The Democratic Party just won its largest congressional majorities in more than a decade. In the House specifically, if current vote tallies hold, it will boast more seats next year than at any time since 1992.

Now what do they do with that power? 

In the near term, the extraordinary scale of the Democrats’ midterm victory might be of little consequence. So long as President Donald Trump holds veto power over legislation, a 254-seat House majority may be no better at advancing the Democratic agenda than a 218-seat one would be. 

Two years from now, however, the blue tsunami’s size could matter enormously. Democrats are unlikely to do quite as well in the 2028 election as they did this year, when the Republican base largely abstained. But Democratic Senate leader Chuck Schumer’s party now has plenty of seats to spare. For this reason, if Democrats win the presidency in 2028, they are now extremely likely to also secure full control of Congress — and by comfortable margins. 

This is no small thing. Under President Joe Biden, Democrats held only a bare Senate majority, enabling any individual senator to dictate the terms of their policymaking. A Democratic president has not had the chance to govern with robust congressional support since 2010.

Democrats are therefore within striking distance of a rare opportunity — a chance to enact their economic agenda without asking Republicans or their party’s most unreliable centrists for permission.

To seize this historic opening, Democrats will need to formulate a platform that effectively advances their core goals. Unfortunately, this will be harder than it sounds — because the party’s current economic priorities appear incompatible with each other.

During the midterm campaign, Democrats promised to:

• Bring down inflation and interest rates.
• Dramatically expand the welfare state.
• Raise taxes on the very wealthy — but no one else — while cutting taxes for millions of Americans. 

Democrats have good reason for embracing all of these objectives. In the last three federal elections, voters punished incumbents for presiding over a rising cost of living. So any governing party would be eager to reduce inflation and borrowing costs, both of which continue to trend in the wrong direction.

“This was the biggest change election in any of our lifetimes,” Democratic Rep. Greg Casar, chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, told me. “And Americans are demanding that we take on these high prices, root out corruption, and make their lives better.” 

Democrats’ desire to expand the welfare state is similarly understandable. Americans lack many forms of social insurance that are common in wealthier countries, such as truly universal healthcare. 

Finally, the party’s embrace of middle-class tax cuts reflects the US electorate’s growing antipathy for taxation. Indeed, last Tuesday, a historically Democratic electorate voted to restrict or cut taxes in states across the country. 

If Democrats’ goals are understandable, however, they aren’t necessarily coherent. In economic conditions similar to today’s, it probably won’t be possible to create large new social programs, avoid tax hikes on anyone but the rich, and drive down inflation and interest rates. 

For now, the party can skirt these questions; so long as Trump is in the White House, Democrats can simply agitate for an end to the Iran war and tariff relief, while denying full responsibility for the economy. 

To govern effectively when and if they win full control of the government, however, Democrats need to recognize the tension between their economic priorities early on — and try their best to reduce that friction. 

Americans are warming up to Democrats — but not to taxes

On election night, Democratic proponents of a more robust safety net prevailed in battleground races across the country.

But the Democratic Party’s economic reformers face a fundamental challenge: The large welfare states they admire have traditionally been financed by broad-based taxes. In nations like Sweden, Denmark, and Norway, high taxes on the middle class suppress consumer spending, clearing fiscal space for large social programs. This is how social democracies are able to have their comprehensive welfare states and stable prices too. 

But that model does not seem to be politically viable in the United States. To the contrary, America is currently witnessing a vast and growing tax revolt. 

That rebellion has been visible in polling and state-level policymaking for some time. Between 2020 and 2025, the share of Americans who considered their federal tax burden “too high” jumped from 46 percent to 59 percent in Gallup’s surveys. Meanwhile, states slashed taxes by tens of billions of dollars. 

But the 2026 midterm results may be the starkest illustration yet of America’s anti-tax mood. This year’s electorate was America’s most Democratic in more than five decades. We essentially saw what a US election looks like when a large share of the Republican base stays home. It turns out that, once you subtract tens of millions of conservatives from the American electorate, Mississippi, South Carolina, and Texas become blue states.

And yet, even this historically Democratic voting public mostly rejected “tax-and-spend” liberalism at the ballot box.

In North Carolina, voters backed Democratic Senate candidate Roy Cooper — and lower income taxes. In Iowa, they rallied behind Democrat Josh Turek for Senate, while also forbidding the legislature from increasing income taxes without a two-thirds majority. In Florida, an atypically Democratic (if still majority Republican) electorate voted to slash property taxes by nearly $5 billion a year. 

In Illinois and Virginia, most localities shot down referendums on new property or sales taxes; in the Old Dominion’s case, municipalities largely rejected a 1 percent sales tax hike to fund school construction and renovation. Likewise, on a good night for Democrats in the Grand Canyon State, Arizonans voted to cap the sales tax on grocery purchases and constitutionally prohibit the taxation of vehicle miles traveled to fund road maintenance. (Today, road construction is often financed with a tax on gasoline, which ensures that those who use the roads contribute to their maintenance. As more drivers switch to electric vehicles, however, an alternative means of measuring road use has become necessary.)

Finally, in deep blue California, a proposal for a one-time wealth tax on billionaires appears to have failed.

This is not to say that the 2026 electorate took the anti-tax side of every ballot measure. There were many important exceptions to this rule. Nevertheless, the fact remains that an exceptionally Democratic electorate opposed higher taxes in a remarkably wide array of cases.

And this anti-tax mood was not lost on Democrats. Virtually all of the party’s battleground Senate and gubernatorial candidates campaigned on tax cuts. In Texas, Sen.-elect James Talarico promised to deliver a “cost-of-living tax cut for the middle class,” while Gov.-elect Gina Hinojosa pledged to pursue the goal of “eliminating residential property taxes.” In Mississippi, Democrats’ unlikeliest new senator, Scott Colom, called for ending all income taxes on teachers and cops. Even Sen.-elect Abdul El-Sayed, one of the Democrats’ most progressive candidates, who wrote a book on Medicare-for-all, vowed to help freeze property taxes on senior citizens.

