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Received today — 13 November 2026 ⏭

Pluralistic: Uber's labor crash (12 Nov 2026)

✇Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
By: Cory Doctorow
12 November 2026 at 21:50


Today's links

  • Uber's labor crash: Replacing serfs with robots just doesn't pencil out.
  • Hey look at this: Delights to delectate.
  • Object permanence: Asimov inspired Al Qaeda; PATRIOT Act scares Canadian customers off US servers; EFF v Trump; Internet infrastructure is unsupported and failing; Nominative determinism debunked; How to fight Trump; Burglars v burglary; NYT said Hitler was only kidding; Folky Song Funny Note; Surviving autocracy; Corporate criminals.
  • Upcoming appearances: Vancouver, Folkestone, Oxford, Sheffield, Virtual, Oxford, Santa Barbara, 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.


A vast, multilane queue of bright yellow, old fashioned taxis. Standing amidst them are 16th century etchings of ragged mendicants. Looming over the scene is a black pillar with the Uber logo.

Uber's labor crash (permalink)

There's a specific kind of lie that tech bosses tell: the "premature truth." That's a lie that they excuse by saying it'll come true soon:

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

Elon Musk is the world's most enthusiastic teller of these lies. That's not surprising: any kind of radical promise about the automotive sector has a 90% chance of being this kind of bullshit. Musk can barely mention the subject of transportation without lying his face off: from "full self-driving" to "hyperloops" to "tunnels" to "flying cars," Musk is a fountain of extremely untrue "premature truths":

https://karlbode.com/musks-fake-flying-car-and-ceo-said-a-thing-journalism/

But Musk has plenty of competition when it comes to lies about futuristic cars. Long before Musk switched on his first bullshit factory, Uber was spending billions to spray the world with lies about cars. Uber has always lied about everything, from driver pay to the company's finances.

Now, lying about driver pay is relatively low-risk for a company like Uber. After all, the company created the app-based worker misclassification playbook, designed to make vulnerable and precarious workers even more vulnerable and precarious. The lies Uber tells about its workforce only have to survive contact with credulous municipal governments so that they keep up a supply of get-out-of-jail-free cards for Uber's many labor, licensing and consumer rights violations.

But lying about your finances is another matter altogether. When Uber lies about its finances, it is lying to rich people, and (unlike workers), rich people have many ways to punish people who lie to them. Despite this, Uber spent more than a decade lying flagrantly and lavishly about its balance sheet.

The most shameless financial lie Uber told is that it was profitable due to the increased valuation of the many ride-hailing companies around the world that Uber owns large shares in. How did Uber come to own large shares in these companies? It happened after Uber's competing ride-hailing companies in countries around the world failed.

Uber's subsidiaries lost billions of dollars, and eventually Uber sold them to its (also money-losing) domestic rivals in all-stock deals that saw Uber acquiring vast amounts of worthless, illiquid shares in the world's failing ride-hailing companies. Then, for years, Uber would announce that its stake in these companies had appreciated in value. These revaluations were purely vibes-based. Uber's former rivals were privately held, and while small volumes of shares traded hands in private deals, Uber's pronouncements that, say, the Chinese company Didi was now worth vastly more than it had been worth a few months before was sheer fantasy dressed up as profits:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/02/11/bezzlers-gonna-bezzle/#gryft

Uber did this over and over (and over and over), relentlessly dogged by Hubert Horan, an aviation analyst who became the world's foremost close-reader of Uber's financial statements:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/08/09/accounting-gimmicks/#unter

Despite these lies, Uber eventually found a way for its early investors to cash out, through a very successful IPO that saw the House of Saud made whole (and then some) on the $31b they plowed into the business so that it could lose $0.41 on every dollar it brought in for the preceding 13 years.

The most remarkable thing about Uber's IPO was the company's S1, the prospectus that tells normie investors how the company will eventually find its way to profit. That's where you'll find Uber's claim that its "total addressable market" is every journey made by taxi, private car, train and bus, for everyone in the world:

https://stratechery.com/2019/uber-questions/

Despite the wild implausibility of this ambition, the company did achieve actual profitability after its IPO. It got there through the simple expedient of paying drivers less and charging riders more. The company spies on its drivers to calculate the lowest wage they'll accept, based on their inferred economic desperation, a process that Veena Dubal calls "algorithmic wage discrimination":

https://pluralistic.net/2023/04/12/algorithmic-wage-discrimination/#fishers-of-men

They also use surveillance data about riders to calculate the highest price you'll pay for a journey. Investors call this "personalized pricing," while everyone else calls it "surveillance pricing." It's a way for Uber to reach into your bank account and reduce the value of your dollars, by charging you more than the next person would pay for the same service:

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

This is something AI turns out to be extremely good at. Businesses can program chatbots to automatically segment their customers and employees based on surveillance data and then perform a series of automated experiments to find the highest prices and lowest wages they'll accept:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/07/30/pay-for-privacy/#ab2654

When it comes to wage theft and price gouging, Uber leads the pack. They've really demonstrated just how much consumer and labor surplus can be diverted to capital with the aid of AI.

Of course, it helps that they're willing to lie like crazy. Uber routinely claims that it pays its drivers hourly rates that are far in excess of minimum wage, but it helpfully omits that drivers only get paid while they have a passenger in the car, and that the company punishes drivers who turn down too many unprofitable jobs.

Drivers only get paid for a fraction of the time they spend working for Uber, and on top of that, they have to pay for fuel, insurance, depreciation, loan interest, and the cost of getting vomit out of their back seats. Add it all up and Uber drivers make peanuts. In Toronto, Uber pay nets out to something like $2.50/hour:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/02/29/geometry-hates-uber/#toronto-the-gullible

$2.50/hour isn't a living wage anywhere in Canada, but it's especially terrible in Toronto, one of the world's most expensive cities. Uber can only be profitable for so long as drivers continue to subsidize its business, and so long as riders are willing to pay more than they ever did under the traditional taxi system (much of which was seen off by Uber's Saudi-subsidized decade of predatory pricing, which also induced a lost decade in global transit investment).

