Remember that scene in “The Lion King,” where Mufasa calls Simba to the top of Pride Rock and tells his son that one day, everything the sunlight touches will be his? Netflix co-CEO Ted Sarandos must put that scene on a loop every night to help him fall asleep. That way, it’s also the first thing he hears when he wakes up in the morning, ready for another busy day of using his money and power to make virtually everything so much worse. If only he let the scene play a little longer, he’d hear Mufasa’s critical addendum: “There’s more to being king than getting your way all the time.”

Last week, a still-unconfirmed report in Puck stated that Netflix is entering initial talks to acquire Letterboxd, the film-logging and review platform beloved by hardcore and casual cinephiles alike. Sony Pictures Entertainment, Paramount Skydance, private equity firms RedBird and TPG, and Reddit co-creator Alexis Ohanian have also reportedly tossed their hats in the ring, setting up early sales meetings with Letterboxd. In April, Semafor reported that Letterboxd was also in talks with Comcast spin-off Versant, which owns Fandango and Rotten Tomatoes. As of now, Letterboxd is majority-owned by the Canadian holding company Tiny, which has a 60% stake, while the remaining 40% is owned by the platform’s co-founders Matthew Buchanan and Karl von Randow.

Naturally, the news of a potential corporate sale hit the very active and very opinionated community of Letterboxd users like the two cars that bounce Brad Pitt back and forth between their windshields in “Meet Joe Black.” Each Friday, Letterboxd posts a prompt on its X account asking users to reply with their last four films logged on the platform. Hundreds of people treat the request like religion, posting screenshots of their recent ratings to find new people in the community to befriend and follow. But last week, the replies were inundated with complaints that Letterboxd had defected to the corporate dark side, along with fearful pleas for the platform’s owners to reconsider. An edited screenshot of Letterboxd’s user interface replaced the four film posters with a concise four-word appeal: “PLEASE. DON’T. SELL. OUT,” with the “N” in “DON’T” replaced by Netflix’s unmistakable red logo.

Some may argue that any platform scaling as fast as Letterboxd is bound to go corporate. Since its official debut in 2011, Letterboxd has amassed a whopping 26 million users. At that rate, the stable yet virtually limitless cash flow that comes from selling to a multi-billion-dollar company could be a boon for maintaining consistent growth and usability. (Letterboxd has become somewhat notorious for its extended server outages in the past couple of years.)

But there’s a major difference between Letterboxd selling to a mass-media company like Versant and a glorified porta-potty like Netflix — the dumping ground for all that is lousy and decrepit in film and television. Since its expansion from movie rentals and streaming into original content, Netflix has made it clear that its sole priority is Netflix, not its customers, and certainly not the art of visual media. For a platform like Letterboxd, which has built its brand on reverence for film and all those who love it, forking over ownership to a company like Netflix would be a cold act of back-stabbing betrayal. And while no brand is exempt from selling out, and tying your affection to a business is a fool’s game in the first place, if Letterboxd must change, the least they can do is change with a modicum of integrity.

Since 2011, Letterboxd has transformed from a simple film-logging platform where you can see what your friends are watching into a full-scale film media empire. The site and app are entirely free, but two paid tiers offer more profile customization, filters and features, all with zero third-party ads. It would be an understatement to say that the site’s library of films available for logging, rating and reviewing is extensive. Letterboxd houses virtually every film you could ever think of: blockbusters, indies, international films, softcore retro porn, short films, TV movies, that obscure film you caught half of on television when you were a kid but never stopped thinking about, and much, much more. A built-in function lets users add films to their watchlist with the touch of a button, and watchlists are easily sortable in case you’re in the mood for something specific.

In recent years, Letterboxd has made a foray into journalism, hiring an editorial team of staff and freelancers, who publish solid film writing on Letterboxd Journal. And on red carpets and film festivals, you can find movie and industry leaders feeding their four favorite films into a microphone emblazoned with Letterboxd’s orange, green and blue dot logo.

But despite all of this swift and massive growth, Letterboxd’s ethos has remained extremely simple: Cinephilia can be a solitary passion, but it’s made better with friends.

