This week on my podcast, I read “Code is a liability (not an asset),” a recent post from my Pluralistic.net blog, about the bad ideas behind the drive to replace programmers with chatbots.

Code is a liability. Code’s capabilities are assets. The goal of a tech shop is to have code whose capabilities generate more revenue than the costs associated with keeping that code running. For a long time, firms have nurtured a false belief that code costs less to run over time: after an initial shakedown period in which the bugs in the code are found and addressed, code ceases to need meaningful maintenance. After all, code is a machine without moving parts – it does not wear out; it doesn’t even wear down.

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(Image: Cryteria, CC BY 3.0, modified)

This week on my podcast, I play the audio from (Digital) Elbows Up: How Canada Can Become a Nation of Jailbreakers, Reclaim Our Digital Sovereignty, Win the Trade-War, and Disenshittify Our Technology, a speech I delivered on November 27, 2025 at OCADU in Toronto, Canada (video here, transcript here).

I recognize that this is all very abstract, so let me make it concrete. When you buy a printer from HP, it becomes your property. What’s property? Well, let’s use the standard definition that every law student learns in first year property law, from Sir William Blackstone’s 1753 treatise:

“Property: that sole and despotic dominion which one man claims and exercises over the external things of the world, in total exclusion of the right of any other individual in the universe.”

The printer is yours. It’s your property. You have sole and despotic dominion over it in exclusion of any other individual in the universe.

But HP printers ship with a program that checks to see whether you’re using HP ink, and if it suspects that you’ve bought generic ink, the printer refuses to use it. Now, Congress never passed a law saying “If you buy an HP printer, you have to buy HP ink, too.” That would be a weird law, given the whole sole-and-despotic dominion thing.

But because HP puts an “access control” in the ink-checking code, they can conjure up a brand new law: a law that effectively requires you to use HP ink.

Anticircumvention is a way for legislatures to outsource law-making to corporations. Once a corporation adds an access control to its product, they can create a new felony for using it in ways that benefit you at the expense of the company’s shareholders.

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This week on my podcast, I play the audio from A post-American, enshittification-resistant internet, a speech I delivered on December 28, 2025 at 39C3, the Chaos Communications Congress in Hamburg, Germany (video here, transcript here).

Trump has staged an unscheduled, midair rapid disassembly of the global system of trade. Ironically, it is this system that prevented all of America’s trading partners from disenshittifying their internet: the US trade representative threatened the world with tariffs unless they passed laws that criminalized reverse-engineering and modding. By banning “adversarial interoperability,” America handcuffed the world’s technologists, banning them from creating the mods, hacks, alt clients, scrapers, and other tools needed to liberate their neighbours from the enshittificatory predations of the ketamine-addled zuckermuskian tyrants of US Big Tech. Well, when life gives you SARS, you make sarsaparilla. The Trump tariffs are here, and it’s time to pick the locks on the those handcuffs and set the world’s hackers loose on Big Tech. Happy Liberation Day, everyone!

Enshittification wasn’t an accident. It also wasn’t inevitable. This isn’t the iron laws of economics at work, nor is it the great forces of history.

Enshittification was a choice: named individuals, in living memory, enacted policies that created the enshittogenic environment. They created a world that encouraged tech companies to merge to monopoly, transforming the internet into “five giant websites, each filled with screenshots of the other four.” They let these monopolists rip us off and spy on us.

And they banned us from fighting back, claiming that anyone who modified a technology without permission from its maker was a pirate (or worse, a terrorist). They created a system of “felony contempt of business-model,” where it’s literally a crime to change how your own devices work. They declared war on the general-purpose computer and demanded a computer that would do what the manufacturer told it to do (even if the owner of the computer didn’t want that).

We are at a turning point in the decades-long war on general-purpose computing. Geopolitics are up for grabs. The future is ours to seize.

In my 24 years with EFF, I have seen many strange moments, but never one quite like this. There’s plenty of terrifying things going on right now, but there’s also a massive, amazing, incredibly opportunity to seize the means of computation.

Let’s take it.

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This week on my podcast, I sit down with my daughter Poesy, for our annual Daddy-Daughter Podcast, a tradition we’ve had since she was three (she’s 17 now!). This year, Poe recaps her graduation, her triumphs with her dance team, and her life at college! She offers us a tutorial on playing Egyptian War, and we sing Jingle Bells!

