BRUSSELS — New powers proposed for the EU’s border police Frontex to monitor social media pose a threat to free speech, European lawmakers and civil society groups have told POLITICO.

The EU Commission’s proposal Tuesday for a major revamp of the coast and border patrol agency included a broad and explicit mandate to monitor social media for information that aids or encourages illegal border crossings into the European Union.

Social democratic Italian lawmaker Brando Benifei told POLITICO it was “legitimate” for authorities to remove online advertisements for human smuggling: “But a broad social media surveillance mandate goes much further, placing online speech under a border agency’s watch.”

After a 2019 monitoring tender with similar powers was revoked over criticism about privacy violations, Benifei said “the Commission now proposes copying ICE’s invasive online tracking,” referencing the much-criticized surveillance tactics of the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency.

Under the EU proposal, Frontex would set up an internal structure to monitor social media and report to the platform in question the content it says is facilitating illegal entry to EU countries. This comes as the Commission is seeking to double the agency’s budget for the next seven years and vastly expand its powers to deport people.

The EU already has several structures that facilitate the exchange of information between civil society, social media platforms and authorities when it comes to disinformation campaigns or illegal content. These include a rapid response system on disinformation campaigns under the Digital Services Act (DSA), the EU’s landmark law regulating digital platforms, as well as a recently established democratic resilience center.

Policing content

Brussels must tread a careful balance not to police individual pieces of content, especially given criticism from civil society activists that it is trying to become the arbiter of truth online. The legality of content is set by countries, which assign their authorities or civil society to monitor the platforms for problematic postings to be flagged to the platforms to be taken down.

Frontex would apply for trusted flagger status under the DSA, which gives priority to the content it flags to social media platforms. Entities that apply for this status have to demonstrate expertise and independence to a national authority, which grants them special status.

“The DSA’s trusted flagger program was never conceived for police forces to circumvent due process when assessing the legality of people’s online expression,” said Jan Penfrat, senior policy advisor at civil society group EDRi.

The Commission’s initial communication suggested Frontex “will be acting” as such an entity, which EU tech chief Henna Virkkunen later clarified meant they would apply for it. That application would have to be reviewed by a national authority to check Frontex’s independence and expertise in that area.

Polish right-wing MEP Piotr Müller told POLITICO that the “mandate must be precise” in focusing on criminal networks. “Frontex should go after smugglers and human traffickers, not police opinions about migration.” Müller is among those that criticize the DSA as policing free speech online.

Executive Vice President Virkkunen announced the news at a meeting Tuesday of signatories of the DSA’s code of conduct on disinformation, some of whom are trusted flaggers. Questions around the implications of the measures for freedom of speech and assembly came up in the closed-door meeting. According to two attendees, Renate Nikolay, deputy director general of DG CONNECT, the Commission’s tech department, tried to assuage the free-speech concerns.

Other lawmakers took a positive, yet reserved, stance towards the changes in Frontex’s mandate. The EU’s migration authorities “need the tools to respond to the changing threats at Europe’s borders, including smugglers using social media to spread lies and promote dangerous crossings,” which can include “better monitoring and information-sharing,” Regina Doherty, a center-right MEP from Ireland told POLITICO.

But “the priority now is to get the detail right so authorities can act quickly within a clear legal framework, and platforms take responsibility for illegal content,” she pointed out.

Austrian center-right MEP Andreas Schwab said that “social media clearly is becoming more and more a concern, but we should not have too many tools – let’s make use of the DSA.”

Another MEP who knows the agency well was more blunt. Fabrice Leggeri, a former director of Frontex who hails from the far-right French National Rally party, said that the new powers amounted to an “attempt to censor freedom of speech in Europe” by Commission President Ursula Von der Leyen.

The Commission didn’t respond to POLITICO’s repeated requests for comment on Frontex’s expertise in this domain.

Max Griera contributed to this report.

America is a politically polarized country. But one topic has both the left and the right in full agreement: Flock cameras suck. No one likes the government spying on them.

To make matters worse, police and 911 staff enjoy using Flock cameras to stalk their exes. — Read the rest

The post Police and 911 staff have used Flock cameras to stalk their exes appeared first on Boing Boing.

PARIS — The French government explored ways of blocking social networks during last Saturday’s protests, two people familiar with the plan told POLITICO.

In the week leading up to Oct. 24, the French interior ministry was in touch with telecom operators to explore ways of cutting access to social networks or even to mobile internet in specific areas to prevent rioters from coordinating, according to one government official from the Prime Minister’s office and one employee of a telecom company.

The push culminated in Prime Minister Sébastien Lecornu directly asking French telecom operators to be ready to block access to TikTok, Instagram, Snapchat and X, in a letter revealed by French digital outlet Blast, which first reported on the government’s request.

Contacted by POLITICO, officials from Lecornu’s office, the technology ministry and the interior ministry did not deny the move nor the letter’s existence.

The government feared that the scenes of violence seen on Oct. 17 could repeat or escalate on the following weekend — a concern that did not materialize, as far fewer incidents were recorded on Oct. 24.

“What they wanted, above all, was to block the communication channels that allow gangs to meet up and organize,” said the employee of a telecommunications provider, who was granted anonymity to speak freely.

The move, however, would have also prevented peaceful protesters from communicating as well. Blocking access to social networks in a targeted area, such as a specific neighborhood, is not technically possible, while cutting access to mobile internet would cause major disruptions to other key services such as mobile payments, security-surveillance devices and emergency communications.

The government also considered a less radical solution that would disable geolocation display features “to prevent gatherings of people who don’t know each other, for example,” according to the official from the prime minister’s office.

Other limitations on social media access are being discussed in parliament as part of the debate on the so-called “who breaks pays” bill, which would hold people who “knowingly took part” in a riot financially responsible — whether or not they committed property damage themselves.

The same bill would require platforms to remove within 24 hours content that incites physical or sexual assault, theft, destruction, or property damage, “when such content is likely to cause a serious disturbance to public order” and within one hour content that encourages insurrection.

Other lawmakers are proposing measures ranging from tracking troublemakers via algorithmic video surveillance to penalizing online marketplaces that fail to prevent the sale of stolen goods.

LONDON — U.K. Chancellor John Healey is set to deliver an unexpected increase in defense spending at his first budget on Wednesday, as Britain strains to reach its NATO commitment to spend 3.5% of GDP on defense by 2035.

Healey — who quit as defense secretary in the dying days of Keir Starmer’s government over a funding row — hopes he can show how Britain will start to reach that target now that he’s safely ensconced in the powerful Treasury.

Until last week, it was assumed that the top finance minister would defer decisions on ramping up funding until next year’s multi-year, government-wide spending review. So Wednesday’s move could represent an early win for the Ministry of Defence in Prime Minister Andy Burnham’s new government.

But with regular warnings in the press and in public about Britain’s unpreparedness for conflict, there’s much more to watch for beyond Wednesday’s headline hike. POLITICO walks through the seven key details and defense industry demands.

1) How will Healey play the numbers game?

Healey’s government-rocking resignation back in June was explicitly over a refusal in Downing Street and the Treasury to commit to spending 3% of GDP on defense by 2030.

Now that he is leading the Treasury, Healey is under pressure to deliver on that. But even that keeps Britain shy of the bigger NATO aim.

On existing plans, U.K. defense spending is set to rise to 2.7% next year and remain flat until 2030. Healey’s first move will be to fill the £4.7 billion black hole in defense funding in the Defence Investment Plan — meant to overhaul the armed forces and improve readiness — published earlier this year.

More money is now expected beyond this, briefed to the media in recent days as a “down payment” towards spending 3% on defense by 2030.

But two government officials, granted anonymity like others in this article to discuss internal thinking, said the pathway to meeting NATO’s larger, 3.5% target will only come in next year’s spending review, not the budget.

Even on the smaller measure, the margins for the chancellor are tight, with government spending rules and debt targets leaving little room for maneuver. Mike Martin, an MP on the House of Commons Defense Committee, told POLITICO: “They have got themselves into a straitjacket over defense spending and none of this will be resolved before the next election. This is why I think an early general election is inevitable.”

2) Will the chancellor move to funnel private capital into defense?

Britain’s defense industry has long called for more direct government spending on domestic contracts. But the sector also wants more private capital flowing into U.K. firms, and will be looking to Healey to set the conditions.

The Financial Times reported last week that Healey will allocate £15.4 billion to the country’s National Wealth Fund and £5 billion to the British Business Bank — a share of which could end up with defense companies.

Two key details to watch here are whether the government claims this money counts towards its wider defense spending commitments, or whether any cash is allocated purely for defense firms. Potential reforms to and incentives for pools of private capital, such as pension funds and venture capital funds, to invest in defense would also be welcomed by the sector in this budget — but the industry may be left waiting.

One of the government officials cited above said that a Defence Finance and Investment Strategy is slated for December, with a Defense Investment Summit coming December 1.

3) Where does Healey stand on global defense team-ups?

On Sunday evening, the Treasury disclosed that it would not join the Canadian-led Defence, Security and Resilience Bank (DSRB) — a proposed multinational financial institution with its own AAA credit rating that aims to provide cheap loans for countries to invest in defense.

The U.K. had previously considered joining the bank, or merging it with its own separate initiative, the Multilateral Defence Mechanism (MDM) — a planned scheme for joint defense procurement, stockpiling and supply chains for member countries.

But a joint statement with Ottawa said that the institutions will now work in partnership.

The MDM currently has £400 million allocated from June’s Defence Investment Plan, while none of the other member nations — the Netherlands, Finland and Poland — have confirmed whether they have contributed capital to the project.

Now that uncertainty over Britain’s membership of the DSRB has gone, the government will be looking to flesh out its plans for its own MDM.

4) Can the chancellor slash energy and manufacturing costs?

Two industry figures told POLITICO that one of the biggest barriers to doing defense business in Britain — making it less attractive than other nations — is the country’s comparatively high energy costs.

However, slashing costs for energy-intensive industries, including the industrial base of the defense sector is expensive, and schemes aimed at reducing costs — such as the British Industrial Competitiveness Scheme – already exist. Measures reportedly under consideration this time around appear to focus more on reducing households’ energy costs than on supporting businesses.

A third industry figure predicted that ministers would not offer immediate support for business energy bills because “every possible option” for instant help “is too expensive.” But a defense industry investor said the Treasury is, however, looking at reducing the financial burden of machinery — which they said is a key issue for small firms wanting to ramp up production as part of the supply chain.

5) What does Buy British actually mean?

The government has been consulting with the defense sector and wider British industry over what exactly constitutes a British company under its plans to implement a new “Buy British” scheme.

The plan aims to bring together Andy Burnham’s pledges of re-industrialization and more evenly-spread growth across the country, and comes after the EU proposed its own Made in Europe procurement plan to try and boost the bloc’s own firms.

The push is also designed to build sovereign capability, which has become increasingly important to Britain amid fears that the U.S. is an unreliable ally. The recent row over Ukraine’s constrained access to the Starlink satellite system has exacerbated such concerns.

Early suggestions indicate the government will take a broad definition — in a potential boost for multinational defense giants. Rupert Pearce, the Ministry of Defence’s National Armaments Director, told a recent industry event that, from his perspective, French defense company Thales, which has a headquarters in the U.K., “is a British company.”

6) Will Healey move further on AI and hybrid defenses?

Ahead of the budget, Healey’s Treasury announced a series of AI-specific policies with potential defense applications.

These include £165 million for AI-driven detection and surveillance of biological threats — a move first teased by the boss of Britain’s MI5 intelligence service.

The government will also put £60 million into its Sovereign AI fund to invest in British tech companies, including autonomous systems, robotics, and advanced manufacturing.

Watch to see whether the chancellor waves around more promises of boosting British resilience to malign actors on Wednesday.

7) Will Donald Trump even notice?

Britain’s comparatively slow progress on defense spending has already caught the eye of the Trump administration.