Inflation (supercharged by AI pricing) has hit all workers, but it's been especially hard on Uber drivers, who didn't have any financial cushion to start with. Eventually, drivers were bound to turn their backs on Uber. "Eventually" is now, according to Uber's Q3 earnings call, where CEO Dara Khosrowshahi told investors that "driver supply [was] not keeping pace with strong consumer demand in several international markets":

https://s23.q4cdn.com/407969754/files/doc_earnings/2026/q3/earnings-result/Uber-Q3-26-Earnings-Press-Release.pdf

As The Gig Economy Project writes, the driver shortage is especially sharp in India and Brazil, two gigantic countries where (according to Uber CFO Balaji Krishnamurthy), there is too much consumer "price sensitivity":

https://thegigeconomyproject.substack.com/p/has-uber-finally-pushed-its-workers

Uber's also having trouble getting drivers to accept the rock-bottom wages they're offering for food delivery. Despite this, Krishnamurthy assured investors that the company's measures to "improve driver availability" wouldn't affect their bottom line. Instead, Krishnamurthy promised to raise prices on riders elsewhere, something he called "re-balancing incentives":

That is part of the art that we’ve got and then there is a lot of algorithmic science that goes into, if you have a dollar, what is the maximum predicted return for that dollar and should I invest that dollar in a driver in Brazil or should I invest that dollar in a rider in India, for example. The algorithm can structurally make these choices based on training on billions of trips and allocate these investments in the way that humans just can’t.

The Gig Economy Project goes on to say that "robotaxis will fundamentally alter the unit economics of taxis, but we are still some time away from the point where robotaxis are price competitive with human-driven vehicles."

Boy is this an understatement. Remember, Uber is already paying drivers sub-minimum, sub-starvation wages, which drivers must spend to cover all the capital, depreciation, maintenance and insurance costs, along with (skyrocketing) fuel costs. I can't think of any way in which replacing starvation-wage drivers who provide their own cars with $200k robotaxis that the company must operate, maintain and insure will work out better for the company than the current situation.

This is as good as it gets for Uber, in other words. Being able to tap an army of desperate workers who supply 99% of Uber's business's capital and variable costs out of their own pockets is vastly superior to operating a fleet of expensive robots that Uber has to purchase and service.

Profitable "driverless" cars have been around the corner for more than 15 years now. Waymo claims to have delivered this through the brute force expedient of using the most expensive sensors and vast amounts of incredibly expensive cloud computing, but their balance sheet remains stubbornly opaque. We don't know how often a "driverless" Waymo is just a remote control car, being piloted by a low-wage worker in an overseas call center (there's a reason Indian technologists joke that AI stands for "Absent Indians"):

https://pluralistic.net/2024/01/29/pay-no-attention/#to-the-little-man-behind-the-curtain

We also don't know how often a Waymo is being overseen by a high-waged engineer. What we do know is that that when GM was forced to reveal this number, it turned out that they'd replaced a single, low-waged cab driver with 1.5 engineers, each of whom earned an order of magnitude more than the cabbie they'd displaced:

https://garymarcus.substack.com/p/could-cruise-be-the-theranos-of-ai

Uber's claims that they were profitable (based on accounting gimmicks) were lies, but they were also premature truths: the company did become profitable (though price-gouging and wage-theft). But there's a limit to how low you can push your workforce's wages, and even if the AI crash delivers a fresh cohort of desperate workers who subsidize Uber's operations for a few more years, they, too, will eventually find that they can't live on $2.50/hour.

When that day comes, robo-taxis won't save the business model. Robots may cost less per hour than Uber drivers (though not by much), but owning a robot is always going to be more expensive than getting drivers to supply free cars to Uber. If Uber can't sustain profitability with that massive subsidy, it is going to hit a wall, and it won't be pretty.

Hey look at this (permalink)


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

Object permanence (permalink)

#25yrsago ObL got the name "Al Qaeda" from Asimov's Foundation;

#25yrsago Folky Song Funny Note https://craphound.com/misc/Folky_Song_Funny_Note.mp3

#20yrsago PATRIOT scares Canadian unis off US servers https://web.archive.org/web/20080204033238/http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/Page/document/v5/content/subscribe?user_URL=http://www.theglobeandmail.com%2Fservlet%2Fstory%2FRTGAM.20061111.wxuniversities11

#15yrsago Minimum wage hike coming to Guangdong, the world’s factory https://web.archive.org/web/20111110113740/http://www.globalpost.com/dispatch/news/regions/asia-pacific/china/111109/china-economy-manufacturing-guangdong

#10yrsago EFF in Trump’s America: Protecting Tomorrow https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2016/11/protecting-tomorrow

#10yrsago America’s actually had worse presidential races than this one https://www.loweringthebar.net/2016/11/worst-presidential-race.html

#10yrsago The internet’s core infrastructure is dangerously unsupported and could crumble (but we can save it!) https://web.archive.org/web/20170222232454/https://fordfoundcontent.blob.core.windows.net/media/2976/roads-and-bridges-the-unseen-labor-behind-our-digital-infrastructure.pdf

#10yrsago Fact-checking Trump’s plan for the first 100 days https://www.npr.org/2016/11/10/501597652/fact-check-donald-trumps-first-100-days-action-plan

#10yrsago Dennis the Dentist: on the unkillable wrongness of nominative determinism https://timharford.com/2016/11/rich-the-banker-whats-not-in-a-name/

#10yrsago How to fight Trump, starting right now https://medium.com/@anildash/forget-why-its-time-to-get-to-work-c49ac5f0da20#.l0xpc3pps

#10yrsago Anti-burglary advice, from burglars https://web.archive.org/web/20161118141701/https://www.kgw.com/news/investigations/we-asked-86-burglars-how-they-broke-into-homes/344213396

#10yrsago Serbian ultra-nationalists celebrate Trump’s victory https://globalvoices.org/2016/11/10/nationalists-and-populists-in-serbia-and-macedonia-celebrate-trumps-victory/

#10yrsago Leonard Cohen wrote the perfect anthem for our times https://memex.craphound.com/2016/11/11/leonard-cohen-wrote-the-perfect-anthem-for-our-times/

#10yrsago “Hitler’s only kidding about the antisemitism” New York Times, 1922 https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/times-insider/2015/02/10/1922-hitler-in-bavaria/?_r=0&smid=tw-share

#10yrsago Rules for surviving an autocracy https://web.archive.org/web/20161111205036/https://www.nybooks.com/daily/s3/nov/10/trump-election-autocracy-rules-for-survival.html

#1yrago American corporate criminals in the crosshairs (finally) https://pluralistic.net/2021/11/12/with-a-fountain-pen/#recidivism

#1yrago A tale of three customer service chatbots https://pluralistic.net/2025/11/11/sorry-to-bother-you/#we-dont-care-we-dont-have-to

Upcoming appearances (permalink)

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


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

Recent appearances (permalink)


A grid of my books with Will Stahle covers..

Latest books (permalink)


A cardboard book box with the Macmillan logo.

Upcoming books (permalink)

  • "The 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: 516 (35512 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.

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

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

ISSN: 3066-764X

Received — 25 October 2026 ⏭

US inequality is getting worse in ways you might not expect

✇Salon.com
By: Markus Schneider
25 October 2026 at 11:00

The buzzword of the 2026 U.S. midterm elections may be affordability, but growing anger over inequality is behind the sentiment.

