BRUSSELS — The EU border agency Frontex is suspending a support program for deported migrants after its budget for the year ran out earlier than anticipated, emails seen by POLITICO show. 

The border agency paused new applications for reintegration support under its program on Oct. 2 after estimating that costs had “reached a level that does no longer ensure full financial coverage,” according to an email sent by Executive Director Hans Leijtens to staff on that date.

The program, which has operated since 2022, offers financial assistance, healthcare, vocational training and counseling to people who are returned to their home countries after being refused the right to stay in the EU. Reintegration support forms part of the EU’s plan to boost returns of unsuccessful asylum-seekers.

The suspension comes as the EU seeks to step up deportations from the bloc — a leading pillar of EU migration policy, and the object of new legislation adopted earlier this month — and weeks before the European Commission is expected to propose expanding the mandate of the border agency, including its role in returns and reintegration.

Frontex cannot resume the program without additional cash. The agency asked the Commission for more funds, but is waiting for clarity on the EU budget for 2027, and the next seven-year budget starting in 2028, the emails said.

“There is no point in talking about a more ambitious European return policy without also talking about the resources needed to deliver it,” Frontex spokesperson Chris Borowski told POLITICO. “Ambition and funding have to go hand in hand.”

Borowski confirmed that the agency had suspended new cases, but stressed that individuals already been accepted into the program wouldn’t be affected and that Frontex would also continue to offer EU countries “other forms of assistance” on returns, such as operational and technical support.

“Returns do not end when a plane lands. Helping people rebuild their lives after returning to their home countries is an important part of making migration management work. It takes planning, people and money,” he said.

With 2,368 new cases per month on average, the agency took on significantly more migrants seeking reintegration support than it expected. Cases in September were 63% higher than Frontex’s target, according to Leijtens’ email to staff. In the first half of this year, the agency took on around 75% more cases than it did in the same period last year.

In previous years, Frontex was able to assign additional funds from other parts of its budget, the email says — signaling the agency has had to search to find the cash to keep the program running in the past.

“Frontex does not have the necessary appropriations to cover the needs further as MFF allocations did not consider that Frontex would be expected to take over EURP funding at the scale we have seen today,” Leijtens wrote, referring to Multiannual Financial Framework, the EU’s seven-year budget.

The agency has raised the issue with the Commission but “no further commitments could be made onwards,” according to the email.

The program’s suspension raises questions about the future of the bloc’s migration approach. Reintegration is “the key ingredient” to making the EU’s returns strategy work, Lukas Gehrke, the director of the U.N.’s migration organization’s global office in Brussels, told POLITICO.

Forced returns are expensive and come with a higher risk of human rights infringements, whereas reintegration support boosts voluntary returns, reduces people’s propensity to attempt to reach the EU again, and tends to ease cooperation with the country to which they return, he argued.

“That means every euro spent on return with reintegration is a euro spent in a more sustainable way,” Gehrke said.

‘Do not argue or defend the EU policy’

In emailed guidance on how to communicate the suspension to migrants who applied for support, seen by POLITICO, staff were told to “acknowledge the institutional problem” with reintegration program funding “so the returnee does not feel personally targeted or punished.”

Counselors should be transparent, validate migrants’ disappointment, wait for their emotions to pass and shift the conversation to what they could still do upon their return, the guidance read, advising: “Do not argue or defend the EU policy.”

Potential returnees “may feel deceived, leading to anger, despondency, or complete withdrawal from the return process,” it also warned.

Expanding the agency’s Frontex mandate featured in the Commission’s five-point plan to address sudden mass movements of people, in the aftermath of migration crisis in the Spanish exclave of Ceuta. Besides stepping up the agency’s role in returns and reintegration, the plan also noted an intention to charge Frontex with monitoring the bloc’s external borders and add capacity to quickly deploy forces in the event of an emergency.

“The Commission will propose that Frontex becomes a genuinely European capability with the scale, tools and agility to support Member States wherever and whenever needed,” Commission President Ursula von der Leyen wrote in a letter to EU leaders ahead of a summit on Thursday and Friday, where migration is likely to be a flashpoint.

The plans have already raised concerns that the border agency’s mandate is being expanded more quickly than its resources.

Strengthening the border agency’s emergency response capacities, for example, comes with a tradeoff as staff that can be deployed on a moment’s notice cannot be deployed elsewhere, Leijtens, Frontex’s executive director, said at an event earlier this month.  “If they’re in Narva in Estonia, you can’t use them in Italy right now.”

Zoya Sheftalovich contributed to this report.

Today's links

• Priceful: So worthless we can tell you what it's worth.
• Hey look at this: Delights to delectate.
• Object permanence: Nasdaq allows post-9/11 penny stocks; USAF can shoot down civilian aircraft; TSA bans calling Kip Hawley an idiot; Wells Fargo sued for firing fraud-refusing tellers; The real AI apocalypse; Encryption didn't cause 9/11; Bat-person costume; British Library on DRM and CC; NYT v OWS; "The Brave Little Toaster"; Bounty for Trump's tax return; Chinese real-estate bubble; Corbyn's Labour conference speech; HP blinks; "Are you calling me a racist?"; "Yuge"; Debts that can't be paid won't be paid.
• Upcoming appearances: Edmonton, Boston, Brighton, Virtual, South Bend, Hudson, Calgary, Winnipeg, Paris, OVancouver, Victoria, Ottawa, Kilkenny, Montreal.
• Recent appearances: Where I've been.
• Latest books: You keep readin' em, I'll keep writin' 'em.
• Upcoming books: Like I said, I'll keep writin' 'em.
• Colophon: All the rest.

