❌

Normal view

Received — 3 August 2026 ⏭

Pluralistic: Dualism (03 Aug 2026)

✇Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
By: Cory Doctorow
3 August 2026 at 10:25


Today's links

  • Dualism: Why not both?
  • Hey look at this: Delights to delectate.
  • Object permanence: UK's Great Firewall falls; Mint the coins; Virtual pets v DRM; Getty copyfrauds 47,000 photos; Net Mexico-US illegal migration is zero; Build a wall (around Trump Tower); Remote-hacking big rigs; Collectible AOL CDs; Indefinite Gitmo; Circuit City rips DVDs; Real Names policies are abusive failures; Escher in a water drop; Maximally code-like bugs.
  • Upcoming appearances: Edinburgh, Sydney, Melbourne, Brighton, London, 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 man's bearded face, constructed out of a medieval hillside, with walls, buildings, trees, hayricks and boulders forming the features. It has been hand-tinted. It looks across at an inverted, blurred, rippling version of itself. The background is a detail from a 19th C French anatomical chart depicting many different ear shapes.

Dualism (permalink)

The greatest magic trick of them all is lying. The reason you can't figure out that coin vanish even after the conjurer performs it three times in a row is that they didn't do the same trick three times in a row! They did three different tricks: "Didn't catch it? Here, let me do it again!" is a lie:

https://magiciansmag.com/3-cool-coin-disappearing-trick/

There's times when it makes sense to treat two outcomes as the same, even if they were produced by very different means. As a reader, my enjoyment of your novel is the same whether it was dictated, typed on an Underwood Noiseless, keyed into a word processor, or scratched out with a fountain pen:

https://nealstephenson.substack.com/p/writing-by-hand-is-good-for-your

There's plenty of routes that arrive at the same place, and if the destination is all that matters to you, it's fine to ignore the journey. But often, those end-points have subtle differences that are only revealed when things go wrong. If all you care about is how things work, chances are good that you're in for an unpleasant surprise when things fail.

I recently found myself arguing with an interviewer about whether AI is, or could be, conscious. We weren't arguing about whether it might someday be possible to make an artificial consciousness – as a materialist, I'll happily stipulate to this. I think that everything we call "consciousness" is the result of a physical process occurring within our bodies (and possibly around them?), so I think it's perfectly reasonable to imagine that someday we might create another physical process that produces the same effect.

But that's not what the interviewer wanted to argue about. His point was that teaching more words to the word-guessing program would produce consciousness, an argument I always liken to "breeding horses to run faster and faster until one of them foals a locomotive." In support of this (outlandish) proposition, the interviewer performed a kind of cognitive coin-trick: "I can often predict what my wife is going to say, and so can a chatbot that's been trained on her words. Therefore, we're both doing the same conscious work – and therefore the chatbot will eventually be as conscious as I am."

"Predicting what you will say through an understanding based on a theory of your mind" and "predicting what you are going to say based on a statistical analysis of your utterances" might produce the same outputs, but they are not the same trick. You can tell by what happens when the trick fails.

My wife and I have been together for 23 years now, and there's plenty of times that we can finish each other's sentences – and so can the autocomplete on our phones. The autocomplete manages the trick by exploiting the fact that we often repeat ourselves. But we manage the trick by understanding each other (and by exploiting the fact of repetition).

When my wife says something surprising – because she is angry or delighted, sad or happy – I can make a reliable guess about what caused my prediction to misfire. Our "sentence completion" trick doesn't emerge from a rough, automatically generated mental table of the statistical likelihood that word A will follow word B. We also understand why those combinations appear in each other's speech and writing.

"Understanding" and "statistical extrapolation" can often lead to the same place, but when they don't, "understanding" provides a way forward, while "extrapolation" founders. Both work fine, but only one fails gracefully. The two tricks only appear the same, but they are fundamentally different.

AI's investor story – and the science fiction tales of AI's eventual capabilities that underpin that investor story – makes heavy use of this conjurer's trick, in which two different outcomes are equated to one another because they resemble each other.

This "ignore the journey, focus on the destination" idea is baked very deeply into the way we think about AI. Take the "Turing Test," a complicated and nuanced thought-experiment proposed in 1950. Over the ensuing 75 years, Turing's thought-experiment has been stripped down into a blunt metric: "Can a chatbot trick a human into thinking it is also human?"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_artificial_intelligence

"I mistook a chatbot for a human" and "I took a human for a human" arrive at near-identical places, but they are subtly and importantly different. The erroneous assumption that my phone's autocomplete is actually a person who understands me well enough to finish my sentences works fine, but the instant I turn to it for understanding, it will fail very badly. Autocomplete's predictions are always grounded in who you used to be, which means autocomplete knows very little about who you are now, and absolutely nothing about who you will become:

https://reallifemag.com/instant-recall/

The low-rez Turing Test that captured popular discourse is profoundly misleading. It's the unsound foundation of a worldview that renders you incapable of distinguishing your understanding of your spouse from their phone's autocomplete function. It's the self-serving rationale that leads you to declare yourself a proud stochastic parrot:

https://xcancel.com/sama/status/1599471830255177728

The AI bubble is (seemingly) full of contradictions, but – like those baffling coin-tricks – these contradictions often resolve themselves very neatly once you realize that the "contradiction" is actually just two things that appear to be one.

