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Received — 17 August 2026 ⏭

Pluralistic: Jennifer Jenkins' 'Music Copyright, Creativity, and Culture' (17 Aug 2026)

✇Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
By: Cory Doctorow
17 August 2026 at 09:00


Today's links

  • Jennifer Jenkins' 'Music Copyright, Creativity, and Culture': The definitive textbook (with comics!).
  • Hey look at this: Delights to delectate.
  • Object permanence: Hair-gel bombers v bras; Hair-gel bombers v chemistry; AOL digs for spammer's platinum; Stross on infosec in 2061; In-game Ponzi; Snowden on Shadow Brokers hack; Life v understanding advanced math; "Greatest of Marlys!"; Housing and precarity; LLMs as slot-machines for coders; Hypercard's backstory; Pirate Party; Fanbois' mental health v critics; Krugman calls for alien invasion; Trump x Serbian genocidaires; The last Sandman Slim; Muphry’s Law; NSA created the Shadow Brokers; DOJ kills private prisons; Walmart externalizes crime; "Sgt Augmento"; Zuckermuskian solipsism.
  • Upcoming appearances: 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.


The cover for the Oxford University Press edition of Jennifer Jenkins' 'Music Copyright, Creativity, and Culture.'

Jennifer Jenkins' 'Music Copyright, Creativity, and Culture' (permalink)

Nobody explains copyright like Jennifer Jenkins, the director of the Duke Center for the Public Domain, in which capacity she is responsible for the annual New Year's roundups of all the materials entering the public domain (a series that started in the decades during which the public domain was frozen by the Sonny Bono Copyright Act):

https://pluralistic.net/2023/12/20/em-oh-you-ess-ee/#sexytimes

Jenkins has a gift for making one of the most complicated, worst understood, most consequential areas of law not only comprehensible, but also fascinating. Her late 2023 explanation of what "Mickey Mouse's copyright is expiring" actually meant was the single best explainer on the subject, in a crowded field:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/12/15/mouse-liberation-front/#free-mickey

Small wonder that she's the go-to copyright and trademark expert for so many media outlets. Perhaps you heard her Planet Money segments on which superheroes are in the public domain:

https://www.npr.org/transcripts/969512231

Jenkins' flair for legal communications carries over to her scholarly work, of course, which is why her Open Copyright Casebook is a standard text for American law schools:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/07/30/open-and-shut-casebook/#stop-confusing-the-issue-with-relevant-facts

Jenkins co-wrote the Casebook with her husband, the equally erudite and expert James Boyle. It's just one of their many fruitful collaborations; they are also the writing team behind THEFT! A History of Music, the greatest graphic novel ever created about the history of music, music law, music censorship, and the music industry:

https://web.law.duke.edu/musiccomic/

Last year, Jenkins published Music Copyright, Creativity, and Culture, an Oxford University Press title that fuses her scholarly and popular work in a generalist textbook on the legal framework for music that will forever change how you think about music. Now, a second edition, with a lengthy section on new music litigation, AI copyright fights, and the issue of uncompensated labor is available as an open access download:

https://web.law.duke.edu/cspd/musiccopyright/

Music Copyright weaves together the economic, cultural, political and artistic history of music, pulling on historic threads ranging from antiquity to medieval Europe to the age of mechanical reproduction to describe changing views of musicians, their audiences, and religious and political leaders on what constituted music, who was allowed to make music, and what music was for. In so doing, she firmly establishes the extremely contingent nature of our present-day norms around music, showing that the "natural" present-day assumptions about who gets paid, who pays, and when payment (or permission) is required are anything but, and are always in flux.

For obvious reasons, much of Jenkins' text describes these changes in the context of the record, the radio, satellite transmission, P2P file-sharing, and digital sampling (along with a chapter on AI). These examples are liberally illustrated with links to musical excerpts that bring the subject to life (these are presented as hotlinks in the ebook; if you're reading the print edition, you can use the book's companion website:)

https://web.law.duke.edu/cspd/musiccopyright/

Interspersed with these histories and analysis are lengthy, extremely on-point excerpts from THEFT!, her graphic novel history of music. These enliven the text as much as the music samples, making this textbook as entertaining as it is informative.

Of especial interest – and importance – are the long sections on the courtroom battles of Ed Sheeran, Katy Perry, and Pharrell Williams over similar "grooves" and "vibes" to other songs, some of them well-known and some quite obscure:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/04/08/oh-why/#two-notes-and-running

These cases highlight the fundamental incoherence of music copyright, a system composed of improvised responses to new technologies, each layered atop the last in a messy pile that virtually no one understands.

