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Pluralistic: Adversarial interoperability is a team sport (21 Oct 2026)

✇Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
By: Cory Doctorow


Today's links

  • Adversarial interoperability is a team sport: Vibe-coded jailbreaks are fun, but don't solve the problem.
  • Hey look at this: Delights to delectate.
  • Object permanence: Labour Whip's pro-Iraq war threats; LoC's emulators; Kevin Mitnick plays CIA stooge; ICE: "The warrant is coming out of my balls"; WIPO's secret trademark meeting; Linking isn't libel (in Canada); Make: singing busts; Tory minister kills Turing's Law; Trump hotels rebrand as "Scion".
  • Upcoming appearances: Vancouver, Ottawa, Vienna, Kilkenny, Courtenay, Vancouver, 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 medieval engraving of an Italianate city; floating in the middle is a giant skull (anterior view). Surrounding the skull is a series of 17th C European machine parts, being worked by tiny engravings of 17th C rude mechanicals. A strangely erotic, massive flower looms out of the right; standing amid its proudly thrusting stamen is a 17th C swordsman.

Adversarial interoperability is a team sport (permalink)

Enshittification is particularly galling because (in theory, at least), digital technology should be really hard to enshittify.

That's because the only digital computer we know how to build is the "Turing-complete, universal von Neumann machine," which is to say, a calculating engine capable of computing every valid program. In some deep, important, foundational sense, every computer is the same as every other computer. Sure, they vary in terms of speed, storage and RAM, but given enough time and electricity, every computer can run every program.

This has profound implications for enshittification. Say a tech boss takes away a feature you value (as when Sonos pushed an update that removed nearly all the functionality from its "smart" speakers), or adds a feature you hate (like when Chamberlain blocked third-party apps from controlling its garage doors so it could force its customers to view seven ads before they could open or close their garages). At that point, a programmer can write an "interoperable" program that restores the good feature or blocks the bad one.

This program can be costlessly and instantaneously distributed to every affected technology user, and those users will likely pay something for it. After all, enshittification is a way to shift value away from technology users to tech companies, which makes the case for you paying for disenshittification technology that wrestles that value back.

All of that means that, in a state of nature, companies that are contemplating enshittification need to worry that their greed will tempt new companies to enter the market and poach their customers and suppliers. This alone might be enough to frighten companies off from enshittificatory gambits, and if companies press ahead regardless, then they open market opportunities for better companies that can costlessly, instantaneously usurp the original manufacturer's relationship with their entire affected customer base.

That's how it should work. But in 1998, Bill Clinton signed the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, and Section 1201 of the DMCA establishes a felony (punishable by a five-year prison sentence and a $500,000 fine) for reverse-engineering and modifying technology without the manufacturer's permission. Then, the US Trade Rep spent the next 25 years making sure that every US trading partner had an identical (or even worse!) "anticircumvention" law:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/05/26/babyish-radical-extremists/#cancon

The result is a grotesquely asymmetrical digital world, in which companies are free to use the flexibility of digital computers to downgrade or brick your digital devices, but where you commit a crime if you avail yourself of a countermeasure to get more out of something you own. This is the core technological factor at play in enshittification.

Enter AI. Thanks to vibe-coding, everyday people are rolling their own software for their devices and building the tools to shatter the digital locks that manufacturers use to block disenshittification. An excellent article by 404 Media's Jason Koebler runs down some of these hacks, including drop-in replacements for smart TV software that blocks the endless ads and surveillance that have made TVs all but unusable:

https://www.404media.co/reverse-engineer-anything-is-the-new-wild-west-of-ai/

These AI tools mix several techniques to disenshittify users' devices. One major component is automating the installation of existing alternative firmware for these devices that have been (possibly illegally) created by hobbyists and uploaded to various code repositories. Installing these alternative OSes is typically a gnarly task, requiring the user to do a lot of complex, fiddly, highly technical work to bypass their devices' digital locks.

In a world without anticircumvention law, a company that sold alternative OSes could hire a ton of programmers and UX developers to smooth over this process, but this is beyond the reach of a typical hobbyist or even a community of hobbyists, especially if they must operate in the shadows, under the threat of civil and criminal liability.

There's a useful analogy here to the trajectory of desktop versions of GNU/Linux. The first time I tried to install Linux (on an original iMac, in the late 1990s), the installation process included a multi-week post-installation wrangle that saw me (often unsuccessfully) compiling key modules from source code and then painstakingly configuring them to get the computer's graphics and I/O working reliably.

Fast forward 30+ years and installing Linux is trivial, thanks to highly capitalized companies like Canonical (makers of Ubuntu, the flavor of Linux I've used for nearly 20 years now). Installing Ubuntu today merely requires that you download the OS to a thumbdrive, reboot your computer using the drive as a startup disk, and click "install." Canonical's installer automatically hunts down the correct software for your hardware and configures it. Canonical writes and contributes to a lot of parts of the Linux OS, but the most important work it does is the fiddly, painstaking, labor- and capital-intensive work of perfecting that installer so it Just Works.

Much of what a vibe-coded jailbreaking tool does is stand in for Canonical, but for hobbyist OSes for smart TVs and speakers and many other devices. These LLMs patiently research every weird error and peccadillo and parse through message boards and logfiles detailing other hobbyists' struggles to get the code working and methodically apply and adapt those solutions until your device Just Works.

Some of these vibe-coded interop tools go farther than that. According to Koebler's coverage, some device owners had their coding assistants scratch-build entirely new, heavily customized OSes for their devices, complete with bypasses that allow this new code to be installed despite the manufacturer's countermeasures which are designed to prevent this. Delightfully, many of these users have created software that revives their bricked, discontinued devices. This poses the possibility of a world in which manufacturers no longer have the last word in your use of your own property: the mere fact that the manufacturer lost interest in a device and killswitched it does not mean that you must consign that valuable device to a landfill to become immortal, toxic e-waste.

