Newly released NYPD body-camera footage showing the aftermath of an immigration enforcement shooting in New York City has intensified scrutiny of federal agents who shot a man with his 5-year-old son in the car.

The footage shows officers arriving Thursday in Marble Hill to find Oscar Belgal, 28, wounded, handcuffed and seated on the ground. NYPD officers rendered aid and rushed him to a hospital. Police later located his unharmed son with a family member.

Mayor Zohran Mamdani condemned the shooting in an initial social media post, saying Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents had shot a New Yorker while his child was in the vehicle.

This afternoon in Marble Hill, a New Yorker was shot by an ICE agent in a residential neighborhood. Early reports indicate agents surrounded him and a 5-year-old child in his car before firing multiple rounds. We believe the child was physically unharmed.

This is an unconscionable and incredibly serious situation. I have called the President; when we speak I will demand that he ends all ICE enforcement actions in our city. I will not stand by while ICE agents terrorize our communities.

Our thoughts are with the injured New Yorker and his family tonight. We are praying for his recovery.

Get ICE out of our neighborhoods. Get ICE out of our hospitals. Get ICE off our streets. Get ICE away from our children.

Abolish ICE.

— Mayor Zohran Kwame Mamdani (@NYCMayor) October 8, 2026

ICE defended the operation, alleging that Belgal, a Dominican national with a criminal record, accelerated his vehicle toward federal agents who feared for their lives. The agency also accused him of gang involvement.

On October 8, at approximately 4:00 PM ET, ICE officers were conducting a targeted enforcement operation in the Bronx, New York, to arrest a criminal illegal alien from the Dominican Republic with a prior criminal conviction for grand larceny, and multiple prior arrests for assault, robbery, possession of drugs, and weapons possession. He has associations to the Trinitarios gang, the same gang who brutally shot a CBP officer last year.

This criminal illegal alien was arrested by the NYPD on December 7, 2023, but was released into the community a few days later by reckless Democrat sanctuary policies that put American lives at risk.

During the incident, an ICE officer discharged his weapon and the criminal illegal alien was injured.

ICE officers immediately rendered aid. The individual is alive and at a local hospital. The FBI and HSI are on the scene. The incident remains under investigation. More information will be shared as it becomes available.

When dangerous illegal aliens are released back onto the streets by radical sanctuary politicians, our officers are forced to make arrests at large in the community in unpredictable and dangerous environments. Our officers should not have to risk their lives, and innocent Americans should not have to face unnecessary danger, because sanctuary politicians refuse to cooperate with federal law enforcement.

— U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (@ICEgov) October 9, 2026

NYPD Commissioner Jessica Tisch said at least one federal agent fired seven rounds, striking Belgal in the neck. Surveillance footage shows armed, plainclothes officers approaching his vehicle but does not capture the shooting itself.

The incident sparked demonstrations across the city, including a Friday march from Foley Square to federal immigration offices in Manhattan.

Mamdani said he unsuccessfully appealed to President Donald Trump and Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin to release Belgal. He subsequently called for ICE’s abolition.

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Belgal’s attorneys said he was transferred to New Jersey after the shooting before being returned to federal detention in Brooklyn. A judge has restricted his transfer and temporarily blocked his deportation while his legal challenge proceeds.

New York Attorney General Letitia James called for a “full and transparent investigation conducted without fear or favor.”

The Bronx district attorney’s office is investigating. ICE has not publicly released its own body-camera footage of the shooting.

The post NYPD footage fuels scrutiny of ICE shooting appeared first on Salon.com.

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.

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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 – and ruin – 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):

https://memex.craphound.com/2010/06/02/fordlandia-novelistic-history-of-henry-fords-doomed-midwestern-town-in-the-amazon-jungle/

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 Ford…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:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/03/09/autocrats-of-trade-2/#witness-the-firepower-of-this-fully-armed-and-operational-battle-station

It also lets billionaires (including the billionaire ruining public education) kidnap and rape more than a thousand girls on a private island:

https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/what-to-know-about-bill-gates-relationship-with-jeffrey-epstein-as-he-is-interviewed-in-house-probe

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:

https://gizmodo.com/a-billionaire-is-fueling-a-rat-explosion-in-a-chicago-park-in-the-stupidest-way-possible-2000823641

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:

https://prospect.org/2026/10/08/democrats-who-let-trumps-oligarchs-buy-hollywood-warner-bros-david-ellison-gavin-newsom/

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 – 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 – 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.