I’ve been an active Letterboxd user and one of the platform’s many evangelists for nearly a decade. It’s the only social media platform that doesn’t drive up my blood pressure within 15 seconds of logging on. While some use the site as a social network, I like to think of it as a personal diary. For those who use art to help shade in the textures of their lives — as sticking points to shape a memory — there is no better place to do so than Letterboxd. One of my favorite things about the site is that I can look back at the hundreds of films I’ve logged into one easily accessible archive to see what my opinion was on any given film, or who I watched it with and in what context. It’s an amazing place to keep track of your own opinions and watch how they transform. The first time I watched “Vox Lux” in January 2019, I wasn’t so sure about the Natalie Portman pop-star drama, giving it three stars. By the third time I’d logged it in 2020, “Vox Lux” earned a full, effusive five stars, a heart, and a glowing review.

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Like others, I have my own system of beliefs about how the platform is best used and how films should be logged. That’s one of the great things about Letterboxd: Everyone uses it differently, and those variations reflect a wide array of tastes in film. Some cinema snobs might find Letterboxd a distasteful asterisk on film culture. But if you really adore the art form, Letterboxd’s popularity is a rare net positive in an era when tech is largely being used to pit humanity against art and each other.

So, of course, companies like Netflix, Paramount Skydance and Sony would seek to corrupt that purity in pursuit of power. Netflix and other streamers have already split the film industry down the middle, separating those who venerate the art form from those who venerate the dollar, leaving many Hollywood titans flailing somewhere in the middle. Take Rian Johnson, whose deal with Netflix has led to his “Knives Out” films being relegated to tiny theatrical release windows in limited markets before being tossed onto the streamer. (If the franchise didn’t vie for awards, which require a theatrical release for consideration, it likely wouldn’t play in theaters at all.) Then there’s Greta Gerwig, who fought for exclusive 45-day theatrical releases for her upcoming adaptations of “The Chronicles of Narnia” — one of the first major films distributed by Netflix to break from the streaming model Sarandos pioneered. Sarandos has been openly cavalier about his belief that the theatrical release is “outdated,” going so far as to claim that Netflix saved Hollywood. But with the box office rebounding from the COVID-19 pandemic, boasting record returns over the last year, Sarandos and all media companies that subscribe to the Netflix business model are desperately seeking new ways to market bad films.

This is precisely why dedicated Letterboxd users fear a potential sale: If Netflix, Sony or Paramount gets its hands on the platform, Letterboxd is likely to go the way of everything else those companies touch. A streamer-owned film-logging platform can kiss objectivity goodbye. Letterboxd’s “popular with friends” feature would likely be littered with streaming slop. The recently launched Letterboxd Video Store — a “rental store built for film discovery,” filled with curated selections and unreleased novelties  — would become a synergistic attempt to get users to pay to rent streamer-exclusive films without a subscription. Letterboxd Journal would be replaced by the advertorial “journalism” of Netflix Tudum, or lame writing about the library of films currently available on whichever streamer or studio makes the shiniest offer. Letterboxd, as we know and love it, would cease to exist, transforming into another nu-media ouroboros. Even if nothing gold can stay, must it always meet such a tragic end?

I wish there were a more pleasant answer. Maybe there’s a chance Letterboxd will be sold to Versant, and the company will integrate movie tickets and Rotten Tomatoes scores directly into its interface — it wouldn’t be the worst fate. But if I could log how many times I’ve seen this sort of film play out on Letterboxd, it would be one of my most-watched. MySpace and Tumblr, once spaces for boundless creativity, died the moment they sold out. Facebook revealed itself as Satan’s playground. Twitter opened a floodgate of Nazis and nonconsensual, illegal AI porn the moment Elon Musk took control.

Letterboxd was once a shining beacon among all of these horror stories, which already had their own unique problems before their formal acquisitions. In its 15 years of operation, Letterboxd has only adapted in ways that better serve its users and the film industry as a whole. Sure, it might be annoying that studios are trying to pass off overly enthusiastic five-star Letterboxd reviews as legitimate film criticism in marketing on posters and in trailers. But that’s not Letterboxd’s fault. The site’s only flaw is being a nice place to spend some time online — interacting with friends while finding new movies to watch and adore or abhor — in an age when online joy is punishable by death.

I guess if Letterboxd decides to sell to a media company and becomes objectively worse, disappointed users can migrate to A24’s physical, paper-bound film logs. There’s nothing unsavory there! Oh, that’s right, A24 just took $75 million of Google money to fund AI development. Pencil and computer paper, it is. If Netflix gets into the office supplies business, then we’re really screwed.