All of this is good news. Some of the most sophisticated jailbreaking tools (such as those on the super viral "Reverse Engineer Anything" Github page) run locally, on your own computer, without invoking the "frontier models" that the big, awful AI companies have created:

https://github.com/morluto/rea

This is good even if you're just modifying your own devices to get them to more closely conform to your own use-case. LLMs are genuinely good at coming up with the abstruse and obscure configuration lines and other incantations to get your technology working. Recently, I used a local model to fine-tune the power-management on my new laptop in ways that go beyond the options that are exposed through user-friendly graphic interfaces. The LLM spat out a grub "GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT" line that (again) Just Worked.

The last time I had to do this, I spent days painstakingly trouble-shooting options by trial-and-error. Using a chatbot to fill in the gaps left by decisions about which configuration options to place within reach of regular users and which to reserve for power-users has made my computer much more useful to me for the things I want to do, like writing and making collages.

The reality is that it's just not practical for technology developers to turn every conceivable function of your computer into a simple-to-use, accessible tool. A large part of technology design is about leaving things out (or, as my favorite Eno Oblique Strategy goes, "Be the first person to not do something that no one else has ever thought of not doing before"). No matter how thoughtful and diligent a technology designer is, they will never fully anticipate the needs and exigencies of their users. That's why the motto of the disability rights movement is "Nothing about us without us."

The users of technology know more about their use-cases than can ever be captured through a requirements gathering exercise and user testing. One of the best and proudest legacies of technology is the lineage of "user-friendly" programming tools that let nontechnical people design their own applications that exactly met their needs, from Hypercard to Visual Basic to Scratch, a lineage that vibe-coding tools are arguably part of:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/09/25/other-people/#right-there

But these tools are not perfect (nothing is). For all that Hypercard lets you do many things that would otherwise require a skilled programmer, it was also always limited relative to, say, writing MacOS code in Objective C. Your Hypercard program might do exactly what you needed it to, but slowly, and sometimes unreliably, and with serious limitations, such as a relatively low ceiling for the number of records you could add to a database.

Vibe-coded personal apps aren't necessarily subject to these limitations, but they come with some significant risks. Vibe-code can have serious security vulnerabilities that expose the user to things like identity theft or sextortion. It's conceivable that a vibe-coded garage-door opener app might make it possible for attackers to open your garage door when you're not home (or worse, when you are!). Depending on your risk-tolerance and expertise, these might be acceptable prices, or they might be too high.

But it's important to clearly identify the problem here: if the alternative OS you install on your smart TV exposes you to privacy-invading hack attacks, the problem is the defect in that software. The problem isn't that you had the temerity to rip out the manufacturer's own software and replace it with code of your choosing. You bought that TV, it's yours, and you don't owe the manufacturer an obligation to expose yourself to its own, built-in, intentional surveillance and invasive ads.

Here's a parallel: you have the right to put any shoelaces in your running shoes. Sure, Nike might prefer you to lace up your Jordans with its expensive OEM laces, but that's Nike's problem, not yours. Now, Nike might argue that by using no-name laces, you run the risk of having a lace break while you're running, which could also break your ankle. That's certainly a possibility: shoelaces do break, and Nike might be justifiably proud of the quality of its laces. But if your generic laces snap (and so does your ankle), the problem is that the shoelaces you chose were defective. The problem is not that you chose someone else's laces.

Your stuff is yours. You can put anyone's milk on your cereal, not just the milk that Kellogg's endorses. If the milk you choose is sour and you have to pour your cereal down the toilet, that's too bad, but it doesn't mean that Kellogg's should have the right to shame you for having the temerity to choose the milk you preferred, and it certainly doesn't militate for DMCA-style enforcement to coerce you into using Kellogg's official milk in the name of protecting you from food wastage.

I raise this because there's a live debate over this subject, which is well represented in the latest 404 Media podcast:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UbG1qwxMtU0

In the podcast, Koebler and his 404 co-founder Joseph Cox express misgivings about various possible uses of "slop interop." Koebler discusses the fact that John Deere sells the same physical tractor at many different price-points, depending on which software a farmer chooses, and raises the possibility that a farmer might vibe-code software that replicates the high-end functionality without paying for it. Koebler discusses two possible downsides to this: first, that the vibe-coded software might be defective and expose the farmer to risk; and second, a question about whether it's fair or just for a farmer to get those additional functions of their tractor without paying for them.

I think the first objection is entirely legitimate. The software you run on your expensive tractor should be secure, both for your own benefit and for the security of our food supply. That's actually a pretty good reason to ditch John Deere's own software, which is very insecure:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/05/08/about-those-kill-switched-ukrainian-tractors/

But I think the second question – whether it's legit to get this functionality without paying John Deere for it – is spurious. Sure, if John Deere provides you with that functionality, then they can send you the bill for it. But if you provide yourself with that functionality, using software you procured independently of John Deere, then John Deere has no right to get paid for it, and they certainly shouldn't have the right to stop you.

That tractor is yours. The fact that John Deere manufactured it is irrelevant. If you pay a contractor to build a house for you and later on pay a different contractor to add another bathroom to it, you don't owe the first contractor anything. It's your house (and if that bathroom has a leaky toilet, that's a matter between you and the second contractor, and not a reason to force you to only use your original contractor).

The law defines a narrow slice of functions that manufacturers get to control: those ideas that a patent examiner deems "novel, useful and nonobvious." It's legit (and good) for commercial operators to copy and improve the ideas of their rivals and competitors. It's why skilled tradespeople cluster together in the same geographic area.