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Hey look at this (permalink)

• McSWEENEY’S ISSUE 84 (ARTISAN’S TOOL ROLL) https://store.mcsweeneys.net/products/mcsweeney-s-issue-84?taxon_id=3

• Trump’s Cascade of Canceled Corporate Enforcement Against Over 200 Corporations https://www.citizen.org/article/trump-cascade-canceled-enforcement-200-corporations/

• FEAR OF MUSIC (SUPER DELUXE EDITION) https://store.talkingheadsofficial.com/collections/fear-of-music

• The Monopoly on the Open Road https://prospect.org/2026/10/07/monopoly-on-the-open-road-patrick-industries-rv/

• Paramount Stock CRUSHED After Merger with Warner Discovery Closes https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/raises-for-me-layoffs-for-thee-the

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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 TiVo’s “self-destruct button” 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 geologist’s 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/Debian–Mozilla_trademark_dispute

#15yrsago Pratchett’s 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

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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

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

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

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Latest books (permalink)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Upcoming books (permalink)

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

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

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

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

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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: 537 (23966 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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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

This article is part of Cafe, TPM’s home for opinion and news analysis.

As insurgent candidates offering critiques of the Democratic Party won primary after primary in 2025 and 2026, pundits were left wondering: were the Democrats having their own “Tea Party moment”? Back in 2010, the Tea Party was key to securing massive GOP legislative gains, even as its reactionary edge cost the GOP winnable senate seats in places like Delaware and Nevada.

Progressive triumphs in Democratic primaries during president Trump’s second administration might suggest something similar is on the way. Zohran Mamdani beat Andrew Cuomo in the race for New York’s mayoralty, Abdul El-Sayed’s triumphed against establishment pick Haley Stevens in the Michigan Senate primary, and Graham Platner easily dispatched — despite scandals of such magnitude he would ultimately have to withdraw as the party’s general election candidate — Gov. Janet Mills in the Maine Senate primary. Each candidate offered fresher rhetoric, more ambitious politics, and a critique of the Democratic Party, allowing them to edge out — or in some cases destroy — their opponents. Cue the invocations of the Tea Party and questions about whether or not “the Democratic Party might very well be about to explode.”  

But comparisons between the Democratic Party’s fresh crop of candidates and the Tea Party do not really stand up to scrutiny. Tea Partiers were motivated by an anti-systemic energy that had deeper roots than the current ire of Democratic voters, and the demographics of the GOP meant the party ultimately embraced a “burn it down” approach to governance. The insurgent left within the Democratic coalition remains focused on conventional liberal issues like human rights, affordability, and taxing the wealthy. New, animating issues for voters — such as ending military funding for Israel and harsher regulation of data centers — still do not see voters anywhere close to the Tea Party’s reactionary fervor to remake, or remove, much of the U.S. government. Democratic voters — and the candidates they elect — may find that current leadership is not fit for their objectives, but replacing a few key stakeholders is a different dynamic from the Tea Party’s anathema towards any Republican interested in “normal” governance.

This op-ed is part of Cafe, TPM’s home for opinion and news analysis.

Last week, New York City announced a groundbreaking $131.5 million settlement with DoorDash. The largest such resolution in city history, the case involved over 260,000 workers who were paid late and in some cases not paid at all. 

It also raises the question: If these underpayments happened in New York City, where DoorDash knew it was under scrutiny, what’s happening to gig workers everywhere else when no one is watching?

“Saturday Night Live” kicked off its 52nd season with a familiar Donald Trump impression, an increasingly familiar presidential friendship and a brand-new character: White House aide Natalie Harp.

The season premiere opened Saturday with Ramy Youssef reprising his role as New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, delivering an update on the nor’easter battering the East Coast before James Austin Johnson’s Trump arrived unexpectedly.

“For some reason that no one can figure out, I really, really like you,” Johnson’s Trump told Mamdani, poking fun at the unlikely rapport between the president and the democratic socialist mayor.

