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Received — 30 May 2026 ⏭

Pluralistic: Carneyism without Carney (30 May 2026)

✇Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
By: Cory Doctorow
30 May 2026 at 11:31


Today's links

  • Carneyism without Carney: Eh?
  • Hey look at this: Delights to delectate.
  • Object permanence: Replacing pharma patents with bounties; USTR v cheap leukemia meds; Plutocrats x wealth segregation; Anonymous Analytics; Scott Walker sells off donors; Anonymization v metadata; Probably; Amazon warehouse workers are the future of Amazon coders; Warcraft eggs; Brainwashing school; People who don't know The Onion is satire; "Company Town"; America is a scam.
  • Upcoming appearances: London, Kansas City, LA, Menlo Park, Toronto, NYC, Edinburgh, South Bend.
  • 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.


A turn-of-the-century Main Street, USA. Over the horizon looms a giant Canadian flag, made out of circuitry. In the foreground is a pixelboard sign reading 'U.S. BORDER CLOSED.' In the foreground looms a giant lumberjack, about to swing his axe into the sign.

Carneyism without Carney (permalink)

The "Third Way" in liberal politics involves saying things that working people love, but doing things that sociopathic plutocrats love. It works …right up until voters notice that you're not doing the things. That realisation breeds cynicism and fury and paves the way for fascist strongmen.

It's really ugly, and no one does it uglier than Canada's Liberal Party. Remember that time Prime Minister Justin Trudeau marched with Greta Thunberg to protest Canada's shitty, planet-wrecking climate policies?

https://globalnews.ca/news/5959371/election-campaign-climate-march/

Gee, Justin – it sure would be great if you could have a word with the fella who decided to bail out America's doomed tar sands pipeline and vowed to pump and torch 173,000,000,000 barrels of Canadian oil:

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/no-country-173-billion-barrels-203807530.html

Trudeau's "Third Way" eventually proved so unpopular that he opened the door to an authoritarian takeover of Canada by an otherwise totally unelectable, Trump-aligned far-right maniac. The only thing that saved Canada from a fate dumber than Trump was Trump himself, who wouldn't stop promising to make Canada the 51st state, an idea that was even more repellent to Canadians than five more years of Third Way bullshit:

https://ca.news.yahoo.com/pierre-poilievre-joe-rogan-podcast-143318576.html

And boy did Canadians find a Third Way bullshitter to move into 24 Sussex Drive: Mark Carney, an austerity-crazed central banker who will endorse incredibly progressive policies…provided he never has to do any of them. When it comes to championing working Canadians while royally screwing them, Carney is the only Canadian politician capable of out-Trudeauing Trudeau.

But we shouldn't reject Carneyism due to the mere fact that Carney refuses to deliver Carneyism. The problem with Carneyism isn't Carneyism itself – the problem with Carneyism is Mark Carney.

Take Carney's policy promise to charge US tech giants a 3% tax, a move that would defeat their incredibly clever gambit of pretending to be Irish and thus not owing any tax, anywhere:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/01/17/erin-lets-go/#circumvention-haven

That was a good policy! So was Carney's "elbows up" policy of sticking it to America in retaliation for Trump's flagrant violation of CUSMA, the free trade agreement negotiated by (checks notes) one Donald J Trump:

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/may/06/trump-carney-meeting-canada-tariffs-trade

Unfortunately, Mark Carney didn't get the memo from (checks notes) Mark Carney, and the very instant Trump arranged his face into his trademarked confused scowl, Carney dropped the tax, apologising profusely:

https://www.canada.ca/en/department-finance/news/2025/06/canada-rescinds-digital-services-tax-to-advance-broader-trade-negotiations-with-the-united-states.html

In the last days of the Trudeau government, the Liberals passed a bill that transformed Canada's Competition Bureau from the weakest antitrust regulator in the world into one of the strongest (on paper, at least):

https://competition-bureau.canada.ca/en/how-we-foster-competition/education-and-outreach/guide-june-2024-amendments-competition-act