Warren Stephens, the U.S. ambassador to the U.K., warned earlier this year that Britain must make “sustained investment” in defense, rather than focusing on “other spending priorities,” and warned against “backloading” defense spending to a later date. 

A lack of a meaningful movement on defense spending — or at least eye-catching claims from opposition parties that Healey has fumbled it — could grab the attention of Trump’s team this time around. The timing is tricky: the Pentagon is currently undertaking a review of American military assets stationed in mainland Europe and the U.K.

BERLIN — As she was climbing the ranks of far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) a decade ago, Alice Weidel privately denounced one of her party’s most influential figures for using racist arguments and Nazi-era language, and sought to have him expelled.

Years later, she praised his leadership, said a bid to ban him from the party was “exaggerated” and that he was suitable for a federal cabinet position.

That striking reversal emerges from a massive leak of internal AfD communications, including emails in which Weidel condemned Björn Höcke, the party’s leader in the eastern state of Thuringia, and warned that extremists were driving away mainstream conservative voters.

The revelations come from more than 420,000 emails and roughly 48,000 documents released by hackers this week, providing a rare glimpse inside Germany’s largest far-right party. An anonymous spokesperson for the hackers told Die Zeit the attack was not “politically” motivated “in the sense that [they] support another party,” but that they published the allegedly stolen material to promote “transparency and public accountability.”

The AfD confirmed the breach, saying hackers had attacked a hosting provider in late September. It condemned the leak as “an attack on the German party system and therefore on democracy itself.”

WELT, which, like POLITICO, is part of the Axel Springer Global Reporters Network, examined emails from one of Weidel’s accounts between 2015 and 2017, when she was a relatively junior figure in the party’s leadership.

Asked by WELT to explain the contrast between her warnings at the time and her present position, Weidel declined to comment through a spokesperson.

A spokesperson for Höcke did not respond to a request for comment sent by POLITICO on Saturday.

‘Deeply problematic’

The messages seen by WELT show a politician deeply alarmed by the growing influence of Höcke, who championed an ethnically defined German nationalism drawing on ideas associated with the Nazi era.

In October 2015, Weidel warned colleagues that the party’s proximity to Pegida, an anti-Islam street movement, and the neo-Nazi National Democratic Party (now known as The Homeland) was alienating the conservative voters it needed to attract.

“In the west we are losing the mainstream conservative electorate completely through our proximity to Pegida, and to the NPD in the east,” she wrote.

Weidel also strongly pushed back on a speech from Höcke that same year, where he contrasted a “life-affirming African expansionary type” with a “self-negating European placeholder type,”

“This is deeply problematic, because the reasoning here is racial. It is fundamentally wrong,” she wrote to the AfD’s federal executive board. “And please, spare me the usual ‘that’s-not-how-it-was-meant.’ I can’t hear it any more.”

In another message, she warned that extremists were deliberately blurring the boundary between the AfD and neo-Nazi politics, driving mainstream conservatives away “in horror.”

She also feared that Höcke’s rhetoric could bring the party under scrutiny by Germany’s Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution, its domestic intelligence service monitoring threats to the constitutional order.

“Höcke’s statements alone, and the use of the term Volksgemeinschaft” — the Nazi-era concept of an ethnic national community — “are enough to land the AfD in that report,” she wrote, referring to the intelligence service’s annual assessment. “Some in our party seem in a hurry to drive the AfD, deliberately or not, into oblivion.”

In May 2025, the agency classified the AfD as a “confirmed right-wing extremist organisation”, citing, among other things, an exclusionary concept of the German nation. The classification, which grants authorities broader surveillance powers, was provisionally suspended by a court in Cologne last February.

‘Wake up, for once’

The leak also features emails about a speech Höcke gave in January 2017 to the AfD’s youth wing, attacking Germany’s culture of Holocaust remembrance.

Höcke described Berlin’s Holocaust memorial as a “memorial of shame,” criticized the country’s efforts to confront its Nazi past and demanded a “180-degree turn in the politics of memory.”

Weidel herself brought a motion to expel him from the AfD.

The motion, obtained by WELT, accused Höcke of using “vocabulary from Adolf Hitler” and endorsing the “Führerprinzip” — the Nazi doctrine of absolute leadership authority. It described him as displaying an “affinity in essence with National Socialism.”

In an internal message, Weidel urged colleagues to recognize the implications of Höcke’s language. “Wake up, for once,” she wrote, warning of the “explosive force of the double meanings” in his speech.

As Weidel prepared to seek the party’s nomination as lead candidate for the 2017 federal election, the leaked correspondence shows that she blocked the recording of her own motion against Höcke in the minutes of a party leadership meeting, arguing that further controversy would damage the party.

Höcke subsequently acknowledged that his speech had been a mistake and asked the leadership to withdraw the move against him.

Weidel publicly welcomed his letter as a “positive signal” and called for an end to the infighting.

Within weeks, she had secured her nomination as the AfD’s lead candidate. Asked whether she would campaign alongside Höcke, she replied: “Yes, of course. We are two parts of one party.”

Indeed, the emails suggest that Weidel’s private misgivings had not entirely disappeared. In May 2017, she condemned an AfD election poster featuring a pregnant woman and the slogan “‘New Germans?’ We’ll make our own” as “an NPD poster,” in a reference to the neo-Nazi party.

Today, Weidel no longer publicly criticizes Höcke. She has praised his leadership in Thuringia and even suggested him for a federal cabinet position.

“We get along very well and we got to know each other over the years,” she told BILD in a 2025 interview. When she was asked whether Höcke was suitable for a federal cabinet position, she simply replied: “Yes.”

When asked in February 2025 about the 2017 expulsion proceedings against him that were backed by Weidel, Höcke called it “old news.”

“We got to know each other and came to appreciate each other. Alice Weidel was the right lead candidate and did a top job,” Höcke told WELT at the time.

The Axel Springer Global Reporters Network harnesses the resources of the company’s newsrooms to publish ambitious scoops, investigations, interviews, opinion pieces and analysis. It allows journalists — including those from POLITICO, The Telegraph, Business Insider, WELT, BILD, Onet and Fakt — to collaborate on major stories for an international audience of hundreds of millions across platforms: online, print, TV and audio.

A Serbian prosecutor investigating alleged corruption surrounding a Trump real estate project in Belgrade was targeted with Israeli-made Pegasus spyware after speaking out about political interference and abuses of power, according to research made public Monday.

Rade Bajić, a member of Serbia’s Public Prosecutor’s Office for Organized Crime, is reported to be the latest target identified in a growing spyware scandal that has engulfed the country’s political opposition, civil society and institutions.

The research is the latest by Toronto University’s Citizen Lab in collaboration with Serbian digital rights organization, SHARE Foundation, including the discovery that Bajić received an Apple Threat Notification iMessage on Aug. 13.

The spyware revelation comes amid mounting controversy over plans to redevelop the former Yugoslav military headquarters in Belgrade into a luxury Trump Tower skyscraper. The project, associated with Jared Kushner, U.S. President Donald Trump’s son-in-law, has faced allegations of political interference and irregularities surrounding the removal of the site’s protected heritage status.

Bajić’s targeting follows revelations in September that at least 14 people in Serbia, including student activists and opposition figures, had received warnings indicating they may have been targeted with sophisticated spyware. Researchers at Toronto University’s Citizen Lab confirmed a Pegasus infection in at least one case. 

“In Serbia, spyware surveillance has steadily expanded from civil society and journalists to student activists, politicians and now university and judicial representatives,” said Andrijana Ristić, a policy advisor at SHARE Foundation. “This escalation is fueled by perceived impunity and state inaction, even in cases where criminal complaints have been filed.”

Another prominent figure caught up in the surveillance scandal is Vladan Đokić, rector of the University of Belgrade, whose phone was infected with Pegasus, according to the same report.

Đokić has emerged as a prominent figure in Serbia’s protest movement after refusing to facilitate a government crackdown on student demonstrators. He has faced sustained pressure from authorities, including a police raid on his university offices on March 31, during which computers and servers were reportedly seized.

Until September, Đokić was also frequently mentioned as a potential leader of the student-backed electoral list ahead of Serbia’s planned Oct. 25 parliamentary snap elections.

The identity of those responsible for deploying Pegasus against Bajić and Đokić has not been established.

“NSO has spent a decade claiming to turn over a new leaf each time an abuse surfaces. But there is no hiding the truth: Pegasus is a technology for repression,” said John Scott-Railton, a senior researcher at Citizen Lab. “It’s no accident that people standing up for freedom in the face of corruption keep getting hacked with NSO’s products.”

An OpenAI engineer and Saudi national faces criminal charges after plugging an audio recorder into an executive conference room's TV set. Crudely wrapped in toilet paper, the device was soon found, and after security footage was reviewed, so was the culprit. — Read the rest

The post OpenAI engineer allegedly installed spy device in executive conference room appeared first on Boing Boing.

With police abuse of Flock surveillance cameras often making news and backlash growing against the rapid deployment of ALPR (Automated License Plate Readers) across the U.S., some cities are finding ways to make sure taxpayers know as little as possible. The Fort Worth suburb of North Richland Hills, reports The Texas Tribune, demanded $2.3 million to fulfill a public records request for information about its use of Flock cameras. — Read the rest

The post Texas city wants $2.3 million to release data on Flock use appeared first on Boing Boing.

Today's links

• Scrutinized: Pervert glasses vs the authentic self.
• Hey look at this: Delights to delectate.
• Object permanence: DRM-free in the UK; Maple-leaf roses; Italian Wikipedia shuts down; Vancouver's property speculator tax works; Ex-Soviet leftists launch "September"; "The Every"; Nielsen x Chinese internet; Get-a-cluevog; Cat EULA; Heart carafe; Millennials screwed; Apple's unlawful evil.
• Upcoming appearances: Virtual, South Bend, Hudson, Calgary, Winnipeg, Paris, OVancouver, Victoria, Ottawa, Kilkenny, Oxford, Montreal.
• Recent appearances: Where I've been.
• Latest books: You keep readin' em, I'll keep writin' 'em.
• Upcoming books: Like I said, I'll keep writin' 'em.
• Colophon: All the rest.

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Scrutinized (permalink)

We're repeatedly told that the killer app for pervert glasses – Meta's AI-enabled camera glasses and their imitators – is that they will remind you of someone's name and spare you the social awkwardness of not recognizing them.

I admit to finding this proposition very seductive. I'm mildly face-blind (I had two aunts I wasn't able to reliably tell apart until I was 12 or 13 and one of them changed her hair), and I meet a lot of people and often find myself incredibly embarrassed when I can't place someone that I know I'm acquainted with.

Actually, the emotion I feel when I don't recognize someone or can't place their name is worse than embarrassment: it's shame. I worry that my chronic inability to remember people's names/faces will make them feel like they're unimportant to me. And shame is such a shitty, gross emotion: it's the invasive thief of joy that shows up whenever things are bad for the purpose of making them worse.

If there were some way to confine pervert glasses to helping people remember names, I'd be all over them. But when it comes to actual, existing pervert-glasses, the main purpose is to covertly capture strangers and shame them. And when (not if) these pervert glasses get hooked up to facial recognition, they will become high-volume doxing factories that will reward the attention-hungry with viral fame.

We've built a society that offers infinite rewards to anyone who can put a name – and thus an identity – to anyone caught in public having an argument, picking their nose, slipping on ice, or eating with their mouth open. We're on the verge of democratizing only the worst part of celebrity: the pervasive hovering cameras that are always there to preserve and distribute your failures.