For example, some of the billionaires who put up the first several hundred million for AI are solipsists who just don't believe other people are entirely real and therefore find it easy to believe that AI can do their jobs. Other billionaires are cynics who think that bosses can be sold defective worker-replacing chatbots because they're credulous suckers for that pitch, the same way they believe that desperate young men are suckers for Joe Rogan's useless and/or dangerous supplements and peptides:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/07/24/supplemental-income/#andrew-tate-gwyneth-paltrow

Billionaire AI true believers and billionaire AI cynics make for a powerful coalition. The roadblocks that might discourage the first group are easily hurdled by the second, and vice-versa. You don't have to believe AI works to believe it can be sold, and you don't have to be motivated by the sales opportunity to believe that AI is about to become god.

Almost every debate I get into about AI turns out to be an unjustified, unacknowledged conflation of two things that seem similar, but have profoundly different underlying characteristics. Take this argument: "Every time we extend rights to the nonhuman world – watersheds, endangered animals, ecosystems – the world gets better. Let's extend rights to AI – whether or not we think it's a 'person' and so reap those benefits."

This, too, is a coin trick. Extending rights to nature reliably makes the world better, but extending rights to constructs makes the world far worse (Exhibit A is corporate personhood) (obviously).

A few moments' thought reveals the difference. If we extend rights to a watershed, that might result in an AI data-center being killed. If we extend rights to AI, that might lead to sacrificing the watershed to cool the data-center:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/07/10/posthuman-as-in-no-humans/#hell-is-other-people

Then there's AI and labor. The world is full of skilled workers who have found ways to use AI on the job that they insist have improved their work. It's also full of skilled workers who warn us that on-the-job AI is producing tech debt at unimaginable scale, seriously depreciating the quality of the tools we use today, and setting us up for painful reckonings in the future.

This (seeming) contradiction melts away once you realize that these workers only appear to be doing the same thing. The first group of workers, excited about their AI-assisted output, are "centaurs": people assisted by machines; workers who choose the time and manner of their AI adoption. The second group are "reverse centaurs": people recruited to serve as peripherals for machines, which direct their actions and workflow:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/12/05/pop-that-bubble/#u-washington

Note that this isn't the same thing as saying "A skilled worker who adopts a tool willingly is always right and will produce a better output as a result." Nor is it saying, "The tool is so flawed that workers who claim it works for them must be deluded."

That's another coin trick! The reality – again – is that this is two things: some workers whose AI-assisted work is measurably worse are wrong about AI making their work better (centaurs, but wrong), and; some workers are being forced to use AI and know damned well that it's making their work worse (reverse centaurs).

Finally, there's an economic coin-trick: "AI will destroy jobs." Sure, yes, AI is destroying jobs. But there's a vast difference between "You got fired because an AI can do your job" and "You got fired because your boss was convinced that the AI can do your job, even though it cannot."

This is one of the most consequential coin-tricks, because it's a real convincer for the investors who are funding the AI bubble. The difference is huge: "AI can do your job" means you're well and truly screwed. If an AI can really replace a contract lawyer, then everyone who needs a contract written or evaluated should be on the side of mass technological unemployment for contract lawyers. The point of contract lawyers is to produce contracts, not to pay contract lawyers' law-school debts and mortgages.

BUT! If some BigLaw's credulous partners can be suckered into firing their juniors and replacing them with chatbots who bill you $1,200/hour to produce unenforceable, error-riddled contracts, then everyone who needs a contract is on the same side as the contract lawyers – united in opposition to their bosses:

https://www.loweringthebar.net/2026/06/its-finally-happened-both-sides-ai.html

Every time we fail to draw this distinction, we help an AI boss raise another billion dollars. Every time we insist on this distinction, we hasten the day that the AI bubble pops, thus sparing a few more everyday savers and innocent bystanders from being wiped out in the crash we can all see on the horizon:

https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/monopoly-round-up-how-new-dealers.

As "Cathy" so aptly put it: "The thing that is a good tool for the skilled people is being sold as a thing to reduce the number of skilled people hired":

https://bsky.app/profile/cathyby.bsky.social/post/3ms3pzq57nc2c

The former is a normal technology. The latter is the root of a catastrophic folly that is destroying our environment, destroying workers' lives, destroying the quality of the goods and services we rely on, and which will shortly destroy our economy.

It's a distinction with a difference.

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 Collectible AOL CDs https://web.archive.org/web/20011119212602/https://www.wired.com/news/culture/0,1284,45585,00.html

#20yrsago Gonzales: Gitmo prisoners can be held indefinitely https://www.dawn.com/news/204441/guantanamo-detainees-may-remain-indefinitely-us-attorney-general-s-warning

#20yrsago Circuit City offers DVD ripping service https://web.archive.org/web/20060811215644/https://consumerist.com/consumer/circuit-city/circuit-city-flouts-the-dmca-for-a-tenner-192049.php

#15yrsago UK government kills Copyright Great Firewall, establishes user rights https://torrentfreak.com/uk-government-abandons-file-sharing-website-blocking-plans-110803/

#15yrsago Mugshot sites and mugshot removal sites: unholy blackmail symbiosis https://web.archive.org/web/20110817051528/https://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2011/08/mugshots/

#15yrsago Law prof: it would be legal to mint 2x $1 trillion platinum coins & use them to pay the US debt https://edition.cnn.com/2011/OPINION/07/28/balkin.obama.options/index.html?hpt=hp_c1