Jenkins understands it, though. I've been reading, writing, and debating about this stuff since the late 1990s, and I learned something new on every page of this delightful book. This should be required reading for anyone who makes music, loves music, or cares about musicians and the arts more generally. It's a towering accomplishment and a brilliant read.

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 RIP, The Industry Standard, Palm buys BeOS https://web.archive.org/web/20010927192339/http://www.wired.com/news/business/0,1367,46113,00.html

#25yrsago Smart dust sensors https://web.archive.org/web/20011112010004/http://www.smalltimes.com/document_display.cfm?document_id=1935

#25yrsago Pentagon patents onion-routing https://web.archive.org/web/20010912222427/http://www.wired.com/news/politics/0,1283,46126,00.html

#25yrsago Coltan: the conflict mineral in our gadgets https://www.nytimes.com/2001/08/12/magazine/the-dirt-in-the-new-machine.html

#25yrsago Danny Goodman Talks About HyperCard https://web.archive.org/web/20011214114614/http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/mac/2001/08/17/goodman.html

#25yrsago Report an insecure website, win a visit from the FBI https://web.archive.org/web/20010820110330/http://www.linuxfreak.org/post.php/08/17/2001/134.html

#20yrsago Copyright wars: film-makers eats themselves https://web.archive.org/web/20070318010544/https://www.laweekly.com/film+tv/film/freedom-of-information/14244/

#20yrsago RyanAir to UK govt: ease off on security or we sue https://www.theguardian.com/business/2006/aug/18/theairlineindustry.terrorism

#20yrsago Federal court bans Bush’s warrantless spying on Americans https://edition.cnn.com/2006/POLITICS/08/17/domesticspying.lawsuit/index.html

#20yrsago Western millionaires plotted Equatorial Guinea coup as a game https://web.archive.org/web/20071114211448/https://www.salon.com/books/review/2006/08/17/roberts/index_np.html

#20yrsago Sweden’s Pirate Party – political arm of the pro-piracy groundswell https://web.archive.org/web/20060820093355/https://www.wired.com/news/technology/1,71544-0.html

#20yrsago Hair-Gel Bombers win war on bras https://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/entry/us-authorities-leave-gel_n_27402

#20yrsago Would a hair-gel bomb actually work? https://seclists.org/interesting-people/2006/Aug/86

#20yrsago The Pirate Bay’s backstory https://web.archive.org/web/20060901180116/https://www.wired.com/news/technology/1,71543-0.html

#20yrsago AOL will dig for buried platinum and gold in spammer’s Mom’s yard https://www.nbcnews.com/id/wbna14365934

#15yrsago Charlie Stross on network security in 2061 https://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2011/08/usenix-2011-keynote-network-se.html

#15yrsago Damning 2007 letter asserts that phone hacking was an open practice at News of the World https://www.theguardian.com/media/2011/aug/16/phone-hacking-now-reporter-letter

#15yrsago In-game Ponzi nets US$50K https://web.archive.org/web/20110921052125/http://gamergaia.com/pc/1724-eve-online-space-heist-one-trillion-isk.html

#15yrsago Copyright troll handed ass (again), tries saddest trick ever to get out of paying its victim’s legal bills https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2011/08/righthaven-rocked-owes-34000-after-fair-use-loss/

#15yrsago English cops arrest man for planning water-fight via Blackberry Messenger https://www.theguardian.com/media/2011/aug/15/essex-water-fight-blackberry-messenger

#15yrsago Woman who recorded Massachusetts police beating charged with illegal wiretapping https://www.masslive.com/news/2011/08/videographer_of_alleged_melvin.html

#15yrsago Criticism of a brand lowers the self-esteem of its adherents https://arstechnica.com/science/2011/08/users-treat-criticism-of-favorite-brands-as-threat-to-self-image/

#15yrsago Homeopathy multinational sues blogger over statements that its mythological curative had “no active ingredient” https://web.archive.org/web/20110930131033/http://www.blogzero.it/contatti/prova/

#15yrsago Edinburgh Fringe show asks audience to shred banknotes https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2011/aug/16/crunch-edinburgh-festival-shred-cash

#15yrsago CCTV deterrence and the London uprising https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2011/aug/17/why-cctv-does-not-deter-crime