It's impossible to overstate how useless the Competition Bureau was before this bill passed. In its entire history, the Bureau had only challenged three mergers, and had never successfully challenged a merger. Canada's do-nothing competition enforcers allowed the country to be captured by Made-in-Canada oligarchs whose ripoffs and abuses would make the Hudson's Bay Company blush:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/12/05/ted-rogers-is-a-dope/#galen-weston-is-even-worse

If Canada was ever going to be a real country (and not just two monopolists and a mining company in a trenchcoat) it needed a serious competition enforcer. Nominally, it has one, thanks to the 2024 Competition Act. The only problem was Carney, who made sweeping real-terms cuts to the Bureau's funding. Thanks to Carney, Canada has a Competition Bureau with all the powers it needs to save Canada from its oligarchs – but it can't afford to do any of that stuff.

Monopolists rip Canadians off like crazy. We even have a guy who mistook Les Miz for an HBR case-study, and embarked upon the country's worst-ever price-fixing campaign, gouging the country on bread prices:

https://www.donotpassgo.ca/p/the-bread-price-fixing-scandal-is

You don't have to be a monopolist to steal from Canadians. Ripping off Canadians is the game everyone can play! Consumer protection agencies are incredible value for money, saving the public hundreds for every dollar that we spend on them. Guess who just eliminated Canada's consumer protection agency?

https://www.donotpassgo.ca/p/carney-government-slashes-consumer

Oh, to be a scammer in Mark Carney's Canada! Whatever Galen Weston doesn't steal is yours for the taking!

But again, the problem isn't Carneyism – the problem is Carney. Carneyism is great. Carneyism gave us that remarkable speech at Davos, where Mark Carney declared a "rupture" in the US-dominated global system of trade and politics, promising a future of "minilateralism" in which "middle powers" like Canada band together for mutual prosperity:

https://www.weforum.org/stories/2026/01/davos-2026-special-address-by-mark-carney-prime-minister-of-canada/

If only Mark Carney had been there to hear those stirring words! He might have understood what a fucking insane idea it is to turn over Canada's military to Palantir, the company that, more than any other, has fused itself with the Trump regime's domestic program of ethnic cleansing and its international program of extraterritorial aggression:

https://www.thestar.com/politics/federal/canadas-deal-with-us-data-giant-palantir-is-legitimate-defence-minister-says/article_e49b9c32-8f76-466c-86ed-36a4110ba45a.html

Carneyism isn't merely a rejection of the old international order. Domestically, Carneyism promises technocratic excellence, skilled leadership that delivers first-class services for the Canadian people. This is a great pitch! It got Mamdani elected, and Mamdani's sincere pursuit of governmental excellence thrills New Yorkers in new ways every day:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/02/24/mamdani-thought/#public-excellence

Here, too, Carneyism is entirely sound – the problem is Carney's vicious anti-Carneyism and his plan to fire tens of thousands of civil servants and replace them with AI chatbots. It's not just that chatbots are terrible substitutes for skilled public officials, they're also controlled by US corporations that are entirely beholden to the Trump regime:

https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/carney-artificial-intelligence-strategy-9.7213733

Unlike Mark Carney, I support Carneyism. Carneyism promises protection for Canadians, from monopolists and mad emperors, petty thieves and potholes. But Carney himself ardently opposes these policies. This will only get worse when the AI bubble pops and vaporises a third of the US stock market, spreading contagion to global capital markets. That will be Carney's cue to roll out his favourite go-to tactic: austerity.

We cannot afford this. Austerity is how we lose the country. Austerity – more than any other force – drives working people into the arms of fascists:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/04/12/always-great/#our-nhs

The thing is, Mark Carney has shown his political opponents how to beat him: just embrace Carneyism. The things Carney says are incredibly popular. Now we just need to elect someone who'll do them.

Hey look at this (permalink)


A shelf of leatherbound history books with a gilt-stamped series title, 'The World's Famous Events.'

