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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)

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: 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

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Received — 30 July 2026 ⏭

Pluralistic: The stupidest imaginable excuses for surveillance pricing (30 Jul 2026)

✇Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
By: Cory Doctorow
30 July 2026 at 14:51


Today's links


The Golden Gate Bridge, wreathed in rising fog. To the right of the scene sits a giant crying baby in a top-hat, his chubby fist resting on an antique cash-register that has been fitted with a CCTV. The CCTV emits a cone of red light that is zapping a female figure - an engraving in the style of a revolutionary French woman storming the Bastille. The woman holds aloft the severed head of Ben Franklin as depicted on a US $100 bill. His eyes glow red.

The stupidest imaginable excuses for surveillance pricing (permalink)

With "surveillance pricing," businesses have finally found something AI can do way, way, way better than people: price gouging.

As the name suggests, "surveillance pricing" is the practice of charging every customer a different price for every transaction, based on the massive surveillance dossiers that Big Tech companies and data-brokers have assembled on everyone in the world. Congress hasn't updated federal consumer privacy law since 1988 (when they passed a law banning the disclosure of VHS rentals), so pretty much any form of consumer surveillance is fair game.

This is where the AI comes in. One thing AI is indisputably great for is multivariate statistical analysis. You can feed an AI "behavioral data" (information about where you go, what you do, what you buy, who you talk to and what you say) about all of your customers and ask it to cluster them according to their shared traits. Then you can direct the AI to automatically run a series of small experiments to discover the maximum markup each group will stomach under which circumstances.

This works without you having to direct the AI to rip off certain groups of people – it will simply find the most vulnerable people and rip them off the most. If you're hiring in an industry that practices a lot of tacit racial discrimination, a system like this can figure out on its own that people of color typically accept lower wages because there are fewer employers bidding for their labor, and recommend lowball salary offers, all without you ever typing "please be racist" into your AI prompt.

This works so well that Google has announced that it is their plan for making a profit off of AI, after losing hundreds of billions of dollars on chatbots:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/01/21/cod-marxism/#wannamaker-slain

In the before times, marketers and demographers had to dream up demographic categories based on limited data and run focus groups to figure out how to maximize revenue from each market segment. Now an AI can segment the data to any degree you choose, and continuously, automatically experiment on each segment to find their weak spots.

It's "theory-free." You don't have to discover why a group is willing to pay more under a given set of circumstances, you merely have to observe and weaponize this fact. You don't have to know why one group of purchasers consistently accept higher prices between 6AM and 8AM – you can just automatically jack up prices on them without knowing or caring that you're gouging parents of young children who are re-ordering essential supplies while trying to get their kids to school in the morning.

I thought up that example. I don't know if it's really happening. But here's something that really is happening: ecommerce sites charge parents of newborns extra when they order thermometers in the middle of the night. I'm not saying that anyone ever sat down and said, "Parents with sick children will pay whatever we charge for a thermometer at 2AM." They didn't have to: this is the kind of thing an automated system can do without any human intervention:

https://www.ftc.gov/system/files/ftc_gov/pdf/p246202_surveillancepricing6bstudy_researchsummaries_redacted.pdf

The goal of surveillance pricing is to shift all the "consumer surplus" (the difference between the highest price you're willing to pay and the price you actually pay) to companies. It's a form of cod-Marxism where you are gouged according to your ability (to pay) and charged according to the desperation of your need:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/01/11/socialism-for-the-wealthy/#rugged-individualism-for-the-poor

The problems of surveillance pricing are well documented. Under Biden, the FTC did a landmark study on the practice, developing a rich factual record that documents the role surveillance pricing plays in the affordability crisis:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/07/24/gouging-the-all-seeing-eye/#i-spy

Companies are already using this technology to rip you off, and they're slavering for the chance to do more of it. Instacart was recently caught marking up some shoppers' items by as much as a third:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/12/11/nothing-personal/#instacartography

The problem is that as much as companies love this, shoppers hate it. Last summer, Delta announced that it was going to surveillance price every seat on every flight, only to face such a massive backlash that they had to make another announcement bemoaning the fact that we'd all misunderstood their (unambiguous and extremely damning) announcement and they were actually going to do no such thing:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/07/30/efficiency-washing/#medallion-clubbed

One thing the Mamdani campaign impressed upon every politician in the country is that people are pissed about affordability and they will support anyone who stands up for the public against AI-equipped price gougers. The problem of course is that those price gougers are highly organized and have deep treasuries (stuffed with money they stole from us). With surveillance pricing, politicians face a familiar conundrum: if they do the thing that's popular with voters, they'll enrage donors.

One way to cut this knot is to enact legislation that seems to address the problem, but stuff it with so many loopholes that it does nothing. This lets you declare yourself the people's champion without doing anything to protect them from the donors who prey on your voters. That's the approach they took in Maryland:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/04/30/something-must-be-done/#there-ive-done-something

But in California, they're actually doing something about surveillance pricing. AB-2564 is a smart, well-written bill that bans surveillance pricing. It contains an easily evaluated test for surveillance pricing and carves out legitimate reasons for offering different prices for the same purchase (for example, when it costs more to deliver the product or service):

https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billTextClient.xhtml?bill_id=202520260AB2564

Now we're in for the hard yards of turning this bill into a law. That's where California's cities come in. When municipal governments pass resolutions supporting a state bill, it makes it much easier to get that bill through the state legislature (and conversely, without support from major cities, it's that much easier to kill the bill before it becomes law).

A few days ago, the San Francisco Board of Supervisors was on the verge of passing a resolution in support of AB-2564. Now, that vote is stalled, thanks to a letter sent by the San Francisco Chamber of Commerce, an organization that has been pissing in San Franciscans' faces and telling them it was raining since 1850:

https://www.sfexaminer.com/news/community/board-not-yet-ready-to-weigh-in-on-state-surveillance-pricing-ban/article_0ae4d143-cced-4988-abda-0b71bcbe524c.html

The Chamber's letter is – to use a technical term – flaming garbage. It raises the most spurious objections imaginable, claims about the bill's language that are belied by its plain, easily understood text. These objections are demolished in a letter the Electronic Frontier Foundation sent to the Supervisors:

https://www.eff.org/document/letter-sf-bos-re-surveillance

In the letter, EFF explains that claims that surveillance pricing will lower prices are overblown and not borne out by evidence. But more importantly – as EFF points out – privacy is a human right, and the idea that you should have to give up your privacy to get a fair price is just a fancy way of saying that privacy should be the exclusive preserve of people who can afford to pay more:

https://www.eff.org/wp/privacy-first-better-way-address-online-harms#Legislation

EFF's letter goes on to address the Chamber's objections. Far from creating uncertainty about which conduct the bill addresses, AB-2564 crisply defines surveillance pricing as:

a customized price for a good for a specific consumer or group of consumers based, in whole or in part, on personally identifiable information collected through electronic surveillance.

The Chamber raises other tired objections, falsely claiming that banning surveillance pricing will end common discounting strategies like offering seniors cheaper movie tickets, or giving cheaper rates to retain customers who call to cancel their service. EFF replies by pointing out that all the Chamber's concerns are covered by the three comprehensive carve-outs in the bill: the ability to charge higher rates when it costs more to service a given customer; offering discounts to retain customers who want to cancel their service; and finally, discounts for criteria anyone can meet (like an "early bird special"), for membership in a broadly defined group (like "seniors"), or for participation in a loyalty program.

The San Francisco Supervisors could have figured out at a glance that the Chamber was bullshitting them. All it takes is a cursory read of the statute. But now they don't even have to do that: EFF has painstakingly debullshittified the Chamber's FUD.

Surveillance pricing is grossly offensive. When a company charges me $0.50 for a product that it charges you $1 for, they're essentially saying that your dollars are worth half as much as mine are. Companies shouldn't be able to reach into your wallet or your bank account and chop your money in half:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/06/24/price-discrimination/#

No wonder AB-2564 has plenty of backers, from EFF to Consumers Union:

https://advocacy.consumerreports.org/press_release/california-state-assembly-passes-key-bill-to-prohibit-surveillance-pricing/

San Francisco's city government should be on that list of supporters.

(Image: Takkk, CC BY-SA 3.0, modified)

Hey look at this (permalink)


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

Object permanence (permalink)

#25yrsago RIP, Wau Holland, founder of the legendary hacker clan, the Chaos Computer Club. https://web.archive.org/web/20010805192406/https://www.wired.com/news/culture/0,1284,45728,00.html

#20yrsago Diebold voting machines can be beaten with a switch-flip https://web.archive.org/web/20061007120702/http://openvotingfoundation.org/tiki-read_article.php?articleId=1

#20yrsago How thieves steal RFID-enabled cars https://web.archive.org/web/20060812065423/https://www.wired.com/wired/archive/14.08/carkey_pr.html

#15yrsago Official London anti-terrorist publication says anarchists should be reported to local police https://web.archive.org/web/20110801233618/https://communitysafe.gov.uk/articles/5962-griffin-weekly-briefing-sheet-attached/attachments/801/download.pdf

#15yrsago French copyright enforcers: “Pirates are big spenders on legit content” https://www.techdirt.com/2011/07/28/another-day-another-study-that-says-pirates-are-best-customers-this-time-hadopi/

#15yrsago Perma-cookie wars continue: KISSMetrics sneaks cookies back onto your computer even if you turn off every cookie vector https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1898390

#1yrago You can't fight enshittification https://pluralistic.net/2025/07/31/unsatisfying-answers/#systemic-problems

Upcoming appearances (permalink)

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


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

Recent appearances (permalink)


A grid of my books with Will Stahle covers..

Latest books (permalink)


A cardboard book box with the Macmillan logo.

Upcoming books (permalink)

  • "The Post-American Internet," a geopolitical sequel of sorts to Enshittification, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2027

  • "Unauthorized Bread": a middle-grades graphic novel adapted from my novella about refugees, toasters and DRM, FirstSecond, April 20, 2027

  • "Enshittification, Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It" (the graphic novel), Firstsecond, 2027

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


Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources:

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

  • A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING

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

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

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

How to get Pluralistic:

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https://mostlysignssomeportents.tumblr.com/tagged/pluralistic

"When life gives you SARS, you make sarsaparilla" -Joey "Accordion Guy" DeVilla

READ CAREFULLY: By reading this, you agree, on behalf of your employer, to release me from all obligations and waivers arising from any and all NON-NEGOTIATED agreements, licenses, terms-of-service, shrinkwrap, clickwrap, browsewrap, confidentiality, non-disclosure, non-compete and acceptable use policies ("BOGUS AGREEMENTS") that I have entered into with your employer, its partners, licensors, agents and assigns, in perpetuity, without prejudice to my ongoing rights and privileges. You further represent that you have the authority to release me from any BOGUS AGREEMENTS on behalf of your employer.

ISSN: 3066-764X

Received — 29 July 2026 ⏭

Pluralistic: Enshittification and Reverse Centaurs go global (29 Jul 2026)

✇Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
By: Cory Doctorow
29 July 2026 at 10:09


Today's links


A bow-wielding cherub standing amidst two antique globes. From behind one looms the poop emoji from the cover of Enshittification, mouth covered in a grawlix-scrawled black bar; from behind the other looms the reverse centaur from the cover of The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI.

