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Pluralistic: Thwarted (09 Oct 2026)
Today's links
- Thwarted: Behold the awesome destructive power of a fully operational billionaire.
- Hey look at this: Delights to delectate.
- Object permanence: Anthrax v National Inquirer; Grey goo v Second Life; Predictive policing v actual crime; Spooky cookies; California v algorithmic price-fixing; Tivo self-destructs; Disney exec endorses piracy; TSA v geologists; Handheld printer; Mandatory DRM for all Canadian music sales; Iceweasel; "Snuff"; "Shade the Changing Girl"; Latam surveillance; Scotland Yard brands encryption terrorism; RBS slaughtered 10k small businesses to seize and sell their assets; Dead Letters.
- Upcoming appearances: Calgary, Winnipeg, Paris, Vancouver, Victoria, Ottawa, Kilkenny, Sheffield, Oxford, Montreal.
- Recent appearances: Where I've been.
- Latest books: You keep readin' em, I'll keep writin' 'em.
- Upcoming books: Like I said, I'll keep writin' 'em.
- Colophon: All the rest.
Thwarted (permalink)
There are many ways in which every billionaire is a policy failure, but the most corrosive and destructive way in which billionaires are policy failures is this: billionaires, despite being unelected and unaccountable, possess the power to control β and ruin β millions of peoples' lives.
Despite what the Prosperity Gospel and the Efficient Market Hypothesis would have you believe, having billions of dollars is in no way a reliable predictor that you also possess the wisdom to unilaterally dictate how thousands or millions of other people must live their lives, and that dictatorial power is the most tangible effect of being a billionaire.
Billionaireism is many things, but above all else, it is the power to do whatever you want to do, at the expense of whatever other people want to do. To be a billionaire is to live a life unthwarted, above the power of your workers, your neighbors, or your government and its laws. It is the right to get high on your own supply. It is the right to live a life in which no one ever calls you on your bullshit.
Billionaires aspire to live a one-sided libertarian fantasy in which they have the unlimited right to do whatever they want, and you have the right to do whatever they tell you to do.
There has always been a group of people who refused to acknowledge that other people have perfectly valid reasons for wanting to pursue their own goals rather than theirs. We call most of those people "toddlers" and devote sizable social effort to helping them outgrow this belief. Billionaires, on the other hand, command resources that allow them to devote sizable effort to getting us to acknowledge that they should be able to tell us what to do.
This is why billionaires love neoclassical economics, with its doctrine of "revealed preferences," which holds that the only true way to understand someone's preferences is to ignore what they say and only pay attention to what they do. It's a belief that can only be adopted by people who suffer the self-inflicted neurological injury you get from doing an economics degree, which renders the victim incapable of perceiving or reasoning about power. To believe in "revealed preferences" is to observe someone who has sold their kidney to pay the rent and marvel at this person who has a revealed preference for only having one kidney:
https://pluralistic.net/2026/03/30/players-of-games/#know-when-to-fold-em
"Revealed preferences" is the economist's version of the bully who grabs your arm and starts whacking you with your own hand while shouting, "stop hitting yourself!" The ideological purpose that "revealed preferences" fills is letting billionaires live a life unthwarted. It's a life where they thwart everyone else, but still claim to be believers in "freedom."
This is what Peter Thiel meant when he wrote that "democracy is incompatible with freedom." In a democracy, the people who you exercise coercive power over are able to band together to create public institutions that act as a check on your power. For Thiel to maximize his freedom (to do things like spying on us and crushing our journalistic outlets), he must prevent all of us from voting, lest we vote to take away those cherished freedoms of his:
https://www.cato-unbound.org/2009/04/13/peter-thiel/education-libertarian/
We're told that as mere mortals, we must inevitably submit to "death and taxes." Billionaires have long since so corrupted our political system that they need not pay taxes:
https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/S/bo256019296.html
They have (practically speaking) infinite wealth, which means that they have practically infinite power, including the power to block any democratic attempt to limit their wealth (and thus their power):
https://www.hamiltonnolan.com/p/the-war-against-accumulated-capital
Having vanquished taxes, the ultra-rich are now committed to defeating death as well, making themselves easy marks for the world's weirdest cult leaders and grifters, who promise them a mix of physical and digital immortality:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0oVSnaINJ30
The fact that billionaires are such suckers, so often, is the strongest argument against billionaireism. Billionaires aren't just powerful, they're also fallible. We're all fallible, of course, but only billionaires get to impose their foolish ideas on so many other people, who have no say in the matter.