#15yrsago Virtual pets starve after bungled resolution to Second Life’s “unauthorized food” war https://web.archive.org/web/20110807214820/http://nwn.blogs.com/nwn/2011/08/sl-meeroos-griefed.html

#15yrsago Google Plus’s “Real Name” policy is abusive; Facebook is not a “Real Name” success story https://www.zephoria.org/thoughts/archives/2011/08/04/real-names.html

#15yrsago Photo: Escher painting refracted in a drop of falling water https://www.reddit.com/r/pics/comments/j5whr/water_drop_falling_in_front_of_an_mc_escher/

#15yrsago Getting digital copyright right: pay artists, but don’t break the Internet https://www.straight.com/article-415146/vancouver/interview-siggraph-2011-keynote-speaker-cory-doctorow-copyright-reform

#10yrsago After repeated budget cuts, Missouri’s underfunded Public Defender drafts the Governor to work for him https://web.archive.org/web/20160804061408/http://www.publicdefender.mo.gov/Newsfeed/Delegation_of_Representation.PDF

#10yrsago Spoofing GPS is surprisingly easy; detecting it is surprisingly hard https://spectrum.ieee.org/gps-spoofing

#10yrsago Decision to retain personally identifying information puts Australian census under threat https://web.archive.org/web/20160804124914/https://censusfail.com/

#10yrsago Residents of Silicon Valley homeless camp clear 48,000 Lbs of garbage from creek, ask for housing https://www.mercurynews.com/2016/08/03/san-jose-homeless-remove-24-tons-of-trash-from-coyote-creek/

#10yrsago Copyright Office to FCC: Hollywood should be able to killswitch your TV https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2016/08/copyright-office-jumps-set-top-box-debate-says-hollywood-should-control-your-tv

#10yrsago Walking Tables: a strandbeest for your dining room https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mBOdZ6nhDJg

#10yrsago Lawsuit: Getty Images copyfrauded 47,000 photos from indie press agency Zuma https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2016/08/getty-images-sued-again-over-alleged-misuse-of-over-47000-photos/

#10yrsago Mexico-US illegal migration has been at zero for 8 years, and other eye-opening facts https://wnyc.org/story/bnch-migration-doug-massey/

#10yrsago Activists are crowdfunding to build a wall around Trump Tower https://www.indiegogo.com/en/projects/wallintrump/wall-in-trump#/

#10yrsago Chinese government decrees that it is always legal to video-record the police https://www.techdirt.com/2016/08/03/yes-you-read-that-correctly-china-says-ok-members-public-to-record-police/

#10yrsago Big rigs can be hijacked and driven with software-based attacks https://www.wired.com/2016/08/researchers-hack-big-rig-truck-hijack-accelerator-brakes/

#5yrsago Elite debt hits record heights https://pluralistic.net/2021/08/03/fitzgerald-was-an-optimist/#debt

#5yrsago Utilities governed like empires https://pluralistic.net/2021/08/04/eighty-sixed/#thank-you-come-again

#5yrsago Congress has allocated enough money to end the eviction crisis https://pluralistic.net/2021/08/04/eighty-sixed/#helicopter-not-found

#5yrsago Vaccine refusal and health insurance https://pluralistic.net/2021/08/04/eighty-sixed/#risk-management

#1yrago AI software assistants make the hardest kinds of bugs to spot https://pluralistic.net/2025/08/04/bad-vibe-coding/#maximally-codelike-bugs

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 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 (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. 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

Received — 13 July 2026 ⏭

Pluralistic: Why aren't AI companies competing directly with their customers? (13 Jul 2026)

✇Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
By: Cory Doctorow
13 July 2026 at 10:15


Today's links


Three gold rush miners standing around a mule wagon piled high with mining supplies. They are surmounted by a Gold Rush-era advertisement reading 'GOLD MINING will be the leading business in the Northwest this year/EVERY MERCHANT can be prepared to supply his customers and keep his Profits and Money at home by inspecting/OUR LINE. It is complete. Send for our prices. Prompt shipments made.' The three miners' heads have been replaced with the heads of robots ganked from old pulp sf magazines. In the background a young man is performing a joyous headstand. The image has been sepia-toned.

Why aren't AI companies competing directly with their customers? (permalink)

"I often wonder what the Vintners buy/One half so precious as the Goods they sell" -The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám

I first encountered that quote from someone extolling the virtues of bookstores, and it stuck with me, because for most of my childhood, every bookstore visit ended with me broke and wishing I'd had three times as much to spend.

As a larval hyperlexic, I just didn't understand what a bookseller could possibly buy with my money that was better than the books they already had? Of course, then I became a bookseller and discovered that Sturgeon's Law ("90% of everything is shit") applies to a bookstore's wares as much as it does to anything else. I also acquired a monthly rent obligation and discovered just how important money could be.

Nevertheless, Omar Khayyám's question stuck with me, especially when I fell down a years-long rabbit-hole of learning about scams and the finance sector (but I repeat myself). Every get-rich-quick schemer will tell you that they've found the infinite money hack, which they will sell to you for a remarkably reasonable sum. Likewise, every stock picker claims they can outperform a simple low-load index fund, and all they ask of you is a few hundred basis points in exchange for multiplying your wealth beyond the dreams of Creosote. Neither one has a good answer to Khayyám's question: if you can make all the money with your amazing system, why do you need my money?