A Pew Research survey released in October 2026 found that roughly 6 in 10 Americans – including 4 in 10 Republicans – believe there’s too much inequality in the U.S. And a growing share from both major political parties state that the economy needs to be fundamentally rebuilt to address this.

This sentiment has, however, been difficult to convert into political results. Public support for California’s proposed wealth tax on billionaires has been waning ahead of the midterms, for example, and in 2025, Republicans passed President Donald Trump’s sweeping legislation that included tax cuts for the wealthy while cutting safety net programs.

I’m an economist who has been studying inequality for about two decades. My research confirms the trend of rising inequality since 1980, driven by the wealthiest pulling away not just from the middle class, but also from the “merely wealthy.” Overall, recent research underscores how policy choices – including taxation and public spending – enabled this 40-year rise in inequality.

Some policies enacted more recently appear to be accelerating this trend. An analysis by the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy, a nonpartisan research organization, concluded that policy changes since the start of 2025 have imposed higher costs on everyone except the top 1%.

Inequality by the numbers

Recent federal data shows that wealth inequality continues to grow. The top 1% saw their share of wealth increase from 31.7% to 32.5% just between the first and second quarters of 2026, a jump of over $8.5 trillion. That caps a steady climb from 30.9% in the last quarter of 2024 – and from 27.4% in 1999.

These recent gains come at the expense of the middle class – the 40% between the bottom half and the top 10% – who hold only 28.8% of all wealth despite being a group that’s 40 times larger than the top 1%. And the middle’s share is shrinking, down from 32.9% in 1999 and 30.2% at the end of 2024, according to the data.

But the ultra-wealthy, those in the top 0.1%, are pulling away even from the rest of the rich, the data shows. This tiny elite owns 15% of all wealth – almost half of all the wealth of the top 1%. Both the top 0.1% and the next 0.9% saw their share of wealth increase, but the top 0.1% captured two-thirds of the gains between the first and second quarters of 2026.

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Sign up for our free morning newsletter, Crash Course.

Even within the highest echelons of wealth concentration, these two groups are on different trajectories.

Crucially, the wealth of the top 0.1% is disproportionately boosted by corporate profits, which are up sharply overall. The top 0.1% reap the most from this growth because their portfolios’ value has soared on the promise of future increased profitability that’s driving up stock prices – especially thanks to the tech and artificial intelligence boom.

How taxes play a role

Since President Ronald Reagan’s tax cuts in the 1980s, the U.S. tax code has become less and less progressive, often through policy changes supported by both Republicans and Democrats.

The common argument for tax cuts is that they stimulate growth, but a growing body of research – including international studies – doesn’t back that up. A 2025 Brookings report notes that U.S. tax policy has gone through massive changes throughout history without any discernible effect on growth.

Nonetheless, congressional Republicans used their narrow majorities in 2025 to pass Trump’s sweeping policy and tax bill, which included provisions making most of his 2017 tax cuts permanent. Those included the historically low top-income tax rate and the lowest corporate tax rate since 1940.

It’s also important to understand that the top 0.1% have a different tax exposure from the rest of the top 1% because the composition of their wealth is different. They own as much in stocks and mutual funds as the next 0.9%, a group that is nine times larger, and those holdings are where most of their recent gains came from.

Furthermore, roughly three-quarters of the top 0.1%’s wealth portfolio consists of corporate and business ownership, allowing them to benefit from the Trump tax cuts in multiple ways – including lower tax rates and more opportunities to defer or avoid tax liability. Their massive holdings of stock mean that they can borrow against it for cash, usually tax-free, rather than having to sell shares.

By contrast, below that elite, real estate is a much more important component of wealth, while corporate equity is a smaller and smaller share. For the middle class, nearly two-thirds of wealth is held in their homes and retirement savings, while corporate and business ownership accounts for only 15%.

The new drivers of inequality

Much of the inequality debate focuses on the role that taxation has played. But other recent policy changes have shifted different kinds of costs on to low- and middle-income earners, while leaving the wealthy relatively unscathed.

One example is a provision in Trump’s 2025 legislation that allowed federal healthcare subsidies through the Affordable Car Act to lapse. Insurers and analysts expect the number of people signing up for coverage through ACA plans to drop by about 5 million due to higher premiums and face much higher out-of-pocket costs.

The spike in energy costs, including gasoline, diesel and heating oil, is another case in point. They disproportionately affect low- and middle-income consumers but barely dent the budgets of the wealthy – while boosting the profits of companies engaged to the extraction, processing and transportation of oil. This divergence has been especially pronounced since the start of the conflict with Iran in February 2026, which has pushed up the global price of oil.

Then there are tariffs, which are fundamentally a consumption tax on imports. Economists at the New York Federal Reserve have found that these levies have inflicted a heavy hit on many common consumer goods. They estimated that prices for these items, which make up a much larger share of household budgets among the nonwealthy, would have fallen on average by 1% over the year without the tariffs. Instead, they have risen by 2.9%.

This acceleration in the redistribution of wealth from the middle class to the very top, in short, has an array of drivers. But they’re not inexorable forces of history. As economist Thomas Piketty put it in “A Brief History of Equality,” published in 2022: “Inequality is first of all a social, historical, and political construction.”

Markus Schneider, Associate Professor of Economics, University of Denver

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

The post US inequality is getting worse in ways you might not expect appeared first on Salon.com.

Received — 3 October 2026 ⏭

Pluralistic: Economic probabilities for our grandchildren (03 Oct 2026)

✇Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
By: Cory Doctorow
3 October 2026 at 14:07


Today's links

  • Economic probabilities for our grandchildren: If only data centers would stop hogging all the copper.
  • Hey look at this: Delights to delectate.
  • Object permanence: RIAA v P2P; Infoseek's anti-terror brain-scanner; Copyrighting every phone number; Carving pumpkins with cookie-cutters; Polish women go on strike; Latent labor in material world; Hitler's meth; "Flying Saucers Are Real!"; Hope, not optimism; Broadcast Flag talk; David Suzuki's free research; "Inquisitor's Apprentice"; California's tax ban made the rich MUCH richer; Union organizers caught Wells Fargo; Power poses aren't real; "Ghosts"; Criticizing tech; "Savage Love A-Z."
  • Upcoming appearances: Brighton, Virtual, South Bend, Hudson, Calgary, Winnipeg, Paris, OVancouver, Victoria, Ottawa, Kilkenny, 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.


The Earth from space; it is covered in scaffolding that is crawling with little rude mechanicals ganked from 17th century engravings of people operating machines.

Economic probabilities for our grandchildren (permalink)

The post-war "peace dividend" owed its existence to three factors: industrial capacity, political freedom and pent-up demand.