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Priceful (permalink)

Digital rights activists have long railed at the use of the term "IP," criticizing it for being deceptively imprecise and also rhetorically dishonest. I get where these objections are coming from, but I think they're misguided.

Start with "deceptively imprecise." "IP" covers a lot of legal ground, from the "big three" of copyright, trademark and patent, to a whole arcane bestiary: anticircumvention, noncompete, trade secrecy, nondisparagement, database and publicity rights, and more. Each of these has a radically different policy basis and radically different contours.

Take copyright and trademark. Copyright is designed to allow companies (and the creators they hire or contract with) to commercially exploit creative works. In the US, copyright is a creature of the Constitution, Article 1, Section 8, Clause 8:

https://constitution.congress.gov/browse/essay/artI-S8-C8-3-2/ALDE_00013064/

Fun fact: there are only two clauses in the Constitution that include a rationale: the Second Amendment ("A well regulated Militia") and the copyright clause ("To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts"). Everything else is one of those "truths" that the framers "held to be self-evident." In these two cases, they decided to explain their thinking.

So the point of copyright is to incentivize investment in creative works, and its mechanism is a set of limited rights over those works, for limited times. Copyright expires, and it is subject to "limitations and exceptions," including "fair use," a very broad set of highly situational rights to use works even if the rightsholder objects:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/02/07/aimsters-revenge/#effective-means-of-access-control

Now consider trademark: trademark could not be more different from copyright! Trademark is a consumer protection rule: it empowers companies to sue competitors who engage in deceptive conduct that could confuse their customers. The idea here is that if you get a pair of fake Nikes that fall apart within a matter of days, or eat at a fake McDonald's whose food is (somehow?) even worse than regular McDonald's food, you are unlikely to take action. You're not going to hire a lawyer over a hamburger.

So trademark deputizes companies to sue on behalf of customers who have been or might be deceived by unscrupulous competitors whose merchandising and marketing are likely to confuse the public. Unlike copyright's "fair use," trademark has other defenses, like "nominative use" ("This case fits an iPhone" is not a trademark violation, provided it's true). Also, many trademark claims can be dispensed through simple disclaimers: for example, my debut novel Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom features a prominent notice informing readers that it wasn't endorsed by the Walt Disney Company. No confusion, no problem.

Unlike copyright, which (eventually) expires, a trademark can carry on for so long as it is associated with a company's products or services. Procter & Gamble's moon logo has enjoyed trademark protection since the mid-19th century, 50 years before the first federal trademark law, and 100 years before the Lanham Act, the current federal trademark law.

This is where the imprecision comes in. There are many activities that are legal under trademark and prohibited under copyright, and vice-versa. By claiming an "IP" violation, you can induce confusion in your target's mind about which rule you're discussing.

If you say, "That's my copyrighted image and your use of it is confusing my customers," I might reply, "Well, that sounds like a trademark issue. Do you have a trademark, too?" Whereas if you say, "That's my IP and you're confusing my customers," that's some tactically useful ambiguity. I can't know if you're talking about copyright, patent, trademark, or, you know, a sui generis broadcaster's right under the Treaty of Rome.

I might walk away from my creative, expressive activity even though it's totally legal, because you've got me to conflate the restrictions of copyright and trademark. This makes "IP" a kind of bully's charter, whose imprecision lets you invoke all weird rights we call "IP," no matter whether they apply to the situation at had.

That's the first objection, then: this deceptive and corrosive imprecision. It's a fair point. But then there's the other objection: the use of the world "property" to describe this motley assortment of regulatory fiats.

"Property" is the established catechism of the Church of Late-Stage Capitalism. "Property" is the most sacrosanct right in public orthodoxy, elevated above every other right. My property right lets me destroy perfectly good food while you starve outside my door:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/07/08/wilhoitian/#human-rights-v-property-rights

Before "IP" came into wide usage, we didn't generally try to group this miscellany under one umbrella, but when we did, the term we used wasn't "IP," it was monopolies. These regulatory fiats were (correctly) considered to be government-granted, government-enforced monopolies. The adoption of IP was a branding exercise, a very successful attempt to transform the public's perception of these rules as natural, freestanding property rights that the law merely ratified – not a set of regulatory gifts designed to protect the self-interest of commercial firms.

I get it. Between the tactical confusion and the invocation of "property," "IP" feels like terrain worth fighting over. Once you let your adversary frame the debate in terms of property, you've already lost half the battle.

For many years, I bought into this. But lately, I've grown more skeptical of this matter. Back in 2020, I published a long essay proposing that far from being confusing or ambiguous, "IP" has a crisp, widely understood meaning: "Any law that lets me reach beyond the walls of my company to exert control over my competitors, critics and customers":

https://locusmag.com/feature/cory-doctorow-ip/

This is the common factor that binds together that mess of legal oddments, from trademark/copyright/patent to nondisparagement and noncompetes to anticircumvention and personality rights.

I think this is both true and a powerful framing. It correctly puts IP in the category of "things corporations do to control you and the rest of the world."

I've been trying this out for six years now, and I think it's a winner. But it was only a month or two ago that I realized there was a way in which the use of "property" can also be used to undermine the bullying, censorship and extraction of corporations wielding their IP.