Object permanence (permalink)

#20yrsago World of Warcraft Easter eggs https://web.archive.org/web/20060614223838/http://www.wow-europe.com/en/contests/noblegarden/winners.html

#15yrsago Bernie Sanders introduces anti-pharma-patent bill, aims to replace drug monopolies with prizes https://web.archive.org/web/20110528053922/http://keionline.org/node/1147

#15yrsago Life at a brainwashing “school for troubled teens” https://www.reddit.com/r/troubledteens/comments/hk0xy/a_gay_teen_describes_her_experience_at_a_utah/

#15yrsago Facebook updates from people who don’t know The Onion is a humor site https://literallyunbelievable.tumblr.com/

#10yrsago Untangling the Web: the NSA’s supremely weird, florid guide to the Internet https://www.techdirt.com/2016/05/27/nsas-guide-to-internet-is-weirdest-thing-youll-read-today/

#10yrsago Company Town: Madeline Ashby’s tale of sex and Singularity cults is a locked-door mystery at sea https://memex.craphound.com/2016/05/28/company-town-madeline-ashbys-tale-of-sex-and-singularity-cults-is-a-locked-door-mystery-at-sea/

#10yrago US trade rep threatens Colombia’s peace process over legal plan to offer cheap leukemia meds https://web.archive.org/web/20160725174757/https://www.statnews.com/pharmalot/2016/05/26/bernie-sanders-novartis-patent/

#10yrsago Security researcher discovers glaring problem with patient data system, FBI stages armed dawn raid https://dailydot.com/politics/justin-shafer-fbi-raid

#10yrsago Wealthy families are most responsible for American wealth segregation https://web.archive.org/web/20160530195842/https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2016/05/10/the-incredible-impact-of-rich-parents-fighting-to-live-by-the-very-best-schools/

#10yrsago Someone just snuck warrantless email access into the Senate’s secret intelligence bill https://web.archive.org/web/20160526201753/https://theintercept.com/2016/05/26/secret-text-in-senate-bill-would-give-fbi-warrantless-access-to-email-records/

#10yrsago Wells Fargo, who preyed on black borrowers, sponsors Black Lives Matter luncheon https://web.archive.org/web/20160527184755/https://theintercept.com/2016/05/27/wells-fargo-sponsorship-of-black-lives-matter-panel-draws-scorn/

#10yrsago Anonymous Analytics: self-proclaimed Anon “faction” that tanks companies through stock reports https://web.archive.org/web/20160527155031/https://news.softpedia.com/news/anonymous-hackers-turned-stock-analysts-are-targeting-us-chinese-corporations-504495.shtml

#10yrsago Scott Walker, saddled with $1.2m debt from failed presidential bid, pawns his own donors https://ghanasoccernet.com/uk/2016/05/24/scott-walker-rents-out-donor-list-to-pay-campaign-debt/

#10yrsago Study shows detailed, compromising inferences can be readily made with metadata https://www.pnas.org/doi/full/10.1073/pnas.1508081113

#10yrsago EFF fights order to remove public records documents detailing Seattle’s smart-meters https://www.muckrock.com/news/archives/2016/may/26/court-grants-temporary-restraining-order-forcing-r/

#5yrsago Probably https://pluralistic.net/2021/05/27/probably/

#1yrago AI turns Amazon coders into Amazon warehouse workers https://pluralistic.net/2025/05/27/rancid-vibe-coding/#class-war

#1yrago America is a scam https://pluralistic.net/2025/05/28/cheaters-ever-prosper/#caveat-america

Upcoming appearances (permalink)

A photo of me onstage, giving a speech, pounding the podium.


A screenshot of me at my desk, doing a livecast.

Recent appearances (permalink)


A grid of my books with Will Stahle covers..

Latest books (permalink)


A cardboard book box with the Macmillan logo.

Upcoming books (permalink)

  • "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/)

  • "Enshittification, Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It" (the graphic novel), Firstsecond, 2026

  • "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

  • "The Memex Method," Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2027


Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources:

Currently writing: "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. Third draft completed. Submitted to editor.