Enshittification and Reverse Centaurs go global (permalink)

It's safe to say that the past couple of years have been good ones for me publishing-wise, thanks to a string of international bestsellers, both novels (Picks and Shovels) and nonfiction (Enshittification, Reverse Centaur), as well as plenty of awards and accolades:

https://craphound.com/shop

Over the past two months, I've won the Locus Award (Enshittification), had a NYT bestseller (Reverse Centaur), gotten a word in the OED ("enshittification"), and had the number one bestselling nonfiction paperback in Canada for more than a month running (Reverse Centaur). I also turned 55 – and my radiologist told me I'm now cancer-free, so it's been a good summer all around.

These books have done especially well internationally because they deal with technopolitics, which means that my readers are disproportionately Internet People, and for historical reasons, these are folks who are more likely to speak English, even if they live outside of the Anglosphere.

This post is primarily for those readers, who often write to me to let me know how much they enjoyed the books, so much so that they'd like to share them with their less online, less English-conversant friends, and want to know whether there is a translation coming in their own language.

Good news! Both Reverse Centaur and Enshittification have many foreign editions that are either published or forthcoming in the next year or so. The foreign rights team at Farrar, Straus and Giroux were good enough to prepare a list of all these editions, which I'm about to reproduce below.

If your preferred language isn't on the list, I apologize. Translation deals are primarily "pull," not "push" – that is to say, a foreign publisher contacts my publisher and asks for the rights (though my publisher does market the rights and attends all the book fairs where these deals are often made).

The upshot here is that I am not really in a position to do more than has already been done to get an edition published in your preferred language or territory. If you happen to have a favorite local publisher, you could always ask them if they would like to get in touch with Farrar, Straus and Giroux foreign rights team to secure a license.

I also need to note here that these deals are generally with established publishers who have relationships with national booksellers and distributors (rather than enthusiastic individuals who want to produce a translation and see if they can get it read by other people in their country). The hard part of publishing isn't the translation, the typesetting, the book design or even the writing – the hard part is connecting a text with its readers:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/07/04/self-publishing/

With that all said, here's the master list of editions of Enshittification and The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI:

Reverse Centaur: paperback, Jun 2026
https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374621568/thereversecentaursguidetolifeafterai/

Reverse Centaur: hardcover, Jun 2026
https://www.versobooks.com/en-gb/products/3584-the-reverse-centaur-s-guide-to-life-after-ai

Reverse Centaur (as A Nagy Összemolás/The Big Collapse), not yet scheduled

Reverse Centaur, not yet scheduled

  • Taiwan 🇹🇼: Acropolis
    Enshittification, first quarter 2027

  • Thailand 🇹🇭: Salt Publishing
    Enshittification, Oct 2026

  • Türkiye 🇹🇷: Okuyanus
    Enshittification, Fall 2026

  • Ukraine 🇺🇦: Athena Publishing
    Enshittification, not yet scheduled

(These are the confirmed deals. There are lots of other deals in negotiation, especially for Reverse Centaur, which is only a month old.)

I hope some of you found this useful! If not (or if so!), don't worry, I'll be back with more essays in the days to come.

One final note for newsletter readers: I realize that I have violated my "one emoji per edition" rule with the flags above. Rest assured this will not be a regular thing.

Hey look at this (permalink)


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

Object permanence (permalink)

#20yrsago Linux Thinkpads can be controlled by knocking on them https://web.archive.org/web/20060814065844/http://www-128.ibm.com/developerworks/linux/library/l-knockage.html?ca=dgr-lnxw01Knock-Knock

#20yrsago Why the CBC doesn’t need DRM https://web.archive.org/web/20060820121451/https://www.michaelgeist.ca/component/option,com_content/task,view/id,1342/Itemid,85/nsub,/

#20yrsago Aussie mall defends its photons from terrorists https://web.archive.org/web/20060910224208/http://www.theage.com.au/articles/2006/07/29/1153816426869.html

#15yrsago Sleepy English town to be entirely surveilled in case criminals forget and drive through it on their way to crimes https://web.archive.org/web/20110731020858/https://www.telegraph.co.uk/motoring/news/8670642/Sleepy-market-town-surrounded-by-ring-of-car-cameras.html

#10yrsago Lessons from the DNC: Ronald Reagan, the Southern Strategy, and “abnormal politics” https://crookedtimber.org/2016/07/30/philadelphia-stories-from-reagan-to-trump-to-the-dnc/

#10yrsago How to pay no taxes at all! (if you’re Apple, Google or Facebook) https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2016/07/video-guide-to-legal-tax-evasion-with-an-apple-boycott.html

#5yrsago Games Workshop declares war on its customers https://pluralistic.net/2021/07/30/space-marines/#fairy-use-tale

#1yrago Delta's AI-based price-gouging https://pluralistic.net/2025/07/30/efficiency-washing/#medallion-clubbed

Upcoming appearances (permalink)

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


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

Recent appearances (permalink)


A grid of my books with Will Stahle covers..

Latest books (permalink)


A cardboard book box with the Macmillan logo.

Upcoming books (permalink)

  • "The Post-American Internet," a geopolitical sequel of sorts to Enshittification, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2027

  • "Unauthorized Bread": a middle-grades graphic novel adapted from my novella about refugees, toasters and DRM, FirstSecond, April 20, 2027

  • "Enshittification, Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It" (the graphic novel), Firstsecond, 2027

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


Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources:

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

  • A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING

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

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

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

How to get Pluralistic:

Blog (no ads, tracking, or data-collection):

Pluralistic.net

Newsletter (no ads, tracking, or data-collection):

https://pluralistic.net/plura-list

Mastodon (no ads, tracking, or data-collection):

https://mamot.fr/@pluralistic

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https://bsky.app/profile/doctorow.pluralistic.net

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Tumblr (mass-scale, unrestricted, third-party surveillance and advertising):

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"When life gives you SARS, you make sarsaparilla" -Joey "Accordion Guy" DeVilla

READ CAREFULLY: By reading this, you agree, on behalf of your employer, to release me from all obligations and waivers arising from any and all NON-NEGOTIATED agreements, licenses, terms-of-service, shrinkwrap, clickwrap, browsewrap, confidentiality, non-disclosure, non-compete and acceptable use policies ("BOGUS AGREEMENTS") that I have entered into with your employer, its partners, licensors, agents and assigns, in perpetuity, without prejudice to my ongoing rights and privileges. You further represent that you have the authority to release me from any BOGUS AGREEMENTS on behalf of your employer.

ISSN: 3066-764X

Received — 1 July 2026 ⏭

Pluralistic: Technocarcinization (01 Jul 2026)

✇Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
By: Cory Doctorow
1 July 2026 at 17:14


Today's links


Two crabs dance with their claws entwined; one has the Google logo on its back, the other, the Apple logo. Their audience is a much larger crab, bearing the Meta logo. The scene is set on a dune.

Technocarcinization (permalink)

"Carcinization" is a curious biological phenomenon: given enough time, across many environments, many species will evolve into crabs. The body-type of a crab, with its low center of gravity, sideways gait (useful for evading predators), ease of concealment and protected organs is suitable to many different environments:

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

Lately, I've watched the American Big Tech platforms as they underwent their own form of technocarcinization, which is when every tech company turns into Facebook.

A 2x2 grid. The vertical axis is labeled 'more surveillant.' The horizontal axis is labeled 'more control-freaky.' The top right quadrant has the Google logo. The top left, the Facebook and Instagram logos. The bottom left has the Apple logo. The bottom right has a Free Software Foundation Gnu.

For a long time, it seemed to me that you could make sense of the tech platforms by placing them into one of four quadrants on a 2×2 grid, in which one axis denoted "control freakishness" and the other, "surveillance."

Each quadrant had its own canonical company. The most surveillant/least controlling company (top left) was Google. They would let you roam the whole wide internet and exert no control over your conduct, but would spy on you wherever you went. The least surveillant/most controlling company was Apple, who imprisoned you in its manicured walled garden, but promised never to spy on you. The non-spying/non-controlling option is free/open source tech (of course), which doesn't care what you do, and doesn't watch you do it. And the most spying, most controlling company was Facebook, a company whose products did everything they could to imprison you within their virtual walls, from which vantage they could effect maximal surveillance.

I've used this comparison many times over the years. I included in my 2023 book The Internet Con, along with the joke that Tiktok's position on the grid was so far up and to the right (maximum surveillance and control) that we'd had to put its logo on the back cover. Enough people took this joke seriously and wrote in to complain that they'd gotten a misprint without the logo that we added it to the paperback:

https://www.versobooks.com/products/3035-the-internet-con

The grid was useful, until technocarcinization started to push all the tech companies into that top right quadrant. Apple is no longer the company that protects you from surveillance – they're the company that spies on you, having secretly added a total surveillance system to the iPhone to target ads to you:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/11/14/luxury-surveillance/#liar-liar

Apple can't even claim to protect you from third-party surveillance. Sure, they block Facebook from spying on you, but they have barred ICE Block, an app that tells you if there are ICE chuds hunting in your neighborhood, looking to kidnap you and send you to a concentration camp. Apple declared ICE mercenaries to be a "protected class":

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

And thanks to Apple's control-freakery – which prevents you from overriding Apple's decisions about your own devices – once Apple decides to spy on you or sell you out to fascist goons, there's nothing you can do about it:

https://locusmag.com/feature/cory-doctorow-neofeudalism-and-the-digital-manor/

Then there's Google, the company that ran a free-range livestock operation in which you could roam wherever you liked, because they could always find you when it was time for the slaughter. For years now, Google has been moving inexorably to the kind of control-freak nonsense that you used to only find in one of Apple's crystal prisons.

For example, every year or two, Google floats a proposal to use secure hardware in your device to rat you out if you've got an ad-blocker, privacy blocker, or other aftermarket add-on that lets you choose how you experience the digital world:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/08/02/self-incrimination/#wei-bai-bai

It's an idea they just can't quit, despite the fact that it's fucking abominable and everyone hates it:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/06/12/compelled-speech/#quishing

Google used to pride itself in its ability to send you to the open web, viewing search as a conduit to other peoples' resources. Now, with AI search summaries, Google is harvesting the open web and then eating the seed corn, keeping searchers inside of Google's walled garden:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/06/29/arsonist-firefighters/#im-feeling-lucky

Google also took the idea of a free/open browser and ran with it, rehabilitating some discarded Apple code and turning it into Chrome, the internet's most dominant browser – by far. Now, Google is nerfing that browser's plug-in architecture in a way that blocks all kinds of user-tunable options, including and especially ad-blocking:

https://protonprivacy.substack.com/p/google-is-finally-killing-ublock

And Google has also announced that they're going to turn Android into an iPhone, making it both technically challenging and radioactively illegal for you to install software of your choosing on your own property:

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2025/08/google-will-block-sideloading-of-unverified-android-apps-starting-next-year/

Google is adopting every one of Apple's worst practices, and Apple is adopting all of Google's worst practices, and so they're both turning into Facebook: technocarcinization!

What's driving this technocarcinization? Well, the obvious answer is that the more Facebooklike a company becomes, the more ways there are for it to rip you off. Surveillance can be monetized by selling your data, by ad targeting, and by surveillance-based pricing and wage-suppression:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/01/21/cod-marxism/#wannamaker-slain

Control lets platforms block competing products, extract massive junk fees to the businesses they connect you to, and control repair and end-of-life, forcing you to replace hardware by blocking parts and independent service:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/01/10/markets-are-regulations/#carney-found-a-spine

It turns out that "if you're not paying for the product, you're the product" is only half-right. The other half is, "even if you pay for the product, you're the product." Pay, don't pay: companies will productize anyone they can. And thanks to our enshittogenic policy environment – where the worst ideas of the worst people make the most money – you can always be productized:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/09/10/say-their-names/#object-permanence

This is independent of the kind of person running the company. Facebook is run by Mark Zuckerberg, a cringe halfwit whose only successful idea was to offer Harvard bros a way of nonconsensually rating the fuckability of female undergrads. Everything he's done since was an acquisition (Whatsapp, Insta) or a flop (metaverse, Libra), or both (Oculus). Zuck owns the majority of the voting stock in the company, which means he has total control over its actions. He can ignore or fire his board members at will. He is the move fast/break things guy, whose every foolish whim can become policy that impacts billions of people.

