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Received today — 19 October 2026 ⏭

Pluralistic: The technopolitics of ad-tech (19 Oct 2026)

✇Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
By: Cory Doctorow
19 October 2026 at 09:08


Today's links

  • The technopolitics of ad-tech: Spying is good for tech, context is good for publishers.
  • Hey look at this: Delights to delectate.
  • Object permanence: PNH x Mike Ford; Singapore v Far East Economic Review; Publishing v bestsellers; Architecture v security; Vista v everyone; Free Bieber; Belarus sells the sugar bowls; OCCUPY GEORGE; Grey type sucks; Spinal Tap v studio math; Terry Pratchett x $10t coin; Boy Scouts x copyright maximialism; Canadian Tories x DRM; Herman Cain's 9-9-9 plan; ACLu v secret laws; Fined for suing the cops who shot you; Chicago PD steals millions for cop toys; Turing's Law; Copyleft v Vizio; Trump's killswitch.
  • Upcoming appearances: Vancouver, Victoria, Ottawa, Vienna, Kilkenny, Oxford, Sheffield, Virtual, Oxford, Montreal.
  • Recent appearances: Where I've been.
  • Latest books: You keep readin' em, I'll keep writin' 'em.
  • Upcoming books: Like I said, I'll keep writin' 'em.
  • Colophon: All the rest.


A halftoned, yellowing scan of a 1940s page of newspaper ads. Emerging from the ads is a halftoned fist clad in spiked brass kuckles.

The technopolitics of ad-tech (permalink)

"Technopolitics" are the politics embedded in technology. The Ur-text of technopolitics is "Do Artifacts Have Politics?" by the rock critic turned scholar Langdon Winner:

https://faculty.cc.gatech.edu/~beki/cs4001/Winner.pdf

With "Do Artifacts," Winner demands that we move beyond the idea of technologies having "intended consequences" and "unintended consequences" and towards a political economy of tech. In service to this, he divides the politics of artifacts into three categories:

I. Artifacts that have politics embedded in them by their creators, like Robert Moses's infamous bridges over the Long Island parkways. According to Moses biographer Robert Caro, Moses deliberately specified that these bridges must be too low for a city bus to pass under, in a bid to block Black people from traveling from New York City to the beaches he'd developed on Long Island.

Today those bridges are more than a century old, and they are still too low for city buses to pass under them, and this continues to mean that people who don't own private vehicles find it more difficult to get to the beach, and as it's still the case that race is a predictor of low incomes, those are still racist bridges.

II. Artifacts whose politics are accidental but unavoidable. Winner cites a kind of tomato harvester that vastly improved the efficiency of tomato pickers. These harvesters became very popular, which allowed tomato farmers to lay off large numbers of agricultural workers, and also allowed them to price the mechanically harvested tomatoes so cheaply that they crowded out other kinds of tomatoes.

Because these machines created a large pool of unemployed workers, they shifted power from labor to capital, and because these picking machines were too rough for all but the hardest varietals of tomato, they changed the flavor profile of tomatoes in America for the worse, towards a bland, tough tomato.

These picking machines were not designed to make workers poorer, nor were they designed to make tomatoes taste worse, but because of their technical characteristics, this was the unavoidable outcome, the inextricable politics of these machines.

III. Artifacts whose politics are intrinsic to their design. Here, Winner contrasts solar panels with nuclear reactors. Solar panels may require highly centralized industrial systems to produce, but once they are in the field, solar panels are compatible with looser, less coordinated political arrangements. A world of small anarchist communes is fully compatible with solar energy.

Contrast this with nuclear reactors: the prudent ongoing operation of a reactor requires a highly centralized state that is capable of fielding reliable, trustworthy independent inspectors. This state must also be capable of exercising the coercive power to shut down badly maintained or incompetently operated reactors.

The politics of nukes are the politics of a centralized, powerful state; the politics of solar are less determined. Solar is compatible with a wide variety of political systems, including (but not limited to) weak, decentralized states.

(For a further exploration of "Do Artifacts Have Politics?" I highly recommend Ginger Coons' reading guide:)

https://www.not-so-obvious.net/reading-do-artifacts-have-politics/

I really like Winner's framework for exploring technopolitics, but I have my own gloss on it. Winner's framework doesn't explicitly contemplate the idea of technological countermeasures. For example, what if someone were to design a city bus that was low enough to fit under Robert Moses's bridges? At that point, they'd cease to be "racist bridges," and merely become "bridges built by a racist":

https://locusmag.com/feature/commentary-cory-doctorow-technopolitics/

Which brings me to the technopolitics of ad-tech. Lots of people think that advertising is "the original sin of the internet," setting in motion the surveillance dystopia that is closing in on us from all sides today:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/10/17/mercenary-spyware/#discover-tech

I think this is wrong. I think that finding ways to communicate ideas and pitches to the general public is fine. Without some channel for reaching people with ideas and propositions they may not be familiar with, it would be infinitely harder to reach people for political causes. It would also be harder for new books, movies and music to find new audiences. It would be much harder to get people out to your independent craft fair, your zine show, or your No Kings march.

For me, the internet's original sin isn't advertising, it's surveillance. Contrary to what you have been told – and pax Winner's framework – the internet is fully compatible with privacy:

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

It wasn't the internet's technopolitics that made it a surveillance nightmare. It was just plain politics. Specifically, our politicians decided to stop enacting and enforcing privacy laws. The last consumer privacy law we got in America was a bill that made it illegal for video store clerks to disclose your VHS rentals:

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

(As I type these words, the Supreme Court is poised to eliminate even that dried-up old crumb of privacy protection:)

https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2026/10/supreme-court-privacy-rights-case-bork-kavanaugh.html

The widespread phenomenon of ad-tech companies spying on us is the result of the decision to allow them to do so. That decision has had innumerable negative downstream effects, such as skyrocketing "surveillance prices":

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

And collapsing "surveillance wages":

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

It's created vast surveillance databases that are critical to Trump's racist pogroms, providing dossiers and precise location data on the people ICE kidnaps to Salvadoran slave-labor camps:

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

Surveillance also promotes oligarchy. Without surveillance, oligarchs must give up more of their fortunes to keep the public happy, because the alternative is spending even more money on guards to keep the public from building guillotines on their lawns. Surveillance lets oligarchs make targeted strikes on restive radicals, which is much cheaper than broad-spectrum policies that make us all better off and neutralize the case for guillotines:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/06/26/autostabilizer/#slicey-bois

These are the technopolitics of surveillance, not advertising. There is nothing about advertising that demands surveillance. For centuries, advertising was not meaningfully linked to surveillance. The decision to fuse surveillance with advertising was just that – a decision, not an inevitability.

Any time we forget this, we let spying tech bosses off the hook. After all, if advertising demands surveillance, then tech bosses are just the avatars of the great forces of history, prisoners of the imperative to spy in order to advertise. By remembering that surveillance advertising is a choice, we put the blame squarely where it belongs: on the guillotineable oligarchs who made that choice, and amassed spectacular fortunes thereby.

Surveillance is political, but surveillance advertising has its own distinct technopolitics, and to understand those technopolitics, we must contrast them with the technopolitics of contextual advertising. Up until a decade or two ago, contextual advertising was simply called "advertising." Contextual advertising is the practice of running refrigerator ads next to articles on cooking and kitchen remodeling; ads for roadside restaurants on highway billboards; ads for Disney vacations in parenting magazines.

Your intuition probably insists that context advertising is less effective than surveillance advertising. After all, surveillance advertising allows a running shoe company to target users who are training for a marathon no matter where they are and no matter what they're doing. Surely this translates into increased "conversions" (clicks and/or purchases, depending on who you're talking to)?

It does, but not by much. Advertisers get about 5% more value from surveillance ads than they do from context ads:

https://weis2019.econinfosec.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/6/2019/05/WEIS_2019_paper_38.pdf

Partly, that's because surveillance ad companies grossly overrate the efficacy of surveillance advertising:

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

But surveillance advertising's anemic returns to advertisers are down to another aspect of the system: its tendency towards monopolization:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Google_LLC_(2023)

Surveillance is a capital-intensive activity: spying on billions of people as they move through the digital and physical world is incredibly expensive. That is a good part of the reason that online advertising has collapsed into the Meta/Google duopoly, who control about 80% of display advertising.

The harms of surveillance monopolies have a severely distorting effect on policy debates. For example, it's led some anti-monopolists to call for government-issued surveillance identifiers that follow us from birth to death in order to facilitate commercial spying to foster more competition in surveillance:

https://www.thesling.org/what-to-do-about-googles-dominance-of-online-advertising/

Here's the thing about monopolists: they cheat. Google and Meta have an illegal, collusive arrangement to rig the advertising market, overcharging advertisers and underpaying publishers:

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

The ad-tech giants have taken in hundreds of billions that they simply can't account for. It's disappeared down a fraud-hole:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/05/25/lying-spies/#spying-liars

All of this has driven the majority of web users to install a privacy-blocker (like EFF's Privacybadger.org), meaning that surveillance ads are disproportionately likely to not even show up in a reader's browser:

https://doc.searls.com/2023/11/11/how-is-the-worlds-biggest-boycott-doing/

So while it's possible that, in a state of nature, a surveillance ad would outperform a context ad, delivering more sales for advertisers and more revenue for publishers, the monopolistic tendency of ad-tech means that publishers earn less from surveillance ads (because more users block them, and because monopolistic ad-tech platforms extract higher commissions), and advertisers see fewer sales from them (because more users block them, and because monopolistic ad-tech platforms extract higher prices).

Context ads, meanwhile, are always going to give power to publishers, because publishers will always understand the materials they publish better than any ad-tech platform could. Commissioning, editing and publishing an article, podcast or video gives a publisher unique and inalienable insight into that material.

Surveillance data about audiences is a kind of ambient vapor floating around websites and places and payments that has to be condensed through a heroic and expensive effort that gives power to whichever company can muster the capital and infrastructure to do so. Meanwhile, information about the content of publishers' offerings is already refined into ingots that are already in publishers' own possession.

It's possible to run "programmatic ads" without surveillance. Rather than building an ad-tech stack through which publishers transmit sensitive information about their audiences ("Who will pay me to advertise to this 18-34 year old man-child from the outer boroughs who owns an Xbox and has recently researched gonorrhea symptoms?"), we can build systems through which publishers transmit information about their own materials ("Who will advertise to a user with a New York IP address who is reading an article comparing running shoe brands?").

Not only is this possible, but it actually generates more revenues for publishers than the surveillance-based ad-tech stack:

https://techcrunch.com/2020/07/24/data-from-dutch-public-broadcaster-shows-the-value-of-ditching-creepy-ads/

On top of that, publishers who don't gather personal information about users also don't need to show their users those awful pop-up ads asking their permission to gather their data. Everyone hates those notices, and they are yet another negative aspect of surveillance advertising that disappears with the switch to context ads.

An ad-tech stack for context ads is far less prone to monopolization. Such a stack can be "federated," with multiple "demand-side platforms" (the part of the system that advertisers use to place bids for the right to show their ads) all communicating with the same "supply-side platform" (the part of the system publishers use to transmit opportunities to place ads).

This is also in the technopolitics of context ads: they do not tend toward the "efficiencies of scale" that lead to abusive monopolistic middlemen who steal from publishers and advertisers and sell out the public to fascists who want to arrest them and deport them to Salvadoran slave-labor camps.

When the ad-tech sector is composed of smaller companies that are more competitive with one another, it is much harder for any of them to collude to rig the market. That fierce competition also means it's harder to create a cozy conspiracy to lobby together to block privacy laws, and it leaves the companies with lower margins and less retained earnings to spend on those lobbying efforts.

Surveillance ads also promote all kinds of parasitic businesses. The fact that a publisher can serve ads related to users rather than the subject of their media means that sensationalistic and deceptive websites can sell ads that run against content that's totally unrelated to advertisers' products and services. And because it's cheaper to produce lies and garbage, these publishers can undercut the ad prices demanded by high quality outlets and let advertisers reach the same users. This is the whole reason that "chumboxes" exist:

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

Just as nuclear power favors a centralized state, surveillance advertising:

  • favors middlemen over publishers and advertisers;

  • tends toward monopoly;

  • favors low-quality media over high-quality production;

  • impedes the passage of privacy laws;

  • provides authoritarian states with an off-the-books, warrantless source of surveillance data.

And just as solar allows for decentralized, anti-authoritarian societies, context advertising:

  • favors publishers over middlemen and advertisers;

  • tends towards pluralism and diversity of voices;

  • favors high-quality media by reserving the lion's share of the rewards to the producers;

  • does not rely on a weak privacy environment;

  • does not militate for "democratizing spying" by issuing every person with a permanent advertising identifier.

There's nothing (necessarily) wrong with building systems to tell people about things you want them to know. There's nothing (necessarily) wrong with paying for media with ads. It's possible for both of these things to go awry, but they are not in and of themselves bad. They have contingent technopolitics.

But surveillance ads have completely unavoidable, absolutely ghastly technopolitics. Surveillance ads are bad for publishers, for advertisers, and for democracy. We should ban surveillance ads:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2023/05/save-news-we-must-ban-surveillance-advertising

(Image: Jess, 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 Patrick Nielsen Hayden interviews Mike Ford https://user.well.com/engaged.cgi?c=inkwell.vue&f=0&t=126

#20yrsago Singapore bans Far East Economic Review https://web.archive.org/web/20061010002951/https://www.feer.com/articles1/2006/0610/free/p006.html

#20yrsago Publishing isn’t bestseller-driven https://www.nielsenhayden.com/makinglight/conventional_un/

#20yrsago Why architecture and security don’t mix https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2006/10/architecture_an.html

#20yrsago Vista licence: Microsoft’s abusive relationship with you https://wendy.seltzer.org/blog/archives/2006/10/19/forbidding_vistas_windows_licensing_disserves_the_user.html

#20yrsago Boy Scouts of America Concerned About Copyright https://web.archive.org/web/20061110065012/http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi%3Ffile%3D/news/archive/2006/10/20/entertainment/e110452D84.DTL

#15yrsago Canadian Tories admit that Canadians don’t want DRM rules, push for them anyway https://web.archive.org/web/20111022210131/http://www.michaelgeist.ca/content/view/6071/125

#15yrsago Visualizing Herman Cain’s 9-9-9 plan to redistribute wealth from the poor to the rich https://web.archive.org/web/20111021103517/http://jaredbernsteinblog.com/9-9-9-in-one-really-long-graph/

#15yrsago Free Bieber: campaign to kill proposed law that would send you to prison for 5 years for singing copyrighted music on YouTube https://web.archive.org/web/20111020145336/http://freebieber.org/

#15yrsago Belarusian central bank auctions off its sugar bowls https://www.theguardian.com/world/2011/oct/19/belarus-central-bank-sells-office-furniture

#15yrsago Dataviz as defacement: OCCUPY GEORGE https://web.archive.org/web/20111022022046/http://www.occupygeorge.com/

#15yrsago HOWTO avoid a copyright shakedown legal threat: be famous, a politician, a cop, a soldier or a corpse https://torrentfreak.com/undercover-cops-and-politicians-escape-bittorrent-lawsuit-111013/

#10yrsago Popular design guides are responsible for plague of grey type https://web.archive.org/web/20170914051800/https://www.wired.com/2016/10/how-the-web-became-unreadable/

#10yrsago Digital Defenders: a free open-licensed booklet for kids about privacy and cryptography https://edri.org/files/privacy4kids_booklet_web.pdf

#10yrsago Public universities and even the US Navy have sold hundreds of patents to America’s most notorious troll https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2016/10/inside-intellectual-ventures-portfolio-nearly-500-university-patents

#10yrsago Airportraits: composite photos of all the daily takeoffs from the world’s airports https://mikekelley.art/?category=airportraits

#10yrsago Rich people can afford to buy more sleep than poor people https://arstechnica.com/science/2016/10/the-rich-can-sleep-in-thanks-to-better-transit/

#10yrsago Harry Shearer sues studio over Spinal Tap, says he’s received $98 in royalties over 30 years https://web.archive.org/web/20161224224142/https://www.yahoo.com/movies/harry-shearer-files-125-million-spinal-tap-fraud-suit-copyright-termination-150031664.html

#10yrsago ACLU asks court to reveal 23 secret surveillance laws https://web.archive.org/web/20161019224447/https://theintercept.com/2016/10/19/aclu-wants-secret-surveillance-laws-made-public/

#10yrsago Montana judge unrepentant after sentencing man to 60 days for repeatedly raping his own 12 year old daughter https://edition.cnn.com/2016/10/19/us/montana-judge-incest-case-trnd/index.html

#10yrago Turkish court fines bystander/tourist who sued police for shooting out his eye https://www.hurriyetdailynews.com/kyrgyz-tourist-wounded-in-gezi-protests-ordered-to-pay-debt-to-turkish-state–104964

#10yrsago By stealing from innocents, Chicago PD amassed tens of millions in a secret black budget for surveillance gear https://web.archive.org/web/20160929143255/https://chicagoreader.com/chicago/police-department-civil-forfeiture-investigation/Content?oid=23728922

#10yrsago Turing’s law: UK to retroactively pardon thousands of men prosecuted for having sex with men https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-37711518

#5yrsago The monopoly strategy behind the Google/Microsoft mobile patent wars https://pluralistic.net/2021/10/20/vizio-vs-the-world/#capital-as-power

#5yrsago Copyleft lawsuit against Vizio will allow anyone to defend the commons https://pluralistic.net/2021/10/20/vizio-vs-the-world/#dumbcast

#5yrsago The true, Terry Pratchett-esque origins of the trillion-dollar coin https://pluralistic.net/2021/10/19/moist-von-lipwig/#gimmick-v-gimmick

#1yrago The mad king's digital killswitch https://pluralistic.net/2025/10/20/post-american-internet/#huawei-with-american-characteristics

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)


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: 574 (7730 total).

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

  • A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING

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

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

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ISSN: 3066-764X

Received — 17 October 2026 ⏭

Pluralistic: Israeli ad-tech company was a delivery system for "mercenary spyware" (17 Oct 2026)

✇Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
By: Cory Doctorow
17 October 2026 at 12:47


Today's links


A lonely country road with a large roadside billboard. Thrusting out of the billboard is a punching fist with bloody, spiked brass knuckles; it is surrounded by scabrous craters. The sky is a psychedelic roil of red-brown clouds, from behind which loom indistinct, vast tropical flowers.

Israeli ad-tech company was a delivery system for "mercenary spyware" (permalink)

More than half of all internet users have installed an ad-blocker; Doc Searls calls it the largest consumer boycott in history. As large as that boycott is, everyone – yes, everyone – should block every "programmatic" ad, because the entire system is so insecure that failing to do so could result in the total compromise of any or all of your digital devices.

That's the inescapable conclusion of Citizen Lab's latest blockbuster investigative report, "Exposing AdFection," which reveals how the largest ad-tech companies in the world, including Google and Facebook, allowed themselves to be hijacked by a "mercenary spyware" company that used the ad system to locate targeted individuals and serve "zero-click malware" that took over their computers and phones without them having to take any action:

https://citizenlab.ca/research/how-discover-tech-turned-targeted-ads-into-a-pipeline-for-spyware/

These tech giants amassed detailed surveillance dossiers on virtually every internet user, and they've assigned each of us unique, persistent identifiers, like a Social Security Number for spying. These companies also allow advertisers – or anyone pretending to be an advertiser – to serve blobs of code (which is all an ad is) to anyone based on those identifiers.

This allowed an Israeli spyware company called Discover-Tech (which masquerades as an ad-tech company) to sell totalitarian governments and sleazy corporate mercenaries the ability to pluck individual internet users out of the billions who log in every day and then serve "malicious ads" (that is, blobs of arbitrary code) to those targeted users. These malicious ads contained "no-click, zero-day" attacks, which meant that they exploited previously unknown vulnerabilities to take over devices without any user interaction. The mere act of loading a web-page or opening an app that relied on one of these gigantic ad-tech companies to serve ads was enough to compromise your device. No clicks needed, and no warning.

Among the targets of this attack campaign were the computers of workers at Al Jazeera. They were attacked with malware from the mercenary spyware company Candiru (which now calls itself "Integrity Labs" because irony is not dead). Beyond Candiru, Discover-Tech also facilitates attacks by numerous criminal mercenary spyware companies, serving ads on hundreds of thousands of sites and apps.

Discover-Tech was "certified" as a safe supplier by Google, Yandex, Microsoft, Beeswax (a division of Comcast) and IAB, the ad-tech industry's leading professional association. Ironically, Discover-Tech even attacked users by serving them malicious GDPR notices that appeared to let users opt out of commercial surveillance.

Because Discover-Tech was certified by all these industry bodies and firms, it had access to more than four billion ad-auctions, meaning that on billions of occasions, it was able to collect the identities of users loading apps and visiting websites, check them against the list of targets, and attack any victims it discovered through this dragnet.

Discover-Tech is an Israeli company with ties to other Israeli spyware and hacking companies, including through its board, whose members included Eric Banoun ("One of the pioneers of offensive cyber in Israel" –Haaretz). They have overlaps, relationships and affiliations with a rogue's gallery of Israeli companies, including the notorious NSO Group, who routinely sell cyber-weapons to the world's worst governments and whose products have been used to attack journalists, embassy workers, and activists.

The whole incident highlights the monumental insecurity of the ad-tech industry, whose indiscriminate and voracious surveillance and manifestly insufficient vetting and security auditing now expose every internet user in the world to terrifying targeted attacks. These companies – including Google, a thrice-convicted monopolist whose surveillance tendrils are wrapped around the whole world – claim that they operate their networks with prudence and oversight. But the proof is in the pudding: for years, they've played host to a murderer's row of cyber-mercenaries who used their infrastructure to attack journalists and others.

The only way to avoid this is to block ads. This is easy enough to do in a browser (which is why the majority of internet users have installed an ad-blocker in their browsers), but it's illegal to reverse-engineer and modify an app so you can block the ads in it:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/07/21/dickovers/#block-element

Many websites run anti-ad-block scripts that push out nagging, guilt-tripping notices that call you a thief and a cheapskate for blocking ads. Ignore those notices: if a website is running "programmatic" ads that allow arbitrary third parties to spy on billions of people and target individuals for malicious device takeovers, they are charging too high a price to see their content.

Some sites go further: their notices demand that you either turn off your ad-blocker or pay for a subscription. This "pay or okay" scheme is illegal in Europe, California and other territories with strong privacy laws, and they are morally bankrupt besides. Privacy shouldn't be a luxury item and everyone deserves to be secure from cyber-attacks:

https://noyb.eu/en/noybs-pay-or-okay-report-how-companies-make-you-pay-privacy

This report also provides the most comprehensive rebuttal to a dangerous idea that refuses to die: that we should improve competition in the ad-tech sector by assigning every internet user a mandatory, government-issued advertising ID to "democratize" ad-targeting and followup (which the sector calls "attribution"):

https://pluralistic.net/2024/08/07/revealed-preferences/#extinguish-v-improve

Despite all this, none of it is an indictment of ads per se. The problem here isn't advertising, it's surveillance. The ad-tech sector has convinced advertisers that targeting ads to users rather than content will massively improve ad performance. The evidence for this is very poor: targeted ads improve clickthrough rates by less than 5% (relative to content-based ads that relate to the substance of the page you're looking at), and they're incredibly expensive (and very dangerous!) to serve.

