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Dutch government to replace Microsoft Windows with NixOS-based operating system

✇Boing Boing
By: Rob Beschizza
The International Criminal Court (ICC) is an intergovernmental organization and international tribunal seated in The Hague, Netherlands. (oliverdelahaye / Shutterstock.com)

The government of the Netherlands plans to replace Microsoft's Windows and other software with a custom Linux-based operating system and IT suite named DAWO (Digitaal Autonome Werkomgeving Overheid).

De Nederlandse overheid maakt een eigen digitale werkomgeving op basis van de Nederlandse Linux-distributie NixOS.

— Read the rest

The post Dutch government to replace Microsoft Windows with NixOS-based operating system appeared first on Boing Boing.

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Pluralistic: Preparing for a post-Trump internet (03 Sep 2026)

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


Today's links


A nuclear mushroom cloud wearing a giant Trump wig. A decaying American flag fills the sky behind it.

Preparing for a post-Trump internet (permalink)

What if post-Trump America is even worse?

I know, it's tempting to think of Trump as a cause, rather than an effect – as an aberration who dragged America into fascism. Trump is exceptional, but the thing that makes him exceptional isn't his corruption, recklessness or cruelty. What makes Trump exceptional is his ability to cajole, intimidate and flatter America's most corrupt, reckless and cruel people into a coalition.

These people hate each other. Nick Fuentes drifts off to sleep every night furiously fantasizing about turning Stephen Miller into a lampshade. Laura Loomer just got ICE to intervene in a Twitter feud by having a guy she dislikes violently arrested, shackled at wrist and ankle, perp-walked, and then shuffled from location to location so that he couldn't meet with his lawyer before being deported:

https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2026/08/milo-yiannopoulos-deportation-trump-maga-laura-loomer-benny-johnson-raheem-kassmm/

They steal like crazy, get each other locked up, and gorge themselves on mind-altering supplements and peptides they buy from random podcast chuds. They are fantastically paranoid, marinated in conspiracy theories, and perennially high on their own supply: all that bullshit about "great replacement," "China is making America hate data centers" and "antifa is a terrorist organization"? A lot of them genuinely believe it. It's not just ghost stories they made up to scare cognitively compromised tube-feeding Fox News addicted rubes. Trumpland is full of actual, functioning adults in positions of real power who periodically go into the bathroom, turn off the lights, hold a flashlight under their chins and scare themselves silly by saying "Aaaaaaaaaantiiii-faaaaaaaaaa" into the mirror.

Donald Trump did not conjure these people out of thin air. They've been lurking in America since its earliest days. They worship authoritarian criminals:

https://abc30.com/post/roger-stones-tattoo-of-nixon-goes-viral/5107047

January 6 wasn't the first presidency they tried to steal, it's just the first one they got punished for:

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

They commit brazen crimes in office that could land them in prison for the rest of their lives, and therefore can't afford to lose power, ever:

https://www.propublica.org/series/supreme-court-scotus

Trump didn't invent these creeps, he just emboldened them. If Reaganomics was capitalism with the gloves off, then Trumpismo is Reaganism with the mask off:

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/aug/16/reaganland-review-rick-perlstein-jimmy-carter-ronald-reagan

So what happens when Trump strokes out while watching Kid Rock wrestle a Hulk Hogan impersonator in a televised barbed-wire cage match on the White House lawn that one of Trump's cronies has exclusive pay-per-view rights to? I mean, it's possible that the Democratic leadership will step up and insist on some form of regular order in the succession to Vance, but come on. These are the tiny "Down with this sort of thing" ping-pong paddle people:

https://www.truthdig.com/articles/ping-pong-paddles-to-a-gun-fight/

It is more likely that Vance – a weak, unimportant charisma-vacuum who is loathed by all of Trump's factions – will end up presiding over a far more chaotic period in American governance than anything that happened under Trump. That could mean ICE leaders ordering mass graves dug in the centers of America's largest cities, drunken generals invading random countries, podcasters declaring "The Purge" with brackets sponsored by Kalshi.