#15yrsago Paul Krugman: save the economy by staging an alien invasion hoax https://comicsalliance.com/watchmen-paul-krugman-alien-invasion/

#15yrsago Minecraft creator challenges trademark belligerents to winner-take-all Quake deathmatch https://web.archive.org/web/20110817205045/http://notch.tumblr.com/post/9038258448/hey-bethesda-lets-settle-this

#15yrsago Muphry’s Law: the inevitability of typos in discussions of typos https://web.archive.org/web/20101227141449/https://www.editorscanberra.org/muphrys-law/

#15yrsago Copyright complaint as phishing email https://memex.craphound.com/2011/08/18/copyright-complaint-as-phishing-email/

#15yrsago Rep Allen West pens “dumbest thing ever written on congressional stationery” https://web.archive.org/web/20110914030034/https://thinkprogress.org/security/2011/08/17/297619/allen-west-nuts/

#10yrsago The NSA’s program of tech sabotage created the Shadow Brokers https://web.archive.org/web/20160818132904/https://www.wired.com/2016/08/shadow-brokers-mess-happens-nsa-hoards-zero-days/

#10yrsago Walmarts are high-crime zones thanks to staff cuts, but America gets the bill https://web.archive.org/web/20160818000539/https://www.bloomberg.com/features/2016-walmart-crime/

#10yrsago DoJ says it will end private federal prisons https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2016/08/department-justice-plans-end-private-prison/

#10yrsago Fiction: Sgt. Augmento, Bruce Sterling’s robots-take-our-jobs story https://web.archive.org/web/20160818161624/https://motherboard.vice.com/read/sgt-augmento

#10yrsago Las Vegas: high unionization rates mean smaller wage-gaps for women, especially older women https://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/17/opinion/how-unions-help-cocktail-servers.html

#10yrsago The incredible true story of the Epcot Horizons superfans who ruled the ride https://web.archive.org/web/20160822031741/https://dangerousminds.net/comments/the_true_story_of_the_unauthorized_daredevil_documentation_of_the_horizons_/

#10yrsago Predictive policing predicts police harassment, not crime https://web.archive.org/web/20160821093834/https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11292-016-9272-0

#10yrsago UC Davis Chancellor spent $400K+ to scrub her online reputation after pepper-spray incident https://www.sacbee.com/news/local/article94733812.html

#10yrsago Reputation systems work because people are mostly good https://timharford.com/2016/08/the-meaning-of-trust-in-the-age-of-airbnb/

#10yrsago The guy who started Serbia’s ethnic cleansing led a pro-Trump rally in Belgrade https://web.archive.org/web/20160817022133/https://theintercept.com/2016/08/16/serb-inspired-ethnic-cleansing-bosnia-leads-vote-trump-rally-belgrade/

#10yrsago Europe’s banks want to store billions in cash to fight back against negative interest https://web.archive.org/web/20160817152157/https://www.cnbc.com/2016/08/16/banks-look-for-cheap-way-to-store-cash-piles-as-rates-go-negative.html

#10yrsago Kill Rock Stars president explains why the radio plays the same songs over and over https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ThrXkYwTBP8

#10yrsago Snowden explains the Shadow Brokers/Equation Group/NSA hack https://www.techdirt.com/2016/08/16/ed-snowden-explains-why-hackers-published-nsas-hacking-tools/

#10yrsago Hackers claim to have stolen NSA cyberweapons, auctioning them to highest bidder https://web.archive.org/web/20160816035711/https://motherboard.vice.com/read/hackers-hack-nsa-linked-equation-group

#10yrsago What life is like when you really understand advanced mathematics https://www.quora.com/What-is-it-like-to-understand-advanced-mathematics-Does-it-feel-analogous-to-having-mastery-of-another-language-like-in-programming-or-linguistics

#10yrsago Parents who can’t pay the bill for kids’ incarceration can still go bankrupt, a US court rules https://archive.thinkprogress.org/everything-wrong-with-how-our-justice-system-treats-poor-people-in-one-awful-case-bfd91a6fa114/

#10yrsago UK Intellectual Property Office grants trademark on “should’ve” https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-37092366

#10yrsago The Greatest of Marlys! is the Lynda Barry book we’ve been waiting for https://memex.craphound.com/2016/08/16/the-greatest-of-marlys-is-the-lynda-barry-book-weve-been-waiting-for/

#5yrsago Housing, money laundry, speculation and precarity https://pluralistic.net/2021/08/16/die-miete-ist-zu-hoch/#assets-v-human-rights

