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Received — 26 August 2026 ⏭

Pluralistic: The age of disinvention (25 Aug 2026)

✇Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
By: Cory Doctorow
26 August 2026 at 05:21


Today's links


A 1960s family living room in which a mom, dad and two kids are mesmerized by a cabinet-style TV. The image has been altered. The TV has an early 1990s VCR atop it. The TV screen is displaying a cross-sectioned human head with brains and spine on display. A huge fist has materialized in the room, with bloody spiked knuckle-dusters, smashing into the VCR. The oil painting over the sofa has been replaced with a pulp image of a male head, its cranium removed and replaced by a dome. Inside the dome is a red eight-segment VCR clock, displaying 12:00. The background in the painting is a tangle of cassette tape. The whole image's colors have been boosted, giving it an overexposed look.

The age of disinvention (permalink)

They disinvented the VCR. You might think that the reason we don't have VCRs anymore is because VCRs were supplanted by DVDs, PVRs and streaming, but that's not the case. They had it in for the VCR from the very start, and they never stopped trying to kill it. Eventually, they succeeded.

The VCR was one of the fastest-adopted technologies in the history of the world, and it was disruptive. The fact that you could record shows to watch later, skip the ads, build a library of your favorites, even loan your tapes around – it drove the studios and broadcasters nuts. The VCR hit the market under a cloud of litigation, and the lawsuits went all the way up to the Supreme Court, culminating with 1984's Betamax decision, whose key precept is that a new technology doesn't violate copyright law if it can "sustain a substantial, non-infringing use":

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_Corp._of_America_v._Universal_City_Studios,_Inc.

As important as the VCR was as a device – creating the home video market, which begat DVDs, then streaming – the Betamax decision is even more important.

You see, copyright is a "fact-intensive" doctrine, which means that determining whether a use is or isn't a copyright violation can be a complex and expensive process of gathering facts, weighing conflicting expert views to arrive at a judgment. If the rule was that new technologies couldn't be introduced unless you could prove that they would never infringe copyright, we wouldn't have any digital technology. Indeed, most technologies would be illegal under that standard. You can infringe copyright with VCRs, photocopiers, hard drives, tape recorders, scanners, computers, phones… Hell, you can infringe copyright with an X-ray machine, a saxophone or a pair of ballet slippers!

There's clearly ways you can use a VCR to infringe copyright: for example, you can record a TV show to a tape, then sell that tape to someone else. There's also ways you can use a VCR that clearly do not infringe copyright: you can lug a camcorder around your kid's birthday party, pester the kids by recording them, then watch the footage later in your living room. Then there's an infinite universe of ways to use a VCR that might infringe copyright, depending on the specifics: recording the Super Bowl while you're at work, then inviting your workmates over to watch it after your shift ends; creating a library of kids' shows for the day-care you run out of your living room; making a highlight reel of your favorite politician's campaign speeches. Anyone who says, "Oh every judge would always call that legal‡ under every circumstance" is admitting they don't understand how copyright works.

‡ Or illegal.

This is a feature, not a bug. Copyright is a fact-intensive doctrine because it is a flexible doctrine. Since the printing press, new ways of mechanically reproducing and transmitting information have appeared at an accelerating pace, and judges are asked to figure out the rules for these new technologies long before legislatures come to grips with them and pass special, tech-specific laws.

Copyright's future-proofing lies in this flexibility, which the Supremes (correctly) recognized in 1984 with the Betamax decision. By ruling that any technology that had "non-infringing uses" was presumptively legal to create and market, the Supremes laid the legal foundation for all the digital tools that followed since.

Crucially, Betamax ensured that last year's tech lottery winners wouldn't get to prevent next year's winners from emerging. This year's admirals are always last year's pirates, and they insist that what they did to their predecessors was progress, while anyone who tries to do the same thing to them is a thief. The sheet music composers condemned the record player, recording artists decried the radio, broadcasters sued over cable and cable operators sued over VCRs. This never stopped: Sony – the company that invented the Betamax and defended it all the way to the Supreme Court – went on to sue Napster!

There's nothing inherently virtuous about "innovation." It's perfectly possible to "innovate" new ways to spy on people and rip them off. But if you're trying to launch a new product in a category that already has clear winners, the best way to convince people to take a chance on you is by making a valuable and useful product.

"Disruptors" are best when they move value from existing companies to those companies' customers. The first TV remotes let people change the channel when an ad came on, making their TV better at broadcasters' expense. The broadcasters had to struggle to adapt, which is fine. They're not charities, after all: they're in business to make money for themselves, and they're only going to give you as much value as they have to.

Competitors fight enshittification: any time a company that you do business with takes something away from you, a competitor can win your business by giving it back. If Youtube doubles the number of ads they expect you to watch – "charging" a higher attentional "price" – an ad-blocking competitor can bargain back on your behalf, allowing you to counteroffer with "how about if I just don't watch any ads?"

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/07/adblocking-how-about-nah

Inside every company, there are fair, honest people, and there are greedy, shitty people. Companies that face competitors are more likely to listen to the workers who want to give customers a fair shake. But if a company has no competitors, those good people can no longer say, "This is a losing strategy because it will open the door to competitors who will make us poorer." Without competitors, the argument against enshittification becomes, "I would feel bad about myself if we did that." This argument always loses to the bad guys, whose argument is, "We will all get richer if we do this."

That's why Google enshittified search: they had no competitors, so the worst ideas of the worst people at Google could be shown to make the most money, and so Google deliberately made its search results worse:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/24/naming-names/#prabhakar-raghavan

Of course, companies can also face consequences from the government, but the fewer competitors a company has, the easier it is for that company to capture its regulators:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/06/05/regulatory-capture/

Competition makes companies weaker, giving the public and democratic institutions more power. Competition makes the public richer at the expense of corporate shareholders, who have less money to spend on the project of subverting democracy.

That's the VCR story all over. The VCR shook up a sclerotic, stagnant TV and film industry, created the home video market, and opened up new distribution channels that allowed all kinds of new creative workers to reach new audiences, either directly or through a fiercely competitive new constellation of distributors who fought each other to offer them the best possible deal.

The media companies who were forced to adapt to the VCR never forgave it for forcing them to develop new, multi-billion dollar businesses without permission. As a Hollywood executive once put it to me, his goal was "a polite marketplace" where no one ever rudely forced him to disgorge more value to viewers and performers:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/01/02/the-internet-heist-part-i/

The executives who made billions after losing their bid to ban the VCR wanted to ensure that no one would ever be so "impolite" as to force them to make billions of dollars against their will ever again. They partnered with electronics firms to ensure that the VCR's successor technologies would only have those features that they approved.