Notably, this large, bipartisan tax revolt has emerged at a time when federal tax rates are unusually low; the bottom 80 percent of workers pay much lower federal taxes today than they did three decades ago.

Large welfare states can’t live on the rich alone

As I’ve already suggested, the Democrats’ growing appetite for tax cuts has not dampened their enthusiasm for new public spending. 

The party’s congressional leaders have signaled support for a social welfare agenda at least as ambitious as President Joe Biden’s unpassed Build Back Better Act, which contained $4.73 trillion of new spending (assuming that all its programs were made permanent, as its authors intended). 

Democratic leaders have recently endorsed reversing Trump’s Medicaid and SNAP cuts; restoring enhanced Affordable Care Act subsidies; expanding the child tax credit and earned-income tax credit; adding dental, vision, and hearing coverage to Medicare; establishing universal childcare; capping Medicare enrollees’ out-of-pocket costs; and expanding Medicaid funding for long-term care, among other things. 

Add up the estimated fiscal costs of all these programs and the bill comes out to nearly $5 trillion. Repealing all of Trump’s tariffs, as Democratic leaders have also promised, costs another $1.4 trillion (although, tariff relief has more complicated implications for inflation than other kinds of tax cuts). 

Critically, America is already on track to run an average annual deficit of $2.4 trillion over the coming decade. It is impossible to know with certainty what the macroeconomic conditions of 2029 will be like. But all else equal, a greater than $2 trillion deficit will put upward pressure on interest rates and prices.

For this reason, there’s a good chance that the next Democratic government won’t be able to inject trillions more dollars into the economy without undermining its own goals on inflation and borrowing costs. 

To be sure, Democrats aren’t saying that they will deficit-finance their proposed spending. Rather, the party generally suggests that it will pay for its new programs (and working-class tax cuts) by soaking the wealthy and corporations.

But that approach probably won’t be sufficient to offset the inflationary impact of the party’s full social welfare agenda. For one thing, congressional Democrats’ appetite for new taxes on the rich has its limits. 

In 2021, the House version of Biden’s Build Back Better Act contained only $1.47 trillion worth of taxes on companies and high earners. And that sum proved too much for multiple Democratic senators. The fiscal policy that actually made it into law — the Inflation Reduction Act — included a mere $349 billion in such taxes.

As noted above, if a Democrat wins the presidency in 2028, he or she will probably have larger majorities than Biden ever did. But it seems unlikely that Senate Democrats in 2029 will be eager to raise taxes on the rich by trillions more than their Biden-era counterparts were.

Regardless, there is a more fundamental problem: Taxes on the rich do not suppress inflation as effectively as taxes on the middle class. 

This is because middle-class families spend a higher percentage of their earnings than millionaires and billionaires do. If you take $2,000 out of every middle-class family’s annual income, many will be forced to consume fewer goods and services, which will reduce consumer demand — and thus, inflationary pressure — throughout the economy.

By contrast, even if you reduce Jeff Bezos’s post-tax income by $200,000, he will feel no need to moderate his spending. His savings might marginally decline. But his consumption is liable to stay about the same, since he will still have more money than he could spend in a lifetime. For this reason, taking money from billionaires — and giving it to working-class families — will tend to nudge inflation upward, all else equal.

“Tax increases on those at the absolute top can address wealth or income inequality, but probably won’t do much to manage demand,” Skanda Amarnath, executive director of the economic research organization Employ America, told me. “If you want to fund big new social programs, the most robust version of that has historically involved broad, regressive taxes, which don’t leave you dependent on the support and compliance of rich people.”

If you don’t want to constrain demand, at least increase supply

It’s possible that inflation will cease to be a pressing concern by 2029. Merely ending the Iran war could cool prices significantly. And if the AI buildout falters, that would also reduce our economy’s demand for labor, chips, and electricity (albeit, perhaps by causing a recession). Alternatively, if Anthropic or ChatGPT builds a machine God in the next couple of years — and puts tens of millions of Americans out of work — we might even see deflation.

But it would be imprudent for Democrats to bank on any of these scenarios. In all likelihood, they will need to scale back their ambitions for the welfare state, grow more comfortable with broad-based taxes, or make peace with pushing up inflation and interest rates.

This said, the party can work to reduce the tension between its objectives. Inflation is what happens when demand for goods and services rises faster than their supply. If Democrats are hellbent on pushing up demand through high social spending and low taxes, they should think seriously about how to make the economy more productive and efficient (and thus, able to generate a larger supply of goods and services).

Massachusetts Rep. Jake Auchincloss is among the Democrats focused on this dimension of the “affordability” challenge. 

“Healthcare, home ownership and taxes now consume more than half the middle-class wallet,” Auchincloss told me. “And housing construction, healthcare and government are all very low labor productivity industries.” Therefore, in Auchincloss’s view, delivering on affordability requires increasing the productivity of the construction, medical, and public sectors. 

With respect to housing, this entails new subsidies and regulatory changes that encourage modular construction — the manufacture of new homes in factories, where productivity gains are easier to achieve — along with zoning reforms. 

In healthcare and government, the path to progress is less clear, but Auchincloss believes that a concerted push for greater efficiency — and the thoughtful deployment of AI — can drive down the unit costs of medical treatment and social service provision in the US (at least, if Democrats prove willing to challenge the interests of healthcare providers, many of whom benefit from the existing system’s inefficiencies). 

More straightforwardly, Congress is presently considering legislation that would erode permitting obstacles to new energy infrastructure. That bill is expected to eventually reduce Americans’ electricity costs by expanding the nation’s supply of both green and carbon power. The more committed Democrats are to growing the welfare state and avoiding middle-class tax hikes, the less they can afford to pass up these kinds of opportunities to increase the economy’s productive capacity.