  • Industrial capacity: freed up by the war's end and the collapse of demand for munitions and materiel;

  • Political freedom: the war's orgy of capital destruction of the majority of the wealth (and thus the power) of the world's oligarchs;

  • Demand: Making up for years of neglect and privation during the war required new production of infrastructure and consumption goods.

In Capital in the 21st Century, Thomas Piketty and his students analyzed painstakingly assembled records of 300 years' worth of capital flows, showing that wealth tends to pool in the hands of the already-wealthy. This creates mounting instability, thanks to the misrule of a shrinking class of increasingly powerful hereditary, unaccountable oligarchs whose whims and follies trump the material and political needs of the vast majority:

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

That instability eventually reaches a breaking point in which the old order collapses in spectacular fashion, and that collapse destroys vast amounts of capital stock. Since this breaking point arrives as a result of oligarchy, in which nearly all the world's wealth has been hoarded by a tiny number of people, those aristocrats are disproportionately impoverished by the conflagration. If 90% of the wealth is in the hands of 1% of the people, a war or disaster that wipes out most capital will mostly destroy the wealth of the 1%. The poor suffer terribly, but they start with nothing – and end with nothing.

We are clearly steaming into one of these situations. The wealthy squandered two generations preventing the world from tackling the climate emergency, and now the inevitable has arrived. California is on track to see a 12 inch sea-level rise in the next month:

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/sep/30/california-kelvin-wave-sea-level-rise

That's just the overture to the American run of this year's "Super El Nino," a blockbuster whose out-of-town previews have been slaying massive crowds all over the world:

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/oct/03/bangkok-thailand-floods-breaking-point-stagnant-lakes

Also right on schedule: the misrule of oligarchs has elevated a con-man to the presidency, who trumps every other president for both corruption and incompetence. From oil to dollars, telecoms infrastructure to the internet itself, Donald Trump is doing everything in his power to end the American empire:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/05/16/technopoly/#trumpismo-is-praxis-question-mark-exclamation-point

A post-American world is on the horizon. What that world will look like is undecided. The US was always a wildly defective trusted third party, but it retained its status as the world's platform for generations thanks to the absence of credible alternatives. Now – as Mark Carney told the Davos crowd last year – the old system has "ruptured":

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

What will replace the dollar?

https://pluralistic.net/2026/02/11/post-dollar-world/#de-dollarization

What will replace oil?

https://pluralistic.net/2025/10/11/cyber-rights-now/#better-late-than-never

What will replace the internet?

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

No one knows. No one can know, because this is all up for grabs. The future isn't something that happens to us. The future is something that we make. And despite the horrible death toll that's locked in by waves of climate shocks – presided over by the dying, fumbling "drink bleach" guy – it's conceivable that the future we get will be a good one, if not an easy one.

A post-oligarch, post-American world could be a post-austerity world, one where we recognize that the limiting factor on public investment isn't money, but resources: energy, material, labor, expertise:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FATQ0Yf0Fhc

Just as the post-war world led to the "30 glorious years" by mobilizing people and material to rebuild a shattered world and shattered lives, a post-American world might be one in which we find full, meaningful employment for all of us, all of our children, and all of their children:

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

As seas rise, we're going to have jobs for every person who is willing, building sea defenses and moving whole coastal cities inland. Two generations of neoliberalism has left us with massive shortages of housing stock, crumbling highways, inadequate schools and hospitals. That means we need to build lots more of these, and they can be built with state-of-the-art climate hardening, including geothermal heat, "passive home" designs, modern insulation, and heat-pumps. The rights-of-way for the interstate system would make dandy railbeds for arrow-straight, all electric high-speed rail powered by solar, wind and tides.

All of this has the potential to yield a second peace-dividend prosperity. A post-oligarch world can recover industrial capacity by diverting it away from destructive activity (data centers, luxury housing) to essential functions (climate defenses, decent housing for everyday people). A post-oligarch world can recover democratic excellence by removing the malign influence that morbid wealth exerts on our policy choices: for example, if we don't like the quality of public schools, we can fix them by giving schools more resources, not by letting billionaire dilettantes privatize and starve them in the name of "school choice":

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

Finally, a post-oligarch society can provide us with an even more inclusive version of post-war prosperity: we can use the wages we earn by building a better world to acquire new homes, induction tops, EVs and ebikes, and beautiful heirloom computers that are built to last for generations, upgraded and maintained by their users:

https://www.edn.com/as-moores-law-slows-open-hardware-rises/

This is a world of material abundance and prosperity. Just as the post-war world made millions of people comfortable, educated and happy by putting them to work clearing the rubble and building something better, a post-oligarch, post-American world can offer everyone all the hard, rewarding work we want, performing the essential work of care and rebuilding. We'll find that work by helping hundreds of millions of climate refugees, who will find work helping each other. This is all economically valuable, environmentally sustaining work that we have labor, energy and expertise for. It's just that all that labor, energy and expertise is being misallocated by the ultra-wealthy who don't even believe that the majority of us exist, and who want to bet the planet and our species on a bizarre scheme to feed so many words to the world-guessing machines that they wake up and become gods:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/05/13/vibe-governance/#k-hole

Nearly a century ago, John Maynard Keynes published "Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren," where he extrapolated from rising productivity to predict a fifteen-hour work-week within two generations:

http://www.econ.yale.edu/smith/econ116a/keynes1.pdf

That dream was destroyed by war and greed. Today, we are submerged in an ocean of debt. I'm not talking about the (fictional) "national debt" that is just a measure of all the dollars the government has spent into existence without taxing out of existence:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/10/21/we-can-have-nice-things/#public-funds-not-taxpayer-dollars

I'm talking about fiscal debt: the solar we didn't build, the carbon we emitted instead; the rail we didn't build, the wildly inefficient aviation we substituted; the walkable, livable, transit-oriented cities we didn't build, the car-choked disasters we built instead. Oligarchic opposition to universal healthcare left us sick, with un- or undertreated illnesses and missed opportunities for prevention that left us with overlapping, population-scale health crises. All of this is debt that must be repaid: we can't walk away from it through bankruptcy. We must build the transit, cities, and systems of care – the infrastructure – our species needs to carry on human civilization. We can't keep hitting snooze on this, lest we are finally awoken by seawater lapping at our pillows.

The world we're in today is awful and terrifying. It's awful because of the climate ruptures we're living through. It's terrifying because we didn't just fail to avert this crisis – we did nothing to prepare for it, either.

As Piketty foretold, the misrule of oligarchs has led to an orgy of destruction, and while poor people will get the worst of it, oligarchs will pay the most, because they own nearly everything, which means they own everything that will be destroyed, too. None of that is good, and it would be better if we hadn't gotten into this situation in the first place.