By contrast, Google and Apple are no longer run by their flamboyant founders, who were every bit as prone to folly as Zuck. They were constrained by their shareholders, which meant that the blast-radius of Steve Jobs's worst ideas (like treating his otherwise curable cancer with green juice) were confined to his own person.

Today, Apple and Google are run by bloodless business sociopaths who go to enormous lengths to project an air of sober adulthood. And yet, these people – who would never be caught dead bow-hunting their own livestock or climbing into an MMA cage – have steered their companies into Facebook's quadrant on our enshittification 2×2.

I think this shows just how much the enshittification of tech is a matter of the policy environment, not the personalities of the people involved. Sure, the worst people imaginable run these companies, but the reason they're able to yield to their most venal impulses and succeed is because the world has been re-arranged to make sociopathy and greed into fitness factors. We get technocarcinization because the most fit organism for a landscape without consequences is a zuckerbergian techno-crab:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/07/28/microincentives-and-enshittification/

What can we do about it? Well, we're going to have to remake the landscape to punish (rather than reward) enshittification:

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

And in the meantime, there is one inhabitant of the 2×2 that hasn't drifted up and to the right: free and open source software. It's still snugly nestled in the low-surveillance/low-control box, and if you live in that box, your life will be much, much better for it.

There's no better time to make the switch: with RAM and storage prices through the ceiling and OSes growing ever-more bloated with AI and spyware (but I repeat myself), this is the moment to rehabilitate that old computer with Linux:

https://www.fosslinux.com/158206/linux-on-older-hardware-revival-guide.htm

The alternative is to be tormented by crabs no matter what you're trying to do or where you're trying to get to.

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)

#15yrsago Print-on-demand and donations - report on DIY publishing business models https://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/columns-and-blogs/cory-doctorow/article/47858-with-a-little-help-heuristics.html

#15yrsago Brazil rises up for free speech in 40 national demonstrations https://globalvoices.org/2011/06/30/brazil-freedom-march/

#10yrsago Grandad builds miniature backyard Disneyland https://abcnews.com/Lifestyle/grandpa-builds-disneyland-inspired-backyard-theme-park-grandkids/story?id=40276633

#10yrsago Elizabeth Warren on monopolies in America, including Apple, Google, and Amazon https://washingtonmonthly.com/2016/06/30/elizabeth-warrens-consolidation-speech-could-change-the-election/

#10yrsago White House plan to use data to shrink prison populations could be a racist dumpster fire https://www.wired.com/2016/06/white-house-mission-shrink-us-prisons-data/

#10yrsago Even if Moore's Law is "running out," there's still plenty of room at the bottom https://www.technologyreview.com/2016/05/13/245938/moores-law-is-dead-now-what/

#10yrsago Black-hat hacker handles are often advertisements https://www.wired.com/beyond-the-beyond/2016/07/web-semantics-modern-german-black-hat-hacker-handles/

#10yrsago Spotify threatens to report Apple to competition regulators over App Store rejection https://web.archive.org/web/20160630220301/https://www.recode.net/2016/6/30/12067578/spotify-apple-app-store-rejection

#10yrsago Researchers find over 100 spying Tor nodes that attempt to compromise darknet sites https://www.defcon.org/html/defcon-24/dc-24-speakers.html#Noubir

#5yrsago Exxon lobbyist confesses to his crimes https://pluralistic.net/2021/07/01/basilisk-tamers/#exxonknew

#5yrsago When the Sparrow Falls https://pluralistic.net/2021/07/01/basilisk-tamers/#rage-against-the-machine

Upcoming appearances (permalink)

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


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

Recent appearances (permalink)


A grid of my books with Will Stahle covers..

Latest books (permalink)


A cardboard book box with the Macmillan logo.

Upcoming books (permalink)

  • "The Post-American Internet," a geopolitical sequel of sorts to Enshittification, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2027

  • "Unauthorized Bread": a middle-grades graphic novel adapted from my novella about refugees, toasters and DRM, FirstSecond, April 20, 2027

  • "Enshittification, Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It" (the graphic novel), Firstsecond, 2027

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


Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources:

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

  • A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING

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

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

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

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"When life gives you SARS, you make sarsaparilla" -Joey "Accordion Guy" DeVilla

READ CAREFULLY: By reading this, you agree, on behalf of your employer, to release me from all obligations and waivers arising from any and all NON-NEGOTIATED agreements, licenses, terms-of-service, shrinkwrap, clickwrap, browsewrap, confidentiality, non-disclosure, non-compete and acceptable use policies ("BOGUS AGREEMENTS") that I have entered into with your employer, its partners, licensors, agents and assigns, in perpetuity, without prejudice to my ongoing rights and privileges. You further represent that you have the authority to release me from any BOGUS AGREEMENTS on behalf of your employer.

ISSN: 3066-764X

Received — 29 June 2026 ⏭

Pluralistic: Gemini is better than search because Google enshittified search (29 Jun 2026)

✇Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
By: Cory Doctorow
29 June 2026 at 18:34


Today's links

  • Gemini is better than search because Google enshittified search: We're All Trying To Find The Guy Who Did This.
  • Hey look at this: Delights to delectate.
  • Object permanence: Microsoft antitrust overturned; Scammer carves C64; RIP Jim Baen; GOP rep to constituent's child: "drop dead" (literally); CCTVs jacked for botnet; Olympic profitability lie; Human factors in health infosec; Exfiltration via computer fans; Congress's summer schedule: 9 working days; Antitrust is political antigrav; Ted Chiang's 72 Letters; Microsoft antitrust appeal; Vinge on privacy; Breaking open the web; Bernie on Brexit; "The Perdition Score"; Intuit v Child Tax Credit.
  • 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.


The original Google homepage, loaded in the first Netscape browser. It is viewed under a giant magnifying glass. Inside the magnifying glass, we see a killer robot (with the head of the Android droid), choking a man to death.

Gemini is better than search because Google enshittified search (permalink)

Write a critical AI book, and you become everyone's confessor for their AI sins. People in my life keep telling me about their guilty AI pleasures, in search of an explanation, absolution or condemnation:

https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374621568/thereversecentaursguidetolifeafterai/

Their most common confession: "I only ever use Google's AI-generated search summaries these days. I no longer click those blue links beneath it, not even to verify the summary." People know that the summaries are full of "hallucinations" (that is, "defects" or "errors") but the summaries are right often enough that many people have come to rely on them, to the exclusion of actual websites, made by actual people, on the actual internet.

Everyone knows this isn't good. The reason there's a web for Google's Gemini AI to summarize is that Google – the thrice-convicted monopoly search company with a 90% market share – directs people to websites, and when you visit a website, you generate revenue for the site, which pays for its maintenance. Most commonly, you generate an "ad impression," but you might also buy a subscription, or generate an "affiliate fee" by purchasing a recommended product.

When Google strips all this away by harvesting an "answer" and displaying it at the top of the page, the bargain between Google and the open web breaks down. Google is extracting 100% of the value from the websites it summarizes, and giving nothing back in return.

This is a marked reversal from Google's founding ethos. In the old days, Google measured its success by how little time you spent on its site. The ideal Google outcome was for you to visit its page (or even better, just a search-box in your browser), type a few words, and get "ten blue links" back, the top one of which was the correct link to locate the information or resource you were seeking. The point of Google was to serve as a conduit, a trusted intermediary that neutrally adjudicated the relevance of every web page for every web user from moment to moment.

Everyone dunks on Google for its high-minded motto, "Don't be evil," but over the years, the company's mission was far more important: "Organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful." That was the pole star that googlers followed for the first couple decades of the company's history…until, that is, the company saturated its market and its growth stalled out.

That was when Google started to panic over its plateauing search revenue, this being an inescapable consequence of 90%+ market-share. The ensuing power struggle pitted googlers who were committed to technical excellence against the company's most ardent enshittifiers, who pointed out that by making search worse, they could increase revenues. After all, if you need to search two or three times to get the answers to your questions, that means the company can show you two or three times as many ads:

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

Where once Google measured its success by how quickly it could send you away from its site and out into the open internet, today's Google is a sticky-trap full of ways to keep you inside its walled garden.

A decade ago, tech had three major approaches:

I. Google's: let you do anything you want, but spy on you while you do it;

II. Apple's: strictly control what you can do, but leave you alone to do it in private; and

III. Facebook's: control everything you do, spy on you from asshole to appetite.

Today, tech is undergoing a form of carcinization, in which every company is turning into a Facebook-crab: maximally surveillant and maximally controlling.

Apple has added surveillance to its walled garden:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/11/14/luxury-surveillance/#liar-liar

While Google has turned its free-range, internet-wide surveillance system into a walled garden that tries to keep you away from the open internet as much as possible.

Now, in Google's defense, the "open internet" kind of sucks these days. Any piece of useful information you seek out on the open internet is liable to be buried under half a dozen pop-ups, pop-unders, and dickovers:

https://daringfireball.net/2026/05/what_is_a_dickover

Even after you clear these away, the actual information you're seeking is further buried in word-salads that anticipated insipid AI prose by half a decade. Think of all those omelet recipes that appear beneath 2,500 words of cod-Proustian remembrances of "the first time I ate an egg."

The major advantage of AI search summaries is in shielding you from all this nonsense. But where did all that nonsense come from in the first place?

It turns out that this is largely Google's fault.

Google and Facebook monopolized the display advertising market, entering into an illegal, collusive arrangement to rig the bidding so that advertisers paid more and publishers received less:

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

The Google/Meta duopoly sucks up 51% of display advertising revenue – more than triple the historic take for advertising intermediaries (buyers, brokers, agencies, etc). As ad revenues for web publishers cratered, the "ad load" on web pages went up. This set up a vicious cycle: increasing the number of ads decreases the number of readers, driving publishers to increase the ad-load even more to make up for the losses.

The major brake on this is ad-blocking. In a world with ad-blockers in it, publishers contemplating an increase in ad-load have to confront the possibility that they will induce ad-overload in their readers, who will install a blocker that stops them from seeing any ads:

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

Google has been looking to kill ad-blocking for a decade, and now they're on the verge of making it happen in Chrome, the dominant web browser they use to reinforce their search monopoly:

https://protonprivacy.substack.com/p/google-is-finally-killing-ublock

Google long ago did away with ad-blocking on mobile devices (reverse engineering an app is a felony, which means an app is just a web-page skinned with the right kind of IP to make it a crime to protect your privacy while you use it). Part of Google's argument for killing ad-blocking for the web is that this puts the web on an even footing with apps – which is a very weird way to describe a race to the absolute bottom:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/06/12/compelled-speech/#quishing

To top it all off, this decade has seen Google make a series of changes to its search prioritization that favored low-value shovelware sites over carefully researched, reliable alternatives. Search for product reviews and you're apt to get a "site reputation abuse" result from a once-reliable outlet like Forbes filled with useless and even dangerous reviews, which are ranked far above independently maintained, rigorous competitors:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/05/03/keyword-swarming/#site-reputation-abuse

This has only gotten worse with AI search, which preferentially draws from spam sites to produce decontextualized, highly confident recommendations for substandard, overpriced junk, at the expense of recommendations for good products:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/07/15/inhuman-gigapede/#coprophagic-ai

It's not like Google doesn't have the ability to sort the good from the bad. Kagi.com is a $10/month paid search engine whose results are vastly superior to Google's. But Kagi doesn't have its own search index: instead, they rent access to Google's index, but apply their own (much smaller and less resourced) team's algorithm to rank the results for your queries. In other words, Google could deliver good search results, they just choose not to:

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

Gresham's Law holds that "bad money drives out good." It refers to a counterfeit coin crisis in Tudor England, where people preferentially spent counterfeit money in order to make it someone else's problem; meanwhile, everyone hoarded their good coins. Soon, virtually all the money in circulation was bogus.