The great perk of powerlessness is the freedom to ignore trade-offs. When crafting campaign rhetoric, a political party can conjure a world where voters will enjoy a robust safety net, large tax cuts, and low prices — so long as the government ends “corporate subsidies,” or cuts aid to Israel, or deports all the undocumented immigrants, or whatever else its base is already eager to do. 

When it’s time to actually govern, however, a party ignores inconvenient truths at its own peril, as Trump’s GOP just ably demonstrated. Democrats must therefore recognize their agenda’s internal contradictions as soon as possible. To execute a coherent economic strategy in 2029 — or whenever they next secure full federal power — the party will need to know what it actually cares about most. 

LONDON — Democratic wins across the U.S. brought a brief rush of excitement to Britain’s left-wing establishment last week — but they also contained warnings for Prime Minister Andy Burnham’s government.

Labour insiders privately cheered the midterm results, interpreting the outcome as a damning verdict on Donald Trump’s politics and a win for Democrats’ unifying strategy of focusing on living standards, despite ideological differences across their slate of candidates.

It’s left Burnham’s followers cautiously optimistic about his approach so far as prime minister, which has included incremental measures to lower costs, such as reducing food tariffs and offering money off energy bills.

A Labour MP, granted anonymity like others in this article to speak frankly, said their own engagement with Democratic New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s team had hammered home “the politics of trying.”

“If people think you’re not even trying, which obviously is what they thought about Trump, then you’re just going to get blown away,” they said. By making small adjustments, the MP argued, Burnham has begun to “develop a coherent argument — which is actually voters have to see you trying on the cost of living.”

Yet beyond this apparent vindication of the PM’s basic strategy, members of his party see clear warning signs for the incumbent British government in the U.S. political shift. An administration only just coming out of a dire stretch in public opinion polls, they worry, could take the wrong lessons from the Dems’ triumph across the pond if they don’t heed the deep anti-incumbent sentiment that drove it.

Reasons to be fearful

Burnham has badged his fledgling administration as a “cost of living government” since he replaced Keir Starmer at the top of Labour earlier this year.

Yet he has faced criticism from some quarters that a government-wide budget unveiled last month lacked real ambition — and now the pressure is on to deliver before a general election, due by 2029.

Claire Ainsley, a former adviser to Starmer who works for the Progressive Policy Institute think tank on both sides of the Atlantic, told POLITICO that, despite arguments about the future direction of the Democratic Party, “what they’ve all had in common is a real focus on affordability.”

“They’ve really focused on bread-and-butter issues for everyday Americans, and clearly that’s the path to be building and hopefully winning in 2028,” she said.

Ainsley highlighted striking moves by a host of prominent Democratic politicians, including Mamdani, who has offered childcare support to New Yorkers, and New Jersey’s Mikie Sherrill — who declared “a state of emergency” on utility bills. Virginia’s Abigail Spanberger has targeted the cost of prescriptions.

“You’ve still got people who are worried here and wouldn’t necessarily say the cost of living is being relieved,” Ainsley warned. “You’ve got interest rates going up and there are lots of warning signs on our dashboard.”

Adam Terry, executive director of the Future Governance Forum think tank, argued likewise that Burnham’s action on the “little things” was part of the answer — but that he has not yet tackled “the big structural questions, namely: why is the economy so sluggish?”

That need to provide deeper solutions to Britain’s woes only raises the stakes for Burnham’s promised ten-year plan and his broader strategy for rewiring the British state, Terry said.

The same Labour MP quoted at the top of the piece — while broadly positive about Burnham’s impact so far — said: “It’s not a coincidence that basically every government in Britain since Brexit has failed usually within 18 months — and I would include in that Keir Starmer’s. Clearly systemic change is definitely required.”

Deborah Mattinson, a Labour member of the House of Lords and pollster who has worked in both the U.S. and U.K., cautioned progressives against believing the age of Trump-style politics is over, “because until things that encourage Trumpism are fixed, it won’t happen.

She added that in the U.S. — and in Germany and France, too — “working people feel the contract that they made with the state has fallen down.”

“The U.K. needs to be really mindful that if you don’t fix those fundamental grievances that people have, then you continue to be in a bind,” Mattinson added.

Up against it

Even those at the top of Labour sense that the PM is up against it if he is to buck the anti-incumbency trend demonstrated by the punishment of Republicans right across the United States.

A senior Labour aide observed that the midterm results strengthened the Democrats as they begin to target the White House in 2028 — but in the meantime they face a similar dilemma of delivery as Burnham.

No.10 Downing Street knows it needs to improve people’s lives, the aide said — but it remains “very difficult” to pull one lever that makes a substantial difference without upsetting financial markets.

Burnham has already been quick to draw a direct line between the U.S. electoral shift and politics closer to home. “I can’t get people’s cost of living pressures down until the conflict in the Middle East is resolved,” he said last week — while urging world leaders to “unite” around efforts to wind down the war.

Here, too, the prime minister may be testing the limits of his own country’s ability to shift the diplomatic dial — while few expect a calmer international picture in which Burnham can really bear down on costs.

Britain will stick to a steady drumbeat of quiet diplomacy for the rest of the year, two people inside government said, including talks with G7 and G20 partners, ongoing contact with Gulf allies, and a bid to maximize the U.K.’s G20 presidency starting in January. 

But a minister in Burnham’s government predicted that when it comes to international relations, and especially military action, Trump’s election drubbing “will not make much difference” to his mindset. 

Anxiety in London over Trump’s next move has certainly not been quelled by initial post-election ripples within the White House, either. Ministers and aides are watching nervously for further news of Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s future — generally seen as a reliable interlocutor with the U.K. — while one serving British diplomat said Stephen Miller’s installation as Trump’s chief of staff represented a “red flag.” 

The senior party official quoted above said: “The U.S.’s relationship with every single country in the world has just been thrown into a level of uncertainty and fluidity.”