#5yrsago Big Oil caught lying about methane https://pluralistic.net/2021/08/17/king-bullet/#methanescan

#5yrsago Sandman Slim's final adventure https://pluralistic.net/2021/08/17/king-bullet/#sticking-the-dismount

#5yrsago The Sacklers threaten us all with a good time https://pluralistic.net/2021/08/18/lets-make-a-deal/#art-of-the-deal

#1yrago Zuckermuskian solipsism https://pluralistic.net/2025/08/18/seeing-like-a-billionaire/#npcs

#1yrago LLMs are slot-machines https://pluralistic.net/2025/08/16/jackpot/#salience-bias

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. Friday's words: 564 (6039 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

Received — 13 April 2026 ⏭

Pluralistic: Austerity creates fascism (13 Apr 2026)

✇Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
By: Cory Doctorow
13 April 2026 at 07:29


Today's links

  • Austerity creates fascism: We can't afford to not afford nice things.
  • Hey look at this: Delights to delectate.
  • Object permanence: The Server of Amontillado; Flapper's Dictionary; Mastercard v rec.humor.funny; Philippines electoral data breach; A front page from the Trump presidency; Spike Lee x Bernie Sanders; France v password hashing; Algorithms as Central European folk-dances; Save Comcast; Lex Luthor v export controls; Zuckerberg in the dock.
  • Upcoming appearances: Toronto, San Francisco, London, Berlin, NYC, Hay-on-Wye, London.
  • 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 line of Nazis at the Nuremburg rally, throwing Nazi salutes. Their backs are to us. Facing them is a hand-tinted group of child laborers from the early 20th century, squinting suspiciously at them.

Austerity creates fascism (permalink)

I'm worried about AI psychosis. Specifically, I'm worried about the psychosis that makes our "capital allocators" spend $1.4T on the money-losingest technology in the history of the human race, in pursuit of a bizarre fantasy that if we teach the word-guessing program enough words, it will take all the jobs. That's some next-level underpants-gnomery:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/03/12/normal-technology/#bubble-exceptionalism

The thing that worries me about billionaires' AI psychosis isn't concern for their financial solvency. No, what I worry about is what happens when the seven companies that comprise a third of the S&P 500 stop trading the same $100b IOU around while pretending it's in all of their bank accounts at once and implode, vaporizing a third of the US stock market.

My concern about a massive collapse in the capital markets isn't that workers will suffer directly. Despite all the Wonderful Life rhetoric about your money being in Joe's house and the Kennedy house and Mrs Macklin's house, the reality is that the median US worker has $955 saved for retirement. You could nuke the whole financial system and not take a dime out of most workers' pockets:

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

No, the thing that has me terrified about AI is that when it craters and takes the economy with it, that we will respond the same way we have during every financial crisis of the 21st century: with austerity, and austerity breeds fascism.

There's a direct line from every K-shaped recovery to every strong-man who's currently sending masked gunmen into the streets. The Hungarian dictator Viktor Orban rose to power after people who'd been suckered into denominating their mortgages in Swiss francs lost their houses when the currency markets moved suddenly, because the swindlers who'd sold them those mortgages took the position that wanting to live somewhere automatically made you an expert in forex risk, so caveat fuckin' emptor, baby.

Back in America, Obama decided to bail out the banks and not the people. His treasury secretary Tim Geithner told him the banks were headed for a catastrophic crash and could only be saved if he "foamed the runways" with everyday Americans' mortgages. Millions of Americans lost their homes to foreclosure as banks, flush with public cash, threw them out of their homes and then flipped them to investment banks who became the country's worst slumlords:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/02/08/wall-street-landlords/#the-new-slumlords

Americans were understandably not entirely happy with this outcome. So when Hillary Clinton replied to Donald Trump's "Make America Great Again" with "America is already great," her message was, "Vote for me if you think everything is great; vote for Trump if you think everything is fucked":

https://www.politico.com/blogs/2016-dem-primary-live-updates-and-results/2016/03/clinton-america-is-already-great-220078

"Austerity begets fascism" is one of those things that makes a lot of intuitive sense, but it turns out that there's a good empirical basis for believing it. In "Public Service Decline and Support for the Populist Right" four economists from the LSE and Bocconi provide an excellent look at the linkage between austerity and support for fascists:

https://catherinedevries.eu/NHS.pdf

Here's how they break it down. Political scientists have assembled a large, reproducible body of evidence to show that "public service provision is crucial to people’s perceptions of their quality of life and living standards." Good public services are the basis for "the social contract between rulers and the ruled" – pay your taxes and obey the laws, and in return, you will be well served.