By downranking quality material in favor of low-effort spam, Google set up a web-wide version of Gresham's Law, where bad webpages drive out good ones, and since so many of those webpages contain product recommendations, they're greshaming the world of real products, too, so the bad is driving out the good there, too.

This is the problem that Gemini search summaries solve: in its role as the web's most important gatekeeper, Google remade it as an ad-festooned cesspit of garbage text and cynical shovelware sites. Now Google proposes to wipe out the publishers whose content they stripmined by breaking the web's bargain: that search engines are symbiotic with publishers. Google has turned fully parasitic, sucking the last drops of juice out of the open web before discarding its husk.

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 Appeals court strikes down Microsoft antitrust ruling https://www.nytimes.com/2001/06/28/business/us-appeals-court-overturns-microsoft-antitrust-ruling.html

#25yrsago Ted Chiang's 72 Letters https://web.archive.org/web/20010720192340/http://www.tor.com/72ltrs.html

#25yrsago Concept handheld devices https://web.archive.org/web/20010620115437/https://www.infosync.no/en/news/n/419.asp

#25yrsago Analyzing Microsoft's successful antitrust appeal https://web.archive.org/web/20010703085656/https://www.salon.com/tech/feature/2001/06/28/appeals_reaction/index.html

#20yrsago Bengali science fiction of the 1880s https://www.lehigh.edu/~amsp/2006/05/early-bengali-science-fiction.html

#20yrsago Vernor Vinge on computers, freedom and privacy https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2006/jun/29/guardianweeklytechnologysection5

#20yrsago Scammer convinced to carve replica Commodore 64 https://www.419eater.com/html/john_boko.php

#20yrsago Jim Baen, sf publisher, has passed away https://web.archive.org/web/20060703024337/http://david-drake.com/baen.html

#15yrsago YouTube listens to fraudulent NyanCat takedown notice, drags heels on put-back from creator https://web.archive.org/web/20110628132607/http://www.prguitarman.com/index.php?id=369

#15yrsago Wyoming’s corporation mills manufacture privileged artificial “people” to order https://www.reuters.com/article/2011/06/28/us-usa-shell-companies-idUSTRE75R20Z20110628/

#15yrsago Publishing in the Internet era: connecting audiences and works https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2011/jun/30/publishers-internet-changing-role?utm_source=twitterfeed&utm_medium=twitter

#15yrsago Why writers should have their own domains https://whatever.scalzi.com/2011/06/29/mastering-ones-own-domain-an-no-this-is-not-a-seinfeld-reference/

#15yrsago Copyright troll’s biggest fan commits terminal irony https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2011/06/righthaven-cheerleader-wanted-irony-police

#10yrsago Mississippi state rep tells distraught mom to buy kid’s lifesaving meds ‘with money she earns’ https://www.sunherald.com/news/local/counties/jackson-county/article86416087.html

#10yrsago Always-on CCTVs with no effective security harnessed into massive, unstoppable botnet https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2016/06/large-botnet-of-cctv-devices-knock-the-snot-out-of-jewelry-website/

#10yrsago Gun-waving cop who attacked black teenaged girl in her bathing suit faces no charges https://web.archive.org/web/20160624103549/http://dfw.cbslocal.com/2016/06/23/grand-jury-no-bills-former-mckinney-pool-party-cop/

#10yrsago The Olympics are profitable for every host city (that lies about the numbers) https://timharford.com/2016/06/how-do-you-make-the-olympics-pay-fudge-the-figures/

#10yrsago Healthcare workers prioritize helping people over information security (disaster ensues) https://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/~sws/pubs/ksbk15-draft.pdf

#10yrsago Fansmitter: malware that exfiltrates data from airgapped computers by varying the sound of their fans https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3GCHCVpndaM

#10yrsago Labour’s knives come out for Corbyn, but he’s guaranteed a spot on the ballot https://www.politico.eu/article/inside-account-of-labour-mps-attacks-on-jeremy-corbyn-shadow-cabinet-resignations-brexit/

#10yrsago Hope Larson’s “Compass South”: swashbuckling YA graphic novel https://memex.craphound.com/2016/06/28/hope-larsons-compass-south-swashbuckling-ya-graphic-novel/

#10yrsago How to Break Open the Web: a report on the first Decentralized Web Summit https://www.fastcompany.com/3061357/the-web-decentralized-distributed-open

#10yrsago Californians will get to vote on legal recreational weed https://web.archive.org/web/20160629130245/http://abcnews.go.com/US/wireStory/voters-decide-legalize-recreational-marijuana-40206739

#10yrsago Bernie Sanders on Brexit: urgent lessons for the Democrats https://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/29/opinion/campaign-stops/bernie-sanders-democrats-need-to-wake-up.html

#10yrsago Electoral fraud: Trump sends fundraiser emails to foreign politicians https://www.cnet.com/culture/trump-spams-foreign-politicians-with-fundraising-emails/#ftag=CAD590a51e

#10yrsago The Perdition Score: Sandman Slim vs the One Percent https://memex.craphound.com/2016/06/29/the-perdition-score-sandman-slim-vs-the-one-percent/

#5yrsago Intuit sabotages the Child Tax Credit https://pluralistic.net/2021/06/29/three-times-is-enemy-action/#ctc

#5yrsago SCOTUS to wrongfully accused terrorists: "drop dead" https://pluralistic.net/2021/06/29/three-times-is-enemy-action/#transunion

#5yrsago Lazy Congress only schedules 9 days' work this summer https://pluralistic.net/2021/06/28/dubious-quant-residue/#back-to-work-you

#1yrago Antitrust defies politics' law of gravity https://pluralistic.net/2025/06/28/mamdani/#trustbusting

Upcoming appearances (permalink)

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


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

Recent appearances (permalink)


A grid of my books with Will Stahle covers..

Latest books (permalink)


A cardboard book box with the Macmillan logo.

Upcoming books (permalink)

  • "The Post-American Internet," a geopolitical sequel of sorts to Enshittification, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2027

  • "Unauthorized Bread": a middle-grades graphic novel adapted from my novella about refugees, toasters and DRM, FirstSecond, April 20, 2027

  • "Enshittification, Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It" (the graphic novel), Firstsecond, 2027

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


Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources:

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

  • A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING

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

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

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

How to get Pluralistic:

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https://pluralistic.net/plura-list

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https://mamot.fr/@pluralistic

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https://bsky.app/profile/doctorow.pluralistic.net

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Tumblr (mass-scale, unrestricted, third-party surveillance and advertising):

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"When life gives you SARS, you make sarsaparilla" -Joey "Accordion Guy" DeVilla

READ CAREFULLY: By reading this, you agree, on behalf of your employer, to release me from all obligations and waivers arising from any and all NON-NEGOTIATED agreements, licenses, terms-of-service, shrinkwrap, clickwrap, browsewrap, confidentiality, non-disclosure, non-compete and acceptable use policies ("BOGUS AGREEMENTS") that I have entered into with your employer, its partners, licensors, agents and assigns, in perpetuity, without prejudice to my ongoing rights and privileges. You further represent that you have the authority to release me from any BOGUS AGREEMENTS on behalf of your employer.

ISSN: 3066-764X

Received — 13 June 2026 ⏭

Pluralistic: Shareholder supremacy and the precog CEO (13 Jun 2026)

✇Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
By: Cory Doctorow
13 June 2026 at 19:49


Today's links


A fake cover for CEO magazine. The central figure is a ZOLTAR fortune-telling animatronic, seated before various divination tools. The headline over him is FIDUCIARY DUTY. In the top right corner, there's a slug reading 'UNIVERSAL EXCUSE: A bright line test that's also *totally* unfalsifiable.' To Zoltar's left is another slug reading, 'FRIEDMAN SAID IT: I believe it. That's good enough for me.'

Shareholder supremacy and the precog CEO (permalink)

It's been 55 years since Milton Friedman – cursed be his name – published his NYT editorial, "The Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits," in which he invented the idea of shareholder supremacy out of whole cloth and declared it to be a universal, freestanding, inarguable truth:

https://www.nytimes.com/1970/09/13/archives/a-friedman-doctrine-the-social-responsibility-of-business-is-to.html

Friedman's editorial railed against the idea of "corporate social responsibility," arguing that corporate managers should confine the exercise of their consciences to projects involving their own money and resources. At work, managers must harden their bleeding hearts and do nothing except increase the returns to their shareholders.

Friedman wasn't merely arguing that this would give rise to better companies – the crux of his argument was that by adopting this "fiduciary duty" standard, it would be easy to determine whether a company was being well-managed or run into the ground:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/09/18/falsifiability/#figleaves-not-rubrics

Friedman argued that "being a good person" was a squishy, undefinable standard that could never be objectively measured. But "maximizing shareholder value" was a crisp, bright-line test that could be readily evaluated by any reasonable person. "Did this manager make as much money as possible for the company's owners?" feels like the kind of question we can all agree on, while, "Did this manager behave in an ethical way?" is much harder to answer.

But even a few moments' thoughts reveal the flaw in this line of reasoning. We can all agree whether a manager made money for the shareholders – but how can we know whether the manager made as much money as possible?

Think about how much "corporate social responsibility" cashes out to performative and insincere nonsense and/or cynical marketing. Target didn't stock Pride merch because they love their LGBTQ friends. They stocked it because they thought they could sell it (same goes for BP marketing its "green" gasoline). Google supports its coders' environmental/queer/antipoverty efforts because being the "don't be evil" company lets you hire in-demand workers who might otherwise go to work for Meta, and every engineer a Silicon Valley firm hires adds an average of $1m to the company's annual bottom line.

Further: it would be absurd to hold managers to the "make as much money as possible" standard in a competitive market, because in that market, there will always be a company that comes in second. If "as much money as possible" is the standard and you're Chairman of the Board of the number two company, with $10b in profit, while the number one pulled in $11b, "as much money as possible" demands that you fire the C-suite immediately, since they objectively could have done 10% better.

So the real standard isn't "make as much money as possible," it's "try to make as much money as possible." And here again, there's no objective way to evaluate managerial performance. Target made a lot of money by selling Pride merch…until they didn't. Do we fire the Target C-suite because they failed to anticipate that 2024 would mark America's transition into the chuddocene, an era in which selling Pride tchotchkes makes you cucked and soy and, you know, gay?

Whether it's "make as much money as possible" or "try to make as much money as possible*," shareholder supremacy can only be evaluated with the aid of a crystal ball…or a time machine.

Which raises a question: what made this nonsensical shareholder supremacy standard so damned attractive to corporate leaders?

Well, what if the ambiguity of shareholder supremacy was a feature and not a bug? What if the function of shareholder supremacy was to absolve the cruelest people for indulging their most sociopathic instincts? What if this "bright line test" was actually a universal excuse, an all-purpose accountability sink that could be used to justify any cruelty or cowardice? "Why didn't I fire my college buddy when I found out that he was sexually abusing his colleagues? Well, he was the best salesman on the team, and I have an obligation to my shareholders. Sorry, my hands were tied."