MADRID — Spain’s center-right People’s Party has pledged to “put a stop to the imposition of unrealistic timelines” for climate goals if it wins the national elections on Nov. 29, a significant pivot from the Sánchez government’s pro-green policies.

The PP, the favorite to win the vote, said decarbonization is an “essential goal for Europe,” but promised to push for an “orderly, realistic, and fair transition,” according to the energy chapter of the party’s manifesto obtained by POLITICO’s Madrid Playbook.

The manifesto said it’s time “to reassess the pace of progress” in the clean energy transition “without dogmatism,” while conceding there are “environmental, geostrategic and economic reasons” behind the decarbonization strategy.

Spain under Socialist Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez has been one of the bloc’s most influential cheerleaders for ambitious climate goals, advocating to protect key EU policies like the Emissions Trading System, pollution reduction targets and the phase-out of gasoline cars.

But the PP’s manifesto shows that would change if the EU’s fourth-largest economy votes for a conservative government led by PP leader Alberto Núñez Feijóo.

Polls point to a clear majority for a coalition between the PP and Vox, a far-right party which is highly hostile to climate policies and is rising in the polls — potentially giving it significant weight in the next cabinet.

Feijóo’s team advocates assessing and relaxing Spain’s climate policy sector by sector, considering three factors: “What is happening in the rest of the world, the technology that is available at the moment, and changes in demand.”

“We will not impose unnecessary obligations and will remove those that harm competitiveness, industry, or employment,” the document adds.

The PP has taken a more skeptical approach to EU climate policy than many of its fellow conservatives in other countries. In November 2025, for example, it voted against the 2040 climate goal in the European Parliament, breaking ranks with most of the EU’s center-right umbrella group, the European People’s Party.

Alberto Nadal, a former secretary of state for energy and for budget under the previous PP government, is the key figure on energy in Feijóo’s team and the mind behind the manifesto’s energy chapter. According to a PP official, he also considered external contributions to the manifesto from experts.  

In a March interview with public broadcaster RNE, Nadal criticized the EU’s “almost Taliban-like or radical” decarbonization strategy. In a recent interview with ElEconomista, Nadal, seen as a possible minister in a future conservative government, shifted his attention to energy prices and industry, without discussing climate or decarbonization.

Nuclear and data centers

The manifesto also proposes extending the operating lifespans of five nuclear plants “with the approval of the Nuclear Safety Council.”

It also points to a change of direction on data centers if there’s a PP-led government, pledging to resolve issues that “are hindering the grid connection” of data centers within 18 months.

The Socialist government has drafted a decree, expected to be approved before the Nov. 29 snap election, that would tie data centers’ access to the electricity grid to sustainability and digital sovereignty requirements. Nadal has already stated that a conservative government will repeal the decree, which he said represents “the end of Spain’s technological future”.

The document also touched on the thorny issue of the 2025 national blackout and commits to updating the operating rules for the electricity system in the first six months in office. In light of what the PP considers a lack of transparency regarding the nationwide blackout, the party has pledged that “every serious incident” will be the subject of its own report.

On the circular economy, the conservative party signals that it won’t “impose additional obligations, accelerate timelines, or squander the investments, infrastructure, and capabilities that Spain already possesses.” That wording casts doubt over the implementation of the country’s deposit return scheme.

Just days after big wins in the midterms, Democrats are celebrating historic victories. But what can we actually learn from these wins? 

David Axelrod is a Democratic strategist and the man behind Barack Obama’s two presidential victories. He’s not a senior political commentator at CNN. He’s spent decades figuring out how Democrats can win. 

On Wednesday, Axelrod joined America, Actually for a conversation with host Astead Herndon about what the blue wave in the midterms reveals about voters in the US right now, the powerful demographic shifts that are underway, and what Democrats need to do next to make good on the promises they made in their campaigns, all while Trump is still in the White House. 

Below is an excerpt of their conversation, edited for length and clarity. There’s much more in the full show, so listen to America, Actually wherever you get your podcasts or watch it on Vox’s YouTube channel.

Is this all about Trump’s unpopularity, or an endorsement of Democrats? I heard Rahm Emanuel say that he doesn’t read this as a vindication of Democrats, but as a repudiation of Republicans.

Does that distinction matter? And do we know if people were voting for Democrats or just against the administration?

I think every midterm election in some ways is a referendum on the incumbent party. That’s been true forever. And it’s almost always the case that the verdict is: not as good as we’d like. You know, this election is the one where the people in power have to put on a button saying, “How am I doing?”

And people get to tell them, and the answer was: really, really bad. 

Horrible! Two thumbs down. 

Really, really bad. And obviously it was a repudiation of the president. I think it was a real response to the same thing that drove the election as much as anything in 2024, which is costs and the fact that people are struggling in this economy. The thing that made this unusual was Trump was elected to lower these costs, and instead he made decisions that palpably raised them — the war, the tariffs.

I think it’s given Democrats a chance to prove that they are who they say they are and work on these issues of cost. And they’re crippled in the sense that if they don’t have a partner in the president, all they can do is try and pass legislation and do things to reduce those costs, but they need a partner to do it.

I don’t discount the fact that Trump may do a 180 on some things and be that partner.

It is an open question who the president becomes after all of this, considering he’s, you know, the nicest way to say it is ideologically flexible. Should Democrats come in thinking accountability? Should they come in thinking, find places of bipartisan alignment? Is the answer both?

Yeah, I think the answer is both. And it’s very tricky to strike that balance. And if the price of cooperation is to lay off of accountability, I don’t think that’s a deal they can make. 

But I look at the way Mayor Mamdani has handled his relationship with Trump. And there may be some instructive elements to that, because he’s certainly critical of the president. But he’s also found areas around housing, for example, on which they can work together. 

Here’s what I would say to Democrats: Be willing to work with him. And I think you’ll pay a price if you don’t. If he’s willing to help you, for example, on rolling back some of these cuts to the affordable healthcare subsidies or to Medicaid cuts. I think the country would actually embrace that kind of deal.