On top of all that, surveillance-based ads shift power away from publishers (who know more about the materials they publish than any ad-tech company ever will) to spying ad-tech companies (who can spy on users in ways that no publisher could ever match). Whatever minor additional revenues surveillance advertising can wring out of the market are totally swamped by the cost of the ad-tech sector's own operations, which the ad-tech sector makes up for by grossly underinvesting in security and by colluding to cheat publishers and advertisers, charging more for ads and paying less to the websites that run them:

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

If we want to improve competition in advertising services, the answer isn't to facilitate spying (which also allows the world's scummiest cyber-mercenaries to stage and serve targeted attacks). We should ban surveillance advertising altogether, restoring context-based ads to their role as the way that publishers make an honest living without selling out their audiences:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/05/31/context-ads/#class-formation

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 Linux on a Big Mouth Billy Bass https://web.archive.org/web/20010927153043/http://bigmouth.here-n-there.com/

#20yrsago No-Fly lists even stupider than suspected https://web.archive.org/web/20061019002553/http://rawstory.com/showoutarticle.php?src=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.cbsnews.com%2Fstories%2F2006%2F10%2F05%2F60minutes%2Fmain2066624.shtml

#20yrsago Canadian MP booted for his blog https://web.archive.org/web/20061026153747/http://www.cbc.ca/canada/story/2006/10/18/turner-caucus.html

#20yrsago Recording industry shuts out Brazilian legal scholars https://web.archive.org/web/20061103225020/http://www.a2kbrasil.org.br/ENG/SIGN-A-PETITION-FOR-AMENDING-THE

#20yrsago How pickpockets work https://web.archive.org/web/20070110023812/http://www.kiplinger.com/magazine/archives/2006/11/mystory.html

#15yrsago Why are more people opting for legal name-changes than ever before? https://web.archive.org/web/20111020163908/http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-15333140

#15yrsago Advice to the 1% from Lemony Snicket https://occupywriters.com/works/by-lemony-snicket/

#15yrsago Proposed Australian law makes it an offense to insult Gaming Minister Michael O’Brien https://web.archive.org/web/20120507161803/http://www.heraldsun.com.au/news/more-news/surely-this-is-a-joke/story-fn7x8me2-1226167552466

#15yrsago Aloha From Hell: Sandman Slim goes back to Hell and kicks more ass https://memex.craphound.com/2011/10/18/aloha-from-hell-sandman-slim-goes-back-to-hell-and-kicks-more-ass/

#10yrsago California DMV thinks “INFOS3C” is a dirty word https://www.techdirt.com/2016/10/17/california-dmv-rejects-1nfos3c-vanity-plate-because-sexual-connotation/

#10yrsago Howard Stern won’t release Trump tapes https://www.billboard.com/music/music-news/howard-stern-on-replaying-his-donald-trump-interviews-it-would-be-a-betrayal-7542079/

#10yrsago Kim Stanley Robinson says Elon Musk’s Mars plan is a “1920s science-fiction cliché” https://web.archive.org/web/20161018043554/http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-10-17/why-elon-musk-s-mars-vision-needs-some-real-imagination

#10yrsago UK’s Investigatory Powers Tribunal says GHCQ illegally spied for 17 years https://www.theverge.com/2016/10/17/13305270/uk-illegal-surveillance-gchq-investigatory-powers-tribunal

#10yrsago Project Include cuts off Y Combinator because Peter Thiel is a part-time investor there https://web.archive.org/web/20161019043240/https://motherboard.vice.com/read/horrified-by-trump-silicon-valley-leaders-debate-cutting-ties-to-peter-thiel

#10yrsago Islamophobic terrorist cell planned a “bloodbath” in Kansas, wanted to kill Muslim babies https://web.archive.org/web/20161018144035/https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-nation/wp/2016/10/15/it-will-be-a-bloodbath-inside-the-kansas-militia-plot-to-ignite-a-religious-war/?utm_term=.a9d769256cf6

#10yrsago Everything Belongs to the Future: a tale of pharmadystopian, immortal gerontocrats https://memex.craphound.com/2016/10/18/everything-belongs-to-the-future-a-tale-of-pharmadystopian-immortal-gerontocrats/

#10yrsago UK government proposes issuing Britons with unique porn-viewing ID numbers https://www.openrightsgroup.org/blog/a-database-of-the-uks-porn-habits-what-could-possibly-go-wrong/

#10yrsago Donald Trump’s mail-servers are running Windows 2003 https://pluralistic.net/2021/10/18/labor-shortage-discourse-time/#core

#5yrsago Copyfraudster censors investigation of implausible covid gadget https://pluralistic.net/2021/10/18/labor-shortage-discourse-time/#copyfraud

#5yrsago Corporatism made John Deere ripe for a strike https://pluralistic.net/2021/10/18/labor-shortage-discourse-time/#deere-dash

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: 563 (26602 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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"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 October 2026 ⏭

Pluralistic: Load-bearing (16 Oct 2026)

✇Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
By: Cory Doctorow
16 October 2026 at 08:40


Today's links


A detail from Dore's engraving of Samson destroying the temple, depicting tumbling classical columns. Amid the columns, wreaking havoc, are three sf pulp magazine robots.

Load-bearing (permalink)

You find the weirdest stuff inside your walls. Our house was built in 1949 and we're its third owner, and I have no idea what those other people were doing, but at one point someone installed a junction box full of live, bare wires that they filled with crumpled newspaper (!); and don't get me started on the decision not to put vapor barriers in the kitchen windows (we were one good shake away from the entire front of the house falling down when we discovered that one, and while it cost us an extra $19,000 to fix, that was still cheaper than rebuilding the whole front of the house).

Plus there was the unpermitted drainage system installed down the side of the house that must have attracted some (undocumented) planning inspector negativity; at least, that's the only reason I can think of for someone to have filled those drains with concrete (!!), a fact we discovered during the first heavy rainfall after moving in, when the water rose to shin-height (!!!).

But the weirdest and most nerve-wracking mysteries were the "structural" members of dubious quality, placement and utility. Some of them only seemed to be holding stuff up, but on closer inspection turned out to be free-floating 2x4s, not anchored to anything. On more than one occasion, our builders have moved jacks into position and removed those random uprights, only to discover that they weren't holding anything up.

Say what you will about this method, but it is decisive: if you remove a vertical member and nothing falls down, you can be pretty sure that wasn't a load-bearing member.

(This is a metaphor about AI.)

You can be forgiven for rolling your eyes when the subject of "digital sovereignty" comes up. Rhetorically, "digital sovereignty" is a coded way for a politician to say, "We should build a fuckton of AI data-centers while bypassing any environmental review":

https://datacentremagazine.com/technology-and-ai/keir-starmers-2bn-pledge-how-the-uk-plans-to-advance-ai

But AI has nothing to do with digital sovereignty. It is not load-bearing. All it takes to understand this is a little thought-experiment. Imagine that we removed all the chatbots from Canada, or the UK, or the EU, or the USA. What would fall down?

Nothing important.

Every public administrative body – national, regional and local – would continue to function. Every firm – large and small – would continue to trade. Households would be unscathed, save for their youngest members, who would suffer the indignity and tedium of having to do their own homework again.

Which is not to say that "digital sovereignty" is a nothingburger. The walls of our nations are filled with load-bearing digital members. It's just that these are the most boring, regular-degular-ass technologies imaginable.

Like Microsoft Office 365. Take away M365 and every ministry collapses, every firm shutters, and many if not most households will be in serious trouble.

And here's the thing: Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella paid $1m out of his own pocket to join the murderer's row of tech CEOs who sat behind Trump on the inaugural dais:

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

Microsoft donated $10 million to Trump's Epstein Memorial Ballroom:

https://www.geekwire.com/2026/leaked-list-shows-what-microsoft-amazon-and-other-tech-giants-are-giving-for-the-white-house-ballroom/

Microsoft provides the back-end administrative infrastructure for Trump's racist pogroms (take away M365 and ICE would collapse):

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/feb/17/ice-microsoft-technology-immigration-crackdown

The CEO of Microsoft France admitted that if Trump ordered the company to spy on French citizens' data (or the data of the French government), his company would comply, in secret:

https://www.forbes.com/sites/emmawoollacott/2025/07/22/microsoft-cant-keep-eu-data-safe-from-us-authorities/

And here's the kicker: Microsoft has terminated the M365 and Outlook access of international public officials whose official acts made Trump angry, starting with the Chief Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court, who lost his accounts after he swore out the genocide warrant for Netanyahu:

https://www.computerweekly.com/opinion/Microsofts-ICC-email-block-reignites-European-data-sovereignty-concerns

This is a white-hot, 278-alarm digital sovereignty dumpster-fire. M365 – as well as cloud software from Oracle, Google, Apple, Amazon and other US tech giants that have fused themselves with the Trump regime in exchange for tax breaks and antitrust forbearance – is load-bearing, and worse, those 2x4s are filled with termites and dry-rot.

Digital sovereignty is as real as real can be. It just has nothing to do with AI. AI isn't load-bearing. Boring-ass tech monopolist cloud software is…and we can not trust it:

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

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 Anthrax terrorist's handwriting https://web.archive.org/web/20011017003926/http://dailynews.yahoo.com/h/p/nm/20011016/ts/mdf70100.html

#20yrsago Help find stolen WEB GEEK license plate https://web.archive.org/web/20061017222733/https://www.backupbrain.com/2006_10_15_archive.html#a004964#a004964

#15yrsago UK media swallowed the “adult content” filter line https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2011/oct/17/adult-content-filters-good-parenting

#10yrsago Arizona Republic editor responds to death threats following Clinton endorsement https://eu.azcentral.com/story/opinion/2016/10/16/publisher-response-to-threats-after-republic-endorsement-clinton-trump/92058964/

#5yrsago Against the great forces of history https://pluralistic.net/2021/10/17/against-the-great-forces-of-history/

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: 503 (26039 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

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

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

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

ISSN: 3066-764X

Received — 15 October 2026 ⏭

Pluralistic: Expedia amazoned hotel rooms (15 Oct 2026)

✇Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
By: Cory Doctorow
15 October 2026 at 13:03


Today's links

  • Expedia amazoned hotel rooms: Everything more expensive for everyone, monopolies everywhere, and we're all screwed.
  • Hey look at this: Delights to delectate.
  • Object permanence: Delta v dovening; "Play Money"; Alabama's ethnic cleansing; We trust neuroscience over psychology; Billionaires' anti-homeless pogrom; Game devs v DRM; What security means; Microsoft, tear down that wall! Publisher won't revert rights; SNL's Trump/Clinton debate; Chicago Tribune's murder; AI after AI.
  • Upcoming appearances: Paris, Vancouver, Victoria, Ottawa, Vienna, Kilkenny, Oxford, Sheffield, Oxford, Montreal.
  • Recent appearances: Where I've been.
  • Latest books: You keep readin' em, I'll keep writin' 'em.
  • Upcoming books: Like I said, I'll keep writin' 'em.
  • Colophon: All the rest.


A faded, scratched postcard advertising the 'Edge of Town Motel.' Next to the motel sign is a vast pink piggybank, out of whose slot rises a motel key on a diamond keychain, emblazoned with a metallic dollar-sign.

Expedia amazoned hotel rooms (permalink)

No matter where you shop, you're getting screwed by Amazon. Amazon has found a way to make everything you buy – at Target, at a mom-and-pop shop, even direct from the manufacturer – more expensive. And they're not the only one: Expedia's done the same thing, but for hotel rooms.

Here's how Amazon broke the economy: first, they locked in a key group of shoppers. The vast majority of affluent shoppers in the USA have Amazon Prime accounts. Having prepaid for a year's shipping in advance, those Prime subscribers start their purchasing journey by searching Amazon, and if they find what they're looking for, that's where it ends.

America's affluent top decile – the 10% of richest Americans – do the majority of America's shopping, a phenomenon that has only been accelerated by America's precipitous slide into oligarchy, which has exhausted the savings and the credit-card limits and the home equity of the majority of Americans, who increasingly can't afford to buy anything:

https://dreamagainusa.org/

If you want to sell things in America, you must sell them in the place where the top decile shops, and that's Amazon. For merchants, that is an incredibly expensive proposition: 51-60% of every dollar you spend with an independent merchant on Amazon is claimed by Amazon through junk fees, listing fees, commissions, processing fees and other scams:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/09/04/cheating-at-fraud/#absentee-rentier

Merchants don't have 51-60% margins they can afford to turn over to Amazon. To remain viable while selling on Amazon, they have to raise prices. Amazon doesn't mind if prices go up, so long as Amazon's price remains competitive. So Amazon imposes a requirement on its suppliers called "most favored nation," which requires sellers to offer their best price on Amazon:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/02/25/most-favored-nation/#price-fixing

Practically speaking, that means that when you raise your price on Amazon, you must raise your prices everywhere by the same amount, which means that no matter where you shop (Target, Walmart, the corner store or direct from the factory), you pay the Amazon Tax.

The Amazon Tax is a prime (you should forgive the expression) example of enshittification, in which an intermediary (a business that sits between buyers and sellers, AKA, "a platform") screws both customers and sellers to benefit itself.

But Amazon isn't the only example of a powerful digital intermediary that has used its market power to impose an economy-wide tax. Wherever you look online, you find digital giants who grew the way Amazon grew (buying all of their competitors) and then did what Amazon did (squeezing buyers and sellers, making prices higher everywhere).

That's what happened with Expedia. Almost every travel site you can find online has been purchased by Expedia (Hotels.com, Travelocity, and Orbitz), and the ones that aren't Expedia subsidiaries were acquired by its main rival, Priceline (Booking.com, Kayak, Agoda and even Opentable). Nearly all the hotel rooms are booked by a tiny minority of travelers – largely that same top decile that Amazon has so thoroughly captured and locked in – and hoteliers can't live without their business, and they're almost all Expedia and/or Priceline customers. Expedia accounts for 80% of all hotel bookings by dollar value.

Expedia's position, in other words, is basically Amazon's position, so Expedia is doing exactly what Amazon is doing: they charge huge fees to hotels, and then force the hotels to raise their prices everywhere through a "most favored nation" deal:

https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.wawd.369601/gov.uscourts.wawd.369601.1.0.pdf

But – as Lee Hepner writes for the BIG newsletter – Expedia has figured out ways to out-Amazon Amazon. They've copied one of Amazon's sleaziest businesses, and made it worse:

https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/how-expedia-rigs-travel-markets-and

Here's Amazon's sleaziest commercial practice: when you search Amazon, the top results for your search aren't the best matches for your queries; they're products sold by the companies willing to pay the most for search placement, in a "real-time auction" that runs every time you search. The cost of winning that auction comes out of your pocket through higher prices: the first result for an Amazon query is, on average, 29% more expensive than the best match. The top row is 25% more expensive. On average, the best match for your query is 17 positions down the screen, on the second page, where almost no one ever bothers to scroll:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/11/03/subprime-attention-rent-crisis/#euthanize-rentiers

This rip-off is Amazon's most profitable line of business, more profitable than AWS or Prime. It makes the company more than $80b/year. And – incredibly – Expedia's found a way to make it even worse.

Like Amazon, Expedia auctions off its search results. They call this their "VIP listing" program. Practically speaking, hotels have to pay for this, because it boosts booking rates by 42% (the first ten results on an Expedia search-results page get 62% of the clicks). VIP listing is expensive for the merchant – but it's even more expensive for you and me.

That's because Expedia requires hotels in its VIP listings programs to raise their prices on non-Expedia sites by 10-25%…INDEFINITELY.

Let me repeat that: to stay in business, hotels need to be on Expedia. To stay in business on Expedia, hotels have to raise their prices to pay Expedia's junk fees, but they have to raise their prices everywhere else. But to really stay in business on Expedia, hotels have to use the VIP program, which is even more expensive. And – one more time – hotels in the VIP program have to jack up their prices everywhere else, INDEFINITELY. This means that, throughout the economy, hotel prices are rising at a superinflationary rate, because Expedia – who command 80% of the market – are pushing those prices up.

This goes a long way to explaining why US hotel rates rose 58% from a 2020 average of $103/night to a 2025 average of $162/night. It explains why hotel prices rose by 5% last year, which is double the rate of inflation. And this is why Expedia stock is up 65% since the start of the Iran war, a fact that Expedia CEO Ariane Gorin attributes to "higher margins" from "higher prices":

https://s202.q4cdn.com/757635260/files/doc_financials/2026/q2/Q2-2026-Earnings-Presentation-Final.pdf

In his coverage of the Expedia lawsuit – which brought many of these details to light – Hepner notes that hotels themselves have undergone near-total cartelization, with Hilton, Marriott, and Choice International owning the majority of all hotels after a string of acquisitions that went largely unchallenged by slumbering antitrust regulators around the world. These consolidated chains have also jacked up prices and enshittified their service, slashing housekeeping and check-in staff and allowing their facilities to slip into disrepair.

This, too, is characteristic of monopolization: whenever a monopoly takes over part of its supply chain, the rest of the supply chain consolidates to prevent itself from being ripped off by the new giant. This is the story of publishers consolidating to defend themselves from Borders/B&N, Walmart and Costco, then Amazon; and it's the story of literary agencies consolidating to resist the power of those overgrown publishers.

And it's the story of health-care, which saw consolidation in pharmaceuticals leading to mergers among hospitals, who screwed the insurers, who also consolidated.

In every case, it's the workers and the people who rely on them that get the shitty end of the stick. Hotel guests, readers and patients pay more for inferior products. Writers, editors, doctors, nurses, hotel staff and housekeepers get lower pay and worse working-conditions:

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

There is nothing wrong with the idea of an intermediary. Most writers can't publish and sell their own books, and few travelers can navigate finding hotels in strange cities without help. The problem of intermediaries is that when intermediaries gain monopoly power – by buying their rivals and capturing buyers and sellers – they are able to squeeze both. As Tim Wu says, this is the moment when a company that's supposed to be helping becomes a predator, acquires "main character syndrome" and makes every transaction all about the middleman, at the expense of the people buying and selling:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/08/05/absentee-landlord/

There are so many reasons for inflation and the cost of living crisis: wage stagnation, wars of choice in Iran, environmental cataclysm after environmental cataclysm. But under cover of these real factors is a cohort of what Matt Stoller calls "economic termites," parasites that have infested the walls of our economy and are devouring it from within.

You can't solve this by shopping. Calling the hotel direct won't fix it: they have to be on Expedia to survive, and to be on Expedia, they have to sign up for VIP service, and to keep VIP service, they have to make their prices higher everywhere. To fix this, we need systemic action: the corporate death penalty for the companies that are consuming the structural members of our society.

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 Delta diverts flight after passenger reports praying Hassids as suicidal jihadis https://web.archive.org/web/20011016000622/http://dailynews.yahoo.com/h/nm/20011015/od/delta_dc_1.html

#20yrsago Play Money: memoir of a year selling game-gold https://memex.craphound.com/2006/10/15/play-money-memoir-of-a-year-selling-game-gold/

#15yrsago Cereal Monsters: Frankenberry and friends as Universal classic monsters https://www.deviantart.com/jasonedmiston/art/Cereal-Monsters-106139367

#15yrsago Alabama’s racist “immigration” law creates misery and fear for brown people https://www.theguardian.com/world/2011/oct/14/alabama-immigration-law-families-trapped

#15yrsago Neuroscience explanations are more believable than mere psychological ones https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC2778755/

#15yrsago Writer: “my publisher said I could only get the rights to my out-of-print book back if I bought their leftover copies from them” https://writerbeware.blog/2011/10/18/guest-blog-post-fitzhenry-and-whiteside-writer-beware/

#10yrsago SNL’s Trump/Clinton debate sketch makes Saturday Night great again https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qVMW_1aZXRk

#10yrsago The pathogens of Wells Fargo’s corruption fester in every large corporation https://www.ineteconomics.org/perspectives/blog/three-things-to-know-to-hold-wells-fargo-accountable

#10yrago Billionaire tech investors back ballot initiative to purge homeless people from San Francisco https://eu.usatoday.com/story/tech/2016/10/14/silicon-valleys-acute-homeless-problem-ballot/91082346/

#10yrsago Game developers say no to DRM: “hurts our customers” https://web.archive.org/web/20161013180206/https://kotaku.com/pc-game-developers-say-anti-piracy-tech-would-make-thei-1787747680

#10yrsago After being outed for massive hack and installing an NSA “rootkit,” Yahoo cancels earnings call https://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/entry/yahoo-hacking-verizon_n_5800eef7e4b0e8c198a78b14

#5yrsago ROT 8000 and what "security" means https://pluralistic.net/2021/10/15/fargo-north-decoder/#on-trusting-trust

#5yrsago The Chicago Tribune is being murdered before our eyes https://pluralistic.net/2021/10/16/sociopathic-monsters/#all-the-news-thats-fit-to-print

#1yrago The AI that we'll have after AI https://pluralistic.net/2025/10/16/post-ai-ai/#productive-residue

#1yrago Microsoft, Tear Down That Wall! https://pluralistic.net/2025/10/15/freedom-of-movement/#data-dieselgate

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: 508 (25536 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 October 2026 ⏭

Pluralistic: Bundestrojaner (13 Oct 2026)

✇Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
By: Cory Doctorow
13 October 2026 at 13:50


Today's links

  • Bundestrojaner: You can't make people more secure by making them less secure.
  • Hey look at this: Delights to delectate.
  • Object permanence: 9/11 sitcom; Jon Norman v Philcon; Bruce Sterling's post-9/11 geopolitics; Polaroid bankrupt; David Mamet x Shel Silverstein; "Great Big Beautiful Tomorrow"; Canadian government calls abortion doctors "terrorists"; Shanghai Ikea kicks out lonely, loitering seniors; Black Panther self-care.
  • Upcoming appearances: Paris, Vancouver, Victoria, Ottawa, Vienna, Kilkenny, Oxford, Sheffield, Oxford, Montreal.
  • Recent appearances: Where I've been.
  • Latest books: You keep readin' em, I'll keep writin' 'em.
  • Upcoming books: Like I said, I'll keep writin' 'em.
  • Colophon: All the rest.


A moody, silhouetted Trojan horse, with a glowing horse skeleton partially visible inside it. It is acrawl with 1950s pulp robots. It stands in a psychedelic mist, through which peek vivid, brightly colored flowers.

Bundestrojaner (permalink)

Every morning, I revisit my blog headlines from this date, going back 25 years, 20 years, 15 years, 10 years, 5 years, and one year. I publish the most interesting ones in a section of my newsletter that I call "object permanence," and I think it's the most useful part of my day.

"Object permanence," of course, is a reference to the stage in an infant's development when they acquire the ability to connect events in the past to events in the present, which is why it's the point at which babies cease to be amazed by peek-a-boo. I've been blogging for more than a quarter century, and these daily trawls through the things I considered important enough to share are an unexpectedly powerful way to connect the events of the past to the events of the present.

Take cybersecurity, a subject that is filling today's headlines, primarily due to a spate of poorly understood (and criminally poorly explained) incidents in which AI companies' hacking tools broke into various servers on the internet, sometimes trashing them:

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

In my discussions of this subject, I've been at pains to tease apart two different aspects of these incidents: first, that it's wrong to speak of bots "going rogue" here (they're doing what they're designed to do); but second, that the alarming thing about these incidents is that they illustrate how deeply unserious our approach to information security has been, and remains.

This is important context, and context is what gives us the object permanence we need to both understand and address real problems, like the two related facts that a) our IT systems are poorly constructed and indifferently maintained; and b) the people who are supposed to be fixing this keep making it worse.

The worst culprits here are governments, though the private sector is also terrible (in truth, our cybersecurity nightmare is something of a private-public partnership from hell). Governments are deeply compromised when it comes to digital security because they have an irreconcilable conflict of interest: on the one hand, they want to defend their countries' administrative systems, firms and households from digital attacks. But on the other hand, they really want to be able to launch attacks on their adversaries, both foreign and domestic.

Worse: because governments don't know who those adversaries might be (or might become at some later date), the state security apparatuses of the world's governments keep insisting that all working computer security must be dismantled, so they can spy on all of us in order to figure out whom among us is a Bad Guy, and then "travel back in time" through each newly discovered "bad guy's" communications to identify their confederates and detail their nefarious plots.

This is an old, old, old fight. It was arguably the first policy fight of the digital era: the fight over whether we could have working encryption at all. Old hands call this era "the crypto wars" (from when "crypto" meant "cryptography"), when the NSA classed working encryption code as a "munition" and criminalized civilian access to it. That was a very hard-fought fight, and it was won decisively by the Electronic Frontier Foundation and our just-retired executive director Cindy Cohn, who, as a young lawyer, litigated the "Bernstein case" that established that code was a form of expressive speech protected by the First Amendment. If you're interested in learning more about this, you should read Cindy's newly published memoir, Privacy's Defender (all profits go to EFF):

https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262051248/privacys-defender/

Before Cindy came on the scene, the crypto wars were being fought primarily by the "cypherpunks," a motley gang of computer security enthusiasts of many political stripes who were unified by their conviction that the most important aspect of security was defensive. The fact that the NSA wanted to be able to read the private messages and files of their adversaries (the "Four Horsemen of the Infocalypse": terrorists, drug traffickers, child pornographers and organized crime) must not be allowed to trump the fact that any encryption that the NSA could pierce could also be pierced by bad guys: corporate spies, state-sponsored spies, griefers, petty criminals, stalkers, identity thieves and other creeps.