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This week on my podcast, I read my latest Locus Magazine column, “Show Me the Incentive, I’ll Show You the Outcome,” about the process by which we ended up with an enshittogenic policy environment:

The whole point of the conservative project is to take away choices, and corral us into “preferences” that we disprefer. Eliminate no-fault divorce, suppress the vote, gerrymander the electoral map, cram a binding arbi­tration clause into every terms of service and a noncompete into every labor contract, buy up all your competitors, DRM-lock all the media, ban contraception and abortion, and you’ve got a world of partners you can’t divorce, politicians you can’t vote out, companies you can’t sue, jobs you can’t quit, services you can’t leave, books and music you can’t move, and pregnancies you can’t prevent or terminate.

And after you are relentlessly corralled into all these things you hate, you will be told that you don’t hate them after all – because you revealed your preferences for them.

Consumerism is a terrible way to make change at the best of times, and it gets less effective by the day, as authoritarianism and market consolidation shrink the world of possibilities to an endless Pepsi Chal­lenge, where “choice” is narrowed to which flavor of sweetened battery acid you hate the least.

I don’t think that end users are to blame for enshittification.

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This week on my podcast, I’ve got the audio from last week’s Enshittification book-tour event with Ed Zitron and Whitney Betran at the Seattle Public Library (you can watch the video here). I’ve got many more cities to go on the tour – I hope to see you at one (or more) of them!

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This week on my podcast, I’ve got the audio from last week’s Enshittification book-tour event with former FTC Chair Lina Khan at the Brooklyn Public Library (you can watch the video here). lI’ve got 24 more cities to go on the tour – I hope to see you at one (or more) of them!

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The real (economic) AI apocalypse is nigh

This week on my podcast, I read “The real (economic) AI apocalypse is nigh,” a recent column from my Pluralistic newsletter; about the looming economic crisis threatened by the AI investment bubble:

A week ago, I turned that book into a speech, which I delivered as the annual Nordlander Memorial Lecture at Cornell, where I’m an AD White Professor-at-Large. This was my first-ever speech about AI and I wasn’t sure how it would go over, but thankfully, it went great and sparked a lively Q&A. One of those questions came from a young man who said something like “So, you’re saying a third of the stock market is tied up in seven AI companies that have no way to become profitable and that this is a bubble that’s going to burst and take the whole economy with it?”

I said, “Yes, that’s right.”

He said, “OK, but what can we do about that?”

So I re-iterated the book’s thesis: that the AI bubble is driven by monopolists who’ve conquered their markets and have no more growth potential, who are desperate to convince investors that they can continue to grow by moving into some other sector, e.g. “pivot to video,” crypto, blockchain, NFTs, AI, and now “super-intelligence.” Further: the topline growth that AI companies are selling comes from replacing most workers with AI, and re-tasking the surviving workers as AI babysitters (“humans in the loop”), which won’t work. Finally: AI cannot do your job, but an AI salesman can 100% convince your boss to fire you and replace you with an AI that can’t do your job, and when the bubble bursts, the money-hemorrhaging “foundation models” will be shut off and we’ll lose the AI that can’t do your job, and you will be long gone, retrained or retired or “discouraged” and out of the labor market, and no one will do your job. AI is the asbestos we are shoveling into the walls of our society and our descendants will be digging it out for generations.

The only thing (I said) that we can do about this is to puncture the AI bubble as soon as possible, to halt this before it progresses any further and to head off the accumulation of social and economic debt. To do that, we have to take aim at the material basis for the AI bubble (creating a growth story by claiming that defective AI can do your job).

“OK,” the young man said, “but what can we do about the crash?” He was clearly very worried.

“I don’t think there’s anything we can do about that. I think it’s already locked in. I mean, maybe if we had a different government, they’d fund a jobs guarantee to pull us out of it, but I don’t think Trump’ll do that, so –”

“But what can we do?”

We went through a few rounds of this, with this poor kid just repeating the same question in different tones of voice, like an acting coach demonstrating the five stages of grieving using nothing but inflection. It was an uncomfortable moment, and there was some decidedly nervous chuckling around the room as we pondered the coming AI (economic) apocalypse, and the fate of this kid graduating with mid-six-figure debts into an economy of ashes and rubble.