And for that reason, I think Trump may take it because I don’t think he gives a damn about the Republican Party. The Republican Party was just a vehicle for him, and now he’s mad at them — because he’s not going to blame himself for what happened on Tuesday.

You’ve mentioned the demographic shifts. They were universal. You talk about men, Latinos, Asian voters, young people, working-class people generally moving towards Democrats in numbers that were even larger than some polls expected. I was wondering: Did we write the obituary on the Obama coalition too early? Is it back?

I’m so allergic to this because I remember when we won. I remember people talking about the coalition of the ascendant. This is the coalition that’s going to govern.

Yeah, the governing majority to come.

The message is: It matters what you do.

Democrats took Hispanic voters, for example, for granted. And they paid a big price in 2024. Republicans took Hispanic voters for granted. And in each case they’re a constituency that is deeply responsive to economic circumstances. They’re getting hammered in this economy, as they were in 2024. They are also — in the main — socially conservative communities. I think both parties have been guilty sequentially in misreading this. 

By the way, everybody’s talking about who’s responsible for the Republican performance this year? I don’t think Stephen Miller is getting the credit that he deserved.

One hundred percent, yeah. 

The immigration overreach is core to the collapse with Latino voters. We heard about that through the year. And just generally shocking to the conscience of the American public.

Yes! There was a vote for decency here. Decency had a big day on Tuesday, and in that vein, it’s so interesting to me that Talarico, Hamilton, candidates like that, who very much preached the gospel of the brotherhood of man and of decency, wound up triumphing in places that you never thought Democrats could triumph. 

So that’s a long way of answering: I think what the Democratic coalition is and can be depends on what Democrats do now.

Today's links

• The AI fatfinger economy has come for my receipts app: Every heretofore useful button now summons a useless AI genie.
• Hey look at this: Delights to delectate.
• Object permanence: Army Times v Rumsfeld; RIAA v soccer mom; Skateboard truck table; Internet scare-story prof won't show her workings; IoT botnet v Liberia; BLM v TPP.
• Upcoming appearances: Kilkenny, Courtenay, Vancouver, Folkestone, Oxford, Sheffield, Virtual, Oxford, Montreal.
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• Latest books: You keep readin' em, I'll keep writin' 'em.
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• Colophon: All the rest.

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The AI fatfinger economy has come for my receipts app (permalink)

"AI is being shoved down our throats" can mean any of several things. It can mean that our bosses are demanding that we use AI in reckless or nonsensical ways on the job:

https://www.404media.co/manifestos-fear-and-loser-thinking-inside-protons-ai-reckoning/

It can mean that Elon Musk and the NASDAQ have colluded to force ordinary retirement savers to bail out his emirati and tech oligarch buddies:

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/06/05/technology/spacex-indexes-401k.html

These are arguably the most important ways in which AI is shoved down our throats, but the most visible form of conscription into the number-go-up AI project is happening at the user interface level. This UI fuckery predates AI. For more than a decade, tech companies and their executives have colluded to trick, coerce and force you into using new features that they wanted to sell to their investors as the future of their companies.

Remember Google Plus, the Facebook-killing social layer that was going to give Google access to a new, multi-trillion-dollar market? Bradley Horowitz, then a VP at Google, charged every product team with cramming G+ into their offerings, tying their bonuses to G+ usage (at companies like Google, your bonus can dwarf your base salary).

Now, googlers are bright and resourceful people, and if you tell them that they can double their earnings by getting users to click on Google Plus buttons, they'll come up with all kinds of ways to get you to do this. Some of those gambits will be the kind of thing that Horowitz doubtless hoped for: innovative and creative ways to add value to Google's core offerings with G+ features.

But when the stakes are that high, Goodhart's Law inevitably comes into play: "When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure":

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law

The easiest way to get a user to click on a G+ button is to replace whatever button that user hits most often with a G+ version. Rather than introducing users to Google Plus in a way that turns them into G+ fans, you just frustrate them by tricking them into clicking on a useless button.

From a product manager's perspective, it's worth making whatever changes as are needed to ensure that your salary is doubled because you hit your "key performance indicator" (KPI), even if it's at the expense of your users' loyalty to your product. Preserving user loyalty at the expense of half your wages is a bad trade.

When a machine learning system does this, we call it "reward hacking." AI programmers create an "objective function" for their system, a single number that the system will try every tactic to increase; then, more often than not, the AI program finds perverse shortcuts to make the number go up whether or not it achieves the programmer's goal:

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

For example, if you charge an AI with coming up with the shortest run through a video game, it might well discover a bug that makes it impervious to enemy attacks or just lets it teleport to the end of the game. To avoid these perverse outcomes, programmers have to add more and more specificity to their objective functions: "speed run the game without teleporting or discovering an immortality hack."

Not for nothing, many science fiction writers (including me) have noted that tech bosses' fear of their own AI systems is a kind of emotional spillover from their frustrations with the corporations they run, where underlings engage in the same kinds of reward hacking that we see from chatbots:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/04/14/timmy-share/#a-superior-moral-justification-for-selfishness

Despite the ease with which metrics can be gamed, tech bosses remained committed to the use of KPIs to shift the priorities of their organizations, and they use the same objective function refinement technique that programmers use for reward-hacking AIs in a bid to prevent cheating by employees who hit their KPIs any way they can.

This explains a lot about the experience of watching a video on your phone. Any time you tune into a show on a streaming platform, you are forced to handle your phone with the delicacy of a photonegative. If any part of your hand brushes any part of the screen, you will immediately be whisked away from the video you're watching to an entirely different one:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/05/15/the-fatfinger-economy/

Worse, after your program has been replaced with this new one, there's no obvious way to get back to the show you were just watching. This is very weird, considering that the "back button" has been a part of computer interfaces since 1981:

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/back%20button

The reason you don't get a back button is reward hacking. Streaming video platforms are under enormous pressure to successfully recommend their back-catalog to their users, because the alternative (commissioning or purchasing a steady stream of popular new shows) is very expensive. Investors put a lot of stock in streaming services' "successful recommendation" rate.