Take Clerkenwell, the neighborhood in London where precision machining was invented by the jewelers and machinists who clustered there during the Longitude rewards. The reason all those competitors sought such close promixity to one another was because they wanted to copy the new techniques their rivals were developing (even if that meant that their rivals would be able to copy them):

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

If you're old enough to remember the advent of spreadsheets and the rollout of Visicalc, Lotus 1-2-3 and Excel, you'll know that every time a software vendor invented a new spreadsheet feature, all the other ones immediately copied it. This wasn't bad for spreadsheets: it was good for spreadsheets, just as copying your competitors was good for precision machining in Clerkenwell.

Everything from GNU/Linux (a feature-for-feature clone of AT&T Unix) to SAMBA (a plug-compatible clone of Microsoft's SMB) to iWork (file-compatible, feature compatible clones of MS Office's apps) came about through this "adversarial interoperability." What's more, the heyday of this kind of adversarial interop was also the heyday of disenshittification, the era in which any anti-feature installed by your existing vendor could be countered by a disenshittifying patch from a new one:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/06/adversarial-interoperability-reviving-elegant-weapon-more-civilized-age-slay

The question of whether vibe-coded software is any good is separate from the question of whether it's good to replace the software in your devices, even if you replace it with software that has features that the manufacturer would normally charge a premium for. You are under no obligation to arrange your commercial affairs to the financial benefit of manufacturers, and anyone who claims to be surprised that someone they sold a device to used it to benefit themselves at the manufacturer's expenses is either disingenuous…or unserious. You bought it, it's yours.

But just as this vibe-coded adversarial interop has drawn both valid and spurious criticism, it's also drawn excitement that is partially justified and partially overblown.

When it comes to reviving bricked devices or rooting out the surveillance and ads from your smart TV, vibe-coded interop tools are genuinely exciting. These are the kinds of enshittification that can truly be remediated with individual jailbreaks.

But the real, meaty examples of enshittification can't be addressed on an individual level – they require systemic fixes. If you jailbreak your iPhone so that it can use alternative app stores, that fact is not sufficient to cause those alternative app stores to come into existence. If we want to stop Apple from levying a $100b "app tax" on the digital economy, it's not enough for individuals to vibe-code their own iPhone patches. We need to repeal the law that bans jailbreaking iPhones, so that a would-be alternative app store can raise capital and pay programmers and tech support staff and salespeople to assemble rival catalogs of software and help customers figure out how to get up their phones to use it.

The same goes for jailbreaking your printer so it accepts generic ink. Sure, this may work for you if you're up for refilling your own cartridges, and I'm sure that you can find someone on Alibaba who will sell you ink by the gallon. But the mere fact that a few users have secretly and privately jailbroken their inkjets won't conjure up a generic inkjet cartridge manufacturing sector. For that to happen, we need to make jailbreaking printers legal, not just possible.

Indeed, if we want to improve the quality of all that jailbreaking code the chatbots are writing and circulating, we need to be able to put those jailbreaks in public repositories for public inspection and public critique. It's possible for some of the code produced by an LLM to be slop, and for other code to be fine, and for yet a third tranche of code to be remediable slop that can be made robust and reliable through auditing and refactoring. You can't figure out which is which if you have to keep that vibe code a secret on pain of a long prison-sentence.

I think there's good cause to be excited at the prospect of getting your devices working better, or just working at all. I think that even if the code stops working after a while, that's still fine – either you got more use out of your device than you would have without the new code, or maybe you just make more code that runs for a while for you, and then you do it again.

These individual improvements to your devices and technology are worth celebrating. But they are no substitute for systemic intervention. If we're going to have a new, good internet, a post-American internet that truly disenshittifies America's defective tech exports and replaces them with robust, transparent digital public goods, we need to make reverse-engineering legal again. Once we fix our policy, then we can fix our code:

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 Secret recording of Labour Whip demanding support for Iraq invasion https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2001/oct/22/uk.september11

#25yrsago LoC launches emulator-based digital file preservation https://web.archive.org/web/20011217002337/http://www.techreview.com/magazine/oct01/innovation5.asp

#25yrsago Kevin Mitnick to play CIA lackey https://web.archive.org/web/20011111105016/http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/55/22395.html

#15yrsago ACLU Tennessee brings suit against ICE officers who broke into house and said, “We don’t need a warrant, we’re ICE, the warrant is coming out of my balls.” https://web.archive.org/web/20111025092605/http://www.aclu.org/blog/immigrants-rights/we-dont-need-warrant-were-ice/

#15yrsago WIPO’s secret, corporate-run trademark enforcement meeting https://web.archive.org/web/20220121054715/https://craphound.com/PROGRAMManilaEdited10212011-FINAL.pdf

#15yrsago Canada’s Supreme Court: Linking isn’t libel https://web.archive.org/web/20111026134334/http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-15374238

#15yrsago HOWTO recreate the Haunted Mansion’s singing busts https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zRtiiMW47i4

#10yrsago Facebook’s crackdown on publishers feeds has sites paying celebs to repost https://digiday.com/media/facebook-thirsty-publishers-turn-celebrities-worm-news-feed/

#10yrsago Internet-destroying outages were caused by “amateurish” IoT malware https://krebsonsecurity.com/2016/10/hacked-cameras-dvrs-powered-todays-massive-internet-outage/

#10yrsago Tory minister’s filibuster kills Turing’s law and pardons for 65,000 persecuted gay men https://www.theguardian.com/law/2016/oct/21/chris-bryant-commons-plea-gay-pardon-law

#10yrsago Trump hotels, faced with massive declines in bookings, rebrand as “Scion Hotels” https://web.archive.org/web/20161023182616/http://www.travelandleisure.com/hotels-resorts/trump-scion-hotels

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: 533 (27469 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

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ISSN: 3066-764X

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Pluralistic: The age of disinvention (25 Aug 2026)

✇Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
By: Cory Doctorow


Today's links


A 1960s family living room in which a mom, dad and two kids are mesmerized by a cabinet-style TV. The image has been altered. The TV has an early 1990s VCR atop it. The TV screen is displaying a cross-sectioned human head with brains and spine on display. A huge fist has materialized in the room, with bloody spiked knuckle-dusters, smashing into the VCR. The oil painting over the sofa has been replaced with a pulp image of a male head, its cranium removed and replaced by a dome. Inside the dome is a red eight-segment VCR clock, displaying 12:00. The background in the painting is a tangle of cassette tape. The whole image's colors have been boosted, giving it an overexposed look.

