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Received — 28 April 2026 ⏭

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

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


Today's links


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Hey look at this (permalink)


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

Object permanence (permalink)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Upcoming appearances (permalink)

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


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

Recent appearances (permalink)


A grid of my books with Will Stahle covers..

Latest books (permalink)


A cardboard book box with the Macmillan logo.

Upcoming books (permalink)

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

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

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

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

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


Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources:

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

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

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

  • A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING

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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 — 6 July 2023 ⏭

Revenge of the Chickenized Reverse-Centaurs

✇OneZero - Medium
By: Cory Doctorow
19 April 2022 at 23:46

Algorithms and worker power

A horse-headed “reverse-centaur” whose eye has been replaced by the glowing eye of HAL9000 from 2001: A Space Odyssey. They are wearing a hi-viz vest and posed in shelving-aisles of an industrial warehouse.
Cryteria, CC BY, modified

In AI circles, a “centaur” describes a certain kind of machine/human collaboration, in which “decision-support” systems (which the field loves to call “AI”s) are paired with human beings for results that draw upon the strengths of each, such as when a human chess master and a chess-playing computer program collaborate to smash their competition.

In labor circles, “chickenization” refers to exploitative working arrangements that resemble the plight of the American poultry farmer. The U.S. poultry industry has been taken over by three monopolistic packers, who have divided the nation up into exclusive territories, so that each chicken farmer has only one buyer for their birds.

Farmers are “independent small businesspeople” who nominally run their own operations, but because all their products must be sold through a single poultry processor, that processor is able to exercise enormous control over the operation. The processor tells the farmer which birds to raise, as well as what the birds are to be fed, how much, and on what schedule. The processor tells the farmer how to build their coops and when the lights are to go on and off. The processor tells the farmer which vets to use, and tells the vets which medicines to prescribe.

The processor tells the farmer everything…except how much they’ll be able to sell their birds for. That is determined unilaterally when the farmer brings their birds to market, and the payout is titrated to the cent, to represent exactly enough money for the farmer to buy birds and feed and vet services through the processor’s preferred suppliers, and to service the debts on the coops and light and land, but not one penny more.

Chickenization has spread beyond chicken farming. Uber drivers are paid on a variable reinforcement drip-feed that gives them just enough to keep up the lease and gas and insurance payments on their vehicles, but not enough to give them breathing space to think about changing careers.

Likewise for Amazon drivers. Amazon styles the drivers as subcontractors working for a “Delivery Service Partner” (DSP), and the DSP is fully chickenized: They have to buy Amazon vans and subject them to Amazon maintenance, but Amazon reserves the right to fire a DSP without notice, stranding them with vehicle and lot leases and payroll liabilities.

The DSP owners are chickenized, but the drivers themselves? They’re more like the chickens. Or rather, they’re centaurs: From the instant you get behind the wheel of an Amazon van, you are being surveilled by an array of cameras hooked up to high-handed, judgemental AIs that monitor your facial expressions, your eye movements, and your ability to meet an impossible quota.

But even though an Amazon driver represents the tight coupling of a human and a machine to do more than either could do on their own, that’s not the kind of centaur that we talk about when it’s a chess master paired with a chess program. That chess master is being augmented by the machine, and the machine is the junior partner in the relationship. The human is the head, and the AI is the body.

By contrast, an Amazon driver is a reverse-centaur. The AI is in charge, and the human is the junior partner. The AI is the head, telling the body what to do. The driver is the body — the slow-witted, ambulatory meat that is puppeteered by the AI master.

The next generation of labor exploitation merges chickenization with reverse-centaurs. DoorDash and other gig companies use apps to script the movements and conduct of “independent contractors” to the finest degree, while hiding their true wages from them until they’ve finished their jobs.

The simplistic answer to this is, “Well, if you don’t like it, don’t work for a gig company.”

But that’s not how labor rights work. Behind every labor struggle is a recognition that business owners have negotiating power over workers that will, over time, shift more and more value from workers to bosses. Labor market outcomes are not a matter of individuals bargaining with one another: In a labor market, atomized workers bargain with consolidated firms.

It’s hard for workers to play companies off against each other to get higher wages (and companies get furious when they pull it off), but it’s easy for businesses to play workers off against each other to pay lower wages.

Historically, worker power has come from unions, which were able to bargain for workers at a specific job-site, or across a sector, and, just as importantly, to win labor regulations that protect all workers. Forty years of all-out assaults on labor organizing have weakened that source of worker power, and both Republicans and Democrats are deeply committed to keeping unions weak.

Despite this lack of institutional support, unions are coming back with a vengeance, and they’re pulling it off by creating new, high-tech organizing tools and strategies that answer high-tech employer tactics with high-tech worker tactics.

Using messaging tools to organize unions is an effective but indirect answer to chickenization and reverse-centaur tactics. A new kind of tech-based labor tool confronts these tactics head-on: counter-apps that help workers seize the means of computation from their bosses.

Take Para, a collection of apps for gig workers that undo the reverse-centaur relationship between workers and gig employers. For example, when DoorDash sends a job offer to a “Dasher,” Para unwraps that offer and reveals the total compensation on offer, which the DoorDash app hides by default until the job is done.

DoorDash understands that its customers want cheap deliveries, and it understands that its drivers don’t want to service cheap jobs where they actually lose money after factoring in time, gas, and depreciation. By hiding the total compensation from drivers, DoorDash is able to trick some of them into making unprofitable runs, allowing the company to offer customer-attracting loss-leader prices that are billed to drivers.