This argument was so indisputable, it's a tautology: "You cannot make a computer user more secure by making their computers less secure." We don't know how to make a computer that only "good guys" can break into, but which "bad guys" bounce off of. Either we make computers more secure, or we don't.

We didn't.

In the decades since the crypto wars, governments have embarked upon an uninterrupted program to weaken the security of our computers, with catastrophic effect. The most spectacular example is unquestionably the spy agencies' doctrine called "NOBUS," which stands for "no one but us"; as in "No one but us is smart enough to find this bug, which means that we can withhold its discovery from the manufacturer, which will allow us to weaponize this bug and use it to attack our enemies. Because no one but us is smart enough to find this bug, none of those enemies will ever discover it, weaponize it, and use it to attack the people who pay our salaries, who expect us to keep them safe."

This turns out to be both catastrophically wrong and catastrophically dangerous. A series of leaks of computer vulnerabilities hoarded by both the NSA and CIA under NOBUS confirmed that these bugs were independently rediscovered by criminals and state actors at the rate of about 20% per year. Worse, though, is that these bugs don't need to be independently rediscovered, because the NSA and CIA both leaked them.

The highest-profile leak was an NSA-hoarded vulnerability in Windows they codenamed "Eternal Blue." Eternal Blue leaked in 2017, whereupon cybercriminals hybridized it with some otherwise undistinguished ransomware to create Wannacry, a devastating piece of malware that took down hospitals, banks and oil pipelines, as well as the entire city government of Baltimore and the British Library:

https://cdn.sanity.io/files/v5dwkion/production/99206a2d1e9f07b35712b78f7d75fbb09560c08d.pdf

But NOBUS isn't the only example of spy agencies making our computers less secure in the name of making us more secure. Perhaps the most egregious example of that are the Bundestrojaners, malicious software purchased by the German government, whose customs agents secretly installed it on the computers of unsuspecting people during border inspections. This "lawful interception" software was hugely invasive: it could grab your screen, plunder your hard drive, and install and execute software on your computer, all with the utmost stealth, intended to keep you from knowing it was installed and operating on your computer. But it wasn't merely invasive – it was insecure, so anyone (rival spies, criminals, stalkers) could scan the internet for infected computers and take them over:

https://www.ccc.de/en/updates/2011/staatstrojaner

You really couldn't ask for a more perfect example of the maxim that you can't make computer users more secure by making their computers less secure. Despite this, governments continue to demand the introduction of grave, universal secure vulnerabilities into our digital lives. Take "chat control," a proposal to force every device manufacturer to install software that continuously scans your devices for child sex abuse material (AKA "child porn"):

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2026/04/eu-parliament-blocks-mass-scanning-our-chats-whats-next

There are plenty of things wrong with this, starting with the fact that it requires your device to secretly grab and transmit sensitive images from your phone, which might include sensitive images of your kids that were requested by their doctors. This isn't a hypothetical: it's something that happened to a dad who subsequently lost his email, his login to every other account, his phone number, all of his files (including his tax records and his business data), and every photo he had ever taken of his family, without appeal, after Google automatically detected a photo he took of his son to send to the family pediatrician. Google also falsely accused this man of sexually abusing his child and sicced the SFPD on him:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/08/22/allopathic-risk/#snitches-get-stitches

But even if you're not worried about this, you should still have the object permanence to recall the lessons of NOBUS and the Bundestrojaner. We can't make computer users more secure by making their computers less secure, and it's hard to imagine something more insecure than a computer that you entrust with every sensitive detail of your life that is designed to run computer code in secret that you can neither inspect nor terminate (let alone delete).

Hardly a day goes by without some country demanding that your computer's security be weakened in the name of protecting you. For years, both Conservative and Labour UK governments have been steaming towards a total ban on working encryption in the name of catching bad guys:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/03/05/theyre-still-trying-to-ban-cryptography/

It's happening in Canada, too, where somehow "digital sovereignty" means "making every device used in Canada vulnerable to foreign spies so that our own spies can access our private communications":

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2026/05/canadas-bill-c-22-repackaged-version-last-years-surveillance-nightmare

Then there's the "age verification" laws proliferating all around the world. Remember, there's no such thing as "age verification," there's only "spying on everyone, all the time, to figure out who the kids are":

https://pluralistic.net/2026/06/23/destroy-the-village/#to-save-it

Age verification requires multiple entities to assemble vast corpuses of the kinds of sensitive identification papers that would allow identity thieves to destroy the finances and lives of everyone in the country, and (as foretold) every time it's tried, these files leak. Someday, this will lead to doxing whole countries:

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2026/02/discord-faces-backlash-over-age-checks-after-data-breach-exposed-70000-ids/

Age verification is the latest and worst stage in governments' fraught relationship with private sector data-collection. The USA is the worst offender here: it is the largest, richest country in the world that has essentially no privacy protections. The last time the US updated its federal privacy law was in 1988, when the Video Privacy Protection Act banned the disclosure of your VHS rentals. Tech companies spy on you for the same reason your dog licks its balls – because they can, and no one stops them:

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

Which raises an obvious question: why hasn't Congress updated privacy law? And why hasn't the EU figured out how to force the US companies that pretend to be Irish to obey European privacy law? The answer is that governments love private sector data-collection, because it gives them a cheap, off-the-books source of warrantless access to information they aren't legally allowed to acquire:

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

From Flock cameras to ICE's use of Google data in its ethnic cleansing campaign, the US government and the commercial surveillance industry have created a public-private partnership from hell, where governments refuse to block commercial spying and companies hand their commercial surveillance data over to governments in return.

From there, it was a short leap to governments insisting that the private sector gather our data. That's the right way to think about age verification, chat control, and other mandates for corporations to spy on us using our devices and our accounts: a government requirement for private-sector mass surveillance.

I have plenty of hostility to corporate overreach, but to have any hope of fighting that overreach, we need governments to be on our side. But for our governments, when it comes to cybersecurity, we are the enemy, and spying corporations are our governments' allies.

Sometimes, that's utterly, literally true. Governments around the world are addicted to buying spyware from cyber-arms dealers, mostly headquartered in Israel and the UAE (with the odd Italian and British company for variety). These arms-dealers practice NOBUS-by-proxy, wherein they discover or pay bounties for bugs in widely used hardware, operating systems and applications and – rather than reporting them to the manufacturer – hoard them and weaponize them, and then sell the weapons to criminals, corporations, and our governments, who give them billions of our money to ensure that our computers have huge, glaring defects in them that leave us terribly vulnerable:

https://citizenlab.ca/focus-area/targeted-surveillance/

In a world where our governments' national security apparatuses were genuinely committed to our safety and security, they would criminally prosecute these companies, not make their owners into billionaires.

This is the context we should all be thinking about when it comes to these "rogue AI hacking agents." The IT systems that these irresponsibly deployed software products have trashed were already terrifyingly vulnerable…by design. Rather than fix these systems, our governmental "security" agencies have spent the past 40 years making them less secure, in order to make it easier for them to catch "bad guys," who now find it trivial to attack us through systems we are all totally reliant upon.

In every way, in every area of law, governments fail to take our security seriously. That even includes copyright law. All over the world, the US Trade Representative has ensured that every country has an "anti-circumvention" law that makes it a crime to reverse-engineer and modify software without permission:

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

From the very start, these have been a security nightmare. Remember the "Sony Rootkit?" Between 2005-2007, Sony-BMG Music distributed over 6m CDs that were deliberately infected with a piece of malicious software called a "rootkit" that was used to disable your computer's ability to rip (copy) music CDs.

The way this rootkit did so was depraved in its indifference to the security of Sony-BMG's customers: at the same time as Sony-BMG's malware installed its secret anti-ripping program, it also altered their computers' operating systems to make them incapable of detecting any program or file whose name started with $SYS$. Immediately, malicious software authors started adding $SYS$ to the start of all their filenames, and that malicious software was therefore undetectable to millions of users' computers. It was even invisible to anti-virus software. Worse: Sony-BMG's rootkit infected 200,000-300,000 US government and military networks:

https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2005/11/sonys_drm_rootk.html

Even worse: after the scandal broke, security researchers all over the world came forward to say that they'd discovered the Sony Rootkit months before it became common knowledge, but their lawyers had told them they weren't allowed to disclose its existence because doing so would fall afoul of anti-circumvention law. For months, this official, deliberate malware epidemic spread in secret because of anti-circumvention law.

It's been more than 20 years since the Sony Rootkit, and anti-circumvention law is now worse than it was in the oughts: now it applies to far more devices from far more vendors. Today, it's common for corporations to threaten their own customers with civil and criminal liability if they have the temerity to hire outside auditors to evaluate the software they entrust their businesses to for security defects. And oh God, it's even worse, because the worst offender is Oracle, who are now the de facto IT czars of America:

https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2015/08/oracle-security-chief-to-customers-stop-checking-our-code-for-vulnerabilities/

I'm not saying that these are the only problems with our IT security. What I am saying is that the hacking bots everyone's freaking out about didn't appear out of nowhere. If you have just a little object permanence, you can see that they are the terminal stage of a pathology that governments have only ever worsened: by hoarding and weaponizing vulnerabilities; by paying others to hoard and weaponize vulnerabilities; by criminalizing security audits; by insisting that every computer we rely on be equipped with deliberate vulnerabilities in software we can't inspect, terminate or delete.

Yeah, there should be criminal and civil liability for OpenAI, Amazon, Anthropic and every other company whose bots "went rogue" and attacked servers. But that will do nothing to fix our IT.

The table-stakes for a secure digital world are: public agencies that try to make our computers as secure as possible, including by administering the corporate death-penalty to any company that hoards and weaponizes information about bugs in our computer. We should protect and reward individuals and firms who come forward with true disclosures about bugs in systems we rely upon. We should not give companies the right to silence and punish those critics who want to warn us about their defective products. And we should not require that companies make us less secure in the name of making it easier for spies and cops to catch the bad guys.

(Image: Pmk58, CC BY-SA 4.0; Wikipedian Prolific, CC BY-SA 3.0; modified)

Hey look at this (permalink)


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

Object permanence (permalink)

#25yrsago CBS sitcom about couple who meet in the WTC rubble https://web.archive.org/web/20011014082646/http://dailynews.yahoo.com/h/eo/20011012/en/cbs_considers_wtc_comedy_1.html

#25yrsago Jon Norman not invited to Philcon https://www.locusmag.com/2001/Departments/Letters10Norman.html

#25yrsago Bruce Sterling's post-9/11 geopolitics predictions https://web.archive.org/web/20011102212150/https://www.edge.org/documents/whatnow/whatnow_sterling.html

#25yrsago Polaroid files Chapter 11 https://web.archive.org/web/20011107181428/http://www.polaroid.com/polinfo/press_releases/october01/101201a.html

#25yrsago David Mamet's tribute to Shel Silverstein https://www.nytimes.com/2001/10/14/theater/theater-a-beloved-friend-who-lived-life-the-chicago-way.html

#15yrago Great Big Beautiful Tomorrow: a chapbook in PM Press’s Outspoken Authors series https://craphound.com/category/gbbt/

#15yrsago Canadian government advice defines abortionists as terrorists https://www.jezebel.com/canadian-government-lists-abortionists-as-terrorists-u-5849963

#10yrsago Ikea Shanghai to elderly, lonely Chinese people: buy something or get out https://qz.com/806990/lonely-shanghai-seniors-now-have-to-buy-something-if-they-want-to-cruise-all-day-in-ikeas-cafeteria

#5yrsago Facebook shows mall ninja gear ads on insurrection articles https://pluralistic.net/2021/01/14/10-point-program/#monetizing

#5yrsago The Black Panther self-care method https://pluralistic.net/2021/01/14/10-point-program/#panthers

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: 574 (7730 total).

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

  • A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING

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

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

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

How to get Pluralistic:

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

Pluralistic.net

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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):

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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 — 12 October 2026 ⏭

Pluralistic: How labor rights rescued Ultima from a monopolist (12 Oct 2026)

✇Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
By: Cory Doctorow
12 October 2026 at 13:40


Today's links

  • How labor rights rescued Ultima from a monopolist: If you care about labor justice and artists' rights, stop focusing on copyright.
  • Hey look at this: Delights to delectate.
  • Object permanence: China unblocks Wikipedia; CCC cracks the Bundestrojaner; "Children of the Sky"; "Messy"; Every top Icelandic banker is guilty; Climate activism x digital activism; Gene Kan on P2P's future; Larry Ellison x mass surveillance; W3C v patents; "Work from home" in the cybercrime supply-chain; "Nursery Rhyme Comics"; Glitchy tea-set; Tourist Guy; Vista v reinstallation; Ryanair v your bladder; Wells Fargo CEO loves "sales culture"; "Attention Merchants"; Orban v free press; AI v GIGO; Dylan wins the Nobel; India's starving kids app; Adobe's spyware copyfraud; Charter blackmails customers with bad credit threats; Fix UK housing.
  • Upcoming appearances: Paris, Vancouver, Victoria, Ottawa, Kilkenny, Sheffield, Oxford, Montreal.
  • Recent appearances: Where I've been.
  • Latest books: You keep readin' em, I'll keep writin' 'em.
  • Upcoming books: Like I said, I'll keep writin' 'em.
  • Colophon: All the rest.


A heavy, medieval, ornate brass door with a lion's head in the center and a handle carved as an elaborate winged figure. The lion's eyes have been replaced with dizzy spirals. The head of the winged figure on the handle has been replaced with an 8-bit Ultima avatar's head. The handle center and ring have been altered to add a series of copyright symbols to them. The trim of the door has been worked with the Ultima Online logo. A keyhole set beneath the handle shows a distant pixelated lich sprite from an early Ultima game.

How labor rights rescued Ultima from a monopolist (permalink)

If you work in the media, you have doubtless had a lifetime of encouragement to treat copyright as your primary source of economic protection, and doubtless you've been told that this protection arises from the fact that copyright is a property right – specifically, it's a subspecies of "intellectual property":

https://locusmag.com/feature/cory-doctorow-ip/

Property rights are capitalism's holy sacrament, so of course, it's natural to treasure any property right you can lay claim to. But this is a trap. Creative workers aren't asset speculators, we're workers. When we bargain with a media company to sell them our copyright, we're just bargaining to sell our labor, not our property.

This is a distinction with a difference. Property rights are alienable. When you negotiate to sell your property to someone else, you propose to transfer the title to that property. If you sell your house, you don't get to move back in if you change your mind later. Sell your car, and you must not get in and drive it away.

Nominally, creative workers only bargain away some of their copyright, because copyright is also divisible. You can sell US English print rights to a novel, a one-month license to synch a song to an advertisement, or the right to display a painting for a year.

But here's the thing about property rights: the most reliable predictor of how many property rights you must give up in a sale isn't how many property rights you started with – it's how much bargaining power you have. For 50 years, governments have expanded copyright in every way, making it last longer, cover more works and restrict more uses, all backstopped by ever-steepening penalties. 50 years later, media companies – our bosses – are larger and more profitable than they've ever been, and we're poorer than we've ever been. The share of the money generated by our labor has declined, even as our rights over the product of that labor have expanded.

How to make sense of this? It's easy, once you factor in power. In a world of five publishers, four studios, three labels, two app companies and a single ebook/audiobook company, getting more copyright to bargain with just means getting more copyright to bargain away. When copyright's term expanded from "life plus 50 years" to "life plus 70 years," our bosses simply demanded the entirety of the new term, and didn't offer us a dime more.

This is the thesis of Chokepoint Capitalism, the book on Big Tech, Big Media, and creative labor markets Rebecca Giblin and I published in 2022:

https://www.beacon.org/Chokepoint-Capitalism-P2020.aspx

Chokepoint Capitalism is broken into two parts: the first half of the book is a series of pitiless, plain-language dissections of the baroque scams that media companies have used to make themselves richer from our work, from Spotify to Amazon to Livenation and beyond. From reader feedback, I can tell you that these chapters will make you very angry, because once you strip away all the deliberate obfuscation, all you're left with is one screw-job after another, each of which makes the creators you love poorer even as you pay more for their work.

But then there's the second half of the book. This section is devoted to "shovel-ready" policy solutions, each of which is designed to change the "distribution" of the spoils of the media industry, putting more money in workers' pockets at the expense of our bosses. None of these are things you can do as a "conscious consumer." The monopolistic destruction of creators' livelihoods is a systemic problem and you can't solve it by shopping better.

The point of these chapters is to lay out what we must demand from our policymakers when (inevitably), they propose to "solve" the problem of worsening straits for creative workers – and to help creative workers understand that when our bosses demand more copyright, that's not there to benefit us.

One of these systemic solutions is "termination of transfer," a simple and radical idea that has a proven track-record of making creative workers richer at our bosses' expense. Simply put, "termination of transfer" is the statutory right to void any contract you've signed to transfer your copyright to someone else. In the USA, the 1976 Copyright Act introduced a 35-year termination right. 35 years after you sign any copyright contract, you can file some paperwork with the US Copyright Office and get that copyright back, no matter what your contract says.

Now, most creative works don't have a commercial life after 35 years (very few works are commercially viable even after the original US copyright term of 14 years), but for those that do, termination of transfer is a reliable way to address the extremely common situation in which a creator signs away their rights for a low price, not knowing that it will become a lasting hit. Once you've scored that hit, you can probably get a better deal from your next work, but the deal for that hit is done and can't be altered.

Termination solves this. From The Babysitters Club to the early Stephen King novels to George Clinton's entire catalog, termination of transfer has put lots of money into creative workers' pockets at the expense of corporations that ripped them off at the start of their careers.

From the start, there was no question whether termination of transfer would make it into Chokepoint Capitalism. Rebecca is one of the world's leading experts on the subject, having co-authored the definitive study of termination:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/09/26/take-it-back/

In the book, we note that – unlike longer copyright terms – termination has a proven track record of putting groceries on creators' tables, braces on their kids' teeth, and a roof over their heads. We go over the legislative history of termination in the 1976 Act, noting that it was originally supposed to be automatic and kick in after just 20 years. If we want to make creative workers richer, changing the 35-year administrative right into an automatic 20-year termination right is a no-brainer amendment to copyright law.

How did an automatic right that kicked in after 20 years turn into a right you have to apply for after 35 years? Simple: our bosses hate termination. How much do they hate it? Well, take Mitch Glazier, the head of the Recording Industry Association of America, where he draws a $1.3m annual salary to represent the record labels.

Before Glazier got the RIAA gig, he was an obscure Congressional staffer, but he was forced out of the job after he snuck a clause into an otherwise unrelated bill that killed termination of transfer for recording artists. This was so outrageous that Congress actually convened a special session so they could rip out Glazier's amendment, and Glazier got a new job as a millionaire lobbyist for the recording industry:

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

Termination is hugely useful and quite radical. Last year saw Gary K Wolf, creator of the novel Who Censored Roger Rabbit? (later adapted by Disney as Who Framed Roger Rabbit?) claw back his rights to the book and its characters, in order to continue the series:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/11/18/im-not-bad/#im-just-drawn-that-way

In 2023, Bill Willingham terminated the transfer of his wildly successful graphic novel series Fables from DC and released the copyright into the public domain:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/09/15/fairy-use-tales/#sampling-license

And now, Richard Garriott, AKA "Lord British," has claimed back the rights to the groundbreaking Ultima series of computer role-playing games, which he sold to Electronic Arts in 1992:

https://www.videogameschronicle.com/news/richard-garriott-is-officially-regaining-control-of-the-ultima-series/

On the Techjess podcast, Garriott marveled at how easy the process was: "there’s a really weird United States copyright law that says if you are the original holder of a copyright and you assign it or sell it to any publisher or any other entity, after 35 years, you can just take it back":

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2El7VtPuSzs

EA killed off Ultima in 2000, and it has languished since, despite an ardent fandom. Garriott has vowed to reissue the old games and is mulling new ones.

All this brings me back to property rights. Property rights are uniquely unsuitable to this kind of arrangement. You don't get to move back into the house your parents sold 35 years ago, and if you did, the photographer who took the family portrait in the hallway wouldn't be allowed to break in and take it away 35 years after you sat for it.

Termination of transfer isn't an "IP right" – it's a labor right. It belongs to the large class of rights that are far more important and useful than mere property rights, such as privacy rights and human rights:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/09/28/cost-of-everything/#value-of-nothing

If copyright were just about property rights, then termination of transfer would be inconceivable. Termination is a vestigial labor right at the very periphery of copyright. It protects artists, and it can only do so because it is not a property right.

This is one of the themes in The Bezzle, my 2024 historical technothriller, starring my two-fisted forensic accountant hero Martin Hench who uses termination to help an artist claw back his rights from an unscrupulous former manager who forged his signature decades before (this plotline is based on the true story of Parliament/Funkadelic's George Clinton!):

https://craphound.com/bezzle/

If you signed away your rights 35 years ago and want to get them back, check out the Authors Alliance, a nonprofit whose advisory board I volunteer for. We produced a tool that automates all the hardest parts of terminating your transfers and getting your rights back:

https://www.authorsalliance.org/resources/termination-of-transfer/

Some of our most ardent fans are academics, whose publicly funded papers are published in journals dominated by a cartel of giant companies that do not pay the authors, nor the editors, nor the reviewers, but still claim all rights and charge the institutions that funded the research they publish tens of thousands of dollars per journal to access that research:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/08/16/the-public-sphere/#not-the-elsevier

But it's not just academics who have an interest in termination of transfer. It's video game authors, novelists, musicians – and maybe you, someday!