This is a question that needs to be forcefully put to AI hucksters. In their more expansive moments, the Altmans and Amodeis of the world will tell you that they're planning to teach the word-guessing program so many words that it will wake up and become god. DOGE's broccoli-haired brownshirts laughed in the faces of the NIH lifers who begged them not to vaporize their long-running cancer research projects: "General AI is around the corner and it's going to cure cancer. Cancer research is a waste of money!"

Which all raises the question: if you've truly incubated a foetal demiurge in your "AI lab," why are you offering to sell it to me? What do the AI hucksters buy/One half so precious as the Gods they sell?"

Of course, they might answer, "We need your money now so we can make god later." That's why they want your boss to fire you and replace you with their chatbots and split your wages with your former employer. But this just raises the same question: if you have a chatbot that can do a doctor's job, why sell it to a hospital? Why not just open your own hospital? If you've got a chatbot that can do a tax accountant's job, why sell it to a tax-prep service? Why not just open a tax-prep service? If you've got a chatbot that can teach my kids, why sell it to my local school district? Why not just open a school?

If the chatbot can do the job, and if the chatbot costs less than the worker who does the job today, then the chatbot company can profitably sell services more cheaply than anyone who presently employs that worker, because the chatbot company already owns the chatbot. If you were really on a glide path to creating an all-powerful deity and just needed cash to keep the venture going until the cancer-curing word-guesser awoke from its long slumber, then wouldn't you want as much cash as possible? Why would you voluntarily split the take with some sucky, washed, non-god-generating business from before 2022?

I think the only reason this question doesn't come up more frequently is that we're stewing in what Douglas Rushkoff calls the "go meta" economy, in which the most respectable and smartest business to operate must be as many abstraction layers away from real work as possible. Don't drive a taxi, own a medallion that you rent to the cab driver. Don't own a medallion, start a "rideshare" company. Don't start a rideshare company, invest in a rideshare company. Don't invest in a rideshare company, buy options to invest in a rideshare company:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/09/13/collapse-porn/#collapse-porn

The inverse relationship between doing something useful and making money is deeply ingrained in our economic wisdom. Take the world of online grifters, who don't just peddle get-rich-quick PDFs, they also peddle tools to generate get-rich-quick PDFs, as well as tools to steal other "wealth influencers'" insta videos and deepfake yourself into their pretend private jets:

https://www.404media.co/how-i-bought-a-private-jet-by-selling-10-subscriptions-to-404-media/

The scam economy boasts a bewildering array of ancillary services, like a $150/month service that lets you produce fake screenshots showing vast monthly income on other scam services (November Kelly calls this "The world's most expensive 'inspect element'"):

https://www.patreon.com/trashfuture/posts/faux-high-level-163443872

It's an old truism that in a gold rush, the only people who come out ahead are the people selling the picks and shovels. But that's not true – there's even more money to be made wholesaling picks and shovels to the retailers who operate the frontier mercantiles. Go meta!

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Alaskan_Gold_Mining_Supplies_(1897)_(ADVERT_277).jpeg

Today's economy is dominated by pick-and-shovel wholesalers. America is a gerontocracy drowning in MBAs, while there's no one to do eldercare:

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/why-recruiters-can-t-find-workers-and-new-grads-can-t-find-jobs-it-s-not-ai/ar-AA27K57y

So it's not surprising that we don't ask why these AI god-botherers need our stupid money while they're immanentizing the eschaton. Why would they operate a hospital if they could go meta and sell the doctorbots to the MBAs running the hospital?

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 Pro-lumber industry spoof of The Lorax https://web.archive.org/web/20010721042828/http://www.forestcouncil.org/news/articles/truax1.htm

#25yrsago Remixable vocal tracks from the next Public Enemy release https://web.archive.org/web/20010813195140/http://www.slamjamz.com/slamnews.php?article=7

#20yrsago Wikipedia creates RSS for its posts https://web.archive.org/web/20060718103013/http://www.micropersuasion.com/2006/07/wikipedia_entir.html

#20yrsago Anti-DRM picture-book https://web.archive.org/web/20060721095740/https://dustrunners.blogspot.com/2006/07/pig-and-box.html

#10yrsago The US has spent $122B training foreign cops and soldiers in 150+ countries, but isn’t sure who https://web.archive.org/web/20160713145824/https://theintercept.com/2016/07/13/training/

#10yrsago German free school teaches without grades, timetables or lesson plans https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/jul/01/no-grades-no-timetable-berlin-school-turns-teaching-upside-down

#10yrsago For the first time, a federal judge has thrown out police surveillance evidence from a “Stingray” device https://www.rawstory.com/2016/07/federal-judge-throws-out-evidence-gathered-with-stingray-cell-phone-tracker/

#10yrsago Day on a Device: art made by screenshotting a multitasker’s screen with each context-switch https://www.theverge.com/2016/7/13/12170526/multitasking-phone-laptop-pierre-buttin-art

#10yrsago Remarkably Normal: the true stories of abortion in America https://web.archive.org/web/20160810092901/http://jezebel.com/the-vagina-monologues-but-for-abortion-1783289270/amp

#10yrsago Theresa May performs the Fresh Prince of Bel-Air theme https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xv7Jd94bnOI

#10yrsago UK Labour’s dirty trick excludes 130,000 members from leadership vote https://web.archive.org/web/20160712225142/http://www.itv.com/news/2016-07-12/corbyn-opponents-try-to-fix-vote/

#10yrsago Security researchers: the W3C’s DRM needs to be thoroughly audited https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2016/06/call-security-community-w3cs-drm-must-be-investigated

