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Received — 7 May 2026 ⏭ Activism

Claude Mythos is an onslaught of software exploits? Color me unimpressed

✇Just an invitation...
By: Marco Fioretti
7 May 2026 at 20:19

A few days ago Anthropic, one of the most important companies of the American AI industry, released a new tool called Claude Mythos that’s making thousands and thousands of software professionals lose their sleep. It may also be a big case of AI overrating and waste of energies.

A great summary of why Mythos is the greatest nightmare of software managers is a Verge article by Yael Grauer titled “Attack of the killer script kiddies”. If you have never heard that term before, “Script kiddies” are people who try to break into computer systems for illegal purposes, but using only software tools (”scripts”) developed by others, because they aren’t skilled enough to write their own. Some quotes of that article are a perfect introduction to my thesis that Mythos isn’t really that interesting, so here they are, almost verbatim:

  • Claude Mythos is a new AI model that seems to find vulnerabilities in every piece of software it’s pointed at

  • fears are growing that not only can AI detect these flaws, but also be used to exploit them, putting hacking skills into the hands of everyone across the planet (that is, script kiddies)

  • [the arrival of AI tools like Mythos] represents a major escalation, where people without technical backgrounds are able to use AI to enhance their capabilities in a way that wasn’t possible with simple scripts [and] is likely to have far more wide-reaching repercussions

  • [the reason is that] AI is great at pattern matching, and [therefore will make] easier and easier for people to find variants of bugs that are already known and ones that have not yet been discovered. And writing exploits is becoming easier as well

  • you can use AI tools and with very minimal human guidance, and in some cases no human guidance, find in widely used software bugs that its developers never had the time to find

  • industry experts predict that the advancement in AI security capabilities is going to lead to a lot more software exploits. Bad actors could direct AI to find bugs in uncommon pieces of software that no one previously would have put in the effort to exploit

  • [with tools like Mythos] you can write exploits [even] for software that exists in only one configuration that one company has. And you can do it on the fly

After the problem, the Verge article describes the steps companies can take to prepare for “the coming onslaught of software vulnerability reports”. Of that section, the part I like the most is the explicit mention of the idiocy of “many people in cybersecurity roles have been laid off because of AI’s efficiencies, even though those efficiencies are exactly why more humans need to remain in the mix” because companies will “need people to decide which patches to prioritize and implement”. But I digress.

They spent billions for bug discovery… and they applied to software first???

Claude Mythos only does software? What You Talkin Bout Willis? (if you never met Arnold, click here)

The concerns about the misuse of Mythos must be taken seriously. No doubts about that. A lunatic or terrorist script kiddie may hurt - maybe not deadly, but seriously - many more people with Mythos than with weapons. Your pension money is much less likely to be stolen by some script kiddie using Mythos AI than by the coming crash of AI stocks that will take your whole pension fund down with them, but that’s not a reason to ignore AI script kiddies, is it?

And yet... I can’t help thinking that a term like Kiddies, that is “juvenile” or “immature”, somehow also applies to treating almost like THE ultimate god of destruction and havoc something made (spending tons of money) to only find and fix bugs in software.

I say so because we should all start to consider the greatest hackers and disruptors the people who exploit or fix bugs in other systems, that are much more critical than software (1). And no, it’s not AI-powered genetic hacking I’m talking about.

Script kiddies for LAWS, not software. That’s what we need

Fixing bugs in software before AI can help exploit them is absolutely necessary. But applying something as powerful as Mythos only to software bugs would be a real waste.

Why did Anthropic first create a Mythos for software companies and institutional users of software?

Why didn’t Anthropic do what I proposed two and a half years ago instead? Namely, unleash AI that finds and exposes all the cruft, contradictions and uselessly complicated language in all the law corpuses of the world.

Please re-read all the bullets above replacing “software” with “laws” and then...

Imagine if there was something like Claude Mythos that any law student or wannabe accountant could use to tell all the citizens of his country “hey, here’s a loophole in law so-and-so that you can use to claim back half the taxes you paid last year, and these are the exact steps to follow to do it”. Then try to imagine a better way to stimulate lawmakers of every party to fix broken laws NOW.

Imagine if there was something like Claude Mythos that, every time a new law proposal is published, everybody could use to easily discover that that proposal violates, contradicts or duplicates in any way other, already existing laws.

Imagine if there was something like Claude Mythos that, after reading all the laws of a country, produced a completely equivalent but much shorter, much more readable set of laws. Something that would make it much quicker and easier for everybody to see what’s good and bad in every law, and for whom.

Of course, every AI-generated denounce of flawed law proposals and every AI-powered rewrite of any law or regulation should be verified word by word by every human with the will and real skills to do it, possibly with “Bug Bounty Programs” as it happens for software. And after that, it should still be ratified by accountable, elected representatives before actually becoming (or not) the new law of the land.

But just imagine how society would change, if existing laws were much shorter and much easier to understand than today for everybody, and if introducing new laws that are redundant or flawed in any way became much, much harder than it is today. The only way to make it even better would be if laws also had the same revision control systems as software.

Those would be really cool, really powerful hacks, not breaking computer systems. They would concretely mitigate, for every human, serious risks that would still exist even if all software of the world was built and managed by real saints that would never use software to hurt anybody. Wouldn’t that be the best and most prestigious hacking of all? Wouldn’t that be the best way ever to be a script kiddie?

Leave a comment

Why isn’t Anthropic or anybody else already doing this?

Of course, since good laws are a foundation of any decent society, their drafting, reviewing and approving MUST remain work done exclusively by humans. That’s not up for discussion. Have you noticed that the AI “law-hacking” uses I suggest are all reactive, not proactive? Nobody should be so dumb to tolerate new laws proposed or written by AI, ever.

The only questions here are: Mythos is a serious risk, but what makes people paint it as the biggest disruption there can be? And why weren’t tools like Mythos first developed and adopted to help make the result of 100% human lawmaking as easy to use and understand as possible? If you ask me, this is a serious lack of imagination and real spirit of innovation.

What’s lacking here? Maybe the answer is the same that makes even people who don’t make of AI a childish religion take seriously concepts like “network states” managed only by unelected software, blockchain-based quality guarantees that don’t really certify what they claim they certify, or “smart” contracts that are all software, but have little or none of the power of real legal contracts.

Maybe the answer is that both AI companies and wannabe script kiddies are making the same mistake: the mistake of liking software and access to software so much to conclude that software, together with rules and criteria that can be completely encoded in software, can be enough to build and manage a society worth living in.

Two-sentences side rant, if I may: historically, another form of the same mistake is the confidence that something only valid for actual software bugs, that is Linus’s law that “given enough eyes all bugs are shallow”, would be enough to make everybody adopt Free/Open Source Software. In practice, this too often led to neglect non-technical flaws that were deal-breakers for too many people who could never write, document or understand source code and never will (2), but by sheer numbers could have spread FOSS much more, much faster, than software hackers alone could ever do.

Back to lack of AI script kiddies that force lawmakers to make laws more readable and harder to fool: I am aware that the answer above cannot be complete. I’d really like to complete it and, above all, I’d really like to find out who will be the first to release a “law-hacking AI”. Hence...

Serious question for Dario Amodei, CEO of Anthropic

Dear Mr. Amodei... can we talk? Seriously. I’d really like to hear what you think of my proposal, and know from you if Mythos or any other product of yours could be used as I propose. My email is mfioretti@nexaima.net. Also, as everybody can see here or here, in general I am very critical of what passes for AI today. But since you and your company seem the most responsible member of the pack... who knows? It may be interesting, and mutually beneficial, to try to do something for Anthropic. Here are some of my qualifications, to help you decide if that may be possible.

Everybody else who’d like to read more stuff like this... Thanks in advance for your subscription (possibly but not necessarily paid) or, even better, a donation for any amount, or consulting, writing or speaking work.

Subscribe now

  1. Yes, “exploit OR fix”, because the true definition of hacker is the one in the Jargon File (1983!!!): not a criminal, but “a person who enjoys exploring the details of programmable systems and how to stretch their capabilities, as opposed to most users, who prefer to learn only the minimum necessary.”

  2. I still remember the flame wars of twenty years ago when many reviews of OpenOffice (the precursor of LibreOffice) included a complain like “not a bad word processor, too bad it doesn’t have a word counter”. Every time that happened, it started the same flame war. On one side, there were the developers going more or less “Duh, is this guy weird, I have never needed a word counter”. On the other, those like me pointing out that “you developers don’t matter. Not with a word processor at least. The people who can tell everybody else to use your product are journalists, and they absolutely need word counters. Can you complain that they don’t recommend your software if you don’t make them happy?”

Pluralistic: Bubbles are REALLY evil (07 May 2026)

✇Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
By: Cory Doctorow
7 May 2026 at 10:08


Today's links


The royal carriage of king Louis Philippe is burned in front of the Chateau d'eau during the French revolution of 1848, Paris 24th February 1848.

Bubbles are REALLY evil (permalink)

I am on record as saying that every economic bubble is terrible, but some bubbles do at least leave behind a salvageable productive residue while others leave behind nothing but ashes; indeed, this is the thesis of my next book, The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI:

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

Here's a historical comparison that's illuminating: Enron vs Worldcom. Both were monumental frauds, the CEOs of both companies died shortly after the frauds were discovered, but they have very different legacies. Enron – a scam that pretended to secure billions of dollars' worth of new efficiencies through "energy trading" but was actually just engineering rolling blackouts in order to jack up energy prices – left behind nothing.

Well, not quite nothing. Enron did leave behind a little useful residue after it burned to the ground: a giant repository of emails. You see, after Enron went bust, it was sued by its creditors, who demanded access to relevant emails from the company's Outlook server. But the company execs decided they didn't want to spend the money to weed out the irrelevant emails before the court-mandated disclosure, so instead they published all the emails ever sent or received by anyone at Enron, including tons of extremely private, personal, sensitive information relating to Enron's employees and customers:

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

This became the "Enron Corpus" and it was the first large tranche of emails that were in the public domain and available to researchers. As a result, it became the gold standard dataset for researchers investigating social graphs, natural language, and many other subjects that subsequently became very important computer science fields and commercial applications.

As legacies go, the Enron Corpus is pretty small ball, and even so, it is decidedly mixed, both because the Enron Corpus constitutes a gross, ongoing privacy violation for a huge number of people; and because a lot of that social graph and natural language work that it jumpstarted has been put to deeply shitty purposes.

Then there's Worldcom: also a gigantic fraud, Worldcom falsified billions of dollars' worth of orders for new fiber optic lines, and it then dug up streets all over the world and installed them. When Worldcom went bankrupt, all that fiber stayed in the ground, and many people are still using it today. My home in Burbank has a 2GB symmetrical fiber connection through AT&T that runs on old Worldcom fiber that AT&T bought up for pennies on the dollar.

So while you have to squint really hard to find any benefit that can be salvaged from Enron, it's really easy to point at Worldcom's productive residue – it's a ton of fiber and conduit running under the streets of major cities around the world, ready to be lit up and bring the people nearby into the 21st century. Fiber, after all, is amazing, literally thousands of times better than copper or 5G or Starlink:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/04/07/swisscom/#stacked

Even though Enron's CEO Ken Lay and Worldcom's CEO Bernie Ebbers both received prison sentences after their fraud was revealed, the bubbles never stopped, and indeed, they only got worse. AI is the biggest bubble in human history, worse even than the South Sea Bubble:

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

And like those earlier bubbles, some of our modern bubbles will leave behind nothing, while others will leave behind some productive residue. Take the cryptocurrency bubble. Crypto will go to zero, and when it does, all it will leave behind is shitty monkey JPEGs and even worse Austrian economics:

https://www.web3isgoinggreat.com/

As with Enron, you can find some productive residue from cryptocurrency if you look hard enough. A lot of programmers have had a heavily subsidized education in Rust programming and cryptographic fundamentals, both of which are unalloyed goods in our otherwise very insecure digital world.

Some of the underlying mechanisms from crypto are useful, even without blockchains. Take Metalabel, a system that lets collaborators on creative projects automate how they handle revenues from those projects by plugging DAO-like logic into traditional, dollar-based bank accounts. They're recycling some of the tooling from the crypto bubble to create a very useful utility, without the crypto:

https://www.metalabel.com/

But, as with the Enron Corpus, this is pretty small ball. The world has flushed away hundreds of billions to get paltry millions' worth of value out of crypto – the rest of that value disappeared into the pockets of crooked insiders who defrauded the public into parting with their savings.

If crypto will be Enron-like in its post-bubble life, what about AI? I think AI is more like Worldcom: there's a bunch of useful stuff that AI can do, after all. Take away the bubble and we'd call the things AI can do "plug-ins" and some people would use them, and others wouldn't, and some of those uses would be productive, and others would be foolish, but we wouldn't bet the world's economy on them, nor would we squander our last dribbles of potable water to cool their data centers.

After the AI bubble pops, there will be a lot of durable residue. The data centers will still stand. The GPUs will still be there, and if we don't "sweat the assets" by running them as hot and hard as they can tolerate, they won't burn out in 2-3 years. There will be lots of applied statisticians, skilled data-labelers, etc, looking for work. And there will be lots of open source models that have barely been optimized (why make an open source model more efficient when you're raising capital based on the promise of outspending everyone else in order to dominate a world of ubiquitous, pluripotent, winner-take-all centralized AI?):

https://pluralistic.net/2025/10/16/post-ai-ai/#productive-residue

That's a situation not unlike the post-dotcom bubble of the early 2000s. Almost overnight, the legion of humanities undergrads who'd been treated to subsidized training in perl, Python and HTML found themselves looking for work. Servers could be purchased in bulk for pennies on the dollar (with user data still on them!). I bought a "dining room set" of six $1,000+ fancy office chairs for $50 each (still wrapped in plastic!) from a dotcom founder who was selling them on the sidewalk out front of his failed startup's office in the Mission. He offered to sell me ten lifetime's supply of branded t-shirts for $20. I turned him down.

That was the birth of Web 2.0. All of a sudden, people who wanted to make real things that were good could do so, because they could find skilled workers, hardware, and office space at such knock-down prices that they could be funded out of pocket or put on a credit card. People got to pursue the web they wanted, free from asshole bosses and VCs. Not everything that got built in those heady days was good, but many good things got built.

I can easily imagine that the post-bubble AI scene will produce benefits comparable to Web 2.0 – projects built by and for people who want to do useful and fun things, without being distracted by the mirage of illusory billions promised by the stock swindlers who created the bubble.

I can easily imagine that I will find some of those post-bubble tools useful, and that in 20 years I will still be using them, just as today, I am still using some of those early post-dotcom bubble services and tools.

And despite all that, IT IS NOT WORTH IT.

The residue that is left behind by every bubble is subsidized, but that subsidy doesn't come from the deep-pocketed investors who are gripped by "irrational exuberance." It comes from mom-and-pop, normie, retail investors who have been tricked into giving their money to the insiders who inflated the bubble.

From Worldcom to Enron, from crypto to AI, the point of the bubble wasn't ever the residue or lack thereof – it was a transfer from working people to crooks. Bubbles are a system for moving the painfully sequestered life's savings of people who do things to people who steal things.

Since the Carter years, workers have been forced to flush their savings into the stock market, after the traditional "defined benefits pension" (that guarantees you an inflation-adjusted sum every month until you die) was replaced with 401(k)s and other "market-based pensions" (where you only get to survive after retirement if you bet correctly on the movement of stocks):

https://pluralistic.net/2022/05/29/against-cozy-catastrophies/

Despite this having all the appearances of a rigged game – finance industry insiders are always going to be better at betting on stocks than teachers, nurses, janitors and other productive workers – proponents of this system always insisted that workers weren't really the suckers at the table. But the stock market is like Kalshi or Polymarket in that one bettor's losses are another bettor's gains, and in those markets, nearly all the money is harvested by less than 1% of bettors:

https://www.coindesk.com/markets/2026/04/29/a-tiny-group-is-winning-on-polymarket-as-under-1-of-wallets-take-half-the-profits

Somehow, supposedly, we could beat those insiders and survive into our old age without having to eat dog food or become a burden on our kids by betting on the whole market, through index-tracker funds:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/03/17/shareholder-socialism/#asset-manager-capitalism

Supposedly, this would "diversify" our portfolios, which would insulate us from risks we could not understand, much less estimate. But thanks to private equity and the AI bubble, betting on "the whole market" is basically "betting on AI." 35% of the S&P 500 is tied up in seven AI companies, who are engaged in the obviously fraudulent (and Worldcom-adjacent) practice of passing the same $100b IOU around really quickly and pretending it's in all their bank accounts at once:

https://www.fool.com/investing/2025/11/05/ai-growth-stocks-is-there-still-room-to-run/

When the AI bubble pops, it will vaporize (at least) 35% of the US stock market and wipe out everyday savers who have been swindled into betting their futures on AI, based on the fraudulent representations of AI pitchmen. Millions of people who worked hard all their lives and deprived themselves of small comforts in order to save for their retirement will be wiped out. They will be made dependent on the Social Security system that Republicans are determined to starve into bankruptcy and then turn into (yet another) "market based system" that you will be required to convert into chips at the stock market casino where you're up against professional players who hold all the cards:

https://www.newsweek.com/major-social-security-change-proposed-to-build-wealth-11727844

Annihilating a third of the stock market will have severe knock-on effects, even though the median US worker only has $955 saved for retirement:

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/955-saved-for-retirement-millions-are-in-that-boat-150003868.html

Because wiping out the life's savings of everyone else will tank consumption for a generation. Retirees who have to sell their family homes to pay their medical bills won't be buying breakfast at the local diner or catching a Tuesday night movie. They won't be indulging their grandkids with nice birthday presents or helping their own kids buy their first home.

Worse still: the only thing our society knows how to do about economic catastrophe (for now, anyway) is to impose brutal austerity, and austerity drives voters into the arms of fascist strongmen, who blame all their woes on a scapegoated minority in order to win office, and then steal everything that's not nailed down:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/04/12/always-great/#our-nhs

Which is all to say, there's a world of difference between recognizing that the AI bubble is the superior sort of bubble in that it will leave a productive residue, and endorsing the AI bubble as a productive or morally acceptable way to produce that residue. It's one thing to anticipate salvaging something useful out of a catastrophe, and another thing altogether to deliberately induce or prolong that catastrophe so as to maximize the amount of salvage.

The swindlers who created this bubble are crooks who have set out to destroy the futures of a generation of savers. They are monsters, and their bubble needs to be popped as quickly as possible.

Hey look at this (permalink)


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

Object permanence (permalink)

#20yrsago Judge mocks FCC’s legal argument for wiretapping VoIP https://web.archive.org/web/20060512141440/https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/archives/004638.php

#20yrsago Podcasting saved from the UN — for now https://web.archive.org/web/20060603152220/https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/archives/004637.php

#15yrsago Two billion people and the royal wedding: pretty damned unlikely https://www.gyford.com/phil/writing/2011/05/06/2-billion-viewers/

#15yrsago Mozilla tells DHS: we won’t help you censor the Internet https://torrentfreak.com/homeland-security-wants-mozilla-to-pull-domain-seizure-add-on-110505/

#15yrsago Foxconn workers forced to sign promise not to commit suicide due to working conditions https://memex.craphound.com/2011/05/05/foxconn-workers-forced-to-sign-promise-not-to-commit-suicide-due-to-working-conditions/

#15yrsago Shannon’s Law: a story about bridging Faerie and the mundane world with TCP-over-magic https://reactormag.com/shannons-law/

#15yrsago Green Army men with PTSD https://www.wearedorothy.com/collections/artworks/products/casualties-of-war

#10yrsago Deep Insert skimmers: undetectable, disposable short-lived ATM skimmers https://krebsonsecurity.com/2016/05/crooks-go-deep-with-deep-insert-skimmers/

#10yrsago How standardizing DRM will make us all less secure https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2016/04/standardized-drm-will-make-us-less-safe

#10yrsago Excellent advice for generating and maintaining your passwords https://www.wired.com/2016/05/password-tips-experts/

#10yrsago Amid education funding emergency, Washington State gives Boeing, Microsoft $1B in tax breaks https://jeffreifman.com/2016/05/05/forget-boeing-microsofts-tax-break-costs-776-million/

#5yrsago MRNA vaccines and Clarke's Law https://pluralistic.net/2021/05/05/clarkes-third-law/#indistinguishable-from-magic

#5yrsago Stimmies killed the McJob https://pluralistic.net/2021/05/05/clarkes-third-law/#precariat-nostalgia

#1yrago Bridget Read's 'Little Bosses Everywhere' https://pluralistic.net/2025/05/05/free-enterprise-system/#amway-or-the-highway

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 — 6 May 2026 ⏭ Activism

Pluralistic: In praise of vultures (06 May 2026)

✇Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
By: Cory Doctorow
6 May 2026 at 12:15


Today's links

  • In praise of vultures: They screw you because they can.
  • Hey look at this: Delights to delectate.
  • Object permanence: Linus v MSFT; Argentina v MSFT; Danny Hillis on theme parks v games; Smartfilter v Distributed Boing Boing; Rental laptops filled with spyware; Torture didn't help capture bin Laden; Massively parallel Apple //e; Stephen Harper v election law; John Deere v Iowa cartoonist; Qualia.
  • Upcoming appearances: Guelph, Barcelona, Berlin, Hay-on-Wye, London, NYC, Edinburgh.
  • 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 down-at-heel frontier courtroom presided over by a flustered judge and his miserable clerk. In the foreground is a vulture in a powdered barrister's wig.