  • "The Reverse Centaur's Guide to AI," a short book for Farrar, Straus and Giroux about being an effective AI critic. LEGAL REVIEW AND COPYEDIT COMPLETE.

  • "The Post-American Internet," a short book about internet policy in the age of Trumpism. PLANNING.

  • 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.

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"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

Received — 4 May 2026 ⏭

Pluralistic: Demand destruction vs fuel-superseding infrastructure (04 May 2026)

✇Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
By: Cory Doctorow
4 May 2026 at 11:39


Today's links


Alexander Rodchenko's classic Russian constructivist 'books' advertising poster; Lilya Brik's face has been replaced with Greta Thunberg's, and instead of shouting the word 'books,' a spray of geometric sunbeams are emanating from her mouth. Superimposed and beneath her is a Soviet propaganda poster of a furiously pointing Lenin. Lenin's skin is Cheeto orange and he wears a straw-yellow Trump wig.

Demand destruction vs fuel-superceding infrastructure (permalink)

No one is better at keeping hope alive than Rebecca Solnit, the historian and essayist whose Hope in the Dark got me through the first Trump administration and whose A Paradise Built In Hell inspired my novel Walkaway:

https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/301070/a-paradise-built-in-hell-by-rebecca-solnit/

In her latest, "Truth, Consequences, Climate, and Demand Destruction," Solnit is nothing short of inspirational – not because she downplays the horror and misery of Trump and his war of choice in Iran, but because she tells us what we stand to salvage from the wreckage:

https://www.meditationsinanemergency.com/truth-consequences-climate-and-demand-destruction/

Solnit starts by explaining some of the (many, many) things that Trump doesn't understand. Principally, Trump doesn't understand the concept of "demand destruction," which is what happens when shortages prompt people to make durable, one-way changes in their behavior that permanently reduce the demand for fossil fuels.

High prices sometimes create demand destruction: for example, if a transient shortage in eggs pushes prices up, people might discover that they prefer tofu scrambles in the morning, so even when the price of eggs comes back down, they buy two dozen fewer eggs every month, forever.

Beyond high prices, shortages and rationing are far more likely to lead to demand destruction. In the 10 years following the 1970s oil crisis, US cars doubled in fuel efficiency, and the gas-guzzler didn't return until car manufacturers exploited the American "light truck" loophole to fill the streets with deadly SUVs:

https://medium.com/vision-zero-cities-journal/the-chicken-tax-and-other-ways-the-u-s-government-subsidizes-your-ford-f-150-444a5164c627

But to really max out on demand destruction, you need both rationing and a cheap, easily installed substitute, and that's what the Strait of Epstein crisis, along with solar and batteries, offers the world today. Solar is incredibly cheap, and getting cheaper every day. Batteries are also incredibly cheap, and they're getting cheaper too. For decades, fossil fuel apologists have insisted that we'll never stop setting old dead shit on fire because "the sun doesn't always shine and the wind doesn't always blow," but thanks to battery deployment in China and California (and more places very soon), the sun shines all night long:

https://ember-energy.org/app/uploads/2026/04/Global-Electricity-Review-2026.pdf?ref=meditationsinanemergency.com

In starting this stupid, unforgivable war, Trump has vastly accelerated the process of demand destruction. Rather than buying American oil, the whole world has undertaken a simultaneous, rapid, irreversible shift to electrical substitutes for fossil fuel applications, from induction tops to balcony solar to ebikes and EVs:

https://thepolycrisis.org/01-demand-destruction-us-oil-is-not-winning-the-iran-war/

As Solnit writes, Trump's stupid war follows on the heels of another unforgivable and cruel blunder: Putin's quagmire in Ukraine, which catapulted Europe into the Gretacene, with a wholesale, continent-wide shift away from fossil fuels to renewables and the devices they power. Now, the rest of the world is following suit. In South Korea, President Lee Jae Myung is leading the charge to transition the country to renewables, framing fossil fuels as an existential geopolitical risk.