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(Image: TechCrunch, CC BY 2.0; Cryteria, CC BY 3.0; modified)

Next Monday, I’ll be departing for a 24-city, three-month book tour for my new book, Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Went Wrong and What To Do About It:

https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374619329/enshittification/

This is a big tour! I’ll be doing in-person events in the US, Canada, the UK and Portugal, and a virtual event in Spain. I’m also planning an event in Hamburg, Germany for December, but that one hasn’t been confirmed yet, so it doesn’t appear in the schedule below. You’ll notice that there are events that are missing their signup and ticketing details; I’ll be keeping the master tour schedule up to date at pluralistic.net/tour.

If there’s an event you’re interested in that hasn’t had its details filled in yet, please send an email to doctorow@craphound.com with the name of the event in the subject line. I’m going to create one-shot mailing lists that I’ll update with details when they’re available (please forgive me if I fumble this – book tours are pretty intensive affairs and I’ll be squeezing this into the spare moments).

Here’s that schedule!

• Cambridge, MA: Harvard Books presents a conversation with Randall “XKCD” Munroe at the Brattle Theater (Oct 7, 6PM)
  https://www.harvard.com/event/cory-doctorow

• Washington, DC: In conversation with former CFPB chair and FTC commissioner Rohit Chopra at Politics & Prose at the Wharf (Oct 8, 7PM)
  https://politics-prose.com/cory-doctorow-10825

• Brooklyn, NY: Greenlight Bookstore presents a conversation with former FTC chair Lina Khan at the Brooklyn Public Library (Oct 9, 7PM)
  https://www.bklynlibrary.org/calendar/cory-doctorow-discusses-central-library-dweck-20251009-0700pm

• New Orleans, LA: Guest of Honor at DeepSouthCon at the New Orleans Airport Hilton (Oct 10-12)
  http://www.contraflowscifi.org/

• New Orleans, LA: Enshittification at Octavia Books (Oct 12, 1PM)
  https://www.octaviabooks.com/event/enshittification-cory-doctorow

• Chicago, IL: In conversation with Rick Perlstein at the University Club (Oct 14, 12PM)
  https://www.eventbrite.com/e/how-platforms-die-with-cory-doctorow-tickets-1747916117159

• Los Angeles, CA: In conversation with The American Prospect‘s David Dayen at Diesel Books (Oct 16, 6:30PM)
  https://dieselbookstore.com/event/2025-10-16/cory-doctorow-enshittification

• Calgary, AB: Literary Death Match at Wordfest (Oct 17, 7:30PM)
  https://wordfest.com/2025/imaginarium/show/literary-death-match/

• Calgary, AB: Big Tech’s Betrayal—and How to Break Free! at Wordfest (Oct 18, 1PM)
  https://wordfest.com/2025/imaginarium/show/big-techs-betrayaland-how-to-break-free/

• San Francisco, CA: In conversation with Jenny Odell, author of How To Do Nothing at Public Works, presented by Booksmith (Oct 20, 7PM)
  https://app.gopassage.com/events/29638

• Portland, OR: Enshittification at Powell’s City of Books (Oct 21, 7PM)
  https://www.powells.com/events/cory-doctorow-10-21-25

• Seattle, WA: In conversation with Ed Zitron of Where’s Your Ed At at the Seattle Public Library, presented by Clarion West (Oct 22, 7PM)
  https://www.spl.org/programs-and-services/authors-and-books/authors-and-books-calendar?trumbaEmbed=view%3Devent%26eventid%3D188210978

• Vancouver, BC: In conversation with David Moscrop at the Vancouver Writers Festival (Oct 23, 530PM)
  https://www.showpass.com/2025-festival-39/

• Montreal, PQ: Keynote for the Attention Forum (Oct 24)
  https://www.attentionconferences.com/conferences/2025-forum

• Montreal, PQ: Enshittification at Librarie Drawn and Quarterly (Oct 24)
  https://mtl.drawnandquarterly.com/events/3757420251024

• Ottawa, ON: Enshittification at the Ottawa Writers Festival (Oct 25, 8PM)
  https://writersfestival.org/events/fall-2025/enshittification

• Toronto, ON: Enshittification with Dan Werb at Type Books in the Junction (Oct 27, 7PM)
  https://www.instagram.com/p/DO81_1VDngu/?img_index=1

