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Received — 16 May 2026 ⏭

Pluralistic: Making sense of Trump's unscheduled sudden midair disassembly of the American empire (16 May 2026)

✇Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
By: Cory Doctorow
16 May 2026 at 10:35


Today's links


A detail from Dore's engraving depicting the drowning of the Leviathan - a great sea-serpent thrashing in a chaotic dark sea. The image has been altered: it has been hand-tinted. The sea serpent is wearing a MAGA hat. Drowning nearby are a beleagured Uncle Sam, an Android robot, and the Statue of Liberty.

Making sense of Trump's unscheduled sudden midair disassembly of the American empire (permalink)

For generations, the American empire was the most powerful force on earth, and so we tended to assume that it was the most durable force on earth – surely anything so powerful must also be eternal?

But power and durability aren't the same thing, as Le Guin reminded us with her oft-quoted maxim that "We live in capitalism, its power seems inescapable — but then, so did the divine right of kings":

https://www.ursulakleguin.com/nbf-medal

Monarchs may be powerful, but that power is derived from a manifestly incorrect belief in special blood, a belief that requires monarchs to inbreed. At best, this produces heads of state who can't stop bleeding and also can't tell you if their blood is blue or red; at worst, it yields heads of state who can't speak intelligibly, much less produce another generation of royals:

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

Oligarchy also produces a sequence of progressively weirder and more terrible rulers who rely on a mix of lies, flattery, coercion and personal cult nonsense to hold their coalition together in the face of mounting evidence for the system's bankruptcy. Thus Reagan begat GW Bush, who begat Trump, whose potential successors are a kennel of the least-charismatic chud podcasters ever to curse an RSS feed.

Trump's second term has resulted in a rapid, unscheduled, mid-air disassembly of the American empire. As Baldur Bjarnason writes, under Trump, America "first turned on their trading partners, then their allies in Europe, and then they delivered one of this century’s biggest economic and energy crises to their allies in Asia":

https://www.baldurbjarnason.com/2026/the-old-world-of-tech-is-dying/

The line comes from an excellent post entitled "The old world of tech is dying and the new cannot be born," about the impact of Trump's de-Americanization of the world on the US tech industry, and thus the world's relationship to tech more broadly. As Bjarnason writes, Trump's tech giants dominate the world because America dominates the world. It's not because the world likes American tech. As Bjarnason writes:

They are, more often than not, about as popular and respected as tobacco or pharmaceutical companies – some of them and their products are polling in terms of public sentiment in ranges similar to child molesters or authoritarian immigration enforcement entities – and their CEOs are some of the more despised public figures in recent history.

These very, very unpopular tech companies dominate because American trade policy insists that they must. They are allowed to violate local laws because stopping them from doing so would result in trade sanctions. It's true that US tech companies face fines abroad from time to time, but these are "the price list for inflicting societal suffering. Pick the one that suits your business model." US trading partners haven't really attempted to extinguish the unlawful conduct of US tech companies.

All of that is up for grabs now, thanks to Trump's uncontrollable compulsion to repeatedly hormuz himself (and America) in the foot. But – as Bjarnason writes – this didn't start with Trump. As ever, Trump is as much an effect as a cause, and the most important cause of Trump is the conversion of America into a financial economy, which started under Reagan, but was only finalized by Obama, who let the Wall Street looters who destroyed the world economy walk away unscathed, even as they stole the homes of millions of Americans:

https://web.archive.org/web/20170130083243/https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/jan/16/how-barack-obama-paved-way-donald-trump-racism

Financial economies "suck the air out of the rest of the economy and make it less competitive." Keeping billionaires in megayachts comes at the expense of "research, education, infrastructure, and healthcare." Countries that financialize lag behind countries where the economy is based on making things, not extracting or financing things.

Generations of both imperial looting and domestic investment made America the richest country on earth. That wealth cushioned America's transition to oligarchy: for a while, the country could survive both "finance and billionaire parasites sucking its blood" and continue to invest in itself. But while you can double the wealth of a billionaire at the expense of a town or two, doubling the wealth of a centibillionaire requires the destruction of whole regions.

