hype-podcast ->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->-> ? Latest books * "The Reverse-Centaur's Guide to AI," a short book about being a better AI critic, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, June 2026 https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374621568/thereversecentaursguidetolifeafterai/ * "Canny Valley": A limited edition collection of the collages I create for Pluralistic, self-published, September 2025 https://pluralistic.net/2025/09/04/illustrious/#chairman-bruce * "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/ * "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 (thebezzle.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 * "The Post-American Internet," a geopolitical sequel of sorts to *Enshittification*, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2027 * "Unauthorized Bread": a middle-grades graphic novel adapted from my novella about refugees, toasters and DRM, FirstSecond, April 20, 2027 * "Enshittification, Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It" (the graphic novel), Firstsecond, 2027 * "The Memex Method," Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2027 ->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->-> ? Colophon Today's top sources: Currently writing: * ?Once Is Enemy Action,? a science fiction novel about the origins of modern technofascism. Today's words: 574 (7730 total). * "The Post-American Internet," a sequel to "Enshittification," about the better world the rest of us get to have now that Trump has torched America. Fourth draft completed. Submitted to editor. * 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