That’s where Para steps in. Para’s long-term goal is to build apps that automate the process by which workers play gig companies off against one another. That way, the auction process, where workers bid to see who will do the job for the lowest pay, is replaced by a process where employers bid to see who will pay the most for a worker’s time.

That’s a powerful vision, but it’s only part of the answer to the chickenized reverse-centaur industry. After all, there’s only so much bargaining power an individual worker can exert. Groups of workers, on the other hand, have a long track record of wringing concessions from employers.

Dashers understand this. The #DECLINENOW movement organizes Dashers (via online forums) to turn down all jobs below a certain payment threshold, with the understanding that the DoorDash algorithm will bid up the offered payments until a worker agrees to do the job.

That’s a process that’s ripe for automation — imagine if Dashers could form co-ops around apps that hid job offers unless they came with a profitable payout.

Counter-algorithmic activism is subtly different from Para’s model: While Para exposes hidden information and automates the process of uncovering it, counter-algorithmic work actually seeks to turn workers into centaurs, not reverse-centaurs.

For example, in 2020, there was a widely shared story about Amazon drivers hanging their burner phones from tree branches near Amazon warehouses. They were doing this because the Amazon delivery algorithm required them to make impossible quotas — impossible in part because of the number of deliveries they had to make, but also impossible because the system wouldn’t allocate a delivery to them unless they were close to the warehouse. By hanging their phones from trees at the warehouse gates, the drivers were able to trick the system into allocating deliveries to them.

This is a crude hack, but in Indonesia, it’s been elevated to a science, thanks to the proliferation of tuyul apps. These are apps created by and for delivery drivers that modify the official delivery dispatch apps. One key tuyul feature: spoofing the GPS telemetry fed to the dispatch algorithms so drivers don’t have to enter dangerous traffic jams around train stations in order to book rides with commuters as they arrive.

In other words, tuyul apps dispense with the fuggly hack of hanging phones from trees, and replace it with transforming phones to act on behalf of workers, not their bosses. (Tuyul apps do a lot more! Check out Rida Qadri’s fantastic reporting on the subject.)

Labor movements have done the most good when they build solidarity across sectors and industries. Lucky (?) for the chickenized reverse-centaurs, there’s plenty of people finding themselves in that circumstance.

Take Taylor Lorenz’s excellent Washington Post article on “algospeak,” an emerging dialect of euphemisms that social media users deploy to bypass the filters that the dominant platforms use to keep discourse brand-safe and minimize publicity scandals.

Much of that article dealt with the problems all communicators face. For example, if you want to talk about suicide and mental health, you have to use the euphemism “become unalive” because the filters downrank any mention of suicide.

But algospeak isn’t just a communications issue: It’s a labor issue. The people who truly live and die by algorithmic ranking choices are the people whose ability to put groceries on the table is directly tied to whether a social media platform suppresses their videos or text.

These video creators are also the source of the bulk of the platforms’ wealth, but — like other chickenized workers — they have no way to know what they’ll get paid for their labor, and don’t find out until the algorithm digests their materials and decides whether or not they will be exposed to the people who’ve explicitly subscribed to their feeds.

These workers are also allies in the fight to create true centaurs out of reverse centaurs. That’s where Tracking Exposed comes in: They’re a loose collective of digital human rights advocates who offer browser plugins that help reverse-engineer the recommendation systems of Facebook, Pornhub, Amazon, TikTok, and YouTube.

These are producing data that creators can use to “walk without rhythm so they don’t attract the sandworm” (AKA the algorithm’s downranking fist). This is fully compatible with the Online Creators’ Association’s demand for “Transparent and Responsive Moderation.”

But these analyses are also yielding new recommendation systems: Tracking Exposed’s YouChoose tool replaces YouTube’s recommendations with recommendations from across the web, which you can understand and modify.

It’s not just online creators and Amazon drivers and Dashers who have natural solidarity when it comes to rendering algorithmic judgments legible and accountable. Tracking Exposed’s other work includes detailed analysis of the way that these systems influence elections and how recommenders create “an alternate universe” in autocratic, warlike states.

The pandemic was a boon to the bossware industry, as locked-down employees discovered how quickly “work from home” could turn into “live at work.” The promise of bossware — tools that monitor your face, your fingers, your conversations and more — is that someday, all workers can be chickenized reverse-centaurs.

The project of understanding and then seizing the algorithm couldn’t be more important to these workers, and soon enough, to all of us.

Cory Doctorow (craphound.com) is a science fiction author, activist, and blogger. He has a podcast, a newsletter, a Twitter feed, a Mastodon feed, and a Tumblr feed. He was born in Canada, became a British citizen and now lives in Burbank, California. His latest nonfiction book is How to Destroy Surveillance Capitalism. His latest novel for adults is Attack Surface. His latest short story collection is Radicalized. His latest picture book is Poesy the Monster Slayer. His latest YA novel is Pirate Cinema. His latest graphic novel is In Real Life. His forthcoming books include Chokepoint Capitalism: How to Beat Big Tech, Tame Big Content, and Get Artists Paid (with Rebecca Giblin), a book about artistic labor market and excessive buyer power; Red Team Blues, a noir thriller about cryptocurrency, corruption and money-laundering (Tor, 2023); and The Lost Cause, a utopian post-GND novel about truth and reconciliation with white nationalist militias (Tor, 2023).

Revenge of the Chickenized Reverse-Centaurs was originally published in OneZero on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

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