This isn't the first time in living memory that this has happened. In 1991 the Soviet Union collapsed, virtually overnight, and the fragile threads that bound its feuding, corrupt regional bosses all snapped, leaving behind nuclear-tipped mafia states. This was a chaotic and frightening time for the people whose governments had simply winked out of existence – but it was also terrifying for the rest of the world, who scrambled to secure those nukes before they could end up in the hands of "non-state actors":

https://www.hks.harvard.edu/publications/what-happened-soviet-superpowers-nuclear-arsenal-clues-nuclear-security-summit

The Soviet Union had some deeply dysfunctional leadership politics to be sure, but at least the people involved were beholden to various power blocs who had an interest in keeping things going. As the geopolitics wonks say, "they were playing an iterated game," where some losses had to be tolerated so that the losers could try to win the next time around.

But there are plenty of people who weren't (and aren't) playing iterated games – people who are even more unhinged, more reckless, more short-termist than the maniacs who filled the world with nuclear weapons. These people don't necessarily care if civilization or even the human race persists if they can't get their way. The thought of them running around with these "weapons of mass destruction" ratcheted up the half-century of stark nuclear terror that had preceded the USSR's collapse to new heights.

Which brings me to the post-Trump internet. Trump isn't the first president to figure out that the internet could be weaponized for geopolitical ends. As the Snowden disclosures showed, there has been a longstanding bipartisan consensus that the internet is a great tool for American surveillance, conducted against friend and foe alike.

But Trump is the first president to openly, directly recruit American tech companies to simply brick foreign officials who displease him, starting with the Chief Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court, who lost his Office 365 and Outlook accounts in retaliation for swearing out a genocide warrant for Netanyahu:

https://www.justiceinfo.net/en/156691-how-sanctions-can-weaponize-us-tech-against-the-icc.html

And then Microsoft obliged Trump again, attacking the Brazilian judge who sentenced Jair Bolsonaro to prison over his unsuccessful coup.

America's tech giants have fully, irrevocably fused with Trump. They donated to his campaign. Their CEOs each paid $1m out of their own pockets to sit behind him on the inauguration dais. Google provides location data for Trump's racist pogroms. Microsoft provides the administrative tools to carry them out. Oracle provides the databases. Apple blocks apps that warn its customers when they're about to be snatched:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/10/06/rogue-capitalism/#orphaned-syrian-refugees-need-not-apply

In exchange, Trump got Canada and the UK to ditch their plans to levy a 3% tax on American tech giants; he got the EU to gut its privacy laws; he sanctioned EU officials who tried to regulate social media; and he's told the tech companies to go through EU officials' private messages, looking for anti-Big Tech partisans whom he will ban from ever entering the USA:

https://judiciary.house.gov/media/in-the-news/us-committee-demands-big-tech-share-private-comms-eu-officials

Big Tech has proved that its only principles are not paying taxes, invading your privacy, and not being broken up by antitrust enforcers:

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2026/09/us-court-rules-google-will-not-have-to-sell-ad-exchange-after-losing-antitrust-case/

Tech companies will do anything for any leader who can guarantee those outcomes. There's no capitulation too petty and stupid for Big Tech:

https://people.com/apple-maps-joins-google-approving-trump-lake-america-change-12074262

America no longer has allies or trading partners. America has rivals and enemies. Trump's coalition wants him to steal Iran, steal Venezuela, steal Cuba, steal Alberta, steal Canada, steal Greenland. They want him to help Israel steal Palestine and Lebanon. And as Trump considers this program of imperial conquest, he has started to tinker with one of the most devastating geopolitical weapons the world has ever seen: tech shutdowns.

If Trump wants Greenland, he can just order Microsoft to switch off Office 365 for the country and every ministry and significant firm will be shuttered in an instant, along with many households:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/04/04/digital-subjugation/#greenlands-next

He can order Apple and Google to shut off all of Denmark's phones. He can order John Deere to shut off all their tractors:

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

(One thing we don't need to worry about is Trump ordering OpenAI and Anthropic to switch off all of Europe's chatbots – sure, he could do that, but if he did, nothing important would break:)

https://pluralistic.net/2026/06/18/their-trillions-our-billions/#eyes-on-the-prize

As weapons of mass destruction go, nukes are pretty stupid. The big ones destroy the territory you're trying to conquer and leave behind an uninhabitable radioactive wasteland. They send clouds of nuclear fallout swirling around the globe, potentially killing you or your allies. 80 years into the Nuclear Age, the best anyone's come up with is a neutron bomb, which only kinda renders territory uninhabitable while still killing everyone with massive radiation blasts.