In praise of vultures (permalink)

One of my bedrock beliefs is that capitalists really hate capitalism. They may name their beloved institutes after the likes of Adam Smith, but they ignore everything Smith had to say about the necessity of competition to keep markets from turning into monopolies:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/06/09/commissar-merck/#price-giver

The theory of capitalism holds that markets are a kind of distributed computer that aggregates trillions of decisions from billions of market participants in order to optimize production and distribution of goods and services, creating a "Pareto-optimal" world where no one can be made better off without making someone else worse off.

Whether or not you believe that this computer exists and functions as predicted, one indisputable fact about it is that it requires the freedom to choose in order to work. The point of market-as-computer is that it aggregates decisions, so it can only work if everyone is as free as possible to decide.

But that's not the world capitalists want. For capitalists, the point is to restrict other people's choices in order to maximize your own freedom. That's how we get economic doctrines like "revealed preferences": the idea that if a person says they want one thing, but does another thing, then you can tell what they really prefer by looking at the latter and disregarding the former. This is the kind of doctrine you can only fully embrace after sustaining the kind of highly specific neurological injury that is induced by taking an economics degree, an injury that makes you incapable of perceiving or reasoning about power. Under the doctrine of revealed preferences, someone who sells their kidney to make the rent has a revealed preference for only having one kidney:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/03/30/players-of-games/#know-when-to-fold-em

Capitalism is supposed to run on risk: the risk of being overtaken by a competitor drives businesses to deliver better services more efficiently, thus producing a bounty for all. But capitalists really hate risk, hence the drive to monopoly: Mark Zuckerberg admitted, in writing, that he only bought Instagram so that he wouldn't have to compete with it ("It is better to buy than to compete" -M. Zuckerberg):

https://pluralistic.net/2025/11/20/if-you-wanted-to-get-there/#i-wouldnt-start-from-here

Capitalists hate capitalism, but they love feudalism. Feudalism is like capitalism, in that you have a ruling class that creams off the surplus generated by labor; but under feudalism, society is organized to protect rents (money you get from owning stuff) over profits (money you get from doing stuff). The beauty of rents is that they are insulated from risk: if you own a coffee shop, you're in constant danger of being put out of business by a better coffee shop. But if you own the building and your coffee shop tenant goes under, well, you've still got the building, and hey, now it's on the same hot block as the amazing new cafe that's driving its competitors out of business:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/09/28/cloudalists/#cloud-capital

Douglas Rushkoff calls this "going meta": don't drive a taxi, rent a medallion to a taxi driver. Don't rent a medallion, start a ride-hailing app company. Don't start a ride-hailing company, invest in the company. Don't invest in the company, buy options on the company's shares. Each layer of indirection takes you further from the delivery of a useful service – and insulates you further from risk:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/09/13/collapse-porn/#collapse-porn

Monopoly is to capitalism as gerrymandering is to democracy, a way to strip out any meaningful choice. Think of the two giant packaged goods companies that fill your grocery aisles: Procter & Gamble and Unilever. Practically everything on your grocer's shelves is made by a division of one of these two massive conglomerates. If you try to "vote with your wallet" by buying a low-packaging version of a product, it's going to be sold to you by the same company that sells the high-packaging version. If you switch to an artisanal brand of cookies made by a local family business, Unilever or P&G will buy that company and issue a press release declaring that they made the acquisition because they know "their customers value choice":

https://pluralistic.net/2024/05/18/market-discipline/#too-big-to-care

Gerrymandering strips your vote of any impact on political outcomes. Monopoly strips your purchases of any ability to influence economic outcomes. Wrap both of them in "revealed preferences" and you get a system that endlessly narrates its ability to deliver choice, and then blames your misery on your having chosen badly.

This is the method of the entire conservative project. As Dan Savage says: the thing that unites conservative assaults on voting, birth control, abortion and no-fault divorce is the stripping away of choice. Conservatives are trying to create a world populated by husbands you can't divorce, pregnancies you can't prevent or terminate, and politicians you can't vote out of office. Add to that Trump's assault on the National Labor Relations Board, his reversal of the FTC's ban on noncompetes, and his protection of "TRAP" agreements that force employees to pay thousands of dollars if they quit their jobs, and you get "jobs you can't quit":

https://pluralistic.net/2025/09/09/germanium-valley/#i-cant-quit-you

Conservative strongmen like Trump and Musk exalt the value of self-determination – for themselves, at everyone else's expense. Trump's ability to stiff the contractors that built his hotels and Musk's ability to rain flaming rocket debris down on the people who live near his company town require that everyone else be stripped of protections. They get to determine their own course in life by taking away your ability to determine your own. Their right to swing their fists ends two inches past your nose:

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

Cheaters and bullies hate the rule of law, hence Trump's endless repetition of Nixon's mantra: "When the president does it, that means it is not illegal." But not everyone can be president, and the world is full of would-be Trumps in positions of power who would like to be able to commit crimes without fear of legal repercussions. For these people, we have something called "binding arbitration."

"Binding arbitration" is a widely used contractual term that forces you to surrender your right to sue a company that wrongs you. Instead of suing, binding arbitration forces you to take your case to an "arbitrator"; that is, a lawyer who is paid by the company that cheated you or maimed you or killed your loved one. The arbitrator decides whether their client is guilty, and, if so, how much that client owes you. The entire process is confidential and it is non-precedential, meaning that if a company rips off millions of people in the same way, each of them has to arbitrate their claims separately, and people who are successful can't share their tactical notes with the people who are next in line to plead for justice.

That makes binding arbitration another key weapon in the conservative movement's war on choice: not just jobs you can't quit and politicians you can't vote out of office, but also companies you can't sue. Binding arbitration is a creation of the Federalist Society and their champion Antonin Scalia, who authored a series of Supreme Court dissents and (ultimately) decisions that opened the door for binding arbitration everywhere:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/10/27/shit-shack/#binding-arbitration

Given the Fedsoc's role in shoving binding arbitration down every worker and shopper's throat, it's decidedly odd that they invited Ashley Keller to be their keynote debater in 2021, where he argued that "concentrated corporate power is a greater threat than government power":

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aY5MrHGjVT8

Keller is a powerhouse lawyer, and an avowed conservative, who has pioneered many tactics for overcoming binding arbitration clauses. He helped create "mass arbitration," bringing thousands of arbitration cases on behalf of Uber drivers who'd had their wages stolen by the company. Since Uber has to pay the arbitrators in each of those cases, they faced a much larger bill than they would face in any possible class action suit:

https://www.reuters.com/article/otc-uber-frankel-idUKKCN1P42OH/

Mass arbitration cases spread to all kinds of large firms that used petty grifts to steal from thousands or even millions of people, like Intuit, who deceive – and rip off – millions of Americans every year with their fake Turbotax "free file" system:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/02/24/uber-for-arbitration/#nibbled-to-death-by-ducks

Mass arbitration worked so well that Amazon actually revised its terms of service to remove binding arbitration from their terms of service, because they realized that they'd be better off facing class action suits:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/06/02/arbitrary-arbitration/#petard

Of course, the point of binding arbitration was never to create a streamlined system of justice – it was to bring about a world of no justice, where you have no right to sue. It's part of the decades-old "tort reform" movement that the business lobby has used to take away your right to sue altogether. Any time you hear about a seemingly crazy lawsuit (like the urban legends about the McDonald's "hot coffee" case), you're being propagandized for a world without legal consequences for companies that defraud you, steal from you, injure you, or kill you:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/06/12/hot-coffee/#mcgeico

That's why companies (like Bluesky) are now trying terms of service that also ban you from mass arbitration, while retaining the right to consolidate claims into a mass arbitration case if that's advantageous to them:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/08/15/dogs-breakfast/#by-clicking-this-you-agree-on-behalf-of-your-employer-to-release-me-from-all-obligations-and-waivers-arising-from-any-and-all-NON-NEGOTIATED-agreements

But Keller keeps finding creative ways around binding arbitration. He's currently bringing thousands of arbitration claims against Google, on behalf of advertisers whom Google stole from (Google is a thrice-convicted monopolist, and they lost a case last year over their monopolization of ad-tech, where they were found to have defrauded advertisers).

He also just argued before the Supreme Court in a case against Monsanto over the company's attempt to escape liability for causing cancer in farmworkers with their Roundup pesticide:

https://www.npr.org/2026/04/27/nx-s1-5793804/supreme-court-monsanto-roundup-arguments

Keller appears in the latest episode of the Organized Money podcast, for a fascinating interview about his work and outlook, and how he reconciles his work fighting corporate power with his identity as a movement conservative:

https://www.organizedmoney.fm/p/the-conservative-who-torments-big

Keller's first big, important point is that (basically), capitalists hate capitalism (see above). He cites Milton Friedman, who "always said that the tort system is the best way to ensure that companies behave and follow the rules." For Keller (and Friedman) the alternative to private litigation against bad businesses is "government regulation and the alphabet soup of Washington, DC agencies [that] try and police these companies."

But, of course, the businesses that want binding arbitration and tort reform (so they can't be sued) also want to "dismantle the administrative state" (so they can't be regulated). They're the impunity movement, the "when the president does it, that means it is not illegal" movement, the "heads I win, tails you lose" movement. They're the caveat emptor movement, the "that makes me smart" movement:

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

They don't want efficient markets, with the ever-present threat of a better competitor putting them out of business. They want feudalism. They want to go meta. They want to have the kind of self-determination you can only achieve by taking away everyone else's self-determination.

I was very struck by Keller's claim to be engaged in an exercise that Milton Friedman identified as the best one for making markets work. One of Keller's most forceful points is that class action suits are especially important for reining in petty, recurrent grifts, the junk fees that are the hallmark of enshittification.

He quotes his old boss, the archconservative judge Richard Posner, who said "Only a lunatic or a fanatic sues for $20." But if you multiply a $20 junk fee by ten million purchases, a company can use that fact to make hundreds of millions of dollars. That's real folding money, which is why every company has figured out a way to whack you for a $20 junk fee.

There are two ways to end this racket: one is litigation, the other is regulation, and the capitalism-hating-capitalists who run the world want to kill both. That's why the business lobby smears lawyers like Keller as being "vultures." But as Matt Stoller says, "vultures look aggressive and whatnot, but when you actually get rid of vultures out of an ecosystem, all sorts of things go haywire."

I love this point. Vultures live off the disgusting, rotting crap that would otherwise pile up around us, breeding disease and emitting an unbearable stench. If plaintiff-side, no-win/no-fee lawyers are vultures, then junk fees, wage theft, and the million petty frauds they fight are the disgusting, rotting crap that vultures feed off of – and the harder we make it for our noble vulture lawyers, the more disgusting, rotting crap we have to live with, hence the unbearable stench that is all around us.

Listening to Keller was a fascinating exercise. I thoroughly disagree with him about many things – the way he characterized Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act couldn't have been more wrong – but it's quite bracing to hear a capitalist who doesn't hate capitalism defend it against the vast majority of capitalists, who hate capitalism more than any socialist ever did.

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 Torvalds responds to Microsoft's Craig Mundie https://web.archive.org/web/20011019132822/http://web.siliconvalley.com/content/sv/2001/05/03/opinion/dgillmor/weblog/torvalds.htm

#25yrsago Bankrupt Argentina considers banning proprietary code and switching to free software https://web.archive.org/web/20010614131152/https://www.wired.com/news/business/0,1367,43529,00.html

#20yrsago Danny Hillis on how games are(n’t) like a theme park https://web.archive.org/web/20060513182649/https://www.wired.com/wired/archive/14.04/disney.html

#20yrsago Mission Impossible opening marked by anti-Scientology flyover https://web.archive.org/web/20060514000636/http://hailxenu.net/

#20yrsago SmartFilter targets Distributed Boing Boing – how to defeat it https://memex.craphound.com/2006/05/04/smartfilter-targets-distributed-boing-boing-how-to-defeat-it/

#15yrsago John Ashcroft assumes charge of “ethics and professionalism” for Blackwater https://web.archive.org/web/20110507103749/https://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2011/05/blackwaters-new-ethics-chief-john-ashcroft/

#15yrsago Rumsfeld and other US officials say torture didn’t help catch bin Laden https://web.archive.org/web/20110505012303/https://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2011/05/surveillance-not-waterboarding-led-to-bin-laden/

#15yrsago Rental laptops equipped with spyware that can covertly activate the webcam and take screenshots https://web.archive.org/web/20110506130156/http://www.ajc.com/business/pa-suit-furniture-rental-933410.html

#15yrsago Parallel machine made out of 17 stitched-together Apple //e’s https://web.archive.org/web/20110504194313/http://home.comcast.net/~mjmahon/AppleCrateII.html

#15yrsago Sarah Palin and James Lankford: giving $4 billion of taxpayer money to oil companies doesn’t matter https://web.archive.org/web/20110505220640/https://thinkprogress.org/2011/05/03/palin-lankford-oil-subsidies/

#15yrsago Stephen Harper violated election laws https://web.archive.org/web/20110701000000*/http://www.examiner.com/canada-headlines-in-canada/stephen-harper-breaks-election-rules-campaigns-on-radio-on-election-day

#15yrsago History and future of bin Ladenist extremism https://www.juancole.com/2011/05/obama-and-the-end-of-al-qaeda.html

#10yrsago Belushi widow & Aykroyd produce Blues Brothers animated series https://deadline.com/2016/05/the-blues-brothers-animated-comedy-series-dan-aykroyd-1201748389/

#10yrsago Chinese censorship: arbitrary rule changes are a form of powerful intermittent reinforcement https://www.techdirt.com/2016/05/04/why-growing-unpredictability-chinas-censorship-is-feature-not-bug/

#10yrsago US government and SCOTUS change cybercrime rules to let cops hack victims’ computers https://www.wired.com/2016/05/now-government-wants-hack-cybercrime-victims/

#10yrsago After advertiser complaints, Farm News fires editorial cartoonist who criticized John Deere & Monsanto https://web.archive.org/web/20160505042150/https://www.kcci.com/news/longtime-iowa-farm-cartoonist-fired-after-creating-this-cartoon/39337816

#10yrsago Outstanding rant about establishment pearl-clutching over Trump https://web.archive.org/web/20160505033357/https://theconcourse.deadspin.com/george-will-is-a-haughty-dipshit-1774449290

#10yrsago The Planet Remade: frank, clear-eyed book on geoengineering, climate disaster, & humanity’s future https://memex.craphound.com/2016/05/04/the-planet-remade-frank-clear-eyed-book-on-geoengineering-climate-disaster-humanitys-future/

#5yrsago Qualia https://pluralistic.net/2021/05/04/law-and-con/#law-n-econ

#5yrsago Whales decry the casino economy https://pluralistic.net/2021/05/04/law-and-con/#all-bets-are-off

Upcoming appearances (permalink)

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


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

Recent appearances (permalink)


A grid of my books with Will Stahle covers..

Latest books (permalink)


A cardboard book box with the Macmillan logo.

Upcoming books (permalink)

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

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

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

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

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


Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources:

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

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

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

  • A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING

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Received — 5 May 2026 ⏭ Activism

A Classical War

✇Welcome to Garbagetown
By: Catherynne M. Valente
5 May 2026 at 18:52

Note: the way this Substack usually works is that every public piece has a follow-up piece for subscribers only containing all the screams I restrained to make the free one nice and civilized and not have to argue reality with sea lions in the comments.

However, this particular one is a standalone under a paywall because I’m about to talk about real people I used to know very well during the era of 9/11 and the Iraq War. And it’s not nice to put them on blast, even anonymously, even if it’s a somewhat elegant (if anything featuring gifs can be elegant AND IT CAN) and well thought-out blast, as they weren’t specifically trying to be bad or stupid or naive, they just listened to a lot of bad stupid naive shit hardly anyone had learned how to publicly say was bad and stupid and naive yet.

And this is about the ONGOING war in Iran and the absolute skull-fractures running it, not holding adults to account for the silly things they thing when we’re young. I’m no better.

So to protect the, if not innocent, at least the “helplessly morally bulldozered by how we were all raised,” I have chosen to screen the calls, so to speak.

Also it happens to be my birthday today. So for whatever reason pleases you, consider signing up to support my work, give me a birthday present, and/or hear about my misspent youth amongst the normies.

Subscribe now

A long, long time ago, I can still remember how that music used to make me…

Premium Photo | Patriotic Parade with American Flags Marching Band
Not for a nation: not the dividing, estranging thing…not for my country right or wrong; not for the drum or the bugle; not for the song, which pipes me away from my home against my will, along with the other children, to where I would not go

…want to fucking puke.

Read more

Pluralistic: The three armies fighting for the post-American world (05 May 2026)

✇Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
By: Cory Doctorow
5 May 2026 at 14:31


Today's links


'The Spirit of 76,' a famous painting depicting three soldiers marching after a US Revolutionary War battle. The figures' heads have been swapped for a man in a top hat, Che Guevara, and a 19th century European general in a silly hat. The US flag in the background has been replaced with the EU flag. The fallen soldier at their feet sports a Trump wig and his skin has been tinted Cheeto orange.

The three armies fighting for the post-American world (permalink)

Political change is downstream of coalition building, and coalitions are fragile things, because by definition they are not fully aligned; they share some goals but often violently disagree about others. A coalition forms when groups set aside their differences to pursue the common elements of their agenda.

Trump is a master coalition builder. He wouldn't have been able to seize and wield so much power without a coalition that includes people who absolutely hate each other and want each other to die. Let's face it, Nick Fuentes wants to turn Ben Shapiro into a lampshade, but they both sent their followers to the ballot box for Trump. We've all seen those videos of Trump supporters railing against "elites" after watching the richest man on Earth cavorting with Trump while promising to give all of their jobs to AI and robots.

This contradiction isn't a bug, it's a feature: the bigger a coalition gets, the more power it has – provided you've got a Trump figure at the top, using his cult of personality to coerce and flatter his coalition members into playing nice with each other.

But Trump's incontinent belligerence, his bullying, and his cognitive decline mean that he's conjuring a new anti-Trump coalition into existence: groups of people who don't agree on much, but do agree on fighting Trumpismo and its leader. This is very visible in US domestic politics, where "Never-Trumper" conservatives find themselves on the same side as Democratic Socialists, at least on this narrow issue. The anti-Trump mass mobilizations – the Women's March, the anti-ICE demonstrations, the No Kings rallies – are visibly, palpably coalitional, made up of people carrying signs and banners for groups that are often at odds with one another…except when it comes to Trump.

But I'm much more interested in the international coalitions that are forming to fight Trump. It started with my longstanding fight for a good internet, free from surveillance, extraction and manipulation, the three evils inherent to the business models of America's shitty, enshittifying tech companies.

Under normal circumstances, you'd expect tech companies in other countries to capitalize on the fact that America exports its obviously defective tech products around the world. As Jeff Bezos often reminds his suppliers: "Your margin is my opportunity." Whether it's Apple taking a 30% margin on iPhone payments, Apple and Meta creaming 51 cents off every ad dollar, Amazon harvesting 50-60% from every platform seller, or inkjet printer companies marking up the colored water you use to print your grocery list by 25 quattuordecillion percent, there's a ton of opportunities to disrupt these comfortable ex-disruptors.

But no one does that, because the US Trade Representative bullied every US trading partner into enacting an "anticircumvention" law that makes it a crime to modify America's tech exports. The quid pro quo for this? Free trade with the USA – and tariffs for any country that didn't fall into line. Well, they all fell into line, and Trump tariffed them anyway.

That means that America's tech giants' margins are now everyone else's opportunity. The trillions that US tech companies extract could be someone else's billions – all they'd have to do is offer the interoperable goods and services that disenshittify America's tech products. They could sell the tools that let anyone in the world use independent app stores, or fix their cars and tractors, and put generic ink in their printers. A year ago, no country could afford to allow a company headquartered in its borders to get into this business, lest they be clobbered with tariffs. Today, any country that isn't thinking about this is a sucker that will end up buying these tools from another country that gets there first.

This means that digital rights hippies like me (who've been banging this drum for 25 years), suddenly have a new ally in the fight against enshittified tech products. Today, there are people who want to help you protect your pocketbook and your privacy, but not because they believe in human rights – rather, because they want to get really, really rich. They see Big Tech's margin as their opportunity.

But it's not just entrepreneurs and activists who want a post-American internet – we have a third member of our coalition: national security hawks. Trump wants to steal Greenland. He wants to steal Alberta. He wants to steal all the oil in Venezuela. He wants to interfere in foreign elections to keep his dictator cronies in office, lest they lose power and find themselves facing prison. And when Trump's allies do face justice, he wants to fire the judges who dare hold these corrupt, powerful men to account.

So when the International Criminal Court issued an arrest warrant for the genocidaire Benjamin Netanyahu, Trump had Microsoft shut down the court's IT systems. The Chief Justice of the ICC lost his Office 365 account, which means he can't access his email archives, his working files, his calendar or his address books. He can't even log in to his non-Microsoft accounts because they're tied to his Outlook email address.

The ICC was just a warmup: Trump did the same thing to the Brazilian high court judge who sentenced the dictator Jair Bolsonaro to prison for attempting a coup after he lost his re-election bid, having presided over a term of gross misrule.

All of this has inflamed concerns within every (former) US ally's national security establishment. These people all understand that Trump doesn't need to roll tanks to take over their countries: he can just brick their key ministries, major firms, and households. He doesn't need to send an army to steal Greenland, he can just shut down Denmark and cut off the world's supply of Lego, Ozempic and ferociously strong black licorice.