Trump's demand destruction accelerates Putin's demand destruction: China and India both increased their energy consumption in 2025 – but reduced their fossil fuel consumption over the same period. In 2025, coal accounted for less than a third of the world's energy for the first time in modern history. 2025 was the year that solar and wind overtook coal globally.

Meanwhile, Trump and his oil baron buddies keep trying to make fetch happen. On the campaign trail, Trump told the oil industry that if they slipped him a $1b bribe, he would give them anything they wanted, and he's kept his promise. Trump will let Big Oil drill anywhere they like, from sacred sites like New Mexico's Chaco Canyon to the Arctic. He'll even let them take all of Venezuela's oil. The problem is that banks can see the demand destruction writing on the wall, and they are conspicuously declining to loan the oil companies the money they'd need to get that oil.

Truly, Trump's a machine for creating stranded assets at scale. As Solnit writes, that's because Trump has no strategic foresight; strategy being "the ability to plan for things to arise that may counter your agenda, so you can continue to pursue your agenda." Trump's a bully, and he's accustomed to intimidating his adversaries into capitulating. That's why Trump keeps making moves without ever thinking about the countermove he might provoke. He can't metabolize the strategic maxim that "the enemy gets a vote."

This is the GOP's whole vibe these days: "how dare you do unto me as I have done unto you?" Solnit points to GOP outrage in response to Democratic gerrymandering in blue states, which Democrats undertook in direct, explicit response to shameless gerrymandering in Texas and other red states. Solnit says that the GOP has "confused having a lot of power with having all the power" and is perennially surprised when their attacks on Iran and Minneapolis elicit a reaction from the people in Iran and Minneapolis.

This is the defective reasoning that caused Comrade Trump to hormuz the world into the full Gretacene. Whereas once the case for the energy transition was driven by activists who warned people about the future consequences of inaction, Trump has summoned up a new army of people who are worried about the present consequences of inaction: such as not being able to drive your car, use your gas stove, or fertilize your crops. Trump has summoned up another army of people, who are worried about the politics of oil, the fact that oil leads to wars and can be mobilized as a weapon when it is withheld from your country.

Activists couldn't deliver the energy transition on their own – but now there's a coalition that's driving rapid, irreversible change: activists concerned about the future of the planet, in coalition with economic actors concerned about the consequences of not being able to cook, heat your home, or keep the lights on; in coalition with national security hawks worried about the geopolitics of oil. That's Comrade Trump's three-part mobilization: human rights, finance, and national security, all insisting that the enemy gets a vote, and voting unanimously for a post-American world.

Last week marked the first Transitioning Away from Fossil Fuels conference, attended by representatives from 54 countries who sidestepped the US- and China-dominated UN to ratify the Fossil Fuel Nonproliferation Treaty Initiative, whose 18 signatories include Colombia, a major oil producer.

The world is moving on, and Trump continues to insist that he can roll back history to some imaginary era of a Great America. Every time this fails, he doubles down on his failures and sets the stage for more failure to come. Take Trump's decision to have the US blockade the Strait of Hormuz. Not only is this a powerful force for demand destruction – but, as Trita Parsi writes, it's also poison for Trump's own electoral fortunes in America:

https://responsiblestatecraft.org/trump-iran-blockade/

Trump won in 2024 by campaigning to improve Americans' cost of living. This is a powerful campaign strategy, and it's not limited to fascists, as Zohran Mamdani can attest. But for this to work, you actually have to reduce the cost of living once you take office, otherwise you will be hated and rejected and hampered in everything you do. The problem (for Trump – but not for Mamdani!) is that America's high cost of living is driven by corporate profiteering, and the only way to fix it is to make the rich poorer so as to make the poor richer:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/02/24/mamdani-thought/#public-excellence