Compared to nukes, tech shutdowns are amazing. Thanks to Big Tech, America – and only America – can brick almost any country on earth, shutting down its administration, agriculture and industry without firing a single shot. The only thing that prevented this from happening was an American elite bloc that was playing an iterated game and saw more benefit from sharing in Big Tech profits as they looted and spied on the world, as opposed to grabbing territory while scaring the world into breaking all land-speed records to ditch American tech and pursue meaningful digital sovereignty.

Trump's chuds and freaks are not bound by these constraints. They're perfectly happy to do Gunboat Diplomacy 2.0: Cloud Diplomacy, where everything from your smartphones to your payroll records can be seized at the click of a mouse, and your country had better fall in line. And Trump is a sick, frail old man, who is not long for this world. When he goes, all bets are off: America will be at the mercy of warring factions who will deploy the coercion and bribery that turned Big Tech into Trump's geopolitical weapon in order to achieve their own purposes – which might well be even stupider, crueler and more unhinged than Trump's.

There's only one way out of this mess: the rapid disassembly of the American internet and the rapid creation of a post-American internet, one built on open, auditable, sovereign digital public goods, internationally built and maintained:

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

In its own way, the creation of this post-American internet is as urgent and as global as was the creation of the covid vaccines. But whenever I speak to powerful people about this, they ask the same question: "What if this makes Trump mad?"

This represents a grave failure to take this crisis seriously. Trump doesn't need to be "mad" to attack your country. Trump attacked Canada over its wildfires, accusing Canada of polluting America's air:

https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/us-complaints-trump-widlfire-smoke-9.7274466

But even if Trump never gets mad at you, that's no guarantee of safety. Trump is not long for this world, and his death or incapacity is no guarantee of the restoration of a "normal" America. And even if America finds its way to "normal" after Trump, that's no guarantee that it will stay normal. The armed, organized maniacs who have seized power in America and who are cheering him on as he rampages all over the world, kidnapping leaders and dropping bombs on schoolchildren are not going to dig a hole, crawl inside it, and pull the dirt down on top of themselves.

But let's say that we find ourselves in the best of worlds, where American fascism is comprehensively defeated and the country embarks on a years-long program of denazification:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/02/10/miller-in-the-dock/#denazification

Even in that amazing future, the world should still race to build a post-American internet. The world should have built that internet after the Snowden revelations. That ghastly failure created the Trumpian internet. If the post-Trump internet isn't a post-American internet, then it'll only be a matter of time until the next crisis comes along, and the coming years will give Big Tech even more chances to worm its tendrils into the world's governments, firms and households, making that crisis be even harder to survive. The best time to act was 13 years ago, after Snowden. The second best time is now.

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 Barnum & Bailey hired an ex-CIA spook to destroy a critical journalist https://web.archive.org/web/20010913192931/http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2001/08/30/circus/print.html

#20yrsago Wired article about Wikipedia is on a editable wiki https://web.archive.org/web/20060901030941/http://www.socialtext.net/wired/index.cgi

#20yrsago Singapore will have nationwide WiFi by 2007 https://web.archive.org/web/20060901191656/http://news.com.com/2100-1039_3-6110189.html

#5yrsago Twitter Arguments https://pluralistic.net/2021/08/29/twitter-arguments/

Upcoming appearances (permalink)

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


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

Recent appearances (permalink)


A grid of my books with Will Stahle covers..

Latest books (permalink)


A cardboard book box with the Macmillan logo.

Upcoming books (permalink)

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

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

  • "Enshittification, Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It" (the graphic novel), Firstsecond, 2027

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


Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources:

Currently writing:

  • “Once Is Enemy Action,” a science fiction novel about the origins of modern technofascism. Today's words: 574 (7730 total).

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

  • A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING

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

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

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ISSN: 3066-764X

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Pluralistic: Jailbreaking isn't theft (25 Jun 2026)

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


Today's links


Steve Jobs holding an iPhone at the product launch. It has been modified. He wears a thief's balaclava. Behind him is the Apple wordmark, 'Think Different.'

Jailbreaking isn't theft (permalink)

It's not often that someone on a panel says something that makes my jaw drop, but that's what happened earlier this week when the moderator of a panel I was on in Toronto described jailbreaking an iPhone as "rampant theft of IP."