Henry Ford thought that he was so rich that he could build Brazilian worker housing whose windows faced the same direction as the worker housing he'd built in Dearborn, Michigan. He literally thought that being rich meant that he could ignore the entire concept of the Earth's axial tilt (he was wrong):
Of course that was the least of Ford's follies. Ford also believed in a secret Jewish conspiracy to control humanity:
https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/features/henryford-antisemitism/
And despite the fact that Ford was so often demonstrably as thick as pigshit, no one was able to stop him from hiring soldiers to literally slaughter anyone who tried to limit his ability to tell other people how to live their lives:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_the_Overpass
Ford is no exception. Elon Musk believes in the same racist garbage as Henry Fordβ¦but he also believes that if you're rich enough, you can simply wish away geometry and physics:
https://pluralistic.net/2025/07/24/geometry-hates-cars/#dogshit-unit-economics
More than anyone else, Musk illustrates the way that being insulated from people who can thwart you leads to absolute ruination. Every terrible idea Musk has, he gets to act on. This has all kinds of negative impacts, including the very real possibility that some day your house will be crushed by his flaming rocketry debris:
https://www.vice.com/en/article/texas-residents-are-suing-spacex-over-terrestrial-bombardment/
That's small potatoes, though: Musk's wrong ideas, combined with his billionaire's impunity, also allowed him to murder hundreds of thousands of the world's poorest children:
https://hsph.harvard.edu/news/usaid-shutdown-has-led-to-hundreds-of-thousands-of-deaths/
Billionaireism is fractally terrible. By definition, the kind of person who will inflict the kinds of harms needed to amass billions of dollars in pursuit of total impunity is someone who will use that impunity to hurt even more people. Anyone who fails to outgrow a toddler's insistence on subordinating others to their will should not be allowed to subordinate anyone to their will.
Billionaire dilettantes aren't like regular dilettantes. Anyone can be a crank, but billionaire cranks have the force-multiplier of money and the impunity it brings. These allow a billionaire to turn his crackpot ideas into an unstoppable force that crushes public education:
It also lets billionaires (including the billionaire ruining public education) kidnap and rape more than a thousand girls on a private island:
Whatever crank whim a rich person has, we all have to live with. Take Barre Seid: the 94 year old billionaire made his fortune manufacturing electronics, and then donated $1.6b to fund "attack philanthropy" in order to undermine belief in climate change and prevent any action from being taken to avert it:
https://www.propublica.org/article/barre-seid-heartland-institute-hillsdale-college-gmu
Seid is one of the main reasons we're experiencing the super El Nino. He's not just in the top 0.1% of wealth-horders, he's also in the top 0.1% of people we can blame for the twelve foot sea-level rise that is currently wiping Long Beach off the map:
https://ktla.com/news/local-news/long-beach-boardwalk-collapse-rachel-surf/
Henry Ford didn't believe in the planet's axial tilt. Elon Musk doesn't believe in geometry.
Barre Seid doesn't believe in climate change. But Barre Seid does believe something: Barre Seid believes in rats.