Last week on the 404 Media podcast, Joseph Cox spoke with Kashmir Hill about this, in an episode appropriately entitled "Meta's Pervert Glasses Are Going to End Privacy":

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aUFnQPtxJ9o

Hill wrote the definitive book on the modern history of facial recognition, Your Face Belongs To Us, which tells the story of Hoan Ton That, whose Clearview AI offers cops, millionaires and elites the power to instantly dox people based on billions of pictures:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/09/20/steal-your-face/#hoan-ton-that

In the podcast, Cox and Hill discuss the surveillance nightmare this represents. ICE and cops are already using facial recognition at scale, though it should be noted that these dragnets are incredibly poor value for money, as the British Transport Police discovered after subjecting millions of travelers to facial recognition in train stations, without catching a single suspect:

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/sep/29/trial-live-facial-recognition-cameras-london-stations-false-positive

But partway through the discussion, Cox and Hill switch from discussing "traditional" surveillance of the sort that has metastasized in the 25 years since 9/11) to a form of surveillance that's very different: the "content-creator" surveillance that mixes always-on cameras with facial recognition to dox and shame strangers for everyday transgressions, mistakes and embarrassments.

While this is certainly a kind of surveillance, I think it's better to call it scrutiny. It's something worse than the sense of being watched: it's the sense of being judged. Inducing this feeling of being judged has long been a (sociopathic) desire of wealthy and powerful people. It's the foundation of Bentham's "panopticon," a prison where prisoners can never tell if they're being watched, which is meant to induce a continuous performance of virtue:

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

Today, Bentham's heir is the odious Larry Ellison, the famously secretive billionaire, Trump crony and Oracle founder who goes to enormous lengths to prevent the public from finding out about his personal life. Ellison is also one of the most vocal proponents of mass surveillance. Larry Ellison has repeatedly called for the installation of ubiquitous, AI-backstopped surveillance for every (non-billionaire) person in the world, calling this "supervision":

Citizens will be on their best behavior, because we are constantly recording and reporting everything that’s going on.

https://futurism.com/the-byte/billionaire-constant-ai-surveillance

What Ellison's saying here is that most of us are fundamentally bad, and we need continuous scrutiny so that we are always haunted by the specter of judgment, which will keep us from yielding to our base selves.

In other words, for Ellison, our authentic selves are a problem to be solved. We refuse to behave in ways that make the world optimal for Ellison, so he will create a world of continuous scrutiny, judgment and punishment, and in that world, we will be so worried about being shamed that we will all suppress our authentic selves and don masks that are designed to Ellison's specifications.

Ellison is hardly unique in both treasuring his privacy while insisting that any private domain carved out by normal people will turn into a place where we indulge our most sinful impulses. Mark Zuckerberg long defended Facebook's "Real Names" policy by saying that anyone who presents different facets of themselves to different groups is "two-faced":

https://pluralistic.net/2021/07/15/three-wise-zucks-in-a-trenchcoat/

This is the same Mark Zuckerberg who bought two houses to either side of his place in San Francisco and expropriated vast tracts of land from their indigenous Hawai'an owners in order to create a privacy-preserving buffer zone around his own homes:

https://www.wired.com/story/mark-zuckerberg-secretive-hawaii-compound-burial-ground/

And it's the same Zuckerberg who expects the ex-Facebook executive Sarah Wynn-Williams to pay him $111m for revealing damning facts about how he runs his company:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/06/27/zuckerstreisand-2/#autodisparagement

It's the same Zuckerberg who flipped out when his sister accidentally posted a family photo to her public Facebook feed and it spread around the internet:

https://abc7news.com/archive/8933289/

And it's the same Zuckerberg who gave us pervert glasses (to opt out, just don't have a face).

Silicon Valley's most ardent privacy invaders are also the most ardent defenders of their own privacy. Ex-Google CEO Eric Schmidt liked to say, "If you have something that you don't want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn't be doing it in the first place":

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2009/12/google-ceo-eric-schmidt-dismisses-privacy

But when Cnet ran an article summarizing details of Schmidt's personal life that could be discovered by searching Google, he ordered a company-wide blacklist of Cnet reporters, which lasted for years:

https://www.cnet.com/tech/tech-industry/eric-schmidt-who-led-googles-transformation-into-a-tech-giant-has-left-the-company/

But Schmidt is an amateur at the game of "privacy for me, never for thee." The true master of the game is Peter Thiel, who secretly bankrolled a lawsuit against Gawker in order to destroy the news outlet in retaliation for outing him as gay (Thiel cofounded Palantir, one of the world's most prolific, shameless surveillance companies):

https://www.wired.com/story/ryan-holiday-conspiracy-peter-thiel-gawker-hulk-hogan/

It's tempting to see this all as mere hypocrisy, but I think it's something far weirder and more disturbing. These men understand completely that scrutiny is antithetical to living as your authentic self. They want to live as their authentic selves, and they want to stop us from living as our authentic selves.

A dive into the Epstein Files reveals the oligarchy's panic over #MeToo and the possibility that the private sins of the wealthy and powerful could become a matter of public knowledge. As Steve Bannon wrote to Epstein concerning #MeToo, "Make sure Woody sees this. Nobody safe":

https://www.theverge.com/tech/874721/epstein-thiel-musk-trump-metoo

Bannon promised Epstein that his culture war would set back #MeToo for a decade, and he is on the vanguard of the movement to silence rape and genocide survivors, and, of course, to force trans people out of public life. For the fascist international to live as their authentic self, it is necessary that we do not.

Scrutiny and shame are antithetical to authenticity, growth and happiness. That's true even when it's people we love subjecting us to a supervisory gaze. Ever notice how a roaring great time at a social gathering can go ice-cold in an instant, the minute someone decides to record the moment with their phone?

My worst moments as a parent – the ones that haunt me and shame me – are those moments when my young daughter was doing something that was right at the edge of her abilities, ferociously concentrating as she drew or played or read, and rather than give her the space to be vulnerable, to err in private and grow, I couldn't help but watch her. When she saw me watching her, the moment died and she moved on to something else.

Each of us needs a zone of imaginative and exertive autonomy, a place where we can screw up without being scrutinized and judged – let alone captured and publicized. Pervert glasses will supercharge the banal and destructive post-9/11 surveillance, sure – but more than that, they will be combined with facial recognition to dox and shame anyone and everyone who makes a public mistake.

Far from Larry Ellison's utopia of people on their "best behavior," this will be a world of inauthentic, stunted selves, a society of people who will never know the joy of finding out who we are and being those people.

---

Hey look at this (permalink)

• WinZapp_Python https://github.com/gabrielhhaber/WinZapp_python/

• The Last Days of the Danube Institute https://www.thedriftmag.com/the-last-days-of-the-danube-institute/

• Let South Africans jailbreak their way to digital sovereignty https://techcentral.co.za/jailbreak-digital-sovereignty-copyright-amendment-bill/286879/

• Mine My Phone https://www.backmarket.com/en-us/mine-my-phone

• Beautiful photos of Black and Brown people, for free https://nappy.co/

---

Object permanence (permalink)

#25yrsago Nielsen will measure Chinese web-traffic https://web.archive.org/web/20011107063612/http://www.bday.net/oct05/p05-051.htm

#25yrsago Fluevog's crowdsourced "open source" design competition assigns all rights in perpetuity to the company https://memex.craphound.com/2001/10/06/a-little-knowledge-is-a/

#20yrsago Cat with a EULA https://wendy.seltzer.org/blog/archives/2006/10/06/coming_soon_kitten_with_a_eula.html

#20yrsago HOWTO fight DRM in the UK https://www.openrightsgroup.org/blog/30-things-we-can-do-about-drm/

#20yrsago HOWTO fold roses from maple-leaves https://web.archive.org/web/20061010121159/http://haha.nu/creative/how-to-make-roses-from-maple-leaves/

#15yrsago Italy’s insane Internet law prompts removal of Italian Wikipedia https://cdt.org/insights/case-in-point-why-wikipedia-italy-would-rather-perish-than-publish/

#15yrsago Wine carafe shaped like human heart https://web.archive.org/web/20111008062759/https://www.livianaosti.com/index.php?/prodotto/cuore/

#10yrsago Millennials are legit screwed https://eig.org/millennial/#1473667707197-bfde262a-83c9

#10yrsago Would-be Ukip leader hospitalised following “altercation” (“punched by a colleague”) https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-37572377

#10yrsago Merciless reporting on the Chicago Police Department’s extortion racket, & the senior officials who covered it up https://web.archive.org/web/20161006133720/https://theintercept.com/2016/10/06/in-the-chicago-police-department-if-the-bosses-say-it-didnt-happen-it-didnt-happen/

#10yrsago Canadian government has turned “consultation” on warrantless mass surveillance into a sales-job https://citizenlab.ca/research/digital-anonymity-subscriber-identification-revisited-yet-again/

#10yrsago Think like a computer scientist: free, interactive textbook https://web.archive.org/web/20130813233552/http://interactivepython.org/runestone/static/thinkcspy/index.html

#10yrago July: Vancouver imposes a 15% tax on foreign real estate speculators; September: home sales drop by a third https://web.archive.org/web/20161004200501/https://mishtalk.com/2016/10/04/vancouver-bubble-burst/

#10yrsago Left-wing activists across the former USSR launch “September,” to rally opposition to far-right movements https://globalvoices.org/2016/10/05/september-a-new-platform-for-leftists-across-the-former-soviet-union/

#5yrsago Dave Eggers' "The Every" https://pluralistic.net/2021/10/05/masha-rides-again/#everywhere

#5yrsago We paid to develop Merck's covid pill https://pluralistic.net/2021/10/06/merck-cenary/#businesslike

#1yrago Apple's unlawful evil https://pluralistic.net/2025/10/06/rogue-capitalism/#orphaned-syrian-refugees-need-not-apply

---

Upcoming appearances (permalink)

https://www.epl.ca/blogs/post/elbows-up-with-cory-doctorow/

• Virtual: How to govern technology in a multipolar digital world (Connecting Current), Oct 6
  https://connectingcurrent.tech/how-to-govern-technology-a-multipolar-digital-world/

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

• Hudson, OH: Hudson Library, Oct 7
  https://engagedpatrons.org/EventsExtended.cfm?SiteID=3850&EventID=596952&PK=

• Calgary: Wordfest, Oct 8
  https://wordfest.com/2026/show/wordfest-presents-cory-doctorow-2026/

• Winnipeg: McNally Robinson, Oct 9
  https://www.mcnallyrobinson.com/event-18991/An-Evening-with-Cory-Doctorow

• Paris: Slow Tech Summit, Oct 15
  https://slowtechsummit.com/

• Vancouver: Read, Resist, Repair, Rejoice (Vancouver Writers Festival), Oct 19
  https://writersfest.bc.ca/festival-event-2026/01

• Victoria: Munro's Books, Oct 20
  https://www.munrobooks.com/events/6113620261020

• Vancouver: Life After AI (Vancouver Writers Festival), Oct 22
  https://writersfest.bc.ca/festival-event-2026/46

• Ottawa: Life After AI (Ottawa Writers Festival), Oct 24
  https://writersfestival.org/event/life-after-ai

• Kilkenny (Kilkenomics), Nov 6-8
  https://kilkenomics.com/

• Vancouver: Enshittification (Sid Williams Theatre Society), Nov 10
  https://www.sidwilliamstheatre.com/events/cory-doctorow-talks-enshittification/

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

• Oxford: Bennett Oxford Symposium on Open Code in Science, Dec 9
  https://www.bennett.ox.ac.uk/events/2026-bennett-institute-symposium/

• Montreal: World Science Fiction Convention, Sep 2-6
  https://montreal2027.ca/en

---

Recent appearances (permalink)

• Terms of Service with Clare Duffy (CNN)
  https://www.cnn.com/audio/podcasts/terms-of-service-with-clare-duffy/episodes/458ce968-af5d-11f0-b539-13ed2afe25f8

• AI, Work, and Power (Software Engineering Daily)
  AI, Work, and Power https://softwareengineeringdaily.com/podcasts/cory-doctorow-on-ai-work-and-power/

• AI, Corporate Power, and the Fight for Worker Control (Plutopia)
  https://plutopia.io/cory-doctorow-ai-corporate-power-and-the-fight-for-worker-control/

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

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

---

Latest books (permalink)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

---

Upcoming books (permalink)

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

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

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

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

---

Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources:

Currently writing:

• “Once Is Enemy Action,” a science fiction novel about the origins of modern technofascism. Today's words: 574 (7730 total).