The post If Letterboxd sells out to Netflix, the people lose appeared first on Salon.com.

There’s a new kind of influencer making the rounds on TikTok and Instagram: the loneliness influencer. Most of these influencers are young women, and “loneliness” might be a slight misnomer. They claim they aren’t lonely, simply alone — no friends, no family, no kids. And they prefer it that way.

“I really wanted to convey a normal life of somebody that doesn’t have this big, great, fun social life,” one influencer, Lana Isa, told Vox. “Like, what does a life look like as someone that doesn’t really have this great big social life, is not really interested in dating and generally prefers nights in? If you were to watch a Friday night in my life, you’d essentially just watch a girl enjoying her peace.”

Isa, and influencers like her, are just one representation of a larger trend, though. The Atlantic’s Faith Hill, who recently wrote a story titled “The Strange Appeal of the Solitude Influencer,” told Today, Explained co-host Noel King that, even though you mostly hear about young men facing a loneliness epidemic, women are having a hard time, too.

“If you actually look at some of these statistics, young women are struggling a lot on a lot of these measures, and, in some cases, more than young men,” Hill said.

Hill spoke with Noel about what’s going on with young women, how their crisis looks different from men’s, and why they’re covered differently.

Below is an excerpt of their conversation, edited for length and clarity. There’s much more in the full podcast, so listen to Today, Explained wherever you get your podcasts, including Apple Podcasts, Pandora, and Spotify.

In the first half of the show, we talked to a young woman who has made a name for herself as a loneliness influencer. What do you think is going on here?

My first impulse when I heard about this genre of video that people are watching is that there’s a lot of people spending a ton of time alone.

We’ve heard a lot of people talk about the loneliness epidemic, so I thought people were getting social connection through these videos from a safe distance, rather than spending time in person with people. Maybe there’s some of that going on. But, I also realized, as I was looking through these videos and reading all the comments, that a lot of the people commenting seemed to have a lot going on in their lives socially, so much so that they were busy, and exhausted, and burned out.

For some people, the appeal was actually in the fantasy of it, in the way that some people would look at influencers posting about these fabulous, exotic vacations they can’t afford to take. People have a very complicated relationship to solitude. People are working long hours. A lot of people [are] taking care of family members without much help. Many people are sort of torn between these needs for social connection and solitude.

Does that mean that this is, perhaps, not as sad as it appears on its face?

I don’t think it’s all sad. My heart goes out to people who are needing more solitude, as well as more social connection. Most people probably don’t have the perfect balance, and I can relate to that myself. I feel like I either have too many plans or not enough.

It’s not necessarily all happy, but it doesn’t mean that there are just so many people out there who are only getting social connection through these videos. I think there’s something a little more complicated going on.

We’ve all heard about the male loneliness crisis. You wrote a very interesting piece that basically said, actually, women are in crisis, as well.

I’ve just been hearing so much about men, and especially young men, being in crisis. I think there’s a lot of reasons we should take that seriously, and I do. But I felt like in those conversations, young women were kind of being flattened into a comparison point where, instead of people talking about how on some measures young men are struggling more than they used to, it got twisted into “young men are struggling more than women.”

There’s this image of the thriving girlboss, the one who is going to college, graduating college, entering the workforce on these conventional measures of success, doing so well. But if you actually look at some of these statistics, young women are struggling a lot on a lot of these measures, and in some cases, more than young men. And so, I don’t think it needs to be a suffering competition, but I did think part of the story was not coming through.

In what ways are women struggling?

Women have, for a long time, reported depression and anxiety at higher rates than men. That is getting worse. It seems like mental health on a lot of different measures — different kinds of stress and distress and suicidality — young women are reporting that at higher and higher rates. It turns out that women actually attempt suicide at higher rates than men do, on average. And the reason that more men die of suicide is that they’re more likely to use lethal means such as firearms.

A lot of times this conversation really revolves around college attendance rates, and women are attending and graduating college at higher rates than men. But a woman with a bachelor’s degree still makes less than a man with a bachelor’s degree on average, even within the same field of study.