But after a forest fire, the canopy opens; and when it does, the seedlings that were overshadowed for centuries by the old growth can sprout in the ashes and the sun. We can't afford to continue living under oligarchy, and as oligarchs' greed and folly drives the old system beyond its breaking point, we must seize the opportunity to build a better successor.

Hey look at this (permalink)


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

Object permanence (permalink)

#25yrago Leak: RIAA's anti-P2P strategy https://web.archive.org/web/20011019060035/https://www.dotcomscoop.com/riaa1003.html

#25yrsago Infoseek founder: my brain-scanner can find all the terrorists https://web.archive.org/web/20011009025805/http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/55/22020.html

#25yrsago Copyrighting every possible phone number as a touch-tone tune https://web.archive.org/web/20011007073546/http://www.theage.com.au/entertainment/2001/10/04/FFX0PGT0CSC.html

#20yrsago What happens to password-locked data when you die? https://web.archive.org/web/20061106235805/http://news.com.com/Taking+passwords+to+the+grave/2100-1025_3-6118314.html

#20yrsago Audio of activist lawyer talk on Broadcast Flag and Chilling Effects https://web.archive.org/web/20061005074245/http://uscpublicdiplomacy.com/index.php/events/events_detail/1859/

#20yrsago David Suzuki: Steal my research – that’s what it’s for! https://web.archive.org/web/20061020144546/http://www.davidsuzuki.org/about_us/Dr_David_Suzuki/Article_Archives/weekly09290601.asp

#20yrsago Interdisciplinary DRM blog from my USC students https://uscpubd510.blogspot.com/search?updated-max=2006-08-24T14:59:00-07:00&max-results=7&start=91&by-date=false

#15yrsag Inquisitor’s Apprentice: tenement sorcerers versus the robber barons in an alternate Gilded Age New York https://memex.craphound.com/2011/10/04/inquisitors-apprentice-tenement-sorcerers-versus-the-robber-barons-in-an-alternate-gilded-age-new-york/

#15yrsago Context: Further Selected Essays on Productivity, Creativity, Parenting, and Politics in the 21st Century https://memex.craphound.com/2011/10/03/context-further-selected-essays-on-productivity-creativity-parenting-and-politics-in-the-21st-century/

#15yrsago Unicode’s “right-to-left” override obfuscates malware’s filenames https://krebsonsecurity.com/2011/09/right-to-left-override-aids-email-attacks/

#15yrsago HOWTO carve a pumpkin by hammering cookie-cutters into it https://web.archive.org/web/20200916004345/https://www.foodnetwork.com/fn-dish/shopping/cookie-cutter-pumpkin-carving

#15yrsago Shell funded warring militias in the Niger Delta https://web.archive.org/web/20111006003453/http://blog.platformlondon.org/2011/10/03/counting-the-cost-corporations-and-human-rights-abuses-in-the-niger-delta/

#10yrsago Sen Mitch McConnell blames Obama for bill that Obama vetoed and McConnell repeatedly voted for https://www.loweringthebar.net/2016/10/congress-blames-veto.html

#10yrsago Polish women go on strike over extreme anti-abortion law https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-37540139

#10yrsago Survivors of CIA torture describe homebrew electric chair used at Afghan black site https://www.hrw.org/news/2016/10/03/interview-new-cia-torture-claims

#10yrsago Visualizing the latent emotional and bureaucratic labor in our material world https://xkcd.com/1741/

#10yrsago Meth, Hitler and the Reich: the true, untold story of the Nazis’ dependence on coke, meth and oxy https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/sep/25/blitzed-norman-ohler-adolf-hitler-nazi-drug-abuse-interview

#10yrsago Flying Saucers are Real! Anthology of the lost saucer-craze https://memex.craphound.com/2016/10/03/flying-saucers-are-real-anthology-of-the-lost-saucer-craze/

#10yrsago The malware that’s pwning the Internet of Things is terrifyingly amateurish https://web.archive.org/web/20161004061621/http://motherboard.vice.com/read/internet-of-things-malware-mirai-ddos

#10yrsago California’s 40-year-old ban on property tax raises has made the rich a lot richer https://web.archive.org/web/20161001034224/https://www.latimes.com/business/hiltzik/la-fi-hiltzik-prop-13–20160929-snap-story.html

#10yrsago The Wells Fargo fraud came to light because of union organizers https://web.archive.org/web/20161005123132/https://prospect.org/article/first-and-foremost-wells-fargo-scandal-about-workers

#10yrsago “Power Poses” are bullshit https://web.archive.org/web/20161007215414/https://www.wbur.org/npr/496093672/power-poses-co-author-i-do-not-believe-the-effects-are-real

#10yrsago Martin Shkreli offers a bailout to ailing 4chan https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2016/10/4chan-cashflow-problem-martin-shkreli-wants-to-join-board/

#10yrsago Ghosts: Raina Telgemeier’s upbeat tale of death, assimilation and cystic fibrosis https://memex.craphound.com/2016/10/04/ghosts-raina-telgemeiers-upbeat-tale-of-death-assimilation-and-cystic-fibrosis/

#10yrsago Yahoo secretly built a tool to scan all email in realtime for US spies https://www.reuters.com/article/idUSKCN1241YT/

#10yrsago How to: Criticize technology https://www.cjr.org/tow_center_reports/constructive_technology_criticism.php

#10yrsago Johnson & Johnson says people with diabetes don’t need to worry about potentially lethal wireless attacks on insulin pumps https://www.reuters.com/article/us-johnson-johnson-cyber-insulin-pumps-e-idUSKCN12411L/

#5yrsago USPS pilots postal banking https://pluralistic.net/2021/10/04/avoidance-is-evasion/#check-cashing

#5yrsago The Pandora Papers https://pluralistic.net/2021/10/04/avoidance-is-evasion/#transparency

#5yrsago Savage Love A-Z https://pluralistic.net/2021/10/04/avoidance-is-evasion/#ggg

#5yrsago Hope, Not Optimism https://pluralistic.net/2021/10/03/hope-not-optimism/

#1yrago When your ISP pays you https://pluralistic.net/2025/10/03/we-dont-care-we-dont-have-to/#were-the-phone-company

#1yrago Blue Bonds https://pluralistic.net/2025/10/04/fiscal-antifa/#post-trump

Upcoming appearances (permalink)

A photo of me onstage, giving a speech, pounding the podium.
https://www.epl.ca/blogs/post/elbows-up-with-cory-doctorow/


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

Recent appearances (permalink)


A grid of my books with Will Stahle covers..

Latest books (permalink)


A cardboard book box with the Macmillan logo.

Upcoming books (permalink)

  • "The 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: 504 (21882 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.