As America looted itself into irrelevance, China – a very different kind of autocracy – invested in domestic capacity and domestic consumption. China's hardly a well-run place: like any autocracy, it functions according to the whims of extremely fallible officials, which produces real-estate bubbles and other crises of production (to say nothing of the demographic crisis of the One Child policy) and necessitates steadily increasing oppression, from online surveillance to concentration camps in Xinjiang.

Bjarnason writes about how this Chinese/US world presents a "double bind" for the EU. Siding with the US is increasingly untenable: the EU exists in large part to promote its domestic industries, but the US is no longer content to leave these alone. As Bjarnason says, US economic policy is now, "whatever our oligarchs want to steal this month, they get."

US tech has extended so many tendrils into so many sectors that it's not possible to defend any industrial sector without impinging on the "technopoly," where "the only ideas and thoughts that have social and cultural legitimacy are those that support, are supported by, and are mediated through technology."

This means that continuing to work within the American system means a steady transfer of economic and political control of every aspect of your life to the US, a decaying empire ruled over by a mad king. Nevertheless, there is a strong, vestigial reflex to protect American tech in the EU, which leaves European power-brokers scrambling to come up with reasons that the EU should confine its tech regulation to empty symbolic gestures, while avoiding meaningful action at all costs:

https://cerre.eu/wp-content/uploads/2026/02/CERRE_Horizontal-Interoperability-of-Social-Networking-Services.pdf

But the American tech sector relies on the other sources of American power – the ones that Trump is so bent on destroying. Trump's de-dollarization of the world economy is pushing the world away from using American tech for payment processing and networking. The American empire created the form of the US tech sector. As Bjarnason writes, "without the weight of the US political empire behind it – if Airbnb or Uber had been local startups – much fewer countries in the world would have loosened their regulations and consumer protections to accommodate them to the point where they prospered as they did."

Trump isn't the first US leader to make a strategic blunder (the US has lost every war it's fought since WWII, after all). But Trump's blunders are different in that they "deliberately signal the end [the US] empire." Hormuz and tariffs have driven people away from the US dollar, and everyone knows who to blame for the senseless deaths in the Gulf and the global privation caused by oil rationing.

That's bad news for a software industry that "shifted its entire value proposition from 'we make tools that help you make or save money' to using political clout and the dollar hegemony to capture, control, and loot entire sectors of the various economies of the world. That strategy only works when you’re in charge."

DOGE wiped out the health systems of the global south, and now Trump's trade negotiators are demanding that these countries promise to keep their hands off of US tech in exchange for reinstating a small trickle of the aid they lost. These countries are rejecting those demands:

https://www.reuters.com/business/healthcare-pharmaceuticals/zambia-says-us-health-deal-must-be-uncoupled-minerals-access-2026-05-04/

It's all up for grabs, in other words. The post-American internet is being born in a post-American world, and the shape of both is impossible to determine from this side of the veil. Bjarnason quotes Gramsci: "the old is dying and the new cannot be born."

I hold out high hopes for a world of international digital public goods: free and open software that replaces America's extractive, defective black boxes with transparent, auditable, trustworthy alternatives that are under the control of the people who use them:

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

But – as Bjarnason says – even the intellectual property framework that the free/open source movement relies on to make its licenses enforceable is an artifact of the collapsing American empire. If the global copyright system collapses with America, there won't be any impediments to reverse-engineering and improving the tech around us – but there also won't be any way to enforce the free software licenses that keep that software open:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/04/02/limited-monopoly/#petardism

The whole essay is very good and – like so many great essays – it raises more questions than it answers. It's also full of standout one-liners like this one:

How do LLMs affect productivity and quality? (Much like leaded petrol. There’s some potential benefit for individual users with literally decades of expertise, provided nobody else uses LLMs. The results are catastrophic when everybody is using them.)

Consider moving it to the top of your weekend reading.