When I talk to people for this story, researchers and therapists, I heard that a lot of young women are in for a rude awakening when they graduate from school. They’ve been in this bubble where they did feel like they could grow and thrive and they were taken seriously. And then, you go out into the real world, where sexism is still very real, and a lot of women are working in workplaces where they realize they’re not taken as seriously, or the people around them who are in positions of power are all men. That’s a difficult realization.

Why, if women and men are both in crisis, did men pull focus?

Women, as an overall population, tend to be a fairly high-functioning one in this narrative. I talked to someone who had trained as a medical sociologist, and she told me a saying that they used to use in this field was, ‘Men die quicker, but women are sicker.’

Women are more likely to endure a lot of chronic illnesses and to sort of soldier on with their pain unnoticed. And we might not be taking that as seriously, because the idea that women are struggling isn’t necessarily a new one or a super surprising one to a lot of people. I think men having a hard time is more of a news story, and we have become, perhaps, kind of inert to women’s distress in this way.

I wonder, as you found yourself covering this, where do you find the hope here?

I am heartened that we’re talking about [young adults] a lot. There’s been a lot of concern lately about Gen Z, and a lot of what we’re talking about when we talk about young men struggling also applies to young women, so we’re onto some of the right things.

I wrote another piece about young adulthood a while back that was really about the idea that young adulthood actually is a really hard developmental phase. And when I published that article, I think for a lot of readers, it seemed to be somewhat of a surprise that young adults are struggling, too. Even just since I’ve written that, people have talked more about young adults struggling. So I do think people are starting to take that seriously and understand that this is an age group that might need help.

Today's links

• Tiktokification shall set us free: Zuck keeps accidentally freeing his hostages.
• Hey look at this: Delights to delectate.
• Object permanence: B2B Trotsky; Public service games; NZ 3 strikes rule; Snowden, vocalist; Obama says money compromised him; Bullshit treescrapers; Tesla's odometer heist.
• Upcoming appearances: Los Angeles, San Francisco, London, Berlin, Barcelona, NYC, Hay-on-Wye, London, NYC.
• Recent appearances: Where I've been.
• Latest books: You keep readin' em, I'll keep writin' 'em.
• Upcoming books: Like I said, I'll keep writin' 'em.
• Colophon: All the rest.

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Tiktokification shall set us free (permalink)

Mark Zuckerberg has a problem with your friends: they're the reason you signed up to use his platform, but they stubbornly refuse to organize your socialization to "maximize engagement." Every time you and your friends wrap up a social interaction and log off, Zuckerberg loses revenue.

After all, by definition, you and your friends have a lot of shared context. You probably feel mostly the same way about most things. You probably mostly consume the same kind of media. You probably mostly consume the same kinds of news. You and your friends make each other's lives better in lots of ways, but typically not by surprising one another. On a typical day, no friend of yours is going to absolutely floor you with a novel thought or finding that sparks hours of furious conversation and argumentation.

And speaking of argumentation: you and your friends probably don't argue that much – I mean, sure, you'll have "friendly disagreements" (again, by definition), but if there's a friend who sparks furious, frustrating, irresistible feuds that drag on and on, chances are that person won't be your friend anymore.

Facebook experienced sustained, meteoric growth by letting people connect with their friends, but Zuckerberg quickly came to understand that his path to revenue maximization ran through nonconsensually cramming strangers' posts into your eyeballs, in the hopes that you would lose yourself in long, pointless arguments.

But that, too, hit a limit. Most of us don't like having our limbic systems tormented by strangers. As anyone who is sick to the back teeth of just hearing the word "Trump" can attest, living in a trollocracy is exhausting.

Enter Tiktok. Tiktok found a way to connect you to strangers who don't make you angry. By offering performers money if they produced media that you "engaged" with, Tiktok offloaded the work of convincing you to conduct your online activities in a way that maximized opportunities to show you an ad onto an army of global theater kids who would spend every hour that god sent trying to figure out how to keep you looking at Tiktok.