How to get Pluralistic:

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Pluralistic.net

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

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

ISSN: 3066-764X

Received — 16 September 2026 ⏭

Pluralistic: How an AI moratorium can save AI bosses (16 Sep 2026)

✇Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
By: Cory Doctorow
16 September 2026 at 09:52


Today's links


Tenniel's 'Red Queen's Race' engraving from Carroll's 'Through the Looking Glass.' It has been altered so that the Red Queen and Alice now have the heads of 1940s pulp robots. The image has been hand-tinted.

How an AI moratorium can save AI bosses (permalink)

There's lots of reasons to believe the "hyperscaler" model of AI can never be profitable, and not just because of its gigantic expenditures and negative unit economics (the companies lose money with every new customer and every new use, and they lose more money with each generation of their products):

https://pluralistic.net/2025/09/27/econopocalypse/#subprime-intelligence

The industry strenuously denies this, of course. They insist that they are only days away from turning their balance sheets right side up. All they have to do is fix those unit economics, then they can make back the cost of producing their models by selling access to them. The problem is that the evidence for those improving unit economics is weak, while the evidence that they're faking their finances is very strong:

https://www.wheresyoured.at/exclusive-openai-financials/

Same goes for the claims that these companies are already profitable. Dig into those claims and you'll learn they depend on a new, special meaning of "profitable" that does not match the generally accepted accounting procedures (GAAP) definition, which is to say, these companies are claiming that they are so cool that their profitability can only be measured using a novel, secret form of mathematics:

https://futurism.com/future-society/anthropic-claude-profit-ai-safety-development-finances

This is the same wheeze that Softbank tried with Wework. Speaking in my capacity as an author of internationally bestselling technothrillers about accounting fraud, I can tell you that it was accounting fraud then, and it's accounting fraud now:

https://www.ndtv.com/world-news/how-wework-went-from-being-47-billion-start-up-to-bankrupt-in-3-years-4552627

But let's give the AI bosses a momentary benefit of the doubt and stipulate that they are on the verge of acquiring positive unit-economics, which will let them start to pay off the massive expenditures they incurred by training their models and enter their long-anticipated profitability phase, when the money-furnaces they've been running for years turn into money printers, to the delight of the investors who've supplied the vast bales of $100 bills the companies have been shoveling into their models' coalboxes for years now.

Basically, they're saying, "Sure, it cost us a lot to get these rails laid, but now that the railroad is complete we can start running cars over them and make a profit." Unfortunately (for bosses and investors), this proposition is every bit as dubious as their claims to improving unit economics.

To understand why, just look at what happened the last time Anthropic shipped a major Claude update. Virtually overnight, all of OpenAI's best customers stopped paying for ChatGPT and started paying for Claude. That's because chatbots have very low switching costs: going from one chatbot to another costs almost nothing:

https://www.businessinsider.com/why-ai-startup-founder-switched-chatgpt-to-claude-2026-3

Everyone using AI knows this to be true. When I walked the floor at CES last year, I asked every AI-powered gadget maker, "What will you do if your chatbot provider jacks up their prices?" and to a one, they said, "No problem, we've designed this thing so that we can switch chatbots with the click of a mouse":

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WfhELBX8Jbs

That means that you can't just "build the railroad and run the cars over it." The minute you finish your railroad, your rivals will announce that they've got a new, adjacent railroad that's even faster than yours, and you will have to get to work laying another set of tracks to support even faster trains.

This is a disaster all around: the AI companies are locked in a Red Queen's Race, a fatal beggar-thy-neighbor doom-loop. The only way they could escape that trap is by signing a nonaggression pact amongst themselves promising not to compete anymore. But there's two giant problems with this: first, it is incredibly, fantastically illegal under antitrust law, because it represents a conspiracy among the dominant players to cease to compete with one another, and; second, it leaves the field open for the further development of Chinese "open weight" models that customers can run on their own modest, low-powered computers, which are presently lagging the US "frontier models" by a mere four months:

https://arstechnica.com/ai/2026/09/exclusive-open-chinese-models-close-gap-with-silicon-valleys-frontier-ai-models/

Even if you don't trust Chinese models, you can extract their training through a process called distillation and transfer them to models you do trust:

https://www.anthropic.com/news/detecting-and-preventing-distillation-attacks

But what if there was a way for the AI companies to get government permission to violate antitrust law and cease to compete with one another, and secure a ban on the use of Chinese open weight models? Turns out, there is a way to call time on the Red Queen's Race: merely insist that you are on the verge of teaching so many words to the word-guessing program that it will wake up and devour us all, and call for a ban on "superintelligence":

https://www.foxbusiness.com/technology/microsoft-ceo-says-superintelligence-must-remain-under-human-control

Once the government stipulates that "superintelligence risk" is an existential crisis, it must grant the hyperscalers a consent decree absolving them from any violations of antitrust law stemming from a conspiracy to halt direct competition with one another:

https://stephaniekelton.substack.com/p/brer-rabbit-and-ai-extinction

Freaking out about "superintelligence" is a canonical example of "criti-hype," where critics repeat boosters' claims but append, "(and that's bad)" to them:

https://peoples-things.ghost.io/youre-doing-it-wrong-notes-on-criticism-and-technology-hype/

Remember, the tech giants want to stop competing. Mark Zuckerberg and Sudar Pichai colluded to rig the ad-market with a secret program called "Jedi Blue":

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

Every year, Google sends Apple a bribe of more than $20b in exchange for Apple not entering the search market:

https://appleworld.today/2025/09/google-wont-be-barred-from-entering-into-search-agreements-with-companies-like-apple/

And the biggest tech companies in the world had a secret "no poach" agreement where they illegally promised not to try to hire one another's top engineers by offering them raises:

https://chicagounbound.uchicago.edu/law_and_economics/1033/

The only thing Peter Thiel hates more than the Antichrist (spoiler, he's just talking about Greta Thunberg) is "wasteful competition":

https://www.youtube.com/shorts/WmRC_NQh6aQ

When an industry that is eating itself alive through "hyperscaling" demands that the government bless a conspiracy to halt competition and ban open source alternatives, you should be suspicious. When that industry is pursuing a venture that has lost more money than any other venture in human history, you should be very suspicious, especially when its "rogue AI hacking" story turns out to be a story about how a hacking tool did exactly what it was designed to do:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/09/12/god-in-the-box/#llms-are-fake

Peter Thiel is right: AI is full of wasteful competition, but not because competition is a waste – rather, it's because the companies are competing to convince people to use their expensive products for the cheapest applications.

Elon Musk's SpaceX IPO depended on him losing billions of dollars by letting the world's stupidest chuds produce mountains of child porn and images of Sonic the Hedgehog with giant boobs. That is indeed wasteful (and reprehensible).