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

• A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING

---

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

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

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

---

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

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

ISSN: 3066-764X

Laredo, cut off from state funding for its Flock cameras, will ask voters for advice on whether to devote $1 million a year to keep 165 of the surveillance devices operating in city limits.

The Laredo City Council voted 7-2 Monday night to set a nonbinding referendum for May — delaying a decision that is coming due for cities, counties and law enforcement agencies that face a financial reckoning after Gov. Greg Abbott blocked state money from being spent on the roadside cameras.

“In my opinion as the head of this local government, with state funding paused, the circumstances have changed,” Laredo Mayor Victor Treviño said before the vote. “If continuing these Flock systems will require the local taxpayer to fund their entire system, I believe that 272,000 residents should have an opportunity to express their opinion.”

At least 14 cities and counties have shut off more than 900 Flock cameras since state funding was rescinded in late August, and more are scheduled to decide their next steps in the coming weeks. Larger cities like Houston and Dallas shuttered grant-funded cameras while leaving much of their networks in operation, while Plano, Robinson and Kendall County were among those that ended their Flock contracts entirely.

Complicating those decisions is a lack of information from the governor’s office about the duration of the funding pause and a desire from local law enforcement to keep the cameras they attribute to reductions in crime. In addition to the funding block, Abbott recently directed the Texas Department of Transportation to pause installation of license plate readers along state roads.

Flock cameras and other AI-enhanced automated license plate readers have come under fire from privacy advocates over their ability to scan all passing vehicles to build a database that can be accessed by law enforcement agencies from across the country. The cameras compile license plate numbers and other identifying information, including make, model, paint color, dents and bumper stickers.

Police say the information provides unprecedented ability to identify suspects, pinpoint stolen vehicles and locate missing persons. Critics fear the creation of a surveillance state and say the databases have been repeatedly abused by police conducting improper searches.

“You can’t afford the number of cops it would take to do what this system is doing,” said Billy Couch, the City of College Station’s police chief, during a tense Thursday night City Council meeting about its two Flock contracts totaling almost $300,000.

---

Start your day with essential news from Salon.
Sign up for our free morning newsletter, Crash Course.

---

As of late August, there were an estimated 13,000 Flock cameras across Texas, according to DeFlock, an anti-surveillance watchdog that uses verified crowdsourcing to map the locations of Flock cameras.

Abbott’s office did not respond to a request for comment about guidance provided to local governments about how to proceed without state funding.

Schertz Assistant Police Chief Phillip Waller said the lack of information about the freeze is causing “major havoc” in smaller departments as local elected officials mull the long-term implications.

“I mean, depending on how big or how small the government entity is, having tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of dollars of [automated license plate readers] not being reimbursed like we thought they were is a major hit to the budget,” Waller said.

Without information about when or if Abbott’s funding freeze will end, some local leaders have been hesitant to make decisions regarding the cameras while their current contract terms are still active.

In Addison, City Council members on Tuesday debated whether Abbott’s funding freeze was temporary or indefinite as they began weighing the loss of state support on the city’s $260,000 Flock contract. In Laredo, City Council member Tyler King cast doubt on the permanence of the funding block in Monday’s meeting.

“I personally believe it’s political, and I think on Nov. 4, if [Abbott is] reelected, that’ll come back, and the money will start flowing in again,” King said. “So if we make a decision based on that, then we’re going to be back in the same situation come Nov. 4 — the money’s back, what do we do now?”

Abbott withdrew state funds for the cameras in August as The Texas Tribune prepared to publish an investigation exploring how a small state agency had directed at least $30 million to help cities, counties and law enforcement agencies pay for more than 3,200 Flock cameras across Texas.

That support from the Motor Vehicle Crime Prevention Authority had been set to continue into 2027, with $10.9 million earmarked to help local agencies afford subscriptions for more than 2,600 Flock cameras, a Tribune review of approved grants found.

The vehicle authority, overseen by a governor-appointed board that includes Laredo’s police chief, Miguel Rodriguez, had completely covered Laredo’s installation costs for its 165 cameras, according to a police department spokesperson. Rodriguez has been a vocal advocate for placing the cameras across Texas and has commended their use in Laredo and elsewhere for allowing a new approach to detecting crime.

Like Laredo, League City southeast of Houston also will hold a nonbinding referendum on Flock cameras — a decision made mid-August, prior to Abbott’s funding freeze.

In addition to grappling with the loss of state money for Flock cameras, some local officials face a financial hit because vehicle authority grants are given as reimbursements.

Kyle, a small city south of Austin, has not received its 2026 grant for $205,000, $80,000 of which would help pay for 32 Flock cameras. Even so, the City Council voted 6-1 at a Sept. 5 meeting to continue Kyle’s Flock contract.

Mayor Yvonne Flores-Cale said they’ve had no issues with the devices.

“When we’re asked to remove something like Flock, it’s difficult, because what do we use instead of it?” Flores-Cale said. “It can’t just be like, ‘take it away and then we’re going to be a safer city,’ because we’ve never had a problem or a complaint or a misuse in our city.”

Like Kyle, College Station, Conroe and Carrollton have rejected calls to end their partnerships with Flock.

College Station’s City Council voted 4-2 to continue their two Flock contracts for another year after hours of emotional public testimony from supporters and critics. The city was awarded a $300,000 grant from the vehicle authority to cover most of the cost of its cameras in fiscal year 2026, none of which has been reimbursed, according to the agency’s records.

Even in cities and counties that are not immediately shifting their approach to Flock, the governor’s actions and widespread scrutiny have prompted police to provide presentations and explanations for how they use their cameras.

During the Schertz City Council meeting on Sept. 15, council members accepted the city’s latest $309,000 vehicle authority grant, with roughly $100,000 intended to be used for 41 Flock cameras before the funding freeze. Waller, the assistant police chief, also detailed how police were — and weren’t — using their cameras, including clarifying that vehicles, not people, are tracked.

Waller said in an interview after the presentation that misinformation about the cameras is rampant online, and he called automated license plate readers a helpful and natural improvement in policing.

“Technology advances and so does police work, and LPRs are just the next step in that advancement,” he said.

Some conversations prompted by the funding pause are the first time local elected officials have publicly discussed whether the cameras should be used. In 2024, when the Laredo City Council approved its first million-dollar installment for Flock cameras, it did so without public discussion — and did the same in January when it approved a $5 million, five-year contract.

Other cities that canceled their contracts, such as Leander and El Paso, had their police enter Flock agreements without city council involvement. The El Paso City Council responded with an ordinance requiring future contracts for license plate readers to be approved by the council.

Not all of the recent cancellations stemmed from funding concerns.

In Pflugerville and Hutto, political leaders ended Flock agreements after learning the extent to which other agencies could access their camera data. A records request from a Pflugerville resident found that hundreds of agencies across the United States had been using the city’s Flock data.

Several law enforcement agencies have begun cracking down on who can access vehicle data collected by their cameras after audits found that unauthorized departments — sometimes hundreds or thousands of them — had used their data. The Texas Department of Public Safety reined in its access significantly after a Tribune analysis found more than 2,800 agencies had repeatedly tapped into their network of more than 900 cameras without signing agreements the department said were mandatory.

This article first appeared on The Texas Tribune.

The post At least 900 Flock cameras have been unplugged in Texas since state funding was cut appeared first on Salon.com.

Today's links

• Surveillance vs guillotines: Someone's gonna fleece these rubes, why not me?
• Hey look at this: Delights to delectate.
• Object permanence: DeCSS; Warhol Worm; Camgirls x Amazon wishlists; 2021 State of Tech (in 2001); RIAA v grieving family; Stasi disguises.
• Upcoming appearances: Edinburgh, Sydney, Melbourne, Brighton, London, South Bend.
• Recent appearances: Where I've been.
• Latest books: You keep readin' em, I'll keep writin' 'em.
• Upcoming books: Like I said, I'll keep writin' 'em.
• Colophon: All the rest.

---

Surveillance vs guillotines (permalink)

In the summer of 2013, two esoteric, technical, incredibly important texts were published within weeks of one another: the first is the Snowden leaks, which revealed a system of global, pervasive digital surveillance; the second was Thomas Piketty's Capital in the 21st Century, a book about the economic inevitability (and political instability) of oligarchy:

https://memex.craphound.com/2014/06/24/thomas-pikettys-capital-in-the-21st-century/

In 2013, it wasn't immediately apparent how these two works connected with one another, but in the years since, I've grown increasingly convinced that Snowden and Piketty can only be properly understood as describing two aspects of the same phenomenon.

Piketty's landmark volume was grounded in a detailed analysis of 300 years' (!) worth of global capital flows, painstakingly compiled by a large team of grad students from a massive set of heterogeneous records. The book's conclusion is the statement that "returns to capital exceed the rate of growth over the long term" (abbreviated as "r > g").

This may sound innocuous, but it is explosive. If r > g, then the most wealth will inevitably accumulate in the hands of people who start with the most wealth, irrespective of whether they do anything productive with that money. This means that the alleged heroes of the market system – the entrepreneurs who found and manage the firms that increase public prosperity – are doomed to play second fiddle to the mere plumbers of money, people who "contribute" by accumulating.

The starkest example of this in Capital 21C is Piketty's contrast between L'Oreal heiress Liliane Bettencourt (then the richest woman in the world) and Bill Gates, founder of Microsoft (then the most successful corporation in the world). Piketty compares the growth in the fortunes of Bettencourt and Gates over two periods: first, the period between Microsoft's founding and Gates' retirement as CEO; and second, the period after Gates's retirement from his executive role, when he became a mere investor, no longer an entrepreneur.

During that first period, in which Gates was founding and running the most successful corporation in the world, he accumulated less wealth than did Liliane Bettencourt, who did precisely nothing of value over that period. Bettencourt didn't even manage her investments – that was all handled by some very clever financial planners, lawyers and accountants. In other words: for Bettencourt, doing nothing at all produced more wealth than founding the most successful corporation in the world did for Gates. Bettencourt, a person who owned things, did better than Gates, a person who did things.

And then Gates retired. He stopped doing things and started owning things. He became an investor, whereupon he out-earned both Bettencourt and Gates-the-entrepreneur. Again, the market system allocated fewer rewards to the most successful person in the doing things business than it allocated to that same person once he quit that job and got into the owning things business.

Piketty shows that this holds true across markets and nations and eras: all other things being equal, the market system produces a class of hereditary aristocrats who command the world's capital and direct its deployment, despite never having done anything. The market's most lavish rewards do not go to its most productive participants, but rather, to those participants who have the good fortune to emerge from the luckiest of orifices.

Worse: winning the orifice lottery in no way qualifies you to direct the capital you've inherited. Liliane Bettencourt had no revolutionary new business ideas, invented no miraculous new materials or processes, produced no brilliant art. She merely accumulated, thanks to the professional services of skilled technicians whose job description includes hiring their own successors to ensure that another generation of winners of the Bettencourt orifice lottery could continue to accumulate, commanding more capital and power in society.

Perhaps if these orifice winners were content to allow their bloodless Renfields to allocate their capital while consuming bonbons and attending yacht parties, this could yield a stable politics. But inevitably, people who win the orifice lottery observe that they come from a long line of wealthy people, a line that will continue with their own descendants, and conclude that they have some kind of special, heritable virtue – magic blood – that the system has recognized with their great fortunes and the power those fortunes confer.

That's when things get dangerous: when aristocrats grow bored with their leisure and mobilize their inherited capital to change the way the rest of us live. Billionaire dilettantes are weapons of mass destruction, and their special projects have a wide blast radius and inflict a lot of collateral damage.