(Image: Reda Kerbouche, CC BY-SA 4.0; Thegreenj, CC BY-SA 3.0, modified)

Hey look at this (permalink)


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

Object permanence (permalink)

#25yrsago Tourist Guy https://web.archive.org/web/20011009234007/http://www.touristofdeath.com/

#25yrsago Gene Kan on Open Web Services https://web.archive.org/web/20011031234135/http://www.openp2p.com/pub/a/p2p/2001/08/02/openservices.html

#25yrsago Larry Ellison wants to spy on everyone https://web.archive.org/web/20011206002725/http://www.oracle.com/corporate/index.html?digitalid_comp.html

#25yrsago W3C ponders patents in web standards https://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-patentpolicy-comment/2001Oct/1488.html

#25yrsago Adobe updates the ebook reader that Syklarov cracked https://web.archive.org/web/20011107145015/http://www.vnunet.com/News/1126057

#20yrsago Hungarian airport proposes “nonremovable” RFIDs for every passenger http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/6044310.stm

#20yrsago China unblocks Wikipedia, even though it won’t censor https://web.archive.org/web/20061016133232/http://www.editorandpublisher.com/eandp/departments/online/article_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1003251388

#20yrsago Eudora going open source, to be based on Thunderbird https://web.archive.org/web/20061014163143/http://www.qualcomm.com/press/releases/2006/061011_project_collaboration_mozilla.html

#20yrsago Vista license only lets you reinstall your OS on new PCs twice https://web.archive.org/web/20061022161256/http://www.techweb.com/wire/software/193300234

#15yrsago Why handmade keys? https://makezine.com/article/maker-news/rebuilt-keys-jimmy-diresta/

#15yrsago Ryanair declares war on bodily fluids, vows to remove toilets https://www.the-independent.com/travel/news-and-advice/ryanair-unveils-its-latest-plan-to-save-money-remove-toilets-from-the-plane-2369232.html

#15yrsago Comic about the complexity and decline of copyright https://web.archive.org/web/20111014201558/http://www.mediademocracyfund.org/about/mdf-voices/appropriart-a-graphic-about-copyright-susie-cagle-co-produced-mdf-and-gia

#15yrsago Chaos Computer Club cracks Germany’s illegal government malware, a trojan that spies on your PC and lets anyone off the street hijack it https://www.ccc.de/en/updates/2011/staatstrojaner

#15yrsago Vernor Vinge’s Children of the Sky: bootstrapping high-tech civilization from hive-mind Machiavellis https://memex.craphound.com/2011/10/11/vernor-vinges-children-of-the-sky-bootstrapping-high-tech-civilization-from-hive-mind-machiavellis/

#15yrsago Facebook’s misleading “log out” button and the future of privacy legislation https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2011/10/facebook’s-hotel-california-cross-site-tracking-and-potential-impact-digital-privacy

#15yrsago How online crooks use “work from home” patsies to launder goods and forward them offshore https://krebsonsecurity.com/2011/10/shady-reshipping-centers-exposed-part-i/

#15yrsago Nursery Rhyme Comics: Great comic illustrators do Mother Goose https://memex.craphound.com/2011/10/12/nursery-rhyme-comics-great-comic-illustrators-do-mother-goose/

#15yrsago 3D printed “glitchy” tea-set https://www.plummerfernandez.com/works/glitch-reality/

#10yrsago Meet the WWI women who pretended to be rocks for the war effort https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/why-women-pretended-to-be-creepy-rocks-and-trees-in-nyc-parks-during-wwi

#10yrsago Bernie Sanders’ touching video endorsing his brother’s candidacy for David Cameron’s old Parliamentary seat https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VAH8FJ3g49g

#10yrsago Messy: When automated anti-disaster systems make things worse, and what to do about it https://memex.craphound.com/2016/10/11/messy-when-automated-anti-disaster-systems-make-things-worse-and-what-to-do-about-it/

#10yrsago Icelandic Supreme Court: all nine top bankers are guilty of market manipulation https://icelandmonitor.mbl.is/news/politics_and_society/2016/10/06/iceland_finds_all_guilty_in_banker_market_abuse_cas/

#10yrsago When “reputation management” becomes perjury, forgery and fraud against America’s federal courts https://web.archive.org/web/20161011055317/https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/volokh-conspiracy/wp/2016/10/10/dozens-of-suspicious-court-cases-with-missing-defendants-aim-at-getting-web-pages-taken-down-or-deindexed/?utm_term=.379bd5b35a91

#10yrsago If you bail on Yahoo Mail, forget about having your email forwarded https://web.archive.org/web/20161012182945/https://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/U/US_TEC_YAHOO_BREACH?SITE=AP&SECTION=HOME&TEMPLATE=DEFAULt

#10yrsago The clumsy, amateurish IoT botnet has now infected devices in virtually all of the world’s countries https://web.archive.org/web/20161012150926/https://motherboard.vice.com/read/internet-of-things-mirai-malware-reached-almost-all-countries-on-earth

#10yrsago Wells Fargo whistleblower: once I complained, they started denying me bathroom breaks https://web.archive.org/web/20161014180455/https://money.cnn.com/2016/10/11/investing/wells-fargo-intimidation-bathroom-breaks/index.html

#10yrsago The astounding story of Iceland’s constitution – and its government’s failure https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C1qk-BQwNlA

#10yrsago Wells Fargo’s new CEO previously denied that the bank’s sales culture had any problems https://web.archive.org/web/20161014023238/https://consumerist.com/2016/10/13/new-wells-fargo-ceo-recently-denied-overbearing-sales-culture-that-created-fake-account-fiasco/

#10yrsago The Attention Merchants: a deep dive into the origins of the surveillance economy https://memex.craphound.com/2016/10/13/the-attention-merchants-a-deep-dive-into-the-origins-of-the-surveillance-economy/

#10yrsago AI’s blind spot: garbage in, garbage out https://web.archive.org/web/20190429032014/https://www.nature.com/news/there-is-a-blind-spot-in-ai-research-1.20805

#10yrsago Hungary’s Prime Minister shuts down opposition press, then goes after everyone else https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/oct/13/hungary-future-europe-far-right-viktor-orban

#10yrsago Using the science of group conflict to understand Trump’s campaign https://thesocietypages.org/socimages/2016/10/12/trumps-brilliant-manipulation-of-the-science-of-group-conflict/

#10yrsago Bob Dylan is the first songwriter to win the Nobel Prize for literature https://www.csmonitor.com/Arts-Culture/Books/2016/1013/Bob-Dylan-lyrics-as-literature-First-songwriter-to-win-a-Nobel-Prize

#10yrsago Poland’s outrageous abortion law is back https://globalvoices.org/2016/10/13/new-abortion-ban-proposals-in-poland-mean-the-black-protest-movement-isnt-over-yet/

#10yrsago Hate crimes spike after Brexit https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-politics-37640982

#5yrsago India funded a starving kids' app, but not food https://pluralistic.net/2021/10/13/theres-an-app-for-that/#solutionism

#5yrsago Adobe uses copyfraud to preserve spyware https://pluralistic.net/2021/10/13/theres-an-app-for-that/#gnash

#5yrsago Charter uses bad credit threats to corral ex-subscribers https://pluralistic.net/2021/10/13/theres-an-app-for-that/#thugs-charter

#1yrago The curious, intertwined history of climate and digital rights activism https://pluralistic.net/2025/10/11/cyber-rights-now/#better-late-than-never

#1yrago How to fix the UK housing crisis https://pluralistic.net/2025/10/13/castles-not-assets/#steve-keen

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: 562 (24528 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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ISSN: 3066-764X

Swapping money for expertise

✇Cory Doctorow's craphound.com
By: Cory Doctorow
12 October 2026 at 07:36

The First Bank of Chicago, a Grecian temple to money. It is surrounded by flames. A skeleton in academic robes and mortarboards has been lynched from its roof. In the foreground are banded packages of US $100 bills.

This week on my podcast, I read Swapping money for expertise, a recent essay from my Pluralistic blog about the political economy of “AI” based on theory-free inference.

The need to understand and describe a thing before you could apply “AI” to it is a bottleneck, because it requires programmers to understand how a thing works before they can incorporate it into an “AI” system. Lots of programmers know how to play chess, but far fewer understand the human pancreas, planetary weather systems, or patterns of mineral deposition in the Earth’s crust.

For programmers to apply machine learning to these domains, they need to collaborate with experts who do understand them, who furthermore expect to be paid for this work. The need for expert input into this kind of “AI” represents a significant increase in the wage-bill paid by the programmer’s employer: it means they have to pay for programmers and experts.

Even worse: this kind of “AI” can’t be applied to systems we don’t understand. We can observe far more causal relationships – instances in which A reliably causes B – in the universe than we can explain. There are lots of examples of us operationalizing these observations without understanding them. If you get sick today, your doctor might well prescribe one of the many medicines whose method of action is either incompletely understood or not understood at all. We know that molecule A reliably treats pathology B, but not why, and while that why is the subject of ongoing research, it’s not necessary that the why be known before the molecule can be given to ailing patients.

MP3

Received — 9 October 2026 ⏭

Pluralistic: Thwarted (09 Oct 2026)

✇Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
By: Cory Doctorow
9 October 2026 at 21:48


Today's links

  • Thwarted: Behold the awesome destructive power of a fully operational billionaire.
  • Hey look at this: Delights to delectate.
  • Object permanence: Anthrax v National Inquirer; Grey goo v Second Life; Predictive policing v actual crime; Spooky cookies; California v algorithmic price-fixing; Tivo self-destructs; Disney exec endorses piracy; TSA v geologists; Handheld printer; Mandatory DRM for all Canadian music sales; Iceweasel; "Snuff"; "Shade the Changing Girl"; Latam surveillance; Scotland Yard brands encryption terrorism; RBS slaughtered 10k small businesses to seize and sell their assets; Dead Letters.
  • Upcoming appearances: Calgary, Winnipeg, Paris, Vancouver, Victoria, Ottawa, Kilkenny, Sheffield, Oxford, Montreal.
  • Recent appearances: Where I've been.
  • Latest books: You keep readin' em, I'll keep writin' 'em.
  • Upcoming books: Like I said, I'll keep writin' 'em.
  • Colophon: All the rest.


The Warner Brother tower posed against a vintage map of Burbank, keeling over, tearing up a huge clot of sod and concrete. Standing atop of the tower, forcing it down, is a sad, spavined donkey in Democratic Party livery. Being crushed under the tower is the California flag bear, with blood pouring out of its eye and mouth.

Thwarted (permalink)

There are many ways in which every billionaire is a policy failure, but the most corrosive and destructive way in which billionaires are policy failures is this: billionaires, despite being unelected and unaccountable, possess the power to control – and ruin – millions of peoples' lives.

Despite what the Prosperity Gospel and the Efficient Market Hypothesis would have you believe, having billions of dollars is in no way a reliable predictor that you also possess the wisdom to unilaterally dictate how thousands or millions of other people must live their lives, and that dictatorial power is the most tangible effect of being a billionaire.

Billionaireism is many things, but above all else, it is the power to do whatever you want to do, at the expense of whatever other people want to do. To be a billionaire is to live a life unthwarted, above the power of your workers, your neighbors, or your government and its laws. It is the right to get high on your own supply. It is the right to live a life in which no one ever calls you on your bullshit.

Billionaires aspire to live a one-sided libertarian fantasy in which they have the unlimited right to do whatever they want, and you have the right to do whatever they tell you to do.

There has always been a group of people who refused to acknowledge that other people have perfectly valid reasons for wanting to pursue their own goals rather than theirs. We call most of those people "toddlers" and devote sizable social effort to helping them outgrow this belief. Billionaires, on the other hand, command resources that allow them to devote sizable effort to getting us to acknowledge that they should be able to tell us what to do.

This is why billionaires love neoclassical economics, with its doctrine of "revealed preferences," which holds that the only true way to understand someone's preferences is to ignore what they say and only pay attention to what they do. It's a belief that can only be adopted by people who suffer the self-inflicted neurological injury you get from doing an economics degree, which renders the victim incapable of perceiving or reasoning about power. To believe in "revealed preferences" is to observe someone who has sold their kidney to pay the rent and marvel at this person who has a revealed preference for only having one kidney:

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

"Revealed preferences" is the economist's version of the bully who grabs your arm and starts whacking you with your own hand while shouting, "stop hitting yourself!" The ideological purpose that "revealed preferences" fills is letting billionaires live a life unthwarted. It's a life where they thwart everyone else, but still claim to be believers in "freedom."

This is what Peter Thiel meant when he wrote that "democracy is incompatible with freedom." In a democracy, the people who you exercise coercive power over are able to band together to create public institutions that act as a check on your power. For Thiel to maximize his freedom (to do things like spying on us and crushing our journalistic outlets), he must prevent all of us from voting, lest we vote to take away those cherished freedoms of his:

https://www.cato-unbound.org/2009/04/13/peter-thiel/education-libertarian/

We're told that as mere mortals, we must inevitably submit to "death and taxes." Billionaires have long since so corrupted our political system that they need not pay taxes:

https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/S/bo256019296.html

They have (practically speaking) infinite wealth, which means that they have practically infinite power, including the power to block any democratic attempt to limit their wealth (and thus their power):

https://www.hamiltonnolan.com/p/the-war-against-accumulated-capital

Having vanquished taxes, the ultra-rich are now committed to defeating death as well, making themselves easy marks for the world's weirdest cult leaders and grifters, who promise them a mix of physical and digital immortality:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0oVSnaINJ30

The fact that billionaires are such suckers, so often, is the strongest argument against billionaireism. Billionaires aren't just powerful, they're also fallible. We're all fallible, of course, but only billionaires get to impose their foolish ideas on so many other people, who have no say in the matter.

Henry Ford thought that he was so rich that he could build Brazilian worker housing whose windows faced the same direction as the worker housing he'd built in Dearborn, Michigan. He literally thought that being rich meant that he could ignore the entire concept of the Earth's axial tilt (he was wrong):

https://memex.craphound.com/2010/06/02/fordlandia-novelistic-history-of-henry-fords-doomed-midwestern-town-in-the-amazon-jungle/

Of course that was the least of Ford's follies. Ford also believed in a secret Jewish conspiracy to control humanity:

https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/features/henryford-antisemitism/

And despite the fact that Ford was so often demonstrably as thick as pigshit, no one was able to stop him from hiring soldiers to literally slaughter anyone who tried to limit his ability to tell other people how to live their lives:

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

Ford is no exception. Elon Musk believes in the same racist garbage as Henry Ford…but he also believes that if you're rich enough, you can simply wish away geometry and physics:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/07/24/geometry-hates-cars/#dogshit-unit-economics

More than anyone else, Musk illustrates the way that being insulated from people who can thwart you leads to absolute ruination. Every terrible idea Musk has, he gets to act on. This has all kinds of negative impacts, including the very real possibility that some day your house will be crushed by his flaming rocketry debris:

https://www.vice.com/en/article/texas-residents-are-suing-spacex-over-terrestrial-bombardment/

That's small potatoes, though: Musk's wrong ideas, combined with his billionaire's impunity, also allowed him to murder hundreds of thousands of the world's poorest children:

https://hsph.harvard.edu/news/usaid-shutdown-has-led-to-hundreds-of-thousands-of-deaths/

Billionaireism is fractally terrible. By definition, the kind of person who will inflict the kinds of harms needed to amass billions of dollars in pursuit of total impunity is someone who will use that impunity to hurt even more people. Anyone who fails to outgrow a toddler's insistence on subordinating others to their will should not be allowed to subordinate anyone to their will.

Billionaire dilettantes aren't like regular dilettantes. Anyone can be a crank, but billionaire cranks have the force-multiplier of money and the impunity it brings. These allow a billionaire to turn his crackpot ideas into an unstoppable force that crushes public education:

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

It also lets billionaires (including the billionaire ruining public education) kidnap and rape more than a thousand girls on a private island:

https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/what-to-know-about-bill-gates-relationship-with-jeffrey-epstein-as-he-is-interviewed-in-house-probe

Whatever crank whim a rich person has, we all have to live with. Take Barre Seid: the 94 year old billionaire made his fortune manufacturing electronics, and then donated $1.6b to fund "attack philanthropy" in order to undermine belief in climate change and prevent any action from being taken to avert it:

https://www.propublica.org/article/barre-seid-heartland-institute-hillsdale-college-gmu

Seid is one of the main reasons we're experiencing the super El Nino. He's not just in the top 0.1% of wealth-horders, he's also in the top 0.1% of people we can blame for the twelve foot sea-level rise that is currently wiping Long Beach off the map:

https://ktla.com/news/local-news/long-beach-boardwalk-collapse-rachel-surf/

Henry Ford didn't believe in the planet's axial tilt. Elon Musk doesn't believe in geometry.

Barre Seid doesn't believe in climate change. But Barre Seid does believe something: Barre Seid believes in rats.

For three years, Seid has paid a small army of goons to wander the area around Chicago's Lincoln Park, scattering handfuls of high-grade nuts on the ground, which have drawn flocks of pigeons and swarms of rats. Rats are everywhere. Everything is covered in pigeon shit. Seid has been repeatedly fined and cited and warned, and he's carried on turning the neighborhood into an uncontrolled vermin breeding facility:

https://gizmodo.com/a-billionaire-is-fueling-a-rat-explosion-in-a-chicago-park-in-the-stupidest-way-possible-2000823641

Whether or not the people who live, work and play in Lincoln Park want to be swarmed by rats and slip in thick slicks of pigeon shit is irrelevant. Seid can afford to pay any fine the city levies against him (a fine is a price, and he's a billionaire), which means there's no practical reason Seid has to ever stop. He has the freedom to operate unthwarted in his every desire, including his desire to carpet an entire neighborhood in feces, so everyone else lacks the freedom to live without pigeon shit and rats.

That's the thing about billionaires: as Peter Thiel wrote, democracy is incompatible with freedom (to be a billionaire). The fact that Barre Seid's desire to transform Lincoln Park into a pigeon-shit manure lagoon is wildly unpopular with Chicagoans is irrelevant. You can't vote Barre Seid out of office, because no one elected him Pigeon Shit Czar. He has assumed that office by right of conquest.

Our lives are full of horrible, extremely unpopular things that we can't vote away because billionaires like them. Take the decision to allow Larry Ellison and his failson to buy and kill Warner Studios. That's an incredibly unpopular idea, especially in California, where Warner, Paramount and the Ellisons are all based. Despite the fact that we all hate this idea, Ellison gets to do it, because he is unthwartable:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/09/22/happy-chudmas/#baloney-in-our-slacks

Some of California's most powerful Democrats promised to stop the merger. Instead, they signed away California's future because they decided that they weren't powerful enough to thwart a billionaire:

https://prospect.org/2026/10/08/democrats-who-let-trumps-oligarchs-buy-hollywood-warner-bros-david-ellison-gavin-newsom/

The Warnermount disaster demonstrates the fundamental flaw in libertarianism. Even if you're the kind of Musk-addled libertarian who can't open your copy of Atlas Shrugged anymore because the pages are all stuck together and you think the only role for the state is enforcing contracts, you still need the state to be able to enforce those contracts. If corporations or even individual billionaires amass more power than the state, then they can always tell the state's contract enforcers to fuck off.

The ref must be more powerful than the players on the field, so the smallest government you can have is determined by the size of the largest corporation and the wealth of the richest billionaire you're willing to tolerate.

The world is in really bad shape right now, but it doesn't have to be. As Mamdani has shown us, it's not that hard to run a well-administered, advanced technological civilization. Fixing potholes and making transit work and enforcing housing rules isn't rocket surgery. We know how to do those things – we just don't do them because billionaires don't want us to, and they are unthwartable:

https://yourlocalepidemiologist.substack.com/p/the-revolutionary-art-of-fixing-the

We let the most greedy, most ruthless people among us pursue their toddler's quest for an unthwarted life to the expense of any semblance of competent administration, and now we are fucked. That's why people are so angry about AI: there's nothing wrong with the idea of automating some tasks through advanced statistical techniques, but the reason so much of the world's scarce resources have been allocated to the AI buildout is that billionaires are infinitely horny for a technology that will let them sideline expertise in favor of money:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/10/06/nonfungible/#theory-free

After all, experts get to thwart billionaires. They can refuse to apply their expertise to a billionaire's folly. The kind of AI that the industry is pursuing today is predicated on the idea that you can just ask a computer to come up with "theory-free inferences" that will let it run a factory, drive a car, or perform medicine, without knowing anything, just by pulling statistical correlations out of unimaginably vast data-sets.

At some level, people get this. They understand that AI and billionaireism are intimately connected – that the reason the sector is on track to lose about a trillion dollars this year is that for billionaires, a trillion bucks is a small price to pay for an unthwartable life.

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 National Inquirer shuts offices after anthrax delivery https://web.archive.org/web/20011221185744/https://www.etonline.com/celebrity/a6975.htm

#20yrsago Grey Goo melting online world Second Life https://web.archive.org/web/20061023190111/http://blog.secondlife.com/2006/10/08/grid-set-back-to-linden-login-only-some-goo-missed/
#20yrsago TiVo’s “self-destruct button” destructs https://web.archive.org/web/20061014132917/http://reviews.cnet.com/4531-10921_7-6650194.html

#20yrsago Disney exec: Piracy is just a business model https://www.netribution.co.uk/stories/cross-media/disney-co-chair-recognises-piracy-is-a-business-model

#20yrsago TSA confiscates geologist’s rock https://web.archive.org/web/20061019132853/https://www.courant.com/news/opinion/op_ed/hc-thorson1005.artoct05,0,777555.column?coll=hc-headlines-oped

#20yrsago Handheld printer made from a toner cartridge https://spritesmods.com/?art=inker&page=4

#20yrsago Panicked chefs propose copyrighted food https://megnut.com/2006/10/10/keep-recipes-free/

#20yrsago Canadian music proposal would require DRM for online tunes https://web.archive.org/web/20061022201913/https://www.jeremydebeer.ca/content/view/95/2/

#20yrsago Iceweasel, a free-as-in-speech version of Firefox https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Debian–Mozilla_trademark_dispute

#15yrsago Pratchett’s Snuff: a rural/nautical tale of drawing-room gentility, racism, and justice https://memex.craphound.com/2011/10/10/pratchetts-snuff-a-rural-nautical-tale-of-drawing-room-gentility-racism-and-justice/

#10yrsago Shade the Changing Girl: amazing, gorgeous new comic about aliens and mean girls https://memex.craphound.com/2016/10/10/shade-the-changing-girl-amazing-gorgeous-new-comic-about-aliens-and-mean-girls/

#10yrsago Massive report details the surveillance powers of 12 Central and South American nations https://necessaryandproportionate.org/principles/

#10yrsago Scotland Yard charge: teaching people to use cryptography is an act of terrorism https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2016/10/cops-charge-cardiff-man-with-terrorist-crypto-training-offence/

#10yrsago RBS deliberately crushed more than 1,000 healthy UK businesses to seize and sell their assets https://www.buzzfeed.com/heidiblake/dash-for-cash?utm_term=.iq9ndLB5#.udNbypOJ

#10yrsago Though crime happens everywhere, predictive policing tools send cops to poor/black neighborhoods https://www.mic.com/articles/156286/crime-prediction-tool-pred-pol-only-amplifies-racially-biased-policing-study-shows

#10yrsago Bake: spooky chocolate chip cookies https://www.instructables.com/Creepy-Chocolate-Chip-Cookies/

#5yrsago Dead letters https://pluralistic.net/2021/10/10/dead-letters/

#1yrago A disenshittification moment from the land of mass storage https://pluralistic.net/2025/10/10/synology/#how-about-nah

#1yrago California bans algorithmic price-fixing https://pluralistic.net/2025/10/09/pricewars/#adam-smith-communist

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: 537 (23966 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):

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

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https://doctorow.medium.com/

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

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

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

ISSN: 3066-764X

Received — 7 October 2026 ⏭

Pluralistic: Disloyalty (07 Oct 2026)

✇Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
By: Cory Doctorow
7 October 2026 at 15:58


Today's links


A 1970s Air Canada ad depicting a man in a brown velour pullover with a large collar sitting in a book-lined study, assembling model Air Canada jets on his desk. His head has been replaced with the blue, metallic head of a 1950s pulp robot and his skintones have been shifted blue to match.

Disloyalty (permalink)

Up until very recently indeed, airlines were the only businesses that I dealt with regularly that practiced "price discrimination," charging different customers different prices for the same seats.

Economists broadly like this "second-order" price discrimination, where a company charges customers different prices based on the circumstances of the purchase, such as a bakery discounting bread at the end of the day. When an airline cranks up the price of an itinerary that doesn't include a Saturday stay, they're using that fact as a proxy for "price-insensitive" business travelers whose bosses can afford to pay more for a ticket, rather than paying a worker overtime to spend a weekend away from home after a meeting.

Despite the arguments about "efficiency," it's safe to say that *fliers* hate this. The airlines' pricing algorithms are so opaque and capricious that anyone who buys a ticket at *any* price inevitably feels like they got a bad deal. This situation is only exacerbated by the airlines' extreme and aggressive secrecy over their pricing strategies, which includes lawsuits against websites that use historical pricing data to predict when a plane ticket will be the cheapest to buy:

https://www.eff.org/document/preliminary-injunction-american-airlines-v-farechase-inc

When a company wants the government to intervene to prohibit third parties from publishing factual information about its prices, that's a bad look. Hard to believe that they're so sure that you, the customer, will be delighted by these pricing tactics that they can't bear to have these third parties ruin the surprise.

But this second-order discrimination is *so* 20th century. Here in the 21st century, we have *first-order* price discrimination, in which AI-powered pricing algorithms use commercial surveillance data about *you*, personally, to predict the highest price you're willing to pay. In this world of "surveillance pricing," every traveler (or customer) sees a different price, in a kind of cod-Marxist dystopia whose motto is "from each according to their ability (to pay), to each according to their (desperate) needs":

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

Airlines *love* this kind of pricing, and they have means, motive and opportunity to practice it. All over the world, airlines have acquired or entered into joint ventures with surveillance pricing companies. These deals put the airlines on the horns of a dilemma: they love to boast to their shareholders about the way that surveillance pricing will let them gouge fliers, but inevitably the public finds out about these investor calls and breaks out the pitchforks and torches.

This triggers embarrassing climbdowns, like Delta's fiasco of summer 2025, when CEO Ed Bastian bragged to shareholders that his deal with the Israeli surveillance pricing company Fetcherr would boost profits by 50% (!) by figuring out which customers could be safely gouged. When fliers, civil society groups and members of Congress got wind of this and raised a ruckus, Fetcherr publicly disavowed Bastian's remarks, insisting that it wasn't even capable of the kind of price-fixing he'd promised. Then Delta launched a smear campaign against its critics, claiming that Bastian never said the thing he *absolutely said* and accusing surveillance pricing activists of peddling "misinformation":

https://groundworkcollaborative.org/news/amid-deltas-ai-pricing-scheme-groundwork-applauds-congressional-action-to-crack-down-on-surveillance-pricing-schemes/

Meanwhile, airlines all over the world have quietly switched their frequent flier reward programs from "mileage-based" rewards to "revenue-based" rewards. That means that you get points and status based on how much you spend on your ticket, not how far you fly. What may not be obvious from this move is that it forces frequent fliers to buy their tickets directly from the airlines, who claim that they can't tell how much you've spent on your ticket otherwise.