The age of disinvention (permalink)

They disinvented the VCR. You might think that the reason we don't have VCRs anymore is because VCRs were supplanted by DVDs, PVRs and streaming, but that's not the case. They had it in for the VCR from the very start, and they never stopped trying to kill it. Eventually, they succeeded.

The VCR was one of the fastest-adopted technologies in the history of the world, and it was disruptive. The fact that you could record shows to watch later, skip the ads, build a library of your favorites, even loan your tapes around – it drove the studios and broadcasters nuts. The VCR hit the market under a cloud of litigation, and the lawsuits went all the way up to the Supreme Court, culminating with 1984's Betamax decision, whose key precept is that a new technology doesn't violate copyright law if it can "sustain a substantial, non-infringing use":

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_Corp._of_America_v._Universal_City_Studios,_Inc.

As important as the VCR was as a device – creating the home video market, which begat DVDs, then streaming – the Betamax decision is even more important.

You see, copyright is a "fact-intensive" doctrine, which means that determining whether a use is or isn't a copyright violation can be a complex and expensive process of gathering facts, weighing conflicting expert views to arrive at a judgment. If the rule was that new technologies couldn't be introduced unless you could prove that they would never infringe copyright, we wouldn't have any digital technology. Indeed, most technologies would be illegal under that standard. You can infringe copyright with VCRs, photocopiers, hard drives, tape recorders, scanners, computers, phones… Hell, you can infringe copyright with an X-ray machine, a saxophone or a pair of ballet slippers!

There's clearly ways you can use a VCR to infringe copyright: for example, you can record a TV show to a tape, then sell that tape to someone else. There's also ways you can use a VCR that clearly do not infringe copyright: you can lug a camcorder around your kid's birthday party, pester the kids by recording them, then watch the footage later in your living room. Then there's an infinite universe of ways to use a VCR that might infringe copyright, depending on the specifics: recording the Super Bowl while you're at work, then inviting your workmates over to watch it after your shift ends; creating a library of kids' shows for the day-care you run out of your living room; making a highlight reel of your favorite politician's campaign speeches. Anyone who says, "Oh every judge would always call that legal‡ under every circumstance" is admitting they don't understand how copyright works.

‡ Or illegal.

This is a feature, not a bug. Copyright is a fact-intensive doctrine because it is a flexible doctrine. Since the printing press, new ways of mechanically reproducing and transmitting information have appeared at an accelerating pace, and judges are asked to figure out the rules for these new technologies long before legislatures come to grips with them and pass special, tech-specific laws.

Copyright's future-proofing lies in this flexibility, which the Supremes (correctly) recognized in 1984 with the Betamax decision. By ruling that any technology that had "non-infringing uses" was presumptively legal to create and market, the Supremes laid the legal foundation for all the digital tools that followed since.

Crucially, Betamax ensured that last year's tech lottery winners wouldn't get to prevent next year's winners from emerging. This year's admirals are always last year's pirates, and they insist that what they did to their predecessors was progress, while anyone who tries to do the same thing to them is a thief. The sheet music composers condemned the record player, recording artists decried the radio, broadcasters sued over cable and cable operators sued over VCRs. This never stopped: Sony – the company that invented the Betamax and defended it all the way to the Supreme Court – went on to sue Napster!

There's nothing inherently virtuous about "innovation." It's perfectly possible to "innovate" new ways to spy on people and rip them off. But if you're trying to launch a new product in a category that already has clear winners, the best way to convince people to take a chance on you is by making a valuable and useful product.

"Disruptors" are best when they move value from existing companies to those companies' customers. The first TV remotes let people change the channel when an ad came on, making their TV better at broadcasters' expense. The broadcasters had to struggle to adapt, which is fine. They're not charities, after all: they're in business to make money for themselves, and they're only going to give you as much value as they have to.

Competitors fight enshittification: any time a company that you do business with takes something away from you, a competitor can win your business by giving it back. If Youtube doubles the number of ads they expect you to watch – "charging" a higher attentional "price" – an ad-blocking competitor can bargain back on your behalf, allowing you to counteroffer with "how about if I just don't watch any ads?"

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/07/adblocking-how-about-nah

Inside every company, there are fair, honest people, and there are greedy, shitty people. Companies that face competitors are more likely to listen to the workers who want to give customers a fair shake. But if a company has no competitors, those good people can no longer say, "This is a losing strategy because it will open the door to competitors who will make us poorer." Without competitors, the argument against enshittification becomes, "I would feel bad about myself if we did that." This argument always loses to the bad guys, whose argument is, "We will all get richer if we do this."

That's why Google enshittified search: they had no competitors, so the worst ideas of the worst people at Google could be shown to make the most money, and so Google deliberately made its search results worse:

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

Of course, companies can also face consequences from the government, but the fewer competitors a company has, the easier it is for that company to capture its regulators:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/06/05/regulatory-capture/

Competition makes companies weaker, giving the public and democratic institutions more power. Competition makes the public richer at the expense of corporate shareholders, who have less money to spend on the project of subverting democracy.