Property rights may be our state religion, but they are also the worst tool for several important jobs that need doing. Think of privacy: the standard for privacy is for you to click through an "agreement" that nominally trades your privacy rights for some product or service. Google spies on you constantly for ad-targeting, you get to see Youtube videos (after watching a bunch of ads).

This is a catastrophe. Virtually every vendor you engage with, from your landlord to your corner deli, wants you to install an app whose terms of service requires you to sign away all of your privacy rights, forever, in exchange for nothing. You get the same sandwich, but you "pay" more, in the form of all your private data, which is flushed into the unregulated data-broker sector to be weaponized against you in a thousand ways, including higher prices and lower wages:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/07/11/your-risk/#my-reward

Worse: because you have "entered into a contract" to "sell" your privacy rights, anything you do to claw those rights back is violation of your end of the contract. Using a tracker blocker like Privacy Badger makes you the cheater:

https://privacybadger.org/

Even if you could get actually paid for the use of your private information, the sums involved would round to zero. Companies like Facebook make pennies from your private data, and inflict harm on you that totals up to hundreds of times more than they actually make. The commercial surveillance industry are poster children for corruption: concentrated gains that are far exceeded by diffuse harms:

https://locusmag.com/feature/cory-doctorow-zucks-empire-of-oily-rags/

But just because privacy doesn't fit well into a property rights framework, it doesn't follow that there's no way to do privacy well. We have lots of other rights frameworks besides property, and it's taken the concerted work of generations to get us to forget that these rights exist at all.

Imagine if our privacy regime was modeled on the human rights system we rely on when it comes to sex, bodily autonomy and consent. In this framework, no one is allowed to do anything to you unless you give your continuous, informed consent, which you can withdraw at any time. "I changed my mind" is a perfectly valid thing to say in the middle of a sexual encounter. It's not a violation of your contract. Quite the opposite: someone who ignores your withdrawal of consent is guilty of criminal assault.

If we apply a consent regime (not a property regime) to privacy rights, then the entire commercial surveillance industry would cease to exist. There's no way you can give "informed consent" to a laundry-list of terms of service that are as impenetrable as they are lengthy, and even if you did, you could withdraw that consent at any time, and Facebook et al would have to immediately stop processing your private information and disgorge it.

Like all forms of property rights, "IP" has severe limitations that can only be addressed by applying a different framework to your disputes. Think of the way that the expansion of copyright has failed creative workers. For 50 years, we've monotonically expanded copyright in every dimension, so that today, copyright covers more works, restricts more uses and inflicts higher statutory penalties.

Over those 50 years, media companies have gotten richer and more profitable while the creative workers whose art these media companies sell have gotten poorer, both in real terms and as a share of the earnings our labor generates for our bosses. This seems like a paradox at first, but really, it's just a built-in feature of property law: that people who have assets but lack bargaining leverage end up selling those assets for peanuts.

In a market dominated by five publishers, four studios, three labels, two app companies and one ebook/audiobook company, giving a creative worker more to bargain with is just giving them more to bargain away. Giving us more copyright is like giving a bullied schoolkid more lunch money: no amount of lunch money will get that kid fed.

This is why arguments about copyright and AI training are such a dead-end. Even if you stipulate that AI training isn't fair use (far from a certainty), or if you want legislative action to establish that every creator gets to decide whether their work can be used to train an AI, you won't help creative workers win the class struggle against AI companies.

Remember the Hollywood writers' strike? It's the only time in history that creative workers have defeated AI, so it's worthy of close study. Specifically, remember that workers on those picket lines weren't striking against the AI companies, they were striking against the studio bosses, artist-hating billionaires like Warner's David Zaslav and Disney's Bob Iger, whose careers have been defined by a relentless quest for ways to pay creative workers less. It was studio bosses, not AI bosses, who wanted to replace screenwriters with AI.

These are the same studio bosses who are now suing AI companies for copyright infringement. That's not because the studio bosses want to get rid of AI models or keep them out of the writers' room. They absolutely want to fire writers and replace us with AI. The studio lawsuits over AI training want to make training a licensable activity so that the studios can get paid for the use of "their" training data to make models that they absolutely want to use to fire most of their writers and then knock down the wages of the survivors of the AI layoffs.

Many creative workers have cheered on these media companies as they chase the AI companies through the courts, and some artists' groups have even submitted amicus briefs on their behalf. But the New York Times – a company that has repeatedly used the dirtiest union-busting tactics imaginable against its workers – is not suing OpenAI to ensure that creative workers don't lose wages to AI. They're suing to make sure that the Times gets a bigger piece of the action when that happens.

If the Times, Disney and Warner prevail, they will immediately amend their standard, non-negotiable contracts to require every creative worker who does any work for them to exclusively and irrevocably sign over the right to train AI with our labor, and the resulting models will be used to attack our jobs and wages.

In other words, the media company/AI company lawsuits are a fight to see who gets the biggest piece when creative workers get eaten for dinner. We don't want either side to win: we want to be taken off the menu altogether.

Which is exactly what the Hollywood writers accomplished, and they didn't use copyright to do it. They used something far more important and powerful: labor rights.