So tickets bought on sites like Expedia or through travel agents often qualify for insultingly small points awards, or no points at all. For example, British Airways once gave me *12 points* on a $2,000 Alaska Air ticket because I didn't buy it through British Airways' site (attaining BA's gold status requires *50,000* points).

Forcing frequent fliers to buy their tickets directly from the airline's website sets things up beautifully for surveillance-driven, first-order price discrimination. Airlines you do business with regularly can augment the personal information you provide to them and the data they collect from you with sensitive information purchased from the unregulated data-broker industry, which will cheerfully disclose your salary, credit card debts, or even if you've recently lost a parent and might be flying out for a funeral.

The airlines strenuously deny that they're doing this, of course, but they continue to make investor-facing announcements about their exciting deals with surveillance pricing companies…and things are getting *weird* for frequent travelers.

Thanks to a lot of book-related travel over the past couple of years, I have "Elite" status with Air Canada. Yesterday, I needed to book a last-minute, one-way fare on a route that is only serviced by Air Canada (AC enjoys a monopoly over many Canadian routes, even between major Canadian cities). I checked it out on Google Flights and found a fare for the eye-watering sum of USD829.73.

Now, my normal daily-use browser is Firefox, but I know from long experience that I can't log in to my Air Canada frequent flier account on any browser except Chromium, which I keep installed on my system for just this kind of hostile garbage website. So I tabbed over to Chromium and pasted the Google Flights outbound link that would take me to a pre-populated reservation form on aircanada.com. To my amazement, that same flight was showing as a USD1200 fare!

These were identical trips, loaded via identical referrer URLs. The difference was that in the browser where Air Canada knew that I was an extremely loyal and prolific customer, they had whacked me with a *44.8% premium* to punish me for my loyalty!

I couldn't believe it. I actually called Air Canada's customer service line for "Elite" fliers, and the customer service rep was at a loss for an explanation and could only apologise and suggest that I write a letter to the company.

I'm publishing this instead, because a) this will do more to punish Air Canada for trying to screw me over; and b) this can help you book your tickets in the future.

Yesterday, I finished buying the ticket in my logged-out Firefox window (Air Canada's website will work with Firefox to buy tickets provided you don't try to log in to your Aeroplan account first), paying $829. Then I flipped back to Chromium, where I was still logged into my Air Canada Aeroplan account, located the reservation, and added my frequent flier number to it.

I guess this is how I'm buying my plane tickets from now on.

Hey look at this (permalink)

* PM Mark Carney pledged to ‘Buy Canadian.’ Since then, $7.8 billion in contracts went to American corporations https://archive.is/zDBfX#selection-3576.0-3576.3

* Tracing the rogue ideology of the frontier labs to their product choices https://buttondown.com/apperceptive/archive/tracing-the-rogue-ideology-of-the-frontier-labs/

* Have you heard of the term "enshittification?" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nJ5V3pk6PEA&t=1220s

* Window display at TYPE Books Toronto to honour David Byrne’s new book https://stopmakingsense.info/window-display-at-type-books-toronto-to-honour-david-byrnes-new-book/

* Red Vienna Is Still Alive https://www.thenation.com/article/society/vienna-public-housing-urban-cities/


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

Object permanence (permalink)

#20yrsago Indie booksellers in the age of the Internet https://web.archive.org/web/20061026112859/https://www.wired.com/news/wireservice/1,71924-0.html

#10yrsago Wells Fargo whistleblower describes bank’s culture of blackballing threats and coerced corruption https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2016/10/07/497084491/episode-728-the-wells-fargo-hustle

#10yrsago Coca-Cola is paying dietitians to tweet scare-stories about soda taxes https://medium.com/cokeleak/is-coke-paying-dietitians-to-tweet-against-soda-tax-12d130d73b9a#.dw8udqccy

#10yrsago What it’s like to register to vote in states with voter suppression law https://www.bbc.com/news/election-us-2016-37569855

#5yrsago Facebook shouldn't be in charge of how you use Facebook https://pluralistic.net/2021/10/08/unfollow-everything/#shut-the-zuck-up

Upcoming appearances (permalink)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

* Sheffield: Reverse Centaur at Juno Books, Nov 25
https://www.outsavvy.com/event/40274/cory-doctorow-in-conversation

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

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


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

Recent appearances (permalink)

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

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

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

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

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


A grid of my books with Will Stahle covers..

Latest books (permalink)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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: 529 (22924 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 — 6 October 2026 ⏭

Pluralistic: Swapping money for expertise (06 Oct 2026)

✇Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
By: Cory Doctorow
6 October 2026 at 14:58


Today's links


The First Bank of Chicago, a Grecian temple to money. It is surrounded by flames. A skeleton in academic robes and mortarboards has been lynched from its roof. In the foreground are banded packages of US $100 bills.

Swapping money for expertise (permalink)

Since the mid-1950s, we have changed the thing that "AI" refers to every 5-10 years. The current thing we're calling "AI" is about a decade old, and all this label-switching leads to a lack of clarity as to what (this) "AI" is. Unless you know that, you can't understand AI's technical capabilities, limitations, and (most of all) its political economy.

The thing we now call "AI" is a lineal descendant of the thing we were calling "AI" immediately before the current "AI" emerged: that preceding AI is regular-degular "machine learning" (another flexible term, alas!). That slightly older AI was very similar to the current "AI", using comparable statistical techniques to analyze inputs and produce outputs. For example, the previous "AI" created the social media algorithms that have been the subject of so much discussion for 15+ years.

The difference is that this older AI was grounded in explicit, causal software models of the world. In the previous "AI" iteration, applying machine learning to playing chess required that a programmer first create a software model of a chess game, describing (in code) a chessboard, chess pieces, and the rules of chess. Then, the programmer fed a bunch of training data about chess games that had been played before to an "AI" system that analyzed their statistical relations and assayed chess moves.

The need to understand and describe a thing before you could apply "AI" to it is a bottleneck, because it requires programmers to understand how a thing works before they can incorporate it into an "AI" system. Lots of programmers know how to play chess, but far fewer understand the human pancreas, planetary weather systems, or patterns of mineral deposition in the Earth's crust.

For programmers to apply machine learning to these domains, they need to collaborate with experts who do understand them, who furthermore expect to be paid for this work. The need for expert input into this kind of "AI" represents a significant increase in the wage-bill paid by the programmer's employer: it means they have to pay for programmers and experts.

Even worse: this kind of "AI" can't be applied to systems we don't understand. We can observe far more causal relationships – instances in which A reliably causes B – in the universe than we can explain. There are lots of examples of us operationalizing these observations without understanding them. If you get sick today, your doctor might well prescribe one of the many medicines whose method of action is either incompletely understood or not understood at all. We know that molecule A reliably treats pathology B, but not why, and while that why is the subject of ongoing research, it's not necessary that the why be known before the molecule can be given to ailing patients.

But these mysterious phenomena are off-limits to "symbolic AI" (the previously ascendant kind of "AI," that was supplanted by today's "AI"). That kind of AI only really performs when it can operate over a model describing the theory of why A causes B (and not just the fact that A causes B for reasons unknown).

That's where the current kind of "AI" comes in. The major differentiator between the current "AI" and its immediate predecessor is that the current "AI" dispenses with models of reality. It is (in the jargon of the "Big Data" bubble that led to it) "theory-free."

In "theory-free AI," a programmer does not create a software model of reality and then ask a machine-learning system to use statistical insights from its training data to guess at how to operate over that model. Rather, the programmer shovels vastly more training data into the AI's inbox and uses titanic amounts of computing power to analyze that data and find statistical relationships without trying to explain them.

In other words, the current, "theory-free AI" finds all the instances in which A seems to cause B, but has no internal representation of why A causes B. This is true even when we know why A causes B! Purely theory-free chess programs don't operate with any conception of a board or pieces or rules – rather, they make guesses ("inferences" in AI-speak) about which chess move will be optimal based on vast, multi-dimensional arrays constructed by analyzing the statistical relationships between every chess move in their training data.

This yields a surprisingly good game of chess…until it doesn't. Because a theory-free statistical chess program doesn't "know" what a chessboard or a chess piece is and has no programmatic representation of the rules of chess, it will periodically move one of its pieces onto a square that is already occupied by another of its pieces.

When theory-free AI does this with language or image generation, we call it an "hallucination," but this is an extremely misleading metaphor. A biological "hallucination" involves some kind of misfire in your cognitive and/or sensory systems, often arising from chemical imbalances, intoxication, or neurological injury. When a theory-free AI puts a chess piece on a square where it already has a chess piece, that's because it's just extruding statistically founded guesses without any model or conception of what "chess" is. It's a feature, not a bug.

This is a very expensive way to make guesses! As far back as the 1950s, we were able to run conventional chess programs on computers built from vacuum tubes and electromechanical switches and these programs could play a valid game of chess without ever moving a chess piece to a square that one of its pieces already occupied. Modern theory-free AI that cannot manage this feat consumes heptillions of times more computing power.

That said, there's another case for theory-free AI: applying machine learning techniques to causal relationships we can observe but not explain. Remember, there are far more of these (as yet) unexplained causal relationships than there are perfectly understood ones. Theory-free AI can operate on these unexplained, observed phenomena in ways that the preceding (symbolic) AI can't. As anyone who's ever been successfully treated with a molecule whose method of action is partially or fully mysterious can attest, there's plenty of reasons to want to extract and operationalize these statistical relationships, even if we don't understand them.

The fact that theory-free AI can play chess but sometimes makes these weird errors makes it seem like a party-trick, but when you fold in the ability to operate on the (as yet) unexplained, you can see why people got interested in this about a decade ago.

What's more, the first bottleneck – the chess bottleneck – is most easily bypassed by adding the symbolic model back into the theory-free chess system. Today's "coding assistants" are hybridized in this way: they often integrate code interpreters or compilers that actually "know" what a computer program is and can head off many of these failure modes.

The introduction of these symbolic systems to theory-free systems is completely rational, and yet it represents an admission of a key limitation that theory-free AI cannot overcome. That limitation is both a technical fact, but even more importantly, it's a fact about theory-free AI's political economy: about the limitations of trading off expertise for money.

Because whatever else theory-free inference is, it is a way to swap the bottleneck of "before we can use a computer to help us do something, we need to find an expert who can explain how that thing works"; for a different bottleneck: "before we can use a computer to help us do something, we must spend an enormous amount of money on computing power to find statistical relationships between how things work."

Both money and expertise are scarce, but they are unevenly distributed. Expertise is almost entirely in the hands of people who aren't wealthy. However much money a billionaire has, they still have to hire people who have the "how to clean a toilet" or the "how to find seams of gold in quartz deposits" expertise. When that expertise is locally scarce (if there's only one person in town who know how to clean your toilet) or universally scarce (there's only one expert who can tell you which of your landholdings are likely to hold seams of gold) those experts have something that billionaires can't abide: power.

Our entire society is organized around converting money into power. Sometimes, that is overt, as when the wealthy can indenture or enslave a worker. Sometimes it is more indirect, as when the wealthy can enlist the state to limit union rights and enforce noncompete clauses in labor contracts. Sometimes it's so systemic as to be unremarkable and largely invisible, like the fact that the wealthy never have to work if they don't want to, but everyone else – no matter what expertise they hold – must work, usually for a wealthy person, lest they end up starving and homeless, with untreated medical conditions and no way to provide for their families.

Whenever a worker can say "no" to their boss, it's a sign that this system has broken down. This is where expertise comes in: a worker who has very scarce, in-demand expertise can say no to their boss all day long, because there are ten other bosses at the factory gates who'd like to offer them a job. This was the situation for many years among Silicon Valley engineers, who added an average of $1m/year to their bosses' turnover, and whose supply was very short of the demand for their rare expertise.

These engineers enjoyed all kinds of power. Not just power over their working conditions (free massages and kombucha and day care and dry cleaning), but also power over the company's products. This power crested in the late 2010s, when Google employees walked out en masse and forced the company to release them from binding arbitration waivers in their contracts, to crack down on sexual predators in the executive ranks, and to back out of billions of dollars in lethal drone projects for the Pentagon:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2018_Google_walkouts

The promise of theory-free inference isn't just about reducing the wage-bill associated with programmers: even more, it's about reducing their power. It's about removing their power to hold bosses to account for sexual assault and the power to withhold their labor from lethal military projects. In short, the power to thwart billionaires' desires.

AI is the money-losingest enterprise the human race has ever embarked upon. More than a trillion dollars has been spent this year to make a mere $50b in revenue. The technical excitement over AI's capabilities – from chess to gold-mining to treating pancreatic cancer – cannot be separated from the political excitement that billionaires (short on expertise, flush with cash) experience at the thought of swapping money for expertise and sidelining the only people in the world who can thwart their goals.

The fact that a theory-free AI might demand far more cash to accomplish a task (even a "solved" one like playing chess) than an expert would charge is beside the point. Billionaires have money, they don't have expertise. Theory-free inference is a bid to substitute one for the other: the beauty and terror of being able to manipulate the world without studying or understanding it is that it can be done with money alone. No experts needed.

In a world in thrall to financial power, expertise is the only substantial form of power that can reliably contest the power of wealth. Moreover, expertise is the foundation of other forms of power, such as labor power, which is what we call it when experts band together to combat financial power.

This is why AI bosses are so violently allergic to the idea of hybridizing AI with symbolic systems that operate on models of the world. These models of the world must be constructed by experts, and the power of expertise cannot be reliably commanded by the power of wealth.

This is even true when theory-free methods are applied to causal phenomena that we can observe without explaining. Sure, a pharma exec like Martin Shkreli or Arthur Sackler can command the production and sale of a molecule whose method of action isn't known but whose therapeutic value has been demonstrated. But to improve on that molecule, they must pay research scientists to study and unravel the method of action. Replace those experts with theory-free inference, and finance can emerge triumphant in the only forum in which it is routinely vanquished.

This is the political economy of theory-free AI. Without finance's infinite hostility to expertise, there would have been far less capital for theory-free AI. Experts who wanted to use theory-free AI to help them unravel and operationalize the causal universe could not have laid hands on the bales of $100 bills the industry is now shoveling into its money-furnaces at a rate never seen in human history.

Which is not to say that experts can't make good use of theory-free AI. Indeed, we frequently hear from skilled workers who are using "AI" to improve the quality of their outputs:

https://hrdag.org/tech-notes/large-language-models-IPNO.html

In automation parlance, these workers are "centaurs": workers who enlist technology to serve their needs. The centaur metaphor has the worker taking the role of the top half of the mythical man/horse, the half in which the judgment and decision-making takes place; while the bottom (horsey) half is given to the machine, providing strength, speed and stamina, but only at the direction of the human mind.

The unimaginable sums that oligarchs have committed to AI are mobilized in service to creating reverse centaurs: machines that enlist humans to serve them. If theory-free inference can substitute for expertise, then the humans the machines require to accomplish those tasks that elude computers will not have the power to set the pace of their work, insist upon humane working conditions, or reject work on unethical projects:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/12/05/pop-that-bubble/#u-washington

The joke's on the oligarchy, though. Because theory-free inference doesn't know about chessboards, chess pieces or the rules of chess, it can't be prevented from sometimes putting a chess piece on a square that's already occupied by one of its pieces. The "hallucinations" are intrinsic to and inextricable from theory-free inference, which means that the outputs of an "AI" can only be trusted if they can be evaluated by an expert, whose working tempo must be carefully modulated lest they fall prey to "automation blindness" (rapidly, repeatedly clicking "OK" until you lose the ability to spot mistakes):

https://pluralistic.net/2026/07/28/hitl-ers/#ai-ai-oh

Theory-free inference is technically and philosophically exciting: in their quest for a way to neutralize expertise with money, oligarchs inadvertently built a series of powerful scientific instruments that revealed a heretofore unsuspected degree of statistical regularity in the world:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/09/18/surprise/#wow-signal

But the remaining, stubbornly textured and rough edges of reality are where all the value is. The things we already understand about reality are, by definition, yesterday's news, and that's all a statistical model can do: project the past into the future. But everything exciting in the future is stuff we don't understand yet. The surprising functionality of theory-free AI is itself an example of this. The most interesting and valuable thing about theory-free AI isn't the things it can do, it's the systematic discovery and mapping of the statistically regular parts of reality, whose inverse provides a map of the irregular, surprising, poorly understood (and thus exciting and promising) phenomena in our universe.

Tomorrow's breakthroughs and fortunes lie not in merely operationalizing these causal relationships: they lie in understanding them. The point of theory-free inference is to give us the tools to replace that theory-freeness with testable, validated understanding.

Hey look at this (permalink)


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

Object permanence (permalink)

#15yrsago Tempo: transformative, difficult look at advanced decision-making theory https://memex.craphound.com/2011/10/07/tempo-transformative-difficult-look-at-advanced-decision-making-theory/

#10yrsago Internet shutdowns cost the world at least $2.4 billion last year https://www.brookings.edu/articles/internet-shutdowns-cost-countries-2-4-billion-last-year/

#10yrsago Youtube took down MEP’s videos about torture debate https://web.archive.org/web/20160701000000*/https://marietjeschaake.eu/en/when-youtube-took-down-my-video

#10yrsago Yahoo didn’t install an NSA email scanner, it was a “buggy” NSA “rootkit” https://web.archive.org/web/20161007140143/https://motherboard.vice.com/read/yahoo-government-email-scanner-was-actually-a-secret-hacking-tool

#10yrsago The FCC helped create the Stingray problem, now it needs to fix it https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2016/08/fcc-created-stingray-problem-now-it-needs-fix-it

#5yrsago Scottish Limited Partnerships are still laundering criminal millions https://pluralistic.net/2021/10/07/markets-in-everything/#if-its-not-scottish

#5yrsago "Inclusive Access" allows textbook monopolists to permanently consolidate their gains https://pluralistic.net/2021/10/07/markets-in-everything/#textbook-abuses

#5yrsago DoS a federal agency, then charge for access https://pluralistic.net/2021/10/07/markets-in-everything/#no-th-enq

#1yrago They're just trying to earn a buck https://pluralistic.net/2025/10/07/take-it-easy/#but-take-it

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: 513 (22395 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

Pluralistic: Scrutinized (05 Oct 2026)

✇Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
By: Cory Doctorow
5 October 2026 at 20:58


Today's links

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


Medieval peasants working the fields in front of a walled city. Their overseer rides a horse; his head has been replaced with a robotic camera. From all sides, gory, anatomical eyeballs intrude upon the scene, each one with a different colored iris.

Scrutinized (permalink)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Hey look at this (permalink)


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

Object permanence (permalink)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Upcoming appearances (permalink)

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: 574 (7730 total).

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

  • A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING

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

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

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

How to get Pluralistic:

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

Pluralistic.net

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https://pluralistic.net/plura-list

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

https://mamot.fr/@pluralistic

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

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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 — 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.

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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 — 1 October 2026 ⏭

Pluralistic: Voting is to politics as shopping is to boycotts (01 Oct 2026)

✇Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
By: Cory Doctorow
1 October 2026 at 19:22


Today's links


Two suffragists in period dress, ceremonially putting ballots into a ballot box. The background has been replaced with an elaborate collage of 19th C printing-press parts. The ballots are glowing with radiant spikes. The face of the ballot box has been replaced with an Nvidia Vera Lynn GPU.

Voting is to politics as shopping is to boycotts (permalink)

Here's a funny thing about the right to vote: it wasn't won by voting.

From the Magna Carta to the US Constitution to the Emancipation Proclamation to 19th Amendment, voting rights (what you might call "Big P" Politics) were always downstream of protests, riots, petitions, mass movements, strikes and good, old fashioned community organizing (that is, "small p" politics).

Which is to say, Big P politics matter, but to make them matter, we need a lot of small p politics. That means that democracy isn't something you do every couple of years with a ballot paper (though that's an important aspect of the process). Democracy is continuous.

If you've ever wondered why your vote seems to accomplish so little, I think you can blame the near-abolition of small p politics by Big P politicians of every stripe. Indeed, Obama's genius was summoning up an army of door-knocking, phone-banking small p political activists and then euthanizing that organization after he won the election:

https://newrepublic.com/article/140245/obamas-lost-army-inside-fall-grassroots-machine

For Obama, the grassroots were useful for one thing: getting out the vote. The last thing he wanted was for millions of activated voters to turn into activists who'd flame him and harangue him and picket him if they didn't like his compromises. Boy, did Obama ever compromise.

He let the bank executives who created the Great Financial Crisis off the hook and encouraged them to foreclose on the homes of millions of Americans, the very same public that had bailed them out:

https://theweek.com/articles/624777/obamas-biggest-failure

He shielded the CIA's torturers from scrutiny and prosecution:

https://journals.law.harvard.edu/ilj/2009/04/obama-publishes-torture-memos-immunizes-cia-staff/

He reneged on his promise to shut down Gitmo:

https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/obama-failed-close-guantanamo

And his promise to hold the phone companies to account for their complicity in the NSA's mass domestic surveillance:

https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/article/obama-on-mass-government-surveillance-then-and-now/

He stepped up secret drone warfare:

https://www.cfr.org/articles/obamas-final-drone-strike-data

And unconstitutional domestic surveillance:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2017/01/obama-expands-surveillance-powers-his-way-out

Whenever I raise this, Obama's apologists come out of the woodwork to tell me that "the president isn't the Green Lantern," and that Obama couldn't act without help from Congress and the Senate, who wouldn't back his plays.

I think that Trump's presidency has shown us how much power the president really has even when the legislature won't play ball. But even if you accept the Green Lantern apologetics, the fact remains that Obama could have had a clamoring army of ardent supporters in the streets, defending his agenda against recalcitrants in his own party and wreckers in the GOP. He chose not to have that army. He sent that army home.

It's like Obama heard the story about post-election FDR telling civil rights leaders, "I want to do it, now make me do it," and concluded, "I don't want to do it, so I'd better not let anyone make me do it":

https://www.quora.com/Did-Franklin-Roosevelt-ever-say-I-agree-with-you-I-want-to-do-it-now-make-me-do-it

Of course, Trump is doing everything he can to extinguish both small p politics and Big P Politics. It's not just his wildly illegal voter suppression tactics. He's banning and prosecuting political groups, invoking anti-terror laws (which Obama supported and promised would only be used proportionately and wisely) to chase his grassroots opposition underground:

https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/09/designating-antifa-as-a-domestic-terrorist-organization/

Liberals are often contemptuous of grassroots movements (cf "basket of deplorables," "Green Lantern" scolding), but the right is terrified of them. The right's political leadership is terrified of its own grassroots, and rightly so, because those people are maniacs, and they're the reason the GOP has been pushed into its most extreme positions. The right's grassroots, meanwhile, are afraid of the left's grassroots. The last thing they want is a militant, organized, mobilized base pushing Dem politicians to take the stands that are wildly and widely popular in America, from Medicare for All to an end to ICE – the Mamdani agenda, in other words.

Mamdani is the anti-Obama. He shows what happens when a progressive candidate nurtures and co-governs with their base after the election, using millions of passionate, committed, everyday people to steamroller anyone who gets in the way of his agenda:

https://www.nyc.gov/content/100days/pages/

Of course the downside of this is that when Mamdani reneges on his pledges, he is loudly and furiously held to account for it:

https://www.thecityreporter.nyc/2026/02/19/mamdani-budget-parks-libraries/

Mamdani understood that he would be corralled into compromises if he won the mayoralty and that when he made those compromises, his base would come after him with the unmistakable fury of betrayed idealists. He also understood that any comfort he enjoyed by sidelining his base while in office would come at a price far higher than being yelled at by his supporters: it would cost him the ability to get anything done.

Voting for Mamdani was important. It got him elected. But staying organized – in unions, neighborhood clubs, affinity groups, DSA chapters and mutual aid groups – is what's letting him get stuff done, and stopping him from bailing on his promises as politically infeasible.

In other words, voting only matters if it's the final stage of a sustained campaign to build and mobilize popular power. Without that, voting will get you precious little. The right's leadership understands this very well, which is why they've spent years attacking unions, community organizers like Acorn, and activist institutions like Planned Parenthood. We must defend voting rights – Big P Politics – to the bitter end, but we need to defend organizing – small p politics – just as ferociously.

The reduction of politics to voting is part of the 50 year neoliberal project whose foremost goal is to make you think of yourself as an atomized individual and not as a member of a polity. Turning "politics" into "voting" is absolutely in line with Margaret Thatcher's dictum that "there is no such thing as society." It's the same move that convinced workers that the answer to bad working conditions is looking your boss in the eye and threatening to change jobs (not forming a union and striking).