That's the VCR story all over. The VCR shook up a sclerotic, stagnant TV and film industry, created the home video market, and opened up new distribution channels that allowed all kinds of new creative workers to reach new audiences, either directly or through a fiercely competitive new constellation of distributors who fought each other to offer them the best possible deal.

The media companies who were forced to adapt to the VCR never forgave it for forcing them to develop new, multi-billion dollar businesses without permission. As a Hollywood executive once put it to me, his goal was "a polite marketplace" where no one ever rudely forced him to disgorge more value to viewers and performers:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/01/02/the-internet-heist-part-i/

The executives who made billions after losing their bid to ban the VCR wanted to ensure that no one would ever be so "impolite" as to force them to make billions of dollars against their will ever again. They partnered with electronics firms to ensure that the VCR's successor technologies would only have those features that they approved.

That's why DVD players are not DVD recorders: the consortium that developed the DVD embedded "hook IP" in the technology. "Hook IP" is a term of art: it means any trademark, copyright or patent that is incorporated into a technology so that anyone who wants to implement that technology must license the hook IP; under the terms of those licenses, doing anything that disrupts the business plans of the consortium is banned.

The DVD consortium's hook IP had all kinds of bizarre licensing terms, like "region coding" – a requirement for DVD players to register the country in which they were sold and to check whether the DVDs you tried to play were from a compatible country. If not, the license terms required the DVD player to refuse to play your discs.

Region coding is an "anti-feature," a technology developed at great expense for which there is no market. Sure, some DVD player owners who had never shopped abroad for a DVD didn't care about region coding. But for customers who bought a disc on vacation, or moved from one country to another: region coding was terrible.

So there were customers who didn't care about region coding, and customers who hated region coding, but there were zero DVD player owners who wanted region coding. No DVD manufacturer could advertise that their products come with region coding. If there were two equivalent DVD players in the market, identical except that one had region coding and the other didn't, the "region-free" player would win. Region-coding is an anti-feature.

Anti-features aren't the only deliberate defects we find in DVD players. The consortium's hook IP licenses didn't just require anti-features, they also banned useful features…including recording. Long after the price of read/write optical drives plummeted to pocket-change, there was still no such thing as a home DVD recorder that would let you stick a spindle full of discs next to the TV and use them to record all your favorite shows.

Shortly after the DVD player emerged, Congress created the most powerful hook IP of all: "anti-circumvention law." Under anti-circumvention law, it's a literal crime – a felony – to modify or reimplement a technology without permission from the manufacturer. In 1998, Bill Clinton signed America's landmark anticircumvention law, the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, section 1201 of which establishes a five-year prison sentence and a $500,000 fine for "bypassing an access control":

https://pluralistic.net/2026/01/14/sole-and-despotic/#world-turned-upside-down

After DMCA 1201, all a manufacturer had to do was add an "access control" (like a password or an encryption key) to their device, and modifying that device in any way could land you in prison. As microchips plummeted in price, all kinds of devices and services acquired these "access controls," so that it became a crime to refill an ink cartridge, fix a tractor, or connect your insulin pump to your glucose monitor. Congress never passed a law criminalizing this conduct: rather, they gave companies the ability to write their own criminal code. Simply by adding an access control to a device, they could felonize any conduct that displeased them.

Every video format and distribution system that succeeded the VCR shipped with an access control: DVDs, Blu-ray and HD DVD, satellite and digital cable, and, of course, streaming video. This is how they disinvented the VCR. Once every video had an access control, it had "hook IP" that could be used to control all technologies that were capable of receiving, storing, or playing back that video.

Remember Tivo? The first digital "personal video recorders" were true successors to the VCR. They could record any broadcast or cable program, store it forever and fast forward through the ads. They were all "feature" and nary an "anti-feature" in sight. That's because they only worked with analog cable (which, being analog, didn't have "access controls" that qualified them for DMCA 1201 consideration) and broadcast signals (sent over the public airwaves on the condition that they not be scrambled).

Digital cable disinvented the Tivo. Every post-VCR digital video signal came with hook IP, and so the Tivos (and other PVRs) had to get permission before they could store and play back modern videos. To get that permission, PVR makers had to agree to a whole suite of anti-features, such as a "broadcast flag" that told it which shows you could and could not record. Even if you did record a show, PVR makers also supported more flags, such as an "expiry date" flag that forced your recorder to delete your shows after a set period, a "no skip" flag that blocked you from fast-forwarding through ads, and "geofence" flags that stopped you from playing back your stored videos based on which country you found yourself in.

Today, if you have a PVR, you probably rent it from your cable provider (who can use DMCA 1201 to block other PVRs from working with your cable provider). It's probably slow, with a confusing user interface, and it only records an ever-dwindling subset of the shows your cable company transmits. Notwithstanding that it's a genuinely shitty piece of technology, it's still awful that you can't buy it – the fact that you have to rent that crapgadget month after month means that you're paying for it several times over.

But at least cable signals have PVRs. For the majority of video we interact with, there's no PVR – not even a shitty, broken one. You can't record your Netflix videos, your HBO Max videos, your Disney Plus videos or your Prime videos. Recording a video off a streaming service has the same copyright status as recording a show off your analog cable had in 1984 when the Supreme Court handed down the Betamax decision, but because there's an "access control" on video streams, it's nevertheless a felony to make a VCR for a streaming service.

You know how streaming companies play all kinds of bullshit games, like dropping videos from their catalog? Even worse: the Amazon Prime scam where Christmas cartoons are all included in your "free" streaming tier from March-October, but cost $3.99 to watch from November to February. All of these ills can be cured with the VCR, a technology that was first marketed in 1971, a technology we have disinvented. If you could record those shows with a device that took orders from you, a device without anti-features, Amazon would derive no benefit playing these grinchy little games. If they played those games anyway, you could beat them.