When public services go wrong, people don't always know who to blame, but they definitely notice that something is going wrong, so when public services fail, people stop trusting the state, and that social contract starts to fray. They start to suspect that elites are lining their pockets rather than managing the system, and they "withdraw their support" for the system.

Fascists thrive in these conditions. Fascists come to power by mobilizing grievances. By choosing a scapegoat, fascists can create support from people who are justifiably furious that the services they rely on have collapsed. So when you can't get shelter, or health care, or elder care, or child care, or an education for your kids, you become a mark for a fascist grifter with a story about "undeserving migrants" who've taken the benefits that should rightly accrue to "deserving natives."

(This is grimly hilarious, given that the wizened, decrepit rich world is critically dependent on migrants as a source of healthy, working-age workers who pay massive amounts into the system while barely making use of it, many of whom plan on retiring to their home countries when they do reach the age where they're likely to extract a net loss to the benefits system.)

Enter the NHS, a beloved institution that is hailed as the pride of the nation by both the political left and the right. The majority of Britons use the NHS, with only 12-14% of the population "going private," so when the NHS declines, everybody notices (what's more, even people with private care use the NHS for many of their needs).

Britons love the NHS and they want the government to spend more on it. There's "a broad public consensus that the government is not going far enough when it comes to funding." That's because generations of cuts to the NHS have left it substantially hollowed out, with major parts of the service handed over to for-profit entities who overcharge and underserve.

The most tangible and immediate evidence of this slow-motion collapse comes when your local general practitioner ("family doctor" or "primary care physician" in Americanese) shuts down. The UK has lost 1,700 GP practices since 2013.

Reasoning that a GP closure would make people angry at the system, the economists behind the paper wanted to see what happened to people's political beliefs when their GP's office shut. They relied on the GP Patient Survey, a longitudinal study run by NHS England and Ipsos Mori. The survey polls a statistically significant random sample of patients from every GP practice in the NHS and then weights the results "to reflect the demographic characteristics of the local population according to UK Census estimates." It's good data.

The researchers cross-referenced this with various high-quality instruments that measured the political views of Britons, like the U Essex Understanding Society Panel, drawing on 13 years' worth of surveys from 2009-2022, gaining access to a protected version of the dataset with fine-grained geographic information about survey respondents, which allowed them to link responses to the "catchment areas" for specific GPs' office. They combined this data with the British Election Study panel, which has surveyed voters 29 times since 2014.

Most of the paper describes the careful work the researchers did to analyze, cross-reference and validate this data, but what interested me was the conclusion: that people who see a severe degradation in the quality of the services they rely on switch their political affiliation to one of Britain's fascist parties – UKIP, the Brexit Party, or Reform – parties that have called for ethnic cleansing in Britain.

This is what has me scared. We can see the looming economic crises in our near future. If it's not the AI crash that triggers the next wave of austerity, it'll be the oil crisis created by Trump's bungling in the Strait of Epstein. And of course, we could always get a twofer, because the Gulf States that were pouring hundreds of billions into AI data-centers now need every cent to rebuild the LNG shipping terminals and oil refineries that Iran blew up after Trump, Hegseth, and Netanyahu started murdering all the schoolgirls they could target. Once they nope out of the AI bubble, that could trigger the collapse.

This is a study about the NHS, but it's not just about the NHS. It's perfectly reasonable to assume that people react this way when they experience cuts to their road maintenance, their schools, their community centers, and any other service they rely on. Fascism – what Hannah Arendt called 'organized loneliness' – can only take root when people stop believing that their society will reward their lawfulness with an orderly and humane existence.

The crisis is coming, but whether we do austerity when it gets here is our choice. Everywhere we turn, political leaders are rejecting generations of failed austerity in favor of "sewer socialism" – the idea that you get people to trust their government by earning that trust. Zohran Mamdani is fixing 100,000 potholes in the first 100 days, despite the multi-billion dollar deficit that outgoing Mayor Eric Adams created by "running the city like a business":

https://prospect.org/2026/04/10/zohran-mamdani-getting-new-york-city-believe-in-government/

In Canada and the UK, party leaders like Avi Lewis (NDP) and Zack Polanski (Greens) are vowing to fight the coming crises by spending, not cutting. Compare that with UK fascist leader Nigel Farage, who says that if he's elected, he'll create a "paramilitary style" British ICE, building concentration camps for 24,000 migrants, with the hope of deporting 288,000 people per year:

https://www.thenerve.news/p/reform-deportation-operation-restoring-justice-data-surveillance-palantir-uk-labour

"Socialism or barbarism" isn't just a cliche – it's actually a choice on the ballot.