This was hugely successful – so successful, in fact, that Tiktok was able to cheat, overriding its own algorithmic guesses about which of its billion cable-access television channels you'd stare at the longest with a "heating tool" that lets the company trick some of those theater kids into thinking that Tiktok was actually more suited to them than other platforms:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/21/potemkin-ai/#hey-guys

For zuckermuskian social media bosses, Tiktok became an object of fierce envy. Here was the ultimate Tom Sawyer robo-fence-painter, a self-licking ice-cream cone that motivated people to convince each other to make money for you. Facebook, Instagram and Twitter took a hard pivot away from showing you the things that the people you loved had to say, in favor of showing you short videos of people whose parents didn't give them enough affection in their childhood, desperately shoving lemons up their noses in a bid to win your approval (and a revshare split with the platforms).

It worked. Sorta. Thing is, some of those "content creators" are actually very good, and none of them appreciate being jerked around. They quite rightly see their reason for being on the platforms as improving their own lives, not the bottom line of the platforms' owners and executives. They may be more "engaging" than your friends, but they're also a lot mouthier and feel entitled to a say in how the platform operates.

What's a billionaire solipsist to do? Obviously, the answer is "AI creators." An "AI creator" is like a "creator" in that it works to maximize your engagement with the platform – and thus the number of ads that can be crammed into your face-holes – but, unlike a "creator," it makes no demands upon the platform and exists solely to serve the platform's shareholders and executives. It's the perfect realization of the solipsist fantasy of a world without people:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/01/05/fisher-price-steering-wheel/#billionaire-solipsism

But there's a problem with this plan: your friends are not a liability for a platform. Your friends are the platforms' single most important asset. Your friends are why the platforms are so "sticky." The platforms don't "hack your dopamine loops" – they just take your friends hostage, and even though you love your friends, they are a monumental pain in the ass, and if you can't even agree on what board-game you're going to play this weekend, how are you going to agree when it's time to leave Facebook, and where to go next?

https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/08/watch-the-surpluses/#exogenous-shocks

So long as you love your friends more than you hate Zuckerberg or Musk, you will remain stuck to their platforms. The platform bosses know this, and they inflict pain on you that is titrated to be just below the threshold where you hate the platforms more than you love your friends.

But as much as the platform bosses rely on your love of your friends, they still view your friends as liabilities, thanks to those friends' unreasonable insistence on structuring their relationship with you to maximize their own satisfaction, rather than how much time you spend looking at ads. So the platforms are deliberately disconnecting you from your friends by minimizing the fraction of your feed that is given over to posts from people you follow, and replacing those friends with a succession of ever-more fungible posters: trolls, creators, and chatbots.

The key word here is fungible. A feed composed of things posted by people you have a personal connection to is non-fungible: it cannot be swapped for a feed of things posted by strangers. Your friends fulfill a very specific purpose in your life that strangers – even extremely cool strangers – cannot match.

On the other hand: one feed of algorithmically selected, entertaining amateur dramatics is broadly equivalent to any other feed of algorithmically selected amateur dramatics. That goes double for feeds whose performers are "multi-homing" on more than one platform – whether you see the extremely charming and interesting Vlog Brothers in a Youtube feed, a Tiktok feed or an Insta feed makes no difference (to you – but it matters a lot to the platform bosses). That goes quintuple for feeds composed of AI slop, which is literally the most interchangeable video that modern science is capable of producing.

All of which is to say: the platforms are deliberately feeding their most important commercial assets into a shredder, in a fit of pique over your friends' unwillingness to act like chatbots. Every day and in every way, the platforms are making it easier to leave them for some rival's service, chasing the billionaire solipsist's dream of a world without people:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/02/17/live-by-the-swordlive-by-the-sword/#unfriending-tom

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Hey look at this (permalink)

• Keep Android Open https://keepandroidopen.org/cta/

• Here comes the sun: New bill would let New Yorkers hang solar panels from windows https://gothamist.com/news/here-comes-the-sun-new-bill-would-let-new-yorkers-hang-solar-panels-from-windows

• The OTW is Recruiting for Legal Committee Paralegals, Legal Committee Trademark Specialists, and Policy & Abuse Volunteers https://www.transformativeworks.org/the-otw-is-recruiting-for-legal-committee-paralegals-legal-committee-trademark-specialists-and-policy-abuse-volunteers/

• Tech Giants and Giant Slayers: The case for Digital Sovereignty and the Digital Commons https://www.openrightsgroup.org/publications/tech-giants-and-giant-slayers-the-case-for-digital-sovereignty-and-the-digital-commons/

• What We’re Reading https://link.newyorker.com/view/5be9ea0f3f92a404690229b0qwzpk.245v/8abef04b