Some context: the panel was in Toronto, and the nominal subject was "digital sovereignty," though all the panelists (except me) interpreted that to mean "sovereign AI." All of their interventions were focused on how Canada could build and operate its own AI, which I found very weird, since there is no AI-related threat to Canadian sovereignty. If Donald Trump ordered OpenAI and Anthropic to turn off all of Canada's chatbots tomorrow, nothing would change: every firm, ministry and household would operate as per normal:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/06/18/their-trillions-our-billions/

Now, that's not to say that Canada doesn't have a digital sovereignty problem – it really does! Donald Trump and US Big Tech have fused into a single entity and Trump now orders US tech giants to terminate the online accounts of foreign officials who displease him. When Microsoft turns off your Office365 account, you lose your working files, your calendar, your address book, your email archives, and the Outlook email address you use to log in to every online service:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/04/01/minilateralism/#own-goal

So while turning off Canada's chatbots would not inflict any real harm on Canada, M365 terminations could paralyse any federal or provincial ministry, any structurally important firm, and most Canadian households.

The threat doesn't stop there: Trump can also order Apple and Google to brick any of Canada's iPhones or Android devices – terminating individual officials' mobile access, or terminating whole provinces. It's not just iPhones either – Trump can also brick any tractor in Canada:

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

This is the real digital sovereignty risk, and Canada needs to address it now. But Canada can't – our hands are tied…by us. In 2012, we passed a law, The Copyright Modernization Act, that criminalizes "jailbreaking," meaning that Canadian companies can't go into business figuring out how to install different app stores on phones and consoles, or change the firmware in tractors to enable independent repair, or reliably export their cloud data to rival Canadian services:

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

Why did we pass this law? Because the Americans promised us free trade and no tariffs on our exports if we agreed to it. That's a promise Trump tore up, but we're still holding up our end of the bargain. That's crazy. It means that American companies can use Canada's courts to destroy Canadian businesses that offer the Canadian people tools to help them escape Big Tech's sleazy ripoffs of their data and cash.

And boy do those US tech companies take in a lot of cash. The US ad-tech duopoly of Google/Meta rig the advertising market, taking 51% out of every ad dollar through an illegal, collusive arrangement called "Jedi Blue":

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

The US mobile tech duopoly takes 30 cents out of every dollar spent via an app, by forcing every app vendor to use their payment processors, which charge 1,000% more than any other payment processor in Canada. That means that every time a subscriber to a Canadian news site signs up through an app, 30% of the lifetime subscription revenue for that Canadian subscriber is funneled to one of two California companies.

The corollary, of course, is that if Canadian businesses were free to compete with US companies – if Canada stopped foolishly holding up its end of the bargain that Trump has dishonoured – then it would be as though every Canadian news outlet increased its subscriber base by 25% overnight! What's more, the Canadian companies that sell those jailbreaking tools would make billions out of US Big Tech's billions.

And that's where the moderator of this week's panel comes in. When I finished making this pitch, they turned to the rest of the panel and said something like, "Well, apart from rampant theft of IP, what else could Canada do to secure its digital sovereignty?"

That's when my jaw dropped. Making it possible for, say, a Canadian company to sell its own Canadian game to a Canadian customer, in Canada, without giving Apple or Xbox 30% of the purchase price, is not "theft of IP." It's not "theft of IP" for a rightsholder to sell their own products to their customers. It's not "theft of IP" for a Canadian owner of a device to decide for themselves which software they want to run on it. If buying software from the company that made it and installing it on a device you own is "theft of IP," then so is putting non-Nike shoelaces in your Air Jordans.

It's not "theft of IP." It's just good business. Moreover, it's the kind of good business that created America's tech giants in the first place. As Jeff Bezos tells his suppliers: "Your margin is my opportunity." US tech giants make whopping margins around the world, thanks to the anticircumvention laws that the US Trade Rep crammed down every US trading partner's throats, laws that allow US companies to use other countries' legal system to destroy their competitors.