For three years, Seid has paid a small army of goons to wander the area around Chicago's Lincoln Park, scattering handfuls of high-grade nuts on the ground, which have drawn flocks of pigeons and swarms of rats. Rats are everywhere. Everything is covered in pigeon shit. Seid has been repeatedly fined and cited and warned, and he's carried on turning the neighborhood into an uncontrolled vermin breeding facility:
Whether or not the people who live, work and play in Lincoln Park want to be swarmed by rats and slip in thick slicks of pigeon shit is irrelevant. Seid can afford to pay any fine the city levies against him (a fine is a price, and he's a billionaire), which means there's no practical reason Seid has to ever stop. He has the freedom to operate unthwarted in his every desire, including his desire to carpet an entire neighborhood in feces, so everyone else lacks the freedom to live without pigeon shit and rats.
That's the thing about billionaires: as Peter Thiel wrote, democracy is incompatible with freedom (to be a billionaire). The fact that Barre Seid's desire to transform Lincoln Park into a pigeon-shit manure lagoon is wildly unpopular with Chicagoans is irrelevant. You can't vote Barre Seid out of office, because no one elected him Pigeon Shit Czar. He has assumed that office by right of conquest.
Our lives are full of horrible, extremely unpopular things that we can't vote away because billionaires like them. Take the decision to allow Larry Ellison and his failson to buy and kill Warner Studios. That's an incredibly unpopular idea, especially in California, where Warner, Paramount and the Ellisons are all based. Despite the fact that we all hate this idea, Ellison gets to do it, because he is unthwartable:
https://pluralistic.net/2026/09/22/happy-chudmas/#baloney-in-our-slacks
Some of California's most powerful Democrats promised to stop the merger. Instead, they signed away California's future because they decided that they weren't powerful enough to thwart a billionaire:
The Warnermount disaster demonstrates the fundamental flaw in libertarianism. Even if you're the kind of Musk-addled libertarian who can't open your copy of Atlas Shrugged anymore because the pages are all stuck together and you think the only role for the state is enforcing contracts, you still need the state to be able to enforce those contracts. If corporations or even individual billionaires amass more power than the state, then they can always tell the state's contract enforcers to fuck off.
The ref must be more powerful than the players on the field, so the smallest government you can have is determined by the size of the largest corporation and the wealth of the richest billionaire you're willing to tolerate.
The world is in really bad shape right now, but it doesn't have to be. As Mamdani has shown us, it's not that hard to run a well-administered, advanced technological civilization. Fixing potholes and making transit work and enforcing housing rules isn't rocket surgery. We know how to do those things β we just don't do them because billionaires don't want us to, and they are unthwartable:
https://yourlocalepidemiologist.substack.com/p/the-revolutionary-art-of-fixing-the
We let the most greedy, most ruthless people among us pursue their toddler's quest for an unthwarted life to the expense of any semblance of competent administration, and now we are fucked. That's why people are so angry about AI: there's nothing wrong with the idea of automating some tasks through advanced statistical techniques, but the reason so much of the world's scarce resources have been allocated to the AI buildout is that billionaires are infinitely horny for a technology that will let them sideline expertise in favor of money:
https://pluralistic.net/2026/10/06/nonfungible/#theory-free
After all, experts get to thwart billionaires. They can refuse to apply their expertise to a billionaire's folly. The kind of AI that the industry is pursuing today is predicated on the idea that you can just ask a computer to come up with "theory-free inferences" that will let it run a factory, drive a car, or perform medicine, without knowing anything, just by pulling statistical correlations out of unimaginably vast data-sets.
At some level, people get this. They understand that AI and billionaireism are intimately connected β that the reason the sector is on track to lose about a trillion dollars this year is that for billionaires, a trillion bucks is a small price to pay for an unthwartable life.