But it was cast member Ashley Padilla’s debut as Harp that quickly stole the sketch.

A rain-soaked Harp burst into the room after supposedly running all the way from Washington, D.C., “Weapons-style,” a reference to the 2025 horror film. Johnson’s Trump then compared his devoted aide to a character from another horror movie.

“She’s like the girl from ‘Obsession’ but blond,” he said.

“I’m kidding, I’m kidding,” Padilla’s Harp responded. “I’m totally normal.”

She then pulled Mamdani close and issued a warning about Trump: “If you hurt him, I will end you.”

Harp, a longtime Trump aide sometimes nicknamed the “human printer” for providing the president with a steady stream of printed news articles and social media posts, has drawn renewed attention over her unusually close relationship with Trump. Reports this summer revealed intensely personal letters Harp sent Trump in 2023, including one telling him, “You are all that matters to me.”

SNL isn’t the only late-night show to turn Harp into a character.

Just two nights earlier, Jimmy Kimmel introduced his own clingy “assistant Natalie,” played by his wife and the show’s executive producer, Molly McNearney. The character hovered beside Kimmel during his Thursday monologue and offered to handle everything from his social media posts to his personal needs.

The back-to-back parodies mark a sudden pop-culture turn for a White House aide who has largely operated outside the spotlight.

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SNL, meanwhile, returned just weeks ahead of the midterm elections with politics firmly back in its repertoire. The premiere also took shots at the Trump administration’s fight with the press, the president’s meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping and his use of artificial intelligence during its “Weekend Update” segment.

The episode was hosted by New York Knicks captain Jalen Brunson, with KATSEYE as musical guest.

The post “Saturday Night Live” returns with “Natalie Harp”: “If you hurt him, I will end you” appeared first on Salon.com.

Fifteen years ago, during President Barack Obama’s first term, we co-founded RootsAction as an online progressive group challenging not only Republicans but also the corporatism and militarism of the Democratic Party. RootsAction supported Bernie Sanders for president in 2016 and 2020. Two years before the 2024 election disaster that returned Donald Trump to the White House, the organization launched the “Don’t Run Joe” campaign, with the warning that the renomination of President Joe Biden by Democrats “would be a tragic mistake.”

Despite polls showing as early as 2022 that strong majorities of Democrats wanted a nominee other than Biden in 2024, the “Don’t Run Joe” message went unheeded — until Biden’s debate debacle in June 2024. By then, it was too late for the open primary process needed to produce a ticket that could inspire activists and defeat the fascistic faux-populism of Trump.

Like the 2024 victory of the twice-impeached, repeatedly indicted Trump, his 2016 win was avoidable. One lesson we’ve learned over the last 16 years since the 2010 midterms is that it’s a big mistake for activists to sit back and expect the Democratic Party establishment to serve up candidates who can mobilize voters and win elections. That establishment failed us in winnable presidential elections in 2000, 2004, 2016 and 2024. Tad Devine, who served as a top strategist for mainstream Democrats for decades before joining Independent Sen. Bernie Sanders’ 2016 presidential bid, knows the mechanisms inside and out. The dollar-dominated process of primary campaigns, he writes in his book “How the Democrats Screwed Bernie,” is often rigged against outsider “candidates who connect with voters, who understand voter anxieties” — and these genuinely populist candidates “are more likely to succeed in general elections than those who rely primarily on insider muscle.”

RootsAction recently teamed up with Progressive Democrats of America to announce that we will jointly launch, just after the November midterm elections, a campaign urging California Rep. Ro Khanna and New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez to run for the 2028 Democratic presidential nomination. “The voices of Khanna and/or AOC are needed in the presidential campaign to ensure that voters hear serious solutions,” the campaign’s petition says. “Without a progressive populist advocate atop the ticket, the Democratic response would be woefully underwhelming — enabling right-wing demagoguery to push voter unrest in dangerous and divisive directions.” 

The petition statement adds that the presence of Khanna and/or AOC in the presidential race “is crucial to foster debate on healthcare, jobs, AI, militarism and the U.S. relationship with Israel, along with many other issues important to a wide range of voters.”