I've been mulling this "rampant theft of IP" remark for a couple of days now, but it wasn't until a reader wrote to me to remind me about Apple's origin story that I realised what the punchline is. Apple founders Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak financed their first product launch by selling "Blue Boxes" (devices that let you make free long distance calls by cheating the phone company) door to door in the UC Berkeley dorms:

https://macdailynews.com/2024/06/19/steve-jobs-felt-certain-apple-would-never-have-existed-without-woz-and-him-making-blue-boxes/

Now, I'm not going to weep for the lost revenues that Jobs and Woz denied to AT&T. After all, AT&T was stealing that money from its customers, which is why, just a few years later, a federal court convicted AT&T of monopolistic practices and broke the company up:

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

But the legal term for what a Blue Box does is "toll theft," which is to say, Apple – a company literally founded on theft – now makes the majority of its profits by convincing people that making a competing product is literally stealing. A company whose founders got their seed capital by marketing illegal circumvention devices now markets products designed to make it a crime for a rightsholder to sell their own work to you.

I've long said that "every pirate wants to be an admiral":

https://pluralistic.net/2025/03/04/object-permanence/#picks-and-shovels

But this is just a little too on the nose. When Apple went into business selling products to rip off the phone company, that wasn't progress. When Canadians go into business selling devices that let iPhone owners use their own property to do legal things – like buying copyrighted works directly from their creators – that is not piracy.

Canada has a real digital sovereignty problem, and it's not AI. Canada will not mitigate its digital sovereignty risk by successfully launching a Made in Canada version of the money-losingest venture in the history of the human species:

https://www.wheresyoured.at/brokenomics/

Canada's real digital sovereignty problem is its reliance on the apps, cloud services and devices that are tethered to the American cloud, access to which Donald Trump could – and does – terminate whenever he feels grumpy. Trump has repeatedly threatened to annex Canada and turn us into "the 51st state." He's trying to steal Alberta right now. Our digital sovereignty risk is the risk of Trump paralysing our country in order to steal Alberta – or the entire shop.

We can address that digital sovereignty risk – and make billions at the same time – by legalising jailbreaking and becoming the world's "disenshittification nation." Unlike a program to build Canadian AI, this will make billions, not lose them – and unlike Canadian AI, this will make our country more resilient and safer, by delivering products that Canadians – and the world – want to buy and will pay us a fortune for.

Big Tech's margins are our opportunity.

(Image: Matthew Yohe, CC BY-SA 3.0; SABYST, CC BY-SA 4.0, modified)

Hey look at this (permalink)


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

Object permanence (permalink)

#25yrsago Major AI breakthrough is imminent https://web.archive.org/web/20010625114014/https://www.latimes.com/business/cutting/lat_cyc010621.htm

#25yrsago Webcomic reply to Scott McCloud on microtransactions https://web.archive.org/web/20010708225439/https://www.penny-arcade.com/view.php3?date=2001-06-22&res=l

#25yrsago School censorware blocks LBGTQ sites https://web.archive.org/web/20010803114449/https://www.salon.com/tech/feature/2001/06/14/net_filtering/print.html

#25yrsago SCOTUS backs freelance writers https://edition.cnn.com/2001/LAW/06/25/scotus.copyright/index.html

#20yrsago Canadian Gov’t Pays Copyright Lobby to Lobby https://web.archive.org/web/20060720230403/http://www.thestar.com/NASApp/cs/ContentServer?pagename=thestar/Layout/Article_Type1&c=Article&cid=1151273413030&call_pageid=971794782442&col=971886476975

#20yrsago How can we keep the Bells from committing net-neutricide? https://web.archive.org/web/20060714044219/http://informationweek.com/news/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=189600971

#20yrsago Disney: We [will|won’t] sue if you put Pooh on a baby’s headstone https://web.archive.org/web/20060711194928/http://www.upi.com/NewsTrack/view.php?StoryID=20060623-093710-8391r

#15yrsago Comic Book Legal Defense Fund backs traveller arrested at Canadian border for “pornographic” manga on his hard drive https://cbldf.org/2011/06/cbldf-forms-coalition-to-defend-american-comics-reader-facing-criminal-charges-in-canada/

#15yrsago Rochester police use selective enforcement of parking laws to harass attendees at a meeting in support of Emily Good https://rochester.indymedia.org/node/7516

#15yrsago What happened before the Vancouver riot kiss https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8mtURc7mkUg

#15yrsago Mexican Congress votes to reject ACTA https://www.techdirt.com/2011/06/22/mexican-congress-says-no-to-acta/

#15yrsago “Hot News” doctrine gets a body-blow https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2011/06/hot-news-doctrine-surviving-life-support

#15yrsago Solar-powered 3D sand-printer https://web.archive.org/web/20110627035221/https://www.thisiscolossal.com/2011/06/markus-kayser-builds-a-solar-powered-3d-printer-that-prints-glass-from-sand-and-a-sun-powered-laser-cutter/