Take Bill Gates: his ideological projects have been a catastrophe. A patent maximalist, he funded the lobbyists who successfully blocked South Africa from producing its own AIDS drugs under an IP waiver program, and then deployed them again to stop the Global South from making their own covid vaccines:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/04/13/public-interest-pharma/#gates-foundation

Closer to home, Gates's hatred of public institutions led him to allocate millions to dismantling public schools and replacing them with charter schools, particularly for poor and racialized kids, with disastrous results:

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

And of course, Gates supported and empowered Jeffrey Epstein and his rape island:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_Gates#Connection_with_Jeffrey_Epstein

Capital's tendency to accumulate in the hands of the already wealthy (r > g) means that these aristocrats end up setting an ever-larger proportion of our societal agenda, despite their manifest unfitness to govern and their absence of any kind of democratic legitimacy.

Piketty argues that inequality is inherently politically destabilizing. A society ruled over by fools and monsters who were not voted into power and can't be voted out of power is a doomed society. Eventually – the French Revolution, the World Wars – these societies grow so unstable that they collapse altogether.

This is where Piketty and Snowden converge. When the Snowden leaks broke, there was a lot of talk about the mechanics and the legality of the NSA's global digital surveillance, but precious little consideration was given to the reason for all this surveillance. In 2013, the idea that this spying was about "security" was so obvious as to be self-evident. The questions at the time were whether spying could produce security. We weren't asking why things were so insecure.

In retrospect, the answer is to be found in Piketty. Piketty's Capital includes a long, impassioned plea to both lawmakers and aristocrats to consider redistributive policies (like a wealth tax) as the most affordable way to achieve political stability. Fundamentally, Piketty argues that the cheapest way to stop people from building a guillotine on your lawn is to build hospitals and schools; this is cheaper than paying for guards and prisons to lock up would-be guillotine builders.

Today's AI debates swirl around the question of whether AI can truly make us more productive – that is, if chatbots will allow one person to do the work of two, or three, or four – or 100. But when it comes to surveillance, the digital revolution unquestionably produced a massive productivity dividend.

Consider the spying apparatus of the former East Germany ("the GDR") widely considered the most surveilled society in human history. When the Berlin Wall collapsed, there were about 16m people in the country. Of those East Germans, about 90,000 worked directly for the Stasi (the secret police), aided by another 100-200,000 paid informants:

https://www.dw.com/en/east-germany-spy-agency-stasi-surveillance/

Call it 200,000 people to spy on 16m. In other words, it took one spy to watch 80 of their neighbors. Contrast this with NSA spying: they accumulated detailed surveillance dossiers on about 6 billion internet users using a staff of no more than 5 million spooks (in 2013, about 5 million Americans were eligible for security clearance). If every single person with security clearance in the USA was working on the NSA's surveillance program, that would mean that by 2013, computers had made it possible for a spy to keep tabs on more than a thousand people.

Orders of magnitude improvements in a mere generation! This is the kind of productivity lift that economists dream of when they fantasize about the dividends from automation.

But why? Why spy?

East Germany spied on its people because the system was so unjust and cruel that its beneficiaries understood that their neighbors were forever on the brink of rising up against them. East Germany's leaders were right about that – but if anything, they didn't put enough people onto the spying project. We can tell, because the Berlin Wall fell in 1989!

Of course, the GDR was already paying more than 1.2% of its population to spy on everyone else. It's likely that East Germany's leaders believed that their society simply lacked the fiscal space to hire more spies, even if short-staffing the Stasi risked societal collapse. Now, if Piketty is right, East Germany's leaders could have solved this problem by giving people fewer reasons to want to overthrow the state. They could have taken their hands out of the cookie jar, could have instituted democratic reforms – they could have made a bid for democratic legitimacy and public material comfort. But that would have come at the leaders' own power and wealth, and, lacking the stomach for this sacrifice, they lost everything.

Enter the NSA: the digitization of human civilization has drastically reduced the cost of surveillance, and – again, per Piketty – this vastly increases the amount of inequality the world can sustain before the illegitimacy, incompetence and cruelty of rule by the neoaristocratic winners of the orifice lottery brings the whole thing crashing down.

The Trump years are proof of this. We've reached a high-water mark for rule by illegitimate billionaire dilettantes. The second Trump admin began with DOGE's Bonfire of the Stupidities, where Musk cultists dismantled vast swathes of the American administrative state. Musk didn't just attack foreign aid – though the fact that the world's richest man murdered hundreds of thousands of the world's poorest children for the lulz isn't merely cruel, but also massively destabilizing in a way that will shake the world's politics for generations – but also domestic institutions. It was a DOGE cultist who fed the part of the NIH that tracks cyclosporiasis outbreaks into the wood-chipper:

https://truthout.org/articles/disease-researchers-blame-doge-cuts-for-spiraling-cyclospora-outbreak/

Today, tens of thousands of Americans are experiencing the literal enshittification of the American state, and this isn't just a human tragedy (though it is), it's also an economic tragedy, with massive knock-on effects for the businesses that rely on those sickened Americans and for the agricultural sector whose outputs are now being shunned by millions. Whether it's letting Bill Gates decide how your schools will work or letting Elon Musk decide how your public health system runs, the result is political chaos and a societal nudge away from the rule of law and towards guillotines.

Which brings me back to Snowden. The Snowden revelations did spur a global conversation about digital surveillance, with the result that the majority of the world's digital traffic is encrypted today. That's not nothing.

But the American state found new ways to conduct mass-scale, global surveillance, often by collaborating directly with tech giants. Billionaires like Peter Thiel capitalized on Big Tech's conflicted feelings about openly participating in surveillance by founding Palantir, with the express mission of murdering the political opponents of oligarchy:

https://www.thecanary.co/trending/2026/01/07/palantir-kill-communists/

Over the past decade, the steady march of digital technology, dominated by a cartel of giant global firms who collude with the US government's system of political repression in exchange for tax breaks, antitrust forbearance and fat federal contracts has yielded more mass surveillance productivity gains than the previous 25 years:

https://apnews.com/article/trump-inauguration-tech-billionaires-zuckerberg-musk-wealth-0896bfc3f50d941d62cebc3074267ecd

The Trump administration is the most unpopular in more than a century. Trump has stolen more money in office than any president in history. Trump presides over spiraling greedflation and collapsing buying power. The Trump administration has also presided over a titanic increase in state-aligned, privatized surveillance. The Trump years are the Flock years:

https://newrepublic.com/article/206992/flock-safety-cameras-alpr-deflock-resistance-nationwide

The Trump years are the Palantir years:

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/30/technology/trump-palantir-data-americans.html

The Trump years are the facial recognition years:

https://www.aclu.org/news/privacy-technology/ice-face-recognition

Trump's authoritarianism is a function of his misrule, and his misrule is enabled by his authoritarianism. The more he steals, the more he destroys with wars of choice, and incoherent tariff policies, and official pronouncements linking autism and vaccinations, the more he needs spy cameras, internet surveillance, vehicle tracking, and facial recognition. Every time Trump talks about a third term in office, or canceling elections, or suppressing the vote, he creates demand for mass surveillance to catch and imprison the people this drives into the streets. The more mass surveillance there is, the safer it is for him to commit unpopular, corrupt acts. It's the world's worst self-licking ice-cream cone.

It's not just Trump, of course. Trump is the vanguard of a movement of orifice lottery winners whose delight in stealing, cheating, maiming and despoiling gives rise to political instability and requires them to divert some of their yacht money to mercenaries:

https://theintercept.com/2026/06/25/police-luigi-mangione-wealthy-ceos-threat/

Take AI: the Trump years are also the AI years. This is the time in which a wildly unpopular technology is being shoved into every part of every app we rely on:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/05/02/kpis-off/#principal-agentic-ai-problem

It's an era where corporate bosses can't stop gloating about how many jobs they're planning to destroy and how many paycuts they plan on imposing on the surviving workers:

https://www.axios.com/2025/05/28/ai-jobs-white-collar-unemployment-anthropic

AI can't do your job, but an AI salesman can reliably convince your boss to fire you and replace you with an AI that can't do your job:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/03/18/asbestos-in-the-walls/#government-by-spicy-autocomplete

And – most visibly – it's an era in which people's cities and towns are being despoiled by data centers they don't want, by local governments operating in the most extreme secrecy, who silence and even arrest citizens who demand a democratically legitimate process for deciding whether they will have to give up their power and water and land and peace:

https://www.404media.co/city-that-arrested-person-for-clapping-at-data-center-meeting-moves-to-virtual-townhalls-for-public-safety/

An economist would tell you that there's an equilibrium being sought here: between the cost of bribing a town council to ram through data center approvals, the cost of building a more modest and palatable data center, and the cost of mollifying public critics. The cost of bribing towns to foist a data center on the townsfolk is low, because there are lots of towns that fit the bill, so data center barons can shop around.

But as data center protests grow larger and better organized (oligarchy is destabilizing), the cost of dealing with public opposition is mounting. Which is why the Trump administration is teaming up with its preferred tech and military contractors to engage in detailed surveillance of data center and AI critics:

https://prospect.org/2026/08/10/private-intelligence-firms-selling-dossiers-on-ai-data-center-critics/

These corporate spooks aren't just spying on data center critics: they've got a whole portfolio of oligarchy-stabilizing surveillance services, targeting "antifa," immigrants' rights and anti-ICE groups.

They're joined by hardware vendors who offer corporations, the wealthy, and enclaves where both are to be found on literal robocops, the ultimate in cheap guard labor (alas, the robots suck):

https://www.404media.co/the-roboguard-revolution-is-short-circuiting/

Trump and his orifice-winning army are caught in the same trap as the leaders of the GDR. Every gain in guard-labor efficiency creates the space for more of them to stick more of their hands even further into the cookie jar. Every time they do, American society grows more unstable, demanding more guard labor.

As we saw in Minneapolis, guard labor – be it mass surveillance, robocops or ICE chuds – is itself destabilizing. Police states make the people who live in them want to overthrow the state, requiring yet more cops, creating more partisans for tearing the whole thing down.

In theory, the orifice class could decide to stop stealing, cheating and maiming. The problem is that for every plute who realizes that the cheapest way to keep the guillotines off his lawn is to play fair, there are three more who lack the executive function to stop cheating. That means that you might as well keep on cheating, since the instability – and the guard labor bills – are coming no matter what.

In the tale of the "Tragedy of the Commons," a common pasture is grazed to dust by shepherds who each understand that if they don't graze their flock until everything is gone, some other shepherd will do so. The original "Tragedy of the Commons" paper was a racist hoax perpetrated by an academic fraud who wanted to make the case for the expulsion of black and Brown people from America and their mass extermination abroad:

https://memex.craphound.com/2019/10/01/the-tragedy-of-the-commons-how-ecofascism-was-smuggled-into-mainstream-thought/

In reality, commons need not be tragic and many of our most important resources have been managed as commons for hundreds of years:

https://archive.org/details/governing-the-commons/page/4/mode/2up

But when it comes to the commons that is "a stable society," the orifice class is caught in an inescapable tragedy, certain of the knowledge that if they don't cheat us, the next American aristo will. Thus the demand for guard labor continues to mount…as does the demand for guillotines.