In other words: Don't get mad at me.

Get mad at Milton Friedman.

Hey look at this (permalink)


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

Object permanence (permalink)

#20yrsago Microsoft gets Linux geeks evicted from convention center https://web.archive.org/web/20010619154332/http://www.newsforge.com/article.pl?sid=01/06/01/1540231

#20yrsago Stanford prof sues James Joyce estate for right to study Joyce https://web.archive.org/web/20060615203517/http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20060613/ap_on_en_ot/james_joyce_lawsuit

#20yrsago Inside China’s iPod sweat-shops https://web.archive.org/web/20060616173514/http://www.macworld.co.uk/news/index.cfm?RSS&NewsID=14915

#15yrsago Terry Pratchett initiates assisted suicide process https://web.archive.org/web/20110614215922/https://www.telegraph.co.uk/health/8571142/Sir-Terry-Pratchett-begins-process-that-could-lead-to-assisted-suicide.html

#15yrsago Lego-making machine made of Lego https://www.eurobricks.com/forum/forums/topic/56346-review-moulding-machine-4000001-lego-insider-tour-exclusive/

#10yrsago It’s getting harder and harder to use gag clauses to silence laid off workers in America https://web.archive.org/web/20160611202305/https://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/12/us/laid-off-americans-required-to-zip-lips-on-way-out-grow-bolder.html

#5yrsago The ACCESS Act https://pluralistic.net/2021/06/12/access-act/#interop

Upcoming appearances (permalink)

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


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

Recent appearances (permalink)


A grid of my books with Will Stahle covers..

Latest books (permalink)


A cardboard book box with the Macmillan logo.

Upcoming books (permalink)

  • "The Reverse-Centaur's Guide to AI," a short book about being a better AI critic, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, June 2026 (https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374621568/thereversecentaursguidetolifeafterai/)

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

  • "The Post-American Internet," a geopolitical sequel of sorts to Enshittification, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2027

  • "Unauthorized Bread": a middle-grades graphic novel adapted from my novella about refugees, toasters and DRM, FirstSecond, April 20, 2027

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


Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources:

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

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

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

  • A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING

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Pluralistic: The world has moved on (11 Jun 2026)

✇Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
By: Cory Doctorow
11 June 2026 at 16:43


Today's links


A blasted wasteland with a mushroom cloud rising over it. In the foreground are swarms of drowning people climbing over each other to escape into the limbs of a dead tree, and a crowd of agonized skeletons. All sourced from Dore engravings illustrating the Old Testament.

The world has moved on (permalink)

Douglas Adams wrote, "Anything that is in the world when you're born is normal and ordinary and is just a natural part of the way the world works. Anything that's invented between when you’re 15 and 35 is new and exciting and revolutionary and you can probably get a career in it. Anything invented after you're 35 is against the natural order of things."

I think about this quote whenever I get angry at the technology around me. When I rail against the Great Enshittening, am I simply committing the sin of nostalgia ("Nostalgia is a toxic impulse" -J. Hodgman)? I am, after all, old.

I've written before how conservatives' yearning for "simpler times" is really just a wish to be a child again. The reason times seemed simpler during your childhood is that you were a child, and if your parents did their job, they shielded you from a lot of the complexity of their adulthood so you could enjoy your childhood:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/04/24/hermit-kingdom/#simpler-times

That's where the "National Customer Rage Survey" comes in. It's been surveying a panel of 1,000 representative consumers every three years for a decade, continuing a research project that started in 1976. The survey measures respondents' attitudes towards the businesses they deal with, and as of 2025, it's fair to say, customers are pissed:

https://customercaremc.com/2025-national-customer-rage-study/

We're experiencing more problems with the products and services we use. Those problems are more severe, they make us angrier, and they produce lingering stress. More and more, we are seeking revenge on the businesses that piss us off.

So it's not just me, an old man yelling at the cloud. The world is getting shittier.

The latest Customer Rage Survey inspired The Guardian's Heather Timmons to launch a new investigative series looking at how fucked up everything is. Her inaugural installment is very good, and it's drawn a massive reader response:

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2026/jun/04/us-consumer-rage-prices-economy

I spoke with Timmons this week about the series. She told me she's been deluged with emails from readers who feel that the world is different now – and many of them cite my work on enshittification. Timmons wanted to know what advice I had for her readers. I told her that I don't think you can solve this as a consumer, because this isn't a market problem, it's a political problem, and shopping isn't politics:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/05/21/purity-culture/#stop-fucking-that-chicken

Later, Timmons forwarded one of those emails to me. It gave an eloquent and evocative account of just how rancid the vibe is these days. The writer said that when they and their spouse encounter this rot, they cite Stephen King's Dark Tower novels, quoting the oft-repeated phrase from that series: "The world has moved on."

At this point, I should warn you that the following contains some Dark Tower spoilers, so if you're planning to read a decades-old (but very good) dystopian western/science fiction crossover series, and if spoilers bug you, this might not be the essay for you.

Spoiler alert!

Still with me? OK, then.

In the Dark Tower novels, we crisscross a fallen world in which decay is all around us. The buildings are rotten, the machines have stopped working and no one knows how to fix them, babies and livestock alike are frequently born with deadly congenital defects. Much of the world has fallen into wasteland, cracked and barren. An army of wreckers, led by the demagogue John Farson (who styles himself "The Good Man") are slowly but surely conquering the land, laying waste to those few remaining outposts of civilization and conscripting the young men in the conquered lands to march on their neighbors.

It wasn't always this way. There was a time when the world was defined by hope and virtue and light, when the machines were fixed and the crops were harvested. Life wasn't golden – there were still squabbles and sorrows and even wars – but life was good.

And then the world moved on.

For reasons that no one truly understands, the normal push/pull of decay and renewal turned into a one-way, irreversible process in which everything that crumbled or snapped or burned up couldn't be repaired or replaced or recovered. Our mysterious ability to beat back the Second Law of Thermodynamics – an absurdity we probably should have always treated as an aberration – has collapsed. The world has moved on.

The Dark Tower series is a long, long, long Bildungsroman, with many detours through the life-stories of the characters in the ensemble cast, as well as the biographies of many of the figures they meet along the road. It's mostly an adventure novel, as road-trip tales tend to be, but those character studies and the lore that they surface – from our world and theirs – creates an overwhelming, many-layered, richly textured sense of loss and worse, of despair. For the world has moved on, and despite the love and care and bravery of many of the people in that world, the world cannot be redeemed. Each terrible day of those people's lives is the best day of the rest of their lives. From here on in, it only gets worse.

When Timmons' reader and their spouse greet every fresh depredation in modern life – hours on the phone with customer service to resolve a billing error that the company repeats every month, say – with "the world has moved on," they are invoking something heavy. This isn't just a rancid vibe, it's the fucking end-times.

For all that the Dark Tower novels are a series of cracking adventures and thoughtful character studies, they are also a mystery. Over and over again, we are made to ask ourselves, why has the world moved on? Was it John Farson and his army? Was it the Man in Black, the evil wizard whom the book's protagonist has pursued across time and space? Was it the Crimson King, the evil force whom the Man in Black serves?

Well, yes – and no.

Midway through the novels, we learn that the Crimson King and his evil minions have laid siege to "the beams," vast ley-lines that span the universe and provide the force that pushes away entropy, creating breathing room where repair and care can live. "All things serve the beams," we're told. The beams are the organizing force of the universe, the answer to the riddle of how such pitiful things as we could have fought back remorseless entropy for so long. By attacking the beams, the villains of the series have all but snuffed out that force, and so the world has moved on.

When I read that email and the invocation of the Dark Tower, I was immediately struck by how apt this comparison is. Because, as I've written many times, there were always enshittifiers who would have plundered your data and money and treated you with naked contempt:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/03/04/object-permanence/#picks-and-shovels

There were always enshittifiers, but those enshittifiers faced external forces that checked their wreckers' urge. They were held in check by competition, and regulation, and workers' sense of fairness and duty, and by the threat of new products and services that might pop up to correct the defects they deliberately introduced into their products by enshittifying them.

And the foundation – the Dark Tower upon which all the beams converged- was antitrust enforcement, grounded in the idea that we could not afford to let any company – not a "good" company, nor a "bad" company – get so large that it could no longer be regulated, lest its executives become "autocrats of trade":

https://pluralistic.net/2022/02/20/we-should-not-endure-a-king/

The same people who laid siege to antitrust law would later come after all forms of checks and balances. These are the people who gave us the "unitary executive" and Project 2025, and the collapse of accountability that has allowed the worst people to commit the gravest sins they could imagine and still reap vast fortunes. These beam-breakers wanted kings, and they got them.

I collect definitions of "conservatism," and one of my favorites comes from Corey Robin's book, The Reactionary Mind. Robins asks how it is that we can call so many disparate, irreconcilable ideologies – various ethno-nationalisms, imperialism, financialism, patriarchy, Christian nationalism, libertarianism, white supremacy, etc – "conservative"? What binds all these views together?

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

Robin's answer: the foundation that all these otherwise disparate views share is that some people are born to rule, while others are born to be ruled over. When these lesser people are elevated to positions of power, their inferiority creates a system of misrule, by which we all suffer. The best outcome for everyone is for us all to know our place and defer to our social betters.

That's why conservatives are obsessed with affirmative action, DEI, and any form of anti-racism. For them, the discriminatory outcomes we see in the wild are natural, reflecting the in-born defects in the people at the bottom of the social order. That's why, after every plane crash, every collision between a cargo ship and a bridge, every spectacular corporate bankruptcy, conservatives race to uncover the race, gender, religion and sexual orientation of the captain, the pilot or the CEO.

If the person who oversaw the catastrophe has anything remotely resembling a marginalized identity, then this is loudly trumpeted as confirmation that "diversity hires," promoted above their station, are ruining our society and wrecking our bridges. Naturally, if the person in charge was a wealthy, well-born, straight white guy, that's just proof that shit happens – it definitely doesn't prove that white straight guys, as a class, should be removed from positions of power.

For conservatives, virtue is "whatever the people who are born to rule desire." Hence Frank Wilhoit's definition of conservativism, "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." It's not a crime if the president does it. It's also not a crime if your boss does it, or if a monopolist does it, or if ICE does it. It's not a crime if the IDF do it, or if the Epstein Class do it. "Taxes are for the little people":

https://pluralistic.net/2021/06/15/guillotines-and-taxes/#carried-interest

The attack on antitrust law was part of the attack on the rule of law, the campaign to put everyone back in the their place. It's a piece of the effort to establish a new hereditary aristocracy, and every hereditary aristocracy requires heredity serfs (that would be us):

https://pluralistic.net/2022/11/06/the-end-of-the-road-to-serfdom/

The ideology of economism – which says that market outcomes are the only way to govern a society – cashes out to "the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must." If we interfere with mergers, or labor practices, or commercial conduct, we "distort the market," which is literally going against nature:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/10/27/economism/#what-would-i-do-if-i-were-a-horse

That's why Trump dismantled the consumer protection agencies, the antitrust agencies, the labor protection agencies, and the environmental protection agencies. When someone in power cheats the system, that's not a crime, no matter how many people they rob, maim or kill. As Trump told us on the debate stage in 2016, that kind of cheating "makes me smart":

https://pluralistic.net/2024/12/04/its-not-a-lie/#its-a-premature-truth

That's why Elon Musk (almost) got to force every pension saver in America to bail out his money-incinerating AI business and his failed social media takeover – because the rules that protect everyday investors are "for the little people." Musk's mistake was trying to get a bunch of billionaires to hold the bag, too. The one form of systemic violence our society will not tolerate is trillionaire-on-billionaire violence:

https://www.cnbc.com/2026/06/05/spacex-blocked-from-early-us-benchmark-index-entry-as-sp-reaffirms-existing-rules.html

The world has moved on. 50 years of neoliberal rule has weakened and snapped the beams – the rule of law, consumer and labor rights, civil rights – that radiated from our Dark Tower – antitrust law, which blocked the emergence of the "autocrats of trade." The people who besieged these beams had the same motives as the Crimson King and John Farson and the Man in Black: they were willing to pay any price for a world free from consequences for people like them. They knew they were born to rule, and that the rules were "for the little people," that breaking those rules "made them smart."