Hey look at this (permalink)
- McSWEENEYβS ISSUE 84 (ARTISANβS TOOL ROLL) https://store.mcsweeneys.net/products/mcsweeney-s-issue-84?taxon_id=3
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Trumpβs Cascade of Canceled Corporate Enforcement Against Over 200 Corporations https://www.citizen.org/article/trump-cascade-canceled-enforcement-200-corporations/
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FEAR OF MUSIC (SUPER DELUXE EDITION) https://store.talkingheadsofficial.com/collections/fear-of-music
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The Monopoly on the Open Road https://prospect.org/2026/10/07/monopoly-on-the-open-road-patrick-industries-rv/
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Paramount Stock CRUSHED After Merger with Warner Discovery Closes https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/raises-for-me-layoffs-for-thee-the
Object permanence (permalink)
#25yrsago National Inquirer shuts offices after anthrax delivery https://web.archive.org/web/20011221185744/https://www.etonline.com/celebrity/a6975.htm
#20yrsago Grey Goo melting online world Second Life https://web.archive.org/web/20061023190111/http://blog.secondlife.com/2006/10/08/grid-set-back-to-linden-login-only-some-goo-missed/
#20yrsago TiVoβs βself-destruct buttonβ destructs https://web.archive.org/web/20061014132917/http://reviews.cnet.com/4531-10921_7-6650194.html
#20yrsago Disney exec: Piracy is just a business model https://www.netribution.co.uk/stories/cross-media/disney-co-chair-recognises-piracy-is-a-business-model
#20yrsago TSA confiscates geologistβs rock https://web.archive.org/web/20061019132853/https://www.courant.com/news/opinion/op_ed/hc-thorson1005.artoct05,0,777555.column?coll=hc-headlines-oped
#20yrsago Handheld printer made from a toner cartridge https://spritesmods.com/?art=inker&page=4
#20yrsago Panicked chefs propose copyrighted food https://megnut.com/2006/10/10/keep-recipes-free/
#20yrsago Canadian music proposal would require DRM for online tunes https://web.archive.org/web/20061022201913/https://www.jeremydebeer.ca/content/view/95/2/
#20yrsago Iceweasel, a free-as-in-speech version of Firefox https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DebianβMozilla_trademark_dispute
#15yrsago Pratchettβs Snuff: a rural/nautical tale of drawing-room gentility, racism, and justice https://memex.craphound.com/2011/10/10/pratchetts-snuff-a-rural-nautical-tale-of-drawing-room-gentility-racism-and-justice/
#10yrsago Shade the Changing Girl: amazing, gorgeous new comic about aliens and mean girls https://memex.craphound.com/2016/10/10/shade-the-changing-girl-amazing-gorgeous-new-comic-about-aliens-and-mean-girls/
#10yrsago Massive report details the surveillance powers of 12 Central and South American nations https://necessaryandproportionate.org/principles/
#10yrsago Scotland Yard charge: teaching people to use cryptography is an act of terrorism https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2016/10/cops-charge-cardiff-man-with-terrorist-crypto-training-offence/
#10yrsago RBS deliberately crushed more than 1,000 healthy UK businesses to seize and sell their assets https://www.buzzfeed.com/heidiblake/dash-for-cash?utm_term=.iq9ndLB5#.udNbypOJ
#10yrsago Though crime happens everywhere, predictive policing tools send cops to poor/black neighborhoods https://www.mic.com/articles/156286/crime-prediction-tool-pred-pol-only-amplifies-racially-biased-policing-study-shows
#10yrsago Bake: spooky chocolate chip cookies https://www.instructables.com/Creepy-Chocolate-Chip-Cookies/
#5yrsago Dead letters https://pluralistic.net/2021/10/10/dead-letters/
#1yrago A disenshittification moment from the land of mass storage https://pluralistic.net/2025/10/10/synology/#how-about-nah
#1yrago California bans algorithmic price-fixing https://pluralistic.net/2025/10/09/pricewars/#adam-smith-communist
Upcoming appearances (permalink)
- Calgary: Wordfest, Oct 8
https://wordfest.com/2026/show/wordfest-presents-cory-doctorow-2026/ -
Winnipeg: McNally Robinson, Oct 9
https://www.mcnallyrobinson.com/event-18991/An-Evening-with-Cory-Doctorow -
Paris: Slow Tech Summit, Oct 15
https://slowtechsummit.com/ -
Vancouver: Read, Resist, Repair, Rejoice (Vancouver Writers Festival), Oct 19
https://writersfest.bc.ca/festival-event-2026/01 -
Victoria: Munro's Books, Oct 20
https://www.munrobooks.com/events/6113620261020 -
Vancouver: Life After AI (Vancouver Writers Festival), Oct 22
https://writersfest.bc.ca/festival-event-2026/46 -
Ottawa: Life After AI (Ottawa Writers Festival), Oct 24
https://writersfestival.org/event/life-after-ai -