Hey look at this (permalink)


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

Object permanence (permalink)

#25yrsago Is the law copyrighted?
https://web.archive.org/web/20010519134232/http://www.uniontrib.com/news/uniontrib/sun/news/news_1n13own.html

#15yrsago Canadian copyright collective wants a music tax on memory cards https://web.archive.org/web/20110517205114/https://www.michaelgeist.ca/content/view/5798/125/

#10yrsago FBI Director: viral videos make cops afraid to do their jobs https://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/12/us/comey-ferguson-effect-police-videos-fbi.html?_r=2

#10yrsago Banker implicated in one of history’s biggest frauds says boss beat him with a tiny baseball bat https://web.archive.org/web/20160516173952/http://www.ibtimes.co.uk/barclays-banker-accused-rigging-libor-rate-hit-assistant-baseball-bat-1559792

#10yrsago Infested: an itchy, fascinating natural history of the bed bug https://memex.craphound.com/2016/05/14/infested-an-itchy-fascinating-natural-history-of-the-bed-bug/

#5yrsago A weapon of mass financial destruction https://pluralistic.net/2021/05/14/billionaire-class-solidarity/#club-deals

#1yrago Are the means of computation even seizable? https://pluralistic.net/2025/05/14/pregnable/#checkm8

Upcoming appearances (permalink)

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


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

Recent appearances (permalink)


A grid of my books with Will Stahle covers..

Latest books (permalink)


A cardboard book box with the Macmillan logo.

Upcoming books (permalink)

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

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

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

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

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


Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources:

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

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

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

  • A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING

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

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ISSN: 3066-764X

Received — 20 April 2026 ⏭

Pluralistic: Comrade Trump (20 Apr 2026)

✇Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
By: Cory Doctorow
20 April 2026 at 18:44


Today's links

  • Comrade Trump: Burning down the American empire to save it.
  • Hey look at this: Delights to delectate.
  • Object permanence: MPAA's threat-based 'education'; Cuehack; Heinlein on GWB; AT&T v the internet; British tax-havens v HMG; What is neoliberalism?; Newspaper landlords; Watch-part motorcycle; Tax havens bad; Buscemi's eyes; Sesame Street on lead poisoning.
  • Upcoming appearances: San Francisco, London, Berlin, NYC, Barcelona, Hay-on-Wye, London, NYC.
  • Recent appearances: Where I've been.
  • Latest books: You keep readin' em, I'll keep writin' 'em.
  • Upcoming books: Like I said, I'll keep writin' 'em.
  • Colophon: All the rest.


A Soviet propaganda poster featuring Lenin pointing angrily into the distance. It has been altered. Lenin now has Trump's hair and his skin in orange. The hammer/sickle logo behind him has been replaced with a cross.

Comrade Trump (permalink)

There aren't a lot of things I agree with Mark Carney about, but there's one area where he and I are in total accord: the old, US-dominated, "rules-based international order" was total bullshit:

https://www.weforum.org/stories/2026/01/davos-2026-special-address-by-mark-carney-prime-minister-of-canada/

Unlike Carney, I never pretended to like that old order, and indeed, I spent my entire life fighting against it – literally, all the way back to childhood, organizing other children to march against Canada's participation in America's nuclear weapons programs:

https://www.flickr.com/photos/doctorow/53616011737/in/photolist-2pFS5kt

All of which means that my experience of the Trump years is decidedly weird. On the one hand, I exist in a near-perpetual state of anxious misery, as Trump and his chud army of Christian nationalists and degenerate gamblers pursue a program of gleeful genocide. But at the very same time, I'm living in a world in which Trump is (inadvertently) dismantling many of the worst aspects of the old order in favor of something decidedly better.

Take Trump's tariff policy. Back during Trump I, he decided that Americans couldn't buy Chinese solar anymore, which had the double benefit of allowing him to pursue the twin goals of throwing red meat to Sinophobic Cold War 2.0 freaks and delivering a giant gift to the planet-wrecking oil companies that had helped him buy his way into office.

This was really bad for America, of course, but those solar panels had to go somewhere. Mostly, they ended up in Pakistan, dumped there at such a massive discount that the country solarized virtually overnight. Pakistani solar installers learned their trade from Tiktok videos set to Tamil film soundtracks, and unwired the country so thoroughly that today, the national power company is in danger of going bust because no one buys their electricity from the grid anymore. Pakistani bridal dowries now routinely include four panels, an inverter and a battery:

https://billmckibben.substack.com/p/a-tale-of-two-countries

This is an inversion of the normal order of things, in which rich countries get all the good stuff first, and poor countries like Pakistan get scraps after we've gorged ourselves. Think of vaccine apartheid, in which monsters like Howard Dean insisted that we had to prevent countries in the global south from making their own covid vaccines, because poor brown people are too stupid and primitive to run a pharma manufacturing operation:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/04/08/howard-dino/#the-scream

But, thanks to Comrade Trump, Pakistan was first in line to become the world's solar capital. The country's LNG terminal – built with Chinese Belt-and-Road money – is now a stranded asset, because no one there needs gas.