They wanted "bossism." Or, as rendered in the original Afrikaans, "baasskap," which means, "the social, political and economic domination of South Africa by its minority white population":

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

Not for nothing, baasskap is the foundation of Muskism, the ideology that Elon Musk epitomizes, even if he can't articulate it:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/04/21/torment-nexusism/#marching-to-pretoria

In "The Utopia of Rules," the late David Graeber described how neoliberal deregulation produced exactly the kind of state that we were warned we'd get under communism. Thanks to monopolies, all the stores were the same and they all sold the same goods. Thanks to the dismantling of labor protection and unions, no one had enough money to get by. Thanks to elite impunity, we were ruled by monsters who committed crimes in the open and thrived as a result. Thanks to unchecked greed, we paid everything we had for healthcare, only to be denied treatment when we needed it. Thanks to the dismantling of the welfare state, more and more of us had to wait in long lines to fill out absurdly long forms in triplicate. Thanks to the intrinsic instability of such a terrible system, more and more of us ended up in prison, and protest became more and more illegal:

https://memex.craphound.com/2015/02/02/david-graebers-the-utopia-of-rules-on-technology-stupidity-and-the-secret-joys-of-bureaucracy/

Graeber pointed out that the rise of the web made it seductively easy for people in authority to force us to fill in forms. When analog bureaucracies impose paperwork costs on us, they also impose paperwork costs on themselves, because processing and filing those forms requires substantial effort, even if filling in those forms requires even more effort from us.

When it comes to virtual paperwork, the asymmetry is even more pronounced. Sure, it takes some admin to set up an online form and write the scripts to process its outputs, but that's a one-off. The form-giver can perform a very little admin and still impose a giant, repeated admin burden on the rest of us.

AI has only made this worse. Now, thanks to vibe coding, everyone can produce a form and its associated processing and analytics back-end with prompts, which creates a grave moral hazard. The kinds of activities that I used to fill in a single short form to accomplish now require ten lengthy forms, created by different people in the same organization, all asking for variations on the same information. Through AI, we have democratized bureaucracy. It's Kafka-as-a-service.

What's more, when you're dealing with a monopoly, you have no choice but to complete whatever paperwork they throw at you. And when the vibe-coded back-end scripts shit the bed and lose or misinterpret your data, you have no choice but to endure an infinite telephone hold queue (if you're lucky) or get shunted to a customer service bot (if you're unlucky):

https://pluralistic.net/2025/11/11/sorry-to-bother-you/#we-dont-care-we-dont-have-to

It's entirely possible to build webforms that are thoughtful, fast, respectful of our time, and well-processed. The problem is that fielding these forms requires that the form-giver undertake some intensive, moderately expensive work (once), while skipping this step merely requires that we all perform intensive, time-consuming work (over and over and over again):

https://mohkohn.co.uk/writing/html-first/

This is how we end up with government forms that require you to list every trip you have ever taken to the USA, since your infancy, with every flight number, which you can only get help with by talking to a chatbot that emails you an out-of-date PDF no matter what question you ask of it:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/02/06/doge-ball/#n-600

This is how we end up with massive customer service queues, long lines at tills, and no one at the gate to answer your questions when your flight is canceled. Understaffing is a form of enshittification, one that shifts value from shoppers to owners, and shifts consequences from owners to workers:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/03/22/nobodys-home/#squeeze-that-hog

This is how we end up with broken machines that no one can fix. Firing workers and replacing them with chatbots or contractors means incinerating their process knowledge – the precious, inchoate, unrecorded understanding that keeps everything working:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/04/08/process-knowledge-vs-bosses/#wash-dishes-cut-wood

This is how companies that make products we love suddenly decide to wreck those products: when the only consequences for shitty products is angry customers with nowhere to go and no one to vent their rage upon except workers who have no labor rights and can't afford to quit, why not do a mafia bust-out for every business?

https://pluralistic.net/2023/07/28/microincentives-and-enshittification/

The world has moved on. Nothing works. Everything costs too much. No one can help. No one knows how to fix anything. The beams were broken by the Crimson King and his economism-crazed minions. The Dark Tower might fall.

So what consumer advice do I have for people who are angry about this? I don't have any consumer advice, I'm afraid. You can't shop your way out of a monopoly. Once again, shopping is not politics.

What I have for you is political advice. To restore the beams and beat back entropy again, we need a better system, not more virtuous individuals. If you feel – as I do – that "the world has moved on," then to wrench it back, you will have to join a polity. Support activist groups like the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the digital rights group I've been at for the past 25 years:

https://supporters.eff.org/donate/join-eff

Join a union. If there's no union at your jobsite, start a union. If you work in tech, you start this process by talking to techsolidarity.org and the techworkerscoalition.org. In the UK, get in touch with United Tech and Allied Workers:

https://utaw.tech/

Get involved in party politics. Find a political party whose local organization supports your values (even if the national version of that party sucks) and then work with your fellow grassroots activists to drag or replace the party leaders. Get involved in local politics: if there's one thing Moms For Liberty has taught us, it's that unregarded, seemingly unimportant local offices have enormous potential to change facts on the ground for the people where you live. Those changes don't have to be change for the worse.

Doing politics is hard. Hell, after all, is other people. It would be great if we could make change by changing ourselves, but that's not how any of this works. The world has moved on, and you can't save it. But together, we can restore the beams and beat back entropy. Hell is other people, but only because other people are so great but it's so hard to figure out how to work together. We can do it, though. We did it with the post-war settlement, the 30 glorious years when we built the welfare state, regulated polluters and bosses, and kicked off the civil rights movement. We did it then, and we can do it again. We must. All things serve the beams.

Hey look at this (permalink)


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

Object permanence (permalink)

#20yrsago Coupland’s JPod: the Anti-Microserfs https://memex.craphound.com/2006/06/09/couplands-jpod-the-anti-microserfs/

#20yrsago Anti-iTunes DRM demonstrations across the USA tomorrow https://www.defectivebydesign.org/node/98

#20yrsago EFF co-founder Barlow debates MPAA prez Glickman http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/programmes/newsnight/5064170.stm

#20yrsago Warehouse where old Disney World rides go to die https://limegreen-loris-912771.hostingersite.com/lost-horizons-another-look-back-at-a-future-world-favorite/

#15yrsago IMF considered harmful https://www.independent.co.uk/voices/commentators/johann-hari/johann-hari-it-s-not-just-dominique-strausskahn-the-imf-itself-should-be-on-trial-2292270.html

#15yrsago AT&T lobbies Wisconsin GOP to nuke Wisconsin’s best-of-breed co-op ISP for educational institutions https://communitynetworks.org/content/does-att-really-own-wisconsin-legislature-battle-over-wiscnet-continues

#15yrsago Developmentally disabled man harrassed by TSA at Detroit airport https://web.archive.org/web/20110610141422/http://www.myfoxdetroit.com/dpp/news/taryn_asher/dad-special-needs-son-harassed-by-tsa-at-detroit-metropolitan-airport-20110608-wpms

#15yrsago Miami cops intimidate citizen journalist who recorded shoot-em-up, smash camera https://web.archive.org/web/20110615035017/https://www.miamiherald.com/2011/06/02/v-fullstory/2248396/witnesses-said-they-were-forced.html

#15yrsago NYC cyclist vs. bike lanes – kamikaze law-abiding https://web.archive.org/web/20110612100758/https://consumerist.com/2011/06/test.html

#15yrsago Judge to copyright trolls: you are “inexcusable” https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2011/06/judge-furious-at-inexcusable-p2p-lawyering-cancels-subpoenas/

#15yrsago Wah wah crybaby extortionists wah wah https://torrentfreak.com/anti-piracy-lawyers-defame-torrentfreak-in-court-110609/

#15yrsago Lisa Goldstein’s The Uncertain Places: Grimm fairytale in California vibrates with believable unreality https://memex.craphound.com/2011/06/09/lisa-goldsteins-the-uncertain-places-grimm-fairytale-in-california-vibrates-with-believable-unreality/

#15yrsago American right upset at report that Thatcher won’t meet Palin https://www.theguardian.com/world/2011/jun/09/margaret-thatcher-sarah-palin-meeting

#15yrsago Lobbynomics: Canadian Chamber of Commerce manufactures fake $30 billion counterfeiting loss https://web.archive.org/web/20110611045202/https://www.michaelgeist.ca/content/view/5841/125/

#10yrsago USA Swimming bans rapist Brock Turner for life https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-news/usa-swimming-bans-convicted-rapist-brock-turner-for-life-114108/

#10yrsago Human advice for exercising while depressed https://web.archive.org/web/20160505140324/https://theestablishment.co/2016/05/05/depression-busting-exercise-tips-for-people-too-depressed-to-exercise/

#10yrsago Every industry thinks it’s special, but only finance gets treated that way https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/06/John-Kay-BIS-speech.pdf

#10yrsago Spain’s Podemos Party publishes its manifesto in Ikea Catalog form https://estaticos.elperiodico.com/resources/pdf/9/4/1465389843149.pdf

#10yrsago Reminder: Neal Stephenson predicted Donald Trump in 1994 https://memex.craphound.com/2016/06/10/reminder-neal-stephenson-predicted-donald-trump-in-1994/

#10yrsago Donald Trump, deadbeat https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/elections/2016/06/09/donald-trump-unpaid-bills-republican-president-laswuits/85297274/

#10yrsago UK startup offers landlords continuous, deep surveillance of tenants’ social media https://web.archive.org/web/20160610150904/https://gawker.com/new-startup-that-sends-dossiers-on-your-private-social-1781576586

#10yrsago UK Parliament votes in Snoopers Charter, now it goes to the House of Lords https://www.techdirt.com/2016/06/08/uk-parliament-ignores-concerns-moves-snoopers-charter-forward/

#10yrsago Hard times for judge who sued dry-cleaner for $65M over missing pants https://www.loweringthebar.net/2016/06/pants-chapter-28.html

#10yrsago New York Attorney General to Time Warner: your Internet is “abysmal” and “troubling” https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2016/06/time-warner-cable-internet-speeds-are-abysmal-ny-ag-claims/

#10yrsago Banks confront negative interest rates with plans to store titanic bundles of money on-site https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2016/06/banks-rebel-against-negative-interest-rates.html

#10yrsago Watchdogs 2: hacker kids led by a guy named Marcus fight the DHS in San Francisco https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5ipUwUcHASI

#10yrsago Internet greybeards and upstarts gather to redecentralize the Internet https://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/08/technology/the-webs-creator-looks-to-reinvent-it.html

#10yrsago How we will keep the Decentralized Web decentralized: my talk from the Decentralized Web Summit https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yth7O6yeZRE

#5yrsago Prisoners' Inventions https://pluralistic.net/2021/06/09/king-rat/#mother-of-invention

#5yrsago Urban broadband deserts https://pluralistic.net/2021/06/10/flicc/#digital-divide

#5yrsago A denialism taxonomy https://pluralistic.net/2021/06/10/flicc/#denialism

Upcoming appearances (permalink)

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


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

Recent appearances (permalink)


A grid of my books with Will Stahle covers..