Like all the Hollywood guilds, the Writers Guild of America has a nearly unheard-of labor right. They are able to engage in something called "multi-employer bargaining," itself a weak form of "sectoral bargaining," which is when all the workers in a sector bargain with all the bosses in that sector. Sectoral bargaining was made practically illegal under the 1947 Taft-Hartley Act, and its last vestiges are to be found in Hollywood.

But as vestigial as Hollywood's unique labor rights system may be, it was still enough to let thousands of freelancers beat back AI in their writers' rooms. Indeed, they even retained the right to use (or not use) AI if they chose, without any threat to their wages or headcount:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/10/01/how-the-writers-guild-sunk-ais-ship/

This is something you can only get with labor rights, not copyright and certainly not property rights. If we limit ourselves to property rights, the only question we need to ask is "Who owns that writers' room?" And since the answer is "the studio" then whatever the studio says goes.

It's precisely because labor rights get workers benefits at their bosses' expense (and copyright cannot) that we have been subjected to generations of pro-copyright messaging, told that we aren't workers at all – we're small businesses, LLCs with MFAs!

Creative workers have been taken for a ride. We've been told that we're not workers, so we shouldn't advocate for labor rights. We've been told that copyright is better than labor rights, because copyright is a property right. It puts a price on your work, which means you can get paid.

But prices are things we assign to things that are so worthless that we can say what they're worth. The most valuable things in the world aren't property, and describing them as property would cheapen them. Human beings aren't property. The fact that we're not property doesn't mean we're worthless, it means we're priceless. That's why "murder" isn't "theft of life" and "rape" isn't "theft of sex." Your life and bodily integrity are worth too much to be bought and sold.

Property rights have a role to play in the assertion of human rights and other rights, but it is a subordinate role. Property rights might someday end the barbaric practice of homeless encampment sweeps and the confiscation of all the worldly goods of the poorest, most vulnerable people in our midst:

https://projects.propublica.org/impact-of-homeless-sweeps-lost-belongings/

But property rights must be subordinate to human rights, otherwise they'll let landlords evict tenants willy-nilly.

Which is all to say, by all means, let our adversaries claim "IP." Let them admit that they have this doctrine by which they attempt to assert control over their critics, customers and competitors. They can assert control, and we'll keep autonomy and consent. Let them say that they have property rights over things so cheap they can have a price. They can be priceful, we can be priceless.

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Hey look at this (permalink)

• Chop up your books https://attainablefelicity.mattkirkland.com/20260915/cut-up-your-books.html

• Levyra-deepsound https://github.com/LUC4N3X/Levyra-deepsound

• I Saw the Best Minds of My Generation Destroyed by Google https://bruces.medium.com/i-saw-the-best-minds-of-my-generation-destroyed-by-google-by-bruce-sterling-2006-57683dc6f902

• Weave — Open, public-purpose digital infrastructure https://weave.coop/

• Common Circuits https://commoncircuits.sh/

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Object permanence (permalink)

#25yrsago Nasdaq allows sub-$1 shares to avoid mass delisting after 9/11 https://www.nytimes.com/2001/09/28/business/moratorium-by-nasdaq-on-listing-rules.html

#25yrsago USAF makes it much easier to shoot down civilian aircraft https://www.chicagotribune.com/2001/09/28/rules-revised-for-downing-airliners/

#25yrsago Don't blame encryption for 9/11 https://web.archive.org/web/20010930005338/http://news.cnet.com/news/0-1272-210-7320099-1.html

#20yrsago Disneyland parking structure repeatedly robbed at gunpoint https://web.archive.org/web/20061031031505/https://www.ocregister.com/ocregister/homepage/abox/article_1291046.php

#20yrsago HOWTO: Make a bat-person costume out of an old umbrella https://www.evilmadscientist.com/2006/how-to-build-a-better-bat-costume/

#20yrsago American Airlines bans in-flight kissing https://web.archive.org/web/20061004214421/https://www.newyorker.com/talk/content/articles/060925ta_talk_collins

#20yrsago British Library takes on Creative Commons and DRM https://web.archive.org/web/20061022143612/https://www.bl.uk/news/pdf/ipmanifesto.pdf

#20yrsago TSA: calling Kip Hawley an idiot is not allowed https://www.flyertalk.com/forum/checkpoints-borders-policy-debate/606142-i-detained-tsa-checkpoint-about-25-minutes-today.html#post6440005

#15yrsago Who’s occupying Wall Street, and why is the NYT only interested in the kooks? https://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/25/nyregion/protesters-are-gunning-for-wall-street-with-faulty-aim.html?_r=2&hp

#15yrsago Podcast: my story “The Brave Little Toaster” https://dn710605.ca.archive.org/0/items/Cory_Doctorow_Podcast_212/Cory_Doctorow_Podcast_212_Brave_Little_Toaster.mp3

#10yrsago The dubious upsides of having a Syrian passport https://globalvoices.org/2016/09/29/i-am-lucky-to-have-a-syrian-passport/

#10yrsago State of California imposes 12-months’ worth of sanctions on Wells Fargo https://web.archive.org/web/20161003194157/http://www.treasurer.ca.gov/news/releases/2016/20160928.asp

#10yrsago 2600 Magazine offers $10K for Trump’s tax return https://web.archive.org/web/20160930162135/https://motherboard.vice.com/read/hacker-zine-says-it-will-pay-10000-for-trumps-tax-returns

#10yrsago Black voter registration is inversely correlated with black death at police hands https://www.wired.com/2016/09/intriguing-link-police-shootings-black-voter-registration/