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Hey look at this (permalink)

• If You Get in a Car Crash, the Risk Is Growing Your Insurance Won’t Pay https://archive.is/7t58c#selection-2140.1-2140.2

• Zack Polanski Promotes Radical Plan to Break Up Britain’s ‘Billionaire Media’ https://bylinetimes.com/2026/08/10/zack-polanski-promotes-radical-plan-to-break-up-britains-billionaire-media/

• Subaru Socialists and the Great Disappointed https://www.newyorker.com/news/fault-lines/subaru-socialists-and-the-great-disappointed

• Not your imagination: from backpacks to food, consumer goods are getting worse https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/aug/10/consumed-consumer-goods-quality

• LAST CALL FOR HOPE 26 TICKETS https://www.2600.com/content/last-call-hope-26-tickets

---

Object permanence (permalink)

#25yrsago Wonderfully thorough backgrounder on DeCSS https://web.archive.org/web/20010816194008/https://lemuria.org/decss/hal2001.html

#25yrsago Warhol Worm https://web.archive.org/web/20010814171036/http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~nweaver/warhol.html

#25yrsago Camgirls use Amazon wishlists for payouts https://web.archive.org/web/20010821234935/http://www.salon.com/tech/feature/2001/08/13/cam_girls/index.html

#25yrsago State of the tech industry 2021 https://web.archive.org/web/20011216222920/http://latimes.com/technology/la-000064605aug09.story

#25yrsago List of scenes cut from Looney Tunes reissues https://web.archive.org/web/20011214095249/http://www.toonzone.net/looney/ltcuts/

#20yrsago Strategy behind using liquids to threaten planes https://web.archive.org/web/20060813001626/https://wondermark.com/d/220.html

#20yrsago RIAA to grieving family: We depose your children in 60 days https://recordingindustryvspeople.blogspot.com/2006/08/riaa-wants-to-depose-dead-defendants.html

#15yrsago Stasi spywear: the inept art of commie disguise https://web.archive.org/web/20120000000000*/http://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/0,1518,777716,00.html

#15yrsago 1968: when Britain’s Daily Mirror tried to overthrow Parliament https://www.bbc.co.uk/webarchive/https%3A%2F%2Fwww.bbc.co.uk%2Fblogs%2Fadamcurtis%2F2011%2F07%2Fevery_day_is_like_sunday.html

#15yrsago My panel with Tim Berners-Lee, Vint Cerf and Al Gore at Mexico City’s Campus Party https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tXPZnpsN4-s

#15yrsago Doctor tried to "cure homosexuality" by tasping gay man while he had sex with a female sex-worker https://web.archive.org/web/20111004080028/https://blog.ketyov.com/2011/08/self-stimulating-brain-for-heterosexual.html

#10yrsago How a digital-only smartphone opens the door to DRM (and how to close the door) https://memex.craphound.com/2016/08/12/how-a-digital-only-smartphone-opens-the-door-to-drm-and-how-to-close-the-door/

#10yrsago Forget Skynet: AI is already making things terrible for people who aren’t rich white dudes https://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/26/opinion/sunday/artificial-intelligences-white-guy-problem.html

#10yrsago How self-driving cars could make everything worse, and what to do about it https://web.archive.org/web/20170918192128/https://www.wired.com/2016/08/self-driving-cars-will-improve-our-cities-if-they-dont-ruin-them/

#10yrsago The Tor Project’s social contract: we will not backdoor Tor https://blog.torproject.org/tor-social-contract/

#10yrsago Cash grants to people with unexpected bills successfully prevents homelessness https://www.science.org/content/article/bit-cash-can-keep-someone-streets-2-years-or-more

---

Upcoming appearances (permalink)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

---

Recent appearances (permalink)

• Speculative Fiction for Social Change (Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff)
  https://pocketcasts.com/podcast/cool-people-who-did-cool-stuff/08cbb840-a6ae-013a-d8aa-0acc26574db2/part-one-cory-doctorow-on-speculative-fiction-for-social-change/15ad467c-0832-44c9-91ea-59defd783dba

• AI, automation and enshittification (Telecoms.com)
  https://www.telecoms.com/ai/the-telecoms-com-podcast-ai-automation-and-enshittification

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

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

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

---

Latest books (permalink)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

---

Upcoming books (permalink)

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

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

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

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

---

Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources:

Currently writing:

• “Once Is Enemy Action,” a science fiction novel about the origins of modern technofascism. Today's words: 507 (3619 total).

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

• A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING

---

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

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

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

---

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

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

ISSN: 3066-764X

Today's links

• The stupidest imaginable excuses for surveillance pricing: Since 1850, San Francisco's Chamber of Commerce has been pissing in our mouths and calling it rain.
• Hey look at this: Delights to delectate.
• Object permanence: RIP Wau Holland; Diebold voting machines suck; How to steal an RFID-locked car; Pirates are big spenders; You can't fight enshittification.
• Upcoming appearances: Edinburgh, Sydney, Melbourne, Brighton, London, South Bend.
• Recent appearances: Where I've been.
• Latest books: You keep readin' em, I'll keep writin' 'em.
• Upcoming books: Like I said, I'll keep writin' 'em.
• Colophon: All the rest.

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The stupidest imaginable excuses for surveillance pricing (permalink)

With "surveillance pricing," businesses have finally found something AI can do way, way, way better than people: price gouging.

As the name suggests, "surveillance pricing" is the practice of charging every customer a different price for every transaction, based on the massive surveillance dossiers that Big Tech companies and data-brokers have assembled on everyone in the world. Congress hasn't updated federal consumer privacy law since 1988 (when they passed a law banning the disclosure of VHS rentals), so pretty much any form of consumer surveillance is fair game.

This is where the AI comes in. One thing AI is indisputably great for is multivariate statistical analysis. You can feed an AI "behavioral data" (information about where you go, what you do, what you buy, who you talk to and what you say) about all of your customers and ask it to cluster them according to their shared traits. Then you can direct the AI to automatically run a series of small experiments to discover the maximum markup each group will stomach under which circumstances.

This works without you having to direct the AI to rip off certain groups of people – it will simply find the most vulnerable people and rip them off the most. If you're hiring in an industry that practices a lot of tacit racial discrimination, a system like this can figure out on its own that people of color typically accept lower wages because there are fewer employers bidding for their labor, and recommend lowball salary offers, all without you ever typing "please be racist" into your AI prompt.

This works so well that Google has announced that it is their plan for making a profit off of AI, after losing hundreds of billions of dollars on chatbots:

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

In the before times, marketers and demographers had to dream up demographic categories based on limited data and run focus groups to figure out how to maximize revenue from each market segment. Now an AI can segment the data to any degree you choose, and continuously, automatically experiment on each segment to find their weak spots.

It's "theory-free." You don't have to discover why a group is willing to pay more under a given set of circumstances, you merely have to observe and weaponize this fact. You don't have to know why one group of purchasers consistently accept higher prices between 6AM and 8AM – you can just automatically jack up prices on them without knowing or caring that you're gouging parents of young children who are re-ordering essential supplies while trying to get their kids to school in the morning.

I thought up that example. I don't know if it's really happening. But here's something that really is happening: ecommerce sites charge parents of newborns extra when they order thermometers in the middle of the night. I'm not saying that anyone ever sat down and said, "Parents with sick children will pay whatever we charge for a thermometer at 2AM." They didn't have to: this is the kind of thing an automated system can do without any human intervention:

https://www.ftc.gov/system/files/ftc_gov/pdf/p246202_surveillancepricing6bstudy_researchsummaries_redacted.pdf

The goal of surveillance pricing is to shift all the "consumer surplus" (the difference between the highest price you're willing to pay and the price you actually pay) to companies. It's a form of cod-Marxism where you are gouged according to your ability (to pay) and charged according to the desperation of your need:

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

The problems of surveillance pricing are well documented. Under Biden, the FTC did a landmark study on the practice, developing a rich factual record that documents the role surveillance pricing plays in the affordability crisis:

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

Companies are already using this technology to rip you off, and they're slavering for the chance to do more of it. Instacart was recently caught marking up some shoppers' items by as much as a third:

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

The problem is that as much as companies love this, shoppers hate it. Last summer, Delta announced that it was going to surveillance price every seat on every flight, only to face such a massive backlash that they had to make another announcement bemoaning the fact that we'd all misunderstood their (unambiguous and extremely damning) announcement and they were actually going to do no such thing:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/07/30/efficiency-washing/#medallion-clubbed

One thing the Mamdani campaign impressed upon every politician in the country is that people are pissed about affordability and they will support anyone who stands up for the public against AI-equipped price gougers. The problem of course is that those price gougers are highly organized and have deep treasuries (stuffed with money they stole from us). With surveillance pricing, politicians face a familiar conundrum: if they do the thing that's popular with voters, they'll enrage donors.

One way to cut this knot is to enact legislation that seems to address the problem, but stuff it with so many loopholes that it does nothing. This lets you declare yourself the people's champion without doing anything to protect them from the donors who prey on your voters. That's the approach they took in Maryland:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/04/30/something-must-be-done/#there-ive-done-something

But in California, they're actually doing something about surveillance pricing. AB-2564 is a smart, well-written bill that bans surveillance pricing. It contains an easily evaluated test for surveillance pricing and carves out legitimate reasons for offering different prices for the same purchase (for example, when it costs more to deliver the product or service):

https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billTextClient.xhtml?bill_id=202520260AB2564

Now we're in for the hard yards of turning this bill into a law. That's where California's cities come in. When municipal governments pass resolutions supporting a state bill, it makes it much easier to get that bill through the state legislature (and conversely, without support from major cities, it's that much easier to kill the bill before it becomes law).

A few days ago, the San Francisco Board of Supervisors was on the verge of passing a resolution in support of AB-2564. Now, that vote is stalled, thanks to a letter sent by the San Francisco Chamber of Commerce, an organization that has been pissing in San Franciscans' faces and telling them it was raining since 1850:

https://www.sfexaminer.com/news/community/board-not-yet-ready-to-weigh-in-on-state-surveillance-pricing-ban/article_0ae4d143-cced-4988-abda-0b71bcbe524c.html

The Chamber's letter is – to use a technical term – flaming garbage. It raises the most spurious objections imaginable, claims about the bill's language that are belied by its plain, easily understood text. These objections are demolished in a letter the Electronic Frontier Foundation sent to the Supervisors:

https://www.eff.org/document/letter-sf-bos-re-surveillance

In the letter, EFF explains that claims that surveillance pricing will lower prices are overblown and not borne out by evidence. But more importantly – as EFF points out – privacy is a human right, and the idea that you should have to give up your privacy to get a fair price is just a fancy way of saying that privacy should be the exclusive preserve of people who can afford to pay more:

https://www.eff.org/wp/privacy-first-better-way-address-online-harms#Legislation

EFF's letter goes on to address the Chamber's objections. Far from creating uncertainty about which conduct the bill addresses, AB-2564 crisply defines surveillance pricing as:

a customized price for a good for a specific consumer or group of consumers based, in whole or in part, on personally identifiable information collected through electronic surveillance.

The Chamber raises other tired objections, falsely claiming that banning surveillance pricing will end common discounting strategies like offering seniors cheaper movie tickets, or giving cheaper rates to retain customers who call to cancel their service. EFF replies by pointing out that all the Chamber's concerns are covered by the three comprehensive carve-outs in the bill: the ability to charge higher rates when it costs more to service a given customer; offering discounts to retain customers who want to cancel their service; and finally, discounts for criteria anyone can meet (like an "early bird special"), for membership in a broadly defined group (like "seniors"), or for participation in a loyalty program.

The San Francisco Supervisors could have figured out at a glance that the Chamber was bullshitting them. All it takes is a cursory read of the statute. But now they don't even have to do that: EFF has painstakingly debullshittified the Chamber's FUD.

Surveillance pricing is grossly offensive. When a company charges me $0.50 for a product that it charges you $1 for, they're essentially saying that your dollars are worth half as much as mine are. Companies shouldn't be able to reach into your wallet or your bank account and chop your money in half:

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

No wonder AB-2564 has plenty of backers, from EFF to Consumers Union:

https://advocacy.consumerreports.org/press_release/california-state-assembly-passes-key-bill-to-prohibit-surveillance-pricing/

San Francisco's city government should be on that list of supporters.