Khanna — whose name recognition has grown recently because of his legislative battles to release the Epstein files and to end the Iran War, and his detention in the occupied West Bank by Israeli settlers — represents our country’s wealthiest district and much of Silicon Valley. Still, he wants to increase taxes on the rich. He calls himself “a progressive capitalist.”

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Want more sharp takes on politics? Sign up for our free newsletter, Standing Room Only, written by Amanda Marcotte, now also a weekly show on YouTube or wherever you get your podcasts.

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Ocasio-Cortez entered the House with great fanfare after a surprise 2018 Democratic primary victory over one of the party’s top leaders on Capitol Hill — Joe Crowley, who is now a corporate lobbyist — representing a working-class, Latino-majority district in New York City. Since then she has led the effort to bring the jobs-creating Green New Deal proposal to Congress, and she is helping lead the charge against the construction of artificial intelligence data centers. She identifies as “a democratic socialist.” 

While there is a difference in how these two politicians label themselves, most voters will be much more interested in whether each will address the needs of the working class and fight the greed of the billionaires. Both are direct political descendants of Sanders. AOC was active in his 2016 campaign, which inspired her to run for Congress, and she regularly joined him last year at “Fighting Oligarchy” rallies. Khanna was a surrogate and national co-chair in Sanders’ 2020 presidential campaign.

RootsAction’s coalition partner in this initiative, Progressive Democrats of America, has a history of major success in candidate recruitment. In late 2013, PDA launched the “Run, Bernie, Run” movement, which drafted Sanders to seek the Democratic nomination in 2016 — a campaign that elevated the national conversation and helped spark today’s progressive upsurge.

The RunRoRunAOC.org petition argues that either Khanna or Ocasio-Cortez — or both of them — need to enter the presidential race. If both were to declare their candidacies, the organizations behind this recruitment initiative are not worried that the two will somehow “split the progressive vote.” As shown by the historic wave of insurgent victories in this year’s Democratic primaries, the party’s electoral base is largely and increasingly progressive. It’s not a small sliver of voters. And a progressive bloc of delegates at the party’s national convention in August 2028 would be all to the good, pushing for popular policies such as taxing the rich, resisting Big Tech’s AI data centers, abolishing Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), green jobs initiatives, enhanced Medicare for All, cutting the military budget and stopping the weapons flow to Israel.

During last year’s New York City mayoral campaign — which, thankfully, employed ranked-choice voting — two progressive candidates actually ran as a duo in the Democratic primary: Zohran Mamdani and Brad Lander. Mamdani became mayor thanks significantly to Lander, and now Lander is heading to Congress thanks in part to Mamdani’s endorsement and support. In other races, progressives have run in tandem in crowded fields, maintaining a non-aggression strategy while bolstering each other’s positions.

Democrats should also remember that in the early months of the 2019-2020 Democratic presidential primary, before a fraught personal split between Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren and Sanders, the presence of the two previously friendly candidates raising similar issues of inequality and corporate greed had actually moved the whole Democratic debate in a notably more progressive direction. Khanna and Ocasio-Cortez could wield similar influence in 2028.

The ground for progressive candidates is ripe. Despite millions of dollars flooding into the campaign coffers of corporatist Democratic candidates from special interests representing AI, crypto and Israel, and despite assists to those candidates from corporate media, this year’s Democratic primaries produced an unprecedented wave of victories by underfunded progressive candidates, including Dr. Abdul El-Sayed, the Democratic nominee for Senate in Michigan. These insurgent successes have occurred at local and statewide levels.

After the November midterms, it will be time for progressives to focus on the national level.

Leaving the 2028 presidential nominating process to the money-drenched party elites — with their record of electoral defeats, governance failures and betrayals — would be a recipe for disaster. Ro Khanna and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez could make all the difference.

The post Democrats need a bold 2028 ticket: Ro Khanna and AOC should run appeared first on Salon.com.

Today's links

• Digital sewer socialism: Mamdani's Public Interest Technologists are what DOGE should have been.
• Hey look at this: Delights to delectate.
• Object permanence: Robot garage takes hostages; Thermostat ransomware; Correlate audience exhalations; Judges x TOR; Expectations management.
• Upcoming appearances: Edinburgh, Sydney, Melbourne, Brighton, London, South Bend.
• Recent appearances: Where I've been.
• Latest books: You keep readin' em, I'll keep writin' 'em.
• Upcoming books: Like I said, I'll keep writin' 'em.
• Colophon: All the rest.