Kilkenny (Kilkenomics), Nov 6-8
https://kilkenomics.com/ -
Vancouver: Enshittification (Sid Williams Theatre Society), Nov 10
https://www.sidwilliamstheatre.com/events/cory-doctorow-talks-enshittification/ -
Vancouver: BC Policy Solutions Gala, Nov 12
https://bcpolicy.ca/gala/ -
Sheffield: Reverse Centaur at Juno Books, Nov 25
https://www.outsavvy.com/event/40274/cory-doctorow-in-conversation -
Oxford: Bennett Oxford Symposium on Open Code in Science, Dec 9
https://www.bennett.ox.ac.uk/events/2026-bennett-institute-symposium/ -
Montreal: World Science Fiction Convention, Sep 2-6
https://montreal2027.ca/en
Recent appearances (permalink)
- Terms of Service with Clare Duffy (CNN)
https://www.cnn.com/audio/podcasts/terms-of-service-with-clare-duffy/episodes/458ce968-af5d-11f0-b539-13ed2afe25f8 -
AI, Work, and Power (Software Engineering Daily)
AI, Work, and Power https://softwareengineeringdaily.com/podcasts/cory-doctorow-on-ai-work-and-power/ -
AI, Corporate Power, and the Fight for Worker Control (Plutopia)
https://plutopia.io/cory-doctorow-ai-corporate-power-and-the-fight-for-worker-control/ -
How to Think About AIβBefore Itβs Too Late (Daniel Solove)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_0xR3uEgGcc -
Could Tech Bosses Destroy Life As We Know It? (Politics JOE)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PL4VktU0SgY
Latest books (permalink)
- "The Reverse-Centaur's Guide to AI," a short book about being a better AI critic, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, June 2026
https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374621568/thereversecentaursguidetolifeafterai/ -
"Canny Valley": A limited edition collection of the collages I create for Pluralistic, self-published, September 2025 https://pluralistic.net/2025/09/04/illustrious/#chairman-bruce
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"Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It," Farrar, Straus, Giroux, October 7 2025
https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374619329/enshittification/ -
"Picks and Shovels": a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about the heroic era of the PC, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), February 2025 (https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250865908/picksandshovels).
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"The Bezzle": a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about prison-tech and other grifts, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), February 2024 (thebezzle.org).
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"The Lost Cause:" a solarpunk novel of hope in the climate emergency, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), November 2023 (http://lost-cause.org).
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"The Internet Con": A nonfiction book about interoperability and Big Tech (Verso) September 2023 (http://seizethemeansofcomputation.org). Signed copies at Book Soup (https://www.booksoup.com/book/9781804291245).
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"Red Team Blues": "A grabby, compulsive thriller that will leave you knowing more about how the world works than you did before." Tor Books http://redteamblues.com.
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"Chokepoint Capitalism: How to Beat Big Tech, Tame Big Content, and Get Artists Paid, with Rebecca Giblin", on how to unrig the markets for creative labor, Beacon Press/Scribe 2022 https://chokepointcapitalism.com
Upcoming books (permalink)
- "The Post-American Internet," a geopolitical sequel of sorts to Enshittification, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2027
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"Unauthorized Bread": a middle-grades graphic novel adapted from my novella about refugees, toasters and DRM, FirstSecond, April 20, 2027
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"Enshittification, Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It" (the graphic novel), Firstsecond, 2027
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"The Memex Method," Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2027
Colophon (permalink)
Today's top sources:
Currently writing:
- βOnce Is Enemy Action,β a science fiction novel about the origins of modern technofascism. Today's words: 537 (23966 total).
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"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.
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A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING
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