If Trump had chosen to bullshit his way through the Iranian blockade of the strait, allowing the Iranians to collect a $2m toll per tanker (payable in Chinese renminbi!), well, oil would have gone up in price some, but the coming runaway inflation on food and fuel would have been substantially blunted. Instead, he decided to "snatch defeat from the jaws of victory" by adding a US blockade, which means that prices in the US are going to skyrocket, making his base furious and driving turnout for Democrats, along with support for more renewables, even among blood-red Republican rural Texas ranchers, who have had enough of "DEI for fossil fuels":

https://austinfreepress.org/renewables-are-now-the-costco-of-energy-production-bill-mckibben-says/

The renewables transition is now a self-licking ice-cream cone, a flywheel that only spins faster and faster. As Solnit writes, this is true notwithstanding the concerns by some climate advocates about the materials needed for the transition. Sure, there will be some extraction involved in mass electrification, and if that's done badly, it will involve stealing and destroying more land from poor and indigenous people. But we don't have to do it badly!

Meanwhile, not transitioning to renewables absolutely requires an endless cycle of incredibly destructive and genocidal extraction. Remember, fossil fuels are fuels, while renewables are infrastructure. Fuels need to be dug up and destroyed every year for so long as we insist on setting old dead shit on fire to survive. We dig up a lot of fossil fuels. The world consumes seventeen times more fossil fuels in a year than we will require to electrify the planet forever:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/08/06/with-great-power/#comes-great-responsibility

The infrastructure of renewables – panels, batteries, transmission lines – requires materials that are often scarce and whose processing involves extremely harmful and polluting processes. But those materials are all recyclable: we don't recycle them today because we haven't prioritized doing so, not because it it technologically beyond our reach. In 2024, America saw its first all-solar powered solar panel recycling factory, which reclaimed 99% of the materials in a panel that was 20% efficient, and then used those materials to make two panels that were each 40% efficient:

https://interestingengineering.com/energy/solarcycle-to-recycle-10-million-solar-panels-yearly

Trump shut that plant down, which means that other countries will get to recycle America's superannuated panels into modern, efficient ones and sell them back to America. America may have blocked any climate reparations for the poor world, but thanks to Comrade Trump, America's still going to end up paying them, in the form of windfall profits for countries whose cleantech economy is racing ahead of America's.

Unlike a fossil fuel economy, a cleantech sector does not require that your country have access to some difficult to find, unevenly distributed reservoir of old dead shit or even rare minerals. Not only is lithium far more common than once believed, it's also being phased out for use in batteries and replaced by sodium, the world's sixth-most abundant element:

https://cen.acs.org/energy/energy-storage-/Sodium-ion-batteries-Should-believe/103/web/2025/11

Lithium is set to join cobalt, a notorious conflict mineral, in the cleantech revolution's rear-view mirror as a transitional material used in early, primitive batteries and no longer required.

A post-carbon future is a post-petrostate future is a post-American future. It will run on solar and wind and batteries, which can be brought online cheaply and quickly, every time demand-destruction surges, using materials that are widely distributed around the world. It won't be a nuclear future, and not just because nuclear materials are (like oil) concentrated according to accidents of geography, nor merely because fissiles are geopolitically catastrophic (like oil). Nuclear plants take at least a decade to bring online, which means that they will always arrive ten years after some future Comrade Trump-type kicks off another orgy of demand destruction, and by the time we turn them on, the world will have already bought, improved and recycled two generations of batteries and panels.

(Image: Stefan Müller (climate stuff), CC BY 2.0)

Hey look at this (permalink)


A shelf of leatherbound history books with a gilt-stamped series title, 'The World's Famous Events.'