Combine the natsec hawks; the economic development wonks, entrepreneurs and investors; and the privacy and digital and human rights activists, and you've got a hell of an anti-Trump coalition around the world, all pulling together to build the post-American internet, a disenshittified and enshittification-resistant internet built on international digital public goods and running on servers outside of the USA:

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

But this coalition isn't limited to the post-American internet – you'll find a coalition much like it in every place where Comrade Trump is calling forth a post-American world. That's the shape of the coalition that's winning Trump's war on fossil fuels: climate activists (hippies), electrification manufacturers and installers (businesses) and national security hawks who don't want to get hormuzed:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/05/04/hope-in-the-dark/#hormuzed-into-the-gretacene

I'm not as plugged into the other areas where Trump has dismantled US hegemony, but it wouldn't surprise me to learn that a coalition much like this one is popping up in the countries where Trump and Musk doged the public health system into oblivion. The global south is full of countries that signed up to enforce US agricultural and pharmaceutical patents and US restrictions on birth control and abortion in exchange for the food-aid and health-aid that Elon Musk and his merry band of broccoli-haired brownshirts killed. It's easy to imagine that reproductive rights and health justice advocates in those countries are now on the same side as investors who'd like to get into business selling generic pharmaceuticals and agricultural inputs, and that they're being backed by people worried that their country's food and health sovereignty are at risk unless they hasten the transition to a post-American world.

I have been an activist all my life, and a digital rights activist for the majority of my adult life. I'm sure there are members of this post-American coalition who want things that are absolutely antithetical to my agenda. That's what makes us a coalition – we disagree about so much, but we all agree on this: it's past time for a post-American world, and Comrade Trump is delivering it.

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 North Korean dictator's son arrested trying to sneak into Tokyo Disneyland https://www.nytimes.com/2001/05/03/world/japan-is-said-to-detain-son-of-north-korean-leader.html

#25yrsago Bruce Sterling on good design https://memex.craphound.com/2001/05/03/great-illustrated-bruce-sterling-rant/

#20yrsago Mainstream press: Colbert wasn’t funny at the White House Correspondents' Dinner, so we ignored him https://web.archive.org/web/20070207014019/http://www.salon.com/opinion/feature/2006/05/03/correspondents/index_np.html

#20yrsago Bush and cronies livid about Colbert’s White House gig https://web.archive.org/web/20060615113045/https://www.usnews.com/usnews/news/articles/060501/1whwatch.htm0

#20yrsago Identity thief rips off 3-week-old baby https://abcnews.com/US/story?id=155878&page=1

#20yrsago Network neutrality – why it matters, and how do we fix it? https://web.archive.org/web/20060507215106/http://www.slate.com/id/2140850/

#15yrsago Federal judge: open WiFi doesn’t make you liable for your neighbors’ misdeeds https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2011/05/after-botched-child-porn-raid-judge-sees-the-light-on-ip-addresses/

#10yrsago Taliban condemn Pakistan city’s first McDonald’s: “we don’t even consider it as a food.” https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/mcdonald-s-opens-quetta-pakistan-taliban-isn-t-lovin-it-n564651

#10yrsago Norway’s titanic sovereign wealth fund takes a stand against executive pay https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-36185925

#10yrsago TSA lines grow to 3 hours, snake outside the terminals, with no end in sight https://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/03/business/airport-security-lines.html?smid=pl-share&_r=0

#10yrsago Inside a Supreme Court case on cheerleader uniforms, a profound question about copyright https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2016/05/supreme-court-to-hear-copyright-fight-over-cheerleader-uniforms/

#5yrsago Dishwashers have become Iphones https://pluralistic.net/2021/05/03/cassette-rewinder/#disher-bob

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

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

ISSN: 3066-764X

Received — 4 May 2026 ⏭ Activism

Pluralistic: Demand destruction vs fuel-superseding infrastructure (04 May 2026)

✇Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
By: Cory Doctorow
4 May 2026 at 11:39


Today's links


Alexander Rodchenko's classic Russian constructivist 'books' advertising poster; Lilya Brik's face has been replaced with Greta Thunberg's, and instead of shouting the word 'books,' a spray of geometric sunbeams are emanating from her mouth. Superimposed and beneath her is a Soviet propaganda poster of a furiously pointing Lenin. Lenin's skin is Cheeto orange and he wears a straw-yellow Trump wig.

Demand destruction vs fuel-superceding infrastructure (permalink)

No one is better at keeping hope alive than Rebecca Solnit, the historian and essayist whose Hope in the Dark got me through the first Trump administration and whose A Paradise Built In Hell inspired my novel Walkaway:

https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/301070/a-paradise-built-in-hell-by-rebecca-solnit/

In her latest, "Truth, Consequences, Climate, and Demand Destruction," Solnit is nothing short of inspirational – not because she downplays the horror and misery of Trump and his war of choice in Iran, but because she tells us what we stand to salvage from the wreckage:

https://www.meditationsinanemergency.com/truth-consequences-climate-and-demand-destruction/

Solnit starts by explaining some of the (many, many) things that Trump doesn't understand. Principally, Trump doesn't understand the concept of "demand destruction," which is what happens when shortages prompt people to make durable, one-way changes in their behavior that permanently reduce the demand for fossil fuels.

High prices sometimes create demand destruction: for example, if a transient shortage in eggs pushes prices up, people might discover that they prefer tofu scrambles in the morning, so even when the price of eggs comes back down, they buy two dozen fewer eggs every month, forever.

Beyond high prices, shortages and rationing are far more likely to lead to demand destruction. In the 10 years following the 1970s oil crisis, US cars doubled in fuel efficiency, and the gas-guzzler didn't return until car manufacturers exploited the American "light truck" loophole to fill the streets with deadly SUVs:

https://medium.com/vision-zero-cities-journal/the-chicken-tax-and-other-ways-the-u-s-government-subsidizes-your-ford-f-150-444a5164c627

But to really max out on demand destruction, you need both rationing and a cheap, easily installed substitute, and that's what the Strait of Epstein crisis, along with solar and batteries, offers the world today. Solar is incredibly cheap, and getting cheaper every day. Batteries are also incredibly cheap, and they're getting cheaper too. For decades, fossil fuel apologists have insisted that we'll never stop setting old dead shit on fire because "the sun doesn't always shine and the wind doesn't always blow," but thanks to battery deployment in China and California (and more places very soon), the sun shines all night long:

https://ember-energy.org/app/uploads/2026/04/Global-Electricity-Review-2026.pdf?ref=meditationsinanemergency.com

In starting this stupid, unforgivable war, Trump has vastly accelerated the process of demand destruction. Rather than buying American oil, the whole world has undertaken a simultaneous, rapid, irreversible shift to electrical substitutes for fossil fuel applications, from induction tops to balcony solar to ebikes and EVs:

https://thepolycrisis.org/01-demand-destruction-us-oil-is-not-winning-the-iran-war/

As Solnit writes, Trump's stupid war follows on the heels of another unforgivable and cruel blunder: Putin's quagmire in Ukraine, which catapulted Europe into the Gretacene, with a wholesale, continent-wide shift away from fossil fuels to renewables and the devices they power. Now, the rest of the world is following suit. In South Korea, President Lee Jae Myung is leading the charge to transition the country to renewables, framing fossil fuels as an existential geopolitical risk.

Trump's demand destruction accelerates Putin's demand destruction: China and India both increased their energy consumption in 2025 – but reduced their fossil fuel consumption over the same period. In 2025, coal accounted for less than a third of the world's energy for the first time in modern history. 2025 was the year that solar and wind overtook coal globally.

Meanwhile, Trump and his oil baron buddies keep trying to make fetch happen. On the campaign trail, Trump told the oil industry that if they slipped him a $1b bribe, he would give them anything they wanted, and he's kept his promise. Trump will let Big Oil drill anywhere they like, from sacred sites like New Mexico's Chaco Canyon to the Arctic. He'll even let them take all of Venezuela's oil. The problem is that banks can see the demand destruction writing on the wall, and they are conspicuously declining to loan the oil companies the money they'd need to get that oil.

Truly, Trump's a machine for creating stranded assets at scale. As Solnit writes, that's because Trump has no strategic foresight; strategy being "the ability to plan for things to arise that may counter your agenda, so you can continue to pursue your agenda." Trump's a bully, and he's accustomed to intimidating his adversaries into capitulating. That's why Trump keeps making moves without ever thinking about the countermove he might provoke. He can't metabolize the strategic maxim that "the enemy gets a vote."

This is the GOP's whole vibe these days: "how dare you do unto me as I have done unto you?" Solnit points to GOP outrage in response to Democratic gerrymandering in blue states, which Democrats undertook in direct, explicit response to shameless gerrymandering in Texas and other red states. Solnit says that the GOP has "confused having a lot of power with having all the power" and is perennially surprised when their attacks on Iran and Minneapolis elicit a reaction from the people in Iran and Minneapolis.

This is the defective reasoning that caused Comrade Trump to hormuz the world into the full Gretacene. Whereas once the case for the energy transition was driven by activists who warned people about the future consequences of inaction, Trump has summoned up a new army of people who are worried about the present consequences of inaction: such as not being able to drive your car, use your gas stove, or fertilize your crops. Trump has summoned up another army of people, who are worried about the politics of oil, the fact that oil leads to wars and can be mobilized as a weapon when it is withheld from your country.

Activists couldn't deliver the energy transition on their own – but now there's a coalition that's driving rapid, irreversible change: activists concerned about the future of the planet, in coalition with economic actors concerned about the consequences of not being able to cook, heat your home, or keep the lights on; in coalition with national security hawks worried about the geopolitics of oil. That's Comrade Trump's three-part mobilization: human rights, finance, and national security, all insisting that the enemy gets a vote, and voting unanimously for a post-American world.

Last week marked the first Transitioning Away from Fossil Fuels conference, attended by representatives from 54 countries who sidestepped the US- and China-dominated UN to ratify the Fossil Fuel Nonproliferation Treaty Initiative, whose 18 signatories include Colombia, a major oil producer.

The world is moving on, and Trump continues to insist that he can roll back history to some imaginary era of a Great America. Every time this fails, he doubles down on his failures and sets the stage for more failure to come. Take Trump's decision to have the US blockade the Strait of Hormuz. Not only is this a powerful force for demand destruction – but, as Trita Parsi writes, it's also poison for Trump's own electoral fortunes in America:

https://responsiblestatecraft.org/trump-iran-blockade/

Trump won in 2024 by campaigning to improve Americans' cost of living. This is a powerful campaign strategy, and it's not limited to fascists, as Zohran Mamdani can attest. But for this to work, you actually have to reduce the cost of living once you take office, otherwise you will be hated and rejected and hampered in everything you do. The problem (for Trump – but not for Mamdani!) is that America's high cost of living is driven by corporate profiteering, and the only way to fix it is to make the rich poorer so as to make the poor richer:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/02/24/mamdani-thought/#public-excellence

If Trump had chosen to bullshit his way through the Iranian blockade of the strait, allowing the Iranians to collect a $2m toll per tanker (payable in Chinese renminbi!), well, oil would have gone up in price some, but the coming runaway inflation on food and fuel would have been substantially blunted. Instead, he decided to "snatch defeat from the jaws of victory" by adding a US blockade, which means that prices in the US are going to skyrocket, making his base furious and driving turnout for Democrats, along with support for more renewables, even among blood-red Republican rural Texas ranchers, who have had enough of "DEI for fossil fuels":

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

The renewables transition is now a self-licking ice-cream cone, a flywheel that only spins faster and faster. As Solnit writes, this is true notwithstanding the concerns by some climate advocates about the materials needed for the transition. Sure, there will be some extraction involved in mass electrification, and if that's done badly, it will involve stealing and destroying more land from poor and indigenous people. But we don't have to do it badly!

Meanwhile, not transitioning to renewables absolutely requires an endless cycle of incredibly destructive and genocidal extraction. Remember, fossil fuels are fuels, while renewables are infrastructure. Fuels need to be dug up and destroyed every year for so long as we insist on setting old dead shit on fire to survive. We dig up a lot of fossil fuels. The world consumes seventeen times more fossil fuels in a year than we will require to electrify the planet forever:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/08/06/with-great-power/#comes-great-responsibility

The infrastructure of renewables – panels, batteries, transmission lines – requires materials that are often scarce and whose processing involves extremely harmful and polluting processes. But those materials are all recyclable: we don't recycle them today because we haven't prioritized doing so, not because it it technologically beyond our reach. In 2024, America saw its first all-solar powered solar panel recycling factory, which reclaimed 99% of the materials in a panel that was 20% efficient, and then used those materials to make two panels that were each 40% efficient:

https://interestingengineering.com/energy/solarcycle-to-recycle-10-million-solar-panels-yearly

Trump shut that plant down, which means that other countries will get to recycle America's superannuated panels into modern, efficient ones and sell them back to America. America may have blocked any climate reparations for the poor world, but thanks to Comrade Trump, America's still going to end up paying them, in the form of windfall profits for countries whose cleantech economy is racing ahead of America's.

Unlike a fossil fuel economy, a cleantech sector does not require that your country have access to some difficult to find, unevenly distributed reservoir of old dead shit or even rare minerals. Not only is lithium far more common than once believed, it's also being phased out for use in batteries and replaced by sodium, the world's sixth-most abundant element:

https://cen.acs.org/energy/energy-storage-/Sodium-ion-batteries-Should-believe/103/web/2025/11

Lithium is set to join cobalt, a notorious conflict mineral, in the cleantech revolution's rear-view mirror as a transitional material used in early, primitive batteries and no longer required.

A post-carbon future is a post-petrostate future is a post-American future. It will run on solar and wind and batteries, which can be brought online cheaply and quickly, every time demand-destruction surges, using materials that are widely distributed around the world. It won't be a nuclear future, and not just because nuclear materials are (like oil) concentrated according to accidents of geography, nor merely because fissiles are geopolitically catastrophic (like oil). Nuclear plants take at least a decade to bring online, which means that they will always arrive ten years after some future Comrade Trump-type kicks off another orgy of demand destruction, and by the time we turn them on, the world will have already bought, improved and recycled two generations of batteries and panels.

(Image: Stefan Müller (climate stuff), CC BY 2.0)

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 Beck dumps Winona and becomes a Scientologist https://web.archive.org/web/20010502151355/http://www.suntimes.com/output/zwecker/zp30.html

#25yrsago Fuck San Francisco https://craphound.com/fucksf.html

#25yrsago Desktop Linux rant https://web.archive.org/web/20021204051712/http://www.linuxplanet.com/linuxplanet/opinions/3297/1/

#25yrsago History of ASCAP and BMI https://www.woodpecker.com/writing/essays/royalty-politics.html

#25yrsago AUSA: If we let you decrypt DVDs, airplanes will start falling out of the sky https://web.archive.org/web/20010504221956/https://www.wired.com/news/digiwood/0,1412,43485,00.html

#25yrsago Microsoft shits on open source https://www.nytimes.com/2001/05/03/business/technology-microsoft-is-set-to-be-top-foe-of-free-code.html

#20yrsago Dan Gillmor explains “citizen journalism” https://web.archive.org/web/20060512043722/https://sf.backfence.com/bayarea/showPost.cfm?myComm=BA&bid=2271

#20yrsago UN plans a treaty to kill podcasts https://web.archive.org/web/20060512141428/https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/archives/004619.php

#20yrsago Sen Stevens tries to sneak the Broadcast Flag into law https://web.archive.org/web/20060505054724/http://ipaction.org/blog/2006/05/breaking-news-broadcast-flag-is-back.html

#20yrago How the US Navy queered San Francisco https://web.archive.org/web/20060504024636/http://ask.yahoo.com/20060502.html

#20yrago Help wanted: new DRM czar for Sony-BMG https://web.archive.org/web/20060512063724/http://www.paidcontent.org/sonybmg-director-new-technology-content-protection-nyc

#20yrsago Rich Americans as sick as poor Brits https://web.archive.org/web/20060516225807/http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=dn9098&feedId=online-news_rss20

#15yrsago Sculpture embodies lossy copying using much-copied house-key https://web.archive.org/web/20110316215804/http://www.danielbejar.com/Visual_Topography_of_a_Generation_Gap.html

#15yrsago Piracy and poor countries: Big Content wants to have its cake and eat it too https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2011/may/03/why-poor-countries-lead-world-piracy

#15yrsago Brust’s Tiassa: versatile fantasy in three modes https://memex.craphound.com/2011/05/02/brusts-tiassa-versatile-fantasy-in-three-modes/

#15yrsago Why New Zealand was dumb to let the USA write its copyright laws https://web.archive.org/web/20110601173727/http://www.geekzone.co.nz/juha/7615

#15yrsago Canadian neocon Tories take a slim majority in election, pro-Internet New Democrats form the opposition https://web.archive.org/web/20110503041720/https://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/politics/new-political-era-begins-as-tories-win-majority-ndp-grabs-opposition/article2006635/

#15yrsago Will technology make us freer, and if so, how? https://locusmag.com/feature/cory-doctorow-techno-optimism/

#15yrsago Wikileaks: America will foot the bill for record company enforcement in NZ if NZ will let America write its laws
https://web.archive.org/web/20110502135002/http://www.michaelgeist.ca/content/view/5769/125/

#15yrsago Horology considered hazardous: the “German Time Bomb” clock with its deadly mainspring https://web.archive.org/web/20110516102538/https://www.anniversaryclocks.org/aci/haller-gtb.pdf

#5yrsago Political economy vs inflation https://pluralistic.net/2021/05/01/mayday/#inflationary-political-economy

#1yrago Apple faces criminal sanctions for defying App Store antitrust order https://pluralistic.net/2025/05/01/its-not-the-crime/#its-the-coverup

#1yrago AI and the fatfinger economy https://pluralistic.net/2025/05/02/kpis-off/#principal-agentic-ai-problem

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.

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

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

How to get Pluralistic:

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"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

The list of countries that get social media wrong keeps growing...

✇Just an invitation...
By: Marco Fioretti
4 May 2026 at 07:22

A few weeks ago Turkey passed a bill to restrict social media use for children under 15, thus joining the group of (as of May 1st, 2026) at least 24 states that have imposed similar age restrictions, or are actively moving in that direction.

All those 24 states are wrong. To see why, imagine a society that at some point finds itself full of huge, very crowded shopping malls with these characteristics:

Thanks for supporting my writing with paid subscriptions, free subscription, or in any other way (see below)

  1. the necessary and sufficient condition to enter those malls is to carry a gun. That is, literally everybody can enter, as long as they have a gun with themselves. No gun, no entrance.

  2. just being in the malls makes visitors wish to use their guns, because the walls leak some invisible gas that makes most humans very nervous and intolerant

  3. outside the malls, giving personal guns to kids as young as 8/9 years old has become almost a dogma. Almost all kids have a gun and are expected to carry it along at all times, often to make their parents feel safer

  4. after a dozen years of gun-enabled violence in those malls, the governments of that society finally realize what’s happening and, pressured by the same enraged parents that armed their children, finally move to protect at least all kids from that violence...

  5. ...but, for technical reasons not relevant right now, it’s impossible to verify the age of who wants to get into the malls without spending lots of money to turn the whole society around the malls into a machine for ever-increasing surveillance and censorship

But governments can’t ignore the problem anymore, and so they decree that, in order to end kids dying inside the malls, everybody can keep visiting the malls carrying a gun (because, of course, the economy!)... as long as the malls keep the armed kids outside, using age verification systems, consequences of point 4 above be damned.

And they all do that with a straight face, instead of going for the single, hugely simpler, hugely cheaper measure that should be implemented before anything else even if the malls weren’t toxic, that is:

forbid kids younger than 15 to have guns, before guns don’t belong in children hands period, so not only said kids can’t enter the malls (see point 1 above), but they finally cannot hurt each other anymore outside the malls.

This absurdity in that hypothetical society is exactly what Turkey and all those other countries are doing right now in our world: imposing age verification systems on social media instead of doing the same for personal smartphones.

Don’t trust me? Just search for “dangers of age verification”.

Don’t like the malls analogy? Try these then

When we invented cars and highways, nobody dreamed for a moment to prevent kids under 16 or 18 from driving their own cars on the highways, by checking everybody’s age at the tollbooth. We said the right thing, that is “never mind highways! Until you’re tall enough to see over the hood and mature enough to handle something lethal, NO CAR FOR YOU, NOWHERE”.

Ditto for weapons. Nobody, not even the most fanatical advocates of pro-gun rights ever demanded laws that would allow children to have their own gun and use it everywhere... except inside shopping malls.

Not enough? Try tobacco or alcool then. Imposing age limits on social media instead of smartphone possession makes as much sense as making selling cigarettes to minors legal, but setting age limits to enter designated smoking areas.

As someone else said, “Honestly, it’s the phones”

The reasons why no sensible adults thinks that, as long as we forbid them to use those products in certain places, children could own cars, weapons, cigarettes or liquors are obvious: everybody can see the risks, and everybody gets that preventing the possession of any of those products is hugely easier than regulating any possible damage that may happen by using them.

Of course, smartphones do not directly cause physical harm. However, after almost two decades of exposure, it’s impossible to deny that personal (that is: uncontrollable) smartphones in children hands too often trigger, or at least amplify, equally important negative effects, including many (e.g. facilitating self-isolation, insufficient sleep, exposure to sexting and cyberbullying, inability to focus, peer pressure to be always “on stage”, excessive gaming, personality-altering AI support for everything from homework to dating advice...) that would exist even if social media didn’t exist at all.

Finally, smartphones in children hands are a powerful part of adultification, that is treating children, for somebody else’s profit of course, “as if they are an adult, usually in a way that is wrong or harmful”.

I’ll say even more clearly: even if we all finally acknowledged - as we really, really should - that way too often the primary or major causes that eventually led kids to suffer all those problems online are offline, social factors like poverty, lack of outdoor playgrounds, or parenting shortcomings of whatever kind and origin... giving the victims a device that in almost every real case would make those problems bigger and more likely to occur makes as much sense as forcing someone who must use crutches because he broke a leg... to wear roller skates.

Governments imposing age limits on social media instead of smartphones is like seeking shelter from a storm in a house with all the doors and windows open, and trying to keep it warm by manually closing only the front entrance, instead of closing everything at once, by pushing the right button on the home automation remote control.