So streaming service bosses charge their product teams with making "successful recommendations." The easiest way to "recommend a show" is to booby-trap the streaming service's UI so that touching any part of the screen takes you to a video you never asked to see.

This is obvious reward hacking, so streaming bosses refined their objective function: they made their teams' bonuses contingent on getting you to watch a new video for a minimum time-frame. This in turn triggered the next volley in the reward-hacking wars, in which product teams took away the back button. This gives users any number of greased slides that whisk them away to a new video. To get back to the old video, users are forced to climb a greased pole.

This is the fatfinger economy: created in the 2010s by teams at large tech companies with KPI-obsessed bosses; refined in the 2020s by teams at bottom-line obsessed streaming media companies; and now perfected by teams being charged with cramming AI into every corner of our lives:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/05/02/kpis-off/#principal-agentic-ai-problem

The fatfinger economy is an extraordinary beneficiary of the drive to add "telemetry" to all of our apps. Today, an app vendor can call up a dashboard and find out which buttons and fields and sliders see the most use, and they can use that ranked list to figure out which buttons to replace with AI-demon-summoning lookalikes that help product teams "prove" to their bosses that they've "successfully integrated AI" and lets their bosses prove to their investors that "users value AI features."

I recently switched from Android to Graphene, a de-googled phone operating system. Graphene's maintainers are blissfully free from the imperative to show that "users value AI features," and that's why I have never accidentally summoned up an undismissable AI by tapping a Graphene UI element.

It's a different story when it comes to apps. Graphene has many different ways to install apps, including via Google Play (Google's default Android store). That's useful because it lets you install your old Android apps after switching to Graphene, but it does leave you exposed to the fatfinger economy.

Last week, I got a painful reminder of the progress of the fatfinger economy outside of Graphene's utopian pocket-universe. I make extensive use of an app called "Genius Scanner," which lets me scan receipts and email them to myself (I do this a lot because, as a freelancer, I have to track a lot of different expenses). I bought a lifetime subscription to Genius Scanner in 2023, after getting burned by Camscanner (my previous, now enshittified scanning app), and I've been perfectly happy with it…until now.

Genius Scanner is obviously under pressure to drive AI adoption. I can tell because they've taken away the most important UI element and swapped it for a worse-than-useless AI button.

Here's how I use Genius Scanner: I press the "make new scan" button and line up the receipt on the screen. Then I press the "retitle" button, which brings up a field that is populated with the current date and time (16 characters in all). This text used to be selected so that hitting the little "x" next to it deleted it, making it easy to title a new scan. After that, I'd just email it to myself.

As of last week, though, there is no button that deletes the date and time so you can enter a useful title. That little "x" has been replaced with a button that brings up an ad for the company's new AI tools, which cost $40/year. There's no way to tell the system that you're not interested in buying a new subscription for the tool that you've already bought a lifetime sub for, and there's no way to get that little "x" back.

To be clear: that little "x" represents one quarter of my receipt scanning workflow. They have swapped it out for an ad for a new subscription AI feature, and gave me 16 new keypresses on the backspace button to replace that single tap on the "x." I have seen that ad about 100 times at this point, because I keep tapping the spot where the "x" used to be.

I'm certain that the company knew that its paying customers relied on the "x" to accomplish a vital function in any scanning app (giving good, descriptive titles to scans). They need the AI number to go up, so they replaced the "x" with the AI ad, which will let them tell their investors that they've got "strong consumer interest in their AI features."

Meanwhile, they already have my money, so there's no way I can punish them for their decision to screw me over to juke a meaningless stat. It's as neat (and depressing) an example of the principle that "even if you're paying for the product, you're still the product" that you could ask for.

It's also a perfect little object-lesson in the ways that companies can report increasing AI interest and usage without generating any interest or usage. In the fatfinger economy, every metric is a target, and is thereby rendered meaningless.

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Hey look at this (permalink)

• Google Will Turn Off Search for Schools That Reject A.I. https://www.nytimes.com/2026/11/03/us/google-search-schools-restrict-ai.html

• Private Credit's State Backstop: How Private Equity Socializes Risk Through Insurers https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=7152239

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Object permanence (permalink)

#20yrsago Army Times: Rumsfeld must go! https://web.archive.org/web/20061107220242/http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/110406Z.shtml

#20yrsago UK is a surveillance society http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/6108496.stm

#20yrsago Record companies sue soccer mom’s kids https://web.archive.org/web/20061104145550/https://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/11/02/AR2006110200114.html

#15yrsago HOWTO make your own skateboard truck lazy-susan table https://www.instructables.com/Skateboard-Table/

#15yrsago Home Secretary to OccupyLondon: you’re scaring the tourists https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-london-15588987

#15yrsago Judge whose daughter released video of him beating her suspended from bench during judicial investigation https://web.archive.org/web/20111105234141/http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/U/US_VIDEOTAPED_BEATING_TEXAS

#15yrsago Prof who keeps announcing links between the Internet, childhood dementia and autism should publish theories in a scientific journal https://www.badscience.net/2011/11/why-wont-professor-greenfield-publish-this-theory-in-a-scientific-journal/

#10yrsago Internet of Things botnet threatens to knock the entire country of Liberia offline https://doublepulsar.com/shadows-kill-mirai-ddos-botnet-testing-large-scale-attacks-sending-threatening-messages-about-6a61553d1c7#.zg4448j8w

#10yrsago Black Lives Matter declares its opposition to TPP https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2016/11/gauis-publius-tpp-has-picked-up-a-powerful-enemy-black-lives-matter.html

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Upcoming appearances (permalink)