• Barcelona, ES: Virtual keynote for Conferencia EUROPEA 4D (Oct 28)
  https://4d.cat/es/conferencia/

• New York City, NY: Keynote for Columbia-Hertie Digital Governance for Democratic Renewal Conference @The Forum, Columbia University (Oct 29)
  https://worldprojects.columbia.edu/our-work/research-and-engagement/democratic-renewal/digital-governance

• Miami, FL: Enshittification at Books & Books (Nov 5, 7PM)
  https://www.eventbrite.com/e/an-evening-with-cory-doctorow-tickets-1504647263469

• Miami, FL: Keynote for Cloudfest (Nov 6, 9:45AM)
  https://www.cloudfest.com/usa/

• Burbank, CA: Signing at the Burbank Book Festival (Nov 8, 2PM)
  https://www.burbankbookfestival.com/

• Lisbon, PT: A post-American, enshittification-resistant internet, with Rabble at Web Summit (Nov 12, 1040AM)
  https://websummit.com/sessions/lis25/92f47bc9-ca60-4997-bef3-006735b1f9c5/a-post-american-enshittification-resistant-internet/

• Cardiff, UK: Hay Festival After Hours at Wales Millennium Centre, Bute Place (Nov 13, 7PM)
  https://www.hayfestival.com/c-203-hay-festival-after-hours.aspx

• Oxford, UK: Enshittification and Extraction: The Internet Sucks Now with Tim Wu at Rawley House, Oxford Internet Institute, (Nov 14, 1730h)
  https://www.oii.ox.ac.uk/news-events/events/enshittification-and-extraction-the-internet-sucks-now/

• London, UK: Enshittification with Sarah Wynn-Williams, author of Careless People and Chris Morris (Brass Eye, Four Lions) (Nov 15, 3PM)
  https://www.barbican.org.uk/whats-on/2025/event/cory-doctorow-with-sarah-wynn-williams

• London, UK: Novara Live with Aaron Bastani (Nov 17, 630PM)
  https://dice.fm/partner/tickets/event/oen5rr-downstream-irl-aaron-bastani-in-conversation-with-cory-doctorow-17th-nov-earth-london-tickets

• London, UK: Enshittification with Carole Cadwalladr at the Frontline Club (Nov 18, 7PM)
  https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/in-conversation-enshittification-tickets-1785553983029

• Vancouver, BC: Virtual event with Vass Bednar for the Vancouver Public Library (Nov 21, 12PM)
  https://www.crowdcast.io/@bclibraries-present

• San Diego, CA: Mission Hills Branch Library (Dec 1, 7PM)
  https://libraryfoundationsd.org/events/doctorow

• Seattle, WA: AI Lecture for the University of Washington’s series on Neuroscience, AI and Society (Dec 4, 7PM)
  https://www.eventbrite.com/e/neuroscience-ai-and-society-cory-doctorow-tickets-1735371255139

• Madison, CT: Enshittification at RJ Julia (Dec 8, 630PM)
  https://rjjulia.com/event/2025-12-08/cory-doctorow-enshittification

• Hamburg, DE: Chaos Communications Congress (Dec 27-30)
  https://events.ccc.de/congress/2025/infos/index.html

• Denver, CO: Enshittification at The Tattered Cover (Jan 22, 6PM)
  https://www.eventbrite.com/e/cory-doctorow-live-at-tattered-cover-colfax-tickets-1976644174937

This week on my podcast, I read “By all means, tread on those people,” a recent column from my Pluralistic newsletter; about the way that the American descent in fascism is connected to its abandonment of the rule of law more broadly:

Just as Martin Niemöller’s “First They Came” has become our framework for understanding the rise of fascism in Nazi Germany, so, too is Wilhoit’s Law the best way to understand America’s decline into fascism:

In case you’re not familiar with Frank Wilhoit’s amazing law, here it is:

Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition, to wit: There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect.

The thing that makes Wilhoit’s Law so apt to this moment – and to our understanding of the recent history that produced this moment – is how it connects the petty with the terrifying, the trivial with the radical, the micro with the macro. It’s a way to join the dots between fascists’ business dealings, their interpersonal relationships, and their political views. It describes a continuum that ranges from minor commercial grifts to martial law, and shows how tolerance for the former creates the conditions for the latter.