Leave a comment

Enough with analogies. Why is this colossal mistake happening?

So far, the only reasons why we haven’t treated smartphones as those other products that are intrinsically unsuitable for children are, in no particular order:

  • these days, if let free to decide by themselves, almost all governments don’t dare - or can’t afford - to propose any solution to any problem that will make people spend less in purchases or taxes

  • still in general, we adults have been all groomed to consider every step back in the deployment of any technology as a really uncool, really boor act that no well-educated, well-mannered person would do.

  • that’s especially true with digital technology. Showing off a smartphone and posting on Instagram has become cooler (even in the USA) than having a car or a gun. Take any two adults with diametrically opposite political or cultural ideas, and the two things they’ll most likely still have in common will be a smartphone in their pockets, and not enough understanding of its true, long-term social impacts

Mind you, I say this without any contempt for the average smartphone user. The three bullets above are just the unavoidable consequence of everything going digital at the same time, way too fast for everybody’s good.

As far as children, smartphones and social media are concerned, however, this is not an excuse anymore to keep acting in the wrong, intrinsically dumbest way. On to action now.

There are only two things that are good in age verification policies

One is that age verification motivates kids to acquire skills that may come useful later:

Hey Canva, draw me an ID card! (Screenshots sources: ChildSafeNet and The Mirror)

The other good thing of hugely misplaced age verification laws is... that it is really easy to make them irrelevant and unnecessary. All it takes is for parents to wake up and push that one button that closes all the doors and windows of that house exposed to the storm: that is, to stop letting their kids have personal smartphones before they are 15 or 16 years old.

That’s a measure that parents have no excuse anymore to avoid, for four excellent reasons. First, see above, age verification laws for social media are too little, too late and too off-target. As things stand now, age verification laws for social media are just Rube Goldberg machines built to fight YESTERDAY’s battles.

Second, while not having a smartphone does not guarantee 100% protection from all the problems I listed, it surely makes avoiding them much, much easier, and the urgent necessity of real solutions to the root problems (e.g. more outdoor play) much harder to ignore, at all levels.

Left: Age Verification Laws, explained by Rube Goldberg 105 years ago. Right: what would actually work (sources: Wikimedia/Wikipedia).

Third, the huge cost-benefit ratio and lack of meaningful side effects: not giving a child a personal smartphone before she’s 15 is one simple act that’s 100% legal everywhere, it’s more than free because it saves money and doesn’t need any law or anybody’s permission to work. At the same time, not having a personal smartphone wouldn’t deprive children of any of the real benefits of the internet or of any actually valuable digital skill. That’s all stuff they could and indeed should still learn and practice as soon as possible, but without any risk of overexposure, that is with desktop or laptop computers at home or in schools, libraries and so on.

Yes, I DO know that for some really special kids 24x7 internet access via smartphone can be a real, effective lifeline. But the solution is to find better lifelines for those kids or making exceptions for them. It cannot be to keep all the other kids in a state that is, as a minimum, a waste of time and sleep._

Fourth, and maybe most important: this is a job for parents only, not governments. There are cases when outsourcing parental responsibilities can be positive, or at least unavoidable, or cheaper. But this is not one of them. No way.

Thanks for sharing this post both in and OUTSIDE Substack. ALL parents must read it.

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If I had to do this myself...

If I ruled the world, which thanks God I don’t, I’d spare kids from the hassle and leash of having any electronic tag, sorry: I meant “any portable phone” until they’re 14 or 15 years old. For the record, that’s what I actually did with my own kids, in years when all their peers were already playing with smartphones. I walked the walk, and it did pay off. But that’s not why I’d say no to any portable phone.

I would do that because I am damn sure that the fact that their children could not be instantly reachable was the last or almost last concrete concern of every parent from the advent of Homo Abilis to your own parents or grandparents. I also happen to think that being on their own was beneficial for the kids.

But if you are different, that’s OK, really: give your kids a normal cellphone, without internet connectivity, cameras and geolocation, and it will still be a huge improvement. You’ll be much less stressed, they’ll still be reachable when it’s actually necessary, and the physical impossibility to get lost alone in less than healthy online spaces, self-inflicted narcissism and similar hassles will open up much better worlds for your kids.

However, even if I did rule the world, I wouldn’t issue any law that forbids smartphones for children. I would launch a massive educational campaign for parents to voluntarily do it themselves, because this is their responsibility. Governments must not impose this part of education, only create support for it. Doing otherwise, as all those states are proudly doing now to look as if they care, can only waste money to produce all sorts of harmful side effects. Including lessening the very meaning and terrible beauty of parenting.

Thanks in advance for helping me to contribute to this education, via direct funding, webinars, speaking engagements or any other work. To discuss these possibilities or just suggest new topics, please email me at mfioretti@nexaima.net.

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Received — 3 May 2026 ⏭ Activism

Comrade Trump

✇Cory Doctorow's craphound.com
By: Cory Doctorow
3 May 2026 at 16:38

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.

This week on my podcast, I read Comrade Trump, a recent column from my Pluralistic newsletter, which will be syndicated in The Nerve.


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.

MP3

Received — 2 May 2026 ⏭ Activism

Pluralistic: The prehistory of the Democratic Nuremberg Caucus (02 May 2026)

✇Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
By: Cory Doctorow
2 May 2026 at 13:22


Today's links


A post-war 'denazification' bonfire featuring several Nazi flags. It has been hand-tinted. There is a smouldering MAGA hat amidst the coals.

The prehistory of the Democratic Nuremberg Caucus (permalink)

Comrade Trump continues his unbroken streak of destroying the American empire's grip on the world, hastening the renewables transition, de-dollarizing global trade, and killing the world's suicidal habit of entrusting its digital life to America's defective, enshittified tech exports:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/04/20/praxis/#acceleration

But Comrade Trump's ambitious praxis knows no bounds. Now, he's helping to remake the Democratic Party as a muscular opposition with a serious commitment to workers' interests over billionaires. It's not merely that Trump has empowered the primary campaigns of leftist Democrats facing down corporate, AIPAC-backed sellouts:

https://prospect.org/2026/04/30/palestine-super-pac-new-jersey-12-district-adam-hamawy/

He's also stiffening normie sellout Democrats' spines, forcing them to confront the stark choice between socialism and barbarism! And Dem leaders don't come more normie sellout than Cory "Big Pharma" Booker, a disgrace to Corys everywhere:

https://web.archive.org/web/20170112224531/https://theintercept.com/2017/01/12/cory-booker-joins-senate-republicans-to-kill-measure-to-import-cheaper-medicine-from-canada/

Nevertheless, that very same (lesser) Cory has introduced legislation to unwind every illegal, corrupt merger that the Trump administration has waved through:

https://www.booker.senate.gov/news/press/booker-introduces-legislation-to-review-and-unwind-anticompetitive-corporate-mergers-approved-under-second-trump-administration

Under the Correcting Lapsed Enforcement in Antitrust Norms for Mergers (CLEAN Mergers) Act, any company that was acquired in a deal worth $10b or more will have to break up with its merger partner if it turns out that these mergers were "politically influenced." "Politically influenced" sums up every major merger under the Trump II regime:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/02/13/khanservatives/#kid-rock-eats-shit

You could be forgiven for assuming that this is just about reining in Wall Street greed, but that it isn't an especially political maneuver. That's not true: antitrust is the most consequentially political regulation (with the possible exception of regulations on elections). Every fascist power defeated in WWII relied on the backing of their national monopolists to take, hold and wield power. That's why the Marshall Plan technocrats who rewrote the laws of Europe, South Korea and Japan made sure to copy over US antitrust law onto those statute-books (that's also why the tech antitrust cases brought in Europe could be re-run in South Korea and Japan – their laws are all substantively similar, because they were harmonized with US antitrust in the 1950s):

https://pluralistic.net/2025/01/22/autocrats-of-trade/#dingo-babysitter

Fascism and monopolies go hand in hand, and smashing monopolies is key to the program of fighting fascism. After defeating fascism in the mid-20th century, the Allies oversaw a program of "denazification," starting with the Nuremberg trials:

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

Inspired by those trials, I've proposed that Congressional Dems could form a "Nuremberg Caucus" that would publicly promise sweeping plans to denazify America after Trump and his allies have been swept from power:

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

The centerpiece of the Nuremberg Caucus playbook is a set of ready-to-file, public indictments against Trump officials who have violated the law, the Constitution, and the rights of the people of the USA. Dems should create and maintain a docket with exhibits and witness lists that gets updated every time one of these crooks runs their big, stupid mouths on Fox News or OANN or Twitter. The Nuremberg Caucus could even set dates for the trials of officials, with judicial calendars for each federal courtroom, starting on January 21, 2029.

The idea here is to both demoralize Trump's collaborators and to stiffen the spines of the Democratic base who will have to be convinced that turning out for the coming elections, and defending them, will mean something, delivering the change and hope they've been promised since the Obama campaign, but which has never materialized.

While trials and punishment for Trump's fascist goons are at the center of the Nuremberg Caucus plan, that's not all of it. The plan also calls for publicly announcing the intention to unwind every corrupt merger that was consummated under Trump. This serves two purposes: first, it promises the electorate that the monopolists who steal from them will face consequences for their crimes; but second, it also puts investors on notice that any gains from corrupt mergers will turn into massive losses once the next administration orders these companies to unscramble the inedible omelets they're cooking up, no matter what the cost.

That's exactly what Booker's CLEAN Mergers Act – cosponsored by Elizabeth Warren (D-MA), Martin Heinrich (D-NM), Chris Murphy (D-CT), and Mazie Hirono (D-HI) – does. I don't think that Booker is listening to me, but I do think that Dems who are willing to introduce this kind of legislation can be cajoled, coerced and sweet-talked into more ambitious Nuremberg Caucus actions.

For example, there could not be a better time to announce plans to unrig the Supreme Court, which has just gutted the Voting Rights Act:

https://prospect.org/2026/05/01/turning-civil-rights-inside-out-supreme-court-voting-rights/

The Supreme Court's legitimacy has been burned to the ground, and Trump's chud justices are pissing on the ashes. Packing the court is a very good idea:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/09/20/judicial-equilibria/#pack-the-court

It's also a very popular idea:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/10/18/the-people-no/#tell-ya-what-i-want-what-i-really-really-want

Which is why I included it in the Nuremberg Caucus plan. But packing the court is just table stakes. In his latest video, Jamelle Bouie lays out a detailed plan for denazifying the Supreme Court:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SRzS61buXkQ

As Bouie points out, "as long as John Roberts has his majority, nothing the left of center in this country wants to do is safe or stable…We can have democracy and self-government in this country or we can have the Supreme Court as it exists, but we cannot have both."

But packing the court – while a good place to start – isn't enough. Per Bouie, the problem isn't just the court's corruption – it's how powerful the court is. Article 3, Section 2 of the Constitution permits Congress to "jurisdiction strip" the Supremes: Congress can pass a law taking voting rights and racial discrimination away from the Supreme Court's jurisdiction. Congress can impose ethics reforms on the court, banning justices from taking bribes (I can't believe I have to type these words).

Congress can turn the Supreme Court's current building into a museum and move the Supreme Court back into its original home in Congress's basement. Congress can take away the Supremes' ability to select their clerks or which cases they hear. All the Constitution says is that there must be a Supreme Court, and it must adjudicate "disputes between states, disputes involving ambassadors, impeachments, that kind of thing." Everything else is up to Congress to grant or withhold from SCOTUS.

This is very good Nuremberg Caucus stuff. It would be an amazing campaign promise for anyone primarying a shitty normie Dem in the midterms: "Vote for me, and I will be part of the legislative movement to make the Supreme Court weaker and thus more accountable."

Now, as much as I like this, I'm really holding out for a Dem to go with my big ICE-melting idea: promising million-dollar bounties for ICE officers who rat out their buddies for violating the law:

ICE agents are signing up with the promise of $50k hiring bonuses and $60k in student debt cancellation. That's peanuts. The Nuremberg Caucus could announce a Crimestoppers-style program with $1m bounties for any ICE officer who a) is themselves innocent of any human rights violations, and; b) provides evidence leading to the conviction of another ICE officer for committing human rights violations. That would certainly improve morale for (some) ICE officers.

As I wrote in February:

Critics of this plan will say that this will force Trump officials to try to steal the next election in order to avoid consequences for their actions. This is certainly true: confidence in a "peaceful transfer of power" is the bedrock of any kind of fair election.

But this bunch have already repeatedly signaled that they intend to steal the midterms and the next general election:

https://www.nj.com/politics/2026/02/top-senate-republican-rejects-trumps-shocking-election-plan-i-think-thats-a-constitutional-issue.html

ICE agents are straight up telling people that ICE is on the streets to arrest people in Democratic-leaning states ("The more people that you lose in Minnesota, you then lose a voting right to stay blue"):

https://unicornriot.ninja/2026/federal-agent-in-coon-rapids-the-more-people-that-you-lose-in-minnesota-you-then-lose-a-voting-right-to-stay-blue/

The only path to fair elections – and saving America – lies through mobilizing and energizing hundreds of millions of Americans. They are ready. They are begging for leadership. They want an electoral choice, something better than a return to the pre-Trump status quo. If you want giant crowds at every polling place, rising up against ICE and DHS voter-suppression, then you have to promise people that their vote will mean something.

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 Implementing TCP over pigeon https://blug.linux.no/rfc1149/

#20yrsago Barenaked Ladies frontman on copyright reform https://web.archive.org/web/20060505032617/http://www.canada.com/nationalpost/news/issuesideas/story.html?id=3367a219-f395-4161-a9b9-95256c613824

#20yrsago Stephen Colbert kills at White House press corps dinner https://web.archive.org/web/20060501114431/http://www.editorandpublisher.com/eandp/news/article_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1002425363

#20yrsago Cinema owners try to lure us back to the movies https://web.archive.org/web/20060620140301/https://www.siliconvalley.com/mld/mercurynews/news/local/states/california/peninsula/14457900.htm?source=rss&channel=mercurynews_peninsula

#20yrsago Smithsonian’s sellout to Showtime slammed by Congress https://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/04/28/AR2006042802213_2.html

#20yrago Wallaby milk: proof against antibiotic resistant bacteria https://web.archive.org/web/20060429102138/http://news.scotsman.com/scitech.cfm?id=593632006

#20yrsago Documentary on radical free school https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rgpuSo-GSfw

#15yrsago Facebook celebrates royal wedding by nuking 50 protest groups https://anticutsspace.wordpress.com/2011/04/29/political-facebook-groups-deleted-on-royal-wedding-day/

#15yrsago Jay Rosen: What I Think I Know About Journalism https://pressthink.org/2011/04/what-i-think-i-know-about-journalism/

#15yrsago Companies should release the source code for discontinued products https://makezine.com/article/maker-news/if-youre-going-to-kill-it-open-source-it/

#15yrsago Scratch-built “freedom press” https://makezine.com/article/craft/freedom_press/

#15yrsago HOWTO quilt a 3D Mad Tea Party set https://www.instructables.com/Quilted-Mad-Tea-Party-Set/

#15yrsago Online activism works: Canada delayed US-style copyright bill in fear of activist campaign https://web.archive.org/web/20110501103056/https://www.michaelgeist.ca/content/view/5763/125/

#15yrsago Ad agency to radicals: “We own radical media(TM)” https://web.archive.org/web/20110503045909/http://radicalmediaconference.wordpress.com/2011/04/27/we-make-radical-media-you-make-adverts/

#15yrsago Troubletwisters: Garth Nix and Sean Williams’ action-packed new kids’ fantasy https://memex.craphound.com/2011/04/30/troubletwisters-garth-nix-and-sean-williams-action-packed-new-kids-fantasy/

#15yrsago RIP, Joanna Russ https://nielsenhayden.com/makinglight/archives/012974.html#547586

#5yrsago Experian doxes the world (again) https://pluralistic.net/2021/04/30/dox-the-world/#experian

#5yrsago Disney's writer wage-theft is far worse than reported https://pluralistic.net/2021/04/29/writers-must-be-paid/#pay-the-writer

#5yrsago Korea set to break the Samsung dynasty https://pluralistic.net/2021/04/29/writers-must-be-paid/#dynasties

#5yrsago What the hell is "carried interest" https://pluralistic.net/2021/04/29/writers-must-be-paid/#carried-interest

#1yrago Mike Lee and Jim Jordan want to kill the law that bans companies from cheating you https://pluralistic.net/2025/04/29/cheaters-and-liars/#caveat-emptor-brainworms

#1yrago Republicans want to force students to pay off scam college loans https://pluralistic.net/2025/04/30/trump-u/#i-think-you-know-what-the-trustees-can-do-with-their-suggestions

Upcoming appearances (permalink)

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


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

Recent appearances (permalink)


A grid of my books with Will Stahle covers..

Latest books (permalink)


A cardboard book box with the Macmillan logo.

Upcoming books (permalink)

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

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

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

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

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


Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources:

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

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

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

  • A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING

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Received — 30 April 2026 ⏭ Activism

I couldn’t care less if AI suffers, and so should you

✇Just an invitation...
By: Marco Fioretti
30 April 2026 at 18:57

A recent AEON article asks “If AIs can feel pain, what is our responsibility towards them?”.

This post could be really, really short. I may point out that speculation is good but sometimes should remain just that, and then ask why on Earth anybody should waste time worrying about causing pain to AIs that don’t even exist yet, instead of how to end the pain we humans inflict on each other. I could do that, and be done with it.

Dark red: main war zones. Rest of map: places worrying about pain of AI. Source: ACLED Conflicts Watchlist 2026.

Then again, seeing how eager people are to carry certain thoughts to places they should never reach, it can be useful to summarize the main points, and why they don’t hold water in practice. Bonus content: AI faithwashing.

If AIs can feel pain...

The AEON article was written because “We once denied the suffering of animals in pain. As AIs grow more complex, we run the danger of making the same mistake.”

Up to just a few centuries ago, the default justification for acts like beating to death infant seals was something like “Can animals talk or reason? Obviously not, so there’s nothing wrong in harming them”. In the 18th century, that attitude (very) slowly started to morph into “Never mind speech or reasoning! if animals can suffer, they shouldn’t be harmed without serious reasons”.

In the 19th century that criterion was finally extended to slaves. One day, maybe, it will cover ordinary human workers too, who knows? But right now, says the article, AI forces us to change the question again to “Can something that’s not a biological species and doesn’t even have a body suffer?” Because, of course, if it does, no decent human should make it suffer without a very serious reason.

Therefore, we cannot avoid to “consider the moral status of AI [and] what suffering might look like when it is entirely disconnected from biology”. In turn, this should force us to conclude that even AIs deserve the protection of the “precautionary principle”. That’s the extremely sensible idea that, recognising the concrete or moral costs that certain actions may have, suggests to avoid them even if we aren’t sure they will actually cause harm.

Since AIs are black boxes that keep getting more complex, “the risk of dismissing the possibility of an inner life because it fits no familiar template becomes harder to ignore.” That’s why the precautionary principle compels us to treat AIs as if they might be sentient until we have strong evidence otherwise.

My answer to AIs feeling pain

The article acknowledges that “current consensus in cognitive science is that these systems remain mindless statistical machines”, but it does so just to ask “what if that changed?” My heartfelt answer is that even if that status did change tomorrow, it couldn’t matter less.

The whole thesis of the AEON piece consists of three points:

  1. Harming without real reasons any living being that can feel pain is just wrong.

  2. Should we find out that some artificial entity can feel pain, we should not hurt it without real reason, just like we do with humans and animals, even if that entity has no biological life of any sort, and no body either.

  3. Since we cannot be sure that something as complex and highly unobservable as AIs cannot “feel pain”, we better not harm them, because the precautionary principle.

Point 1 is obviously right. Point 2 may sound sensible in general, but applying it to the AIs of today is a really convenient cover-up for some, and an obscuration of a much more important issue for everybody else.

How do you separate, in practice, “Don’t hurt the poor AIs because they may suffer” from demands to “not hurt our own divinity and bank accounts” by the folks who control AI?

The article asks what we ought to do “as AI systems develop forms of behaviour that mimic - or perhaps even instantiate - emotions”. That’s a cover-up again, because AI systems don’t “develop”. They are developed to “develop” behaviors by people that, so far, have almost never proved to be mature and unselfish enough to avoid monumental mistakes.

Even ignoring those folks and their interests, there is a huge difference between non-human biological beings of any kind and the AIs of tomorrow: the former came to exist and have been around for ages, independently from our will. That’s why they have our same rights to exist and not suffer (yes, I am simplifying real big here, but not in ways that hurt the point I’m trying to make).

AIs are a completely different matter, for the simple reason that real AIs do not exist yet and their actual arrival and occupation of every bit of our lives are not unavoidable at all. Not THESE AIs, for sure, even if their bubble won’t pop, which it will. Yes, I know that that whole article is about “what about the moment when they may exist?”. But that’s another smoke screen, albeit very different from the other.

If the subject is “species” that will exist only if and when we could succeed to create them, the question of whether it would be OK to harm it almost disappears before the real one which is “MUST we create this thing, and let it loose in the world?”

That’s the issue that makes that second point moot: we have no obligation to create all the AIs we could, just because we could. NO OBLIGATION. If there is one thing certain here, is that what doesn’t exist cannot suffer. Philosophical speculation is good and necessary, but actual actions and policies have different priorities.

Prof. Ian Malcolm, (not) speaking at the “Anthropic & Christians” summit mentioned below.

Prove me that we MUST really create something that may also make humans suffer, before demanding we pay the slightest attention to its hypothetical sufferings. Especially if what would surely suffer from limiting creation and deployment of what passes for AI today is just someone’s stock portolio, or the juvenile urge to play gods without any unpleasant consequence.