(Image: Takkk, CC BY-SA 3.0, modified)

---

Hey look at this (permalink)

• Louis Brandeis: The Empiricist https://prospect.org/2026/07/30/aug-2026-louis-brandeis-the-empiricist/

• The Rent Is Higher Than You Think https://economicpopulist.substack.com/p/the-rent-is-higher-than-you-think

---

Object permanence (permalink)

#25yrsago RIP, Wau Holland, founder of the legendary hacker clan, the Chaos Computer Club. https://web.archive.org/web/20010805192406/https://www.wired.com/news/culture/0,1284,45728,00.html

#20yrsago Diebold voting machines can be beaten with a switch-flip https://web.archive.org/web/20061007120702/http://openvotingfoundation.org/tiki-read_article.php?articleId=1

#20yrsago How thieves steal RFID-enabled cars https://web.archive.org/web/20060812065423/https://www.wired.com/wired/archive/14.08/carkey_pr.html

#15yrsago Official London anti-terrorist publication says anarchists should be reported to local police https://web.archive.org/web/20110801233618/https://communitysafe.gov.uk/articles/5962-griffin-weekly-briefing-sheet-attached/attachments/801/download.pdf

#15yrsago French copyright enforcers: “Pirates are big spenders on legit content” https://www.techdirt.com/2011/07/28/another-day-another-study-that-says-pirates-are-best-customers-this-time-hadopi/

#15yrsago Perma-cookie wars continue: KISSMetrics sneaks cookies back onto your computer even if you turn off every cookie vector https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1898390

#1yrago You can't fight enshittification https://pluralistic.net/2025/07/31/unsatisfying-answers/#systemic-problems

---

Upcoming appearances (permalink)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

---

Recent appearances (permalink)

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

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

• A Conversation with Lina Khan (Law and Economy Student Network)
  https://www.youtube.com/live/7Ak5LZllqwE

• Will AI ever come alive, and what happens if it does? (BBC News)
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lzk4o3fPZZE

• Waarom jij straks het hulpje van AI bent (VPRO)
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tOnvR2fs8CA

---

Latest books (permalink)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

---

Upcoming books (permalink)

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

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

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

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

---

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. Fourth draft completed. Submitted to editor.

• 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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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

Today's links

• Technocarcinization: Enshittification is the great leveler.
• Hey look at this: Delights to delectate.
• Object permanence: Grampa's backyard Disneyland; Elizabeth Warren on monopolies; Spotify v Apple (antitrust edn); Exxon lobbyist confesses; "When the Sparrow Falls."
• Upcoming appearances: London, Edinburgh, Sydney, Melbourne, Brighton, London, South Bend.
• Recent appearances: Where I've been.
• Latest books: You keep readin' em, I'll keep writin' 'em.
• Upcoming books: Like I said, I'll keep writin' 'em.
• Colophon: All the rest.

---

Technocarcinization (permalink)

"Carcinization" is a curious biological phenomenon: given enough time, across many environments, many species will evolve into crabs. The body-type of a crab, with its low center of gravity, sideways gait (useful for evading predators), ease of concealment and protected organs is suitable to many different environments:

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

Lately, I've watched the American Big Tech platforms as they underwent their own form of technocarcinization, which is when every tech company turns into Facebook.

For a long time, it seemed to me that you could make sense of the tech platforms by placing them into one of four quadrants on a 2×2 grid, in which one axis denoted "control freakishness" and the other, "surveillance."

Each quadrant had its own canonical company. The most surveillant/least controlling company (top left) was Google. They would let you roam the whole wide internet and exert no control over your conduct, but would spy on you wherever you went. The least surveillant/most controlling company was Apple, who imprisoned you in its manicured walled garden, but promised never to spy on you. The non-spying/non-controlling option is free/open source tech (of course), which doesn't care what you do, and doesn't watch you do it. And the most spying, most controlling company was Facebook, a company whose products did everything they could to imprison you within their virtual walls, from which vantage they could effect maximal surveillance.

I've used this comparison many times over the years. I included in my 2023 book The Internet Con, along with the joke that Tiktok's position on the grid was so far up and to the right (maximum surveillance and control) that we'd had to put its logo on the back cover. Enough people took this joke seriously and wrote in to complain that they'd gotten a misprint without the logo that we added it to the paperback:

https://www.versobooks.com/products/3035-the-internet-con

The grid was useful, until technocarcinization started to push all the tech companies into that top right quadrant. Apple is no longer the company that protects you from surveillance – they're the company that spies on you, having secretly added a total surveillance system to the iPhone to target ads to you:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/11/14/luxury-surveillance/#liar-liar

Apple can't even claim to protect you from third-party surveillance. Sure, they block Facebook from spying on you, but they have barred ICE Block, an app that tells you if there are ICE chuds hunting in your neighborhood, looking to kidnap you and send you to a concentration camp. Apple declared ICE mercenaries to be a "protected class":

https://pluralistic.net/2025/10/06/rogue-capitalism/#orphaned-syrian-refugees-need-not-apply

And thanks to Apple's control-freakery – which prevents you from overriding Apple's decisions about your own devices – once Apple decides to spy on you or sell you out to fascist goons, there's nothing you can do about it:

https://locusmag.com/feature/cory-doctorow-neofeudalism-and-the-digital-manor/

Then there's Google, the company that ran a free-range livestock operation in which you could roam wherever you liked, because they could always find you when it was time for the slaughter. For years now, Google has been moving inexorably to the kind of control-freak nonsense that you used to only find in one of Apple's crystal prisons.

For example, every year or two, Google floats a proposal to use secure hardware in your device to rat you out if you've got an ad-blocker, privacy blocker, or other aftermarket add-on that lets you choose how you experience the digital world:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/08/02/self-incrimination/#wei-bai-bai

It's an idea they just can't quit, despite the fact that it's fucking abominable and everyone hates it:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/06/12/compelled-speech/#quishing

Google used to pride itself in its ability to send you to the open web, viewing search as a conduit to other peoples' resources. Now, with AI search summaries, Google is harvesting the open web and then eating the seed corn, keeping searchers inside of Google's walled garden:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/06/29/arsonist-firefighters/#im-feeling-lucky

Google also took the idea of a free/open browser and ran with it, rehabilitating some discarded Apple code and turning it into Chrome, the internet's most dominant browser – by far. Now, Google is nerfing that browser's plug-in architecture in a way that blocks all kinds of user-tunable options, including and especially ad-blocking:

https://protonprivacy.substack.com/p/google-is-finally-killing-ublock

And Google has also announced that they're going to turn Android into an iPhone, making it both technically challenging and radioactively illegal for you to install software of your choosing on your own property:

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2025/08/google-will-block-sideloading-of-unverified-android-apps-starting-next-year/

Google is adopting every one of Apple's worst practices, and Apple is adopting all of Google's worst practices, and so they're both turning into Facebook: technocarcinization!

What's driving this technocarcinization? Well, the obvious answer is that the more Facebooklike a company becomes, the more ways there are for it to rip you off. Surveillance can be monetized by selling your data, by ad targeting, and by surveillance-based pricing and wage-suppression:

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

Control lets platforms block competing products, extract massive junk fees to the businesses they connect you to, and control repair and end-of-life, forcing you to replace hardware by blocking parts and independent service:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/01/10/markets-are-regulations/#carney-found-a-spine

It turns out that "if you're not paying for the product, you're the product" is only half-right. The other half is, "even if you pay for the product, you're the product." Pay, don't pay: companies will productize anyone they can. And thanks to our enshittogenic policy environment – where the worst ideas of the worst people make the most money – you can always be productized:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/09/10/say-their-names/#object-permanence

This is independent of the kind of person running the company. Facebook is run by Mark Zuckerberg, a cringe halfwit whose only successful idea was to offer Harvard bros a way of nonconsensually rating the fuckability of female undergrads. Everything he's done since was an acquisition (Whatsapp, Insta) or a flop (metaverse, Libra), or both (Oculus). Zuck owns the majority of the voting stock in the company, which means he has total control over its actions. He can ignore or fire his board members at will. He is the move fast/break things guy, whose every foolish whim can become policy that impacts billions of people.

By contrast, Google and Apple are no longer run by their flamboyant founders, who were every bit as prone to folly as Zuck. They were constrained by their shareholders, which meant that the blast-radius of Steve Jobs's worst ideas (like treating his otherwise curable cancer with green juice) were confined to his own person.

Today, Apple and Google are run by bloodless business sociopaths who go to enormous lengths to project an air of sober adulthood. And yet, these people – who would never be caught dead bow-hunting their own livestock or climbing into an MMA cage – have steered their companies into Facebook's quadrant on our enshittification 2×2.

I think this shows just how much the enshittification of tech is a matter of the policy environment, not the personalities of the people involved. Sure, the worst people imaginable run these companies, but the reason they're able to yield to their most venal impulses and succeed is because the world has been re-arranged to make sociopathy and greed into fitness factors. We get technocarcinization because the most fit organism for a landscape without consequences is a zuckerbergian techno-crab:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/07/28/microincentives-and-enshittification/

What can we do about it? Well, we're going to have to remake the landscape to punish (rather than reward) enshittification:

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

And in the meantime, there is one inhabitant of the 2×2 that hasn't drifted up and to the right: free and open source software. It's still snugly nestled in the low-surveillance/low-control box, and if you live in that box, your life will be much, much better for it.

There's no better time to make the switch: with RAM and storage prices through the ceiling and OSes growing ever-more bloated with AI and spyware (but I repeat myself), this is the moment to rehabilitate that old computer with Linux:

https://www.fosslinux.com/158206/linux-on-older-hardware-revival-guide.htm

The alternative is to be tormented by crabs no matter what you're trying to do or where you're trying to get to.

---

Hey look at this (permalink)

• How the AI bubble could pop and take down the global economy, according to the BIS https://www.theregister.com/ai-and-ml/2026/06/29/how-the-ai-bubble-could-pop-and-take-down-the-global-economy-according-to-the-bis/5263793

• To Decarbonize Quickly, Think Beyond Electrification https://jacobin.com/2026/06/climate-electrification-homes-cars-decarbonization-tech

• Ireland is big tech’s lapdog – and that compromises its EU presidency https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2026/jun/30/ireland-big-tech-lapdog-eu-presidency-digital-sovereignty

• Beyond Denial How Oil Execs Shaped a Landmark Climate Study https://www.propublica.org/article/wedges-climate-research-bp-fossil-fuel-princeton

• US Supreme Court just blew up EU-US Data Transfers https://noyb.eu/en/us-supreme-court-just-blew-eu-us-data-transfers

---

Object permanence (permalink)

#15yrsago Print-on-demand and donations - report on DIY publishing business models https://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/columns-and-blogs/cory-doctorow/article/47858-with-a-little-help-heuristics.html

#15yrsago Brazil rises up for free speech in 40 national demonstrations https://globalvoices.org/2011/06/30/brazil-freedom-march/

#10yrsago Grandad builds miniature backyard Disneyland https://abcnews.com/Lifestyle/grandpa-builds-disneyland-inspired-backyard-theme-park-grandkids/story?id=40276633

#10yrsago Elizabeth Warren on monopolies in America, including Apple, Google, and Amazon https://washingtonmonthly.com/2016/06/30/elizabeth-warrens-consolidation-speech-could-change-the-election/

#10yrsago White House plan to use data to shrink prison populations could be a racist dumpster fire https://www.wired.com/2016/06/white-house-mission-shrink-us-prisons-data/

#10yrsago Even if Moore's Law is "running out," there's still plenty of room at the bottom https://www.technologyreview.com/2016/05/13/245938/moores-law-is-dead-now-what/

#10yrsago Black-hat hacker handles are often advertisements https://www.wired.com/beyond-the-beyond/2016/07/web-semantics-modern-german-black-hat-hacker-handles/

#10yrsago Spotify threatens to report Apple to competition regulators over App Store rejection https://web.archive.org/web/20160630220301/https://www.recode.net/2016/6/30/12067578/spotify-apple-app-store-rejection

#10yrsago Researchers find over 100 spying Tor nodes that attempt to compromise darknet sites https://www.defcon.org/html/defcon-24/dc-24-speakers.html#Noubir

#5yrsago Exxon lobbyist confesses to his crimes https://pluralistic.net/2021/07/01/basilisk-tamers/#exxonknew

#5yrsago When the Sparrow Falls https://pluralistic.net/2021/07/01/basilisk-tamers/#rage-against-the-machine

---

Upcoming appearances (permalink)

• London: Idler Festival, Jul 11
  https://www.idler.co.uk/festival/

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

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

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

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

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

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

---

Recent appearances (permalink)

• Lawfare Daily
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T1KIwaYRs1g

• How to Think About AI (Organized Money)
  https://www.organizedmoney.fm/p/how-to-think-about-ai-with-cory-doctorow

• Breaking Points
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VJmUbkRqXeE

• A.I. Enshittifies Everything (Slate)
  https://slate.com/podcasts/what-next-tbd/2026/06/cory-doctorow-thinks-a-i-is-overvalued-and-overrated-and-still-a-threat

• A World That Just Might Work
  https://aworldthatjustmightwork.com/2026/06/cory-doctorow-ai-use-it-dont-buy-the-hype-dont-feed-the-bubble/

---

Latest books (permalink)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

---

Upcoming books (permalink)

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

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

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

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

---

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. Fourth draft completed. Submitted to editor.