Hey look at this (permalink)


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

Object permanence (permalink)

#25yrsago The Server of Amontillado https://web.archive.org/web/20070112024841/http://www.techweb.com/wire/story/TWB20010409S0012

#25yrsago Mastercard threatens the moderator of rec.humor.funny https://www.netfunny.com/rhf/jokes/01/Apr/mcrhf.html

#15yrsago Sweden exports sweatshops: Ikea’s first American factory https://web.archive.org/web/20190404035900/https://www.latimes.com/business/la-xpm-2011-apr-10-la-fi-ikea-union-20110410-story.html

#15yrsago Canada’s New Democratic Party promises national broadband and net neutrality https://web.archive.org/web/20110412064952/https://www.michaelgeist.ca/content/view/5734/125/

#15yrsago Flapper’s dictionary: 1922 https://bookflaps.blogspot.com/2011/04/flappers-dictionary.html

#15yrsago Toronto’s Silver Snail to leave Queen Street West https://web.archive.org/web/20110409181737/http://www.thestar.com/entertainment/article/970520–the-silver-snail-comics-icon-sold-to-move

#15yrsago WI county clerk whose homemade voting software found 14K votes for Tea Party judge is an old hand at illegal campaigning https://web.archive.org/web/20110412121323/http://host.madison.com/wsj/news/local/govt-and-politics/elections/article_7e777016-62b2-11e0-9b74-001cc4c002e0.html

#15yrsago Canadian Tories’ campaign pledge: We will spy on the Internet https://web.archive.org/web/20110412125250/https://www.michaelgeist.ca/content/view/5733/125/

#15yrsago France to require unhashed password storage https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-12983734

#15yrsago Central European folk-dancers illustrated sorting algorithms https://www.i-programmer.info/news/150-training-a-education/2255-sorting-algorithms-as-dances.html

#10yrsago Save Comcast! https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2016/04/save-comcast

#10yrsago Goldman Sachs will pay $5B for fraudulent sales of toxic debt, no one will go to jail https://web.archive.org/web/20160412155435/https://consumerist.com/2016/04/11/goldman-sachs-to-pay-5b-to-settle-charges-of-selling-troubled-mortgages-ahead-of-the-financial-crisis/

#10yrsago How could Lex Luthor beat the import controls on kryptonite? https://lawandthemultiverse.com/2016/04/11/batman-v-superman-and-import-licenses/

#10yrsago Congresscritters spend 4 hours/day on the phone, begging for money https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ylomy1Aw9Hk

#10yrsago Philippines electoral data breach much worse than initially reported, possibly worst ever https://www.infosecurity-magazine.com/news/every-voter-in-philippines-exposed/

#10yrsago A cashless society as a tool for censorship and social control https://web.archive.org/web/20260311032317/https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2016/04/cashless-society/477411/

#10yrsago Boston Globe previews a front page from the Trump presidency https://s3.documentcloud.org/documents/2797782/Ideas-Trump-front-page.pdf

#10yrsago Spike Lee interviews Bernie Sanders: Vermont, Trump, Clinton, guns and Brooklyn https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/movies/movie-features/bernie-sanders-interviewed-by-spike-lee-thr-new-york-issue-880788/

#5yrsago Youtube blocks advertisers from targeting "Black Lives Matter" https://pluralistic.net/2021/04/10/brand-safety-rupture/#brand-safety

#5yrsago Google's short-lived data-advantage https://pluralistic.net/2021/04/11/halflife/#minatory-legend

#1yrago Zuckerberg in the dock https://pluralistic.net/2025/04/11/it-is-better-to-buy/#than-to-compete

#1yrago The most remarkable thing about antitrust (that no one talks about) https://pluralistic.net/2025/04/10/solidarity-forever-2/#oligarchism

Upcoming appearances (permalink)

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

Recent appearances (permalink)


A grid of my books with Will Stahle covers..

Latest books (permalink)


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Upcoming books (permalink)

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

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

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

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

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


Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources:

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

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

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

  • A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING

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