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Digital sewer socialism (permalink)

Hardly a day goes by without my getting an email from someone looking for a way to do good with technology. From computer science students thinking about post-grad careers to seasoned coders with decades of experience, there's an army of hackers looking for a way to turn their expertise into public goods.

There's a name for this movement: it's called "Public Interest Technology" and the people who work in it are called "public interest technologists." There've always been techies who understood the link between tech and public wellbeing and who committed themselves to working for the betterment of society, but their numbers swelled as Big Tech companies saturated their markets and switched from growing by making products people like, to locking in their users and then extracting more value from their technological prisoners:

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

It was the era when (in the words of Facebook's Jeff Hammerbacher) "The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads":

https://quoteinvestigator.com/2017/06/12/click/

For organizations like the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the growing cohort of hackers who wanted to hack for good was great news. Our staff technologist group swelled from a couple of overworked computer scientists helping lawyers and activists with campaigns to a series of increasingly ambitious software projects, from Privacy Badger (a tracking-blocker that every web user needs):

https://privacybadger.org/

To Let's Encrypt and Certbot, projects that forever changed the internet's default state, so that today, nearly all online communications are encrypted and resistant to mass surveillance:

https://certbot.eff.org/

Other opportunities for public interest technologists proliferated. Bruce Schneier created the canonical resource page for Public Interest Technologists, including career opportunities for would-be public interest technologists:

https://public-interest-tech.com/

But the motherlode of public interest technologist opportunities wasn't the nonprofit sector – it was the public sector. It started with the UK's Government Digital Service, a group of public-spirited hackers (many of them ex- of the BBC, where they'd been tempest-tossed by endless internal power-struggles over the role of the internet in public service media) who retooled many of the UK government's most important administrative front-ends. For several glorious years, Britons delighted to the daily marvel of having their routine interactions with their government transformed from clunky, broken web-pages to slick, superbly thought through online processes that had all the polish of Amazon or Google, but without any of the gamesmanship, manipulation or privacy invasions:

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

Despite many attempts at official sabotage by a string of increasingly shambolic UK governments, the GDS still exists, and it still does amazing work, even though it operates today with a fraction of the official support that it enjoyed at its inception. The last time I renewed my UK passport, I was gobsmacked by how easy and sensible the process was. Local authorities have gotten in on the act, too: I renewed my absentee voting registration with Hackney Council last week and it was as simple as scanning a QR code, affirming my details, and clicking "submit."

Around the world, a generation of public sector technologists duplicated and improved on the UK GDS's work. In Taiwan, a rogue public interest hacker named Audrey Tang led a group of digital guerrillas in creating shadow versions of every Taiwanese government website that scraped and remade the entire digital presence of the Taiwanese state to make public information and services accessible, legible and useful to its people. After the next election, Tang was named Taiwan's first ever Minister of Digital Affairs (today, she is a Taiwanese "Ambassador-At-Large"):

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

In the USA, Jen Pahlka went from running a ragtag "civic hacking" org called Code For America to helping to found the United States Digital Service under Obama, bringing some of that UK GDS spirit to America's dreadful online presence, which had been largely built and maintained by beltway bandits who'd billed handsomely and delivered some of the internet's greatest crimes against usability:

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

But the USDS's legacy is bitter. In 2025, USDS was effectively dismantled and replaced with DOGE, Elon Musk's handpicked team of tech-bro cultists who set out to dismantle as much of the US government as possible, deliberately sabotaging the usability of America's governmental systems to make it harder for the public to access the services they are entitled to and pay for with their taxes.

My own run-in with this was my attempt to get a certificate of citizenship for my daughter when she turned 18: all I could find was an online form that started by requiring me to list the dates and flight numbers for every trip I'd taken to the USA from the time I was born to the day I became a US citizen, a 50+ year period that started with a trip to visit my snowbird grandparents in Florida when I was six months old. The entire support and advice service for the US Customs and Immigration Service has been replaced with a DOGE chatbot that repeatedly emails and texts links to the form, no matter what question you ask, and no matter whether you call, email or use the website's chat interface:

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

Many of the DOGE kids were monsters. The most chilling DOGE story I've heard was the anonymous testimony of NIH officials who begged the DOGE children who were dismantling their work to spare some long-running cancer research projects whose great promise would be vaporized if they were interrupted. The DOGE kids laughed at these entreaties, saying that once Musk had perfected "General AI" we wouldn't need cancer research, because their tame AI god would cure cancer.