It's not just VCRs. Anti-circumvention law led to the enshittification of everything from tractors to ventilators, phones to smart speakers, thermostats to games consoles, all of which are bristling with hook IP that lets their manufacturers decide what you can do with your own property.

All of this is extremely relevant at this moment, thanks to Trump's tariffs. For more than a quarter century, the US Trade Representative has arm-twisted every American trading partner into enacting an anti-circumvention law like DMCA 1201. All over the world, governments promised to lock up entrepreneurs and technologists if they dared to disenshittify America's defective tech exports. In exchange, these governments were promised free trade with the USA: tariff-free access to American consumers.

That's where Trump comes in. From the moment his "Liberation Day" tariffs landed, any country that upheld its anti-circumvention laws was sacrificing its national competitiveness, resiliency and integrity in exchange for nothing. Trump reneged on America's obligations to its trading partners, just like he reneged on every deal he's ever made:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/07/22/table-flipper/#graveyard-of-indispensable-nations

The good news is, this means we can have VCRs again! All it will take is for one (or more) countries to decide to lift its one-sided restrictions on making technologies "capable of sustaining a substantial non-infringing use" and wait for one (or more) entrepreneurs to figure out that reintroducing the VCR is a winner, just like it was in the 1970s, when the VCR was the fastest-adopted technology in the history of the world.

It's not just VCRs, of course. For a generation, entire product categories have been suppressed, all over the world. There is a whole CES (good) worth of products that are truly innovative (good) waiting to be brought to market.

The last time there was this much low-hanging fruit on offer was after WWII, where six years' worth of bombings, austerity and neglect provided endless opportunities to repair, rebuild and replace the worn, crumbling built environment, vehicle fleet and personal belongings of people all over the world.

After a quarter-century of innovation prohibition, there are dozens of lucrative, easily perfected technologies just waiting to be made: the dongle that jailbreaks your phone or console and installs a third-party app store, the dongle that flashes your printer so it takes generic ink; the dongle that lets your mechanic install generic parts in your car and lets farmers fix their tractors. Our whole digital world has been wrapped in chains by rent-extracting monopolists who gloried in their power to use hook IP to deprive you of the right to use your property in ways you see fit, writing private laws that made it a crime to displease them.

A generation of allowing companies to shift value from their customers and suppliers to themselves has made them richer, us poorer, and everything more expensive. They've accumulated vast wealth at our expense. Their margins are our opportunity.

The VCR was a great idea 55 years ago. 55 years later, it's an idea whose time has come – again.

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 Metacrap https://people.well.com/user/doctorow/metacrap.htm

#15yrsago Slashdot’s CmdrTaco steps down https://meta.slashdot.org/story/11/08/25/1245200/Rob-CmdrTaco-Malda-Resigns-From-Slashdot

#15yrsago Chalk memorial for Jack Layton in front of Toronto’s New City Hall https://www.flickr.com/photos/lewolf011/6076393292/

#15yrsago Coordinated multinational ATM fraud nets $13M in one night https://krebsonsecurity.com/2011/08/coordinated-atm-heist-nets-thieves-13m/

#5yrsago Vaccinate workers at (almost) any price https://pluralistic.net/2021/08/26/chained-to-the-mast/#vaccine-leave-hesitancy

#1yrago By all means, tread on those people https://pluralistic.net/2025/08/26/sole-and-despotic-dominion/#then-they-came-for-me

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: 544 (9802 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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Pluralistic: Dealing with dickovers (21 Jul 2026) dickovers

✇Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
By: Cory Doctorow


Today's links


A traffic cop waving a red baton. His head has been replaced with the Adblock Plus logo - a red stop-sign with the letters ABP in the center. He stands before a psychedelic rainfail. Around his baton radiates a cornea of golden light.

Dealing with dickovers (permalink)

One of 2026's better tech-related coinages is "dickover," John Gruber's term for

a modal panel, popover, or curtain presented by a website or app, deliberately obscuring its own content to frustrate the user with an unwanted, unnecessary, mandatory interaction; e.g. asking the user to accept “cookies”, subscribe to a newsletter, install the website’s mobile app, agree to terms of service, or anything else that the user couldn’t give two shits about.

https://daringfireball.net/2026/05/what_is_a_dickover

These are bad everywhere, but they are especially terrible in the UK and EU, where websites practice a form of malicious compliance to the GDPR, Europe's landmark privacy law. Under the GDPR, websites are required to secure your affirmative consent to process your data. The obvious way that websites should respond to this is by not collecting your data unless there's a damned good reason for it, but the actual response is to repeatedly shove cookie-consent dialogs in your face before letting you use the site.

These are absolutely unnecessary. Your browser can be configured to transmit a "global privacy control signal" by default that tells websites you don't consent to be spied on while you look at their pages:

https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/global-privacy-control

But many websites punish you by throwing up a "Global Privacy Control detected" dickover that forces you to click through to affirm their confirmation of your confirmation that you don't want to be spied on.

If you don't have the GPC set, websites will demand that you tell them whether you want to be spied on – and they'll do it again, every time you visit them. The website operators falsely claim that they have to do this under the terms of the GDPR (or other laws, like California's CCPA). This is a lie. Every privacy law contains an exception that allows websites to store data about you for a "legitimate interest," and that obviously includes setting a cookie that says, "don't ever spy on this user."