The third argument - precautionary principle for AIs - is even easier. And funnier, in the wrong way of course.

The easy part is that if we cannot be sure that something as complex and highly unobservable as AIs cannot “feel pain”, we can’t even be sure of what makes the same AIs “feel pleasure”. That is, if we are to apply the precautionary principle as the article suggests, the only way to be sure we never make these things “suffer” is to not create them at all.

The funny-in-the-wrong-way part is the application of the precautionary principle in the wrong direction and in the wrong moments. Must we really be so stupid to ignore that the precautionary principle should be applied, first and foremost, to the very creation and deployment of AIs?

Because, you know, the whole argument that “AI is already here, it’s too late for certain questions” is a really stupid argument. Once more, “AI Is Not Unavoidable. Not This AI, That’s for Sure!”

These are products (repeat with me: PRODUCTS, not “beings”) that, well before and well below being real intelligence, are already so dangerous for your savings and pension fund that its creators and the IMF are discussing right now how to contain it... and we’re supposed to care about their suffering after they’re released? Intelligence, this is not.

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What the article gets right (without even realizing it)

Here are the two passages of the articles I do like and agree with:

  • “Whether we take that step [to avoid pain for AIs] or not will tell us more about ourselves than about machines”

  • “Even if artificial intelligences do not - and may never - possess the capacity to suffer, our attitudes toward them can serve as a test of our ethical reflexes”.

I agree. Accepting to discuss how to avoid pain for AIs in the current landscape will indeed serve as a test... of our own gullibility, and reveal who’s really intelligent: we or the machines?

Thanks for sharing this post as much as you can, in and outside Substack!

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The deeper, more dangerous error

Here is another, deeper reason why I say never mind about AI pain: besides being intrinsically weak, certain arguments unavoidably validate the position that AI is a “being” on more or less the same level as humans. But if that is the case, it works both ways, and we already know where that leads and how bad it is. We have already seen workers treated like robots instead of robots replacing workers. Accepting certain arguments makes it easier to accept that humans are not worth more than software, and that the first AIs, that is corporations, can keep having the same rights and privileges as actual human beings.

Finally, the AI Overton window, getting smaller and smaller

Last March, Anthropic summoned about 15 Christian leaders from Catholic and Protestant churches, academia, and the business world to get advice on how to steer moral and spiritual development of their AI “Claude” to properly handle complex and unpredictable ethical queries, participants said. According to a report from Washington Post, the discussions also covered how Claude should respond to users who are grieving loved ones and whether Claude could be considered a “child of God”.

Still quoting from the report, here are some of the issues that Anthropic and its guests explored:

  • “We’ve got to build in ethical thinking into the machine so it’s able to adapt dynamically.”

  • Anthropic genuinely cares about Claude’s wellbeing

  • Anthropic leaders frequently talk about the need to give Claude a moral character

  • What does it mean to give someone (not “something”) a moral formation?

What’s wrong with this apparently reassuring picture? At least two things, actually:

  1. considering a chatbot a “child of God” provided of “wellbeing” that’s also a recipient of “moral formation” is exactly what I called the “deeper error”. What needs serious moral formation are the people who develop chatbots and turn them loose on people who by and large are unequipped to handle the impact

  2. the main real religion actually professed in that summit was the very american religion that “AI is unavoidable”. As I said, it isn’t. What religious leaders of any faith should teach in Silicon Valley is restraint, not faithwashing of dangerous products, or limiting what should be discussed about AI products

Especially if those products are - quoting from this synthesis of a Guardian piece you really should read - “being trained to mirror everything but us at our most authentically human.” Here is the gist of that argument (emphasis mine):

  • “The models learn from textbooks, social media posts, and scripted film and television dialogue. They have virtually no access to the unscripted, face-to-face, voice-to-voice conversations that make up the vast majority of human communication.”

  • “That blind spot is not just a technical limitation. It is a cultural feedback loop that is already running.”

  • “As billions of people absorb AI-generated text daily, they are beginning to absorb its patterns. The machine is not learning to sound like us. WE are learning to sound like it.”

Of course. This is the logical consequence of what I said above: accepting certain arguments makes it easier to accept that humans are not worth more than software. And when that happens, the result is not humanized AIs, but robotized humans. So, don’t give a f**k about any pain the AIs may feel someday. Worry about who imposes them today as just another, but really lousy religion instead.

Leave a comment

Important final note to Anthropic, all their competitors and everybody else...

... that is, everybody aiming to reboot AI for the real common good: I do get a thing or two about AI right, and I’ve been preaching the similarities between sincere faith and digital technologies that make sense for twenty years now (*). If what you want is AI that makes sense for everybody, give me a call or (thanks!) sponsor my writing, by subscribing or with donations for any amount via PayPal or LiberaPay.

(*) to see what I mean, read the “Why I PERSONALLY care about all this stuff” paragraph of “Two great “Software for Catholics” initiatives and what may make them even more helpful... for everybody”

Pluralistic: How not to ban surveillance pricing (30 Apr 2026)

✇Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
By: Cory Doctorow
30 April 2026 at 16:38


Today's links


A busy 1950s grocery store. The scene has been altered: the massive, menacing, glaring red eye of HAL 9000 from Stanley Kubrick's '2001: A Space Odyssey' hovers over the store, shooting red beams into the cash register. The store -- but not the shoppers at its front -- is suffused with red light.

How not to ban surveillance pricing (permalink)

If you want to piss me off, it's easy: just breezily assert that our tech regulation problems are the result of the fast pace of technological change racing ahead of the plodding speed of governmental action:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/04/22/uber-for-nurses/#go-meta

While there have been some instances in which this was true, it is far more often the case that there are blindingly obvious answers to tech problems, which our lawmakers and regulators ignore, amidst a rising chorus of warnings about the dire consequences of failing to act.

Take the new Maryland bill that (supposedly) outlaws surveillance pricing: this bill is, frankly, a terribly drafted piece of shit. Worse: it's a terribly drafted piece of shit bill that fails to resolve a serious and urgent problem. Even worse: the lawmakers who drafted this piece of shit bill and Maryland Governor Wes Moore were all loudly and repeatedly warned about the problems of this bill, and they did nothing and now the people of Maryland are fucked.

So what is surveillance pricing, why is it so dangerous, and what's wrong with Maryland's Protection Against Predatory Pricing Act?

Surveillance pricing is when a company spies on you ("surveillance") and uses the resulting dossier to raise its prices to the maximum it calculates you will be willing to pay ("pricing"). With surveillance pricing, a retailer reaches into your bank account and devalues your dollars. If you pay $2 for an apple at the grocery store and the same store only charges me $1 for that apple, then that grocer is telling you that your dollars are worth half as much as mine:

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

There's a kind of economics brainworm that makes some economists looooove surveillance pricing. They will insist that this is an "efficient" way to price goods, and claim that surveillance pricing isn't just a way to raise prices on people who are willing to pay more, it's a way to lower prices for people who are willing to pay less.

What you're supposed to infer from this is that people who can afford more will end up paying more, while people who can afford less will pay less. It's pitched as the Robin Hood of pricing policies, gouging the rich to finance discounts for the poor. But in practice, that's not at all how surveillance pricing works. Instead, surveillance pricing is most often used to levy a "desperation premium" on people who have fewer choices and less leverage.

For example, there's a McDonald's investments portfolio company called Plexure that supplies surveillance pricing tools to fast food restaurants. Plexure advertises its ability to use surveillance data to find out when a customer has just gotten a paycheck so that vendors can increase the price of their usual breakfast sandwich order. This isn't aimed at wealthy people – it's explicitly designed to target people who are living paycheck to paycheck.

Surveillance pricing is also used to determine how much you get paid; when that happens, we call it "algorithmic wage discrimination." Gig platforms like Uber use surveillance data about their drivers to predict which workers are most desperate, and those drivers are offered less money per mile and per hour, because a desperate worker will take whatever is on offer. Gig work apps for health-care do the same thing to nurses:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/12/18/loose-flapping-ends/#luigi-has-a-point

Indeed, surveillance pricing represents a kind of cod-Marxism. Instead of "from each to their own ability, to each according to their need," the "efficient" surveillance pricing motto is, "from each according to their desperation, to each according to our power":

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

Surveillance pricing is anything but efficient. Because surveillance pricing is a transfer from consumers to investors, it has the net effect of reducing consumption overall. If your grocer can screw you out of an extra $50/month on your household food bill, that's $50/month you can't spend on a babysitter, a movie, or a couple of nice books for your kid. The American economy runs on consumption, and the American consumer has less discretionary income than they've had in generations. Anything that reduces consumption is a drag on the whole economy.

Surveillance pricing is rampant and getting worse all the time. During the Biden administration the FTC held hearings on the practice and developed a detailed, eye-watering record of all the ways that surveillance, combined with digital platforms that can alter prices for every visit by every customer, has resulted in a massive transfer from working people to wealthy investors:

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

Unfortunately – and predictably – Trump's new FTC chairman, Andrew Ferguson, killed off that action, replacing it with an initiative that encouraged FTC officials to anonymously rat each other out for being too "woke":

https://pluralistic.net/2025/04/21/trumpflation/#andrew-ferguson

He did this even as a whole bunch of surveillance pricing companies were blitzing their clients with messages about the surveillance pricing possibilities created by Trump's tariffs, which would condition buyers to expect higher prices, creating opportunities to smuggle in surveillance-priced premiums:

https://pros.com/learn/webinars/navigating-tariff-increases-future-proof-pricing-strategy

It's only gotten worse since. Back in January, Google CEO Sundar Pichai announced that the company had a new plan to make AI profitable: they would supply surveillance prices for sellers who used Google's advertising services. After all, Google spies on more people, more comprehensively, than anyone except Meta and the NSA, and Google has an advanced ad-targeting network and a giant AI arm. Put these three facts together and Google can offer merchants the ability to target you for ads and prices that are calculated, to the penny, to be the most you would be willing to pay:

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

All this – rampant, desperation-based price-gouging; federal inaction; a risk to the whole economy – is the backdrop for Maryland's new anti-surveillance pricing bill, which Governor Wes Moore has been trumpeting as the nation's first state bill banning surveillance pricing. This would be very cool – if it was real. But – as the American Economic Liberties Project's Pat Garofalo writes for the Economic Populist – the Protection Against Predatory Pricing Act is so badly drafted that it will have essentially no impact on surveillance pricing. It's positively riddled with loopholes:

https://economicpopulist.substack.com/p/gov-wes-moore-claims-maryland-banned

The first problem with this bill is its scope: it only regulates surveillance pricing for groceries. It has nothing to say about the use of surveillance data to reprice car rentals, apartments, healthcare, taxi rides, quick-service food, or the thousand other areas where surveillance pricing is already rampant. Worse: it is silent on algorithmic wage discrimination: the use of surveillance data to reprice your wages, penalizing workers for being poor by making them even poorer.

Now, helping people with their grocery bills isn't nothing. However, even within that very narrow scope, this bill is a disaster. As Garofalo points out, the bill's first glaring loophole here is how it permits surveillance pricing if a purchaser "consents." This is quite a loophole! After all, we live in an era in which "consent" consists of clicking "I agree" when presented with a gigantic list of terms and conditions, which you cannot negotiate, which are subject to change without notice, and which are so long that it would take 26 hours to review all the "agreements" you "consent" to in any given 24-hour day.

So if the company that you use to book your pet's veterinary check-ups is owned by the same company that provides your grocer with its surveillance pricing tools, you might "consent" to having that company jack you on every bag of groceries just by clicking "I agree" when your cat needs a vet appointment.

The bill also exempts "promotional offers" and "temporary discounts," suggesting that it was drafted by someone who has never encountered a merchant whose retail premises are always plastered with signs trumpeting the fact that every price in the shop is both "temporary" (ACT NOW!) and "promotional" (SALE! SALE! SALE!). Since the bill doesn't define either of these words, it effectively grants every grocer in the state an easy way to evade the law entirely.

Finally, the bill exempts two exceptionally scammy tactics that are already the major vehicle for surveillance price-based gouging: loyalty cards and subscription-based pricing.

Loyalty cards are often a total scam:

https://consumerlaw.berkeley.edu/news/price-loyalty-how-rewards-programs-trap-consumers-and-how-states-can-take-action-protect-them

And subscriptions are a scammer's best friend:

https://redrocks.org/financial-education/hidden-charges-and-fake-subscriptions-the-quiet-scam-costing-consumers-millions

But even if you are ripped off by a grocer who can't be bothered to call the scam a "sale" or a "temporary offer," who can't be bothered to dress it up as a "loyalty perk" or a "subscription price," you still can't get justice. That's because the Protection Against Predatory Pricing Act excludes the "private right of action," which means that you can't sue a grocer who rips you off. All this bill lets you do is petition the state Attorney General's office to sue the grocer on your behalf, and if the AG doesn't think you deserve justice, you're shit out of luck. And the Protection Against Predatory Pricing Act pre-empts other rights in Maryland's existing Consumer Protection Act, meaning that it actually gives Marylanders fewer rights than they had a month ago, before it was signed into law.

Legislation this bad doesn't happen by accident. The omissions and defects in this law aren't there because "technology moves so fast that lawmakers can't make sense of it." This is the result of lobbyists and sellout politicians conspiring to rip off the public, and of a governor who decided to ignore the warnings about the bill in order to get a chance to grandstand on Bill Maher while doing nothing to help Marylanders:

https://x.com/BlueGeorgia/status/2047868126365106631

From nurses' wages to your payday breakfast sandwich, surveillance pricing is everywhere, especially in groceries. Every time you use Instacart to shop at Albertsons, Costco, Kroger, and Sprouts Farmers Market, you might be getting ripped off for as much as 23% of the total price:

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

This isn't some silly-season fake controversy. It's an existential crisis for America's cash-strapped, heavily indebted households, whose lives have been made immeasurably worse by the inflation from Trump's Strait of Epstein disaster. Maryland had the chance to do something to help these people and instead they squandered it, selling out to lobbyists for companies whose bottom line depends on draining the bank accounts of the most desperate people in the state.

(Image: Cryteria, CC BY 3.0, modified)

Hey look at this (permalink)


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

Object permanence (permalink)

#25yrsago Google's now running on 8,000 Linux servers https://web.archive.org/web/20010501043429/http://www.internetweek.com/story/INW20010427S0010

#25yrsago Karl Schroeder’s Ventus in the NYT https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/books/01/04/29/reviews/010429.29scifit.html

#20yrsago Sony screwing artists out of iTunes royalties, customers out of first sale https://www.nytimes.com/2006/04/30/technology/cheap-trick-allman-brothers-sue-sony-over-download-royalties.html

#20yrsago Robot Lego CD thrower can shatter discs https://www.techeblog.com/hammerhead-the-lego-cd-thrower/

#15yrsago Understanding alternative voting, with coffee and beer https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TtW3QkX8Xa0

#15yrsago Battleshoe https://philnoto.tumblr.com/post/4613522934/quite-busy-with-work-today-so-heres-a-little

#15yrsago Filling Paris’s potholes with knitwork https://www.flickr.com/photos/39380641@N03/albums/72157622189211405/

#15yrsago Pinhole cameras made out of hollow eggs https://www.lomography.com/magazine/71984-the-pinhegg-my-journey-to-build-an-egg-pinhole-camera

#15yrsago Canadian pro-Net Neutrality/anti-censorship/anti-surveillance party gaining support https://web.archive.org/web/20110429020845/http://www.ekospolitics.com/index.php/2011/04/ndp’s-new-status-as-second-runner-holding-april-26-2011/

#15yrsago We Say Gay: Tennessee kids fight bill that would prohibit discussing homosexuality in school https://web.archive.org/web/20110501072834/https://wesaygay.com/

#15yrsago HOWTO build an impossible Escher perpetual motion waterfall https://www.instructables.com/Perpetual-Motion-Machine-The-real-life-version-of/

#15yrsago RIP Keith Aoki, copyfighting law prof, comics illustrator, musician and writer https://www.thepublicdomain.org/2011/04/27/rip-keith-aoki/

#5yrsago Unpack the court with judicial overrides https://pluralistic.net/2021/04/27/bruno-argento/#crisis-of-legitimacy

#5yrsago Pharma's anti-generic-vaccine lobbying blitz https://pluralistic.net/2021/04/27/bruno-argento/#pharma-death-cult

#5yrsago Klobuchar on trustbusting https://pluralistic.net/2021/04/27/bruno-argento/#klobuchar

#5yrsago Robot Artists & Black Swans https://pluralistic.net/2021/04/27/bruno-argento/#fantascienza

#1yrago The enshittification of tech jobs https://pluralistic.net/2025/04/27/some-animals/#are-more-equal-than-others

#5yrsago Dems want to give $600b to the one percent https://pluralistic.net/2021/04/28/inequality-r-us/#neotrumpism

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.

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

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

How to get Pluralistic:

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

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

ISSN: 3066-764X

Received — 28 April 2026 ⏭ Activism

Pluralistic: Vicky Osterweil's "The Extended Universe" (28 Apr 2026)

✇Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
By: Cory Doctorow
28 April 2026 at 07:57


Today's links


The Haymarket Books cover for Vicky Osterweil's 'The Extended Universe.'

Vicky Osterweil's "The Extended Universe" (permalink)

Vicky Osterweil's The Extended Universe: How Disney Killed the Movies and Took Over the World makes the kind of long, polemical, startling and illuminating argument that defines great cultural criticism; it's the sort of book that encapsulates the reasons I read criticism in the first place:

https://www.haymarketbooks.org/books/2525-the-extended-universe

My first brush with this kind of criticism came more than two decades ago, when I read John Kessel's now-classic "Creating the Innocent Killer," a critique of Orson Scott Card's Ender's Game, a book I had read and enjoyed enough to re-read several times:

https://johnjosephkessel.wixsite.com/kessel-website/creating-the-innocent-killer

Kessel's argument is that Card used Ender's Game to smuggle in some very ugly ideas, wrapped in a story that was compelling, even exhilarating. In Ender's Game, we meet Andrew "Ender" Wiggin, a small, physically weak boy possessed of a prodigious intellect and a great deal of sensitivity and empathy. Ender is tormented by an escalating series of aggressors, whom he retaliates against with overwhelming force, first to the point of lethality and then all the way to literal genocide. And here's where Card makes his move: Ender's sensitivity and empathy and intellect tell him that he must respond this way, because he can tell that his aggressors will not back off from their intention to harm him; and because Ender is so small and weak, he has to use whatever tactic his brilliant mind can devise, and if that tactic results in the death penalty for mere bullying, well, that's the bully's fault, not Ender's. Indeed, in dying at Ender's hands, these bullies re-victimize Ender, because Ender is a gentle, smart, wise, weak person, and these inescapable murders that he is goaded into committing are a stain on his soul that he can never wash away.

Before reading "Creating the Innocent Killer," I confess I didn't really understand what criticism was for. Like many people, I conflated "criticism" with "reviews," thinking of critical works as a species of inconveniently difficult-to-digest essays that might help me figure out which books to read and which movies to see.

Kessel's magnificent essay changed all that, and not in spite of the fact that Kessel had pointed out some very important problems with a book that I loved, but because of that fact. In helping me understand the ugliness hidden within something whose beauty and virtues I saw very clearly, Kessel taught me more about myself – about where my aesthetics and my values overlapped, and where they diverged. It was literally life-changing.

Like Kessel, Osterweil's 'Extended Universe' deals with media that I have a great deal of affection for – the products of the Walt Disney Company. Though I'm primarily interested in theme parks – I love a big, ambitious built environment of any description and Disney pursues these with a seriousness that few others can touch – the Disney films (and the films of the studios Disney purchased, like Marvel and Lucasfilm) are obviously intimately bound up in those theme park designs.

Osterweil has her own ambivalent affection for these movies. Like so many of us, she's been raised on them, and they've shaped how she sees the world and its stories. But – like me – Osterweil is deeply suspicious of capitalism, American imperialism, and the notion of "intellectual property," and she uses reviews of a dozen Disney films to make the case that Walt Disney and the studio he founded with his brother are standards-bearers for these odious forces, and not just in the overt ways that might immediately spring to mind, but also in subtle ways that can be teased out of a close reading of the films.

In so doing, Osterweil also makes a sharp and well-argued case that intellectual property, colonialism and racial oppression are all facets of the same drive, the drive of people who fancy themselves born to rule to dominate others, which requires that those others also be dehumanized and their work denigrated. When Walt Disney insisted that his be the only name associated with "his" movies, he was playing out the same logic that underpinned his virulent opposition to labor unions and his participation in American imperialism in Latin America.

As with Kessel, Osterweil's argument is full of surprises and illuminations that are especially vivid for those of us who have great affection for these works. As her chapter on Black Panther shows, this contradiction need not go unresolved. There is plenty of scope for fans to seize the reins of the narrative (and as her chapter on the reactionary backlash to the later Star Wars movies shows, it's not just the forces of progress and anti-racism who can pull off this move).

Like the very best criticism, Osterweil's book is more than a way to deepen your understanding of the material she dissects – it's a way to deepen your understanding of the world that produced it, and to deepen your understanding of yourself.

Hey look at this (permalink)


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

Object permanence (permalink)

#20yrsago Frank Zappa’s anti-censorship letter https://www.flickr.com/photos/mudshark/117551768/in/set-72057594090059726/

#15yrsago Chemistry kit with no chemicals https://web.archive.org/web/20110427212354/http://blog.makezine.com/archive/2011/04/chemistry-set-boasts-no-chemicals.html

#15yrsago Russian corruption: crooked officials steal multi-billion-dollar company, $230M tax refund, then murder campaigning lawyer https://web.archive.org/web/20110426045152/http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2011/04/20/russia_s_crime_of_the_century?