That's why DVD players are not DVD recorders: the consortium that developed the DVD embedded "hook IP" in the technology. "Hook IP" is a term of art: it means any trademark, copyright or patent that is incorporated into a technology so that anyone who wants to implement that technology must license the hook IP; under the terms of those licenses, doing anything that disrupts the business plans of the consortium is banned.

The DVD consortium's hook IP had all kinds of bizarre licensing terms, like "region coding" – a requirement for DVD players to register the country in which they were sold and to check whether the DVDs you tried to play were from a compatible country. If not, the license terms required the DVD player to refuse to play your discs.

Region coding is an "anti-feature," a technology developed at great expense for which there is no market. Sure, some DVD player owners who had never shopped abroad for a DVD didn't care about region coding. But for customers who bought a disc on vacation, or moved from one country to another: region coding was terrible.

So there were customers who didn't care about region coding, and customers who hated region coding, but there were zero DVD player owners who wanted region coding. No DVD manufacturer could advertise that their products come with region coding. If there were two equivalent DVD players in the market, identical except that one had region coding and the other didn't, the "region-free" player would win. Region-coding is an anti-feature.

Anti-features aren't the only deliberate defects we find in DVD players. The consortium's hook IP licenses didn't just require anti-features, they also banned useful features…including recording. Long after the price of read/write optical drives plummeted to pocket-change, there was still no such thing as a home DVD recorder that would let you stick a spindle full of discs next to the TV and use them to record all your favorite shows.

Shortly after the DVD player emerged, Congress created the most powerful hook IP of all: "anti-circumvention law." Under anti-circumvention law, it's a literal crime – a felony – to modify or reimplement a technology without permission from the manufacturer. In 1998, Bill Clinton signed America's landmark anticircumvention law, the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, section 1201 of which establishes a five-year prison sentence and a $500,000 fine for "bypassing an access control":

https://pluralistic.net/2026/01/14/sole-and-despotic/#world-turned-upside-down

After DMCA 1201, all a manufacturer had to do was add an "access control" (like a password or an encryption key) to their device, and modifying that device in any way could land you in prison. As microchips plummeted in price, all kinds of devices and services acquired these "access controls," so that it became a crime to refill an ink cartridge, fix a tractor, or connect your insulin pump to your glucose monitor. Congress never passed a law criminalizing this conduct: rather, they gave companies the ability to write their own criminal code. Simply by adding an access control to a device, they could felonize any conduct that displeased them.

Every video format and distribution system that succeeded the VCR shipped with an access control: DVDs, Blu-ray and HD DVD, satellite and digital cable, and, of course, streaming video. This is how they disinvented the VCR. Once every video had an access control, it had "hook IP" that could be used to control all technologies that were capable of receiving, storing, or playing back that video.

Remember Tivo? The first digital "personal video recorders" were true successors to the VCR. They could record any broadcast or cable program, store it forever and fast forward through the ads. They were all "feature" and nary an "anti-feature" in sight. That's because they only worked with analog cable (which, being analog, didn't have "access controls" that qualified them for DMCA 1201 consideration) and broadcast signals (sent over the public airwaves on the condition that they not be scrambled).

Digital cable disinvented the Tivo. Every post-VCR digital video signal came with hook IP, and so the Tivos (and other PVRs) had to get permission before they could store and play back modern videos. To get that permission, PVR makers had to agree to a whole suite of anti-features, such as a "broadcast flag" that told it which shows you could and could not record. Even if you did record a show, PVR makers also supported more flags, such as an "expiry date" flag that forced your recorder to delete your shows after a set period, a "no skip" flag that blocked you from fast-forwarding through ads, and "geofence" flags that stopped you from playing back your stored videos based on which country you found yourself in.

Today, if you have a PVR, you probably rent it from your cable provider (who can use DMCA 1201 to block other PVRs from working with your cable provider). It's probably slow, with a confusing user interface, and it only records an ever-dwindling subset of the shows your cable company transmits. Notwithstanding that it's a genuinely shitty piece of technology, it's still awful that you can't buy it – the fact that you have to rent that crapgadget month after month means that you're paying for it several times over.

But at least cable signals have PVRs. For the majority of video we interact with, there's no PVR – not even a shitty, broken one. You can't record your Netflix videos, your HBO Max videos, your Disney Plus videos or your Prime videos. Recording a video off a streaming service has the same copyright status as recording a show off your analog cable had in 1984 when the Supreme Court handed down the Betamax decision, but because there's an "access control" on video streams, it's nevertheless a felony to make a VCR for a streaming service.

You know how streaming companies play all kinds of bullshit games, like dropping videos from their catalog? Even worse: the Amazon Prime scam where Christmas cartoons are all included in your "free" streaming tier from March-October, but cost $3.99 to watch from November to February. All of these ills can be cured with the VCR, a technology that was first marketed in 1971, a technology we have disinvented. If you could record those shows with a device that took orders from you, a device without anti-features, Amazon would derive no benefit playing these grinchy little games. If they played those games anyway, you could beat them.

It's not just VCRs. Anti-circumvention law led to the enshittification of everything from tractors to ventilators, phones to smart speakers, thermostats to games consoles, all of which are bristling with hook IP that lets their manufacturers decide what you can do with your own property.

All of this is extremely relevant at this moment, thanks to Trump's tariffs. For more than a quarter century, the US Trade Representative has arm-twisted every American trading partner into enacting an anti-circumvention law like DMCA 1201. All over the world, governments promised to lock up entrepreneurs and technologists if they dared to disenshittify America's defective tech exports. In exchange, these governments were promised free trade with the USA: tariff-free access to American consumers.

That's where Trump comes in. From the moment his "Liberation Day" tariffs landed, any country that upheld its anti-circumvention laws was sacrificing its national competitiveness, resiliency and integrity in exchange for nothing. Trump reneged on America's obligations to its trading partners, just like he reneged on every deal he's ever made:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/07/22/table-flipper/#graveyard-of-indispensable-nations

The good news is, this means we can have VCRs again! All it will take is for one (or more) countries to decide to lift its one-sided restrictions on making technologies "capable of sustaining a substantial non-infringing use" and wait for one (or more) entrepreneurs to figure out that reintroducing the VCR is a winner, just like it was in the 1970s, when the VCR was the fastest-adopted technology in the history of the world.