That's gas whose supply has been choked off in the Strait of Epstein…which brings me to Trump's foreign policy and its impact on the global energy shift. Transitory energy shortages have small effects: when your energy bill goes up for a while (because of extreme weather, say), it makes you angry and sad and might result in an electoral loss for whatever politician presided over the price hike. But when you get genuine, prolonged shortages – the sort that are accompanied by rationing – you make permanent changes.

Rationing is so psychologically scarring that it induces people to make long-delayed investments that result in permanent changes to their consumption habits. Maybe you've known for a long time that an induction top would be better for your indoor air quality and your cooking than the gas range you have now, but you don't want to buy a whole new appliance and pay for an electrician to run a high-wattage line in expensive conduit from your breaker panel to your kitchen.

But if you're an Indian restaurateur who can no longer get any cooking gas – because it's being rationed for household use – then you are going out to buy whatever induction top you can lay hands on. Maybe it's a cheap, low-powered single burner one that plugs into your existing electrics, or maybe you're splashing out and swapping out your whole gas appliance. Whichever it is, you are no longer interested in your chef's insistence that real cooking gets done over gas. If your chef can't cook on an induction top, your chef will need to find employment elsewhere.

This is going on all over the world right now, as people buy EVs (and pay to have chargers installed at home – maybe getting a twofer on their conduit runs with two high power lines run through the same conduit infrastructure). In Australia – where the last shipment of gas for the foreseeable came into port last week – people are calling their local EV dealers and offering to buy whatever car is on the lot, sight unseen.

Meanwhile, in Ethiopia, a series of dollar-related crises caused the country to ban imports of internal combustion engines altogether (oil and gas are denominated in dollars, which means you can only get oil if you first sell stuff to Americans or others who'll pay in dollars). The country's fleet of noisy, dirty motorbikes is being swiftly replaced by ebikes that get eight miles to the penny:

https://www.ecofinagency.com/news-industry/0810-49366-ethiopia-expands-vehicle-import-ban-to-trucks-pushing-electric-transport

Ebikes are insanely great technology. Cheap, rugged and reliable, they're basically bicycles that abolish hills. Once you've gotten accustomed to an ebike – maybe you've invested in a folding helmet and a raincoat – you'll never go back. The advantages of an ebike commute over a car commute are legion, but my favorite little pleasure is the ability to easily make a stop at a nice coffee shop halfway between home and work, rather than being stuck buying shitty chain coffee near the office.

Four years ago, another mad emperor, Vladimir Putin, invaded Ukraine – and in so doing, catapulted Europe's energy transition into the Gretacene, with unimaginable defeats for the fossil fuel lobby. Not just subsidies for the clean energy transition, but also policy shifts in areas that had been deadlocked for a decade, like approvals for balcony solar, which is transforming the continent. Even the UK, one of the oil industry's most reliable vassal states, is now greenlighting balcony solar:

https://www.gov.uk/government/news/government-to-make-plug-in-solar-available-within-months

This may not sound like much, but the UK is a country whose politics is composed of 50% hatred of migrants and trans people, and 50% incredibly stupid planning battles. Great Britain is a magical land where your neighbors can ask the government to prevent you from installing double-glazing on the grounds that it will change the "historic character" of their neighborhood of terraced Victorian homes.

I once lost a fight to get permission to put a little glass greenhouse on my balcony on the grounds that it would "alter the facade" of the undistinguished low-rise 1960s industrial building I live on top of. The fact that HMG is going to tell your facade-obsessed neighbors to fuck off all the way into the sun so that you can hang solar panels off your balcony is nothing short of a miracle.