Object permanence (permalink)

#25yrsago Beck dumps Winona and becomes a Scientologist https://web.archive.org/web/20010502151355/http://www.suntimes.com/output/zwecker/zp30.html

#25yrsago Fuck San Francisco https://craphound.com/fucksf.html

#25yrsago Desktop Linux rant https://web.archive.org/web/20021204051712/http://www.linuxplanet.com/linuxplanet/opinions/3297/1/

#25yrsago History of ASCAP and BMI https://www.woodpecker.com/writing/essays/royalty-politics.html

#25yrsago AUSA: If we let you decrypt DVDs, airplanes will start falling out of the sky https://web.archive.org/web/20010504221956/https://www.wired.com/news/digiwood/0,1412,43485,00.html

#25yrsago Microsoft shits on open source https://www.nytimes.com/2001/05/03/business/technology-microsoft-is-set-to-be-top-foe-of-free-code.html

#20yrsago Dan Gillmor explains “citizen journalism” https://web.archive.org/web/20060512043722/https://sf.backfence.com/bayarea/showPost.cfm?myComm=BA&bid=2271

#20yrsago UN plans a treaty to kill podcasts https://web.archive.org/web/20060512141428/https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/archives/004619.php

#20yrsago Sen Stevens tries to sneak the Broadcast Flag into law https://web.archive.org/web/20060505054724/http://ipaction.org/blog/2006/05/breaking-news-broadcast-flag-is-back.html

#20yrago How the US Navy queered San Francisco https://web.archive.org/web/20060504024636/http://ask.yahoo.com/20060502.html

#20yrago Help wanted: new DRM czar for Sony-BMG https://web.archive.org/web/20060512063724/http://www.paidcontent.org/sonybmg-director-new-technology-content-protection-nyc

#20yrsago Rich Americans as sick as poor Brits https://web.archive.org/web/20060516225807/http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=dn9098&feedId=online-news_rss20

#15yrsago Sculpture embodies lossy copying using much-copied house-key https://web.archive.org/web/20110316215804/http://www.danielbejar.com/Visual_Topography_of_a_Generation_Gap.html

#15yrsago Piracy and poor countries: Big Content wants to have its cake and eat it too https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2011/may/03/why-poor-countries-lead-world-piracy

#15yrsago Brust’s Tiassa: versatile fantasy in three modes https://memex.craphound.com/2011/05/02/brusts-tiassa-versatile-fantasy-in-three-modes/

#15yrsago Why New Zealand was dumb to let the USA write its copyright laws https://web.archive.org/web/20110601173727/http://www.geekzone.co.nz/juha/7615

#15yrsago Canadian neocon Tories take a slim majority in election, pro-Internet New Democrats form the opposition https://web.archive.org/web/20110503041720/https://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/politics/new-political-era-begins-as-tories-win-majority-ndp-grabs-opposition/article2006635/

#15yrsago Will technology make us freer, and if so, how? https://locusmag.com/feature/cory-doctorow-techno-optimism/

#15yrsago Wikileaks: America will foot the bill for record company enforcement in NZ if NZ will let America write its laws
https://web.archive.org/web/20110502135002/http://www.michaelgeist.ca/content/view/5769/125/

#15yrsago Horology considered hazardous: the “German Time Bomb” clock with its deadly mainspring https://web.archive.org/web/20110516102538/https://www.anniversaryclocks.org/aci/haller-gtb.pdf

#5yrsago Political economy vs inflation https://pluralistic.net/2021/05/01/mayday/#inflationary-political-economy

#1yrago Apple faces criminal sanctions for defying App Store antitrust order https://pluralistic.net/2025/05/01/its-not-the-crime/#its-the-coverup

#1yrago AI and the fatfinger economy https://pluralistic.net/2025/05/02/kpis-off/#principal-agentic-ai-problem

Upcoming appearances (permalink)

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A screenshot of me at my desk, doing a livecast.

Recent appearances (permalink)


A grid of my books with Will Stahle covers..

Latest books (permalink)


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Upcoming books (permalink)

  • "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/)

  • "Enshittification, Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It" (the graphic novel), Firstsecond, 2026

  • "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

  • "The Memex Method," Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2027


Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources:

Currently writing: "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. Third draft completed. Submitted to editor.

  • "The Reverse Centaur's Guide to AI," a short book for Farrar, Straus and Giroux about being an effective AI critic. LEGAL REVIEW AND COPYEDIT COMPLETE.

  • "The Post-American Internet," a short book about internet policy in the age of Trumpism. PLANNING.

  • A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING

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