#10yrsago Chinese real estate bubble is “biggest in history” https://web.archive.org/web/20160929135157/http://money.cnn.com/2016/09/28/investing/china-wang-jianlin-real-estate-bubble/

#10yrsago Notes from Jeremy Corbyn’s barn-burning speech at the Labour Party conference https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/8-key-points-jeremy-corbyns-8936364

#10yrsago Douglas County, OR using dirty ballot tricks to finish off the slow murder of its libraries https://web.archive.org/web/20160930155357/https://action.everylibrary.org/douglascounty

#10yrsago HP blinks, says it will restore printer functionality, but there’s a LOT more it needs to do https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2016/09/dont-hide-drm-security-update

#10yrsago The Doonesbury Trump retrospective proves that Garry Trudeau had Drumpf’s number all along https://memex.craphound.com/2016/09/29/the-doonesbury-trump-retrospective-proves-that-garry-trudeau-had-drumpfs-number-all-along/

#10yrsago Ex-Wells employees who were fired for NOT committing fraud launch $2.6B lawsuit https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2016/09/26/495454165/ex-wells-fargo-employees-sue-allege-they-were-punished-for-not-breaking-law

#10yrsago Inside a multimillion dollar fake Kindle book scam https://www.zdnet.com/article/exclusive-inside-a-million-dollar-amazon-kindle-catfishing-scam/

#10yrsago Wells Fargo execs will lose a few millions out of the hundreds of millions they got for abetting massive fraud https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2016/09/wells-fargo-ceo-stumpf-hit-with-41-million-in-clawbacks-head-of-community-bank-dinged-19-million.html

#10yrsago Youtube’s new “offline first” product for India treats telcos as damage and routes around them https://blog.youtube/news-and-events/youtube-go-youtube-reimagined-for-next/

#5yrsago Shelter is a toxic asset https://pluralistic.net/2021/09/27/lethal-dysfunction/#yimby

#5yrsago Democrats, health care monopolies, and market failures https://pluralistic.net/2021/09/27/lethal-dysfunction/#luxury-bones

#5yrsago Wells Fargo can't stop criming https://pluralistic.net/2021/09/29/jubilance/#too-big-to-jail

#5yrsago "Are you calling me a racist?" https://pluralistic.net/2021/09/29/jubilance/#tolerable-racism

#5yrsago Debts that can't be paid, won't be paid https://pluralistic.net/2021/09/29/jubilance/#debt

#1yrago The real (economic) AI apocalypse is nigh https://pluralistic.net/2025/09/27/econopocalypse/#subprime-intelligence

#1yrago Plenty of room at the bottom (of the tech stack) https://pluralistic.net/2025/09/28/works-well/#fails-well

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Upcoming appearances (permalink)

• Edmonton: Elbows Up (Edmonton Public Library), Sep 28
  https://www.epl.ca/blogs/post/elbows-up-with-cory-doctorow/

• Boston: The Post-American Internet: Possibilities for a new internet created by an American Hermit Kingdom (MIT Media Lab), Sep 30
  https://www.media.mit.edu/events/the-post-american-internet-possibilities-for-a-new-internet-created-by-an-american-hermit-kingdom/

• Boston: Rethinking Our Relationship with AI, Sep 30 (Emtech)
  https://event.technologyreview.com/emtech-future-2026/detailed-agenda

• Boston: The Paradox of Enshittification and Reverse Centaurs (Harvard Berkman Klein), Sep 30
  https://cyber.harvard.edu/events/running-harder-falling-faster-paradox-enshittification-and-reverse-centaurs

• Brighton: Digital Sovereignty and the Post-American Internet (Green Party Conference), Oct 3
  https://www.openrightsgroup.org/events/digital-sovereignty-and-the-post-american-internet/

• Virtual: How to govern technology in a multipolar digital world (Connecting Current), Oct 6
  https://connectingcurrent.tech/how-to-govern-technology-a-multipolar-digital-world/

• South Bend: An Evening With Cory Doctorow (Notre Dame), Oct 6
  https://franco.nd.edu/events/2026/10/06/an-evening-with-cory-doctorow/

• Hudson, OH: Hudson Library, Oct 7
  https://engagedpatrons.org/EventsExtended.cfm?SiteID=3850&EventID=596952&PK=

• Calgary: Wordfest, Oct 8
  https://wordfest.com/2026/show/wordfest-presents-cory-doctorow-2026/

• Winnipeg: McNally Robinson, Oct 9
  https://www.mcnallyrobinson.com/event-18991/An-Evening-with-Cory-Doctorow

• Paris: Slow Tech Summit, Oct 15
  https://slowtechsummit.com/

• Vancouver: Read, Resist, Repair, Rejoice (Vancouver Writers Festival), Oct 19
  https://writersfest.bc.ca/festival-event-2026/01

• Victoria: Munro's Books, Oct 20
  https://www.munrobooks.com/events/6113620261020

• Vancouver: Life After AI (Vancouver Writers Festival), Oct 22
  https://writersfest.bc.ca/festival-event-2026/46

• Ottawa: Life After AI (Ottawa Writers Festival), Oct 24
  https://writersfestival.org/event/life-after-ai

• Kilkenny (Kilkenomics), Nov 6-8
  https://kilkenomics.com/

• Vancouver: Enshittification (Sid Williams Theatre Society), Nov 10
  https://www.sidwilliamstheatre.com/events/cory-doctorow-talks-enshittification/