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It’s the 500th edition of my podcast, and to celebrate, I’m bringing you an hour-long excerpt from the audiobook of my forthcoming book Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What To Do About It (Farrar, Straus and Giroux US/Canada; Verso UK/Commonwealth).

Because Amazon won’t carry my audiobooks (or any DRM-free audiobooks), I have to produce my own books and pre-sell them on Kickstarter campaigns. The Kickstarter for this one is underway and going great.

I hope that listening to this long sample will convince you to pre-order your copy! I don’t ask for Patreon donations, I don’t put ads on my work – these Kickstarters are a big part of why I’m able to pursue my open access, enshittification-free publishing program, and I really thank you for your support.

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This week on my podcast, I conclude my reading of my 2003 Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine story, Nimby and the D-Hoppers” (here’s the first half). The story has been widely reprinted (it was first published online in The Infinite Matrix in 2008), and was translated (by Elisabeth Vonarburg) into French for Solaris Magazine, as well as into Chinese, Russian, Hebrew, and Italian. The story was adapted for my IDW comic book series Cory Doctorow’s Futuristic Tales of the Here and Now by Ben Templesmith. I read this into my podcast 20 years ago, but I found myself wanting to revisit it.

Don’t get me wrong — I like unspoiled wilderness. I like my sky clear and blue and my city free of the thunder of cars and jackhammers. I’m no technocrat. But goddamit, who wouldn’t want a fully automatic, laser-guided, armor-piercing, self-replenishing personal sidearm?

Nice turn of phrase, huh? I finally memorized it one night, from one of the hoppers, as he stood in my bedroom, pointing his hand-cannon at another hopper, enumerating its many charms: “This is a laser-guided blah blah blah. Throw down your arms and lace your fingers behind your head, blah blah blah.” I’d heard the same dialog nearly every day that month, whenever the dimension-hoppers catapaulted into my home, shot it up, smashed my window, dived into the street, and chased one another through my poor little shtetl, wreaking havoc, maiming bystanders, and then gateing out to another poor dimension to carry on there.

Assholes.

It was all I could do to keep my house well-fed on sand to replace the windows. Much more hopper invasion and I was going to have to extrude its legs and babayaga to the beach. Why the hell was it always my house, anyway?

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This week on my podcast, I once again read my 2003 Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine story, Nimby and the D-Hoppers” The story has been widely reprinted (it was first published online in The Infinite Matrix in 2008), and was translated (by Elisabeth Vonarburg) into French for Solaris Magazine, as well as into Chinese, Russian, Hebrew, and Italian. The story was adapted for my IDW comic book series Cory Doctorow’s Futuristic Tales of the Here and Now by Ben Templesmith. I read this into my podcast 20 years ago, but I found myself wanting to revisit it.

Don’t get me wrong — I like unspoiled wilderness. I like my sky clear and blue and my city free of the thunder of cars and jackhammers. I’m no technocrat. But goddamit, who wouldn’t want a fully automatic, laser-guided, armor-piercing, self-replenishing personal sidearm?

Nice turn of phrase, huh? I finally memorized it one night, from one of the hoppers, as he stood in my bedroom, pointing his hand-cannon at another hopper, enumerating its many charms: “This is a laser-guided blah blah blah. Throw down your arms and lace your fingers behind your head, blah blah blah.” I’d heard the same dialog nearly every day that month, whenever the dimension-hoppers catapaulted into my home, shot it up, smashed my window, dived into the street, and chased one another through my poor little shtetl, wreaking havoc, maiming bystanders, and then gateing out to another poor dimension to carry on there.

Assholes.

It was all I could do to keep my house well-fed on sand to replace the windows. Much more hopper invasion and I was going to have to extrude its legs and babayaga to the beach. Why the hell was it always my house, anyway?

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This week on my podcast, I read Why I don’t like AI art, a column from last week’s Pluralistic newsletter:

Which brings me to art. As a working artist in his third decade of professional life, I’ve concluded that the point of art is to take a big, numinous, irreducible feeling that fills the artist’s mind, and attempt to infuse that feeling into some artistic vessel – a book, a painting, a song, a dance, a sculpture, etc – in the hopes that this work will cause a loose facsimile of that numinous, irreducible feeling to manifest in someone else’s mind.

