As you may have noticed, many members of the American media and political classes are currently rending their garments in terror and despair at the perceived threat of “socialism.” It’s not at all clear what that word means in 2026, in this context or any other. 

It only helps a little to observe that whatever “socialism” is supposed to refer to these days, it doesn’t have much to do with an economic or political system where the state or the working class control the means of production. I’m sure we could find people out there who advocate that. Hell, I might be among them, if it were a remotely realistic possibility. But none of those people are prominent in the current (and long overdue!) internal power struggle within the Democratic Party and the American left writ large.

Come to think of it, you know who really wants state control of the economy, if only in an incoherent, ass-backward, “Mixed-up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler” kind of way? Donald Trump, that’s who. For all his extended excoriations of Democrats as woke America-hating Marxist radical traitors, Trump has meddled more extensively and more directly in the economy than any Democratic president since Franklin D. Roosevelt. 

It’s clearly going too far to call Trump a socialist, largely because profoundly corrupt autocratic or oligarchic regimes like his cannot easily be captured in ideological categories. He’s definitely not a democratic socialist (or a constitutional democrat of any other variety). But there’s no way around the fact that his fantastical DIY presidency has consigned conventional right-wing ideology about the sacredness of free-market capitalism to the proverbial dustbin. Let’s put it this way: Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceaușescu called himself a socialist; legendary Argentinian president Juan Perón did not. Trump belongs on the same historical shelf as those guys, if only as a wannabe.

Almost everything about Trump’s management of the economy during his second term, and pretty much everything else, has been disastrous. But even if we assume that the epic personal and institutional graft of his presidency will not survive his departure, he has created a haphazard regime that’s so deeply enmeshed in fossil fuels, Big Tech and AI, rare earths, pharmaceuticals, shipbuilding, semiconductors and the weapons industries that no one will be able to disentangle it anytime soon. 

As Indiana University scholar Sarah Bauerle Danzman told Foreign Policy in 2025, it’s “jarring” to encounter “a Republican administration embracing state capitalism in a way we haven’t seen in a long time, while all the time decrying ‘socialism.’” According to more recent reporting in Forbes, the federal government now holds equity stakes in roughly 30 different companies across a range of industries. “What started with a ‘golden share‘ in U.S. Steel,” writes Keith Johnson of Foreign Policy, “has morphed into a government takeover of vast swathes of the economy,” best exemplified by capricious tariff policies that seem motivated by the president’s personal whims and grievances. As libertarian economist Tad DeHaven tells Johnson, since all this “is driven by one man’s personal desires, there is no plan and no strategy. It changes by the day.”

Fanatical Republicans from deep-red districts can keep staging government shutdowns and preaching the defeated gospels of Milton Friedman as much as they like. But it’s difficult to imagine any future GOP putting the genie all the way back in the bottle and entirely undoing this unexpected turn to oligarcho-socialism or state capitalism or, ahem, national socialism or whatever else it might be called. The Econ 101 term would be “dirigisme,” which was coined to describe the highly interventionist, quasi-socialist economy that rebuilt France after World War II and has more recently been applied to China, Singapore, South Korea and so on.

This raises the amusing possibility that the mainstream Democratic Party — always ready to turn itself into the punchline of historical irony — will once again end up holding the bag for a set of policies supported by their donor class and literally no one else. More than 70% of registered Democrats, according to a Fox News poll taken in March, say that capitalism is “not working very well or not working at all.” So naturally the party leadership seems prepared to go to the barricades to defend it.

 

To be entirely fair, in some cases the centrist moral panic over “socialism” seems to refer to rational or at least straightforward electoral concerns. Fairly or otherwise, mainstream Democrats convinced a tiny plurality of Wisconsin voters that gubernatorial candidate Francesca Hong was too much of a humorless leftist to survive exposure to the mythical but coveted “median voter” in November. They may well have been correct; we don’t get to re-run the experiment and find out.

But in other instances, such as Zohran Mamdani’s historic victory in New York in 2025 and a series of Democratic primary wins by progressive or socialist-aligned candidates in that city and across the country, the hysteria has more to do with generational and attitudinal change — yeah, I’m sorry, with a vibe shift — than with specific policy proposals or ideological labels. 

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On one level, it seems incredible that deep-dyed Democratic insiders like James Carville or former DNC chair Jaime Harrison are surprised that their party, which collectively decided to “resist” the second coming of Trump by doing absolutely nothing and steadfastly ignored the scale of Israel’s war crimes in Gaza for as long as possible, is seen as hopelessly weak by its own voters. Carville recently called for a “schism” (a delightfully old-fashioned word) within the Democratic Party, and Harrison has urged the so-called socialists to leave the Demo-normies alone and “focus on building the party you actually support.” That old saw about being careful what you wish for comes to mind.

On the other hand, there’s nothing especially mysterious about those attitudes. Those guys and others like them were raised on ancient fables of the ideological excesses of the 1960s and ‘70s, and no doubt still get a bit misty-eyed over Bill Clinton and the “New Democrats” of 1992. Don’t stop thinking about tomorrow!

Their version of the Democratic Party eagerly devoured the devil’s candy, in the form of unbreakable partnerships with Madison Avenue, Wall Street and Silicon Valley and closed-door, $10,000 fundraising dinners in East Hampton and the Napa Valley. There’s no escape from that kind of political bargain on this side of the apocalypse. 

They have always viewed left-wing opposition as childish and contemptible, but not far below the surface they have dreaded the day it rises up to bite them in the ass and destroy their glorious temples of political triangulation. That day has now come, and they are in danger of becoming the last advocates of a faith that both the right and left have abandoned. They can only hope that Donald Trump’s corruption and incompetence will save them from their own. 