#10yrsago Australian educational contractor warns of wifi, vaccination danger to “gifted” kids’ “extra neurological connections” https://web.archive.org/web/20180211151730/https://www.theage.com.au/national/victoria/antivaccination-program-offered-to-gifted-children-in-primary-schools-20160621-gpnzzp.html#ixzz4CYBYf4Bl#ixzz4CYBYf4Bl

#10yrsago US Customs and Border Protection wants to ask for your “online presence” at the border https://www.theverge.com/2016/6/24/12026364/us-customs-border-patrol-online-account-twitter-facebook-instagram?utm_campaign=theverge&utm_content=chorus&utm_medium=social&utm_source=twitter

#10yrsago Stasi radio monitoring department, hard at work, 1980s https://web.archive.org/web/20160625190241/https://visualhistory.livejournal.com/1039990.html

#10yrsago Apps help women bypass states’ barriers to contraception https://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/20/health/birth-control-options-websites.html

#10yrsago The blacker a city is, the more it fines its residents (especially black ones) https://priceonomics.com/the-fining-of-black-america/

#10yrsago The demographics of Brexit https://web.archive.org/web/20160626130820/http://www.perc.org.uk/project_posts/thoughts-on-the-sociology-of-brexit/

#10yrsago The morning after the Brexit vote, Nigel Farage admits money for the NHS was a lie https://memex.craphound.com/2016/06/24/the-morning-after-the-brexit-vote-nigel-farage-admits-money-for-the-nhs-was-a-lie/

#10yrsago How to protect the future web from its founders’ own frailty https://memex.craphound.com/2016/06/24/how-to-protect-the-future-web-from-its-founders-own-frailty/

#10yrsago More than 30 people burned during Tony Robbins “motivational” firewalk https://web.archive.org/web/20160627054938/https://bigstory.ap.org/c7872f6db09e4656a612ee13aab74d50

#10yrsago Google’s version of the W3C’s video DRM has been cracked https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5CkWjOvpZJw

#10yrsago Undercover reporter spent four months as a prison guard in a Louisiana pen run by CCA https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2016/06/cca-private-prisons-corrections-corporation-inmates-investigation-bauer/

#10yrsago Sanders will vote Hillary https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/2016-election/bernie-sanders-says-he-will-vote-hillary-clinton-n598251

#10yrsago Brexit: a timeline of the coming slow-motion car-crash http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2016/06/tomorrow-belongs-to-me.html

#5yrsago The pandemic showed remote proctoring to be worse than useless https://pluralistic.net/2021/06/24/proctor-ology/#miseducation

#1yrago Surveillance pricing lets corporations decide what your dollar is worth https://pluralistic.net/2025/06/24/price-discrimination/

#1yrago What's a "public internet?" https://pluralistic.net/2025/06/25/eurostack/#viktor-orbans-isp

Upcoming appearances (permalink)

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


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

Recent appearances (permalink)


A grid of my books with Will Stahle covers..

Latest books (permalink)


A cardboard book box with the Macmillan logo.

Upcoming books (permalink)

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

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

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

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

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


Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources:

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

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

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

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

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

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

ISSN: 3066-764X

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Pluralistic: AI digital sovereignty risk doesn't exist (18 Jun 2026)

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


Today's links


A 1989 black and white photo of the Berlin Wall; peering over the wall is Microsoft's 'Clippy' chatbot.

AI digital sovereignty risk doesn't exist (permalink)

Back at the height of the blockchain bubble, I made a hobby of pointing out that crypto weirdos were palming a card. I used this formulation:

if: problem + blockchain = problem – blockchain

then: blockchain = 0

https://pluralistic.net/2022/01/30/the-inevitability-of-trusted-third-parties/

You see, blockchain weirdos kept insisting that they could solve problems related to trust and institutional design with "smart contracts." Rather than having to trust a board of directors to steer an organization, you could just have a self-executing institution, the "distributed autonomous organization" or DAO.