What's a legit interest? Well, I can tell you what it isn't. Facebook claimed that they had to spy on you, even if you opted out by laboriously clicking through one of their dickovers or by transmitting a GPC signal to their servers, because you had also clicked through their terms of service, which say, "Facebook is going to spy on you with every hour that god sends, from asshole to appetite, abandon hope all ye who enter here" (a direct quote). Facebook claims that this is a contract with you, whereby the company has promised to spy on you, and if they stop, they would be violating the contract, which might make you mad, so they are legally required to eavesdrop on every conversation you have and follow you everywhere you go:

https://www.cliffordchance.com/content/dam/cliffordchance/briefings/2023/07/european-court-of-justice-in-facebook-ruling-clarifies-interplay-between-eu-competition-law-and-data-protections-enforcement.pdf

This is bullshit, and the European Court of Justice affirmed it. But despite the fact that surveillance advertising companies are happy to stretch the definition of "legitimate interest" to cover "spying on you because our ToS say we will," these same companies insist that "legitimate purpose" can't possibly include "remembering the fact that you told us not to spy on you the last time you were here," and so every time you click through to one of many popular websites, you get a dickover, and the only way to make it stop is to "consent" to being spied upon.

But it doesn't have to be this way. While the right answer to this kind of rampant lawlessness is stonking fines and even the corporate death penalty for repeat offenders, internet users have a myriad of options available to them for banishing dickovers to the scrapheap of history. These measures aren't difficult to avail yourself of, and using them will make your life infinitely better, so I'm going to tell you about some of them.

Before I start, one note: these measures only work on browsers, not apps. An app is a webpage wrapped in the right kind of IP law to make it a felony to change how it works, which is why companies are infinitely horny to get you to use their apps, not their websites:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/05/07/treacherous-computing/#rewilding-the-internet

What's more, these measures really only work on desktop browsers, because mobile browsers are apps, and are severely limited by law and mobile operating systems, making it hard-to-impossible to customize them so that they'll respect your rights. This is true of all mobile browsers, but it goes triple for iOS (iPhones and iPads):

https://pluralistic.net/2022/12/13/kitbashed/#app-store-tax

Finally, this mostly only works on Firefox, and it works worst on Chrome, Google's monopolistic browser. When it comes to customizing your browsing experience to get rid of annoyances like dickovers and ads, Chrome is hands-down the worst choice, and Google is about to make it much, much worse, forcing a change that will kill the most popular blockers. Stop using Chrome, switch to Firefox:

https://protonprivacy.substack.com/p/google-is-finally-killing-ublock

So, once you're on your actual computer, using Firefox, how can you disenshittify your internet experience? The first thing to familiarize yourself with is Reader Mode, a built-in Firefox feature that switches any webpage to a black type/white background column of text. Just click the little "page view" icon next to the Firefox location bar or use the key combo "ctrl-alt-r."

Some power tips for Reader Mode: Firefox tries to guess whether a given page should have a Reader Mode option based on its layout. This sometimes blocks Reader Mode on pages that badly need it. You can force Firefox to always allow you to try Reader Mode by going to "about:config" in your location bar, then searching for "reader.parse-on-load.force-enabled" and toggling it to "true". If you switch to Reader Mode and the page breaks, you can switch back by hitting ctrl-alt-r again.

Many websites' "soft paywalls" (which allow you to read an article or two before getting a demand to register and/or pay) can be defeated with Reader Mode. Just hit ctrl-alt-r and see if the whole article appears. If it doesn't, try one or both of: a) reloading the page while still in Reader Mode, and/or; b) Clearing cookies for the page (click the shield next to the site's URL in Firefox's location bar, then click "Clear cookies and site data"), and then reload.

That's Reader Mode, and it comes built into Firefox, and can be installed via various extensions on other browsers. Now let's move on to more advanced techniques, starting with "Kill Sticky," a bookmarklet that deletes any "static" elements in a web-page you've loaded (broadly, this is anything that won't change position when you scroll your browser).

Just click the "Kill Sticky" bookmarklet and all the static elements in the current tab go away. This includes things like navigation bars, which are often (but not always) useless annoyances. The original Kill Sticky, created by Alisdair McDiarmid, is 13 years old, and it still works great, but eight years ago, gala8y created a new version that caught some outliers that the original Kill Sticky missed. I've been running gala8y's version for a year now with no problems, and I recommend it as your second line of dickover defense (after Reader Mode):

https://github.com/gala8y/kill-sticky–forked

Kill Sticky is great for getting rid of the dickovers on a website you're not planning to visit more than once. But if you visit a dickover website regularly, you can permanently block its dickovers by using the Adblock Plus (ABP) browser extension:

https://adblockplus.org/

Once you have Adblock Plus installed, you can instruct your browser never to render a given website's dickover. Just load the website, hover your pointer over the dickover, and click your right mouse-button (Mac users need to ctrl-click). This will pop up a Firefox context menu, and at the bottom of that menu is "Block Element…".

Select "Block Element," then move your mouse around the screen. Different regions of the screen will glow pink, showing you which element (part of the page) ABP can access there. Once you've highlighted the dickover, click the "Preview" button on the ABP dialog in the bottom right corner. This will show you how the page looks after you've banished that element.

If it's an element you want to delete forever, click "Create" and ABP will create a new rule for that page that blocks that element. Note that many dickovers consist of several elements, each atop the other, and after you block one element, you might have to repeat the process to delete the element "behind" it, digging your way down to the actual webpage. Each element you block is listed in the top pane of the ABP dialog box. For example, here's Wired.com's UK dickover:

||media.wired.com/photos/6a565246c8e0799a2981818e/1:1/w_*c_limit/WEB_2026-06-21_EA-WIRED-NBNO-FullQual_0011.jpg

If you block an element by accident and want to restore it, just delete its corresponding line in the Block Element dialog. When websites change their layouts and their dickovers come back, just add the new one to the Block Element for that page. No need to delete the old entries.

Finally, if all else fails, there's Remove Paywall, a website that tries several different ways to load a page without its interrupters, nag screens, regwalls and paywalls:

https://www.removepaywall.com/

It's also available as a browser plugin, so you can just right-click on any page and select "Remove Paywall" from the pop-up menu. Remove Paywall often loads a page with all of its dickovers, and you can use all the techniques enumerated above – Reader Mode, Kill Sticky and Block Element – with Remove Paywall versions of pages.