Art, in other words, is an act of communication – and there you have the problem with AI art. As a writer, when I write a novel, I make tens – if not hundreds – of thousands of tiny decisions that are in service to this business of causing my big, irreducible, numinous feeling to materialize in your mind. Most of those decisions aren’t even conscious, but they are definitely decisions, and I don’t make them solely on the basis of probabilistic autocomplete. One of my novels may be good and it may be bad, but one thing is definitely is is rich in communicative intent. Every one of those microdecisions is an expression of artistic intent.

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(Image: Cryteria, CC BY 3.0, modified)

This week on my podcast, I read my latest Locus Magazine column, “There Were Always Enshittifiers,” about the historical context for my latest novel, Picks and Shovels:

It used to be a much fairer fight. It used to be that if a com­pany figured out how to block copying its floppies, another company – or even just an individual tinkerer – could figure out how to break that “copy protection.” There were plenty of legitimate reasons to want to do this: Maybe you owned more than one computer, or maybe you were just worried that your floppy disk would degrade to the point of unread­ability. That’s a very reasonable fear: Floppies were notoriously unreliable, and every smart computer user learned to make frequent backups against the day that your computer presented you with the dread DISK ERROR message.

In those early days, it was an arms race between companies that wanted to control how their customers used their own computers, and the technological guerrillas who produced the countermeasures that restored command over your computer to you, its owner. It’s true that the companies making the “copy protection” (in scare quotes because the way you protect your data is by making copies of it) typically had far more resources than the toolsmiths who were defending technology users.

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Last night, I traveled to Toronto to deliver the annual Ursula Franklin Lecture at the University of Toronto’s Innis College. The lecture was called “With Great Power Came No Responsibility: How Enshittification Conquered the 21st Century and How We Can Overthrow It.” It’s the latest major speech in my series of talks on the subject, which started with last year’s McLuhan Lecture in Berlin, and continued with a summer Defcon keynote.

This speech specifically addresses the unique opportunities for disenshittification created by Trump’s rapid unscheduled midair disassembly of the international free trade system. The US used trade deals to force nearly every country in the world to adopt the IP laws that make enshittification possible, and maybe even inevitable. As Trump burns these trade deals to the ground, the rest of the world has an unprecedented opportunity to retaliate against American bullying by getting rid of these laws and producing the tools, devices and services that can protect every tech user (including Americans) from being ripped off by US Big Tech companies.

I’m so grateful for the chance to give this talk. I was hosted for the day by the Centre for Culture and Technology, which was founded by Marshall McLuhan, and is housed in the coach house he used for his office. The talk itself took place in Innis College, named for Harold Innis, who is definitely the thinking person’s Marshall McLuhan. What’s more, I was mentored by Innis’s daughter, Anne Innis Dagg, a radical, brilliant feminist biologist who pretty much invented the field of giraffology.

But with all respect due to Anne and her dad, Ursula Franklin is the thinking person’s Harold Innis. A brilliant scientist, activist and communicator who dedicated her life to the idea that the most important fact about a technology wasn’t what it did, but who it did it for and who it did it to. Getting to work out of McLuhan’s office to present a talk in Innis’s theater that was named after Franklin? Swoon!

Here’s the audio from the talk.

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This week on my podcast, I bring you the audio from yesterday’s Jacobin virtual book launch for my book Picks and Shovels, with Yanis Varoufakis, hosted by David Moscrop. You have until Monday night to order personalized, signed copies of the book from Los Angeles’s Secret Headquarters (I’m dropping by the warehouse to sign them on Tuesday, on my way to my event at LA’s Diesel Bookstore with Wil Wheaton). See the whole tour schedule (20+ cities and still growing!) here.

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This week on my podcast, I read MLMs are the mirror-world version of community organizing, a recent post from my Pluralistic newsletter.

MLMs prey on the poor and desperate: women, people of color, people in dying small towns and decaying rustbelt cities. It’s not just that these people are desperate – it’s that they only survive through networks of mutual aid. Poor women rely on other poor women to help with child care, marginalized people rely on one another for help with home maintenance, small loans, a place to crash after an eviction, or a place to park the RV you’re living out of.