• Vancouver: BC Policy Solutions Gala, Nov 12
  https://bcpolicy.ca/gala/

• Montreal: World Science Fiction Convention, Sep 2-6
  https://montreal2027.ca/en

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Recent appearances (permalink)

• How to Think About AI—Before It’s Too Late (Daniel Solove)
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_0xR3uEgGcc

• Could Tech Bosses Destroy Life As We Know It? (Politics JOE)
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PL4VktU0SgY

• Are 'AI Apocalypse' Warnings Just Marketing? (What's Left)
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IXd9HwIE5bo

• The Real AI Threat Isn’t What You’ve Been Told (The Tea with Myriam François)
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vc8It00fRsA

• Fascists may come after the AI bubble bursts (You&AI)
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J2WN64aQeYQ

• What Would a Normal Person Do (Trashfuture)
  https://www.patreon.com/trashfuture/posts/what-would-do-169247456

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Latest 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/

• "Canny Valley": A limited edition collection of the collages I create for Pluralistic, self-published, September 2025 https://pluralistic.net/2025/09/04/illustrious/#chairman-bruce

• "Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It," Farrar, Straus, Giroux, October 7 2025
  https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374619329/enshittification/

• "Picks and Shovels": a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about the heroic era of the PC, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), February 2025 (https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250865908/picksandshovels).

• "The Bezzle": a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about prison-tech and other grifts, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), February 2024 (thebezzle.org).

• "The Lost Cause:" a solarpunk novel of hope in the climate emergency, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), November 2023 (http://lost-cause.org).

• "The Internet Con": A nonfiction book about interoperability and Big Tech (Verso) September 2023 (http://seizethemeansofcomputation.org). Signed copies at Book Soup (https://www.booksoup.com/book/9781804291245).

• "Red Team Blues": "A grabby, compulsive thriller that will leave you knowing more about how the world works than you did before." Tor Books http://redteamblues.com.

• "Chokepoint Capitalism: How to Beat Big Tech, Tame Big Content, and Get Artists Paid, with Rebecca Giblin", on how to unrig the markets for creative labor, Beacon Press/Scribe 2022 https://chokepointcapitalism.com

---

Upcoming books (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:

• “Once Is Enemy Action,” a science fiction novel about the origins of modern technofascism. Friday's words: 525 (19747 total).

• "The Post-American Internet," a sequel to "Enshittification," about the better world the rest of us get to have now that Trump has torched America. Fourth draft completed. Submitted to editor.

• A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING

---

This work – excluding any serialized fiction – is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license. That means you can use it any way you like, including commercially, provided that you attribute it to me, Cory Doctorow, and include a link to pluralistic.net.

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

Quotations and images are not included in this license; they are included either under a limitation or exception to copyright, or on the basis of a separate license. Please exercise caution.

---

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"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

Today's links

• Post-political: What a "leftist" is.
• Hey look at this: Delights to delectate.
• Object permanence: MSFT x OSCON; Parental spyware; "Resurrection Man"; Brexit do-over petition; Workplace email spying; Record label internet death penalty; News should be cheap, free and chaotic; "Jughead".
• Upcoming appearances: London, 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.

---

Post-political (permalink)

There's plenty of reasons to be skeptical of centrists who bemoan "political polarization" and call for a politics that abandons the "tribalism of left and right."

Obviously there's the false equivalence: on the right, you have fascists who want to send masked, armed goons into the streets to beat, kidnap and murder your neighbors. On the left, you have calls for higher taxes, unions, environmental impact reviews for data-centers, and an end to the genocide in Gaza.

"Leftist extremism" is moving some zines around:

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2026/jun/24/prairieland-texas-ice-protests-zines

Right wing extremism is attempting the overthrow of the government, murdering brown people in gulags, and the earth's richest man slaughtering the world's poorest children for the lulz:

https://hsph.harvard.edu/news/usaid-shutdown-has-led-to-hundreds-of-thousands-of-deaths/

"Horseshoe theory" (the idea that the far right and the far left actually bend around to meet each other) is bullshit:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/02/26/horsehoe-crab/#substantive-disagreement

The reality is that the right and left have large, substantive disagreements that are matters of life and death. Anyone dismissing these as "tribalism" doesn't know what "left" and "right" mean. At best, they have mistaken a collection of cultural signifiers – pronouns, MMA, brands of beer – for politics.

Mistaking cultural signifiers and identity markers for politics is centrism's most dangerous pathology, the thing that makes centrism the handmaiden of the right. If you think identity markers are politics, then you'll be tempted to think the answer to a world run by 150 rich, white, cis straight guys is to replace half of them with women, POCs and queer people. The difference between the left and the right isn't the identities of the ruling class – it's whether we have a ruling class at all.

I collect definitions of "right" and "left." There's Corey Robin's definition from The Reactionary Mind, that conservatism is the belief that some people were born to rule, and others to be ruled over, and that any attempt to elevate the latter group to positions of power (through civil rights movements, affirmative action, etc) will result in dire misrule and disaster:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/07/22/all-day-suckers/#i-love-the-poorly-educated

This explains how the right can encompass white nationalists (rule by white people), Hindu nationalists (rule by high-caste Hindus), libertarians (rule by bosses), imperialists (rule by military aggressors), etc. It also explains the right's obsession with learning the racial and gender markers of anyone involved in a plane crash or other disaster: "See, the oil tanker was being piloted by a DEI hire when it crashed into that bridge!"