#10yrsago Help Doctors Without Borders fill in the geodata blanks for vulnerable communities https://missingmaps.org/blog/2016/07/14/mapswipe/

#10yrsago Sign a book of congratulations for America’s new Librarian of Congress https://web.archive.org/web/20160718023555/https://action.everylibrary.org/congratulate_carla_hayden_today

#10yrsago Hungary’s Cold War cartoons were weird and awesome https://globalvoices.org/2016/07/14/the-fascinating-world-of-cold-war-era-hungarian-cartoons/

#10yrsago The ACLU has a roadmap for defeating President Donald Trump’s signature initiatives https://web.archive.org/web/20160715131734/https://action.aclu.org/sites/default/files/pages/trumpmemos.pdf

#10yrsago America’s infrastructure debt is so bad that towns are unpaving roads they can’t afford to fix https://web.archive.org/web/20160713170836/https://www.wired.com/2016/07/cash-strapped-towns-un-paving-roads-cant-afford-fix/

#10yrsago It’s official: the Olympics result in the worst budget overruns of any megaproject https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2804554

#10yrsago Vivendi lobbyist appointed to run copyright for UN agency https://web.archive.org/web/20160717052135/http://keionline.org/node/2614

#10yrsago The long, racist history of Brexiteer Boris Johnson, the new UK Foreign Secretary https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-36792746

#5yrsago Facebook employees stalk users https://pluralistic.net/2021/07/14/who-watches-the-zuckmen/#pecksniffs

#5yrsago Semantic drift versus ethical drift https://pluralistic.net/2025/07/14/pole-star/#gnus-not-utilitarian

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 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 (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. 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

Received — 18 June 2026 ⏭

Pluralistic: AI digital sovereignty risk doesn't exist (18 Jun 2026)

✇Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
By: Cory Doctorow
18 June 2026 at 17:22


Today's links


A 1989 black and white photo of the Berlin Wall; peering over the wall is Microsoft's 'Clippy' chatbot.

AI digital sovereignty risk doesn't exist (permalink)

Back at the height of the blockchain bubble, I made a hobby of pointing out that crypto weirdos were palming a card. I used this formulation:

if: problem + blockchain = problem – blockchain

then: blockchain = 0

https://pluralistic.net/2022/01/30/the-inevitability-of-trusted-third-parties/

You see, blockchain weirdos kept insisting that they could solve problems related to trust and institutional design with "smart contracts." Rather than having to trust a board of directors to steer an organization, you could just have a self-executing institution, the "distributed autonomous organization" or DAO.

So for example, if you want to buy a copy of the US Constitution at a Sotheby's auction, you could set up a DAO to raise and pool the funds, eliminating the need to find trustworthy people to receive, hold and deploy these funds:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ConstitutionDAO

However – and here's where the palmed card comes in – the DAO can't go to Sotheby's and place a bid on the Constitution. Instead, the members of the DAO have to elect a guy to receive all that cash, walk into Sotheby's, get one of those little ping-pong paddles last seen at the State of the Union in Chuck Schumer's withered claw (emblazoned with the brave slogan "You're hurting my fee-fees") and raise the paddle during the bidding.

That guy doesn't have to go to Sotheby's. That guy can simply walk away with all the money. Members of the DAO are trusting this guy with their entire collective treasury. Indeed, since the DAO has no corresponding legal entity, it might even be that members of the DAO can't sue this guy if he steals all their money – and even worse, without a limited liability structure, it might mean that everyone in the DAO can be sued for anything bad this guy does with the money.

Which raises the question: what's the point of building this insanely complex hairball of blockchain-based smart contracts to raise and hold the money if you're just going to hand it to this guy and trust him without limit? Why not just have that guy set up a Zelle account and a Whatsapp group? In other words: the problem that the DAO is trying to solve is the difficulty of trusting people with the keys to the kingdom, but no matter how much blockchain you sprinkle on this DAO, it ends with this one guy walking around with all your money, which he can steal with impunity if he so chooses.

Or, put more succinctly:

if: problem + blockchain = problem – blockchain

then: blockchain = 0

This turns out to be a really good way of assessing policy prescriptions for their soundness and foundation in reality, because – as the blockchain swindle shows us – it's possible to come up with entirely fictitious solutions to entirely real problems. The problem of designing a trustworthy institution that can't be betrayed by its leaders and whose operations don't consume all its resources is a real problem – it's quite possibly the real problem – but adding a DAO does nothing to solve the core problems of institutional design, and actually makes some of those problems worse.

There's another real problem with a fictitious solution that is – surprise! – tied to another tech bubble: digital sovereignty.