 

The post Even MAGA loves socialism now appeared first on Salon.com.

Francesca Hong’s narrow loss in Tuesday’s Wisconsin Democratic primary for governor has been billed as a setback for progressives following a string of high-profile wins. A “stunning loss,” the New York Times proclaimed on Wednesday. POLITICO declared the democratic socialist’s defeat by David Crowley, a mainstream Democrat and the Milwaukee County executive, “is undercutting the narrative of an emerging insurgency.” Both publications agreed the result exposed “the limits of the left” and its power.

In fact, what the race revealed were the weaknesses and limitations of an ineffective candidate who would have almost certainly flamed out in the general election. Democrats across the political spectrum, and especially progressives, should all be breathing a sigh of relief at her defeat.

Hong had a compelling story. The child of South Korean immigrants, she has confronted the high cost of college — she was once forced to drop out to find work — and has experienced financial hardship. As a single mother and service-industry worker, Hong carries relatable and valuable lived experience that is often missing from the halls of state and federal government.

The problem was that the 37-year-old assemblywoman couldn’t quite manage to assemble a compelling narrative from all those memorable, resonant elements. At nearly every turn, she allowed herself to be defined: as a well intentioned candidate with some wacky views (“Abolish the Senate,” anyone?); as a provocateur who, to quote one Wisconsin voter, was “sort of inviting some controversies”; as being, in the words of the Wisconsin Elections Commission’s Democratic chair, “willing to sell out the Jews of Wisconsin for a few bucks”; as the contender most likely to prevail in a primary that sometimes seemed like a Marx Brothers comedy, with candidates dropping out of (and, in the case of Crowley, reentering) the race according to shifting fortunes.

Hong was never fully in control of her own narrative. By the end, and by her own hand, she was reduced to being a joyless hater of holidays and an avowed enemy of All Things Fun.

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Sign up for our free morning newsletter, Crash Course.

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Her interviews didn’t help. While Hong described herself as a “hustler” in a July interview with MS NOW’s Antonia Hylton, the energy she gave off was anything but. She appeared out of her element, far too hesitant even in the friendly environment afforded by the liberal-oriented network, and her performance set the stage for a test she was bound to fail when it came three weeks later. In an appearance on Fox News, Hong withered under host Dana Perino’s questioning about how much her views aligned with the Democratic Socialists of America platform and her provocative social media history, which included calls to “[d]efund then abolish” the police.

Worse were Hong’s attempts to confront her apparent antipathy toward holidays including Thanksgiving, Valentine’s Day, Fourth of July and even Halloween that appeared on her unscrubbed X account. Asked by CNN’s Kaitlan Collins about her Nov. 16, 2020, call to “cancel Thanksgiving,” Hong passed up the chance to disavow the tweet and instead talked about how she cooked a Thanksgiving meal at 16. Two days later, she told POLITICO’s Irie Sentner that it was her “favorite holiday” while admitting, “I’m kind of a curmudgeon when it comes to holidays in general.”

Hong might as well have changed her campaign slogan to I HATE FUN. It’s a tale as old as Dickens: No one likes a Scrooge.

A more adept progressive, such as New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez or Dr. Abdul El-Sayed, Michigan’s Democratic Senate nominee, would have easily batted away the questions. Ocasio-Cortez, in fact, did just that during an appearance on ABC News’ “This Week” two days before the primary. When host Jonathan Karl asked her about Hong’s social media history and past positions, Ocasio-Cortez laughed it off. 

“I have a local city councilman that has this saying that ‘Woke 1 was crazy,’” she said of Hong’s tweets, some of which came during the Covid-19 pandemic. “And I think that what’s important is that we have to assess what a candidate is saying now.” Describing some of the ideas raised during this time as useful, Ocasio-Cortez said, “during lockdown, of course — rhetoric in that time is not rhetoric that we would use today.”

The congresswoman’s response demonstrated an agility and awareness that Hong clearly lacks, something that was surely a factor in Ocasio-Cortez’s decision to not endorse her fellow democratic socialist. When asked by Karl, she said she was focused on “winning back the Congress, winning back the House and positioning ourselves to have the best chance possible to win the Senate.”

But the diss was notable — and shrewd. For the left to succeed, Ocasio-Cortez knows they must move beyond functioning as scolds. Dourness rarely plays well in politics, and it’s a particularly unbecoming quality in progressives, who can sometimes come off as humorless. The most electable progressives are instead happy warriors, a quality Ocasio-Cortez and New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani have in spades.

Witness Madmani’s recent conversation with the New York Times’ Lulu Garcia-Navarro. In a telling exchange, Garcia-Navarro asked the mayor about traits that make a good politician, and then she pointed to his smile and innate optimism. He replied, “You are showing something to the world about who you are, what you’re for, how it makes you feel, and I think oftentimes it feels like politicians are blank canvasses, and everyone else is supposed to paint them in. I think it’s time to show people ‘This is whom I am. Maybe you don’t like it, maybe you do like it. But this is me.'”

Despite her efforts and compelling personal story, Francesca Hong allowed everyone else to paint her in, and had she prevailed in the primary, it would have likely doomed her in November. She was an imperfect messenger for the left, and instead of being a setback, her loss on Tuesday was a gift to progressives.

The post Francesca Hong’s loss in Wisconsin is a win for progressives 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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This work – excluding any serialized fiction – is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license. That means you can use it any way you like, including commercially, provided that you attribute it to me, Cory Doctorow, and include a link to pluralistic.net.

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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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