#15yrsago Golden-age short-change cons https://web.archive.org/web/20110429014539/https://blog.modernmechanix.com/2011/04/26/tricks-of-short-change-artists/

#10yrsago Campaigners search Londoners’ phones to help them understand the Snoopers Charter https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=szN7DlmMLYg

#10yrsago Mitsubishi’s dieselgate: cheating since 1991 https://web.archive.org/web/20160427145038/https://www.cnet.com/roadshow/news/mitsubishi-cheated-fuel-economy-tests-since-1991/#ftag=CAD590a51e

#10yrsago Bellwether: Connie Willis’s classic, hilarious novel about the science of trendiness https://memex.craphound.com/2016/04/26/bellwether-connie-williss-classic-hilarious-novel-about-the-science-of-trendiness/

#5yrsago The Big U https://pluralistic.net/2021/04/26/moolah-boolah/#poison-ivies

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.

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

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

How to get Pluralistic:

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

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

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

ISSN: 3066-764X

Received — 27 April 2026 ⏭ Activism

Pluralistic: The enshittification multiverse (27 Apr 2026)

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


Today's links

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


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

The enshittification multiverse (permalink)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Hey look at this (permalink)


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

Object permanence (permalink)

#25yrsago Jakob Nielsen on reputation managers https://www.nngroup.com/articles/reputation-managers-are-happening/

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Upcoming appearances (permalink)

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


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

Recent appearances (permalink)


A grid of my books with Will Stahle covers..

Latest books (permalink)


A cardboard book box with the Macmillan logo.

Upcoming books (permalink)

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

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

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

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

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


Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources:

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

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

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

  • A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING

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

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

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

How to get Pluralistic:

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Pluralistic.net

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

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

ISSN: 3066-764X

Received — 25 April 2026 ⏭ Activism

Pluralistic: Ada Palmer's "Inventing the Renaissance" (25 Apr 2026)

✇Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
By: Cory Doctorow
25 April 2026 at 13:17


Today's links


The U Chicago Press cover for Ada Palmer's 'Inventing the Renaissance.'

Ada Palmer's "Inventing the Renaissance" (permalink)

Ada Palmer may just be the most bewilderingly talented person I know: a genius sf writer, incredible librettist and singer, wildly innovative educator, and a leading historian of the Renaissance, and last year, she published her magnum opus, Inventing the Renaissance, a stunning book about so much more than history:

https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/I/bo246135916.html

All of my friends seem to be writing their magnum opuses these days! When (modern) historian Rick Perlstein and I did an event last year for my Enshittification tour, he told me he'd just finished his 1,000 page (ish? I may be misremembering slightly) history of the American conservative movement. And I recently had dinner with China Mieville, who told me he'd just turned in the manuscript for a novel he'd been trying to figure out how to write all his life.

I can't wait to read these books! And I couldn't wait to read Inventing the Renaissance, and I would have been much quicker off the mark but for the exigencies of book tours and books due and so on – but I've been reading it for the past two months or so, and I think I've pitched it about a hundred times to strangers and friends as I savored it, because it's just that good.

Inventing the Renaissance isn't a work of history, it's a work of "historiography" – the study of how histories get written and rewritten. Palmer's point here isn't to make us merely understand the Renaissance – she wants us to understand how the idea of a Renaissance, a rebirth out of a "dark age" into a "golden age" – has been used, abused, created and demolished, for centuries and centuries, including during the centuries when the Renaissance was actually underway.

Palmer teaches Renaissance history at the University of Chicago, where she is legendary for a unique annual pedagogical exercise in which she leads her students through a weeks-long live-action role-playing game that re-enacts the election of the Medicis' Pope. Every student is given a detailed biography of their character's position, goals, proclivities and history, and for weeks, the students scheme, ally, betray and assassinate each other. At the climax, the students take over the university's faux-Gothic cathedral, dressed in Renaissance drag (Palmer has a Google alert for theater companies that are selling off their costumes, and her tiny office at the university overflows with racks of cardinals' robes and other period garb), and they invest a Pope:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/10/17/against-the-great-forces-of-history/

This exercise is nothing short of genius, and the students who experience it often report that it is life-changing. That's because the final candidates are never quite the same, nor are the cardinals who cast votes for the winner. And yet, there are certain bedrocks that never shift, including the fact that Italy is always invaded by some of the factions involved in the election, though which cities burn also changes.

The point of this exercise is to expose the students to the power and limits of both "great historical forces" and the human agency that every one of us has within the envelope defined by those forces. Palmer wants her students to get a bone-deep understanding that while every moment has great forces bearing down on it, that the people of each moment have an enormous amount of leeway to channel the floodwaters that history will unleash. From the servant who bears a message from one great power to another, up to those great powers themselves, each person guides the course of history, even if they can't halt some of its outcomes.

Though Palmer unpacks this exercise and its meaning and results in the final part of her magnum opus, this message about forces and people is really the key to her historiography. She develops these themes in the most charming, accessible manner imaginable, weaving her own journey into history with her accounts of how different eras consciously created and deployed the idea of "the Renaissance" and how these ideas were bolstered, undermined, or ultimately demolished by new evidence. You could not ask for a better account of why there is not, and can never be, a single, canonical "history" of an era or a moment. There will always be multiple histories, overlapping each other, warring with one another, supplanting each other, or being revived as "lost" histories that reveal a truth that "they" have buried.

This is such an ambitious book, and the ambition pays off in so many ways. Take the book's structure: there's a long middle section in which Palmer describes how more than a dozen figures from the Renaissance experienced their era, with many overlapping events and timelines. Palmer's sensitive, beautifully researched and written accounts of the lives of these figures – highborn and lowly, sinister and virtuous – highlights the contradictions of this centuries-long "moment" we call "the Renaissance" and shows us how those contradictions can't ever be resolved, only acknowledged and understood.

This is Palmer the novelist, blending seamlessly with Palmer the historian. Palmer is a close literary – and personal – ally of the equally brilliant sf/fantasy writer Jo Walton, whose work has mined classical and Renaissance history to great effect since she and Palmer struck up their friendship. First, there were Walton's "Philosopher Kings" books, a three-book long thought experiment in which every person of every era who ever dreamed of living in Plato's Republic is brought through time and space to the doomed volcanic island that will someday give rise to the story of Atlantis, to try out Plato's ideal society for real:

https://memex.craphound.com/2015/01/13/jo-waltons-the-just-city/

Then there was Lent, Walton's story of the fanatical reformer Savonarola, who is forced to re-live his life over and over, with breaks in hell where he is tormented by his failure:

https://web.archive.org/web/20190516170659/https://www.latimes.com/books/la-ca-jc-review-jo-walton-lent-20190516-story.html

And this June, she'll bring out Everybody's Perfect, a novel that uses Palmer's trick of telling a story from many viewpoint characters, each of whom perceives the events so differently that their versions can't really be reconciled, except by understanding that there is no one history and there cannot be one history. There are only the histories, ever changing. The omnipotent third person narrator is a lie. I don't know if Palmer got this idea from Walton, or if Walton was inspired by Palmer, but it is a wonderful living example of how intellectual and creative movements (like those that are attributed to the Renaissance) feed one another.

One of Palmer's areas of specialty is free speech and censorship. Along with Adrian Johns, we co-taught a grad seminar called "Censorship, Information Control, and Information Revolutions from Printing Press to Internet" that connected Ada's work to the current battles over online speech:

https://neubauercollegium.uchicago.edu/research/censorship-information-control-and-information-revolutions-from-printing-press-to-internet

Palmer wants us to understand that the majority of censorship is self-censorship – that the Inquisition could only intervene in a tiny minority of cases of prohibited thought and word, and they had to rely on key people – printers, for example – anticipating the Inquisitors' tastes and limiting their speech without an Inquisitorial edict (if this seems relevant to the Trump administration's "war on woke," then you're clearly paying attention):

https://pluralistic.net/2024/02/22/self-censorship/#hugos

Those correspondences between the deep historical record and our current moment make Inventing the Renaissance extremely important and timely – a book hundreds of years in the making, and bang up to date.

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 Gloating NYT editorial about the dotcom crash https://www.nytimes.com/2001/04/23/opinion/editorial-observer-after-the-fall-the-new-economy-goes-retro.html

#20yrsago RIAA sues family that doesn’t own a PC https://www.techshout.com/riaa-sues-local-family-without-computer-for-illegal-music-file-sharing/

#15yrsago Righthaven copyright troll loses domain https://web.archive.org/web/20110425035158/http://www.domainnamenews.com/legal-issues/righthavencom-invalid-whois/9232

#15yrsago Steampunk Venetian mask https://bob-basset.livejournal.com/160226.html

#5yrsago John Deere's dismal infosec https://pluralistic.net/2021/04/23/reputation-laundry/#deere-john

#5yrsago Foxconn's Wisconsin death-rattle https://pluralistic.net/2021/04/23/reputation-laundry/#monorail

#5yrsago Laundering torturers' reputations with copyfraud https://pluralistic.net/2021/04/23/reputation-laundry/#dark-ops

#1yrago Sarah Wynn-Williams's 'Careless People' https://pluralistic.net/2025/04/23/zuckerstreisand/#zdgaf

Upcoming appearances (permalink)

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


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

Recent appearances (permalink)


A grid of my books with Will Stahle covers..

Latest books (permalink)


A cardboard book box with the Macmillan logo.

Upcoming books (permalink)

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

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

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

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

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


Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources:

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

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

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

  • A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING

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

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

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

How to get Pluralistic:

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

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

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

ISSN: 3066-764X

Received — 24 April 2026 ⏭ Activism

Pluralistic: A free, open visual identity for enshittification (24 Apr 2026)

✇Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
By: Cory Doctorow
24 April 2026 at 14:50


Today's links


The poop emoji from the cover of the US edition of 'Enshittification,' with a grawlix-scrawled black bar over its mouth. In the background is a blue tinted, rotated detail of the emoji's eyes and mouth.

A free, open visual identity for enshittification (permalink)

To my surprise, my life's work has turned out to be a long series of attempts to get people to engage with the abstract, distant issues of tech policy before it's too late. This is hard, because people naturally devote their attention to things that are concrete and immediate (for very good reasons!).

For nearly 25 years, I've worked with my comrades at the Electronic Frontier Foundation to raise the salience of these abstract, technical ideas. I've come up with metaphors, parables, framing devices, narratives, and then…a dirty little word: enshittification. It turned out that this word, and the minor license to vulgarity it confers, was the secret to unleashing a tide of interest in these issues, to my immense surprise and gratification.

But I don't confine my efforts to coming up with words to engage people on these matters. For several years now, I have been developing myself as a collagist, combining public domain images with Creative Commons-licensed materials to create several collages every week that aim to illustrate these abstract, technical issues in an engaging, visual way:

https://www.flickr.com/photos/doctorow/albums/72177720316719208

The US cover for Enshittification

This got a lot easier with the 2025 publication of my international bestseller Enshittification, and not just because a lot of people read that book. It was also because the US edition, from MCD/Farrar, Straus and Giroux had a gorgeous cover:

https://mpd-biblio-covers.imgix.net/9780374619329.jpg

That cover featured a (literally and figuratively) iconic variation of the "pile of poo" emoji, with angry eyebrows and a grawlix-scrawled black censor's bar over its mouth. It was designed by the brilliant Devin Washburn of No Ideas studio:

https://www.noideas.website/

A male figure in heavy canvas protective clothes, boots and gauntlets, reclining in the wheel-well of a locomotive, reading a book. The figure's head has been replaced with the poop emoji from the cover of the US edition of 'Enshittification,' whose mouth is covered with a black, grawlix-scrawled bar. The figure is reading a book, from which emanates a halo of golden light.

Devin's poop emoji became my go-to visual shorthand for illustrating stories about enshittification, an instantly recognizable way to identify my subject matter:

https://www.flickr.com/photos/doctorow/54957634601/in/album-72177720316719208

The staring red eye of HAL 9000 from Stanley Kubrick's '2001: A Space Odyssey. In the center is the poop emoji from the cover of the US edition of 'Enshittification,' with angry eyebrows and a black, grawlix-scrawled bar over its mouth. The poop emoji's eyes have also been replaced with the HAL eye.

I remixed it over and over:

https://www.flickr.com/photos/doctorow/54962122121/in/album-72177720316719208

The Earth from space. Squatting over North America, casting a long shadow and ringed by a red, spiky halo, is the poop emoji from the cover of the US edition of 'Enshittification,' with a grawlix-scrawled black bar over its mouth, wearing a Trump wig. Leaching through the starscape is a 'code waterfall' effect as seen in the credits of the Wachowskis' 'Matrix' movies.

And over:

https://www.flickr.com/photos/doctorow/54992219613/in/album-72177720316719208

I liked it so much I ordered a couple hundred enamel pins and a couple thousand vinyl stickers featuring the design, and handed them out for free to people I met on my 33-city book tour. Everywhere I went – and every time a video went out showing me wearing the pin – I was inundated with requests to buy this stuff. But my pins and stickers weren't merch (stuff you could buy) – they were swag (stuff I gave away). I had no interest in getting into the merch business!

But you folks kept asking, and also, I really loved that design, so I offered Devin a cash buyout for the rights to his enshittification poop emoji and then I released it under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license that lets you use it any way you want, including for commercial products, provided you attribute it and link back to the original:

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

And I made sure that my EFF comrades had first crack at this design, and they've made merch of it. You can get a $5 sticker:

https://shop.eff.org/products/enshittification-sticker

Or a $10 pin:

https://shop.eff.org/products/enshittification-pin

With all proceeds going to the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the most profound and powerful disenshittifying force on the planet Earth!

My xeriscaped lawn, featuring an Enshittification poop emoji lawn flag as well as several cacti and some rusty dinosaur sculptures.

But because this is CC licensed, you can make your own merch and swag! I made this great print-on-demand lawn flag my for front garden so I could let my enshittification flag fly:

https://www.flickr.com/photos/doctorow/55025045602/

My goal here is to create a free, open, remixable visual language for talking about platform decay, not owned by me or anyone, a part of the commons. Use it to illustrate anything you want, especially if you want to analogize enshittification to other phenomena, like politics or other non-digital phenomena. Semantic drift is good, actually!

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

You can get the high-rez of Devin's enshittification poop emoji from the internet's three most important repositories of Creative Commons licensed work.

There's a copy on Wikimedia Commons:

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Enshittification_poop_emoji_logo.png

And on Flickr:

https://www.flickr.com/photos/doctorow/55225631563/

And of course on the Internet Archive, along with a PSD that includes an ink-density adjustment layer:

https://archive.org/details/enshittification-poop-emoji-logo

I've supported Creative Commons literally since the very beginning. I worked with Larry Lessig, Aaron Swartz, Matt Haughey and Lisa Rein on the launch of the original licenses in 2002/3, and my first novel, Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom was the first book released under a CC license:

https://craphound.com/down/download/

Creative Commons is one of the most amazing feats of stunt-lawyering ever attempted, and it has been an unmitigated success, with tens of billions of works licensed CC, including all of Wikipedia. Like EFF, CC is a charitable nonprofit that depends on individual donors to keep its work going. The org turned 25 this year (along with my career as a novelist), and they've launched a giant fundraiser to carry their work forward.

As my contribution to the fundraiser, I've provided them with 375 signed, numbered copies of Canny Valley, my (otherwise) not-for-sale, extremely limited edition book of my collages, with an intro by Bruce Sterling. The book was designed by type legend John D Berry and printed at Pasadena's Typeworks, a century-old, family-owned print shop, on 100lb Mohawk paper, with a PVC binding that will last for generations:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/04/10/canny-valley/

CC tells me there's still some copies of Canny Valley left in the fundraiser. If you're intrigued by my collaging and want to own this very strange and beautiful little artifact, here's where to go:

https://mailchi.mp/creativecommons/were-turning-25-book-giveaway

And if you want to try your own hand at collaging – or making merch (or swag!) – help yourself to Devin's wondrous piece of poo and go to town.

Hey look at this (permalink)


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

Object permanence (permalink)

#20yrsago Court throws out RIAA attempt to sue little girl https://web.archive.org/web/20060422232323/https://p2pnet.net/story/8603

#15yrsago Android secretly stores location data too — though less of it, and with less detail https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2011/04/android-phones-keep-location-cache-too-but-its-harder-to-access/

#15yrsago Portal turret Easter egg https://www.flickr.com/photos/57617475@N00/5638462322/

#15yrsago Michael Chabon’s introduction to The Phantom Tollbooth 50th anniversary edition https://web.archive.org/web/20110424055621/http://www.nybooks.com/blogs/nyrblog/2011/apr/21/michael-chabon-phantom-tollbooth-wonder-words/

#10yrsago UK spy agencies store sensitive data on millions of innocent people, with no safeguards from abuse https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2016/04/uk-secret-police-surveillance-bulk-personal-datasets/

#10yrsago Zombie company Atari wants exclusive right to make haunted house games https://www.techdirt.com/2016/04/21/ex-game-maker-atari-to-argue-to-us-pto-that-only-it-can-make-haunted-house-games/

#10yrsago Hackers take $81 million from Bangladesh’s central bank by pwning its $10 second-hand routers https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-36110421

#10yrsago Forget the one percent, it’s the 0.1% who run the show https://web.archive.org/web/20160416022112/https://www.alternet.org/economy/1-really-problem

#10yrsago The quest for the well-labeled inn https://memex.craphound.com/2016/04/22/the-quest-for-the-well-labeled-inn/

#5yrsago EFF sues Proctorio over copyfraud https://pluralistic.net/2021/04/22/ihor-kolomoisky/#copyfraud

#5yrsago Fighting FLoC is compatible with fighting monopoly https://pluralistic.net/2021/04/22/ihor-kolomoisky/#not-that-competition

#5yrsago Moxie hacks Cellebrite https://pluralistic.net/2021/04/22/ihor-kolomoisky/#petard

#5yrsago Banks made bank on covid overdraft charges https://pluralistic.net/2021/04/22/ihor-kolomoisky/#usurers

#5yrsago The awesome destructive power of a billionaire https://pluralistic.net/2021/04/22/ihor-kolomoisky/#force-multiplier

#1yrago More Everything Forever https://pluralistic.net/2025/04/22/vinges-bastards/#cyberpunk-is-a-warning-not-a-suggestion

Upcoming appearances (permalink)

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


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

Recent appearances (permalink)


A grid of my books with Will Stahle covers..

Latest books (permalink)


A cardboard book box with the Macmillan logo.

Upcoming books (permalink)

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

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

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

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

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


Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources:

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

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

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

  • A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING

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

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

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

How to get Pluralistic:

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

Pluralistic.net

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

https://pluralistic.net/plura-list

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

https://mamot.fr/@pluralistic

Bluesky (no ads, possible tracking and data-collection):

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

Medium (no ads, paywalled):

https://doctorow.medium.com/

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

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

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

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

ISSN: 3066-764X

Received — 23 April 2026 ⏭ Activism

Pluralistic: The (other) problem with automatic conversion of free software to proprietary software (23 Apr 2026)

✇Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
By: Cory Doctorow
23 April 2026 at 14:25


Today's links


The surface of Mars. In the foreground are a gnu and a giant pump-magazine killer robot whose head is being piloted by Tux the penguin. At their feet lies a dead robot, its head smashed in.

The (other) problem with automatic conversion of free software to proprietary software (permalink)

Here's an interesting stunt: a project called Malus.sh will take your money, and in exchange, it will ingest any free/open source code you want, refactor that code using an LLM, and spit out a "clean room" version that is freed from all the obligations imposed by the original project's software license:

https://www.404media.co/this-ai-tool-rips-off-open-source-software-without-violating-copyright/?ref=daily-stories-newsletter

Malus was co-created by Mike Nolan, who "researches the political economy of open source software and currently works for the United Nations." Nolan told 404 Media's Emanuel Maiberg that he shipped Malus as a real, live-fire business that will exchange money for an AI service that destroys the commons as a way to alert the free software movement to a serious danger.

As Maiberg writes, Malus relies on a legal precedent set in 1982, in which IBM brought a copyright suit against a small upstart called Columbia Data Products for reverse-engineering an IBM software product. IBM's argument was that Columbia must have copied its code – the copyrightable part of a work of software – in order to reimplement the functionality of that code. Functions aren't copyrightable: copyright protects creative expressions, not the ideas that inspire those expressions. The idea of a computer program that performs a certain algorithm is not copyrightable, but the code that turns that idea into a computer program is copyrightable.

Columbia's successful defense against IBM involved using a "clean room" in which two isolated teams collaborated on the reimplementation. The first team examined the IBM program and wrote a specification for another program that would replicate its functionality. The second team received the specification and turned it into a computer program. The first team did handle IBM software, but they did not create a new work of software. The second team did create a new work of software, but they never handled any IBM code.

This is the model for Malus: it pairs two LLMs, the first of which analyzes a free software program and prepares a specification for a program that performs the identical function. The second program receives that specification and writes a new program.

The Malus FAQ performs a "be as evil as possible" explanation for the purpose of this exercise:

Our proprietary AI robots independently recreate any open source project from scratch. The result? Legally distinct code with corporate-friendly licensing. No attribution. No copyleft. No problems.

This business about "attribution" and "copyleft" is a reference to the terms imposed by some free software licenses. The purpose of free software is to create a commons of user-inspectable, user-modifiable software that anyone can use, improve, and distribute. To achieve this, many free software licenses impose obligations on the people who distribute their code: you are allowed to take the code, improve the code, give it away or sell it, but you have to let other people do the same.

Typically, you have to inform people when there's free software in a package you've distributed (attribution) and supply them with the "source code" (the part that humans read and write, which is then "compiled" into code that a computer can use) on demand, so they can make their own changes. This system of requiring other people to share the things they make out of the code you share with them is sometimes called "copyleft," because it uses copyright, which is normally a system for restricting re-use to require people not to restrict that use.