It's not just VCRs, of course. For a generation, entire product categories have been suppressed, all over the world. There is a whole CES (good) worth of products that are truly innovative (good) waiting to be brought to market.

The last time there was this much low-hanging fruit on offer was after WWII, where six years' worth of bombings, austerity and neglect provided endless opportunities to repair, rebuild and replace the worn, crumbling built environment, vehicle fleet and personal belongings of people all over the world.

After a quarter-century of innovation prohibition, there are dozens of lucrative, easily perfected technologies just waiting to be made: the dongle that jailbreaks your phone or console and installs a third-party app store, the dongle that flashes your printer so it takes generic ink; the dongle that lets your mechanic install generic parts in your car and lets farmers fix their tractors. Our whole digital world has been wrapped in chains by rent-extracting monopolists who gloried in their power to use hook IP to deprive you of the right to use your property in ways you see fit, writing private laws that made it a crime to displease them.

A generation of allowing companies to shift value from their customers and suppliers to themselves has made them richer, us poorer, and everything more expensive. They've accumulated vast wealth at our expense. Their margins are our opportunity.

The VCR was a great idea 55 years ago. 55 years later, it's an idea whose time has come – again.

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 Metacrap https://people.well.com/user/doctorow/metacrap.htm

#15yrsago Slashdot’s CmdrTaco steps down https://meta.slashdot.org/story/11/08/25/1245200/Rob-CmdrTaco-Malda-Resigns-From-Slashdot

#15yrsago Chalk memorial for Jack Layton in front of Toronto’s New City Hall https://www.flickr.com/photos/lewolf011/6076393292/

#15yrsago Coordinated multinational ATM fraud nets $13M in one night https://krebsonsecurity.com/2011/08/coordinated-atm-heist-nets-thieves-13m/

#5yrsago Vaccinate workers at (almost) any price https://pluralistic.net/2021/08/26/chained-to-the-mast/#vaccine-leave-hesitancy

#1yrago By all means, tread on those people https://pluralistic.net/2025/08/26/sole-and-despotic-dominion/#then-they-came-for-me

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:

  • “Once Is Enemy Action,” a science fiction novel about the origins of modern technofascism. Today's words: 544 (9802 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.

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Received — 14 August 2026 ⏭

Pluralistic: Capital formation (14 Aug 2026)

✇Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
By: Cory Doctorow
14 August 2026 at 13:10


Today's links


Three weird male figures' heads. The figures have gigeresque throats made from dripping stalagmites and stalactites, and their crania have been replaced with clear domes. The three figures overlap, each smaller than the previous. In the rightmost, largest dome is the portrait of Ben Franklin seen on a US$100 bill. The middle dome contains a 19th century bank with Grecian columns. The left dome contains the US capital. The background is a heavily processed monochrome image of wiring in an early mainframe.

Capital formation (permalink)

Funny thing about competition: there's both a pro-market and an anti-market case for a competitive system.
https://pluralistic.net/2026/08/13/one-chokable-throat/#too-clever-by-half

If your theory is that markets deliver prosperity by spurring businesses to provide the superior products and services at lower prices needed to attract and retain workers and customers, then competition is a must-have. Without competitors, companies are "too big to care":

https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/04/teach-me-how-to-shruggie/#kagi

Meanwhile, if you think that the pressure of greed will always drive companies to cheat, and want companies held in check by democratically accountable lawmakers and enforcers, then you also want competition, because otherwise, disorganized sectors of hundreds of small businesses collapse into oligarchic cartels. Members of these cartels cease to compete directly with one another and instead collude to rip off workers and customers, leaving them aslosh in ready cash they can mobilize to capture regulators, securing an enshittogenic policy environment that reflects the easily arrived-at consensus that's only possible when you boil a sector down to a small handful of firms, each of them "too big to jail":

https://pluralistic.net/2022/06/05/regulatory-capture/

In other words: if your ideal is a world of high-quality products and services, produced by workers laboring under fair conditions, delivered to consumers at a fair price, then you want competition. Competition scares some people into running their businesses ethically; and competition ensures than an unethical operator can be held to account by government agencies charged with protecting workers and consumers.

Once you understand the role of competition as a counter-oligarchic check on corporate power, the rise of Big Tech and its authoritarian turn becomes much easier to understand.

Tech is uniquely hospitable to competition thanks to the intrinsic properties of digital computers. Formally, computers are "Turing-complete, universal von Neumann machines," which is to say that every computer can run every valid program. This means that any enshittificatory gambit assayed by a tech company – say, locking generic ink out of your printer; or blocking third party app stores for your phone or console; or sticking a dozen extra ads before every Youtube video – is technically doomed.

Every time a tech boss introduces a 10' pile of shit to a digital product or service you rely upon, they induce rival technologists to create 11' ladders made of code that they can costlessly, instantaneously distribute to every one of the enshittifier's customers and suppliers:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/07/adblocking-how-about-nah

This explains the dynamism of early tech, which saw companies rising quickly to conquer their markets, only to yield to the temptation to extract more from customers and/or suppliers while underinvesting in improvements to their products and services. When this happened, new digital companies sprang into being, reverse-engineering the incumbents' products and launching "complementary goods" – plug-ins and mods – that fixed the defects in dominant products, usurping the market leader's place in the workflows and pocketbooks of its customers and suppliers:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/10/adversarial-interoperability

For many years, this "adversarial interoperability" worked its magic on the burgeoning tech sector, creating a state of constant ferment where people who wanted to improve and then supplant the state-of-the-art were able to cheaply enter and capture the market, only to be taken down by the next generation of disenshittifiers when they, too, inevitably yielded to the temptation to replace innovation with extraction. Every pirate wants to be an admiral – but every admiral must then confront the pirates who rush in to fill the vacuum they create when they switch sides.

But that system of beneficial disruption was itself disrupted – not by technology, but by policy. In 1998, Bill Clinton signed the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). Section 1201 of the DMCA makes it a felony to practice adversarial interoperability, establishing penalties of $500k and five years in prison for people who reverse engineer and modify products:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/01/14/sole-and-despotic/#world-turned-upside-down

DMCA 1201 created a one-way ratchet that progressively narrowed the possibilities for tech competition. As more and more US companies re-engineered their products so that modifying them would give rise to DMCA 1201 liability, American startups gave up on disrupting Big Tech, re-orienting towards "acqui-hires," when a startup's highest purpose is to be absorbed by a giant, sclerotic incumbent that mothballs its products and assigns its engineers to work on incremental maintenance (or worse, enshittification) for its dominant offerings.