Comrade Putin's contribution to oil-soaked Britain's energy transition can't be overstated. Thanks to "free market" policies that sent energy prices soaring after the Ukraine invasion, Brits installed so much solar (despite the existing impediments to solarization) that now the government is begging us to use more energy this summer, because the grid can't absorb all those lovely free electrons:

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2026/apr/14/uk-households-power-renewables-soar

The UK is on a glide-path to adopting the Australian plan. Australia also benefited from Trump I's solar embargo, receiving a ton of cheap solar that would otherwise have ended up in America. Now Australia has so much solar that they're giving away electricity, with three free hours of unlimited energy every day. Stick your dishwasher, clothes-dryer and EV charger on a timer, invest in a battery or two, and fill your boots:

https://billmckibben.substack.com/p/free-electricity-like-at-no-cost

(Maybe at this point you're thinking dark thoughts about critical minerals and such. That's not the problem you think it is and it's getting better every day. To take just one example, lithium batteries are about to be replaced with sodium batteries. Sodium is the world's sixth-most abundant element:)

https://www.livescience.com/technology/electric-vehicles/china-puts-a-sodium-ion-battery-into-an-ev-for-the-first-time-it-can-drive-248-miles-on-a-single-charge

The Strait of Epstein crisis is going to do more to accelerate permanent, unidirectional migration away from fossil fuels to cleantech than decades of environmental activism. Cleantech is so much better than fossil fuels – cheaper, more reliable, cleaner – that anyone who tries it becomes an instant convert. That's why the fossil fuel industry has been so insistent that no one get to try it!

To take just one example here: Texas ranchers have been solarizing, thanks to the state's bizarre "free market" energy system that sees energy prices spiking so high during cold snaps that you literally have to choose between freezing to death and going bankrupt. Solar is great for agriculture, especially in climate-ravaged Texas, where it provides crucial shade for crops and livestock, while substantially reducing soil evaporation, resulting in substantial irrigation savings.

When the oil-captured Texas legislature introduced a bill to force electric companies to add one watt of fossil power for every watt of solar that their customers installed, furious ranchers from blood red Republican rural districts flooded their town hall meetings, decrying the plan as "DEI for fossil fuels." The bill died:

https://austinfreepress.org/renewables-are-now-the-costco-of-energy-production-bill-mckibben-says/

This is the template for the long-foreseeable future. Thanks to Trump's stupid, bloody, unforgivable war of choice in the Gulf, the world is going to install unimaginable amounts of cleantech. They are going to throw away their water heaters, motorbikes, furnaces and cars and replace them with all-electric versions. They're going to cover their roofs and balconies with panels. The battery industry will experience a sustained boom. The fortunes that fossil fuel companies are reaping from the current shortage is their last windfall.

The writing is on the wall. Trump opened Alaska for drilling and the oil companies noped out because they couldn't find a bank that would loan them the money needed to get started. Then it happened again in Venezuela. This de-fossilizing was already the direction of travel, the only question was the pace at which the transition would proceed – and Comrade Trump has just stomped all over the (liquid natural) gas pedal.

Energy is just one realm where Trump is doing praxis. One of the most exciting developments that Trumpismo's incontinent belligerence has induced is the global technology transition.

For decades, the only people pointing out the dangers of using America's cash-grabbing, privacy invading defective tech exports were digital rights hippies like me, and our victories were modest and far between. Despite the Snowden revelations, despite the tech industry's prolific snood-cocking at EU privacy regulators and Canadian lawmakers, we all just carried on using these incredibly dangerous, steadily enshittifying Big Tech products. We even run our governments and structurally important companies off Big Tech. We let US tech companies update (that is, downgrade) the software on our cars and tractors, our pacemakers and ventilators, our power plants and telephone switches.

There's lots of reasons for this. For one thing, ripping out and replacing all that software and firmware is a prodigious challenge, as is building the data-centers to host it for every "digitally sovereign" country. Add to that the complexity of successfully migrating data, edit histories, archives and identities and you're looking at a very big lift. So long as the American tech bosses kept their enshittificatory gambits to a measured, slow flow, they could keep the pain beneath the threshold where it was worth us boiling frogs leaping out of their pot.