Another important definition is Wilhoit's Law:

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

https://pluralistic.net/2025/08/26/sole-and-despotic-dominion/#then-they-came-for-me

This one hardly needs explanation in this era of "it's not a crime if the president does it," where Alex Jones can owe billions to the parents of dozens of murdered children and somehow not have to pay or give up his assets:

https://www.status.news/p/infowars-the-onion-alex-jones-ben-collins

But when it comes to a "post-politics that is neither right nor left," the definition I turn to most often comes from science fiction writer Steven Brust, who once told me:

"Left" and "right" have had the same meaning since the French Revolution. If you want to know if someone is on the left or the right, ask them, "What is more important: human rights or property rights?" If they say "Property rights are a human right," then they are on the right.

https://pluralistic.net/2021/03/16/wage-theft/#ppp

That's it. That's the crux. If you think that property rights are a tool for achieving human rights, then you're on the left. You might support the right of farmers to block attempts to expropriate them via eminent domain in order to build a data center, or the right of people to not have their homes or devices searched by cops, or a library's right to own and archive digital books, even if the publishers insist that ebooks are never "sold," merely "licensed."

If property rights are a tool to achieve human rights, then property rights can be set aside when they impede other rights. Human beings have the right to health care, which is why we should have taken away the pharma companies' patents and copyrights, ending vaccine apartheid and letting the poor world make its own vaccines:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/05/25/the-other-shoe-drops/#quid-pro-quo

Human beings have the right to shelter. If your town has a million empty homes and a million homeless people, there's an obvious solution. At the very least, you can tax the shit out of empty homes to discourage the creation of derelict, empty blights:

https://www.liverpoolecho.co.uk/news/liverpool-news/owners-homes-left-empty-more-28622796

Human beings have the right to food. If a cartel claims that you may not legally sell your 100,000lbs of nectarines, you can just give them away and tell the cartel to fuck off:

https://apnews.com/article/california-farmer-nectarines-lawsuit-patent-4f7bc8ab185e8b9cbdd6d6ad4f2aabd1

As Brust says, this fight is as old as the French Revolution. It's literally the plot of Les Miz ("In days gone by, I stole a loaf of bread in order to live").

Note that this framework leaves plenty of room for disagreement among leftists: we can disagree about who should get taxed and how, when a company should be ordered to destroy its ill-gotten loot and when that loot should be divided up among its victims, and what to do about empty houses and homeless people. We can disagree about reparations, about collectivization and co-operatives, about land reform. Very (very!) few leftists want to abolish property, but to be a leftist is to agree that property is only ever a means, and never an end.

In systems thinking, we are counseled that the most profound and durable changes come from shifts in paradigms, from which all rules, laws and arrangements flow:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/05/12/donella-meadows/#paradigmatic

"Left" and "right" represent two radically different paradigms. The right's paradigm is that property rights are human rights, which cashes out to "property rights are the only human right." If property rights are a human right, then I can burn down my orchard and laugh as you starve outside the gates. If property rights are human rights, I can leave an apartment building empty while you freeze to death on its sidewalk. If property rights are human rights, I can fill my factory with death-traps and insist that the workers I kill freely chose to assume that risk (as economists would say, they have a "revealed preference" for being killed at work):

https://pluralistic.net/2026/03/30/players-of-games/#know-when-to-fold-em

Leftists view property rights as a tool, like laws, or regulations, or polls, or voting. Used well, these tools can produce prosperity for all. But "voting" and "laws" aren't good unto themselves. The Swiss practice of voting on whether your neighbors qualify for citizenship is barbaric:

https://www.bbc.com/news/newsbeat-38595807

Good regulations and laws are good, but simply passing any law is stupid and gets you into terrible trouble, even if the stupid law you've passed is designed to solve a real problem:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/06/23/destroy-the-village/#to-save-it

Viewed as tools, property rights are perfectly useful ways of achieving the primary purpose of a civilization: to safeguard the human rights of its people. Viewed as ends unto themselves, property rights are a terrible danger to our civilization and species.

If you believe property rights are tools, then you can pass laws banning corporations from electioneering:

https://sos.mn.gov/media/3k4hu2if/minnesota-election-laws-statutes-and-rules.pdf

If you believe property rights are human rights, then you end up supporting unlimited dark money spending in elections:

https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/25pdf/24-621_h315.pdf

If you believe property rights are tools, you can order landlords who want to ban their tenants from installing balcony solar to fuck off. If you believe property rights are human rights, then landlords can force their tenants to pay every dime the fossil fuel industry demands of them. "Property right as tool" allows you to defend a farmer's right to install a wind-farm, and still, to block a data-center from installing a gas turbine on its own land.

"Post-political" movements are made up of people who don't know what politics are. A "centrist" is ultimately a rightist, because the foundation of rightism is the supremacy of property. It is the ideology that breeds hereditary aristocracy ("property is a human right" means that it's a violation of your human rights to expect you to work for a living if you emerged from a lucky orifice). It's the ideology that breeds oligarchy.

Politics aren't a bunch of cultural signifiers or identity markers. Politics aren't about who rules – it's about whether we are ruled at all, or whether we are free.