So for example, if you want to buy a copy of the US Constitution at a Sotheby's auction, you could set up a DAO to raise and pool the funds, eliminating the need to find trustworthy people to receive, hold and deploy these funds:

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

However – and here's where the palmed card comes in – the DAO can't go to Sotheby's and place a bid on the Constitution. Instead, the members of the DAO have to elect a guy to receive all that cash, walk into Sotheby's, get one of those little ping-pong paddles last seen at the State of the Union in Chuck Schumer's withered claw (emblazoned with the brave slogan "You're hurting my fee-fees") and raise the paddle during the bidding.

That guy doesn't have to go to Sotheby's. That guy can simply walk away with all the money. Members of the DAO are trusting this guy with their entire collective treasury. Indeed, since the DAO has no corresponding legal entity, it might even be that members of the DAO can't sue this guy if he steals all their money – and even worse, without a limited liability structure, it might mean that everyone in the DAO can be sued for anything bad this guy does with the money.

Which raises the question: what's the point of building this insanely complex hairball of blockchain-based smart contracts to raise and hold the money if you're just going to hand it to this guy and trust him without limit? Why not just have that guy set up a Zelle account and a Whatsapp group? In other words: the problem that the DAO is trying to solve is the difficulty of trusting people with the keys to the kingdom, but no matter how much blockchain you sprinkle on this DAO, it ends with this one guy walking around with all your money, which he can steal with impunity if he so chooses.

Or, put more succinctly:

if: problem + blockchain = problem – blockchain

then: blockchain = 0

This turns out to be a really good way of assessing policy prescriptions for their soundness and foundation in reality, because – as the blockchain swindle shows us – it's possible to come up with entirely fictitious solutions to entirely real problems. The problem of designing a trustworthy institution that can't be betrayed by its leaders and whose operations don't consume all its resources is a real problem – it's quite possibly the real problem – but adding a DAO does nothing to solve the core problems of institutional design, and actually makes some of those problems worse.

There's another real problem with a fictitious solution that is – surprise! – tied to another tech bubble: digital sovereignty.

It's a genuine problem that everyone in the world (outside of China's sphere of influence) is glued to America's tech platforms. These platforms steal everyone's money and data, and every country has signed a trade deal with the USA promising not to let its own technologists and entrepreneurs go into business making add-ons and complementary goods that remediate the defects in America's tech exports:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/01/29/post-american-canada/#ottawa

What's more, Trump's response to finding himself in this poker game that's rigged entirely in his favor is to flip over the table because he resents having to pretend to play at all (as November Kelly so aptly put it). His incontinent belligerence on the world stage sees him making bids to steal whole countries and he's recruited American tech giants to help him in this chaotic program of lunatic imperialism. When other countries' public officials make decisions that Trump dislikes, he gets companies like Microsoft to disconnect whole institutions from the internet, deleting their files, email archives, calendars and address books, and depriving them of the ability to connect to any service tied to their Outlook accounts:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/04/20/praxis/#acceleration

Which means that if Trump wants to steal Greenland, he doesn't have to roll tanks into Nuuk – he can just brick the country of Denmark. He can shut down all their ministries, every large firm, every household. He can shut down their iPhones and Android devices. He can kill their smart-speakers. He can hormuz the world's supply of Ozempic, Lego and ferociously strong licorice:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/04/04/digital-subjugation/#greenlands-next

It doesn't stop there! Trump can also shut down every tractor!

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

This is the digital sovereignty risk. It's also the digital sovereignty opportunity. If countries repeal the laws that the US bullied them into accepting, laws that protect US tech giants from local competitors who block their plunder of data and money, they can turn America's tech trillions into their own tech billions. As Jeff Bezos likes to say, "your margin is my opportunity":

https://pluralistic.net/2026/01/30/zucksauce/#gandersauce

Meanwhile, repealing these US-protecting laws would enable countries to extract their data from US platforms so they can move it into domestic alternatives, and bypass the software locks that block them from updating phones, cars, tractors and ventilators to protect them from remote killswitches:

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

The digital sovereignty risk is having your country's government, businesses and industries terminated by Trump. The digital sovereignty opportunity is making billions of dollars by producing and exporting products that defend people from Big Tech plunder and Trumpian killswitches. That is the real world.

But many "digital sovereignty" advocates are living in an imaginary world, in which the digital sovereignty risk is that Trump will shut off their country's access to AI.