That doesn't mean we should allow the AI companies to get the government to bless their conspiracy in restraint of trade; rather, it militates for having the government investigate them for securities fraud, trafficking in child sex abuse material, election finance violations, and a long list of other crimes and misdemeanors.

Hey look at this (permalink)


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

Object permanence (permalink)

#25yrago Flash Worms: Thirty Seconds to Infect the Internet https://web.archive.org/web/20011024012950/http://www.silicondefense.com/flash/

#20yrsago This Film is Not Rated – must-see doc about MPAA ratings https://memex.craphound.com/2006/09/16/this-film-is-not-rated-must-see-doc-about-mpaa-ratings/

#15yrsago Chinese netizens angered by “princelings” — spoiled children of the rich and powerful https://edition.cnn.com/2011/09/16/world/asia/china-elite-children/index.html?iref=allsearch

#15yrsago LibDems get to vote on copyright reform, but who inserted the clause saying downloading should be a criminal act? https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2011/sep/16/libdems-vote-copyright-reform

#15yrsago Insurer: music-festival tragedy caused by illegal downloading https://twitpic.com/6l5ap2

#10yrsago US religion is worth $1.2T/year, more than America’s 10 biggest tech companies, combined https://web.archive.org/web/20161019095803/http://www.religjournal.com/pdf/ijrr12003.pdf

#10yrsago Geographically representative map of the London Underground https://web.archive.org/web/20240813111321/https://www.citymonitor.ai/analysis/map-londons-tube-shows-disused-stations-track-layout-and-more-2429/

#10yrsago Republican election officials block restrictions on foreign spending in US elections https://web.archive.org/web/20160916181403/https://theintercept.com/2016/09/16/fec-republicans-kill-attempt-to-block-foreign-money-in-u-s-elections/

#10yrsago Tommy Chong asks Obama to pardon him for his bullshit drug paraphernalia bust https://web.archive.org/web/20210720131834/https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/lifestyle/lifestyle-news/tommy-chong-seeks-obamas-pardon-928962/

#10yrsago Week two for the largest prison strike in US history https://web.archive.org/web/20160916143157/https://theintercept.com/2016/09/16/the-largest-prison-strike-in-u-s-history-enters-its-second-week/

#5yrsago Criminal entrepreneurship in Mexico’s high-tech drug cartels https://web.archive.org/web/20160917133449/https://motherboard.vice.com/read/how-drug-cartels-operate-like-silicon-valley-startups

#1yrago No such thing as selective censorship resistance https://pluralistic.net/2025/09/16/too-many-throats-to-choke/#pluralism-is-resiliency

Upcoming appearances (permalink)

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


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

Recent appearances (permalink)


A grid of my books with Will Stahle covers..

Latest books (permalink)


A cardboard book box with the Macmillan logo.

Upcoming books (permalink)

  • "The 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: 555 (15487 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.

How to get Pluralistic:

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

Pluralistic.net

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

https://pluralistic.net/plura-list

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

https://mamot.fr/@pluralistic

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

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

Medium (no ads, paywalled):

https://doctorow.medium.com/

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

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

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

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

ISSN: 3066-764X

Received — 11 September 2026 ⏭

Pluralistic: Inefficiency is bad, actually (11 Sep 2026)

✇Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
By: Cory Doctorow
11 September 2026 at 16:55


Today's links


A foil bowl of red jello on a red tablecloth, next to a shining spoon. Submerged in the jello is an elaborate watch movement.

Inefficiency is bad, actually (permalink)

The most reliable way to lose a political battle is to let your adversary define the terms. For example, if you're an artist and you let your boss define the fight over AI, he'll make it all about "IP" (not labor) and ask you to help secure a victory that will make him richer and you poorer:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/09/02/scrape-scrope-scrap/

If we want to win these important battles, we can't let our adversaries define them. That's the blunder we made 50 years ago, when we let the neoclassical economists redefine the problem of monopolies. Before the Carter era, the monopoly fight was about power. Monopolies had to be fought because wealth concentration would create "autocrats of trade," so powerful as to be beyond the reach of any regulator, any union, any competitor. Even if a company achieved its monopoly by being the best in the world – by making the best products at the best prices while paying the best wages – its power still needed blunting, lest it change its mind and start charging more, reducing quality, and paying less:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/02/20/we-should-not-endure-a-king/

The Chicago School economists who were catapulted to dominance by Reagan, Thatcher, et al won this debate by changing the frame. They insisted (as neoclassicals love to do) that economics is no mere social science, obsessed with squishy, qualitative matters like "power." Rather, economics was a natural science, like physics, in which everything important could be crystallized (which is to say, reduced) to an equation:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nobel_Memorial_Prize_in_Economic_Sciences#Creation_and_funding

Economists call these equations "models," and they are famously impenetrable…unless you've had extensive training in economics. Once everything important about the economy was captured by abstruse equations, ordinary people's "feelings" about being squeezed, coerced, corralled or cheated were no longer germane:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/05/09/rest-in-piss-robert-bork/#harmful-dominance

Thus, competition enforcement was transformed: no longer was it an inquiry into the power that a company wielded or might amass through a merger. Rather, every competition question was a matter of solving an equation that would tell you whether the result would be "efficient":

https://pluralistic.net/2021/06/03/jitters/#brittleness

This framing was tactically brilliant. Once an economist pronounces a merger to be "efficient," everyone who opposes that merger can be dismissed as campaigning for an inefficient world. Who wants to live in an inefficient world?

But "efficiency" isn't a freestanding concept. A Martian observing the Earth through a powerful telescope could not tell you when a long line at the grocery store was "efficient" (because the wages saved by understaffing exceeded the lost business from customers who noped out and abandoned their shopping cart) and when it was "inefficient" (because the mom whose wait made her miss administering her kid's insulin ended up spending thousands on an emergency room visit).