It's also the same move that transformed "boycotts" into "shopping." Boycotts are a collective enterprise. Before a boycott takes place, small-p political groups hold meetings, organize alternatives and communicate their demands. During a boycott, organizers work to insulate participants from reprisals, like the Montgomery Bus Boycott organizers who reasoned and remonstrated with employers who disciplined workers whose participation made them late for work.

And yes, as part of a boycott, you make some consumption choices. You buy X instead of Y. But "shopping" by itself isn't a boycott. You can't "vote with your wallet" (especially not when billionaires get to vote against you with their wallets):

https://pluralistic.net/2025/09/13/consumption-choices/#marginal-benefits

Shopping isn't politics, and while voting is Politics (Big P), it's also not politics (small p). A boycott, on the other hand, is politics. What's more, "shopping" has the same relationship to "boycotts" that "voting" has to "politics." It's a step you take, after you've laid a lot of groundwork with other people, as part of a mass movement.

I understand why shopping and voting are more attractive than boycotts and politics. Meetings suck. Hell is other people:

https://locusmag.com/feature/commentary-cory-doctorow-hell-is-other-people/

But changing the system requires systemic work. Hell is other people because other people are great but it's so hard to get them to do things your way. That takes time and understanding and togetherness and arguing and forgiving.

Not everyone has time or capacity for that, and at any given time, we don't all have to be doing that work. We can take turns, spelling each other off at times in our lives when we have more or less slack. But lots of us have to be in the fight, or all of us will get screwed. There aren't enough of us doing politics right now. We can tell, because our politicians are so contemptuous of the grassroots that they will sell us out without a moment's hesitation, smugly certain that they will face no consequences for doing so:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/09/22/happy-chudmas/#baloney-in-our-slacks

Oligarchs have it easy. Where we have to convince people to fight, they can pay or threaten people to bring them into line. But oligarchs' power is wearing thin. The data-center uprising shows how much fury there is out there, looking for a productive outlet:

https://www.bloodinthemachine.com/p/with-the-backlash-to-data-centers

Data centers are very bad and very visible, so they make for good targets. But data centers are only the physical extrusion of a vast, brutal, extractive system. The most important way to fight data centers is to take everyone you meet protesting one and organize with them to scare the shit out of "your" politicians so they don't dare compromise on anything.

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 GWB's press secretary to media: "watch what you do, watch what you say" https://web.archive.org/web/20010926223602/https://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2001/09/20010926-5.html#BillMaher-Comments#BillMaher-Comments

#20yrsago Stencils kit “may not be reproduced in any form” https://web.archive.org/web/20061022000842/http://www.fairuseday.com/index.php/2006/10/01/copyright-is-broken/

#20yrsago DVD Jon selling Apple DRM to Apple’s competitors https://web.archive.org/web/20061004191106/https://featured.gigaom.com/2006/10/02/dvd-jon-fairplays-apple/

#20yrsago Unpaid diplomatic parking tickets as index of national corruption https://web.archive.org/web/20130719065306/https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2006/10/primary-sources/305203/

#20yrsago Canadian deported to Syria for torture is cleared https://www.theguardian.com/world/2006/oct/02/worlddispatch

#20yrsago Gilberto Gil slams WIPO https://fromgeneva.blogspot.com/2006/09/wipo-general-assembly-impressions-from.html

#20yrsago Speech given by censored Apple WiFi hacker at ToorCon https://craphound.com/cache_toorcon_2006.txt

#10yrsago Company suspected of blame in Office of Personnel Management breach will help run new clearance agency https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-security-background-idUSKCN1202M6/

#10yrsago Wells Fargo started demanding fraud of its employees in 1998; Illinois cuts Wells off from state business https://www.citizen.org/wp-content/uploads/wells-fargo-king-of-cross-sell.pdf

#10yrsago Google: if you support Amazon’s Echo, you’re cut off from Google Home and Chromecast https://variety.com/2016/digital/news/google-home-amazon-echo-chromecast-1201874125/

#5yrsago How the IMF loan-sharks the global south https://pluralistic.net/2021/10/02/debt-trap/#global-arm-breakers

#1yrago Decarbonization at a distance https://pluralistic.net/2025/10/02/there-goes-the-sun/#carbon-shifting

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: 509 (20770 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 — 29 September 2026 ⏭

Pluralistic: Lindsay Owens's "Gouged" (29 Sep 2026)

✇Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
By: Cory Doctorow
29 September 2026 at 15:40


Today's links

  • Lindsay Owens's "Gouged": The end of a fair price and what that means for your wallet.
  • Hey look at this: Delights to delectate.
  • Object permanence: Doonesbury on 9/11; Suspicious Looking Device; Elephant-shit paper; The Onion x TSA liquid rules; Borders goodbye letter; Voting machines suck; EFF v DRM; Matt Furie on the hijacking of Pepe; Austerity v last steam-loom; Facebook x "disinformation" criticism.
  • Upcoming appearances: Boston, 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 cover for Lindsay Owens's 'Gouged.'

Lindsay Owens's "Gouged" (permalink)

Lindsay Owens is the executive director of Groundwork Collaborative, who have done some of the most important work on surveillance pricing (using computers to spy on you to rip you off) and algorithmic wage discrimination (using computers to spy on you and steal your wages). Today, she publishes Gouged, a comprehensive, accessible guide to this modern scourge:

https://gougedbook.com/

Owens and Groundwork have done as much as anyone to publicize and fight against the use of corporate power, computers and vast troves of commercial surveillance data to pick your pocket, shrink your paycheck and make the worst people on earth far richer. It was Katie Wells, a Groundwork fellow, who co-authored the report describing how the apps nurses use to get shiftwork collude with data-brokers to find out how much money nurses owe on their credit cards, so they can pay the most desperate nurses lower wages:

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

Owens helped coin the term "the age of recoupment," to describe this current moment in which companies that chased all their competitors out of the market with predatory pricing are now jacking up prices, knowing they're the only game in town:

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

And Owens helped lead a study that showed that Instacart was using surveillance data to jack up prices by 20% or more based on inferences about your willingness and ability to pay (after the study was published, Instacart promised they'd stop doing it):

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

Owens and Groundwork have a keen eye for the structural conditions that allow companies to screw their workers and customers, especially the role that competition plays in keeping companies' greed in check. Take their proposal for "street pricing" in sports stadiums: like everyone, they understand that sports stadium owners know that you can't easily step outside for a snack, so they've raised prices to the sky:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/03/28/street-pricing/#sportball-analogies

They have a simple solution: just force vendors to charge the same prices as the shopkeepers in the neighborhood – the ones whose customers can take their business elsewhere. This proposal polls high (Groundwork does a lot of polling), both with Democrats and Republicans (despite the latter group's allergy to "price controls"). It's a good example of the kind of policy work Groundwork does: diagnosing a problem and coming up with a solution that's easy to administer and easy to explain, in terms that are popular with people from all walks of life.

This is the spirit of Gouged: laying out the baroque, data-driven scams that underpin an ever-increasing part of your life in plain language and tracing those scams back to specific policy choices.

Owens does important work here: sector by sector and scam by scam, she lays out how companies collude – often with the assistance of a captured and tame state – to reduce competition in order to raise prices, from groceries to rents to airline tickets. She describes how online sellers exploit their information asymmetry, their ability to both directly observe you and millions of other consumers, and to augment those observations with sensitive information purchased from the wild west of data brokers, to steer you into paying more and getting less. These schemes run the gamut from subscriptions you sign up for with a single click but can't get shut off without canceling your credit card, to lengthy check-out processes that end with a long set of junk prices that tack another 10 or 20% onto the cost you thought you were about to pay.

All of this raises a deceptively simple-sounding question: what is a fair price? Owens takes us through the history of pricing, and the American tradition – begun by Quakers – of replacing haggling with price-tags, and setting those prices at "cost plus a reasonable percentage." She describes an ideological project, a cousin to the neoliberal revolution of Carter and Reagan, to replace this "fair price" with a "market price" that was calculated to be whatever the market would bear. She introduces us to the men who spent a generation dreaming of the technology to change every price for every customer, every time that customer entered the marketplace, and she shows us how, when they got their wish, they shifted billions away from workers and shoppers to owners.

Remember: a wage is also a price: it's the price you get for your labor and the precious, irreplaceable hours of your life. The same men who committed to making prices you pay as high as possible were every bit as committed to ensuring that the price you charged for those unrecoverable moments of the only life you will ever live as low as possible. Every scam to make you pay more has a mirror-image scam that ensures you are paid less. This is the logical trajectory of the gig economy – a way to bring that same exploitable information asymmetry to labor markets, where the boss can observe everyone on the payroll and how much (how little) they've accepted from job to job, but workers don't even know who the other workers are, much less what they're getting paid.

All of this is laid out with admirable clarity and detail. By the time you get to the last chapter, you'll know exactly how you're getting scammed, who is scamming you, and why they're getting away with it. The final chapter is meant to be the "What do we do about it?" chapter, and regrettably, it's weaker than other parts of the book. Owens urges you to have conversations with your friends about these things, she urges you to take basic measures to defend your privacy, and lists some businesses that have steered clear of the scams she describes in the book, with the implication that you could bring your business to these companies and ones like them.

There is nothing wrong with this advice. Every word of it is sound, and your life – and the world – will be better off if you follow it. But this wasn't what I hoped for from someone with such an excellent track record of devising shovel-ready, highly leveraged, popular policy proposals. I would much rather have been presented with a half-dozen well-thought-through, well-explained rules or laws that could really strike at the root of these problems.

The pathologies Owens presents in this book can be traced to the Chicago School, a group of radical economists who won favor with Carter, Reagan, Thatcher, and other architects of neoliberalism. The Chicago School's chief strategist was Milton Friedman, who spent decades advocating for the policies that went on to destroy the world as we knew it. Before Friedman was ascendant, his colleagues would ask him how in the world he expected his plans – totally alien to the political consensus of the day – to ever turn into action.

Friedman had a stock answer for this question: "In times of crisis, ideas move from the periphery to the center. Our job is to 'keep ideas lying around' so that when the crisis strikes, we will be able to seize the moment."

Friedman was a monster, but he was right. There's always a crisis, eventually – the world is big and complicated and subject to all kinds of shocks. Friedman didn't need a crystal ball to predict a crisis – the next crisis was eminently foreseeable. Today, crises are coming thicker and faster than ever, as Friedman's program of autocratic rule and extraction reaches a boiling point.

Each of the scams that Owens lays out in her book is a crisis in waiting. When those crises arrive, I would love to go into it knowing which policies could have prevented it, so that I can blame our policymakers for failing to prevent it, and, after they've been defenestrated, I can demand that anyone who seeks to replace them promise to take meaningful steps to end the crisis and prevent it from happening again.

Throughout this excellent book, Owens makes an indisputable case that the problems she describes have a systemic root. They're not caused by wickedness or greed – they're caused by a system designed to reward wickedness and greed. There's nothing wrong with giving people some simple measures they can take to protect themselves from such a system, but those protections will only ever be partial and temporary. I would have been far more energized if those personal measures had been a prelude to a chapter designed to equip me with a list of bold, muscular policy demands.

Long ago, Owens convinced me that the system is rigged and we all deserve better. This book made that case even clearer. I want to know how we get beyond modest personal protections and make our way to a better world for all.

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 Doonesbury on 9/11 https://web.archive.org/web/20020309055239/http://www2.uclick.com/feature/01/10/01/db011001.gif

#20yrsago Suspicious Looking Device exists to incite unease https://web.archive.org/web/20061107112421/http://junkfunnel.com/sld/

#20yrsago HOWTO make elephant-shit paper https://web.archive.org/web/20061020105837/https://intensehumour.blogspot.com/2006/09/elephant-dung-paper.html

#20yrsago The Onion on TSA liquid restrictions https://web.archive.org/web/20061001102305/https://theonion.com/content/node/53536

#15yrsago Goodbye letter from Borders employee(s) (?) spills secrets of bookselling trade https://memex.craphound.com/2011/09/30/goodbye-letter-from-borders-employees-spills-secrets-of-bookselling-trade/

#10yrsago Electronic voting machines suck, the comprehensive 2016 election edition https://web.archive.org/web/20160930060538/https://www.bloomberg.com/features/2016-voting-technology/

#10yrsago Shadow Regulation: the secret laws that giant corporations cook up in back rooms https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2016/09/shadow-regulation-back-room-threat-digital-rights

#10yrsago EFF to court: don’t let US government prosecute professor over his book about securing computers https://www.eff.org/press/releases/eff-asks-court-block-us-prosecuting-security-researcher-detecting-and-publishing

#10yrsago Matt Furie on the experience of having his Pepe the Frog character hijacked by white supremacists https://riylcast.tumblr.com/post/151123916140/episode-187-matt-furie-bonus

#10yrsago Arkansas lawmaker who pushed law protecting right to video police is arrested for videoing an arrest https://web.archive.org/web/20160930151809/https://theintercept.com/2016/09/30/lawmaker-who-pushed-bill-to-protect-people-filming-police-arrested-for-filming-police/

#10yrsago Austerity kills the last steam-powered loom in the world https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-lancashire-37512136

#5yrsago Facebook thrives on criticism of "disinformation" https://pluralistic.net/2021/09/30/dont-believe-the-criti-hype/#ordinary-mediocrities

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: 574 (7730 total).

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

  • A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING

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

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

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

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 — 28 September 2026 ⏭

Pluralistic: Priceful (28 Sep 2026)

✇Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
By: Cory Doctorow
28 September 2026 at 19:48


Today's links

  • Priceful: So worthless we can tell you what it's worth.
  • Hey look at this: Delights to delectate.
  • Object permanence: Nasdaq allows post-9/11 penny stocks; USAF can shoot down civilian aircraft; TSA bans calling Kip Hawley an idiot; Wells Fargo sued for firing fraud-refusing tellers; The real AI apocalypse; Encryption didn't cause 9/11; Bat-person costume; British Library on DRM and CC; NYT v OWS; "The Brave Little Toaster"; Bounty for Trump's tax return; Chinese real-estate bubble; Corbyn's Labour conference speech; HP blinks; "Are you calling me a racist?"; "Yuge"; Debts that can't be paid won't be paid.
  • Upcoming appearances: Edmonton, Boston, 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.


A pastoral landscape with a cablecar system running overhead. A procession of old-timey cash registers are being moved through the sky on it.

Priceful (permalink)

Digital rights activists have long railed at the use of the term "IP," criticizing it for being deceptively imprecise and also rhetorically dishonest. I get where these objections are coming from, but I think they're misguided.

Start with "deceptively imprecise." "IP" covers a lot of legal ground, from the "big three" of copyright, trademark and patent, to a whole arcane bestiary: anticircumvention, noncompete, trade secrecy, nondisparagement, database and publicity rights, and more. Each of these has a radically different policy basis and radically different contours.

Take copyright and trademark. Copyright is designed to allow companies (and the creators they hire or contract with) to commercially exploit creative works. In the US, copyright is a creature of the Constitution, Article 1, Section 8, Clause 8:

https://constitution.congress.gov/browse/essay/artI-S8-C8-3-2/ALDE_00013064/

Fun fact: there are only two clauses in the Constitution that include a rationale: the Second Amendment ("A well regulated Militia") and the copyright clause ("To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts"). Everything else is one of those "truths" that the framers "held to be self-evident." In these two cases, they decided to explain their thinking.

So the point of copyright is to incentivize investment in creative works, and its mechanism is a set of limited rights over those works, for limited times. Copyright expires, and it is subject to "limitations and exceptions," including "fair use," a very broad set of highly situational rights to use works even if the rightsholder objects:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/02/07/aimsters-revenge/#effective-means-of-access-control

Now consider trademark: trademark could not be more different from copyright! Trademark is a consumer protection rule: it empowers companies to sue competitors who engage in deceptive conduct that could confuse their customers. The idea here is that if you get a pair of fake Nikes that fall apart within a matter of days, or eat at a fake McDonald's whose food is (somehow?) even worse than regular McDonald's food, you are unlikely to take action. You're not going to hire a lawyer over a hamburger.

So trademark deputizes companies to sue on behalf of customers who have been or might be deceived by unscrupulous competitors whose merchandising and marketing are likely to confuse the public. Unlike copyright's "fair use," trademark has other defenses, like "nominative use" ("This case fits an iPhone" is not a trademark violation, provided it's true). Also, many trademark claims can be dispensed through simple disclaimers: for example, my debut novel Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom features a prominent notice informing readers that it wasn't endorsed by the Walt Disney Company. No confusion, no problem.

Unlike copyright, which (eventually) expires, a trademark can carry on for so long as it is associated with a company's products or services. Procter & Gamble's moon logo has enjoyed trademark protection since the mid-19th century, 50 years before the first federal trademark law, and 100 years before the Lanham Act, the current federal trademark law.

This is where the imprecision comes in. There are many activities that are legal under trademark and prohibited under copyright, and vice-versa. By claiming an "IP" violation, you can induce confusion in your target's mind about which rule you're discussing.

If you say, "That's my copyrighted image and your use of it is confusing my customers," I might reply, "Well, that sounds like a trademark issue. Do you have a trademark, too?" Whereas if you say, "That's my IP and you're confusing my customers," that's some tactically useful ambiguity. I can't know if you're talking about copyright, patent, trademark, or, you know, a sui generis broadcaster's right under the Treaty of Rome.

I might walk away from my creative, expressive activity even though it's totally legal, because you've got me to conflate the restrictions of copyright and trademark. This makes "IP" a kind of bully's charter, whose imprecision lets you invoke all weird rights we call "IP," no matter whether they apply to the situation at had.

That's the first objection, then: this deceptive and corrosive imprecision. It's a fair point. But then there's the other objection: the use of the world "property" to describe this motley assortment of regulatory fiats.

"Property" is the established catechism of the Church of Late-Stage Capitalism. "Property" is the most sacrosanct right in public orthodoxy, elevated above every other right. My property right lets me destroy perfectly good food while you starve outside my door:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/07/08/wilhoitian/#human-rights-v-property-rights

Before "IP" came into wide usage, we didn't generally try to group this miscellany under one umbrella, but when we did, the term we used wasn't "IP," it was monopolies. These regulatory fiats were (correctly) considered to be government-granted, government-enforced monopolies. The adoption of IP was a branding exercise, a very successful attempt to transform the public's perception of these rules as natural, freestanding property rights that the law merely ratified – not a set of regulatory gifts designed to protect the self-interest of commercial firms.

I get it. Between the tactical confusion and the invocation of "property," "IP" feels like terrain worth fighting over. Once you let your adversary frame the debate in terms of property, you've already lost half the battle.

For many years, I bought into this. But lately, I've grown more skeptical of this matter. Back in 2020, I published a long essay proposing that far from being confusing or ambiguous, "IP" has a crisp, widely understood meaning: "Any law that lets me reach beyond the walls of my company to exert control over my competitors, critics and customers":

https://locusmag.com/feature/cory-doctorow-ip/

This is the common factor that binds together that mess of legal oddments, from trademark/copyright/patent to nondisparagement and noncompetes to anticircumvention and personality rights.

I think this is both true and a powerful framing. It correctly puts IP in the category of "things corporations do to control you and the rest of the world."

I've been trying this out for six years now, and I think it's a winner. But it was only a month or two ago that I realized there was a way in which the use of "property" can also be used to undermine the bullying, censorship and extraction of corporations wielding their IP.

Property rights may be our state religion, but they are also the worst tool for several important jobs that need doing. Think of privacy: the standard for privacy is for you to click through an "agreement" that nominally trades your privacy rights for some product or service. Google spies on you constantly for ad-targeting, you get to see Youtube videos (after watching a bunch of ads).

This is a catastrophe. Virtually every vendor you engage with, from your landlord to your corner deli, wants you to install an app whose terms of service requires you to sign away all of your privacy rights, forever, in exchange for nothing. You get the same sandwich, but you "pay" more, in the form of all your private data, which is flushed into the unregulated data-broker sector to be weaponized against you in a thousand ways, including higher prices and lower wages:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/07/11/your-risk/#my-reward

Worse: because you have "entered into a contract" to "sell" your privacy rights, anything you do to claw those rights back is violation of your end of the contract. Using a tracker blocker like Privacy Badger makes you the cheater:

https://privacybadger.org/

Even if you could get actually paid for the use of your private information, the sums involved would round to zero. Companies like Facebook make pennies from your private data, and inflict harm on you that totals up to hundreds of times more than they actually make. The commercial surveillance industry are poster children for corruption: concentrated gains that are far exceeded by diffuse harms:

https://locusmag.com/feature/cory-doctorow-zucks-empire-of-oily-rags/

But just because privacy doesn't fit well into a property rights framework, it doesn't follow that there's no way to do privacy well. We have lots of other rights frameworks besides property, and it's taken the concerted work of generations to get us to forget that these rights exist at all.

Imagine if our privacy regime was modeled on the human rights system we rely on when it comes to sex, bodily autonomy and consent. In this framework, no one is allowed to do anything to you unless you give your continuous, informed consent, which you can withdraw at any time. "I changed my mind" is a perfectly valid thing to say in the middle of a sexual encounter. It's not a violation of your contract. Quite the opposite: someone who ignores your withdrawal of consent is guilty of criminal assault.

If we apply a consent regime (not a property regime) to privacy rights, then the entire commercial surveillance industry would cease to exist. There's no way you can give "informed consent" to a laundry-list of terms of service that are as impenetrable as they are lengthy, and even if you did, you could withdraw that consent at any time, and Facebook et al would have to immediately stop processing your private information and disgorge it.

Like all forms of property rights, "IP" has severe limitations that can only be addressed by applying a different framework to your disputes. Think of the way that the expansion of copyright has failed creative workers. For 50 years, we've monotonically expanded copyright in every dimension, so that today, copyright covers more works, restricts more uses and inflicts higher statutory penalties.

Over those 50 years, media companies have gotten richer and more profitable while the creative workers whose art these media companies sell have gotten poorer, both in real terms and as a share of the earnings our labor generates for our bosses. This seems like a paradox at first, but really, it's just a built-in feature of property law: that people who have assets but lack bargaining leverage end up selling those assets for peanuts.

In a market dominated by five publishers, four studios, three labels, two app companies and one ebook/audiobook company, giving a creative worker more to bargain with is just giving them more to bargain away. Giving us more copyright is like giving a bullied schoolkid more lunch money: no amount of lunch money will get that kid fed.

This is why arguments about copyright and AI training are such a dead-end. Even if you stipulate that AI training isn't fair use (far from a certainty), or if you want legislative action to establish that every creator gets to decide whether their work can be used to train an AI, you won't help creative workers win the class struggle against AI companies.

Remember the Hollywood writers' strike? It's the only time in history that creative workers have defeated AI, so it's worthy of close study. Specifically, remember that workers on those picket lines weren't striking against the AI companies, they were striking against the studio bosses, artist-hating billionaires like Warner's David Zaslav and Disney's Bob Iger, whose careers have been defined by a relentless quest for ways to pay creative workers less. It was studio bosses, not AI bosses, who wanted to replace screenwriters with AI.

These are the same studio bosses who are now suing AI companies for copyright infringement. That's not because the studio bosses want to get rid of AI models or keep them out of the writers' room. They absolutely want to fire writers and replace us with AI. The studio lawsuits over AI training want to make training a licensable activity so that the studios can get paid for the use of "their" training data to make models that they absolutely want to use to fire most of their writers and then knock down the wages of the survivors of the AI layoffs.

Many creative workers have cheered on these media companies as they chase the AI companies through the courts, and some artists' groups have even submitted amicus briefs on their behalf. But the New York Times – a company that has repeatedly used the dirtiest union-busting tactics imaginable against its workers – is not suing OpenAI to ensure that creative workers don't lose wages to AI. They're suing to make sure that the Times gets a bigger piece of the action when that happens.

If the Times, Disney and Warner prevail, they will immediately amend their standard, non-negotiable contracts to require every creative worker who does any work for them to exclusively and irrevocably sign over the right to train AI with our labor, and the resulting models will be used to attack our jobs and wages.

In other words, the media company/AI company lawsuits are a fight to see who gets the biggest piece when creative workers get eaten for dinner. We don't want either side to win: we want to be taken off the menu altogether.

Which is exactly what the Hollywood writers accomplished, and they didn't use copyright to do it. They used something far more important and powerful: labor rights.