It's a genuine problem that everyone in the world (outside of China's sphere of influence) is glued to America's tech platforms. These platforms steal everyone's money and data, and every country has signed a trade deal with the USA promising not to let its own technologists and entrepreneurs go into business making add-ons and complementary goods that remediate the defects in America's tech exports:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/01/29/post-american-canada/#ottawa

What's more, Trump's response to finding himself in this poker game that's rigged entirely in his favor is to flip over the table because he resents having to pretend to play at all (as November Kelly so aptly put it). His incontinent belligerence on the world stage sees him making bids to steal whole countries and he's recruited American tech giants to help him in this chaotic program of lunatic imperialism. When other countries' public officials make decisions that Trump dislikes, he gets companies like Microsoft to disconnect whole institutions from the internet, deleting their files, email archives, calendars and address books, and depriving them of the ability to connect to any service tied to their Outlook accounts:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/04/20/praxis/#acceleration

Which means that if Trump wants to steal Greenland, he doesn't have to roll tanks into Nuuk – he can just brick the country of Denmark. He can shut down all their ministries, every large firm, every household. He can shut down their iPhones and Android devices. He can kill their smart-speakers. He can hormuz the world's supply of Ozempic, Lego and ferociously strong licorice:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/04/04/digital-subjugation/#greenlands-next

It doesn't stop there! Trump can also shut down every tractor!

https://pluralistic.net/2022/05/08/about-those-kill-switched-ukrainian-tractors/

This is the digital sovereignty risk. It's also the digital sovereignty opportunity. If countries repeal the laws that the US bullied them into accepting, laws that protect US tech giants from local competitors who block their plunder of data and money, they can turn America's tech trillions into their own tech billions. As Jeff Bezos likes to say, "your margin is my opportunity":

https://pluralistic.net/2026/01/30/zucksauce/#gandersauce

Meanwhile, repealing these US-protecting laws would enable countries to extract their data from US platforms so they can move it into domestic alternatives, and bypass the software locks that block them from updating phones, cars, tractors and ventilators to protect them from remote killswitches:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/01/01/39c3/#the-new-coalition

The digital sovereignty risk is having your country's government, businesses and industries terminated by Trump. The digital sovereignty opportunity is making billions of dollars by producing and exporting products that defend people from Big Tech plunder and Trumpian killswitches. That is the real world.

But many "digital sovereignty" advocates are living in an imaginary world, in which the digital sovereignty risk is that Trump will shut off their country's access to AI.

This is where the "if problem + blockchain" formulation comes in handy. If Trump shut off Canada's access to Chatgpt, Claude and Grok tomorrow, nothing would happen. No significant business, no federal or provincial ministry, no municipal government depends on these products for anything essential. And if Canada were to build their own local AI to sub in for Chatgpt, Claude and Grok, it would loose tens, if not hundreds of billions of dollars. Worst of all, a national AI strategy does nothing – not one solitary thing – to protect Canada from Trump shutting down our ministries, our companies, or our tractors.

In other words:

If: digital sovereignty + AI = digital sovereignty – AI

Then: AI = 0

If you think AI tools are nifty and want Canada to invest in AI, then first, please stop pretending that this has anything to do with "digital sovereignty." Not only is this a transparent bit of nonsense, it's a dangerous one, because digital sovereignty is a real problem, and AI does nothing to solve it.

If you want a good "national AI strategy," try this: save your money until the bubble bursts, and then buy your GPUs and hire your talent at 10 cents on the dollar and put them to work refining open source models:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/12/05/pop-that-bubble/#u-washington

Buying AI at the top of the market is nuts. That would be like shopping for Aeron chairs and foosball tables in March 2000. If you just sit tight for a couple months, you'll be able to find bankrupt dotcom entrepreneurs selling these at knock-down prices out front of their formerly overpriced office space in the Mission, in the time-honored tradition of former Wall Street millionaires selling apples out of their Rolls Royces:

https://digicoll.lib.berkeley.edu/record/323794

(Literally: I bought a "dining room set" of six $1500 Steelcase Leap chairs in the summer of 2000 from a failed dotcom CEO on Van Ness for $25 a piece – still in the original plastic!)

And in the meantime, please let's stop pretending that digital sovereignty has anything to do with "national AI." If Trump takes away your AI, everything is fine. If Trump takes away your iPhones, Office 365 and tractors, your country grinds to a halt. This is just not that complicated:

If: digital sovereignty + AI = digital sovereignty – AI

Then: AI = 0

(Image: Armin Kübelbeck, CC BY-SA 4.0, modified)

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 Napster boss's American Library Association keynote https://web.archive.org/web/20010623201456/https://www.salon.com/tech/wire/2001/06/17/napster/index.html

#20yrsago Flickr: we’ll give full access to competitors – if they reciprocate https://www.flickr.com/groups/central/discuss/72157594165399644/#comment72157594167782546

#20yrsago Report from a concert by a Serbian war-criminal https://web.archive.org/web/20060613081324/http://blog.b92.net/blog/22

#20yrsago European podcasters to WIPO: Stay away from us! https://web.archive.org/web/20060619224538/https://www.bloggernews.net/2006/06/european-podcasters-team-up-to-lobby.html

#15yrsago KFC: support diabetes research by buying an 800 calorie, 56 spoonful of sugar “Mega Jug” https://web.archive.org/web/20110619031415/https://theweek.com/article/index/216462/irony-alert-buy-kfcs-800-calorie-soda-to-support-diabetes-research

#10yrsago Terrorist who murdered Jo Cox shouts: “Death to traitors” in court https://www.csmonitor.com/World/2016/0618/Accused-killer-of-MP-Jo-Cox-makes-defiant-court-statement

#10yrsago Judge orders release of man convicted while his public defender was handcuffed https://web.archive.org/web/20160617172242/http://www.reviewjournal.com/crime/judge-releases-man-who-received-jail-sentence-while-lawyer-was-handcuffs-video

#10yrsago Hambone virtuoso https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YMJeaZtgwng

#10yrsago Google Fiber now forces subscribers into binding arbitration; days left to opt out https://web.archive.org/web/20160617141759/https://consumerist.com/2016/06/16/google-fiber-copies-comcast-att-forces-users-to-give-up-their-legal-right-to-sue/

#1yrago The Immortal Choir Holds Every Voice https://pluralistic.net/2025/06/18/anarcho-cryptid/#decameron-and-on

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.