Latest books (permalink)


A cardboard book box with the Macmillan logo.

Upcoming books (permalink)

  • "The Reverse-Centaur's Guide to AI," a short book about being a better AI critic, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, June 2026 (https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374621568/thereversecentaursguidetolifeafterai/)

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

  • "The Post-American Internet," a geopolitical sequel of sorts to Enshittification, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2027

  • "Unauthorized Bread": a middle-grades graphic novel adapted from my novella about refugees, toasters and DRM, FirstSecond, April 20, 2027

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


Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources:

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

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

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

  • A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING

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"When life gives you SARS, you make sarsaparilla" -Joey "Accordion Guy" DeVilla

READ CAREFULLY: By reading this, you agree, on behalf of your employer, to release me from all obligations and waivers arising from any and all NON-NEGOTIATED agreements, licenses, terms-of-service, shrinkwrap, clickwrap, browsewrap, confidentiality, non-disclosure, non-compete and acceptable use policies ("BOGUS AGREEMENTS") that I have entered into with your employer, its partners, licensors, agents and assigns, in perpetuity, without prejudice to my ongoing rights and privileges. You further represent that you have the authority to release me from any BOGUS AGREEMENTS on behalf of your employer.

ISSN: 3066-764X

Received — 27 April 2026 ⏭

Pluralistic: The enshittification multiverse (27 Apr 2026)

✇Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
By: Cory Doctorow
27 April 2026 at 10:39


Today's links

  • The enshittification multiverse: It's a useful analogy.
  • Hey look at this: Delights to delectate.
  • Object permanence: Every complex ecosystem has parasites; Prison for "attempted infringement"; When We Were Robots in Egypt; Golfing in The Blitz; Copyright vs privacy (NZ edn); GOP support for pedophile Hastert; EFF's music license; RIP Jane Jacobs; California is fanfic; DMCA v medical implants; "Burglar's Guide to the City"; Flaming river; Fantasy accounting.
  • Upcoming appearances: Berlin, NYC, Barcelona, Hay-on-Wye, London, NYC.
  • 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.


Space, awash in nebulae; a receding line of vast Enshittification poop emojis curves away to infinity, each mouth covered in a grawlix-scrawled black bar.

The enshittification multiverse (permalink)

It's official: you have my consent and enthusiastic blessing to apply "enshittification" to things that aren't digital platforms! Semantic drift is good, actually:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/10/14/pearl-clutching/#this-toilet-has-no-central-nervous-system

With that out of the way, let's talk about how enshittification can be usefully applied to gambits that worsen something in order to shift value from the users of that thing to the person doing the worsening.

Here's the crux: in life, there are many zero-sum situations in which others' pain is your profit. The most basic example of this is profit margins: as your profit margin climbs, so do the prices paid by others. The more money a customer gives you for whatever you're selling, the less money that customer has to spend on other things they want.

This is the fatal flaw in the economist's justification for surveillance pricing (when the price you're quoted is based on surveillance data about the urgency of your needs and your ability to pay): a seller who commands higher prices from a buyer deprives other sellers of that buyer's money.

The airline that knows you can't miss a funeral and also knows how much purchasing power is available on your credit card can charge you every cent you can afford – but that means that the coffee shop owner who normally sells you a latte in the morning will lose out on your business for months while you dig yourself out of that hole.

Tim Wu has a good example of this: imagine a world in which electricity utilities were unregulated and got to charge "market rates" for their products. Prior to the current wave of cheap, efficient solar, electrical power was a "natural monopoly." In nearly every circumstance, a given person would end up with just one source of power, and life without power was nearly unimaginable. In that situation, the power company's "rational" decision would be to charge you everything you could afford for the least electricity you could survive on: enough to keep your fridge and a few lights on. That means that you would be deprived of the value of, say, a clock radio and a coffee-maker, and the manufacturers of the clock radio and the coffee-maker would likewise suffer the loss of your business.

So the "monopoly" part is key to this story. The more alternatives you have, the harder it is to squeeze you on prices. Airport concessionaires can charge $12 for a Coke on the "clean" side of a TSA checkpoint because realistically you can't leave the airport and get a Coke elsewhere – and if you do, you can't bring it through the checkpoint.

Any source of lock-in becomes an invitation to shift value away from your customers and suppliers to yourself. High "switching costs" are always a precondition for enshittification – otherwise the people you're trying to enshittify will simply take their business elsewhere:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2021/08/facebooks-secret-war-switching-costs

That's why market concentration is so central to the enshittification story: when the number of competitors in a sector dwindles to a cartel (or a duopoly or a monopoly) companies find it easy to fix prices so there's no point in shopping around, and they can capture their regulators and harness the power of the state to block other companies from entering the market with a better deal:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/02/05/small-government/

Now that we understand the role that switching costs, regulatory capture, and market concentration play in enshittification, let's put them together to propose a framework for applying enshittification to things other than digital platforms:

Enshittification happens when someone sets out to reduce your choices, and then uses that lock-in to make things worse for you in order to make things better for themself.

Note that this definition requires a degree of intent. Enshittification isn't just bargaining hard when you find yourself in a position of strength. It's what happens when you set out to systematically weaken other people's bargaining position in anticipation of a future opportunity to fuck them over in order to improve your own situation.

So if the business lobby bribes Republican state legislators to pass "right to work" laws that make it nearly impossible for workers to unionize, and then the businesses involved worsen their workers' pay and conditions, we can call that enshittification. If they can bind workers to noncompete "agreements" that make it illegal for the cashier at Wendy's to get $0.25/h more at the McDonald's, that's even more enshittifying:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/11/10/zero-sum-zero-hours/#that-sounds-like-a-you-problem

Or if shitty men lobby to end anti-discrimination laws (making it much harder for a single woman to survive on her paycheck) and to end no-fault divorce (to make it much harder for a woman to leave the husband she marries to survive in a world where it's legal to discriminate against her in the workplace), in anticipation of being able to be a shitty husband without losing their wives, they are enshittifying marriage (applying this to the effort to kill the concept of "marital rape" is left as an exercise for the reader).

This can also be applied to politics. Restrictions on immigration and out-migration are both preludes to state enshittification, since a population that can't leave for another state will, on average, put up with more abuse from their political classes without leaving. Tying your work visa to your employer is very enshittification-friendly:

https://prospect.org/2026/04/22/north-carolina-farm-stole-h-2a-visa-workers-passports-lawsuit-trump-immigration/

One of the questions I get most frequently is "what about AI and enshittification?" This is a complicated question! Obviously, AI is very enshittification-prone: as "black boxes" that do not produce reliable, deterministic outputs, AI products have a lot of intrinsic cover for their enshittifying behavior.

If you ask a chatbot to recommend a product and it steers you toward an inferior option that generates a higher commission for the company, who can say whether that was the chatbot cheating, or if it was a "hallucination?" Likewise, if you ask a chatbot to solve your problem and it does so in an inefficient way that burns a zillion tokens (which you have to pay for), is that the chatbot malfunctioning, or is that price-gouging?

https://pluralistic.net/2025/08/16/jackpot/#salience-bias

Beyond this, AI is very useful for plain old enshittification. Surveillance pricing – changing prices or wages based on the other person's desperation and ability to pay – is something AI is very good at:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/01/21/cod-marxism/#wannamaker-slain

And AI companies can enshittify their products in all the traditional ways: after a customer integrates AI in their lives and businesses in ways that are hard to escape, the AI company can raise prices, insert ads, and route queries to cheaper models that cost less to run and produce worse outputs.

But here's where there's a critical difference between enshittifying AI and enshittifying a profitable tech business like app stores or search engines. AI is the money-losingest project the human race has ever attempted. At $1.4 trillion and counting, the AI companies and their "frontier models" are so deep in the red that I can't see any way that any of these firms will survive:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/04/16/pascals-wager/#doomer-challenge

So, on the one hand, as these companies find themselves ever-more cash-strapped, they will be severely tempted to enshittify their products. But on the other hand, if these companies are doomed no matter what they do, then the enshittification will take care of itself when they go bankrupt.

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 Jakob Nielsen on reputation managers https://www.nngroup.com/articles/reputation-managers-are-happening/

#25yrsago EFF's sharing friendly music license https://web.archive.org/web/20010429045301/https://www.eff.org/IP/Open_licenses/20010421_eff_oal_pr.html

#25yrsago Speedle: what links are forwarded most online? https://web.archive.org/web/20010401084047/http://www.speedle.com/

#20yrsago RIP Jane Jacobs, urban activist https://web.archive.org/web/20061009063708/http://www.canada.com/topics/news/story.html?id=fe1de18f-6b6e-473d-b0cb-0cc422dcf661&k=25935

#20yrsago Why fan fiction is so important https://nielsenhayden.com/makinglight/archives/007464.html#007464

#20yrsago California got its name from fanfic https://nielsenhayden.com/makinglight/archives/007464.html#122035

#20yrsago DMCA revision proposal will jail Americans for “attempting” infringment https://web.archive.org/web/20060502093524/https://ipaction.org/blog/2006/04/bill-hollywood-cartels-dont-want-you_24.html

#20yrsago Vista’s endless parade of warnings won’t create security https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2006/04/microsoft_vista.html

#15yrsago Passover poem about robots: “When We Were Robots in Egypt” https://reactormag.com/when-we-were-robots-in-egypt/

#15yrsago Naipaul’s rules for beginning writers https://web.archive.org/web/20110508152004/http://www.indiauncut.com/iublog/article/vs-naipauls-advice-to-writers-rules-for-beginners/

#15yrsago Rules for golfing during the blitz https://directorblue.blogspot.com/2011/04/stiff-upper-lip.html

#15yrsago New Zealand’s rammed-through copyright law includes mass warrantless surveillance and publication of accused’s browsing habits https://www.stuff.co.nz/technology/digital-living/4922854/Copyright-change-about-more-than-idle-threats

#15yrsago State Dept adding intrusive, semi-impossible questionnaire for US passport applications https://web.archive.org/web/20110427025422/https://www.consumertraveler.com/today/state-dept-wants-to-make-it-harder-to-get-a-passport/

#10yrsago A Burglar’s Guide to the City: burglary as architectural criticism https://memex.craphound.com/2016/04/25/a-burglars-guide-to-the-city-burglary-as-architectural-criticism/

#10yrsago EFF to FDA: the DMCA turns medical implants into time-bombs https://www.eff.org/files/2016/04/22/electronic_frontier_foundation_comments_cybersecurity_in_medical_devices_.pdf

#10yrsago James Clapper: Snowden accelerated cryptography adoption by 7 years https://web.archive.org/web/20160425161451/https://theintercept.com/2016/04/25/spy-chief-complains-that-edward-snowden-sped-up-spread-of-encryption-by-7-years/

#10yrsago Australian MP sets river on fire https://web.archive.org/web/20170518083229/https://www.yahoo.com/news/australian-politician-sets-river-fire-protest-fracking-064640159.html

#10yrsago Fantasy accounting: how the biggest companies in America turn real losses into paper profits https://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/24/business/fantasy-math-is-helping-companies-spin-losses-into-profits.html

#10yrsago Leading Republicans send letters in support of Dennis Hastert, pedophile https://www.chicagotribune.com/2016/04/22/more-than-40-letters-in-support-of-hastert-made-public-before-sentencing/

#5yrsago Guess who's doing a usury in Iowa https://pluralistic.net/2021/04/24/peloton-usury/#going-nowhere-fast

#1yrago Every complex ecosystem has parasites https://pluralistic.net/2025/04/24/hermit-kingdom/#simpler-times

Upcoming appearances (permalink)

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


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

Recent appearances (permalink)


A grid of my books with Will Stahle covers..