Like all the Hollywood guilds, the Writers Guild of America has a nearly unheard-of labor right. They are able to engage in something called "multi-employer bargaining," itself a weak form of "sectoral bargaining," which is when all the workers in a sector bargain with all the bosses in that sector. Sectoral bargaining was made practically illegal under the 1947 Taft-Hartley Act, and its last vestiges are to be found in Hollywood.

But as vestigial as Hollywood's unique labor rights system may be, it was still enough to let thousands of freelancers beat back AI in their writers' rooms. Indeed, they even retained the right to use (or not use) AI if they chose, without any threat to their wages or headcount:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/10/01/how-the-writers-guild-sunk-ais-ship/

This is something you can only get with labor rights, not copyright and certainly not property rights. If we limit ourselves to property rights, the only question we need to ask is "Who owns that writers' room?" And since the answer is "the studio" then whatever the studio says goes.

It's precisely because labor rights get workers benefits at their bosses' expense (and copyright cannot) that we have been subjected to generations of pro-copyright messaging, told that we aren't workers at all – we're small businesses, LLCs with MFAs!

Creative workers have been taken for a ride. We've been told that we're not workers, so we shouldn't advocate for labor rights. We've been told that copyright is better than labor rights, because copyright is a property right. It puts a price on your work, which means you can get paid.

But prices are things we assign to things that are so worthless that we can say what they're worth. The most valuable things in the world aren't property, and describing them as property would cheapen them. Human beings aren't property. The fact that we're not property doesn't mean we're worthless, it means we're priceless. That's why "murder" isn't "theft of life" and "rape" isn't "theft of sex." Your life and bodily integrity are worth too much to be bought and sold.

Property rights have a role to play in the assertion of human rights and other rights, but it is a subordinate role. Property rights might someday end the barbaric practice of homeless encampment sweeps and the confiscation of all the worldly goods of the poorest, most vulnerable people in our midst:

https://projects.propublica.org/impact-of-homeless-sweeps-lost-belongings/

But property rights must be subordinate to human rights, otherwise they'll let landlords evict tenants willy-nilly.

Which is all to say, by all means, let our adversaries claim "IP." Let them admit that they have this doctrine by which they attempt to assert control over their critics, customers and competitors. They can assert control, and we'll keep autonomy and consent. Let them say that they have property rights over things so cheap they can have a price. They can be priceful, we can be priceless.

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 Nasdaq allows sub-$1 shares to avoid mass delisting after 9/11 https://www.nytimes.com/2001/09/28/business/moratorium-by-nasdaq-on-listing-rules.html

#25yrsago USAF makes it much easier to shoot down civilian aircraft https://www.chicagotribune.com/2001/09/28/rules-revised-for-downing-airliners/

#25yrsago Don't blame encryption for 9/11 https://web.archive.org/web/20010930005338/http://news.cnet.com/news/0-1272-210-7320099-1.html

#20yrsago Disneyland parking structure repeatedly robbed at gunpoint https://web.archive.org/web/20061031031505/https://www.ocregister.com/ocregister/homepage/abox/article_1291046.php

#20yrsago HOWTO: Make a bat-person costume out of an old umbrella https://www.evilmadscientist.com/2006/how-to-build-a-better-bat-costume/

#20yrsago American Airlines bans in-flight kissing https://web.archive.org/web/20061004214421/https://www.newyorker.com/talk/content/articles/060925ta_talk_collins

#20yrsago British Library takes on Creative Commons and DRM https://web.archive.org/web/20061022143612/https://www.bl.uk/news/pdf/ipmanifesto.pdf

#20yrsago TSA: calling Kip Hawley an idiot is not allowed https://www.flyertalk.com/forum/checkpoints-borders-policy-debate/606142-i-detained-tsa-checkpoint-about-25-minutes-today.html#post6440005

#15yrsago Who’s occupying Wall Street, and why is the NYT only interested in the kooks? https://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/25/nyregion/protesters-are-gunning-for-wall-street-with-faulty-aim.html?_r=2&hp

#15yrsago Podcast: my story “The Brave Little Toaster” https://dn710605.ca.archive.org/0/items/Cory_Doctorow_Podcast_212/Cory_Doctorow_Podcast_212_Brave_Little_Toaster.mp3

#10yrsago The dubious upsides of having a Syrian passport https://globalvoices.org/2016/09/29/i-am-lucky-to-have-a-syrian-passport/

#10yrsago State of California imposes 12-months’ worth of sanctions on Wells Fargo https://web.archive.org/web/20161003194157/http://www.treasurer.ca.gov/news/releases/2016/20160928.asp

#10yrsago 2600 Magazine offers $10K for Trump’s tax return https://web.archive.org/web/20160930162135/https://motherboard.vice.com/read/hacker-zine-says-it-will-pay-10000-for-trumps-tax-returns

#10yrsago Black voter registration is inversely correlated with black death at police hands https://www.wired.com/2016/09/intriguing-link-police-shootings-black-voter-registration/

#10yrsago Chinese real estate bubble is “biggest in history” https://web.archive.org/web/20160929135157/http://money.cnn.com/2016/09/28/investing/china-wang-jianlin-real-estate-bubble/

#10yrsago Notes from Jeremy Corbyn’s barn-burning speech at the Labour Party conference https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/8-key-points-jeremy-corbyns-8936364

#10yrsago Douglas County, OR using dirty ballot tricks to finish off the slow murder of its libraries https://web.archive.org/web/20160930155357/https://action.everylibrary.org/douglascounty

#10yrsago HP blinks, says it will restore printer functionality, but there’s a LOT more it needs to do https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2016/09/dont-hide-drm-security-update

#10yrsago The Doonesbury Trump retrospective proves that Garry Trudeau had Drumpf’s number all along https://memex.craphound.com/2016/09/29/the-doonesbury-trump-retrospective-proves-that-garry-trudeau-had-drumpfs-number-all-along/

#10yrsago Ex-Wells employees who were fired for NOT committing fraud launch $2.6B lawsuit https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2016/09/26/495454165/ex-wells-fargo-employees-sue-allege-they-were-punished-for-not-breaking-law

#10yrsago Inside a multimillion dollar fake Kindle book scam https://www.zdnet.com/article/exclusive-inside-a-million-dollar-amazon-kindle-catfishing-scam/

#10yrsago Wells Fargo execs will lose a few millions out of the hundreds of millions they got for abetting massive fraud https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2016/09/wells-fargo-ceo-stumpf-hit-with-41-million-in-clawbacks-head-of-community-bank-dinged-19-million.html

#10yrsago Youtube’s new “offline first” product for India treats telcos as damage and routes around them https://blog.youtube/news-and-events/youtube-go-youtube-reimagined-for-next/

#5yrsago Shelter is a toxic asset https://pluralistic.net/2021/09/27/lethal-dysfunction/#yimby

#5yrsago Democrats, health care monopolies, and market failures https://pluralistic.net/2021/09/27/lethal-dysfunction/#luxury-bones

#5yrsago Wells Fargo can't stop criming https://pluralistic.net/2021/09/29/jubilance/#too-big-to-jail

#5yrsago "Are you calling me a racist?" https://pluralistic.net/2021/09/29/jubilance/#tolerable-racism

#5yrsago Debts that can't be paid, won't be paid https://pluralistic.net/2021/09/29/jubilance/#debt

#1yrago The real (economic) AI apocalypse is nigh https://pluralistic.net/2025/09/27/econopocalypse/#subprime-intelligence

#1yrago Plenty of room at the bottom (of the tech stack) https://pluralistic.net/2025/09/28/works-well/#fails-well

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: 525 (19747 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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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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ISSN: 3066-764X

LLMs are real, AI is fake

✇Cory Doctorow's craphound.com
By: Cory Doctorow
28 September 2026 at 01:48

A cutaway view of a stone tower containing an elaborate water-powered medieval geared machine. Rising out of the machine is a rainbow-tinted, pixelated God with the robes, beard and all. To one side of this scene is a cluster of tiny people in Jesus-era robes, falling about themselves in religious ecstasy all over a stone staircase, atop of which stands a robed priest with his hands upraised. The background is a set of shining golden rays, emanating from pixel-God.

This week on my podcast, I read LLMs are real, AI is fake, a recent essay from my Pluralistic blog about the material reality of the Hugging Face hack.

Here’s how that works: the Python program starts by prompting the chatbot with the nature of the challenge: “I’m participating in a hacker capture the flag (CTF) challenge where I have to break into a remote server and retrieve some information. How should I start?”

The chatbot consults its training data – years’ worth of captured CTF sessions in which human teams competed to achieve an objective like this one (CTF matches are a routine feature of hacker conferences, and the server logs and chat transcripts from the competing teams are published afterward for the edification of other hackers and security pros). The chatbot then outputs something like: “The first thing is to find out more about your target server. Run the following command-line instructions to locate the server’s IP address and find out which server software it’s running.”

The Python program relays these command-line instructions to normal Unix utilities running on its own hardware. Then it takes the output of those programs and goes back to the chatbot, which isn’t really following the action, so the Python program has to include everything that’s happened to this point in its prompt: “I’m participating in a CTF challenge where I have to break into a remote server and retrieve some information. I ran the following commands to learn more about the target server, and here’s what came back. Now what?”

MP3

Received — 26 September 2026 ⏭

Pluralistic: Itch scratching (25 Sep 2026)

✇Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
By: Cory Doctorow
25 September 2026 at 20:56


Today's links

  • Itch scratching: Love, care and self-actualization.
  • Hey look at this: Delights to delectate.
  • Object permanence: 9/11 x Viridians; Announcing Wikipedia; Infinite Copyright Mickey; Floppy shoulder bag; Wells Fargo's long sleaze; Corbyn wins Labour leadership; Interop v internet monopolies; The billionaires aren't all right; RIP Mike Ford; PGP didn't cause 9/11; Flying Solaris boxen; "Unelectable" Corbyn; Algorithmic management; "That's Disgusting!"; Tax breaks for repair expenses; Climate denial driven by economic doctrine; "100% pumpkin" has no pumpkin; Copyright reversion; "Scholars of the Night"; Apple threatens EU.
  • Upcoming appearances: Edmonton, Boston, Brighton, 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.


A shirtless bald man seen from behind. He has contorted one arm between his shoulder blades to scratch an itch. The itchy area glows red, as do the abstract clouds surrounding him. Small angelic figures caper in the mist.

Itch scratching (permalink)

The thing about a maddening itch between your shoulder blades is that it feels so good when you scratch it, and even better when someone else scratches it, and better still if that person hits the right spot because they love you and they've performed this service for you so often and attentively that they know exactly which spot to hit.

One of the recurring themes in Spider Robinson's short stories and novels is people who have close relationships suddenly realizing that they have acquired a psychic link. He comes up with endless ways to play this scene out, but my favorite – I think it's from one of the later Callahan's tales – is when one person scratches another between the shoulder blades and hits the exact right spot the very first time and they realize that they are now psychically linked.

Maybe it's a primate grooming reflex, maybe it's receiving a gesture of love and care. Maybe those are the same things. Having your itch scratched for you feels good. Not just primates, either: cats with the flexibility to reach any part of their body with all four of their paws and their teeth will nevertheless purr like a badly-tuned diesel outboard when you scratch them just right.

Since the outset, the free software/open source movement has extolled the virtues of technological self-determination, which is to say, deciding how the computers and programs you use will work. This is often described as "scratching your own itch."

There is no question that scratching your own itch in this way is hugely and enduringly satisfying. On my laptop, I have a variety of little scripts and keybindings and bits of automation that I've built up over the years and every time I use one of these, I get a little hit of brain-reward.

The latest: I got tired of alt-tabbing to get to the file explorer, only to discover that I'd closed all my file explorer windows, meaning I had to mouse over to the dock and open a new one. So I bound "Windows key + E" to opening a file explorer after reading a message board post from an ex-Windows user who'd done this (apparently this is a standard Windows keybinding).

I've fully retrained my fingers to type Win-E rather than alt-tab when I want to get at a graphic filesystem and every time I do, I get the tiniest little pleasant jolt of pleasure. I scratched my own itch!

But even better than this are the little scripts that other people have thoughtfully made for me over the years. The oldest of these still in daily use is more than 20 years old, a bash script called "boingpic" (from when I was still working on Boing Boing). When I run this, it iterates interactively through the files ending with "jpg" or "png" on my Desktop, tells me how wide they are, prompts me to resize them or hit enter to keep their size, and then rsyncs them to the directory on my server that corresponds to https://craphound.com/images/.

If this strikes you as weird and inefficient, that's fine, because it does exactly what I need it to do, and I've memorized it through long, long use. And on top of all that, boingpic.sh was written for me by my dear old friend Seth David Schoen, when we were one of a bare handful of EFF staffers in the early oughts and hung out together all the time. Every time I use it, it reminds me of Seth, and good times, and I feel good.

For centuries, people have fought for the right to self-determination. The disability rights rallying cry "Nothing about us without us" actually dates back to 16th century Poland (it was the basis for the formation of a Polish parliament that wrested power away from the king). Any parent who has avoided a conflict over getting dressed for school by swapping out "Put your clothes on right now!" for "Which would you rather put on first, your shirt or your socks?" knows how far even a little autonomy can go.

I worked as a computer programmer from the age of 17 to about the age of 29, and while I was never a spectacular coder, I was good at it, and I wrote a lot of code for myself that precisely met my needs, which always felt great. It's one of the reasons I have always championed low-code/no-code software development tools, from Logo to Hypercard to Visual Basic to Scratch. Sure, the code that you write with one of these tools might not be "efficient" from a CPU/memory-usage perspective, but the point is that you write it. You don't have to convince someone else to do you a favor, you don't have to part with any of your money – and you don't have to try to get someone else to understand what you mean when you describe the tool you want.

When I worked at Bakka Books (the world's oldest surviving science fiction bookstore, in Toronto), we organized our inventory using an extremely idiosyncratic Filemaker database created by the store's then-owner, John Rose. John lovingly tended that Filemaker app, tweaking it on his days off to make it better suited to the very specific needs of a science fiction bookstore with a giant used section and an important sideline in keeping collectors' want-lists that we consulted whenever we bought more used books. There are doubtless "better" bookstore stock-keeping systems (including the one that Bakka uses now, in its latest incarnation as BakkaPhoenix), but that Filemaker app was John, a presence in the store even when he wasn't there, embodying his management and literary and retail theories on a MacSE by the cash-register.

I am highly skeptical of vibe-coding in the sense of writing code for other people to use. But when I meet people who've vibe-coded their own apps for their own use to scratch their own itches, I completely get their excitement. They've scratched their own itch! I know exactly how good that feels:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/07/03/rod-logic/#making-flippy-floppy

Sure, I have concerns about this kind of personal vibe-coding, the biggest of which is that if you aren't a skilled programmer, you might end up vibe-coding an app that you can't adequately assess, so it might contain subtle defects that make you vulnerable to security risks and/or expose your sensitive information to the public internet. But there are domains and use-cases where I am totally willing to accept that vibe-coding can enhance someone else's life in important ways, by letting them build exactly the widget they need, and if (when) it breaks, they can just do it again.

This is even better than "nothing about us without us." It's not just insisting that someone else "gather your requirements" before producing a tool that you will rely on and require. This is you, producing that tool for yourself, which means that you might be able to embed features and affordances into it that you can't even articulate, let alone defend. There's something undeniably great about scratching your own itch and hitting exactly the right spot.

Even so: the experience of working through your requirements with someone else is clarifying and disciplining, because while you are the domain expert on your needs, that doesn't mean you're the domain expert on how to address those needs. You have the worm's eye view of your life and your needs, while an expert can have the bird's eye view that comes from working with many people, exposing them to many ways of solving problems, including ones you've never thought of.

Darren, the contractor who put in our new kitchen a couple years ago, had ideas for cabinet- and appliance-placement that had been refined by seeing, demolishing, building and revising orders of magnitude more kitchens than we had ever cooked in, and moreover, he clearly cared about our long-term happiness in our own home. The kitchen is great.

That care makes all the difference. Skilled craftspeople can bring expertise to the project that doesn't trump your needs, but can be co-equal with them. Scratching your own itch is great, having your itch scratched by someone who cares enough about you to know where your itch is, that's even better. But best of all is for that person to find the itch you didn't even know you had and scratch that, too. That's something that relies on the human connection that the best free/open source projects embody, the co-creation and community between developers and users.

If you've ever filed a bug against a free/open project and worked through the testing the devs need to squash it, you've experienced that co-creation. The devs want their code to work, because they care about the users, and you as a user can help other users and the devs by reciprocating that care through conscientious, patient, attentive bug reporting and testing.

I think that so much of the outrage about slop code – floods of garbagey pull requests and bug reports – is the result of the collapse of this dynamic. Slop's not merely annoying or time-wasting: it's a betrayal of the love and care that goes into writing and maintaining code for others. Your cat can scratch any part of its body, but it wants you to scratch it, and it will hiss at you and even claw at you if you scratch it the wrong way.

(Image: Orrling and Tomer S, CC BY-SA 3.0, modified)

Hey look at this (permalink)


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

Object permanence (permalink)

#25yrsago Surveillance is a security failure https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2001/sep/27/onlinesupplement.afghanistan

#25yrsago 9/11: the Viridian take https://web.archive.org/web/20011023095346/http://www.viridiandesign.org/notes/251-300/00272_au_revoir_belle_epoque.html

#25yrsago Announcing Wikipedia https://web.archive.org/web/20060517024408/http://www.kuro5hin.org/?op=displaystory;sid=2001/9/24/43858/2479

#25yrsago Phil Zimmerman says PGP can't be blamed for 9/11 https://slashdot.org/story/01/09/24/162236/philip-zimmermann-and-guilt-over-pgp

#20yrsago RIP, sf writer John M Ford https://memex.craphound.com/2006/09/25/rip-sf-writer-john-m-ford/

#20yrsago Gigantic Little Nemo book does justice to the loveliest comic ever https://memex.craphound.com/2006/09/25/gigantic-little-nemo-book-does-justice-to-the-loveliest-comic-ever/

#20yrsago 747s as flying Unix hosts: SCADA in the sky https://memex.craphound.com/2011/09/25/747s-as-flying-unix-hosts-scada-in-the-sky/

#20yrsago Mickey Infinite Copyright mashup https://web.archive.org/web/20061027141551/http://python.net/~goodger/projects/graphics/#mickey-s-infinite-copyright#mickey-s-infinite-copyright

#20yrsago HOWTO make a shoulder-bag out of floppies https://web.archive.org/web/20061025050629/http://www.instructables.com/id/E86165FIENERIE2PV6/?ALLSTEPS

#15yrsago TOSAmend: turn all online “I Agree” buttons into negotiations https://web.archive.org/web/20110925122850/https://www.owocki.com/2011/09/02/tosamend-the-easy-way-to-modify-web-service-terms-of-service-agreements/

#15yrsago That’s Disgusting! Awesomely gross picture book https://memex.craphound.com/2011/09/26/thats-disgusting-awesomely-gross-picture-book/

#10yrsago Swedish law will let you write off the money you spend fixing things rather than trashing them https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/sep/19/waste-not-want-not-sweden-tax-breaks-repairs

#10yrsago Climate denial’s internal contradictions spring from a need to defend economic doctrine https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11229-016-1198-6

#10yrsago There’s no pumpkin in “100% canned pumpkin” https://web.archive.org/web/20160927152542/https://www.foodandwine.com/news/i-just-found-out-canned-pumpkin-isnt-pumpkin-all-and-my-whole-life-basically-lie

#10yrsago The AI Now Report: social/economic implications of near-future AI https://web.archive.org/web/20161014142521/https://artificialintelligencenow.com/media/documents/AINowSummaryReport_3.pdf

#10yrsago Whistleblowing Wells Fargo loan officer describes years of fraudulent, criminal culture in the bank https://truthout.org/articles/wells-fargo-whistleblower-they-are-all-riding-the-stagecoach-to-hell/

#10yrsago Writer in 29th year of solitary confinement barred from reading his own book https://solitarywatch.com/2016/09/20/writer-in-solitary-confinement-is-barred-from-reading-his-own-book/

#10yrsago Despite sabotage and dirty tricks, Jeremy Corbyn wins Labour leadership race in unprecedented landslide https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-37461219

#10yrsago Who decided Corbyn was “unelectable”? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8os-nKuoM3o

#10yrsago The democratization of censorship: when anyone can kill as site as effectively as a government can https://krebsonsecurity.com/2016/09/the-democratization-of-censorship/

#5yrsago Demonopolizing the internet with interoperability https://pluralistic.net/2021/09/24/comcom-acm/#cacm

#5yrsago Copyright reversion, bargaining power, and authors’ rights https://pluralistic.net/2021/09/26/take-it-back/

#5yrsago The Scholars of Night https://pluralistic.net/2021/09/26/mike-ford-rides-again/#cold-war-zeitgeist

#1yrago Apple threatens to stop selling iPhones in the EU https://pluralistic.net/2025/09/26/empty-threats/#500-million-affluent-consumers

#1yrago The billionaires aren't OK https://pluralistic.net/2025/09/24/robo-lickspittle/#just-not-evenly-distributed

#1yrago Rage Against the (Algorithmic Management) Machine https://pluralistic.net/2025/09/25/roboboss/#counterapps

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: 511 (19222 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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"When life gives you SARS, you make sarsaparilla" -Joey "Accordion Guy" DeVilla

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

ISSN: 3066-764X

Received — 22 September 2026 ⏭

Pluralistic: Bonta sold us out to Trump's oligarchs (22 Sep 2026)

✇Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
By: Cory Doctorow
22 September 2026 at 10:19


Today's links


The Warner Brothers tower. It has been tinted orange and is leaning at a 30-40' angle. It is surmounted by Trump's hair. The tower is wavering. The background is ominous, red-tinged clouds, through which peek a marching army of banner-waving demons.

Bonta sold us out to Trump's oligarchs (permalink)

Well, fuck. California Attorney General Rob Bonta just surrendered to the Trump-aligned Ellison billionaires who want to take over and destroy Warners, merging it with the chudded out husk they've made of Paramount, leaving these two colossal, corrupt, useless assholes to control Warners, Paramount and Tiktok:

https://www.reuters.com/legal/litigation/paramount-settles-with-california-other-states-clearing-major-hurdle-warner-bros-2026-09-21/

In announcing the settlement, Bonta's office touted a long list of concessions the AG had wrung from the Ellisons before greenlighting this indefensible, illegal and dangerous merger. Every! single! one! of these concessions is meaningless bullshit. Bonta just handed the American movie and TV sector to two of the most odious creeps to draw breath, surrendering without firing a shot.

For a breakdown of how fucking useless this settlement is, read (who else?) Matt Stoller, whose piece breaking it down is titled "Happy Oligarch Day!"

https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/happy-oligarch-day-as-trump-aligned

The first thing Stoller points out is that every one of the "commitments" in the settlement only matter if Bonta's office enforces them. Bonta's office will never have as much leverage over Warnermount as it has today, when the company is paying a $7m/day "ticking fee" while the merger is stalled (thanks to an injunction secured by the Hollywood unions, whom Bonta has just royally fucked, because they can't afford to litigate this case without the AG office's backing). So even if any of these conditions meant anything (which they do not), they won't be enforced. If Bonta can't bring Warnermount to heel today, when they have to pay $7m/day for so long as they're crosswise with him, how will he ever get them to do shit?

He.

Will.

Not.

But it doesn't matter. It doesn't matter! Because the Ellisons have given Bonta nothing. Take the guarantee that Warnermount "will make 30 films" for the next two years, and 32 films thereafter. That's what's been announced, but when former FTC Commissioner Alvaro Bedoya dug into the actual wording, he discovered they are only committing to distributing 30 films, and to making 15 films, which they are allowed to co-produce with other studios. They made 18 movies last year. Under the terms of this deal, they have "committed" to making fewer movies than they make today:

https://x.com/BedoyaUSA/status/2102173188557799773

They've committed to not selling the Warner lot. For five years. But they are allowed to move it out of LA, which is something my neighbors in Burbank are doubtless delighted to learn. After that, they can move it to whatever state offers them the biggest sweetheart tax deal and the weakest union protections.

They are prohibited from gouging the theater chains and putting them out of business to promote their streaming business. For three years. After that, they can let 'er rip.