In other words, people who lack monetary capital must rely on social capital for survival. That’s why MLMs target these people: an MLM is a system for destructively transforming social capital into monetary capital. MLMs exhort their members to mine their social relationships for “leads” and “customers” and to use the language of social solidarity (“women helping women”) to wheedle, guilt, and arm-twist people from your mutual aid network into buying things they don’t need and can’t afford.

But it’s worse, because what MLMs really sell is MLMs. The real purpose of an MLM sales call is to convince the “customer” to become an MLM salesperson, who owes you a share of every sale they make and is incentivized to buy stock they don’t need (from you) in order to make quotas. And of course, their real job is to sign up other salespeople to work under them, and so on.

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Announcing the Picks and Shovels book tour (permalink)

My next novel, Picks and Shovels, is officially out in the US and Canada on Feb 17, and I’m about to leave on a 20+ city book-tour, which means there’s a nonzero chance I’ll be in a city near you between now and the end of the spring!

https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250865908/picksandshovels

Picks and Shovels is a standalone novel starring Martin Hench – my hard-charging, two-fisted, high-tech forensic accountant – in his very first adventure, in the early 1980s. It’s a story about the Weird PC era, when no one was really certain what shape PCs should be, who should make them, who should buy them, and what they’re for. It features a commercial war between two very different PC companies.

The first one, Fidelity Computing, is a predatory multi-level marketing faith scam, run by a Mormon bishop, a Catholic priest, and an orthodox rabbi. Fidelity recruits people to exploit members of their faith communities by selling them third-rate PCs that are designed as rip-off lock-ins, forcing you to buy special floppies for their drives, special paper for their printers, and to use software that is incompatible with everything else in the world.

The second PC company is Computing Freedom, a rebel alliance of three former Fidelity Computing sales-managers: an orthodox woman who’s been rejected by her family after coming out as queer; a Mormon woman who’s rejected the Church over its opposition to the Equal Rights Amendment, and a nun who’s quit her order to join the Liberation Theology movement in the struggle for human rights in America’s dirty wars.

In the middle of it all is Martin Hench, coming of age in San Francisco during the PC bubble, going to Dead Kennedys shows, getting radicalized by ACT UP!, and falling in love – all while serving as CFO and consigliere to Computing Freedom, as a trade war turns into a shooting war, and they have to flee for their lives.

The book’s had fantastic early reviews, with endorsements from computer historians like Steven Levy (Hackers), Claire Evans (Broad-Band), John Markoff (What the Doormouse Said) and Dan’l Lewin (CEO of the Computer History Museum). Stephen Fry raved that he “hugely enjoyed” the “note perfect,” “superb” story.

And I’m about to leave on tour! I have nineteen confirmed dates, and two nearly confirmed dates, and there’s more to come! I hope you’ll consider joining me at one of these events. I’ve got a bunch of fantastic conversation partners joining me onstage and online, and the bookstores that are hosting me are some of my favorite indie booksellers in the world.

BOSTON (Feb 14):

Boskone, 4PM, Westin Boston Seaport District
https://schedule.boskone.org/62/

Brookline Booksmith with KEN LIU, 7PM, 279 Harvard Street, Brookline
https://brooklinebooksmith.com/event/2025-02-14/cory-doctorow-ken-liu-picks-and-shovels

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VIRTUAL (Feb 15):
YANIS VAROUFAKIS, sponsored by Jacobin and hosted by David Moscrop, 10AM Pacific, 1PM Eastern, 6PM UK, 7PM CET
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xkIDep7Z4LM

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MENLO PARK (Feb 17):
Kepler’s Books with CHARLIE JANE ANDERS, 7PM, 1010 El Camino Real
https://www.keplers.org/upcoming-events-internal/cory-doctorow

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LOS ANGELES (Feb 18):
Diesel Bookstore with WIL WHEATON, 630PM, 225 26th Street, Santa Monica
https://www.dieselbookstore.com/event/Cory-Doctorow-Wil-Wheaton-Author-signing

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SEATTLE (Feb 19):
Third Place Books with DAN SAVAGE, 7PM, 17171 Bothell Way Northeast #A101 Lake Forest Park
https://www.eventbrite.com/e/cory-doctorow-with-dan-savage-picks-and-shovels-a-martin-hench-novel-tickets-1106741957989

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TORONTO (Feb 23):
Another Story, 630PM, 315 Roncesvalles Ave
https://www.eventbrite.ca/e/picks-shovels-cory-doctorow-tickets-1219803217259