• 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

Today's links

• Spying on kids to save kids from spying is very, very stupid: First they came for the VPNs.
• Hey look at this: Delights to delectate.
• Object permanence: RIP Darwin's tortoise; ISPs conspire to create copyright jail; Waxy v fair use; Broken Windows is BS; Google is a machine-learning company; "Writing the Other"; Canadian wealth-tax.
• Upcoming appearances: Toronto, NYC, Philadelphia, Chicago, London, Edinburgh, Sydney, Melbourne, Brighton, London, South Bend.
• Recent appearances: Where I've been.
• Latest books: You keep readin' em, I'll keep writin' 'em.
• Upcoming books: Like I said, I'll keep writin' 'em.
• Colophon: All the rest.

---

Spying on kids to save kids from spying is very, very stupid (permalink)

The literature on harms to kids from online platforms is complex and nuanced, rife with people citing small, ambiguous studies as iron-clad evidence that kids are being destroyed by the internet:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ype6c6DdHQY

It's a weird coalition of anti-Big Tech campaigners (who are rightly angry at the platforms' callous disregard for user welfare) and Heritage Foundation-backed culture warriors (who think that if their kids aren't exposed to LGBTQ content they won't come out as queer). While there's plenty these groups disagree about, they share one consensus: there should be a "minimum age" for certain kinds of internet use.

The problem is, there's no such thing as "age verification" for the internet. What we call "age verification" is actually mass surveillance, so invasive and pervasive that it makes the ad-tech industry's commercial surveillance look like some kind of cypherpunk darknet pirate utopia:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/08/14/bellovin/#wont-someone-think-of-the-cryptographers

"Age verification" means that everyone who does anything online will have to submit to fine-grained tracking and recording of all their online activities. This nightmare is the surveillance advertising industry's fondest dream, a world where it's literally illegal to avoid their tracking, all in the name of saving kids…from them!

So it's not just a weird alliance of anti-Big Tech crusaders and the conspiratorial right that's pushing for age verification – they are unwitting allies of the very tech industry they think they're fighting. Those tech industry insiders are fully aware that an "age verification" mandate is really a way for the government to teach every child how to use a VPN. They're also fully aware that the next move is to ban VPNs:

https://www.express.co.uk/news/uk/2217934/vpn-ban-table-july-labour

Tech bosses are the ones sitting on our shoulders saying, "Go ahead, swallow that fly – it'll be fine. And if you do have to swallow a spider afterward, well, that'll surely be the end of it":

https://pluralistic.net/2026/05/19/shes-dead-of-course/#consensus-hallucination

Behind them is a long line of caliper-wielding grifters who claim they can use your phone's camera to distinguish a child who is 17 years, 364 days old from an adult who's just turned 18:

https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/facial-age-estimation

It's beyond farce. After all, whatever harms you believe the internet is inflicting on kids – and there's absolutely some kids who are being harmed by their internet use – those harms all start with surveillance. Your kids can't be targeted by algorithms without the surveillance data that's being used to target them. They can't be funneled into pro-anorexia content or extreme misogyny forums without that funnel being primed by commercial spying.

Why do tech companies spy on your kids? The same reason your dog licks its balls: because they can, and no one stops them:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/03/10/ice-tech/#foreseeable-outcomes

America hasn't updated its consumer privacy laws since 1988 (when Congress banned the disclosure of your VHS rentals). The EU has the GDPR, but it also has Ireland, the country where all GDPR cases against Big Tech go to die, because any tax haven inevitably becomes a crime haven:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/10/31/losing-the-crypto-wars/#surveillance-monopolism

Other countries have privacy laws to varying degrees, but are grossly outmatched by US tech giants, who have fused with the Trump regime, to the extent that Trump will impose penalties on your country if you attempt to regulate his tech companies – he'll even have your top officials cut off from the internet in retaliation:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/04/04/digital-subjugation/#greenlands-next

Any attempt to save kids from online harms should start with saving kids from online surveillance, but that's the opposite of what we're doing today. After decades of failing to pass and enforce privacy controls for the internet, those same governments are breaking all land-speed records to pass "age verification" laws that make privacy illegal:

https://bsky.app/profile/rebeccawilliams.info/post/3moviqzdit22z

The fact that these bills have the firm backing of the tech industry's most controlling, most spying companies tells you everything you need to know about them:

https://web.archive.org/web/20260315022337/https://tboteproject.com/

Kids are being harmed by online spying, and so are the rest of us. Whether you think that the algorithm made Grampy go Qanon or you're suspicious that online surveillance data was used to deny you a loan, a job, or a lease, you should want privacy:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/12/06/privacy-first/#but-not-just-privacy

Online surveillance is being used to raise the prices you pay and lower the wages you're offered:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/04/06/empiricism-washing/#veena-dubal

And the same data that's being used to "verify age" today will be used by ICE tomorrow to figure out who to round up for a concentration camp:

https://www.wired.com/story/ice-asks-companies-about-ad-tech-and-big-data-tools/

You can't protect kids from online surveillance by spying on them. You just can't. Anyone who tells you otherwise is trying to get you to swallow a fly so they can sell you a spider, a bird, a cat, and an ICE chud in a gaiter, Oakleys and plate carrier (beneath which lurks a stick-and-poke Totenkopf tattoo).

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Hey look at this (permalink)

• AI doomerism is misplaced. Here’s what it will take to pop the bubble https://www.salon.com/2026/06/22/ai-doomerism-is-misplaced-heres-what-it-will-take-to-pop-the-bubble/

• Visa and Mastercard: The Original Gangsters of Electronic Collusion https://www.thesling.org/visa-and-mastercard-the-original-gangsters-of-electronic-collusion/

• Has it happened yet? https://hasithappenedyet.org/

• Platform-Controlled Search and Distortions in Attention Allocation https://tinbergen.nl/discussion-paper/6496/26-035-vii-platform-controlled-search-and-distortions-in-attention-allocation

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Object permanence (permalink)

#20yrsago Darwin’s tortoise dead at 176
https://web.archive.org/web/20060704143750/http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20060623/od_afp/australiaanimal_060623102146;_ylt=Ave_b4Ps2r9TGXqs5nZIVIoFO7gF;_ylu=X3oDMTA5bGVna3NhBHNlYwNzc3JlbA–zoo

#15yrsago Major US ISPs set to limit repeat infringers with throttling, limiting access to 200 websites, and copyright reeducation school https://web.archive.org/web/20111105225114/http://news.cnet.com/8301-31001_3-20073522-261/exclusive-top-isps-poised-to-adopt-graduated-response-to-piracy/

#15yrsago Why fair use doesn’t work unless you’ve got a huge war-chest for paying lawyers https://waxy.org/2011/06/kind_of_screwed/

#15yrsago Model net neutrality rule for municipalities https://web.archive.org/web/20110626114610/http://envisionseattle.org/2011/06/model-net-neutrality-ordinance-for-seattle.html

#15yrsago Campus hookups: college sex isn’t new, but hookups are different https://thesocietypages.org/socimages/2011/06/21/the-promise-and-perils-of-hook-up-culture/

#15yrsago A Brief History of the Corporation: understanding what an attention economy is and where it comes from https://ribbonfarm.com/2011/06/08/a-brief-history-of-the-corporation-1600-to-2100/

#15yrsago Eliza: what makes you think I’m a psychotherapeutic chatbot? https://www.filfre.net/2011/06/eliza-part-1/

#10yrsago Broken Windows policing is nonsense https://www.nyc.gov/assets/oignypd/downloads/pdf/Quality-of-Life-Report-2010-2015.pdf

#10yrsago How it feels to be under DDoS attack https://www.oreilly.com/radar/ddos-emotions/

#10yrsago 2016: the first presidential election in 50 years without Voting Rights Act protections https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/welcome-to-the-first-presidential-election-since-voting-rights-act-gutted-179737/3/

#10yrsago Google is restructuring to put machine learning at the core of all it does https://web.archive.org/web/20180530051703/https://www.wired.com/2016/06/how-google-is-remaking-itself-as-a-machine-learning-first-company/

#10yrsago Misconfigured database exposes sensitive data for 154 million US voters https://dailydot.com/politics/154-million-voter-files-exposed-l2

#10yrsago To understand the Trump campaign, study real-estate developer hustle https://web.archive.org/web/20161028030522/https://storify.com/KC_EDM/trump-is-running-his-campaign-like-a-real-estate-d

#10yrsago Writing the Other: intensely practical advice for representing other cultures in fiction https://memex.craphound.com/2016/06/23/writing-the-other-intensely-practical-advice-for-representing-other-cultures-in-fiction/

#1yrago The case for a Canadian wealth tax https://pluralistic.net/2025/06/23/billionaires-eh/#galen-weston-is-a-rat

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Upcoming appearances (permalink)

• Toronto: The Sovereignty Debate (IAB Canada's State of the Nation), Jun 23
  https://iabcanada.com/state-of-the-nation-2026

• Toronto: The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI (Osler Records/Type Books), Jun 23
  https://www.eventbrite.com/e/cory-doctorow-book-launch-and-talk-tickets-1991501299998

• NYC: The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI with Jonathan Coulton (The Strand), Jun 24
  https://www.strandbooks.com/cory-doctorow-the-reverse-centaur-s-guide-to-life-after-ai.html

• Philadelphia: The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI with David Williams (Fitler Club/Philadelphia Citizen), Jun 25
  https://www.eventbrite.com/e/cory-doctorow-book-event-tickets-1990110326559

• Chicago: The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI with Rick Perlstein (Exile in Bookville), Jun 26
  https://exileinbookville.com/events/50628

• London: Idler Festival, Jul 11
  https://www.idler.co.uk/festival/

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Recent appearances (permalink)

• How to Mess with Big Tech Oligarchs (Fighting Fascism)
  https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/how-to-mess-with-big-tech-oligarchs-w-cory-doctorow/id1888647397?i=1000773711479

• Reverse Centaur with Angie Coiro (Kepler's Books)
  https://www.youtube.com/live/cWN6XBa73xA

• How to Think About AI Before It’s Too Late (Galaxy Brain)
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SPQNPJ0CEPo

• The future of world governance, with Kim Stanley Robinson (UN Independent Expert on International Order)
  https://www.youtube.com/live/wJvBvYdaAMY

• How to Think About Artificial Intelligence (KUER)
  https://radiowest.kuer.org/show/radiowest/2026-06-16/cory-doctorow-on-how-to-think-about-artificial-intelligence

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Latest books (permalink)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Upcoming books (permalink)

• "The 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

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

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

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