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

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

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

• Folkestone Writers Festival, Nov 16
  https://www.creativefolkestone.org.uk/whats-on/cory-doctorow-the-internet-is-broken-now-what/

• Oxford: Ministry of the Future, Nov 23
  https://ministryforthefuture.co.uk/events.html

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

• Virtual: Enshittification, AI, and the Future of Technology (UBC Master of Educational Technology), Nov 28
  https://met.ubc.ca/2026/09/met-speaker-series-cory-doctorow-enshittification-ai-and-the-future-of-technology/

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

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

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Recent appearances (permalink)

• Clint Eastwood (No Gods No Mayors)
  https://www.patreon.com/NoGodsNoMayors/posts/clint-eastwood-173008088

• Life After AI (Brain Bar)
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IPPa43-n0vI

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

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

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

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Latest books (permalink)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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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 (32413 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

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

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

---

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A specter is haunting Europe, and plenty of other places too. Nobody knows quite what to call it. It isn’t the specter of communism this time around, or at least not under that name — although something approaching class warfare, redefined in 21st-century terms, is on the agenda for the first time in decades. 

Student protests that began at secondary schools in the northern suburbs of Paris about a month ago have sparked a wave of demonstrations and street battles— occasionally tipping over into rioting, looting, and organized property destruction — that has now spread to at least six or seven countries, with new outbreaks happening nearly every day. But there is no single unifying issue that has brought students, labor unions, left-wing activists, anarchist rebels and hundreds of thousands of ordinary people into the streets of Paris, Lisbon, Madrid, Brussels, Milan, Belgrade, Athens and Tirana, among many other cities. 

While the protests in Belgium and Italy are direct outgrowths of the French student movement, the proximate causes of unrest are local and distinct in every case. Protests in Spain and Portugal reflect years of simmering discontent over the soaring cost of living, especially a housing crisis made worse by the explosion of Airbnb-style tourist rentals. In Greece the protests were initially about workplace safety and public sector wages. In Albania and Serbia, where protest movements were well underway before the French students made headlines, the main issues involve deeply entrenched government corruption. 

Thousands of miles away in the world’s largest self-described democracy, India’s youth-driven Cockroach Janta Party (“Voice of the Lazy & Unemployed”) isn’t connected to the French protests at all, except by the kind of historical coincidence that isn’t really a coincidence. The CJP was launched earlier this year, about halfway between political satire and social media experiment, and by midsummer became a mass movement that has shaken the autocratic Hindu nationalist government of Prime Minister Narendra Modi to its foundations. 

Given this diversity and the tangential connections between all these events, it’s almost easier to say what the protest wave of 2026 is not about than to define it precisely. No dramatic world-historical event has catalyzed all this, and for the most part these protests are happening in relatively prosperous, relatively peaceful and nominally democratic nations. We’re not on the cusp of global financial or economic crisis, at least not yet, although there are troubling warning signs. There is no immediate threat of military conflict or civil warfare in any of these countries, although Russia’s war in Ukraine, Israel’s murderous war in Gaza and the spectacularly mismanaged U.S. war with Iran have all fueled the rising sense of collective outrage. 

To use one of this decade’s most overused words, the outrage seems existential. It’s about everything everywhere all at once or, to more cynical observers, about nothing in particular. It’s about underfunded schools, crumbling infrastructure and soaring rents, and also about Gaza, climate change and the enforced spread of AI, data centers and government surveillance. 

Ironically enough given its origins, the outrage is also being driven by a highly literate and globally connected generation, one that is sufficiently well educated to perceive the underlying conditions that have made those things happen. They see paralyzed centrist governments held captive by bankers and tech billionaires; they see an economy built on worsening inequality, systematic insecurity and what sociologists call “elite overproduction” (e.g., university graduates working as baristas); they see the climate crisis addressed only with bland rhetoric or regulatory fiddling as one deadly heat wave follows another.

What the protests of 2026 are not about, to any measurable degree, is skin color or religion. Donald Trump, Elon Musk, Benjamin Netanyahu and far too many of their fellow travelers have seized on the disorder in Europe as evidence of the pernicious effects of “open borders” and Islamic immigration. It’s a losing proposition to quote stuff that the president of the United States says on social media and then feign outrage, as if we were actually surprised. But we are where we are: France is being “conquered, looted and burned to the ground by migrants, jihadists and communists who hate Christianity,” Trump informed us via Truth Social last week.

That fantastical framing tells us a lot more about him and his supporters, needless to say, than about the remarkably diverse crowds in the streets of Europe’s major cities. But the tempting prospect of blaming immigrants for the protests or the acts of violence — maybe not as the primary cause and way below the Trump level, in an effort to fend off critics on the right — has created a kind of acid test or moral hazard for political leaders and media commentators. The pass/fail ratio is both depressing and mildly surprising.

Embattled German Chancellor Friedrich Merz and the newly-installed Hungarian Prime Minister Péter Magyar, for instance, have failed the test, both suggesting that “high rates of migration and a failure to integrate the foreign-born are partly behind the sudden, violent upheaval,” to quote this week’s leading editorial in the Economist. So did New York Times opinion columnist Frank Bruni, an alleged liberal who began his breezy Oct. 22 discussion with right-winger Bret Stephens by stating the unquestioned premise that “a velocity of religious, racial and ethnic diversification over the past quarter century that has exceeded what many longtime residents could easily make sense of and comfortably adapt to” had somehow led to angry high school students and window-smashing anarchists in French cities.

As for French President Emmanuel Macron, bête noire of the protest movement, perhaps he has decided to go down fighting in the last six months of his largely disastrous decade in power. For all his arrogance and hubris, Macron is no racist and has decried the “stupid comments” by foreign leaders he declines to name, who claim that France has been “invaded by hordes of migrants and Islamists, which is completely false.”