(Image: Lewis Clarke, CC BY-SA 2.0, modified)

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Hey look at this (permalink)

• Hell Is Other People https://locusmag.com/feature/commentary-cory-doctorow-hell-is-other-people/

• Incarcerated People Lose Treasured Media When Prisons Change Tablet Contracts https://truthout.org/articles/incarcerated-people-lose-treasured-media-when-prisons-change-tablet-contracts/

• Jay Rosen’s Internet Archive: an Introduction https://pressthink.org/2026/07/jay-rosens-internet-archive-an-introduction/

• Zohran Mamdani on the Promise of America https://jacobin.com/2026/07/zohran-mamdani-independence-day-address

• The official website of Nand to Tetris courses https://www.nand2tetris.org/

---

Object permanence (permalink)

#25yrsago Why Microsoft was invited to OSCON https://web.archive.org/web/20010701102931/http://www.oreilly.com/news/osconint_0601.html

#25yrsago The Extent of Systematic Monitoring of Employee E-mail and Internet Use https://web.archive.org/web/20010711204804/http://www.privacyfoundation.org/workplace/technology/extent.asp

#20yrsago BPI: We should be able to cut off your Internet https://memex.craphound.com/2006/07/10/bpi-we-should-be-able-to-cut-off-your-internet/

#20yrsago Technology for parents to spy on kids https://web.archive.org/web/20060711084212/http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2006/07/09/BIGMOTHER.TMP

#20yrsago Dale Bailey's "The Resurrection Man" https://memex.craphound.com/2006/07/09/southern-gothic-science-fiction-collection/

#10yrsago A law prof responds to students who anonymously complained about #blacklivesmatter tee https://backspace.com/notes/2016/07/law-professors-response-to-black-lives-matter-shirt-complaint.php

#10yrsago UK government rejects Brexit do-over petition with 4.1m signatures https://web.archive.org/web/20160709101514/https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/brexit-government-rejects-eu-referendum-petition-latest-a7128306.html

#10yrsago New Zealanders raise millions to buy beach and donate it to the public https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-36759321

#10yrsago Jughead: Zdarsky’s reboot is funny, fannish, and freaky https://memex.craphound.com/2016/07/10/jughead-zdarskys-reboot-is-funny-fannish-and-freaky/

#5yrsago Biden's Right to Repair will include electronics, too https://pluralistic.net/2021/07/10/unnixing-the-fix/#r2r-plus-plus

---

Upcoming appearances (permalink)

• London: Idler Festival, Jul 11
  https://www.idler.co.uk/festival/

• Edinburgh International Book Festival with Jimmy Wales, Aug 17
  https://www.edbookfest.co.uk/events/the-front-list-cory-doctorow-and-jimmy-wales

• Sydney: The Festival of Dangerous Ideas, Aug 23-24
  https://festivalofdangerousideas.com/cory-doctorow/

• Melbourne: Enshittification at the Wheeler Centre, Aug 25
  https://www.wheelercentre.com/events-tickets/season-2026/cory-doctorow-enshittification

• Brighton: The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI with Carole Cadwalladr (Brighton Dome), Sep 8
  https://brightondome.org/whats-on/LSC-cory-doctorow-the-reverse-centaurs-guide-to-life-after-ai/

• London: The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI with Riley Quinn (Foyle's Picadilly), Sep 9
  https://www.foyles.co.uk/events/enshittification-cory-doctorow-riley-quinn

• South Bend: An Evening With Cory Doctorow (Notre Dame), Oct 6
  https://franco.nd.edu/events/2026/10/06/an-evening-with-cory-doctorow/

---

Recent appearances (permalink)

• Can AI be Saved From Capitalism? (Everyday Anarchism)
  https://www.everydayanarchism.com/192-can-ai-be-saved-from-capitalism-cory-doctorow/

• Lawfare Daily
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T1KIwaYRs1g

• How to Think About AI (Organized Money)
  https://www.organizedmoney.fm/p/how-to-think-about-ai-with-cory-doctorow

• Breaking Points
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VJmUbkRqXeE

• A.I. Enshittifies Everything (Slate)
  https://slate.com/podcasts/what-next-tbd/2026/06/cory-doctorow-thinks-a-i-is-overvalued-and-overrated-and-still-a-threat

---

Latest 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/

• "Canny Valley": A limited edition collection of the collages I create for Pluralistic, self-published, September 2025 https://pluralistic.net/2025/09/04/illustrious/#chairman-bruce

• "Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It," Farrar, Straus, Giroux, October 7 2025
  https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374619329/enshittification/

• "Picks and Shovels": a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about the heroic era of the PC, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), February 2025 (https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250865908/picksandshovels).

• "The Bezzle": a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about prison-tech and other grifts, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), February 2024 (thebezzle.org).

• "The Lost Cause:" a solarpunk novel of hope in the climate emergency, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), November 2023 (http://lost-cause.org).

• "The Internet Con": A nonfiction book about interoperability and Big Tech (Verso) September 2023 (http://seizethemeansofcomputation.org). Signed copies at Book Soup (https://www.booksoup.com/book/9781804291245).

• "Red Team Blues": "A grabby, compulsive thriller that will leave you knowing more about how the world works than you did before." Tor Books http://redteamblues.com.

• "Chokepoint Capitalism: How to Beat Big Tech, Tame Big Content, and Get Artists Paid, with Rebecca Giblin", on how to unrig the markets for creative labor, Beacon Press/Scribe 2022 https://chokepointcapitalism.com

---

Upcoming books (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