Latest books (permalink)


A cardboard book box with the Macmillan logo.

Upcoming books (permalink)

  • "The Reverse-Centaur's Guide to AI," a short book about being a better AI critic, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, June 2026 (https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374621568/thereversecentaursguidetolifeafterai/)

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

  • "The Post-American Internet," a geopolitical sequel of sorts to Enshittification, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2027

  • "Unauthorized Bread": a middle-grades graphic novel adapted from my novella about refugees, toasters and DRM, FirstSecond, 2027

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


Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources:

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

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

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

  • A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING

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

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

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

How to get Pluralistic:

Blog (no ads, tracking, or data-collection):

Pluralistic.net

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"When life gives you SARS, you make sarsaparilla" -Joey "Accordion Guy" DeVilla

READ CAREFULLY: By reading this, you agree, on behalf of your employer, to release me from all obligations and waivers arising from any and all NON-NEGOTIATED agreements, licenses, terms-of-service, shrinkwrap, clickwrap, browsewrap, confidentiality, non-disclosure, non-compete and acceptable use policies ("BOGUS AGREEMENTS") that I have entered into with your employer, its partners, licensors, agents and assigns, in perpetuity, without prejudice to my ongoing rights and privileges. You further represent that you have the authority to release me from any BOGUS AGREEMENTS on behalf of your employer.

ISSN: 3066-764X

Received — 17 April 2026 ⏭

Pluralistic: Tiktokification shall set us free (17 Apr 2026)

✇Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
By: Cory Doctorow
17 April 2026 at 12:30


Today's links


Dore's illustration of Moses coming off the mountain with the Ten Commandments; it has been modified. It has been hand tinted. Moses' head has been replaced with Mark Zuckerberg's metaverse avatar's head. The Tiktok logo appears in the bottom left corner of the stone tablets.

Tiktokification shall set us free (permalink)

Mark Zuckerberg has a problem with your friends: they're the reason you signed up to use his platform, but they stubbornly refuse to organize your socialization to "maximize engagement." Every time you and your friends wrap up a social interaction and log off, Zuckerberg loses revenue.

After all, by definition, you and your friends have a lot of shared context. You probably feel mostly the same way about most things. You probably mostly consume the same kind of media. You probably mostly consume the same kinds of news. You and your friends make each other's lives better in lots of ways, but typically not by surprising one another. On a typical day, no friend of yours is going to absolutely floor you with a novel thought or finding that sparks hours of furious conversation and argumentation.

And speaking of argumentation: you and your friends probably don't argue that much – I mean, sure, you'll have "friendly disagreements" (again, by definition), but if there's a friend who sparks furious, frustrating, irresistible feuds that drag on and on, chances are that person won't be your friend anymore.

Facebook experienced sustained, meteoric growth by letting people connect with their friends, but Zuckerberg quickly came to understand that his path to revenue maximization ran through nonconsensually cramming strangers' posts into your eyeballs, in the hopes that you would lose yourself in long, pointless arguments.

But that, too, hit a limit. Most of us don't like having our limbic systems tormented by strangers. As anyone who is sick to the back teeth of just hearing the word "Trump" can attest, living in a trollocracy is exhausting.

Enter Tiktok. Tiktok found a way to connect you to strangers who don't make you angry. By offering performers money if they produced media that you "engaged" with, Tiktok offloaded the work of convincing you to conduct your online activities in a way that maximized opportunities to show you an ad onto an army of global theater kids who would spend every hour that god sent trying to figure out how to keep you looking at Tiktok.

This was hugely successful – so successful, in fact, that Tiktok was able to cheat, overriding its own algorithmic guesses about which of its billion cable-access television channels you'd stare at the longest with a "heating tool" that lets the company trick some of those theater kids into thinking that Tiktok was actually more suited to them than other platforms:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/21/potemkin-ai/#hey-guys

For zuckermuskian social media bosses, Tiktok became an object of fierce envy. Here was the ultimate Tom Sawyer robo-fence-painter, a self-licking ice-cream cone that motivated people to convince each other to make money for you. Facebook, Instagram and Twitter took a hard pivot away from showing you the things that the people you loved had to say, in favor of showing you short videos of people whose parents didn't give them enough affection in their childhood, desperately shoving lemons up their noses in a bid to win your approval (and a revshare split with the platforms).

It worked. Sorta. Thing is, some of those "content creators" are actually very good, and none of them appreciate being jerked around. They quite rightly see their reason for being on the platforms as improving their own lives, not the bottom line of the platforms' owners and executives. They may be more "engaging" than your friends, but they're also a lot mouthier and feel entitled to a say in how the platform operates.

What's a billionaire solipsist to do? Obviously, the answer is "AI creators." An "AI creator" is like a "creator" in that it works to maximize your engagement with the platform – and thus the number of ads that can be crammed into your face-holes – but, unlike a "creator," it makes no demands upon the platform and exists solely to serve the platform's shareholders and executives. It's the perfect realization of the solipsist fantasy of a world without people:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/01/05/fisher-price-steering-wheel/#billionaire-solipsism

But there's a problem with this plan: your friends are not a liability for a platform. Your friends are the platforms' single most important asset. Your friends are why the platforms are so "sticky." The platforms don't "hack your dopamine loops" – they just take your friends hostage, and even though you love your friends, they are a monumental pain in the ass, and if you can't even agree on what board-game you're going to play this weekend, how are you going to agree when it's time to leave Facebook, and where to go next?

https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/08/watch-the-surpluses/#exogenous-shocks

So long as you love your friends more than you hate Zuckerberg or Musk, you will remain stuck to their platforms. The platform bosses know this, and they inflict pain on you that is titrated to be just below the threshold where you hate the platforms more than you love your friends.

But as much as the platform bosses rely on your love of your friends, they still view your friends as liabilities, thanks to those friends' unreasonable insistence on structuring their relationship with you to maximize their own satisfaction, rather than how much time you spend looking at ads. So the platforms are deliberately disconnecting you from your friends by minimizing the fraction of your feed that is given over to posts from people you follow, and replacing those friends with a succession of ever-more fungible posters: trolls, creators, and chatbots.

The key word here is fungible. A feed composed of things posted by people you have a personal connection to is non-fungible: it cannot be swapped for a feed of things posted by strangers. Your friends fulfill a very specific purpose in your life that strangers – even extremely cool strangers – cannot match.

On the other hand: one feed of algorithmically selected, entertaining amateur dramatics is broadly equivalent to any other feed of algorithmically selected amateur dramatics. That goes double for feeds whose performers are "multi-homing" on more than one platform – whether you see the extremely charming and interesting Vlog Brothers in a Youtube feed, a Tiktok feed or an Insta feed makes no difference (to you – but it matters a lot to the platform bosses). That goes quintuple for feeds composed of AI slop, which is literally the most interchangeable video that modern science is capable of producing.

All of which is to say: the platforms are deliberately feeding their most important commercial assets into a shredder, in a fit of pique over your friends' unwillingness to act like chatbots. Every day and in every way, the platforms are making it easier to leave them for some rival's service, chasing the billionaire solipsist's dream of a world without people:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/02/17/live-by-the-swordlive-by-the-sword/#unfriending-tom

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 Leon Trotsky, B2B visionary https://web.archive.org/web/20020211212222/http://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/works/1935/1935-ame.htm

#20yrsago What would a BBC “public service game” look like? https://web.archive.org/web/20060417123908/http://crystaltips.typepad.com/wonderland/2006/04/on_public_servi.html

#15yrsago New Zealand’s 3-strikes rule can go into effect in September https://legislation.govt.nz/bill/government/2010/119/en/latest/#DLM3331800

#15yrsago Lawsuit: DRM spied on me, gathered my personal info, sent it to copyright enforcers who called me with $150,000 legal threat https://www.techdirt.com/2011/04/14/drm-accused-sending-personal-info-to-help-with-licensing-shakedown/

#10yrsago Edward Snowden provides vocals on a beautiful new Jean-Michel Jarre composition https://web.archive.org/web/20190415045927/https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-news/edward-snowdens-new-job-electronic-music-vocalist-184650/

#10yrsago Uber and Lyft don’t cover their cost of capital and rely on desperate workers https://www.ianwelsh.net/the-market-fairy-will-not-solve-the-problems-of-uber-and-lyft/?

#10yrsago Treescrapers are bullshit https://99percentinvisible.org/article/renderings-vs-reality-rise-tree-covered-skyscrapers/

#10yrsago Before and After Mexico: a Bruce Sterling story about the eco-pocalypse https://bruces.medium.com/before-and-after-mexico-f3371c346c8a#.33e9poqnx

#10yrsago Barack Obama: Taking money from 1 percenters compromised my politics https://web.archive.org/web/20160415201709/https://theintercept.com/2016/04/15/barack-obama-never-said-money-wasnt-corrupting-in-fact-he-said-the-opposite/

#1yrago Tesla accused of hacking odometers to weasel out of warranty repairs https://pluralistic.net/2025/04/15/musklemons/#more-like-edison-amirite

Upcoming appearances (permalink)

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


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

Recent appearances (permalink)


A grid of my books with Will Stahle covers..

Latest books (permalink)


A cardboard book box with the Macmillan logo.

Upcoming books (permalink)

  • "The Reverse-Centaur's Guide to AI," a short book about being a better AI critic, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, June 2026 (https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374621568/thereversecentaursguidetolifeafterai/)

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

  • "The Post-American Internet," a geopolitical sequel of sorts to Enshittification, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2027

  • "Unauthorized Bread": a middle-grades graphic novel adapted from my novella about refugees, toasters and DRM, FirstSecond, 2027

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


Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources:

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

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

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

  • A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING

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

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

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

How to get Pluralistic:

Blog (no ads, tracking, or data-collection):

Pluralistic.net

Newsletter (no ads, tracking, or data-collection):

https://pluralistic.net/plura-list

Mastodon (no ads, tracking, or data-collection):

https://mamot.fr/@pluralistic

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Medium (no ads, paywalled):

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Tumblr (mass-scale, unrestricted, third-party surveillance and advertising):

https://mostlysignssomeportents.tumblr.com/tagged/pluralistic

"When life gives you SARS, you make sarsaparilla" -Joey "Accordion Guy" DeVilla

READ CAREFULLY: By reading this, you agree, on behalf of your employer, to release me from all obligations and waivers arising from any and all NON-NEGOTIATED agreements, licenses, terms-of-service, shrinkwrap, clickwrap, browsewrap, confidentiality, non-disclosure, non-compete and acceptable use policies ("BOGUS AGREEMENTS") that I have entered into with your employer, its partners, licensors, agents and assigns, in perpetuity, without prejudice to my ongoing rights and privileges. You further represent that you have the authority to release me from any BOGUS AGREEMENTS on behalf of your employer.

ISSN: 3066-764X

Received — 11 October 2025 ⏭
Received — 1 October 2025 ⏭

Announcing the Enshittification tour

✇Cory Doctorow's craphound.com
By: Cory Doctorow
1 October 2025 at 18:13

A hobo with a bindlestiff, walking down a lonely train track. His head has been replaced with a poop emoji with angry eyebrows whose mouth is covered with a black bar covered in grawlix.

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

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

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

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

Here’s that schedule!

❌