But the most important force defending American internet hegemony was free trade: specifically, the US forced all of its trading partners to adopt "anticircumvention" laws that make it illegal to modify US tech exports. That means that you can't go into business selling your neighbors the tools to use generic ink or an independent app store, much less make a fortune exporting those tools to the rest of the world:

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

Enter Comrade Trump. When Trump started weaponizing US tech platforms to take away the working files, email accounts and cloud calendars of judges who pissed him off (by sentencing Bolsonaro to prison, and by swearing out a genocide warrant for Netanyahu), he put the whole world on notice that he could shut down their governments, judiciaries or companies at the click of a mouse:

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

And of course, he's whacked the whole world with tariffs that violate the trade agreements that imposed the anticircumvention obligations that protect America's defective tech exports. Now there's no longer any reason to keep those laws on the books. Happy Liberation Day, everyone! The post-American internet is at hand:

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

But Trump has even more praxis up his spraytan-stained sleeves. Trump is succeeding where Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren and AOC failed: he's making the case for Democrats to defenestrate their useless, sellout, Epstein-poisoned leaders. All across the country, radical Dems and avowed socialists are sweeping primaries and elections, as voters realize that Blue No Matter Who will doom them to eternal torment in the Manchin-Synematic Universe:

https://prospect.org/2026/02/11/progressive-win-new-jersey-anti-ice-organizing-mejia/

Fury over Trumpismo is pushing even the most useless Democratic leaders to sign up for billionaire taxes:

https://jacobin.com/2026/04/zohran-tax-rich-hochul-nyc

Thanks to Comrade Trump, the median Democratic voter will no longer be satisfied with Kente cloth photo-ops and little ping-pong paddles stenciled with "down with this sort of thing":

https://www.truthdig.com/articles/ping-pong-paddles-to-a-gun-fight/

Thanks to Trump, we might see criminal prosecutions – and a primary challenge for any Dem that gets in the way of a serious, Nuremberg-style reckoning with Trumpismo and its gangsters:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/02/10/miller-in-the-dock/#denazification

Look, all things being equal, I would have preferred that Trump had keeled over from a mid-burger stroke on the campaign trail in 2016. But when life gives you SARS, you make sarsaparilla. This is a deeply shitty timeline, but Comrade Trump keeps tripping over his red tie. Let's take the wins.

Hey look at this (permalink)


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

Object permanence (permalink)

#25yrsago The MPAA 'educates the public' with threatening letters https://web.archive.org/web/20120318060108/http://news.cnet.com/2100-1023-255961.html&tag=tp_pr

#25yrsago Cuehack for the :CueCat https://web.archive.org/web/20010803172853/http://www.rtmark.com/cuejack/

#25yrsago Microsoft Technical Support vs The Psychic Friends Network https://web.archive.org/web/20010410171616/http://www.bmug.org/news/articles/MSvsPF.html

#20yrsago The novel Heinlein would have written about GW Bush’s America https://memex.craphound.com/2006/04/17/the-novel-heinlein-would-have-written-about-gw-bushs-america/

#20yrsago Hilarious hijinx with security guards who hate building-photographers https://thomashawk.com/2006/04/photographing-architecture-is-not.html

#20yrsago Hundreds ask Smithsonian not to sell out to Showtime https://web.archive.org/web/20060420031124/https://www.americanprogress.org/site/pp.asp?c=biJRJ8OVF&b=1554385

#20yrsago How AT&T wants to turn the Internet into mere TV https://web.archive.org/web/20060620095643/http://www.salon.com/tech/feature/2006/04/17/toll/index_np.html

#20yrsago NOLA mayoral candidate doctors Disneyland photo – again https://web.archive.org/web/20060422010054/https://www.wonkette.com/politics/new-orleans/kimberly-williamson-butler-continues-to-astound-us-167923.php

#20yrsago Where He-Man came from https://web.archive.org/web/20060423061651/https://thesneeze.com/mt-archives/000500.php

#20yrsago FBI demand chance to censor muckracking journo’s papers https://web.archive.org/web/20060421045340/https://www.chronicle.com/free/2006/04/2006041801n.htm

#15yrsago Ethiopia’s “newspaper landlords” rent the want-ads by the minute https://www.cnn.com/2011/BUSINESS/04/19/newspaper.rental.ethiopia/index.html