But not every DOGE operator was a digital arsonist. Take Dan Berulis, a DOGE staffer who came out of the private sector and later turned whistleblower over the group's activities, who now faces assassination attempts:

https://www.wired.com/story/he-blew-the-whistle-on-doge-then-his-brakes-were-cut/

Berulis joined DOGE to improve America's digital infrastructure, not to dismantle it. When he talks about his motives, he sounds like an early GDS pioneer, one of Audrey Tang's direct-action government data scrapers, or one of the Code For America hackers who followed Pahlka to USDS:

https://www.npr.org/2025/04/15/nx-s1-5355896/doge-nlrb-elon-musk-spacex-security

DOGE was a catastrophe. It left America's government digital presence in far worse shape than it found it, and even the modest savings it claimed to have made from all this destruction turn out to be lies:

https://www.yahoo.com/news/politics/articles/elon-musk-doge-made-big-110000036.html

But as Berulis demonstrates, there is a bipartisan group of skilled, ethical technologists who are desperate to do meaningful public interest work. Their numbers swell every day, as Big Tech continues to curdle – no longer merely sclerotic and enshittifying monopolies, now active participants in Trump's authoritarian dismantling of democracy itself:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/10/06/america-with-chinese-characteristics/#orphaned-syrian-refugees-need-not-apply

Tech bosses' gleeful mass layoffs mean that tech workers can no longer count on good treatment and stable, high-earning careers; at the same time, tech bosses' betrayal of democracy makes the prospect of working for a tech company far more ethically dubious than mere ad-tech optimizations. The result is a bumper crop of geeks looking for ways to do good with their lives and skills – as all the emails in my inbox asking for advice about this attests.

Enter NYC Mayor Zohran Mamdani, who has made "public excellence" the cornerstone of his politics, hiring the most skilled workers he can find and then giving them all the authority and resources they need to fix 100,000 potholes, bring New York's worst landlords to justice, and deliver every day for all the people of New York:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/11/15/unconscionability/#standalone-authority

Mamdani has just unveiled his Public Interest Technology (PIT) Crews: five "game changing" teams of public interest hackers who will remake NYC's digital services:

https://www.nyc.gov/mayors-office/news/2026/07/transcript–mayor-mamdani-launches–public-interest-technology–

Writing for Wired, Steven "Hackers" Levy paints a portrait of New York's PIT Crews, describing them as "what DOGE should have been":

https://www.wired.com/story/mamdani-assembles-his-nyc-tech-team/

I'll go farther than that: the PIT Crews – and Mamdani's project as a whole – is delivering the entire failed promise of DOGE. Unlike Musk and Trump, Mamdani is actually rooting out fraud and waste. The reason Mamdani can do this – and the reason billionaires can't – is that the fraud and waste that undermines governments at all levels come from the super-rich, with their tax-dodging, their no-bid contracts, their addiction to public subsidies.

Musk owes his riches to federal bailouts and contracts: if he wants to "eliminate government fraud and waste" he should turn over his files to an IRS inspector (if he can find a survivor of the DOGE massacre) and surrender himself for a lengthy prison sentence. For Musk, "government fraud and waste" is a single mom on food stamps who misses a box on a 600-page form because she's exhausted from working three jobs to make rent – not a no-bid contractor trousering billions in public funds for projects that overcharge and underdeliver.

Mamdani's PIT Crews are "small groups of engineers and designers will strive to change the hidebound and confusing nature of current city services by using state-of-art skills to rapidly whip up specialized apps that solve real problems." Mamdani says that they'll "raise expectations on what government can deliver, because we really can deliver."

As Levy describes it, the big difference between the Obama-era USDS and 2026's PIT Crews is "a skeptical, almost adversarial, stance toward Big Tech." NYC's PIT Crews explicitly recruit top-tier hacker talent who want to "make software that doesn't serve advertisers, the military, or the pocketbooks of centibillionaires."