Big Tech's pirates turned admirals, free to "disrupt" the weak and poor, while enjoying the legal entitlement to destroy anyone who dared to disrupt them. They embodied Frank Wilhoit's definition of conservativism: a class that the law that "protects but does not bind" alongside a class that the law "binds but does not protect":

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

It was fine for them to "move fast and break (our) things," but forbidden for us to "move fast and break kings." Disruption for thee, never for me.

Nor was this a merely American sickness. Having neutered domestic competitors that might threaten its tech incumbents, the US government set out to prevent other countries from challenging its world-girdling tech empires. For the past 25 years, the US Trade Representative has prioritized getting anticircumvention laws on the books of all of America's trading partners as a condition of free trade with the US, with the result that today, virtually every country in the world has a law that makes it illegal to disrupt American tech giants:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/05/05/three-is-a-magic-number/#coalitions

Anti-circumvention law is so obviously, manifestly an invitation to enshittify that when governments enacted these laws, they felt the need to include some kind of "safety valve" they could point to when critics raised anti-circumvention's potential for abuse. The world's would-be enshittifiers figured out a devious method to insert clauses into anti-circumvention that looked like anti-abuse measures, but which were, in practice, useless ornaments.

Many anti-circumvention laws – including DMCA 1201 – have a process for creating "exemptions" to the ban on reverse-engineering and modifying a device. The way these exemptions processes are written, they seem to say that if a company uses anti-circumvention law to block legitimate activity – say, if John Deere uses the law to stop you from fixing your own tractor – then you can go to some kind of governing body (in the US, it's the Copyright Office) and petition for an exemption to anti-circumvention. If that exemption is approved, then making that modification becomes legal.

Before I carry on, let me say here that even if that's how the system worked, it would still be grossly offensive. If you buy a device – a car, a tractor, a printer, a console, a phone – it is your property and you should not have to hire a lawyer to ask a government agency to create a legal exemption that lets you do otherwise legal things with it. You should not need to petition the government for the right to buy generic ink, use a third-party app store or take your car to an independent mechanic.

But this isn't how the system works. It's a scam. Anti-circumvention exemptions are a cheap trick. They only sound useful. A reasonable person who hears that the US Copyright Office has made it legal to use a third-party app store with your iPhone would assume that this means that if someone launches their own app store, they can give you the tools needed to unlock your iPhone and activate their store.

That's not how the DMCA exemptions process works. Under the statute, the US Copyright Office is only empowered to create "use exemptions," which allow you, the owner of the iPhone, to make use of a tool that unlocks your phone and installs the third-party app store. The Copyright Office does not have the power to create a tools exemption that would allow someone to make that unlocking tool and sell or give it to you. Making that tool remains a felony with a five-year prison sentence attached to it.

What this means is that if you want to use your own property in a way that was legal before DMCA 1201, that has been made legal again because you hired a lawyer who successfully petitioned the US Copyright Office to grant an exemption, you can only do so if you, personally reverse engineer your device to effect the permitted modifications to it.

So: if the US Copyright Office legalizes alternative iPhone app stores, the only way to exercise this exemption is for every iPhone owner in the country to get a computer science degree, secure the use of a clean-room, decap the "secure enclave" on a spare iPhone's CPU, extract its cryptographic keys, and integrate them in a new version of iOS that they personally write and install on their phone. No iPhone owner is allowed to discuss how to do this with any other iPhone owner engaged in the same project, on penalty of a five year prison sentence.

Obviously, this is ridiculous, and iPhones are just the tip of the iceberg. It's also true if you want to enable independent repair of powered wheelchairs, whose manufacture is controlled by a duopoly of private-equity backed companies that have all but abandoned spending on repair, leaving wheelchair users stuck in bed for months while they await service:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2022/06/when-drm-comes-your-wheelchair

This absurd situation is the same if you're blind and want to make use of an exemption that lets you reverse-engineer ebook formats so that you can run your ebooks through a Braille printer, screen reader or other assistive device. Under the exemptions rules for the world's anti-circumvention laws, every blind person is expected to personally reverse engineer the access control systems built into Adobe and Amazon's ebook formats, write an exploit that lets them extract the text of these restricted ebooks and then repackage that text in a new, open format:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/03/16/whittle-a-webserver/#mere-ornaments

This "use exemption"/"tools exemption" split is a near-perfect way of tricking people into thinking that these laws are more reasonable than they appear. When Canada passed its landmark right-to-repair and interoperability laws in 2024, many celebrated – missing the fact that under Canada's anti-circumvention law (Bill C-11, the Copyright Modernization Act of 2012), it remains illegal to undertake the reverse-engineering needed to exercise the rights these new laws (seemed to) enshrine:

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

For a quarter-century, I've made it my life's work to explain how bad and dangerous this system is, and, thankfully, I've started to make a little headway over the past few years. My core audience contains a lot of hackers who are rightly affronted at the existence of a body of law that criminalizes the kinds of exploration and modification that they've devoted their lives to.

Being hackers, they ponder this situation and start to think about how they can hack the law to escape it. Just lately, I've heard from a lot of people who think they can solve this problem by asking a chatbot to reverse-engineer and modify the firmware on their tractors, wheelchairs, ebooks, iPhones, what-have-you. You can't put a chatbot in prison for violating anti-circumvention law, right?

I regret to inform you that if you did this in a way that rose to the attention of a big corporate bully, they wouldn't blame your chatbot for writing the exploit: they'd blame you for prompting the chatbot to create this new tool.

Just yesterday, I heard from a reader who had a clever idea: what if you gave your unmodified iPhone to a hacker who knew how to install a third-party app store on it, and they modified that phone, and then sold it back to you for $10? The hacker would be making a use exemption, not a tools exemption.

This, too, will not produce the outcome we're seeking. Even if Apple can't convince a judge that selling you a modified iPhone is "trafficking" in a circumvention device (a very big "if"), this wheeze misses the wider point about how adversarial interoperability was able to disenshittify tech for the years when tech companies weren't just dishing out disruption, but also being disrupted themselves.