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Object permanence (permalink)

#25yrsago Leon Trotsky, B2B visionary https://web.archive.org/web/20020211212222/http://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/works/1935/1935-ame.htm

#20yrsago What would a BBC “public service game” look like? https://web.archive.org/web/20060417123908/http://crystaltips.typepad.com/wonderland/2006/04/on_public_servi.html

#15yrsago New Zealand’s 3-strikes rule can go into effect in September https://legislation.govt.nz/bill/government/2010/119/en/latest/#DLM3331800

#15yrsago Lawsuit: DRM spied on me, gathered my personal info, sent it to copyright enforcers who called me with $150,000 legal threat https://www.techdirt.com/2011/04/14/drm-accused-sending-personal-info-to-help-with-licensing-shakedown/

#10yrsago Edward Snowden provides vocals on a beautiful new Jean-Michel Jarre composition https://web.archive.org/web/20190415045927/https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-news/edward-snowdens-new-job-electronic-music-vocalist-184650/

#10yrsago Uber and Lyft don’t cover their cost of capital and rely on desperate workers https://www.ianwelsh.net/the-market-fairy-will-not-solve-the-problems-of-uber-and-lyft/?

#10yrsago Treescrapers are bullshit https://99percentinvisible.org/article/renderings-vs-reality-rise-tree-covered-skyscrapers/

#10yrsago Before and After Mexico: a Bruce Sterling story about the eco-pocalypse https://bruces.medium.com/before-and-after-mexico-f3371c346c8a#.33e9poqnx

#10yrsago Barack Obama: Taking money from 1 percenters compromised my politics https://web.archive.org/web/20160415201709/https://theintercept.com/2016/04/15/barack-obama-never-said-money-wasnt-corrupting-in-fact-he-said-the-opposite/

#1yrago Tesla accused of hacking odometers to weasel out of warranty repairs https://pluralistic.net/2025/04/15/musklemons/#more-like-edison-amirite

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Upcoming appearances (permalink)

• Los Angeles: LA Times Festival of Books, Apr 19
  https://www.latimes.com/events/festival-of-books

• San Francisco: 2026 Berkeley Spring Forum on M&A and the Boardroom, Apr 23
  https://www.theberkeleyforum.com/#agenda

• London: Resisting Big Tech Empires (LSBU), Apr 25
  https://www.tickettailor.com/events/globaljusticenow/2042691

• NYC: Enshittification at Commonweal Ventures, Apr 29
  https://luma.com/ssgfvqz8

• NYC: Techidemic with Sarah Jeong, Tochi Onyibuchi and Alia Dastagir (PEN World Voices), Apr 30
  https://worldvoices.pen.org/event/techidemic/

• Barcelona: Internet no tiene que ser un vertedero (Global Digital Rights Forum), May 13
  https://encuentroderechosdigitales.com/en/

• Berlin: Re:publica, May 18-20
  https://re-publica.com/de/news/rp26-sprecher-cory-doctorow

• Berlin: Enshittification at Otherland Books, May 19
  https://www.otherland-berlin.de/de/event-details/cory-doctorow.html

• Hay-on-Wye: HowTheLightGetsIn, May 22-25
  https://howthelightgetsin.org/festivals/hay/big-ideas-2

• SXSW London, Jun 2
  https://www.sxswlondon.com/session/how-big-tech-broke-the-internet-b3c4a901

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

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Recent appearances (permalink)

• Pete "Mayor" Buttigieg (No Gods No Mayors)
  https://www.patreon.com/posts/pete-mayor-with-155614612

• The internet is getting worse (CBC The National)
  https://youtu.be/dCVUCdg3Uqc?si=FMcA0EI_Mi13Lw-P

• Do you feel screwed over by big tech? (Ontario Today)
  https://www.cbc.ca/listen/live-radio/1-45-ontario-today/clip/16203024-do-feel-screwed-big-tech

• Launch for Cindy's Cohn's "Privacy's Defender" (City Lights)
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WuVCm2PUalU

• Chicken Mating Harnesses (This Week in Tech)
  https://twit.tv/shows/this-week-in-tech/episodes/1074

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Latest books (permalink)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Upcoming books (permalink)

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

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

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

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

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

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Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources:

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