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

Received — 17 June 2026 ⏭

Pluralistic: The (real) dead economy theory (17 Jun 2026)

✇Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
By: Cory Doctorow
17 June 2026 at 20:27


Today's links

  • The (real) dead economy theory: Vibes and memestocks, all the way down.
  • Hey look at this: Delights to delectate.
  • Object permanence: Jim Baen has had a stroke; Blame Apple for iTunes DRM; France v the internet; "Rotters"; 1901 undersea cables; Washington Post wants Trump coverage blackout; Taxes are for the little people; Gamer lifecycle; Ghanian postal song; "What Lies Beneath the Clock Tower": Murder of Jo Cox; 12 year old doxed by anti-vaxers; Hong Kong bookseller recants forced confession.
  • Upcoming appearances: LA, Menlo Park, Toronto, NYC, Philadelphia, Chicago, London, Edinburgh, Brighton, 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.


The Federal Reserve building, tilted at an eldrirtch angle, wreathed in mist. In the foreground looms an abandoned cemetery. Overhead flies a blood-red moon in a cloudy, ominous sky.

The (real) dead economy theory (permalink)

Here's a fun fact about Elon Musk: in 2020, his (nominal) net worth was $20b, and today it's $1t (nominally). But that's not the fun fact; this is: everything he's done since 2020 was a flop.

As John Quiggin writes, the pre-2020 Musk was the Musk of Tesla, batteries and Starlink. The post-2020 Musk is the Musk of Starship, robotaxis, Cybertrucks and Twitter – a string of commercial flops and assets that literally exploded. I would add that post-2020 Musk created the world's hungriest money-furnace, an automated child-porn production tool called "XAI":

https://crookedtimber.org/2026/06/15/one-big-grift/

Quiggin declares that this is the era in which "financial markets fail in the task of valuing assets accurately," and "the institutional structures that are supposed to make them work have given up trying." Nor did this start with the Spacex IPO. As Quiggin writes, Bitcoin and other cryptos were once shunned by nominally sober financial institutions like Goldman Sachs, but today, not only do all the big banks offer crypto services, people have largely stopped calling it cryptocurrency because no one is even pretending that it's a form of money. It's a tradeable collectible, not even particularly useful for paying for crimes or laundering money.

Spacex is just a continuation of the logic of crypto, in which something is valuable because some people think other people will pay more for it in the future, and not because it does useful things:

https://johnquiggin.com/2018/02/09/bitcoin-kills-the-efficient-market-hypothesis/

That's the logic of the whole market today. AI – the world's money-losingest technology – attracts investment at the expense of everything else. When horrified NIH lifers begged the DOGE boys not to shut down long-running medical research projects, Musk's broccoli-haired brownshirts laughed in their faces, saying we don't need cancer research because "GAI" is almost here and it will cure cancer. You could hardly ask for a better example of investing in vibes over value than shutting down real cancer research to free up money for teaching more words to the word-guessing machine because it's about to become God and cure cancer.

Today, Goldman Sachs isn't merely all-in on crypto – it's all-in on the Spacex IPO. As Quiggin writes, the bank has signed off on Musk's claim that "Musk's ragbag of assets" will grow one hundredfold in the next 40 months.

Quiggin's short essay has been rolling around in my mind since I read it a couple days ago. Then, yesterday, I spotted this essay by Owen McGrann entitled "The Dead Economy Theory":

https://www.owenmcgrann.com/p/the-dead-economy-theory

The perfect name for this phenomenon! Or so I thought. Then I read McGrann's article, and discovered that it's yet another piece asking how the economy will work after AI takes all of our jobs because AI is absolutely going to do that and there's no point in even questioning whether that will happen.

Look, thought experiments about how to deal equitably with labor displacement in the face of automation are all well and good. I'm a science fiction writer, that stuff is my bread and butter.

But applying "dead economy theory" to the blithe acceptance of the claims of AI pitchmen is a terrible waste of a killer coinage. The true risk of AI to your job isn't: "an AI will do your job." It's: "an AI salesman will exploit your boss's infinite horniness for replacing mouthy workers with pliable machines to sell him a chatbot that can't do your job, and then your boss will fire you and replace you with that inept, defective chatbot."

By the same token: the real "dead economy" risk isn't that all the productive labor will be done by chatbots owned by a habitual liar and eminently guillotineable billionaire like Sam Altman. The actual dead economy risk is that our institutions and markets will continue to move capital from productive activity into memestocks, vibes, and bubbles.

We could do "AI cancer research" by producing tools that automate gnarly multivariant analysis problems for cancer researchers. But what we're actually doing is defunding cancer research (especially any research into "systemic" cancer because studying systemic things is "woke") to free up fiscal space so we can build data-centers and make Musk into a trillionaire.

That's not just a dead economy – it's one that'll kill everyone you love and everything that matters.