The interoperability-driven dynamism that disciplined or displaced tech companies that abused their market power was a mass phenomenon. The printer cartel doesn't need to be able to charge everyone $10,000/gallon for ink. If a few people at the margins figure out how to jailbreak their printers, that doesn't stop the grift. Even better if the people who do use generic ink have to depend on anonymous, shadowy businesses that don't have customer service departments you can call when your printer gets an update that breaks ink compatibility, or an address you can send a process-server to if you're stuck with thousands of dollars' worth of useless ink cartridges after one of those updates.

To make generic ink a viable check against the abuses of HP and its colored water mafia, you need a counter-industry. You need salespeople making calls on large enterprises who buy their ink by the ocean, offering them a better deal and a guarantee of uninterrupted service. To make good on that guarantee, you need an army of hackers who reverse-engineer every software update HP pushes out in a matter of hours, and you need another army of customer service reps who help people who can't figure out how to install that update.

As economists would say, you need "capital formation." You need the ability to raise or borrow money, a mailing address, an ad campaign, booths at conferences and free samples in the mail. You need to be able to show potential customers that you are insured in the event that you brick their devices, so switching to your product doesn't endanger their capital investments. You need to have a business whose doors can be beaten down by regulators in the event that you use your after-market mods as a tool to steal data or money from your customers.

To understand how this worked, cast your mind back to the Office Suite Wars of the early 2000s. Back then, Microsoft ruled the desktop world, controlling more that 95% of the PC OSes, a share so large and so ruthlessly acquired and maintained that they were convicted of violating anti-trust laws.

Microsoft used illegal tying and predatory pricing to push every one of those PC owners into using Microsoft Office, which meant that even if you used a Mac, 19 times out of 20, the people you needed to collaborate with on memos, spreadsheets and slide-decks were using MS Office.

Microsoft made a version of Office for the Mac, but it was the single most curséd piece of packaged software ever offered to the market. Merely waving the Mac Office floppy around a workplace would cause files to spontaneously go corrupt on random PCs in the vicinity.

For Mac users, this meant that 95% of the time, they could not reliably collaborate with other computer users. For people like me – then a freelance CIO-for-hire who was helping small businesses connect their computers to each other and the internet – it meant that increasingly, we made CEOs swap their Powerbooks for Thinkpads and designers swap their PowerPCs for Dells with beefy graphics cards, moving the whole business to PC/Windows.

Apple solved this problem by reverse-engineering MS Office and producing the iWork Suite: Pages, Numbers and Keynote, which could perfectly read and write Microsoft's Word, Excel and Powerpoint files. That adversarial interoperability saved the company, but the gambit wasn't one-and-done.

Microsoft spent the next several years maliciously introducing changes to the Office file formats that broke compatibility with iWork, which Apple countered by paying an army of coders to swiftly analyze these new formats and update iWork to maintain compatibility with them:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/06/adversarial-interoperability-reviving-elegant-weapon-more-civilized-age-slay

I think Apple was fated to win this expensive cat-and-mouse game, if only they could hang in there long enough. For every Mac in the field, Microsoft was supporting 19 PCs, and these computers ran a fragmented mosaic of Windows and Office versions. Every time Microsoft broke compatibility with Office to mess up one Mac user, they also messed up 19 PC users, all of whom had to be patched and updated to maintain compatibility. This gave Apple a powerful advantage that mounted with every turn of the game, so all they had to do was hang in there until the asymmetrical costs overwhelmed Microsoft.

Which is what happened. Eventually, Microsoft sued for peace and agreed to standardize the office file-formats at the International Standards Organization, ushering in an era of unprecedented compatibility. This ISO standardization is why you can now paste styled text from the Word application into a browser-based Google Doc or an application-based LibreOffice window. It's also a game Microsoft continues to cheat at, with a string of dirty tricks meant to leverage its dominance to shut out competitors altogether:

https://blog.documentfoundation.org/blog/2026/07/17/microsofts-main-tool-for-lock-in/

The rise (and impending fall) of a truly open format that lets every computer user collaborate on any document is an object lesson in the combined role that adversarial interoperability and capital formation play in disenshittifying technology. For Microsoft, a "competitor" isn't one hacker who can open a Word file in a program of their own devising, nor is a "competitor" the small number of users that single competitor can support.

Microsoft is an incorrigible, bullying cheat with a sick and rotten corporate culture: to stop the kind of ruthless princeling who rises to a position of power in a company like Microsoft from turning predatory requires severe, obvious penalties that follow directly from any extractive gambit.

To muster that kind of competition requires the kind of capital formation you only get from true legalization, not the anemic sham offered by anti-circumvention's "exemptions." Even where the competition is spread out across many shifting small businesses and individuals, the system of competition requires a stable backstop that produces the tools these small firms rely on.

In 2014, Ofcom, the UK's telecoms regulator, affirmed that Britons had the right to unlock their phones, even if their carrier had sold them a phone that was locked to its network. Overnight, every small shop acquired a phone-unlocking side-hustle. One morning as I walked from my flat to the tube, I passed three unlockers: one at a newsagent's, where they would take your phone and return it unlocked within a day; one at my dry-cleaner's, where a guy with a folding card table would unlock your phone while you waited; and another folding table guy right by the tube entrance who'd also work while you waited, and who charged £5 less than the guy at the dry-cleaner's.

None of these people were electrical engineers or software developers or hackers. They just followed recipes that were provided by one of a few well-capitalized firms that sold them a subscription to jailbreaking tools that were kept up to date for every make and model of every phone.

One frequent excuse for the ban on repair tools for cars or wheelchairs or tractors is that these devices are now so computerized that they require specialized knowledge if they are to be safely serviced. Even if that's true, that's exactly what a legal toolchain provides.

The guy who fixed my solar panels wasn't a software engineer, he was an electrician who had the customer-service phone number for the company that made my solar inverter. If that company had a viable competitor who could offer their own firmware for my solar installation and was hungry for my business, maybe that technician would have gotten through in three minutes rather than three hours.

And if that alternative firmware was defective, then I could join a class action suit and get made whole – something that is nearly impossible to imagine happening with solar OEMs, who face so little competition that they all put binding arbitration clauses in their terms of service that take away your right to sue, no matter whether they cheat you or burn your house down:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/05/06/champerty-loves-company/#circle-of-life

That's the amazing thing about digital tools. Through software, experts are able to package up their expertise into self-executing code, which can costlessly, instantaneously be distributed to everyone in the world who needs it. But paying those experts isn't cheap, and neither is supporting their tools.

I love William Gibson's maxim that "the street finds its own use for things," but if you can't neutralize a large, dangerous monopolist with individual tinkering – the best you can hope for is some measure of individual relief..