Back in 2024, Ed Zitron tried an experiment: he bought Amazon's bestselling laptop and tried to use it, discovering it to be a horror-show of shovelware, including processor-devouring preinstalled spyware that rendered it all but unusable:

https://www.wheresyoured.at/never-forgive-them/

Zitron's (excellent) point is that technically proficient people have better computers than most users, and these computers are configured in better ways, and as a result, we participate in a fundamentally different internet to the one that normies are forced to use.

It's an excellent observation, and Zitron's point – that these laptops were actively enshittified by hardware makers and OS vendors – is an important one (the essay is called "Never Forgive Them").

But to this point, I would like to add another: we have a duty and obligation to the people we love to show them how to seize the means of computation. The normies in your life need the tips and tricks I lay out in this article more than anyone. Sure, it takes some doing to install Firefox, Kill Sticky, Adblock Plus and Bypass Paywalls; it takes a minute to figure out Reader Mode.

But if you install these tools for the people you love and show them how to use them (or just reconfigure the sites they visit most frequently to block dickovers and other annoyances), you will permanently improve their internet experience, clawing back hours of annoyances every week, while also protecting their privacy.

Anyone who is confused by switching to Firefox is also going to be confused by the deceptive language and practices that go along with dickovers. By leaving your unsophisticated loved ones exposed to dickovers, you're not decreasing the amount of technological confusion they're likely to experience in a day – you're vastly increasing the amount of danger they face as a result of that confusion.

There's never been a better time to disenshittify your cherished normies' computers. The AI companies' illegal monopolization of the memory market has sent the price of new computers, RAM and storage skyrocketing:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BORRBce5TGw

All of us – but especially normies – are having to do more with less. The best way to squeeze extra performance out of any computer (but especially an aged and underpowered computer) is by switching to a free/open operating system like GNU/Linux and replacing your proprietary, resource-gobbling apps with free/open alternatives:

https://www.fosslinux.com/158206/linux-on-older-hardware-revival-guide.htm

Seizing the means of computation isn't theft, it's bargaining. Commercial surveillance companies will tell you that by spying on you, they are simply engaged in a marketplace exchange in which you swap your privacy for access to online services. But they are running a very curious sort of market: it's a "market" where as soon as you stop to browse someone's wares, the stallholder gets to reach into your pocket and clean out your wallet. In "markets," prices are announced and bargained over, not set unilaterally and extracted from anyone unwise enough to cross the threshold.

Adblocking, dickover blocking and other customizations are a way for you to bargain back, to answer the opening bid of "How about you give me all of your data forever and let me do anything I want with it?" with "How about 'nah?'"

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/07/adblocking-how-about-nah

Dickovers are companies' illegal response to privacy laws. Privacy laws are the public response to companies' out-of-control data theft and weaponization. They call us thieves, but they're the ones who embarked upon a generation-long campaign of unrestricted data plunder. What they call "theft" is just self-defense.

A generation ago, publishers and advertisers fell in love with pop-up ads. Early pop-ups were virulent in ways that are hardly imaginable today: visiting a website summoned dozens of pop-ups, some of them employing dirty tricks like spawning as an invisible 1×1 pixel, or running away from your cursor when you tried to close them. They auto-played sound and music. They were Satanic.

We got rid of pop-ups by installing pop-up blockers. Browser vendors (starting with Opera, then Mozilla) blocked pop-ups by default. Soon, pop-ups simply ceased to exist for the majority of internet users, and at that point, the same companies who'd insisted that they would go out of business unless they could fill your screen with pop-ups quietly gave up on them and found another way to advertise.

No one should ever have to look at another dickover. If dickovers become invisible for everyone on the web, there won't be any dickovers. Companies claim they need dickovers to survive. It's bullshit. They want dickovers, but if dickovers cease to be rendered on their target audience's screens, they'll switch to less invasive tactics, just like they've always done.

(Image: Kanerva T, CC BY 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)

#20yrsago Worst week in the history of broadcast TV https://web.archive.org/web/20060717100605/http://asia.news.yahoo.com/060711/ap/d8iq1l8g0.html

#20yrsago Pen with built-in WiFinder https://web.archive.org/web/20060808191736/https://informatica.shopwprintit.com/index.cfm?action=ViewDetails&ItemID=135&Category=95

#15yrsago Russian Pirate Party must change name, contemplates “Pira7e Party” https://torrentfreak.com/judge-pirate-party-name-ban-decision-stands-110722/

#15yrsago Public special ed employee has $0 paycheck after health insurance deductions https://web.archive.org/web/20110726080414/http://www.educationvotes.nea.org/2011/07/20/a-special-education-worker-talks-candidly-about-empty-paychecks-organizing/

#15yrsago Act now! Congress wants to kill WiFi-like spectrum, sell it off to highest bidder instead https://web.archive.org/web/20110722113231/https://publicknowledge.org/dont-let-cos-buy-way-out-regulation

#15yrsago New Yorkers freestyle rap in Union Square https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N3fd9mzfRoQ

#10yrsago Advances in transparent, brain-revealing skull-windows https://web.archive.org/web/20160722140424/https://www.medgadget.com/2016/07/transparent-skull-implant-repeat-brain-laser-therapy.html

#10yrsago EFF is suing the US government to invalidate the DMCA’s DRM provisions https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/jul/21/digital-millennium-copyright-act-eff-supreme-court

#10yrsago Ed Snowden and Andrew “bunnie” Huang announce a malware-detecting smartphone case https://www.tjoe.org/pub/direct-radio-introspection/release/

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

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

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ISSN: 3066-764X

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