This is where the "if problem + blockchain" formulation comes in handy. If Trump shut off Canada's access to Chatgpt, Claude and Grok tomorrow, nothing would happen. No significant business, no federal or provincial ministry, no municipal government depends on these products for anything essential. And if Canada were to build their own local AI to sub in for Chatgpt, Claude and Grok, it would loose tens, if not hundreds of billions of dollars. Worst of all, a national AI strategy does nothing – not one solitary thing – to protect Canada from Trump shutting down our ministries, our companies, or our tractors.

In other words:

If: digital sovereignty + AI = digital sovereignty – AI

Then: AI = 0

If you think AI tools are nifty and want Canada to invest in AI, then first, please stop pretending that this has anything to do with "digital sovereignty." Not only is this a transparent bit of nonsense, it's a dangerous one, because digital sovereignty is a real problem, and AI does nothing to solve it.

If you want a good "national AI strategy," try this: save your money until the bubble bursts, and then buy your GPUs and hire your talent at 10 cents on the dollar and put them to work refining open source models:

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

Buying AI at the top of the market is nuts. That would be like shopping for Aeron chairs and foosball tables in March 2000. If you just sit tight for a couple months, you'll be able to find bankrupt dotcom entrepreneurs selling these at knock-down prices out front of their formerly overpriced office space in the Mission, in the time-honored tradition of former Wall Street millionaires selling apples out of their Rolls Royces:

https://digicoll.lib.berkeley.edu/record/323794

(Literally: I bought a "dining room set" of six $1500 Steelcase Leap chairs in the summer of 2000 from a failed dotcom CEO on Van Ness for $25 a piece – still in the original plastic!)

And in the meantime, please let's stop pretending that digital sovereignty has anything to do with "national AI." If Trump takes away your AI, everything is fine. If Trump takes away your iPhones, Office 365 and tractors, your country grinds to a halt. This is just not that complicated:

If: digital sovereignty + AI = digital sovereignty – AI

Then: AI = 0

(Image: Armin Kübelbeck, CC BY-SA 4.0, modified)

Hey look at this (permalink)


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

Object permanence (permalink)

#25yrsago Napster boss's American Library Association keynote https://web.archive.org/web/20010623201456/https://www.salon.com/tech/wire/2001/06/17/napster/index.html

#20yrsago Flickr: we’ll give full access to competitors – if they reciprocate https://www.flickr.com/groups/central/discuss/72157594165399644/#comment72157594167782546

#20yrsago Report from a concert by a Serbian war-criminal https://web.archive.org/web/20060613081324/http://blog.b92.net/blog/22

#20yrsago European podcasters to WIPO: Stay away from us! https://web.archive.org/web/20060619224538/https://www.bloggernews.net/2006/06/european-podcasters-team-up-to-lobby.html

#15yrsago KFC: support diabetes research by buying an 800 calorie, 56 spoonful of sugar “Mega Jug” https://web.archive.org/web/20110619031415/https://theweek.com/article/index/216462/irony-alert-buy-kfcs-800-calorie-soda-to-support-diabetes-research

#10yrsago Terrorist who murdered Jo Cox shouts: “Death to traitors” in court https://www.csmonitor.com/World/2016/0618/Accused-killer-of-MP-Jo-Cox-makes-defiant-court-statement

#10yrsago Judge orders release of man convicted while his public defender was handcuffed https://web.archive.org/web/20160617172242/http://www.reviewjournal.com/crime/judge-releases-man-who-received-jail-sentence-while-lawyer-was-handcuffs-video

#10yrsago Hambone virtuoso https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YMJeaZtgwng

#10yrsago Google Fiber now forces subscribers into binding arbitration; days left to opt out https://web.archive.org/web/20160617141759/https://consumerist.com/2016/06/16/google-fiber-copies-comcast-att-forces-users-to-give-up-their-legal-right-to-sue/

#1yrago The Immortal Choir Holds Every Voice https://pluralistic.net/2025/06/18/anarcho-cryptid/#decameron-and-on

Upcoming appearances (permalink)

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


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

Recent appearances (permalink)


A grid of my books with Will Stahle covers..

Latest books (permalink)


A cardboard book box with the Macmillan logo.

Upcoming books (permalink)

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

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

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

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

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


Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources:

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

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

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

  • A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING

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

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

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

How to get Pluralistic:

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

Pluralistic.net

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

https://pluralistic.net/plura-list

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

https://mamot.fr/@pluralistic

Bluesky (no ads, possible tracking and data-collection):

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

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

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

ISSN: 3066-764X

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