It's true that in these adversarial interoperability fights, the upstarts enjoy a tremendous advantage, but that advantage isn't infinite. For the guerrillas to outlast the empire, they have to be able to wage a long, persistent fight.

To marshal the resources needed to sustain that fight and to maintain the logistics demanded by its supply lines requires the good guys to be allowed to fight in the open, without the looming threat of criminal prosecution, a threat that forecloses on capitalization and mass adoption.

Enshittification isn't downstream of cruelty, it's downstream of greed. The point of enshittification is to exploit the control a firm can exercise over the customers, suppliers and workers it holds captive in order to extract more from them. The titanic profits this exploitation delivers are a powerful lure for would-be disenshittifiers and investors who would fund their liberatory revolution.

Don't get me wrong, I love my hackers and I sit in awe of the awesome leverage of writing code that can be costlessly, instantaneously distributed to everyone who needs it. But so long as governments and the law are on the side of extraction and enshittification, the disenshittificatory insurgency will be starved of resources, condemned to remain marginal and inadequate.

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 Berkeley Breathed: the Onion interview https://web.archive.org/web/20011201062719/http://www.theonionavclub.com/avclub3728/avfeature_3728.html

#25yrsago Chinese going mobile crazy http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/asia-pacific/1492584.stm

#25yrsago Free wifi in NYC https://web.archive.org/web/20011024070700/http://www.villagevoice.com/issues/0133/meyers.php

#20yrsago RIAA’s “abundance of sensitivity” ends harassment of grieving family https://memex.craphound.com/2006/08/14/london-copyfighters-speak-at-speakers-corner-on-aug-27/

#20yrsago London Copyfighters: Speak at Speaker’s Corner on Aug 27! https://memex.craphound.com/2006/08/14/london-copyfighters-speak-at-speakers-corner-on-aug-27/

#20yrsago TSA wins the war on lipstick https://memex.craphound.com/2006/08/14/tsa-wins-the-war-on-lipstick/

#15yrsago RIP Paul Meier, father of the randomized trial https://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/13/health/13meier.html?_r=1

#15yrsago Long Beach Police Chief: we detain photographers, and I don’t have any guidelines for that policy, photography is classed with attempts to acquire weaponized smallpox https://web.archive.org/web/20110927230257/http://www.lbpost.com/life/greggory/12188

#15yrsago David Cameron’s net-censorship proposal earns kudos from Chinese state media https://web.archive.org/web/20110815220203/https://www.globaltimes.cn/NEWS/tabid/99/articleType/ArticleView/articleId/670718/Riots-lead-to-rethink-of-Internet-freedom.aspx

#15yrsago Empirical manners: towards a science of harmonious norms https://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2011/08/rewilding-etiquette.html

#15yrsago Tiki Room resurgent https://passport2dreams.blogspot.com/2011/08/every-cloud-has-silver-lining.html

#10yrsago After New Zealand spooks misidentified pro-democracy activist, NSA spied on him for them https://web.archive.org/web/20160815040057/https://theintercept.com/2016/08/14/nsa-gcsb-prism-surveillance-fullman-fiji/

#10yrsago Even the woo industry thinks Gwyneth Paltrow’s “smoothie dust” ads are too much https://web.archive.org/web/20160811225548/https://consumerist.com/2016/08/09/ad-and-supplement-self-regulation-groups-have-issues-with-gwyneth-paltrows-smoothie-dusts/

#10yrsago It’s pretty easy to hack traffic lights https://www.usenix.org/system/files/conference/woot14/woot14-ghena.pdf

#10yrsago Private prison contractor’s $1B no-bid deal to run immigration jails guarantees 100% occupancy payouts https://web.archive.org/web/20160815022103/https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/inside-the-administrations-1-billion-deal-to-detain-central-american-asylum-seekers/2016/08/14/e47f1960-5819-11e6-9aee-8075993d73a2_story.html

#10yrsago Court of Appeal reverses Labour disenfranchisement ruling, but Corbyn still likely to win https://web.archive.org/web/20160813134816/http://www.newstatesman.com/politics/staggers/2016/08/high-courts-judgement-wont-stop-jeremy-corbyn-winning

#10yrsago John Oliver on subprime auto-lending and its killswitches https://web.archive.org/web/20160816154135/https://consumerist.com/2016/08/15/john-oliver-keegan-michael-key-explain-why-subprime-car-loans-are-so-awful/

#10yrsago Worst of McMansions: architectural criticism of inequality’s most tangible evidence https://web.archive.org/web/20160814031109/http://mcmansionhell.tumblr.com/

#5yrsago Provocateur copyrights a Magic: The Gathering Deck https://pluralistic.net/2021/08/14/angels-and-demons/#owning-culture

#5yrsago Disneyland at a stroll https://pluralistic.net/2021/08/15/disneyland-at-a-stroll-part-vi/

#1yrago Bluesky creates the world's weirdest, hardest-to-understand binding arbitration clause https://pluralistic.net/2025/08/15/dogs-breakfast/#by-clicking-this-you-agree-on-behalf-of-your-employer-to-release-me-from-all-obligations-and-waivers-arising-from-any-and-all-NON-NEGOTIATED-agreements

#1yrago "Privacy preserving age verification" is bullshit https://pluralistic.net/2025/08/14/bellovin/#wont-someone-think-of-the-cryptographers

Upcoming appearances (permalink)

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

Recent appearances (permalink)


A grid of my books with Will Stahle covers..

Latest books (permalink)


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:

  • “Once Is Enemy Action,” a science fiction novel about the origins of modern technofascism. Today's words: 570 (5421 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.

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Pluralistic: How the EU can punish Google (despite Trump) (27 Jul 2026)

✇Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
By: Cory Doctorow
27 July 2026 at 12:52


Today's links

  • How the EU can punish Google (despite Trump): Grant me the courage to change the things I can.
  • Hey look at this: Delights to delectate.
  • Object permanence: Chilling Effects; Billy Bragg v Myspace; Glenn Beck calls murdered Norwegian children "Hitler Youth"; Photog sues Getty for $1b copyfraud; Best paid CEOs perform worst; Olympics v "Olympics"; Alberta tar sands v "hot lesbians"; IoT security apocalypse; 3 Little Pigs in pidgin; The nasty party; Copyright extortionist infringed fellow extortionist; Grandpa mobbed for photographing grandson in park; Ice Bucket Challenge didn't cure ALS; Twiddling enshittifies your brain.
  • 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 giant fist clutching the Android robot. The robot is orange and has Trump's hair. The fist extends from an EU-flag-blue cuff, and it is ringed with yellow EU flag stars. To the side is an old-timey western bar with a drunk, smoking, glaring Uncle Sam leaning on it. The background is a haunted, moonlit forest.