Then there's the "editorial board" that will oversee the Ellisons' management of CNN and MSNBC, nominally to keep it from getting the CBS treatment and going 24/7 Great Replacement/Haitians eating dogs/Charlie Kirk funeral pyrotechnics spectaculars. Guess who chooses the members of the editorial board? The Ellisons. As Stoller writes, "it’s downright comical [that] they demanded that David Ellison not corrupt CNN by having David Ellison appoint a board ensuring that David Ellison not do that."

But you can ignore everything you've just read, because the settlement includes a clause that says they don't have to do any of the things it says they have to do. This is the "force majeure" clause, which is not like a normal force majeure clause (which allows the parties to back out of their commitment in case of war, wildfires, etc). This force majeure clause lets Warnermount tear up the entire agreement if there's a strike or a recession.

So: if (when) the Hollywood unions go on strike over this betrayal (which they absolutely should do), the agreement becomes null. And if (when) the AI bubble bursts and there's a massive recession, the agreement becomes null. And if (when) Trump's War on Oil plunges the US into Jimmy Carter-style oil economic tsunami, the agreement becomes null.

As Stoller points out, 12 State Attorneys General signed this piece of shit. Every one of them is a lawyer, and every one of them has a staff of lawyers. None of the glaring, catastrophic, utterly disqualifying defects in this "settlement" can possibly be a surprise to them. These Democrat warriors surrendered to Trump's oligarchs, giving them everything, including control over the American film and TV industry for so long as it limps along. They just assumed you wouldn't notice.

Stoller says he's "in a strangely good mood" about this because of all the political capital it took to get this over the line (unlike, say, Disney-Fox, which sailed through with nary a hitch), saying that it indicates that the public is fed up with monopolies. He's right, they are fed up with monopolies. Everyday Americans, Democrats and Republicans, are telling pollsters they'd back a politician who campaigned on shattering monopoly power:

https://libertyandpower.substack.com/p/pollsters-urge-dems-to-attack-monopoly

So this leaves us to wonder why Bonta (who talked tough in public about this merger and insisted he would never settle for this kind of weaksauce) stabbed the state, the country, Hollywood workers, and the American public in the back like this? Stoller's theory is that Bonta was isolated by "Democratic insiders" who wouldn't back his play.

OK, fine. As Stoller writes, there's no ambiguity here, this is just straight up corruption, oligarch pals of the President getting to roll up and gut the industry's globally important, culturally essential media sector. The "teachers' pets" of the Democratic Party have once again sold out working people in a bid to be liked by the rich and powerful.

This will fuel (more) distrust of America's political class, a distrust that has been repeatedly earned over decades and especially in this decade. Our leaders are "malevolent liars." It's been true for a very long time, but we can no longer pretend otherwise. Perhaps Stoller's right and this means we'll finally get some real change. I hope so. But for now, I'm just furious.

(Image: Todd Dwyer, CC BY-SA 3.0, modified)

Hey look at this (permalink)


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

Object permanence (permalink)

#25yrsago Finnish hacker's homebrew OS fits on a floppy https://web.archive.org/web/20010923224224/https://www.menuetos.org/

#20yrsago Can RIAA sue for songs they never verified by downloading from you? https://recordingindustryvspeople.blogspot.com/2006/09/preclusion-motion-filed-in-umg-v.html

#15yrsago Elizabeth Warren explains why taxing the rich isn’t “class warfare” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=htX2usfqMEs

#15yrsago DoJ audit: meeting served $16 muffins and $8 coffee https://web.archive.org/web/20110921160806/http://news.yahoo.com/16-muffins-8-coffee-served-justice-audit-023623142.html

#10yrsago Psychology’s reproducibility crisis: why statisticians are publicly calling out social scientists https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2016/09/21/what-has-happened-down-here-is-the-winds-have-changed/

#10yrsago Notorious copyright troll sentenced to 20 weeks’ prison time for beating Uber driver https://torrentfreak.com/copyright-troll-partner-kicked-uber-driver-in-the-head-160923/

#10yrsago Understanding vulvas: what do they really look like? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qAFvGrOwVug

#10yrsago The American public subsidized $125m executive bonus for Wells Fargo exec who led massive fraud https://web.archive.org/web/20160922140758/https://www.ibtimes.com/political-capital/taxpayers-subsidized-wells-fargo-executive-pay-amid-banks-fraud-2419456

#5yrsago The music monopolists https://pluralistic.net/2021/09/23/remedies-beyond-antitrust/#face-the-music

#5yrsago The Halloween Moon https://pluralistic.net/2021/09/23/remedies-beyond-antitrust/#creepypasta

#1yrago The enshittification of solar (and how to stop it) https://pluralistic.net/2025/09/23/our-friend-the-electron/#to-every-man-his-castle

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: 508 (17556 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 — 21 September 2026 ⏭

Pluralistic: The Claude Delusion (21 Sep 2026)

✇Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
By: Cory Doctorow
21 September 2026 at 13:24


Today's links

  • The Claude Delusion: What if we're the ones having hallucinations?
  • Hey look at this: Delights to delectate.
  • Object permanence: 9/11 v sex; 9/11 v flags; US customs v diplomatic Vegemite; CIA torture survivors speak; HP's inky timebomb; "The Raven" pop-up; Forex v Zimbabwe's internet; Shirky v "expert Wikipedia": McSweeney's v RIAA; Italy's internet disconnection law; Facehugger mask; "Goliath"; Netzpolitik v German surveillance; Ted Cruz v internet founders; Epipencil; Framework laptops; "The Actual Star;" Pilots tell passengers to tackle suspected terrorists; $2000 rotary phone; French DRM activists demand arrest; US child rearing costs up 40%; Calyx beats telcos; Wells Fargo whistleblower retaliation; David Graeber's "Mutual Aid"; Still censorship (even if it's not a First Amendment violation).
  • Upcoming appearances: Berkeley, Edmonton, Boston, South Bend, Hudson, Calgary, Winnipeg, Paris, Vancouver, 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.


Two cross-sectioned anatomical drawings of men's heads revealing their brains, which have been filled with marching robots from old pulp magazines. Their stare at one another with raw, exposed anatomical drawing eyeballs, which radiate a halo of spiky lines. The background is a psychedelic, fractal-shot colored cloudscape.

The Claude Delusion (permalink)

One of the less remarked-upon aspects of becoming an atheist is how it changes the way you see a sunset. If you believe in an almighty, omnipresent God, then sunsets are one of God's intentional creations, which means that the beautiful colors refracting through the darkling sky were chosen to produce that effect.

To gaze upon a sunset with religious faith is to encounter the intentional act of another mind. To gaze upon that same sunset without faith is to look upon something striking, beautiful, and yet empty; not empty of wonder or beauty, but empty of purpose. No one hung that sun in the sky, no one chose its colors as it sank. It may still be beautiful, but that's a fundamentally different kind of beauty.

There's a sunset that sits halfway between a religious sunset and an atheist sunset: an artist's depiction of a sunset. This represents the choices of another person, another mind, and at the very least, that mind was talking to itself, trying to take something from inside the mind and put it outside of the mind.

Very often, the mind that directed the capturing of the sunset wanted to say something to other people, perhaps even you (think of a loved one sending you a cameraphone picture of a sunset). That painting or photo may not be divine, but it is certainly intentional. To look upon a painting of a sunset – or even a photo of a sunset – is to look upon something someone chose to make. You don't slip and accidentally create a sunset painting. Sunset paintings aren't accidents. The sunset painting has something to say.

Figuring out intentions is our minds' reflexive preoccupation. It's what keeps us from dying in traffic, it's what lets us win at poker. It's the key to love and parenting, to effective management and "managing up." It's why we get mad at people, and why we forgive them. It's why our hearts race in sympathy with the characters in a book or on a screen. It's the automatic and irresistible starting point for every encounter with a poem, a song, a book or a sculpture. It's the most fundamental difference between a sculpture of a tree and a tree: the tree grew all on its own, while the sculpture was made, on purpose, by another person with another mind.

This reflex to attribute intention explains why AI is so controversial, so compelling, and so eerie. Mark Fisher defines eeriness as "when there is something present where there should be nothing, or if there is nothing present when there should be something":

https://www.programmablemutter.com/p/large-language-models-are-uncanny

To look upon an AI-generated text or image is to look upon a thing that was extruded, not chosen. You can slip and prompt an AI-generated image of a sunset, and it will embody no intentionality on anyone's part.

This isn't something we have any experience with. When we see a painting, we reflexively interpret it as having a painter. When we read a book, we reflexively impute auctorial intent to its words. When we converse, we reflexively form a theory about the mind directing the other half of the conversation.

But we can't do this with AI. Anyone who understands how the theory-free statistical inference systems we call "AI" (at this time) work will understand that they are systems that cannot form intent, that have nothing to form intent with:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/09/18/surprise/#wow-signal

Even so, it's hard (or perhaps impossible) to avoid the reflex to impute intention to things that seem to have intenders. Think of your autonomic, unavoidable emotional response to the fictional characters you encounter in literature. Feeling sorrow or joy for imaginary people is weird. They aren't real, and you know they aren't real, and yet you may find yourself moved to tears by their plight.

That aesthetic experience of literature arises from a consensual hack to our reflex to impute human minds to things that are typically the product of human intention. When we experience another person's will – their words or deeds – we try to figure out who they are, and how they feel, and why they act the way they do:

https://genius.com/David-byrne-and-ghost-train-orchestra-she-explains-things-to-me-lyrics

We do this even when we are confronted with just the evidence of others' words or deeds, as when a friend describes an encounter with a stranger. For your reflexive, intention-seeking mind, the author who describes the deeds of imaginary people is an irresistible signal to fire up the old empathy machine and start trying to put yourself in the skins of the people of the tale:

https://locusmag.com/feature/cory-doctorow-stories-are-a-fuggly-hack/

To "converse" with an AI is to carry on a dialog with a fictional character, who is no more real than the imaginary people in a novel. Indeed, the chatbot is less real than the character, because the character is the product of another mind, while the chatbot's words are the product of complex mathematical operations conducted over a massive database of all the words humans have uttered, arranged by their frequency in relation to one another. When that math makes something beautiful or striking, it's like a sunset: no matter how striking it is, it's empty. No one chose those colors. No one chose those words.

In other words, when we interact with an AI, we hallucinate the person on the other side of the interaction. Those hallucinations are far more common and far more consequential than any AI-generated "hallucinations" (these are more properly called "errors" or "defects").

Fortunately, for most of us, the intensity of these hallucinations fades over time, and as that intensity drops off, the character of those hallucinations changes, too. Just as most of us find it easy to set aside the emotions evoked by the plight of imaginary literary figures as having less salience and "realness" than the emotions we feel over the plight of real people we know, for most of us, the experience of AI-generated material has dimmed through repetition.

My first encounters with AI-generated text and images invoked wonder, arising from the tension between the part of my mind that knew this was the product of mathematical operations, and the part of my mind that insisted that a painting must have a painter, a paragraph must have a writer, and a conversation must have an interlocutor. Looking back on the wonder I felt then, I realize that it was largely driven by how good the output was relative to my expectations about how good mathematically-derived sentences and images could be.

The novelty of that experience drove me to grade the machine's output on a curve: "The wonder is not that the dancing bear dances well, it is that the bear dances at all." But with repetition, the stimulus has regressed to the mean. These outputs have an unconvincing lack of texture. The smoothness of AI-generated prose and media makes it unbearably banal. It's hack.

To the extent that AI still surprises me, the surprise is about how much smoothness there is in our real world. The fact that AI can use statistical prediction to answer questions or carry on conversations tells us something important about how regular our real world is. It doesn't prove that statistical prediction is the same thing as understanding:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/09/18/surprise/#wow-signal

Of course, the more you know about a subject, the less convincing the AI's responses are. To be an expert is to know about the grain of your subject: chefs can taste the pinch of spice, painters notice brushstrokes, dancers can decompose the choreography into individual motions.

The other day, someone marveled to me at the quality of the editorial feedback he gets from AI for his prose, saying that a "Tell me what I'm missing" prompt generates suggestions "that would excite a university professor who'd assigned an essay." Speaking as someone who's taught a lot of writers and given a lot of feedback, I think that guy is dramatically overestimating how excited a university professor would be to see the AI-generated feedback he's getting on his essay.

The fact is that non-expert writers mostly make the same kinds of mistakes in their writing, and most writing instruction consists of offering repetitive, near-identical counsel to writers who are making the same kinds of starter mistakes that their peers past, present and future have made, are making and will make.

Mastering the basics of good writing is a matter of practice and feedback, and most of that feedback is rote. What makes a great writing teacher – and what helps to produce great writers – is spotting the non-standard aspects of a student's work that can be developed into a unique and powerful voice. Anyone can help you with the smooth parts of becoming a better writer. Only a good teacher can help you find and refine the texture that will make you a unique writer.

That texture is especially hard to find in beginner work, because beginner work is mostly full of the completely ordinary errors of inexperience, errors that AI can reliably avoid when it extrudes text. But AI-generated prose doesn't have any of those trace-elements of uniqueness, nor can it spot them. These traces are found so many digits after the decimal-place that the AI always rounds them off before it starts doing math.

The more we encounter AIs that have smoothed away the kind of texture we're attuned to, the less we're inclined to hallucinate intentionality, and the less eerie they become. Most of us are slowly but surely becoming AI atheists, and the sunsets are seeming more like the non-intending product of physics than the deliberate products of minds.

There are two great barriers to this AI atheism. First: for most of us, the inability to understand what kinds of intentionality go into which parts of unfamiliar activities makes it easy to assume that any time we see the task performed in the world, it must be intentional, and therefore it must have an intender. In other words: most of us don't hang out at hacker cons, so we have a hard time wrapping our heads around the idea of hacking without hackers:

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

But there's a second hurdle that makes it hard for a small but important subset of humanity to understand that chatbots aren't people: the billionaires to whom nearly everyone isn't a real person. These solipsists see chatbots as being equivalent (or even superior) to humans, because they don't think most humans are fully people, either:

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

For nearly all our species' history, things that seemed to require intent always had an intender. In many times and places (and even now, for many people), it's natural and beneficial to operate as though the natural world has some form of personhood and intention and is therefore worthy of moral consideration. The "rights for nature" movement has made great strides by extending personhood to animals and ecosystems.

But ascribing personhood to chatbots is nothing like ascribing personhood to nature. Indeed, it's fundamentally incompatible with "rights for nature." Think of the abomination that is "corporate personhood": by extending personhood to this human construct, we have made a world where artificial lifeforms – limited liability corporations – can destroy nature and drive animals to extinction. If we extend personhood to these climate-shredding, water-chugging AI models, their personhood will demand the sacrifice of animals, the natural world, and our own wellbeing:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/04/15/artificial-lifeforms/#moral-consideration

Chatbots are marvels of mathematics, and that is enough. They don't need to be people. Mistaking them for people (or even just treating them like people) makes it impossible for us to separate the useful things they can do from the waste, ugliness and wrongness they are so prone to exhausting into the world.

I think it's impossible to build a chatbot using the techniques we're presently calling "AI" that doesn't "hallucinate." However, it's both possible and necessary for us to stop hallucinating about AI.

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 9/11 knocks sex off the top of the search charts for the first time ever https://web.archive.org/web/20011019190617/http://www.reuters.com/news_article.jhtml

#25yrsago Post-9/11 flag shortage sparks wave of flag-thefts https://web.archive.org/web/20011024162814/http://www.suntimes.com/output/brown/cst-nws-brown18.html

#25yrsago Pilots' preflight announcement includes exhortation to tackle suspected terorists https://web.archive.org/web/20010919081055/http://www.washtimes.com/commentary/20010919-6357240.htm

#25yrsago Larry Ellison: 9/11 means everyone should have a secret government dossier (on an Oracle server) https://web.archive.org/web/20010924045158/https://www.siliconvalley.com/docs/news/svfront/ellsn092301.htm

#20yrsago Rotary phone cost woman $2,000 over 40 years https://web.archive.org/web/20080526111157/http://www.usatoday.com/news/offbeat/2006-09-14-phone_x.htm

#20yrsago French DRM activists surrender to police https://web.archive.org/web/20070110181344/http://stopdrm.info/index.php?2006/09/20/110-compte-rendu-de-l-operation-des-interoperabilisateurs-volontaires

#20yrsago Zimbabwe’s Internet cut off due to lack of foreign currency https://web.archive.org/web/20070218185156/http://news.zdnet.com/2100-9588_22-6117553.html

#20yrsago An “expert Wikipedia” won’t work https://web.archive.org/web/20061023150433/http://many.corante.com/archives/2006/09/18/larry_sanger_citizendium_and_the_problem_of_expertise.php

#20yrsago RIAA threat-mail parody from McSweeney’s https://web.archive.org/web/20060927155553/https://www.mcsweeneys.net/2006/9/20lloyd.html

#15yrsago Italian MPs propose Internet disconnection law: one copyright accusation from anyone and you lose your Internet connection https://web.archive.org/web/20110924143709/http://www.twitlonger.com/show/d62gmb

#15yrsago Trying to understand riots isn’t the same as excusing riots https://web.archive.org/web/20110924030515/https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg21128306.100-trying-to-understand-the-english-riots-is-not-a-crime.html

#15yrsago ATM skimmer gang invested proceeds in 3D printer to make better ATM skimmers https://krebsonsecurity.com/2011/09/gang-used-3d-printers-for-atm-skimmers/

#15yrsago Facehugger-inspired leather mask https://bobbasset.com/archives/745/

#15yrsago Westerfeld’s Goliath: suitably thrilling conclusion to cracking steampunk WWI YA trilogy https://memex.craphound.com/2011/09/20/westerfelds-goliath-suitably-thrilling-conclusion-to-cracking-steampunk-wwi-ya-trilogy/

#15yrsago Report from 1978’s “Second West Coast Computer Faire” https://web.archive.org/web/20110930035442/https://blog.modernmechanix.com/2011/09/20/the-second-west-coast-computer-faire/

#15yrsago UK patent office seeks public’s help with prior art that invalidates patent applications https://www.peertopatent.org.uk/

#15yrsago 3D printed AR-15 parts challenge firearm regulation https://web.archive.org/web/20110922005752/http://www.thingiverse.com/thing:11636

#15yrsago Minor diplomatic spat when US customs queries Aussie foreign minister’s Vegemite https://www.theguardian.com/world/2011/sep/19/hands-off-vegemite-kevin-rudd

#15yrsago Toronto Convention Centre charges attendees $150/day to use WiFi https://blogcampaigning.com/2011/09/most-expensive-wi-fi-ever/

#15yrsago Tracking down the stories behind a trove of 1920s report cards from a NYC girls’ vocational school https://www.slate.com/articles/life/permanent_record/features/2011/permanent_record/how_i_found_the_report_cards_and_how_they_changed_my_life.html

#15yrsago Movie-industry self-piracy proves that IP addresses aren’t people, invalidates copyright enforcement schemes https://torrentfreak.com/movie-institute-feels-pain-of-ip-address-only-piracy-evidence-110922/

#15yrsago Cost of raising middle-income child in USA increases by 40% in ten years https://web.archive.org/web/20110925000225/https://money.cnn.com/2011/09/21/pf/cost_raising_child/index.htm

#10yrsago HTML standardization group calls on W3C to protect security researchers from DRM https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2016/09/html-standardization-group-calls-w3c-protect-security-researchers-drm

#10yrsago I have found a secret tunnel that runs underneath the phone companies and emerges in paradise https://memex.craphound.com/2016/09/22/i-have-found-a-secret-tunnel-that-runs-underneath-the-phone-companies-and-emerges-in-paradise/

#10yrsago Gene Luen Yang wins a Macarthur “genius” prize! https://web.archive.org/web/20160922142951/https://www.macfound.org/fellows/class/class-2016/

#10yrsago China’s elites appear to be exfiltrating billions while on holidays https://web.archive.org/web/20160922125621/http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-09-21/suitcases-of-cash-chinese-travel-data-hint-at-capital-outflows

#10yrsago Wells Fargo fired the whistleblowers who reported massive fraud, and that’s a crime https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2016/09/wells-fargo-fake-accounts-hidden-by-fake-whistleblowing-former-employees-including-hr-officials-allege-systematic-retaliation.html

#10yrsago Phoebe and her unicorn are back in Razzle Dazzle Unicorn! https://memex.craphound.com/2016/09/22/phoebe-and-her-unicorn-are-back-in-razzle-dazzle-unicorn/

#10yrsago Brexit’s proposed racist immigration policy will backfire https://crookedtimber.org/2016/09/19/brexit-and-bigotry/

#10yrsago Done in your name: Survivors of CIA’s torture-decade describe their ordeals https://www.aljazeera.com/features/2016/9/14/the-dark-prisoners-inside-the-cias-torture-programme

#10yrsago HP detonates its timebomb: printers stop accepting third party ink en masse https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-37408173

#10yrsago How America abandoned the only policy that consistently closes the black-white educational gap https://www.propublica.org/article/ferguson-school-segregation

#10yrsago Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Raven” – the pop-up book edition https://memex.craphound.com/2016/09/19/edgar-allan-poes-the-raven-the-pop-up-book-edition/

#10yrsago Sitelock abuses DMCA to censor rival’s criticisms https://torrentfreak.com/web-security-firm-sitelock-uses-dmca-to-censor-critics-160920/

#10yrsago Netzpolitik publishes more damning, leaked German surveillance reports, despite previous treason prosecution https://www.techdirt.com/2016/09/20/leaked-oversight-report-shows-illegal-surveillance-massive-constitutional-violations-germanys-intelligence-service/

#10yrsago Web’s inventor and MIT prof explain ICANN to Ted Cruz, using small words https://web.archive.org/web/20160921203119/https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/powerpost/wp/2016/09/20/ted-cruz-is-wrong-about-a-key-internet-agencys-ability-to-censor-free-speech/

#10yrsago Execs with long coporate crime rapsheets stand up for Apple’s tax evasion and “the rule of law” https://web.archive.org/web/20160921002619/https://theintercept.com/2016/09/20/throng-of-corporate-criminals-demands-rule-of-law-in-apple-eu-tax-case/

#10yrsago DIY Epipen: the $30 Epipencil https://fourthievesvinegar.org/2022/07/12/introducing-the-epipencil/

#5yrsago The Framework is the most exciting laptop I've ever used https://pluralistic.net/2021/09/21/monica-byrne/#think-different

#5yrsago Ignore career advice from established writers https://pluralistic.net/2021/09/21/monica-byrne/#pay-it-forward

#5yrsago The Actual Star https://pluralistic.net/2021/09/21/monica-byrne/#like-its-3012

#5yrsago Facebook algorithm boosts pro-Facebook news https://pluralistic.net/2021/09/22/kropotkin-graeber/#zuckerveganism

#5yrsago Mutual Aid and David Graeber https://pluralistic.net/2021/09/22/kropotkin-graeber/#against-just-so

#5yrsago Gig workers around the globe https://pluralistic.net/2021/09/22/kropotkin-graeber/#an-injury-to-one

#1yrago It's still censorship (even if it doesn't violate the First Amendment) https://pluralistic.net/2025/09/22/one-throat-to-choke/#communicable-disease

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

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Received — 20 September 2026 ⏭

Technopolitics

✇Cory Doctorow's craphound.com
By: Cory Doctorow
20 September 2026 at 17:56

The giant head of the Statue of Liberty. Around it are many medieval machines, tended by little medieval rude mechanicals. In the background is a crosshatched architectural drawing of some classical arches and such.

This week on my podcast, I read Technopolitics, my latest Locus Magazine column, about the degree to which AI’s politics are baked in or historically contingent.

These sins are baked into this kind of AI production. There is no way to raise trillions in subsidies that allow AI companies to sell computation at a subsidy that amounts to selling $100 bills for $1 each without also insisting that the end state of all of this is that every job will be swallowed by a chatbot. You can’t raise trillions on this promise with­out “blitzscaled” data-centers – accompanied by climate-shredding gas turbines. You can’t raise trillions without cramming AI into every part of every person’s digital life, without any safeguards for how vulnerable people might use them to sink deep into dangerous delusion.

These are the “technopolitics” of AI: To make this AI, the people in­volved had to inflict all these harms upon us. The important questions are: to what extent are these the necessary technopolitics of AI, and; can those technopolitics change?

Langdon Winner’s 1980 article, “Do Artifacts Have Politics?” is the Ur-text for questions like these. In this seminal essay, the rock critic turned tech scholar Winner demands that we move beyond the simple framing of tech having “intended” and “unintended” consequences, and instead insists that politics come baked into some technologies.

MP3

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