In practice, an economist's "efficiency" is indistinguishable from "brittleness" and often crosses over into "cheating." The most "efficient" companies in the world have made an art out of locking in their customers, making it so hard to switch to a rival that customers tolerate declining quality, service and affordability:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/09/06/hotels-california/#the-eagles-were-optimists

During the pandemic, the "efficiency" of long supply-chains, low inventory, and bare-bones staffing was revealed as a form of societal immunocompromise, the annihilation of everything we need to survive when the status quo collapses, so that disaster always becomes calamity:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/06/01/factories-to-condos-pipeline/#stuff-not-money

Speaking this week on the Capitalisn't podcast, the heterodox economist Mariana Mazzucato unpacks her new book The Common Good Economy, and how its thesis reframes "efficiency" as a productivity question:

https://capitalisnt.com/episodes/can-capitalism-serve-the-common-good-ft-mariana-mazzucato-EODamLKT

Mazzucato describes how the economic fetish for efficiency and growth lacks specificity. Organizing a society around "growth" leads to a financialized economy, in which firms post growth by selling off the things they need to survive:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/05/23/spineless/#invertebrates

It leads to an enshittification economy, where firms "grow" by making their products worse, as when Google adds five more ads to every Youtube video and makes search worse so you'll have to keep refining your queries, loading fresh ads every time:

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

As with "efficiency," there's nothing wrong with "growth" (indeed, "de-growth" is a terrible slogan and a giant self-own for the climate movement). To smash gouging landlords, we need to grow the supply of housing stock, but if we flatten this to mean "number (of new condos) go up," we'll end up with a city full of half-built buy-to-rent condos that no one wants to pay for, much less live in:

https://www.mpamag.com/ca/mortgage-industry/market-updates/toronto-condo-buyers-abandon-units-worth-less-than-they-paid/524217

We need "growth" of batteries, solar panels, sea-walls, heat-pumps, insulation and recycling plants. We need "growth" of controlled burns, medical services, and gender-affirming care. We need "growth" of federated social media and non-American alternatives to productivity software.

This is where framing the debate is so important. We have to take back terms like "productivity," so it means "making things that we need more of," not "making more things." Governments can use taxation, procurement and regulation to coerce, convince, or woo private firms into producing these things – and governments can produce them directly.

The biggest barrier to a productive, resilient economy is corporate power. Smashing their power and building our own has to be our alpha and omega. We can't afford to spend our time arguing about whether a monopolist is "efficient." Efficiency does not render concentrated wealth and power safe for human civilization.

Once we reclaim productivity as "more of the things we want," we'll make it clear that replacing civil servants with AI chatbots is a loser policy. Mark Carney wants to fire tens of thousands of Canadian civil servants and replace them with defective LLMs on the grounds that these will cost less:

https://www.pm.gc.ca/en/news/news-releases/2026/06/04/prime-minister-carney-launches-ai-all-canadas-new-national-artificial

But they will deliver less, too. The only thing public sector chatbots truly deliver is cynicism about the ability of the state to achieve anything:

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

After generations in which the private sector has been allowed to degrade into an extractive, hostage-taking, enshittifying, planet-torching existential risk, we need the public to believe that states can deliver excellence. What's more, any politician who oversees the delivery of excellence will be beloved by the public, who will reward that politician by backing the kind of wildly ambitious program we desperately need:

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

As Mark Carney so eloquently said at Davos, as frightening as it is to have Trump "rupture" the old order, we should all be able to agree that the old order sucked and seize this opportunity to build something new and better:

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

I believe in Carneyism with all my heart – I just wish Carney did:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/05/30/rupture/#deeds-not-words

For all Carney's talk of a rupture and a better new world, his two signature strategies (besides replacing the civil service with chatbots) are retaliatory tariffs and importing Chinese EVs. Neither of these addresses Canada's resiliency and productivity deficits. If the retaliatory tariffs work, Canada goes back to getting its cars from America. If the China deal works, Canada swaps its USA risk for a China risk.

If Carney was actually interested in Carneyism, he'd use retaliatory tariffs and Chinese EVs to buy time while committing massive investment for building Canada's industrial capacity to manufacture the things that give other countries dangerous leverage. The problem with the old order was that it created a brittle system where one maniac elevated to a position of power could shatter everyone's peace and prosperity. The answer to that is not "a different maniac." It's also not two maniacs.

To be truly productive and efficient, Canada needs a competent, well-resourced civil service, not chatbots. It needs the capacity to build things that it can't afford to do without. Carney's failure to embrace Carneyism while insisting that he is delivering efficiency and growth is as clear an example of the risks of letting your enemies set the terms of the debate as you could ask for.

(Image: Martell, CC BY-SA 3.0; Horacio Cambeiro, CC BY-SA 4.0; modified)

Hey look at this (permalink)


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

Object permanence (permalink)

#25yrsago Tell Canada to Reject Anti-Technology Bans https://web.archive.org/web/20010917020803/https://www.eff.org/alerts/20010907_eff_canada_cpdci_alert.html

#25yrsago Making Light on 9/11 https://web.archive.org/web/20010917012109/http://www.panix.com/~pnh/makinglight.html

#25yrsago Twin Towers survivor registry https://web.archive.org/web/20010914220549/https://www.shunn.net/okay/

#25yrsago Blame encryption for 9/11 https://web.archive.org/web/20010917024851/http://www.usatoday.com/life/cyber/tech/2001-02-05-binladen.htm

#20yrsago Lawbot: open expert system for legal “advice” https://web.archive.org/web/20061103200129/https://www.lawunderground.org/PortalCSVS/DesktopDefault.aspx

#20yrsago USPTO encloses 10MB of porn with trademark rejection https://web.archive.org/web/20061005074505/https://www.thesmokinggun.com/archive/0911061uspto1.html

#20yrsago German Pirate Party founded https://web.archive.org/web/20061011142613/http://www.piratenpartei-deutschland.de/index.php?id=50

#20yrsago Starbucks co-produces movie, then sells DVD https://web.archive.org/web/20060322021155/http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/06013/637176.stm

#20yrsago How Hollywood’s MP in Canada financed her campaign https://web.archive.org/web/20061010121752/https://www.michaelgeist.ca/content/view/1428/125/

#20yrsago Jimmy Wales to Beijing: Wikipedia won’t censor https://web.archive.org/web/20061004173945/http://observer.guardian.co.uk/world/story/0,,1869074,00.html

#20yrsago Chumby chairman interview: squeezable, open bean-bag computer https://wifinetnews.com/archives/2006/09/podcast_21_chumbys_chairman_steve_tomlin.html

#15yrsago Judge: copyright troll showed “staggering chutzpah” in sending its own subpoenas to ISPs https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2011/09/judge-sanctions-copyright-troll-attorney

#10yrsago Why Facebook’s “It’s too hard” excuse for Vietnam war photo takedown is bullshit https://web.archive.org/web/20160914214543/http://tinyletter.com/danhon/letters/s3e27-it-s-difficult

#10yrsago A socialist wrote the Pledge of Allegiance, which used to be accompanied by Nazi salutes https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/rules-about-how-to-address-us-flag-came-about-because-no-one-wanted-to-look-like-a-nazi-180960100/?no-ist

#1yrago Hate the player AND the game https://pluralistic.net/2025/09/10/say-their-names/#object-permanence

#1yrago Reverse centaurs are the answer to the AI paradox https://pluralistic.net/2025/09/11/vulgar-thatcherism/#there-is-an-alternative

Upcoming appearances (permalink)

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

Recent appearances (permalink)


A grid of my books with Will Stahle covers..

Latest books (permalink)


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Upcoming books (permalink)

  • "The 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 (14417 total).

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

  • A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING

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