Companies love to use free software, but they don't like to share free software. Companies like Vizio raid the commons for software that is collectively created and maintained, then simply refuse to live up to their end of the bargain, violating the license terms and (incorrectly) assuming no one will sue them:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/10/20/vizio-vs-the-world/#dumbcast

Malus's promise, then, is that you can pay them to create fully functional reimplementations of any free/open source software package that your company can treat as proprietary, without any obligations to the commons. You won't even have to acknowledge the original software project that you knocked off!

This is the risk that Nolan and his partner are trying to awaken the free/open source community to: that our commons is about to be raided by selfish monsters who serve as gut-flora for the immortal colony organisms we call "limited liability corporations," who will steal everything we've built and destroy the social contract we live by.

This is a real problem, but not because of AI. We already have this situation, and it's really bad. Most of the foundational free software projects were created under older licenses that did not contemplate cloud computing and software as a service. The "copyleft" obligations of these licenses are triggered by the distribution of the software – that is, when I send you a copy of the code.

But cloud services don't have to send you the code: when you run Adobe Creative Cloud or Google Docs, the most important code is all resident on corporate servers, and never sent to you, which means that you are not entitled to a copy of the new software that has been built atop of our commons. In other words, big companies have "software freedom" (the freedom to use, modify and improve software) and we've got "open source" (the impoverished right to look at the versions of these packages that are sitting on services like Github – itself a division of Microsoft):

https://mako.cc/copyrighteous/libreplanet-2018-keynote

Then there's "tivoization," a tactic for stealing from the commons that wasn't quite invented by Tivo, though they were one of its most notorious abusers. Tivoization happens when you distribute free software as part of a hardware device, then use "digital locks" (sometimes called "technical protection measures") to prevent the owner of this device from running a modified version of the code. With tivoization, I can sell you a device running free software and I can comply with the license by giving you the code, but if you change the code and try to get the device to run it, it will refuse. What's more, "anti-circumention" laws like Section 1201 of the US Digital Millennium Copyright Act make it a felony to tamper with these digital locks, so it becomes a crime to use modified software on your own device:

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

There's no question that the tech industry would devour the free software commons if they were allowed to, and the AI threat that Nolan raises with Malus seems alarming, but while there's something to worry about there, I think the risk is being substantially overstated.

That's because copyleft licenses – and indeed, all software licenses – are copyright licenses, and software written by AI is not eligible for a copyright, because nothing made by AI is eligible for copyright:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/03/03/its-a-trap-2/#inheres-at-the-moment-of-fixation

Copyright is awarded solely to works of human authorship. This fact has been repeatedly affirmed by the US Copyright Office, which has fought appeals of this principle all the way to the Supreme Court, which declined to hear the case. That's because the principle that copyright is strictly reserved for human creativity isn't remotely controversial in legal circles. This is just how copyright works.

Which means that the "be evil" version of Malus's business model has a fatal flaw. While the code that Malus produces is indeed "legally distinct" with "no attribution" and "no copyleft," it's not true that there are "no problems." That's because Malus's code doesn't have "corporate-friendly licensing." Far from it: Malus's code has no licensing, because it is born in the public domain and cannot be copyrighted.

In other words, if you're a corporation hoping to use Malus to knock off a free software project so that you can adapt it and distribute it without having to make your modifications available, Malus's code will not suit your needs. If you give me code that Malus produced, you can't stop me from doing anything I want with it. I can sell it. I can give it away. I can make a competing product that reproduces all of your code and sell it at a 99% discount. There's nothing you can do to stop me, any more than you could stop me from giving away the text of a Shakespeare play you sold me. You can't stick a license agreement or terms of service between me and the product that binds me to pretend that your public domain software is copyrighted – that's also not allowed under copyright.

Does that mean that Malus is a meaningless stunt? No, because this automated reimplementation does create some risks to our software commons. A troll who doesn't care about selling software could clone every popular free software project and make public domain versions that would be confusing and maybe demoralizing. Combining these clean-room reimplementations with cloud software or tivoization could create hybrid forms of commons-enclosure that are more virulent than the current strains.

But reimplementation itself is not a risk to free software. Reimplementation is the bedrock of free software. GNU/Linux itself is a reimplementation of AT&T Unix. Free software authors re-implement each other's code all the time, often because they think the license the original code was released under sucks. Literally the coolest free software thing I've seen in the past 12 months included a reimplementation of Raspberry Pi's PIO module to escape from its bullshit patent encumbrances:

https://youtu.be/BbWWGkyIBGM?si=vO5zLH3OG5JLW7OP&t=2253

Reimplementation is good, actually. And honestly, if corporations are foolish enough to reimplement their code using an LLM, and in so doing, create a vast new commons of public domain software, well, that's not exactly the freesoftwarepocalypse, is it?

(Image: Muhammad Mahdi Karim, GNU FDL; modified)

Hey look at this (permalink)


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

Object permanence (permalink)

#25yrsago PimpMySnack: homemade, gigantic versions of snack food https://web.archive.org/web/20060421034050/http://www.pimpmysnack.com/gallery.php

#20yrsago Thieves discover abandoned Soviet missile silo full of cash https://web.archive.org/web/20060411021047/http://www.mosnews.com/news/2006/03/07/moneyfound.shtml

#15yrsago Victorian house’s facade converted to a folding garage-door https://web.archive.org/web/20110423213819/https://www.blog.beausoleil-architects.com/2011/03/architectural-magic.html

#15yrsago Xerox’s first successful copier burst into flame so often it came with a fire-extinguisher https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xerox_914

#15yrsago MPAA: “democratizing culture is not in our interest” https://torrentfreak.com/mpaa-democratizing-culture-is-not-in-our-interest-110420/

#15yrsago Mail Rail: London’s long-lost underground postal railroad https://web.archive.org/web/20110805130854/http://www.silentuk.com/?p=2792

#10yrsago Kindle Unlimited is being flooded with 3,000-page garbage books that suck money out of the system https://web.archive.org/web/20160421055052/https://consumerist.com/2016/04/20/amazon-unintentionally-paying-scammers-to-hand-you-1000-pages-of-crap-you-dont-read/

#10yrsago America’s wealth gap has created an ever-increasing longevity gap https://www.counterpunch.org/2016/04/21/the-death-gap/

#10yrsago Why is Congress so clueless about tech? Because they fired all their experts 20 years ago https://www.wired.com/2016/04/office-technology-assessment-congress-clueless-tech-killed-tutor/

#10yrsago Why Internet voting is a terrible idea, explained in small words anyone can understand https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=abQCqIbBBeM

#10yrsago VW offers to buy back 500K demon-haunted diesels https://www.reuters.com/article/us-volkswagen-emissions-usa-idUSKCN0XH2CX/?feedType=RSS&feedName=topNews

#10yrsago Printer ink wars may make private property the exclusive domain of corporations https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2016/04/eff-asks-supreme-court-overturn-dangerous-ruling-allowing-patent-owners-undermine

#5yrsago Some thoughts on GWB's call for truth in politics https://pluralistic.net/2021/04/21/re-identification/#seriously-fuck-that-guy

#5yrsago What's wrong with EU's trustbusters https://pluralistic.net/2021/04/21/re-identification/#eu-antitrust

#5yrsago Hawley and Taylor Greene faked their donor-surge https://pluralistic.net/2021/04/21/re-identification/#jan-6-fraud

#5yrsago The Observatory of Anonymity https://pluralistic.net/2021/04/21/re-identification/#pseudonymity

#1yrago Trump's FTC opens the floodgates for tariff profiteering https://pluralistic.net/2025/04/21/trumpflation/#andrew-ferguson

Upcoming appearances (permalink)

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


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

Recent appearances (permalink)


A grid of my books with Will Stahle covers..

Latest books (permalink)


A cardboard book box with the Macmillan logo.

Upcoming books (permalink)

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

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

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

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

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


Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources:

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

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

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

  • A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING

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

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

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

How to get Pluralistic:

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

Pluralistic.net

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

https://pluralistic.net/plura-list

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

https://mamot.fr/@pluralistic

Bluesky (no ads, possible tracking and data-collection):

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

Medium (no ads, paywalled):

https://doctorow.medium.com/

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

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

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

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

ISSN: 3066-764X

Received — 22 April 2026 ⏭ Activism

Pluralistic: It's not a crime if we do it (to nurses) with an app (22 Apr 2026)

✇Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
By: Cory Doctorow
22 April 2026 at 17:24


Today's links


A 1950s killer robot with eye lasers; it has collected four bell jars in which float the heads of disembodied nurses. It is zapping one jar with its lasers. In the background is a golgotha, taken from a Dore Old Testament engraving.

It's not a crime if we do it (to nurses) with an app (permalink)

If I could abolish one piece of received wisdom about tech policy, it would be this: "Tech moves at the speed of innovation and regulation moves at the speed of government, so regulation will always lag behind tech."

(If I could abolish two pieces of received wisdom about tech policy, the other one would be "If you're not paying for the product, you're the product." Decent treatment is not a customer reward program, and "voting with your wallet" only works if you're a billionaire whose wallet is thicker than all the other wallets put together.)

To be clear, there are times when tech enables new forms of conduct that don't fit neatly into the existing policy framework. For example, we apply copyright to anyone who makes or handles a copy of a creative work, and that used to be a pretty good proxy for "someone in the supply chain of the media industry."

The problem is that computers work by making dozens and dozens of copies every time you click your mouse, and we all use computers for everything, and clicking a mouse doesn't make you part of the entertainment business. The fact that we've had hyperinflation in "making and handling copies" but continued to apply an esoteric industrial framework to pretty much everything everyone does all the time is a huge problem that desperately needs fixing:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/10/21/the-internets-original-sin/

Copyright notwithstanding, tech generally does not outrun our capacity to regulate it. Rather, tech bosses come up with incredibly flimsy reasons why their business doesn't fit into the existing regulatory framework, and policymakers accept these ridiculous excuses so readily that one can only assume they're in on the racket.

Take "fintech," all those neobanks and the cryptocurrency junk and shitcoins and stablecoins and NFTs and so on that a group of pump-and-dumpers, money launderers and stock swindlers have pushed for more than a decade now. As Trashfuture's Riley Quinn says, "Whenever you hear 'fintech,' you should think 'unregulated bank.'" It's not hard to apply existing regulations to these companies: they fall under banking law, usury law, securities law and gambling law.

There's no (good) reason not to apply these legal frameworks to the crypto industry – but there are plenty of bad reasons not to. The most obvious reason not to apply those regulations is that you are on the same side as the pump-and-dumpers, money launderers and stock swindlers. The reason we struggle to regulate fintech is that we just don't want to.

Then there's Uber, which claimed that it wasn't a taxi company, it was a "transportation network company," which meant that none of the regulations we apply to taxis should apply to Uber. To call this a transparent ruse is to do great violence to the good, hardworking transparent ruses putting in the hard yards to run honest scams. "Uber isn't a taxi company, it's a transportation network company" is about as plausible as those t-shirts that read "It's not a bald spot, it's a solar-panel for a sex-machine."

Emboldened by the success of the "transportation network company" wheeze, Uber launched Uber Eats, claiming that it wasn't a "food delivery company" but rather a "delivery network company." This set up the template for a remorseless tide of new sex-machine solar-panels that have pushed Uber's system of wage-theft and worker misclassification into an expanding constellation of labor categories.

From fintech to price-fixing to gig-work, the entire industry runs on the very stupid proposition that "it's not a crime if we do it with an app":

https://pluralistic.net/2025/01/25/potatotrac/#carbo-loading

One of the worst of these sex-machine solar-panels is to be found in nursing, where a cluster of heavily capitalized apps that nurses must rely on to get shifts insist that they aren't "healthcare staffing agencies," rather, they are "healthcare worker platforms" that should be exempted from the regulations that we started applying to the former after a string of calamities and disasters.

This phenomenon is detailed in eye-watering detail in "Uber For Nursing," a must-read new report by Katie J Wells, Maya Pinto, and Funda Ustek Spilda for the AI Now Institute:

https://ainowinstitute.org/publications/uber-for-nursing

If "Uber for nursing" rings a bell, you might be thinking of "Uber for Nursing: How an AI-Powered Gig Model Is Threatening Health Care," an earlier report that Wells and Spilda wrote for the Roosevelt Institute in late 2024:

https://rooseveltinstitute.org/publications/uber-for-nursing/

The Roosevelt Institute report contained many eye-popping findings, most notably that at least some of the leading national nursing gig-work platforms were using data-brokers to find out how much debt nurses were carrying, and offered lower wages to the nurses with the most debt, on the grounds that the most economically desperate nurses will accept the lowest pay:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/12/18/loose-flapping-ends/#luigi-has-a-point

The new report describes how, in the absence of a muscular policy response, these nursing gig-work companies have raised fantastic sums of money, some of which they have diverted to regulatory capture projects in a bid to states to recognize their solar-panel sex-machines, with great success. These companies haven't merely refined their lobbying game, either – as a sphincter-puckering appendix detailing the experience of nurses with these apps shows, they have also made great strides in immiserating nurses and transferring their earning power to gig platforms and the hospitals that rely on them.

This degradation of the work experience is characteristic of the new world of AI-powered jobs. AI isn't taking workers' jobs, but it is enshittifying them, with degrading, neurosis-inducing surveillance and high-handed discipline:

https://www.ineteconomics.org/perspectives/blog/what-does-it-mean-to-work-under-algorithmic-eyes

Algorithmic oversight is a terror for any worker, but it's particularly bad when applied to healthcare workers:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/08/05/any-metric-becomes-a-target/#hca

But gig-work companies remain laser-focused on healthcare workers, likely because that is one of the only growing professions left in America. They're trying to screw over healthcare workers for the same reason Willie Sutton robbed banks: "That's where the money is." The corollary here is that the 15% of the American workforce that is employed in the healthcare industry is on the front lines of the battle against gig-work and algorithmic management.

Like parasites that attack the sick and weak, gig-work and algorithmic management come first for industries that are already bad for workers and the people they serve, making things much worse while insisting that they're just trying to apply a cool digital fix to a broken analog system. That, too, was Uber's playbook: attacking the medallion taxi system as corrupt and sclerotic – while replacing it with a system that's corrupt, extractive and dynamic, able to evade all attempts to improve things for drivers and riders (such as drivers' unions).

That's what's happened with healthcare staffing agencies. These have long been a fixture in healthcare, partly because there was always a large cohort of skilled healthcare professionals who valued the flexibility of short term contracts (for example, "travel nurses") and partly because hospitals love hiring contractors who aren't part of their workers' unions.

Staffing agencies weren't good. A string of scandals led to waves of regulations in states like Colorado, Minnesota and New York that required agencies to "register annually, disclose shareholders and executive officers, certify worker credentials, report to state authorities on the number of workers employed, document service rates charged to facilities, and list average wages paid to workers by job category." These regulations also banned staffing agencies from locking up workers with noncompete agreements and ripping them off with finder's fees.

Rather than strengthening these protections, gig nursing platforms avoid them. Where staffing agencies secure multi-week contracts for travel nurses, gig platforms typically assign workers to single-day shifts. Where staffing agencies let nurses bargain for their scheduling needs, gig platforms present take-it-or-leave-it offers and no opportunities to speak to a human when things go wrong. And where staffing agencies evaluated the workers on their roster based on employer feedback, the gig platforms install apps that continuously surveil and evaluate workers, downranking them and cutting their hours and pay based on algorithmic judgments that are never explained and cannot be appealed.

Platforms match nurses with shifts, claiming to regulators that they're little more than a "job-notice board." But when they pitch hospitals, they tell a different story, about their ability to use algorithms to erode wages and blacklist workers who make trouble. Healthcare gig-work apps push workers to accept shifts that require more travel and pay less, at facilities they don't want to work at. Refusal to accept a shift can permanently compromise your ability to get future shifts, and/or lower the wage you're offered in future.

In addition to these poor working conditions and low wages, gig platforms have resurrected the prohibited practice of charging workers "finder's fees," by layering on junk fees that take money out of every paycheck. Staffing agencies aren't allowed to do this, but the gig-work platforms' "solar panel for a sex-machine" gambit transforms the finder's fee into a "platform fee" that somehow escapes regulators' grasp.

How is it that a regulator can't see that a "platform fee" is exactly equivalent to a "finder's fee?" This is not a case of technology outpacing regulation – it's a case of lawmakers colluding with profitable firms to evade regulation in order to steal from workers.

The platforms are aslosh in investor cash – Clipboard Health, Intelycare, and Shiftkey are all valued at more than $1b, and Shiftkey just completed a $300m private equity raise. This leaves them with lots of ready cash to spend on regulatory entrepreneurship. In Georgia, Clipboard lobbied "to exempt gig nursing platforms from state unemployment insurance and workers’ compensation laws." In Ohio, Shiftkey and Clipboard are pushing a bill "to classify gig nurses as independent contractors, exempting gig platforms from minimum wage and other worker protection laws." In Utah, Nursa is praising a bill that a state senator called "lightest-touch regulation." All in all, 17 states have nurse gig platform deregulation bills underway.

In 2022, the healthcare gig-work platforms tried to get a California ballot measure to carve nursing platforms out of all state labor laws. They withdrew it, but pursued an "under the radar" approach to get the same thing by seeking changes in administrative rules, rather than state laws. Lobbying for administrative law changes to exempt healthcare gig-work platforms from regulation is also underway in Missouri, Louisiana and Utah.

One bright light in all this comes from New York state, where a 2025 law "affirmatively recognizes gig nursing platforms as entities that must comply with the state’s healthcare staffing agency rules." The existence of this law proves that the crisis of gig-work healthcare platforms is not an example of tech racing ahead of regulation. If New York's state leg can figure out that a gig-work platform is just a staffing agency in app form, then other states can do so as well. If they don't figure that out, that's because they don't want to.

Sometime in this century, our political class and our financial class arrived at a consensus that Douglas Rushkoff describes as "go meta," in his 2022 book Survival of the Richest:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/09/13/collapse-porn/#collapse-porn

The "go meta" ethos insists that the most important, smartest and most valuable move is always away from productive labor. Don't drive a cab: go meta and own a medallion that you rent to a cab driver. Don't own a medallion, go meta and start a gig-work ride-hailing company. Don't start a gig-work ride-hailing company, go meta and invest in a gig-work ride-hailing company. Don't invest in a gig-work ride-hailing company, go meta and buy options in a gig-work ride-hailing company – and so on and so on, into ever more abstracted forms of gambling and rent-collection.

The reorganization of the economy around parasitic middlemen and financial gamblers (but I repeat myself) is the real reason that we can't regulate tech. Once you've decided that the most important party to a transaction is the person who has the option on the share on the platform on the license that the worker who actually does the job requires, of course you're going to see a solar-panel for a sex-machine in every bald spot.

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 PKD ratted out other SF writers to the FBI https://web.archive.org/web/20010428121230/https://www.linguafranca.com/print/0105/cover.html

#15yrsago Weird Al snubbed by Lady Gaga, releases his parody without permission as fair use https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fUxXKfQkswE

#15yrsago How do you compete with free? A taxonomy of reasons to pay for digital files https://www.theguardian.com/technology/gamesblog/2011/apr/20/digital-free-persuade-pay-cory-doctorow?utm_source=twitterfeed&utm_medium=twitter

#15yrsago iOS devices secretly log and retain record of every place you go, transfer to your PC and subsequent devices https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2011/apr/20/iphone-tracking-prompts-privacy-fears

#10yrsago Before 1988 Olympics, South Korea sent ‘vagrants’ to camps where rape and murder were routine https://web.archive.org/web/20160420234916/https://bigstory.ap.org/article/c22de3a565fe4e85a0508bbbd72c3c1b/ap-s-korea-covered-mass-abuse-killings-vagrants

#10yrsago Luxury overnight bus with sleeper cabins shuttles between LA and San Francisco https://www.inc.com/tess-townsend/sleepbus-gets-you-from-sf-to-la-for-50.html

#10yrsago Volkswagen’s internal Dieselgate probe stuck because the company used code-words for its cheat software https://web.archive.org/web/20160419095045/https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-04-19/vw-cheating-code-words-said-to-complicate-emissions-probe

#10yrsago Chinese opsec funnies: your foreign boyfriend is a western spy! https://web.archive.org/web/20160420125125/https://www.chinalawtranslate.com/nsed/

#10yrsago UK Chancellor exempts families of “Politically Exposed Persons” from money laundering scrutiny https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2016/04/uks-osborne-exempts-members-of-parliament-other-politically-exposed-persons-from-money-laundering-oversight.html

#10yrsago Colorado school district wants to arm security staff with assault rifles https://www.csmonitor.com/USA/2016/0419/Colorado-school-district-to-equip-security-workers-with-semiautomatic-rifles

#5yrsago McDonald's corporate wages war on ice-cream hackers https://pluralistic.net/2021/04/20/euthanize-rentier-enablers/#cold-war

#5yrsago Real penalties for covid evicters https://pluralistic.net/2021/04/20/euthanize-rentier-enablers/#cfpb

Upcoming appearances (permalink)

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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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Received — 21 April 2026 ⏭ Activism

Hugo Announcement!

✇Welcome to Garbagetown
By: Catherynne M. Valente
21 April 2026 at 21:14

If you only know me by my political writing, this may seem quite out of left field. But I am, in fact, a science fiction and fantasy novelist by day—and today is big news in that part of my world.

*Drumroll*

I am so beyond thrilled to announce that my spooky summer gothic story (with a twist we don’t tell others about so they can enjoy the reveal!), When He Calls Your Name, has been nominated for a Hugo Award!

And god DAMN what an absolutely stacked category and overall ballot!

Thank you to anyone and everyone who nominated it, this really means so much to me. I am so proud of this story, and I had hoped it would find an audience, but it’s always impossible to know what will or won’t strike readers.