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NYC (Feb 26):
The Strand with JOHN HODGMAN, 7PM, 828 Broadway
https://www.eventbrite.com/e/cory-doctorow-john-hodgman-picks-and-shovels-tickets-1131132841779

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PENN STATE (Feb 27):
Kern Auditorium, 7PM, 112 Kern Building
https://www.bellisario.psu.edu/assets/uploads/CoryDoctorow-Poster.pdf

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DOYLESTOWN (Mar 1):
Doylestown Bookshop, 12PM, 16 S Main St
https://www.eventbrite.com/e/cory-doctorow-picks-and-shovels-a-martin-hench-novel-tickets-1146230880419

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BALTIMORE (Mar 2):
Red Emma’s, 2PM, 630PM, 3128 Greenmount Ave
https://redemmas.org/events/cory-doctorow-presents-picks-and-shovels/

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DC (Mar 4):
Cleveland Park Library with MATT STOLLER, 630PM, 3310 Connecticut Ave NW
https://www.loyaltybookstores.com/picksnshovels

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RICHMOND (Mar 5):
Fountain Bookstore with LEE VINSEL, 6PM, 1312 E Cary St
https://fountainbookstore.com/events/1795820250305

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AUSTIN (Mar 10):
First Light Books, 7PM, 4300 Speedway/43rd
https://thethirdplace.is/event/cory-doctorow-picks-shovels-1

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BURBANK (Mar 13):
Dark Delicacies, 6PM, 822 N. Hollywood Way
https://www.darkdel.com/store/p3257/Thu%2C_Mar_13th_6_pm%3A_Pick_%26_Shovel%3A_A_Martin_Hench_Novel_HB.html#/

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SAN DIEGO (Mar 24):
Mysterious Galaxy, 7PM, 3555 Rosecrans
https://www.mystgalaxy.com/32425Doctorow

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BELFAST (Mar 24) (remote):
Imagine! Festival with ALAN MEBAN, 7PM UK
https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/cory-doctorow-in-conversation-with-alan-meban-tickets-1106421399189

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CHICAGO, Apr 2:
Exile in Bookville with PETER SAGAL, 7PM, 410 S Michigan Ave, 2nd floor
https://exileinbookville.com/events/44853

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BLOOMINGTON, Apr 4:
Morgenstern Books, 6PM, 642 N Madison St
https://morgensternbooks.com/event/2025-04-04/author-event-cory-doctorow

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AUCKLAND, May 2
Unity Books, 19 High Street, 6PM
https://www.eventbrite.co.nz/e/an-evening-with-cory-doctorow-tickets-1320740102199

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WELLINGTON, May 3,
Unity Books, 57 Willis Street, 3PM
https://www.unitybooks.co.nz/news-and-events/author-talk-picks-and-shovels-by-cory-doctorow

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PITTSBURGH, May 15
White Whale Books, 4754 Liberty Avenue
https://whitewhalebookstore.com/events/20250515

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PDX, Jun 20:
Barnes and Noble with BUNNIE HUANG, Lloyd Center
https://stores.barnesandnoble.com/event/9780062183697-0

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LONDON, Jul 1
The Conduit with RILEY QUINN
6 Langley Street
https://howtoacademy.com/events/cory-doctorow-the-fight-against-the-big-tech-oligarchy/

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MANCHESTER, Jul 2
Blackwell’s Bookshop, 146 Oxford Road
https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/an-evening-with-cory-doctorow-tickets-1308451968059

I really hope you’ll come out and say hello. I know these are tough times. Hanging out with nice people who care about the same stuff as you is a genuine tonic.

This week on my podcast, I read Canada shouldn’t retaliate with US tariffs, a recent post from my Pluralistic newsletter.

But you know what Canada could make? A Canadian App Store. That’s a store that Canadian software authors could use to sell Canadian apps to Canadian customers, charging, say, the standard payment processing fee of 5% rather than Apple’s 30%. Canada could make app stores for the Android, Playstation and Xbox, too.

There’s no reason that a Canadian app store would have to confine itself to Canadian software authors, either. Canadian app stores could offer 5% commissions on sales to US and global software authors, and provide jailbreaking kits that allows device owners all around the world to install the Canadian app stores where software authors don’t get ripped off by American Big Tech companies.

MP3