How the EU can punish Google (despite Trump) (permalink)

The "Serenity Prayer" (Serenity to accept things I can't change/Courage to change the things I can/Wisdom to know the difference) is usually cited as pop psychology or addiction recovery advice, but I think there's a place for it in policymaking.

Take the EU's fight against US Big Tech. During the Biden years, the EU's tech policy matured into something serious and ambitious, culminating in the Digital Markets Act (DMA) and Digital Services Act (DSA), a pair of big, muscular policies that would curb Big Tech's most abusive conduct. The EU's ambition didn't occur in a vacuum: it was part of a global wave of antitrust fervor whose top agenda item was reining in tech:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/06/28/mamdani/#trustbusting

In this fight, the EU had important partners all over the world. For example, South Korea and Japan used the facts uncovered through EU enforcement action against Google and Apple to pursue similar cases:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/10/an-injury-to-one/#is-an-injury-to-all

But the EU's most important partner in its fight against American Big Tech was America. Biden's trustbusters – Lina Khan, Rohit Chopra, Jonathan Kanter, Tim Wu, et al – were every bit as serious about Big Tech power as anyone in the EU. After all, the American public are always the first victims of any new tech scam, and America is the only country with a large, affluent population who lack modern, comprehensive consumer privacy protection, making Americans highly prized prey for tech companies:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/04/23/zuckerstreisand/#zdgaf

With America and the EU on the same side of the tech fight, the world had a fighting chance. Tech knew this, which is why Big Tech backed Trump hard during the 2024 election and aggressively curried his favor after he won. From the tech barons who paid $1m each to sit behind Trump on the inaugural dais to the millions tech companies donated to Trump's Epstein Ballroom at the White House, tech has made it clear that it supports anything Trump wants to do, provided he shields Big Tech from any attempt to limit their ability to spy on and steal from Americans and the world.

Even before he took office, Trump made it clear how he would reward tech's loyalty: weeks before the inauguration, Trump went to Davos and threatened the EU with reprisals if they enforced the DSA or DMA against his tech companies:

https://techcrunch.com/2025/01/23/trumps-not-happy-with-how-eu-regulators-have-treated-us-tech-giants/

Trump wasted no time leaning on US trading partners on behalf of Big Tech. He bullied Canadian PM Mark Carney into dropping his plan to tax US tech companies. Big Tech uses a variety of tax-cheating gambits to evade taxation around the world, making it impossible for (tax-paying) domestic companies to compete:

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

Trump also got UK PM Keir Starmer to drop his plan to tax tech:

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/apr/01/starmer-offered-big-us-tech-firms-tax-cuts-in-return-for-lower-trump-tariffs

And he got the EU to roll back its plan to regulate AI:

https://fortune.com/2025/11/07/eu-ai-act-weaken-regulation-delay-big-tech-trump-government/

None of the governments that caved to Trump got anything in return. As I've written:

Give Trump everything he asks for and he'll demand more. Deny Trump anything and he'll demand more. Sign a contract with Trump and he'll break it. Send Trump an invoice and he'll stiff you. For Trump, "the art of the deal" can be summed up in one word: renege.

https://pluralistic.net/2026/07/22/table-flipper/#graveyard-of-indispensable-nations

Case in point: after the EU surrendered to Trump on AI regulation, Trump announced that a on ban EU officials who had worked on the Digital Services Act from traveling to the USA:

https://www.state.gov/releases/office-of-the-spokesperson/2025/12/announcement-of-actions-to-combat-the-global-censorship-industrial-complex/

Then, after the EU made more concessions to Trump, he announced a ban on even more EU officials:

https://www.lawfaremedia.org/article/the-trump-administration-targets-europe-s-content-moderation-laws

Trump ordered his tech giants to dig through EU officials' private correspondence so he can figure out who to ban next:

https://www.politico.eu/article/us-congress-judiciary-committee-big-tech-private-communication-eu-officials/

Trump's tech companies got the memo. When the EU ordered Apple to follow the law, Apple told the EU to fuck off:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/02/06/spoil-the-bunch/#dma

After all, Apple is a key partner in the Trump administration's mass deportations. Apple blocked an iPhone app that warns Apple customers if they're about to be kidnapped or murdered by ICE. Trump needs Apple, just as much as Apple needs Trump:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/10/06/rogue-capitalism/#orphaned-syrian-refugees-need-not-apply

Despite this, the EU keeps trying to enforce its laws against Trump's companies. Last week, the Commission announced a $1b fine against Google for violating the Digital Services Act with conduct that cost Europeans many billions:

https://digital-markets-act.ec.europa.eu/commission-fines-google-eur890-million-breaches-digital-markets-act-2026-07-23_en

In other words, Google wasn't even being ordered to disgorge all the money it stole, just some of it. Remember, a fine is a price: the EU's fine here will only make this kind of cheating slightly less profitable.

Nevertheless, Trump responded immediately by threatening the EU with many billions more in tariffs if they continue to attempt to enforce the law against one of his companies:

https://www.lemonde.fr/en/international/article/2026/07/24/trump-says-eu-to-pay-very-big-price-for-890-million-google-fine_6755804_4.html

Trump, the European Commission and Google all know this is about more than one $1b fine. The DSA and DMA both provide for steeply rising fines and other penalties for repeat offenders, and Google clearly has no plan to end its very profitable European crime-spree. Trump's threats aren't a bid to kill this enforcement – Trump wants to kill all enforcement.

Retaliatory tariffs aren't the only weapon Trump has at his disposal. If the EU (or any other country) levies a serious fine against Google, Apple, Oracle, Microsoft, or any of Trump's other tech companies, Trump can order US banks not to turn over those fines, even after the EU sends them a court order for the money. If a bank defies Trump, he can threaten to yank its charter. Or he could just run the same swindle he pulled on Tiktok: stealing the whole company and selling it to one of his buddies, who will run it the way Trump wants.

The reality is that without America's assistance, the EU has precious little hope of forcing American companies to do things they don't want to do. In terms of the Serenity Prayer, this is "a thing they cannot change."