#15yrsago It’s people like us what makes trouble: the pernicious influence of immigrants in the UK. https://web.archive.org/web/20080314013819/http://feorag.newsvine.com/_news/2008/03/10/1356131-the-pernicious-influence-of-immigrants-in-the-uk

#15yrsago China’s “Jasmine Revolution”: anonymous out-of-country bloggers troll the politburo https://web.archive.org/web/20110412063347/http://globalguerrillas.typepad.com/globalguerrillas/2011/04/the-jasmine-revolution.html

#15yrsago Motorcycles made from watch parts https://www.deviantart.com/dkart71/art/Motorcycles-out-of-watch-parts-18a-204941090

#15yrsago Steve Buscemi’s Eyes: the printable mask https://eyesuckink.blogspot.com/2011/04/free-home-version-of-steve-buscemis.html

#15yrsago Privacy, Facebook, politics and kids https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/video/2011/apr/18/cory-doctorow-networking-technologies-video?CMP=twt_fd

#15yrsago NZ MP votes for anti-piracy law hours after tweeting about her love of pirated music https://torrentfreak.com/kiwi-mp-called-out-as-pirate-after-passing-anti-piracy-law-110415/

#15yrsago Righthaven copyright trolls never had the right to sue, have their asses handed to them by the EFF https://web.archive.org/web/20110418001051/http://paidcontent.org/article/419-righthavens-secret-contract-is-revealedwill-its-strategy-collapse/

#15yrsago TSA considers being upset at screening procedures to be an indicator of terrorist intentions https://www.cnn.com/2011/TRAVEL/04/15/tsa.screeners.complain/

#10yrsago The saga of Ian Bogost’s pressure-washer https://bogostpressurewasherstatus.tumblr.com/

#10yrsago Heads of UK’s tax havens to Her Majesty’s Government: go fuck yourself https://web.archive.org/web/20160411112631/http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/tax-haven-corporate-tax-avoidance-uk-ministers-humiliated-after-cayman-bvi-british-virgin-islands-a6974956.html

#10yrsago George Clooney’s neighbor threw a $27/plate Sanders fundraiser to counter Clooney’s $33K/head Hillary event https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/2016-election/sanders-supporters-shower-clinton-motorcade-1-bills-n557191

#10yrsago What is neoliberalism? https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/apr/15/neoliberalism-ideology-problem-george-monbiot?CMP=twt_books_b-gdnbooks

#10yrsago No, tax-havens aren’t good for society (duh) https://web.archive.org/web/20160602053124/https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/five-myths-about-tax-havens/2016/04/15/76d001d2-0255-11e6-b823-707c79ce3504_story.html

#10yrsago John Oliver and the cast of Sesame Street on lead poisoning https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GUizvEjR-0U

#10yrsago Supreme Court sends Authors Guild packing, won’t hear Google Books case https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2016/04/fair-use-prevails-as-supreme-court-rejects-google-books-copyright-case/

#10yrsago Four years later, Popehat’s favorite con-artist is indicted https://web.archive.org/web/20160419031946/https://popehat.com/2016/04/18/anatomy-of-a-scam-investigation-chapter-14-the-indictment/

#10yrsago Hacking Team supplied cyber-weapons to corrupt Latin American governments for human rights abuses https://www.derechosdigitales.org/wp-content/uploads/malware-para-la-vigilancia.pdf

#10yrsago High profits mean capitalism is cooked https://www.promarket.org/2016/04/16/are-we-all-rent-seeking-investors/

#10yrsago A look back at the D&D moral panic https://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/18/us/when-dungeons-dragons-set-off-a-moral-panic.html

#10yrsago Petition to reassign head of Canada Post to deliver letters at $500k/year https://www.ipetitions.com/petition/help-canada-post-ceo-deepak-chopra-keep-his-job

#1yrago Mark Zuckerberg personally lost the Facebook antitrust case https://pluralistic.net/2025/04/18/chatty-zucky/#is-you-taking-notes-on-a-criminal-fucking-conspiracy

Upcoming appearances (permalink)

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

Recent appearances (permalink)


A grid of my books with Will Stahle covers..

Latest books (permalink)


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Upcoming books (permalink)

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

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

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

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

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


Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources:

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

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

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

  • A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING

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