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 Jim Baen, science fiction publisher, has had a serious stroke https://nielsenhayden.com/makinglight/archives/007658.html#007658

#20yrsago Why Apple is to blame for iTunes DRM https://web.archive.org/web/20060620004534/http://vitanuova.loyalty.org/NewsBruiser-2.6.1/nb.cgi/view/vitanuova/2006/06/15/1

#20yrsago Lifecycle of a gamer https://www.raphkoster.com/2006/06/16/the-lifecycles-of-a-player/

#20yrsago Spammer: I’ll buy MySpace profiles with more than 20k contacts https://web.archive.org/web/20060619062837/http://skibrooklyn.blogspot.com/2006/06/easy-money-sell-your-friends.html

#20yrsago Psychology of bad probability estimation: why lottos and terrorists matter https://web.archive.org/web/20060627174933/https://server1.sxsw.com/2006/coverage/SXSW06.INT.20060311.DanielGilbert.mp3

#15yrsago Copyright complaint kills Peanutweeter https://web.archive.org/web/20110620093750/https://www.wired.com/underwire/2011/06/peanutweeter-dmca-takedown/

#15yrsago Work song of Ghanian postal workers cancelling stamps https://blogfiles.wfmu.org/KF/0512/Ghana_Post_Office.mp3

#15yrsago What Lies Beneath the Clock Tower: steampunk choose-your-own-adventure https://memex.craphound.com/2011/06/17/what-lies-beneath-the-clock-tower-steampunk-choose-your-own-adventure/

#15yrsago French proposal: any URL to be arbitrarily blacklisted without due process https://www.laquadrature.net/en/2011/06/15/the-entire-internet-under-governmental-censorship-in-france/

#15yrsago Rotters: YA horror novel about grave-robbing chills, thrills, delights https://memex.craphound.com/2011/06/15/rotters-ya-horror-novel-about-grave-robbing-chills-thrills-delights/

#15yrsago Map of undersea cables from 1901 https://web.archive.org/web/20110220121138/http://www.dephx.com/2010/11/map-of-undersea-cables-from-1901.html

#15yrsago Copyright complaint kills Peanutweeter https://web.archive.org/web/20110620093750/https://www.wired.com/underwire/2011/06/peanutweeter-dmca-takedown/

#15yrsago Work song of Ghanian postal workers cancelling stamps https://blogfiles.wfmu.org/KF/0512/Ghana_Post_Office.mp3

#15yrsago What Lies Beneath the Clock Tower: steampunk choose-your-own-adventure https://memex.craphound.com/2011/06/17/what-lies-beneath-the-clock-tower-steampunk-choose-your-own-adventure/

#10yrsago Supreme Court ruling is a blow to copyright trolling business-model https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2016/06/attorneys-in-copyright-case-on-resold-textbooks-inch-closer-to-2m-payday/

#10yrsago The Orlando shooting, according to the Congressmen who took the most money from the NRA https://web.archive.org/web/20160617143716/https://theslot.jezebel.com/heres-how-the-congressmen-who-have-gotten-the-most-cash-1782083985

#10yrsago British Pro-EU MP murdered in the street by man shouting “Britain first!” https://web.archive.org/web/20160616212235/https://theintercept.com/2016/06/16/british-referendum-campaign-suspended-killing-pro-europe-lawmaker-jo-cox/

#10yrsago 12 year old makes devastating video about anti-vaxxers, gets doxxed https://skepchick.org/2016/06/anti-vaxxers-dox-a-child-critic/

#10yrsago Report from the prison-industrial complex’s leading trade show https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/jun/16/us-prisons-jail-private-healthcare-companies-profit

#10yrsago Your cable operator is spying on you and selling the data from your set-top box https://publicknowledge.org/public-knowledge-defends-consumer-privacy-in-set-top-box-data-complaint-to-fcc-ftc/

#10yrsago Not robots: youth unemployment caused by late retirement, driven by pension precarity https://thebaffler.com/salvos/exit-planning-geoghegan

#10yrsago Oakland mayor denies firing police chief over officers who statutorily raped teen sex-worker https://eastbayexpress.com/badge-of-dishonor-top-oakland-police-department-officials-looked-away-as-east-bay-cops-sexually-exploited-and-trafficked-a-teenager-2-1/

#10yrsago Paramount tells judge that they’re still suing over Star Trek fan-film https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/business/business-news/paramount-says-star-trek-fan-903497/

#10yrsago $40,000/year private school sues school for low-income kids for $2M over “Commonwealth” https://www.bostonglobe.com/metro/2016/06/16/can-school-lay-claim-commonwealth-its-name-back-bay-institution-believes-can/WHwiaaPEn04cIY6uxXjoiO/story.html

#10yrsago Wisconsin Congresswoman: mandatory drug tests for anyone claiming $150K in itemized tax-deductions https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/jun/16/gwen-moore-drug-test-rich-for-tax-deductions

#10yrsago Hong Kong bookseller: I was forced to confess on China TV https://www.bbc.com/news/av/world-asia-china-36552672#5yrsago

#10yrsago Washington Post calls for “blackout” on Trump coverage, appeals to RNC https://web.archive.org/web/20160615113350/https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/the-right-response-to-donald-trump-a-media-blackout/2016/06/14/2868a0e0-3256-11e6-8758-d58e76e11b12_story.html

#10yrsago Security economics: black market price of hacked servers drops to $6 https://www.wired.com/2016/06/xdedic-server-trading-forum-kaspersky/

#10yrsago Lower-case “x” as a gender-neutral typographic convention https://kottke.org/16/06/x-marks-gender-neutral

#5yrsago Taxes are for the little people https://pluralistic.net/2021/06/15/guillotines-and-taxes/#carried-interest

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.

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

❌