The Serenity Prayer doesn't stop with "things you can't change." The next line seeks "the courage to change the things I can." The EU has no control over Google's conduct, but it has total control over its own conduct.

Specifically, the EU could get rid of the laws that ban European companies from modifying US tech exports. The EU adopted the Copyright Directive in 2001. Article 6 of the EUCD makes it a crime to reverse-engineer and modify a device without the manufacturer's permission. This law was adopted under pressure from the US Trade Representative, who threatened the EU with tariffs on its exports unless it adopted an "anticircumvention rule" that banned EU technologists from making products that let Europeans prevent US tech companies from stealing their money and data":

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

This law is still in force in the EU, despite the fact that Trump (predictably) reneged on the US side of the bargain, hitting the EU with massive tariffs and even threatening to steal part of Denmark.

Article 6 of the Copyright Directive is the reason European tech companies can't jailbreak America's apps, whether that's to get its government and corporate data off of US platforms:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/10/15/freedom-of-movement/#data-dieselgate

Or to modify American social media apps to respect EU privacy laws:

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

The EU can't control what Apple or Google do. But the EU can absolutely decide whether Trump's companies can use Europe's courts to destroy European companies that defend the privacy and economic integrity of the European people.

If the EU kills off Article 6 of the Copyright Directive, they can use European companies to bring Google and Apple's defective tech exports into compliance with European law. Unlike Trump's companies, those companies can be forced to pay their taxes and respect their users' privacy, labor and consumer rights.

That's the Serenity Prayer's "wisdom to know the 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 Chilling Effects https://web.archive.org/web/20010801172448/http://eon.law.harvard.edu/chill/

#25yrsago 13-year-old hacker's book deal: “The Unofficial Guide to Ethical Hacking" https://web.archive.org/web/20011102164905/http://www.vnunet.com/News/1124279

#20yrsago France’s new copyright law slaughters kills use and open source https://web.archive.org/web/20060812223624/http://soufron.typhon.net/spip.php?article150

#20yrsago Billy Bragg gets MySpace’s terms of service changed https://web.archive.org/web/20100809150257/http://blogs.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=blog.view&friendID=34570397&blogID=137856388&MyToken=626131d4-c695-42ba-867b-754b9e2bfeaa

#15yrsago Buy an Old West town in South Dakota for $0.8M https://web.archive.org/web/20110728012824/https://edition.cnn.com/2011/US/07/27/south.dakota.town.sale/index.html

#15yrsago Glenn Beck compares murdered Norway campers to “Hitler Youth” https://www.latimes.com/archives/blogs/top-of-the-ticket/story/2011-07-25/opinion-glenn-beck-hits-new-low-compares-norway-victims-to-hitler-youth

#15yrsago 3 Little Pigs rendered into Papua New Guinea pidgin https://www.abc.net.au/reslib/200709/r184705_686227.mp3

#15yrsago Why they call the Tories “the nasty party” https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2011/jul/28/tory-lib-dems-clash-on-policy

#15yrsago US ISP/copyright deal: a one-sided private law for corporations, without public interest https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2011/07/graduated-response-deal-what-if-users-had-been

#15yrsago Copyright extortionist ripped off his competitor’s threatening material https://torrentfreak.com/anti-piracy-lawyers-rip-off-work-from-competitor-110727/

#15yrsago Karl Schroeder: Science fiction versus structured study of the future, sf as aspiration https://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2011/07/beyond-prediction.html

#15yrsago Norwegian PM refuses to let terrorist attacks drive his country to intolerance and paranoid “security” https://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/28/world/europe/28norway.html?_r=1

#15yrsago Man with camera in park who fled angry parent sought by police (turns out he was taking pix of his grandson) https://web.archive.org/web/20110829052009/https://pixiq.com/article/man-photographing-grandkid-in-park-deemed-suspicious

#10yrsago Laurie Penny at the DNC: “Dissent will not be tolerated. Protest will not be permitted.” https://medium.com/welcome-to-the-scream-room/bad-moon-rising-8cd348df50e9#.9lhcixjn1

#10yrsago The Ice Bucket Challenge did not fund a breakthrough in ALS treatment https://web.archive.org/web/20160914225439/http://www.healthnewsreview.org/2016/07/ice-bucket-challenge-breakthrough-experts-pour-cold-water-superficial-reporting/

#10yrsago Silicon Valley banks offer tech giants’ new hires 100% mortgages on 24 hours’ notice https://web.archive.org/web/20160727095557/http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-07-27/zero-down-on-a-2-million-house-is-no-problem-in-silicon-valley

#10yrsago Patent fighters attack the crown jewels of three of America’s worst patent trolls https://web.archive.org/web/20160727191625/https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2016/07/patent-defense-group-seeks-to-knock-out-top-three-trolls-of-2015/

#10yrsago Censorship company drops bogus lawsuit against researchers who outed them https://citizenlab.ca/research-interest/

#10yrsago Photographer sues Getty Images for $1B because they’re charging for pix she donated to LoC https://hyperallergic.com/photographer-files-1-billion-suit-against-getty-for-licensing-her-public-domain-images/

#10yrsago First-ever Michelin star for street food awarded to Singaporean hawker stalls https://web.archive.org/web/20160723174014/http://uk.reuters.com/article/us-singapore-food-hawkers-michelin-star-idUKKCN1021XA

#10yrsago Highest-paid CEOs generate lowest shareholder returns https://www.msci.com/documents/10199/91a7f92b-d4ba-4d29-ae5f-8022f9bb944d

#10yrsago Olympics to companies: mentioning “Olympics” in social media is a trademark violation #https://web.archive.org/web/20160727075209/https://www.espn.com/olympics/story/_/id/17120510/united-states-olympic-committee-battle-athletes-companies-sponsor-not-olympics

#10yrsago Pro-tar-sands activists say dirty Canadian oil is better because “lesbians are hot” https://www.joeydevilla.com/2016/07/26/this-ill-advised-hot-lesbians-ad-promoting-canadian-vs-saudi-oil-is-real-and-not-a-parody-by-the-onion/

#5yrsago The infosec apocalypse is nigh https://pluralistic.net/2021/07/27/gas-on-the-fire/#a-safe-place-for-dangerous-ideas

#1yrago How twiddling enshittifies your brain https://pluralistic.net/2025/07/28/twiddlehazard/#outboard-brains-considered-harmful

Upcoming appearances (permalink)

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Recent appearances (permalink)


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Latest books (permalink)


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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

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