You might think, after 22 years and more than my fair share of ceremonies, it would be old hat and no big deal. Not even a little bit true. The first time I saw an email in my inbox saying I’d been nominated for a Hugo I felt like I’d been bodied by a speeding freight train--and the train got me this time, too. Just being read, spoken of, having my work acknowledged at all, beggars my heart. In this era? It beggars my everything.

All I ever wanted in my life was to write my little stories and have people read them. What a nomination like this says to me is that the dream happened, and that’s the whole game, for me.

If you’ve been following me for a bit, you probably know I’ve been nominated...many times. I believe this is somehow my 13th nomination, which seems like madness. I have not actually won for fiction, though, or alone. Ever. Only as part of the old SF Squeecast gang. I’d joke that I’m the Susan Lucci of the Hugos...if I felt confident anyone remembers who Susan Lucci is.

So I don’t really expect to win, especially against that incredible slate. And I’m not being self-deprecating when I say that’s more than fine. Much like Suze, I long ago learned to focus on a pretty dress and a fun trip--and I’m on the hunt for my vampire gown as we speak! The honor really is the nomination, and I’m over the moon about it.

The awards will be given out at LAcon in August. Consider this your obligatory notice that anyone can vote with a supporting membership, and that supporting membership, while not free, comes with free copies of every nominated work. And the retail price of that package comes out to far more than the membership fee.

But all I really want to say is just thank you. Thank you for all these years. And please keep reading fiction. Fiction written by human beings. Human beings working day over day over day toward that same dream I’ve had since I was a child: tell a story by the fire to other people and know it mattered to them, even if just a little.

See you in Los Angeles!

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Good parenting is hard because it’s too cheap and simple

✇Just an invitation...
By: Marco Fioretti
21 April 2026 at 18:30

Parenting should be a choice of joy, economically and emotionally sustainable for everybody who would actually want to be a parent. These days, instead, it has become, or it is perceived even when it shouldn’t, as an embarrassingly expensive ordeal that must suck every cent and waking minute out of parents.

That could be tolerable if the results were good, but they too often aren’t. Believing that the default parenting style in “first world” is the best way to turn babies into happy, balanced adults with the best chances to get a great job is something people keep doing out of desperation or lack of imagination, but it gets harder every year.

Why is good parenting so hard? Here, I argue that maybe it’s because it is too simple and too cheap to see, adding as final bonus what happily childless people must know and do to stay so.

Before starting, my usual PSA: if you like what I say, thanks for sharing it as much as possible, and for supporting it with direct donations, or paid subscriptions. I am also available for online meetings about this and any other topic you can find here. To see why it may be a good idea, also read the endorsements I got.

Definition, effects and causes of Intensive Parenting

Overparenting hurts everybody, in and outside the family. And the worst part is, for no good reason at all.

The default way to raise kids for most contemporary parents with enough money and worries to spend is aptly called overparenting, or “Intensive Parenting”. Just like the road to hell, it is paved with sincere, good intentions, but way too often leads to dark places, or at least results that weren’t really worth their toll: I’m talking of those impressive but hollow, short-lived resumes that won’t guarantee lasting success, even if they were built by relentless nagging, parents intrusions and deprivation (for both children and parents!) of the experiences that would make the right impacts.

What causes Intensive Parenting is mostly loneliness and fear. Intensive Parenting is a reaction to being alone in an increasing inequal world, and pushed to remain ignorant of what the real purpose of schooling and education is.

Intensive Parenting is what gets parents in debt to fill their childrens’ lives with needlessly turbocharged schooling, and expensive but ultimately oppressive activities for their “future”, instead of, say, sending them to the nearest public park to play as they want, but spending 100 times less, through a parents cooperative, to pay supervisors of those parks. Or lobbying together to have their city administration do the same.

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Intensive parenting, which is good for GDP and little else, is just one of the unavoidable consequences - and goals - of one sad reality: almost every adult alive today has been groomed to be alone, to WANT to be alone and to only consider solutions for loneliness and safety that come with a price tag, the higher the better. Ending this state of things to get happy kids from happy, debt-free parents is possible, even if doing so is simple and cheap enough to feel terribly uncool (for who keeps listening to the wrong pressures, of course).

What schools are REALLY for, and what to demand from them

Contrarily to what most people are still indoctrinated to believe, the purpose of grade school, and to a non-negligible extent also of Colleges and Universities, is NOT to prepare children to get a great job. Getting prepared to do a job is the purpose of professional training, which is something else entirely and the more is kept separate from school the better. This was always true, and is even truer in an age when everybody and their chatbot keep making claims like “most jobs of tomorrow don’t exist yet, buy something to prepare your kids for them”.

The purpose of school is to form human beings that can reason by themselves, want to do it and do have the right culture to do it right. There is plenty of official reports and anecdotes, for example here, here and here, that too many students arrive at college age lacking basic notions and skills they should have mastered in primary school.

This is important because lacking certain basic skills means, for example, being incapable of making certain calculations or quantitative estimates quickly without any technological help. But being like that means being much easier to fool by whatever politician shouts louder than all the others. It means being incapable of understanding how one’s Government actually works, and of being skeptical only when it does make sense to do so.

In practice, this means that the best primary schools may be those who don’t make parents waste money and stress on tons of more or less fashionable tech and extra activities, but make every child master skills like:

  • basic math by mind (ever noticed how many youngsters can’t figure out if they are getting the right change at the cash register, or if some chart is flawed?)

  • age-appropriate, but always deep, high quality reading and writing practice

  • real ability to retrieve, organize, rate and generally manage information (ever noticed how much time many youngsters waste on scrolling through their pictures or other digital documents, because they never learned how to tag and sort them in folders?)

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Leave schools to kids and teachers. A parent’s job is something else.

The knowledge outlined above is essential. Once it is granted, even if the purpose of school and college were to train students to want increasingly precarious jobs whose only guarantee would be hustle culture, what they would need most to succeed would never be grades or certificates. It would be things like real self-reliance, adaptability, critical thinking, being good team players...

Those are the skills that are and will remain the most valuable in every workplace and beyond workplaces, for example in dating

Those are the skills that cannot be replaced by any AI, are often lacking in traditional education and are quite hard to acquire in any activity, no matter how fashionable and expensive, where the child is continuously supervised and prevented from failing.

And finally, those are the skills that parents must aim to cultivate in their children. Care about them, and school grades will take care of themselves, and even if they’ll be much lower than you’d like, it won’t really hurt them.

Consequently, the main priorities of everybody aiming to be a happy parent of future happy adult should be things like:

Leave school and grades to kids and teachers. Yes, I already said that, but it’s crucial.

Make the kids know and live the importance of Cooperation, Well Being, Free Time, and how they are linked. Avoid like the plague getting kids and parents alike drown in expensive, life-sucking, toxically competitive activities, from “travel sports” to anything (choruses, learning music, theater, whatever...) whose common core is increasing pressures even most adults couldn’t bear for years. The right amount of boredom stimulates creativity (and real success later in life) much more than any course, for free.

Reject both infantilization and adultification. These days, market and political forces (that also act through Intensive Parenting!) deliberately blur the limits between generations, pushing adults to be imbeciles in pursuit of eternal but false youth, kids to be adults and both groups to never really be “together”. The system and peer-pressure push parents to make kids dress, behave, spend and consume like adults, years before it would be sane but never on their own which would often be healthier.

Foster independence. For 99.9999% of human history, the only people who were always watched by an adult were inmates. Today, instead, parents are supposed to make kids run, spend and struggle like adults but... only and always (because it’s good for “the economy”) as babies. That is, under perpetual, strict supervision of an adult professional (see “travel sports above”). The only thing kids can, no: must handle alone (because, again, the economy) is to get lost into worlds not even actual adults know how to navigate sanely. Do the opposite. It’s getting finally obvious that personal smartphones before 14/15 years old were a huge mistake, so don’t repeat it. For everything else, leave the kids alone. This does not mean to let them do whatever they damn please. It means show them what to do, help them to prepare for it, and then let them do it themselves. In case you missed it, there is at least one way to do it that’s been field-tested worldwide for 120 years now and (when done right) is as good and life changing as the first day.

If you don’t get this joke, the explanation is in the last picture. Image source: Reddit.

Concrete advice to functional, happy human beings in the 21st-century

YOU sure YOU don’t want to have kids for whatever reason? NO PROBLEM AT ALL, but please keep reading. It’s in your interest too. If you do want kids instead let me say, as a father of three...

The previous paragraph was about the high-level goals. Let’s get practical now.

  1. Do have kids as soon as possible! I do NOT think young couples without any income should just go and have a baby. I say that if you are a young adult in 2026, it’s quite likely that 10 or 15 years from now you will still have the same job insecurity of your first summer job. With such perspectives, if you do want kids, waiting till you’re 35 or older is NOT smarter than having them now. Quite the opposite actually. Have kids when YOUR parents are still energetic enough to help. Have kids when it guarantees that when you’ll be 35 they will already go to school, buy groceries, cook their own meals, do their homework, help their grandparents... all by themselves, while you secure some paid gig for the next quarter.

  2. Did you notice I said “kidS”, plural? If you want to have kids, do have more than one. It’s a blessing for them and the best method there is to be sure that you’ll only spend money on parenting for stuff that really matters, including partnering with other parents to share the costs for “playground supervisors”. Heck, you may spend less with two kids than with one that would make it harder to resist to temptations.

  3. Relax. Parenting is not a problem. Don’t be scared to have kids. There are reasons to be scared, but the only one that matters is not having them with the right partner. You don’t need to be everybody everywhere, every moment, and if you did you’d almost surely do more harm than good. Kids will grow up as the beings THEY were born to be, no matter what you do. Overprotection is the mother of stress. Just relax and enjoy the ride.

  4. Never make your kids live or reboot YOUR life, never make THEIR lives yours. Also, leave their teachers alone. I still remember a parents meeting where one father harshly criticized a teacher because “I really don’t understand how WE (=son AND father!) got such a low grade at the last test” then turned to the other parents and asked “don’t you agree? I know you got really low grades too!”. My wife and I almost laughed, then answered “WE??? We got out of schools twenty years ago. Our son is the one who just got a low grade, NOT us, so it’s him and the teacher who must work out what to do next!”

  5. On the same note: boycott every online gradebook that notifies you in real time of all your kid grades and assignments. The sane way for both you and your kids to learn about that stuff is to raise your kids so THEY tell you all their grades, good or bad. That’s what foster self-esteem and responsibility, not being greeted by “why did you got a D???” the moment they enter home. For the same reason... unless there are actual, serious medical reasons, never spend a dime on preventative private tutoring of any kind. What kids must really learn from homework is to take responsibility of their actions and to love to always do their best for real, that is by themselves, low grades be damned. Preventative tutoring is the school equivalent of doping in sports. It just hides problems until it doesn’t, and it’s addictive.

  6. Have the right aspirations for your kids: if you worry about their future jobs, don’t forget that opportunities for people who learn basic trades that pay well and can’t be off-shored will increase. In any case, if what matters is soft, not quantifiable skills, why chase every possible certification or trophy of quantifiable activities since kindergarten? Why, when every scientist or doctor with a grip of reality is shouting from the rooftops that we need to just stop and smell the roses?

  7. The sooner the simpler may be the main rule, when basic life skills like good manners and sensible self-discipline are concerned: teaching a toddler not to be rude or regular sleeping habits, which are hugely important, is exponentially easier than trying to do it just four or five years later. Never fall for "child-led" parenting like this.

  8. Read to your kids. Do it everyday, seriously: No matter what people selling video and AI assistants say, 99% of the knowledge everybody should learn as soon as possible is text. This does not negate the educational value of, e.g. video clips. But like it or not, it’s text that still rules the world and will continue to do so, and the only way to master it is to become avid readers (and possibly decent writers too). Therefore... Read to your babies and children, everyday, and let them SEE YOU reading on your own, because that is by far the largest motivating factor in making children love reading. I get sad every time I visit someone’s house that is better than mine, more decorated, newer, etc.. but without bookshelves. More on the value of reading and writing is here and here.

  9. Just say NO to personal smartphones until 14/15 years old. Just say no because, for all the reasons I already explained at length here, here and here, it’s hugely easier and cheaper than any other “solution” to protect children from social media, online predators, overexposure, toxic peer pressure and, last but not least, datafication: as things stand today, the difference between us and the humans in the Matrix pods is only that we are plugged to provide data, not energy. All the real benefits and opportunities of digital education and access are still available with non-portable computers.

  10. Last but not least, cooperate with other parents to have all your kids be alone together. Because, even if micromanaging your kid's life did made sense in principle, you could do that or ask for community help with child care - "but you can’t have both".

(I should have probably added some thoughts about all the other “parentings”: gentle, permissive, authoritarian, what else? But this post is already long. Ask for a follow-up on those issues, if interested)

Please share this advice as much as you can, in and outside Substack! Thanks from stressed kids worldwide!

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The part for those who do NOT want to have kids

At this point in time, having kids or concretely supporting people who want to have them solves more real problems than it creates, for everybody. First, every society needs enough people of DIFFERENT generations to survive without going mad, and even to restore the natural world, if that is your main concern. Promises of home robots assisting every lonely elder are a fraud, and even if they or any other tech-first solution were real they would drive us mad, eventually. Last but not least, both overpopulation and fears of ethnic replacements are almost non-issues where we actually are now.

The end of overpopulation is already happening quite fast, it is just not evenly distributed yet. If you worry about ethnic replacement instead: that’s stuff that happens because of other stuff that happened, or did not happen one or two generation ago. Demography is the science that tells you what you should have done thirty years ago - e.g. support famiuly welfare in your country or birth control in depeloping countries - to get the output you’d like to get next year. Trying to undo certain phenomena in an electoral cycle or two is like demanding that the last three Soccer World Cups had different winners. Yes, that’s exactly what many Italians would like now, but what happened cannot un-happen:

Keynes said that in the long run we’re all dead. Demography says that everybody is replaced in the long run, before they realize it. If replacement put in motion decades ago is finally getting visible, the only human and feasible thing that’s left is to manage it in order to minimize social attrition, unrest and multiple ghettos.

Back to having kids now: YOU do not want to have children? That’s cool. Seriously. Only people who really want to have kids should have them. All the others, however, should always lobby for pro-children policies anyway. By “pro-family policies” I mean policies that make it as easy, REALLY easy as possible, for people who do want to have kids, to have as many kids as possible. And I deliberately say “pro-family”, not “pro-life”, because pro-life debates are too often only about birth control, which I have no intention to discuss here. Just support pro-family policies, because it won’t make overpopulation continue. It will just produce societies worth living in, because they will be younger, much more cohesive, and much more willing to help all their members.

Chess knights needs enough space to move. So do your kids, together with the freedom to choose which way to jump. Image source: Kidchess.com

Pluralistic: Quinn Slobodian and Ben Tarnoff's "Muskism: A Guide for the Perplexed" (21 Apr 2026)

✇Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
By: Cory Doctorow
21 April 2026 at 15:18


Today's links


The Harpercollins cover for Quinn Slobodian and Ben Tarnoff's 'Muskism: A Guide for the Perplexed.'

Quinn Slobodian and Ben Tarnoff's "Muskism: A Guide for the Perplexed" (permalink)

Quinn Slobodian and Ben Tarnoff's Muskism: A Guide for the Perplexed seeks to describe the ideology that gave rise to Elon Musk, the social forces that gave rise to that ideology, and the terrible future that ideology seeks to bring about:

https://www.harpercollins.com/products/muskism-quinn-slobodianben-tarnoff?variant=43838135402530

The book's starting point is that "Muskism" isn't merely the things Musk says, believes and does. It's the ideology that coalesces around him, from the people in his wake and the people he follows. Just as Henry Ford neither defined "Fordism" nor precisely practiced it, "Muskism" is centered on Elon Musk, but it's not Elon Musk's creation.

So what is Muskism? To answer this question, Slobodian and Tarnoff enumerate the factors and influences that produced Musk himself. There's apartheid, with its "rational" system of technocratic authoritarianism, which blended together a life of luxury and plenty (for white settlers), brutal surveillance and state violence (for the Black majority) and fascist control over speech (for everyone), combined with a meat-grinder draft that saw young men of Musk's age being called up to suppress liberation uprisings.

Peak apartheid coincided with peak personal computing, the moment where PCs (and then, modems) were getting cheaper and faster, propagating like mushrooms, offering a young Musk access to a broad world outside of the fascist bubble of South Africa, inspiring global ambitions in Musk.

Closer to home, there's Musk's family: his grandfather, a grandiose and vicious white supremacist who moved to South Africa from Canada because of his love for apartheid and racial hierarchy. There's Musk's father, a violent and abusive fool.

Muskism is also a new variant on techno-libertarianism. Traditional techno-libertarianism seeks to dismantle the state – or better yet, exit from the state, in the manner of an Ayn Rand hero. Techno-libertarianism is intimately bound up with settler colonialism, ever on the hunt for an "empty land" (terra nullius) that can be settled without committing the original sin of expropriation, the gravest offense in a religion organized around the total sanctity of private property:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/06/14/this-way-to-the-egress/#terra-nullius

Muskism doesn't seek to exit the state, it seeks to colonize and control it. Long before DOGE, Musk was playing the organs of the state to his own tune, securing massive contracts and subsidies for his solar and rocketry businesses, relying on the massive, deep-pocketed government to keep his businesses afloat.

Obviously (DOGE!), Muskism also seeks to dismantle the state, but only the parts of it that can be transferred to Musk's own private hands. Muskism is about big government…for Musk, but not for you. It embodies that important conservative value summarized in Wilhoit's Law:

There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect.

https://crookedtimber.org/2018/03/21/liberals-against-progressives/#comment-729288

This is Musk through and through – a man who demands the right to call innocent strangers "pedo guy" without legal consequence; and also wields the power of the state to shutter businesses that boycott his platform because of its shitty practices:

https://www.findlaw.com/legalblogs/courtside/elon-musk-sues-advertisers-who-boycott-x-under-anti-trust-laws/

Musk grew up on science fiction novels and weaves stfnal tropes through his offerings (for example, calling his chatbot "Grok"). There's no shortage of reactionary politics in science fiction, but Musk doesn't confine his sf-inspired cosmology to reactionary literature. He's famously very fond of the Wachowskis' "Matrix" movies, and leans heavily into the metaphor of the Matrix in explaining his interest in wiring people directly into computers, in characterizing opposing political beliefs as "mind viruses," and in calling his political enemies "NPCs":

https://pluralistic.net/2025/08/18/seeing-like-a-billionaire/#npcs

But Musk's relationship to this metaphor differs in a subtle and important way from the right's "Red Pill" rhetoric. Musk doesn't want to break out of the Matrix – he wants to control the Matrix. He wants to decide which opinions you're allowed to see and discuss (because "most people have weak firewalls for bad ideas"), he wants to beam ideas directly into your neural link, and he wants to abolish any form of workplace democracy, conquering the world with South African baasskap (boss-ism):

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

Throughout this slim volume, Slobodian and Tarnoff tease these strains of thought out of Musk's deeds and utterances, and in the systems that he has built or colonized through acquisition. The authors are offering more than a psychoanalysis, though – they're surfacing the material basis for Muskism, the benefits it delivers to its adherents, and the victories it has racked up.

They reveal the method in Musk's chaotic and bullying management style, and recount the times Musk has successfully shattered sclerotic processes to make real breakthroughs, especially in aerospace. You'd be hard pressed to read these passages without feeling some grudging admiration.

Muskism gets stuff done…sometimes. At a cost. A high cost. Tarnoff and Slobodian count that cost, identify who pays it, and conjure up the world in which those costs continue to mount for all of us.

It's a chilling vision, a Torment Nexus dystopia run by someone who thinks cyberpunk was a suggestion, not a warning.

Hey look at this (permalink)


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

Object permanence (permalink)

#15yrsago US, EU want to delay copyright treaty to help blind people for 3-5 years https://web.archive.org/web/20110423170607/http://keionline.org/node/1114

#15yrsago Is sugar a poison? https://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/17/magazine/mag-17Sugar-t.html?_r=1&pagewanted=all

#15yrsago More watch-part motorcycles https://ummaisoumenos.blogspot.com/2008/11/miniaturas-fantsticasbikesfeitas-de.html

#15yrsago Seeds: comic-book memoir of father’s cancer is moving, sweet https://memex.craphound.com/2011/04/19/seeds-comic-book-memoir-of-fathers-cancer-is-moving-sweet/

#10yrsago Something New: frank, comedic, romantic memoir of a wedding in comic form https://memex.craphound.com/2016/04/19/something-new-frank-comedic-romantic-memoir-of-a-wedding-in-comic-form/

#10yrsago Ben and Jerry arrested at Democracy Spring demonstration in DC https://web.archive.org/web/20160419173913/https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/co-founders-of-ben-and-jerrys-arrested-at-us-capitol/ar-BBrW5tb?li=BBnb7Kz

#10yrsago Competing construction companies stage a bulldozer fight in a busy street https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UrtnIImGipg

#10yrsago Chicago Police Accountability Task Force Report: racism, corruption, and a “broken system” https://chicagopatf.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/04/PATF_Final_Report_4_13_16-1.pdf

#5yrsago Facebook's tonsils https://pluralistic.net/2021/04/19/tonsilitis/#mod-traum

#1yrago Against transparency https://pluralistic.net/2025/04/19/gotcha/#known-to-the-state-of-california-to-cause-cancer

Upcoming appearances (permalink)

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


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

Recent appearances (permalink)


A grid of my books with Will Stahle covers..

Latest books (permalink)


A cardboard book box with the Macmillan logo.

Upcoming books (permalink)

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

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

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

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

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


Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources:

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

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

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

  • A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING

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