Their inaugural chief is Lisa Gelobter, a veteran of both tech firms and the USDS, who says that "Without technology, policy is just words written on a piece of paper." The first project on her roster is implementing "Click to Cancel," a policy inaugurated by Lina Khan, Biden's FTC Chief – and then dismantled by Trump. Under Click to Cancel, companies are required to create one-click workflows to cancel subscriptions and memberships, ending the pernicious, incredibly profitable practice of trapping people with impossible-to-halt recurring billings. Today, Khan is running Mamdani's Economic Development Board, and her Click to Cancel rule is back – for New Yorkers, at least:

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/jul/22/lina-khan-nyc-economic-development-board

NYC PIT Crew's new Click to Cancel site will be live when the policy takes effect on Oct 1. It's a whistleblower site that will make it easy to report merchants who make it hard to get shut of their online Roach Motels (users check in, but they don't check out). It's estimated the Click to Cancel rule will save New Yorkers $160m in the first year alone – but only if Mamdani can enforce it, which is why this website is so critical.

This focus on meat-and-potatoes service delivery was once dismissed as "sewer socialism," an unserious form of progressive politics with an undue focus on improving people's daily lives at the expense of high-flying political change. Today, Mamdani is at the vanguard of an army of proud sewer socialists, who say that once you deliver for people in their day-to-day existence, they will trust you and back you when you fight for deep, structural changes (and the corollary: if you can't deliver for people in their daily lives, why should they trust you when you claim that you'll make everything better?):

https://prospect.org/2026/04/10/zohran-mamdani-getting-new-york-city-believe-in-government/

3,000 techies applied for 35 jobs with NYC's PIT Crews, and, as Levy writes, many of them are high-flying senior coders who are willing to take a massive pay-cut and forfeit their stock options to do something that's both technically excellent and meaningful to their users' lives.

It's a clear message to other leaders, at every level of government. Many of the most skilled, ambitious people in every field want to make the world a better place. Every city, county and state could use a squadron of PIT Crews, and there's an army of coders who would give anything for the chance to give everything to make a better world.

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Hey look at this (permalink)

• What Was the Internet? https://www.bostonreview.net/articles/what-was-the-internet/

• BMW Suddenly Blasts Its Cars’ Internal Screens With Aggressive Advertisements https://futurism.com/advanced-transport/bmw-suddenly-blasts-cars-advertisements

• People in the midwest know what a livestream is https://www.garbageday.email/p/people-in-the-midwest-know-what-a-livestream-is

• how Google can go legit https://blog.zgp.org/how-google-can-go-legit/

• The Yardstick That Ate the Market https://itsg13.substack.com/p/the-yardstick-that-ate-the-market

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Object permanence (permalink)

#25yrsago Moscow's pirate music market https://web.archive.org/web/20010912203143/https://www.wired.com/news/culture/0,1284,45908,00.html

#25yrsago Webcomics v trad comics https://web.archive.org/web/20010821073756/https://www.salon.com/tech/feature/2001/08/09/comics/index.html

#25yrsago Aussie teens are addicted to their phones https://web.archive.org/web/20010818220523/http://news.ninemsn.com.au/national/story_5807.asp

#20yrsago Canadian librarians decry “Captain Copyright” https://web.archive.org/web/20060813004140/https://cla.ca/Access_Copyright_CptCopy_let_Final_.pdf

#20yrsago TiVo/Macrovision screw up breaks devices again https://zatznotfunny.com/2006-08/tivo-macrovision-and-the-stealth-broadcast-flag/

#20yrsago Will the Supreme Court strike down the TSA’s secret laws? https://papersplease.org/gilmore/

#20yrsago Robot garage loses software license, strands parkers https://web.archive.org/web/20060809213517/https://www.wired.com/news/technology/0,71554-0.html?tw=wn_index_1

#15yrsago Typewriter-part penguin https://web.archive.org/web/20111116020049/http://jemayer.tumblr.com/post/8674700147

#15yrsago Choosing Android because you don’t trust Google https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2011/aug/09/technology-failure-more-important-than-success

#15yrsago HOWTO sound Canadian https://web.archive.org/web/20110610104919/http://www.oed.com/public/canadianenglish

#15yrsago Lev Grossman’s The Magician King: fantasy sequel, the banality of magic and the magic of banality https://memex.craphound.com/2011/08/09/lev-grossmans-the-magician-king-fantasy-sequel-the-banality-of-magic-and-the-magic-of-banality/

#10yrsago Rosie the Riveter, Ghostbusters edition https://www.deviantart.com/hugohugo/art/We-Can-Bust-It-621803816

#10yrsago Thai telcoms regulator wants tourists to use location-tracking SIMs https://web.archive.org/web/20160812182254/https://www.nationmultimedia.com/breakingnews/Thailand-mulls-location-tracking-tourist-SIM-cards-30292551.html

#10yrsago Mysterious medical research consortium: we should own volunteers’ clinical trial data for 5 years https://www.techdirt.com/2016/08/08/medical-researchers-want-up-to-five-years-exclusivity-clinical-trial-data-derived-volunteers/

#10yrsago Illegal “Warranty Void If Removed” still ubiquitous: they’re on the Xbox One S https://web.archive.org/web/20160809092923/https://motherboard.vice.com/read/the-xbox-one-s-still-uses-microsofts-illegal-warranty-void-if-removed-sticker

#10yrsago Your medical data: misappropriated by health-tech companies, off-limits to you https://web.archive.org/web/20180806230935/https://www.wired.com/2016/02/our-medical-data-must-become-free/

#10yrsago Return of Dieselgate: 3 more hidden programs found in VW Audi/Porsche firmware https://www.reuters.com/article/us-volkswagen-emissions-audi-idUSKCN10I0PB/

#10yrsago Timelapse of pills dissolving: “decaying clowns” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4rY3X4xafs0

#10yrsago Proof-of-concept ransomware for smart thermostats demoed at Defcon https://web.archive.org/web/20161020083358/https://www.pentestpartners.com/blog/thermostat-ransomware-a-lesson-in-iot-security/

#10yrsago Compounds in human exhalations during movies vary in response to suspense and comedy https://www.nature.com/articles/srep25464

#10yrsago How racist traffic stops criminalize black people, and what to do about it https://www.vox.com/2016/8/5/12364580/police-overcriminalization-net-widening

#10yrsago Chicago cops switched off bodycams and high-fived after shooting unarmed black teen https://web.archive.org/web/20160807194244/http://www.theroot.com/articles/news/2016/08/chicago-pd-paul-oneal-video/

#10yrsago DoJ to judges: use Tor to protect your internet connection https://web.archive.org/web/20160807025945/http://motherboard.vice.com/read/department-of-justice-official-tells-hundred-federal-judges-to-use-tor

#5yrsago Expectations management pluralistic.net/2021/08/08/expectations-management-part-v/

#5yrsago When your boss wants an AI camera in your bedroom https://pluralistic.net/2021/08/09/computer-says-no/#disciplinary-tech

#5yrsago The 22 Murders of Madison May https://pluralistic.net/2021/08/09/computer-says-no/#existential-crisis

#1yrago Millionaire on billionaire violence https://pluralistic.net/2025/08/09/elite-disunity/#awoken-giants

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Upcoming appearances (permalink)

• Virtual: EFFecting Change: Who the Machine Serves, Aug 12
  https://www.eff.org/event/effecting-change-who-machine-serves

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Recent appearances (permalink)

• The AI Enshittification Bubble (Hidden Forces)
  https://hiddenforces.io/podcasts/the-ai-enshittification-bubble-cory-doctorow/

• F@#$ the AI Overlords (On The Media)
  https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/otm/articles/f-the-ai-overlords

• Why AI Won't Replace Workers, But Will Crash The Economy (Smart Cookies)
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rRRmUuxJolY

• AI and the Enshittification Era (The Weekly Show with Jon Stewart)
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-dAIJRjb-Bw

• AI is not inevitable (Betakit)
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DbiTVkq1WHo

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Latest books (permalink)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Upcoming books (permalink)

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

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

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

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

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Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources:

Currently writing:

• “Once Is Enemy Action,” a science fiction novel about the origins of modern technofascism. Friday's words: 564 (2916 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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