But the most forceful rejection of current racist narratives about the European protests, and perhaps the best single summary of why they are happening in the first place, comes, improbably enough, in the above-quoted leading editorial in the Economist:

Even if some young protesters in France wear Algerian football shirts or chant pro-Palestinian slogans, the upheaval in Europe today is not about race or religion. Over 500,000 people marched in France on Saturday [Oct. 17] and they were largely unmasked and white. They were fired up, as in other countries, by the cost of living and poor public services. They want more fuel subsidies, more spending on schools, more handouts.

Leaving aside the buzzword “handouts,” which is meant to signal the innate laziness of the non-wealthy, that’s some straight-up gospel preaching. As the editorial confesses, once upon a time the Economist enthusiastically backed Macron as the golden boy of neoliberal reform, but now he and other “head-in-the-sand centrists” seem to be “out of ideas.” Strikingly, the editorial has no new ideas to offer.

In a Foreign Policy essay last week, former Estonian president Kersti Kaljulaid defines the central problem in Europe, plausibly but rather too vaguely, as “intergenerational hopelessness” and a downward spiral of economic expectation. Once again, the Economist — which can fairly be described as the house organ of global capital — goes at the issue far more directly. Demonstrators on Europe’s streets, its editorial proposes, are “consumed by rage”:

Rage at the failure of the state and against the floundering centrist politicians who govern. Rage at high prices and economic dysfunction. And for some, rage against the idea of centrist politics at all.

Go on with your bad self! It’s not irrelevant or accidental that the call, as they say in horror movies, is coming from inside the house. No one can credibly accuse the Economist of being soft on Marxism or unfaithful to free-market dogma (that same editorial mocks leftist French presidential candidate Jean-Luc Mélenchon, not inaccurately, as an “aging rabble-rouser and onetime Trotskyist”). That gives it the freedom to state plain facts that so-called moderates like Merz and Bruni would rather avoid: Yes, “centrist politics” have visibly failed, not just in France but across the Western democracies. Indeed the entire system or basket of principles known as “liberal democracy” is in big trouble, and on the verge of systemic failure. 

“Liberalism” in that context is not an ideological label in the contemporary American sense but a term from old-school political economy, used to describe the forced marriage in Western nations between market capitalism, parliamentary democracy, and a varying list of civil rights and civil liberties. Liberalism in that sense has dominated most of the world since the Cold War, and until recently it encompassed both major political parties in the U.S. I hardly need to convince you that is no longer the case, or that proudly illiberal parties and leaders have emerged and spread throughout the Western-style democracies, like an unpleasant but unkillable fungus. (As this article was published, it appears that Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, Brazil’s leftist president, has defeated Flávio Bolsonaro — the son of imprisoned former president Jair Bolsonaro — ending a string of six consecutive right-wing victories across Latin America. True to form, Bolsonaro called for the results to be annulled.)

Liberal democracy was a roaring economic success for most of the 20th century, at least in broad strokes and with some well-known caveats. Oddly enough, those bygone glory days are pretty much what Trump keeps promising to bring back, to no visible effect. But the current crisis of liberalism is nothing new. It began to unfold decades ago, well before Francis Fukuyama proclaimed the “end of history.” Today’s enraged French students — and their parents, teachers and neighbors, for that matter — have inherited a world of false promises and diminished expectations. 

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Real wages have steadily declined in most Western countries (including our own) since the 1970s, allowing for a brief uptick during the technology boom of the 1990s. Across the liberal democratic zone, social services have been slashed in one “austerity” budget after another while government debt has soared. Rapidly aging population has made large-scale immigration a necessity, while right-wing demagogues have seized on the new arrivals as the main cause of the economic problems that immigrants can ameliorate. The result almost everywhere has been an accelerating vicious cycle of political dysfunction and public disillusionment, fueling the rise of what the Economist calls “charismatic figures from the extremes,” meaning Mélenchon and Marine Le Pen in France, and no doubt Zohran Mamdani and You Know Who over here. 

As a leading Marxist scholar told me decades ago, every radical who confidently predicts the collapse of capitalism is always wrong. If and when that ever happens, no one will have expected it. The same is likely true of liberal democracy today, which has survived worse crises than this and still retains broader popular legitimacy than is visible at this moment. Students in Milan and Marseille and Mumbai may well return to school and be reconciled to their lives, at least for now. But they have shown us something: There are dark passages ahead and enormous changes coming, and none of us can accurately identify the specter who blocks the path forward.

The post Why are young people so angry? Why isn’t everyone? appeared first on Salon.com.

When I began using Instacart about five years ago, grocery delivery struck me as an almost preposterous luxury. I hadn’t grown up in a household where paying someone else to do the grocery shopping was a particularly imaginable expense. I’ve only recently come around to purchasing frozen, pre-chopped onions without a small pang of guilt. But the pandemic had made grocery delivery feel sensible, even responsible, and I quickly developed an appreciation for the peculiar pleasure of having someone else navigate the supermarket on my behalf.

For a while, the service justified my enthusiasm. A missing shallot might become a red onion. All-purpose flour might arrive as bread flour. Once, a family-sized frozen lasagna was replaced with an enormous bag of frozen pasta and meatballs. None of these exchanges was perfect, but they followed a recognizable culinary logic. Someone, somewhere, appeared to understand what dinner was supposed to be.

Over the past couple of years, however, the substitutions became increasingly adventurous. Shoppers, often from profiles with traditionally male names, would inform me that a supermarket had apparently run out of tomatoes in every conceivable form. Fresh, canned, crushed, diced: all gone. Carrots became parsnips. Green cabbage became spinach. More than once, I found myself studying photographs of grocery shelves, circling the very products I’d requested and sending the images back to my shopper, who would politely assure me that they weren’t available.

Then came the order in which a request for Panko breadcrumbs was fulfilled with a box of vanilla wafers.

The breadcrumbs were meant to become a crunchy, buttery topping for a baked pasta with Parmesan, peas and ham. Instead, my shopper sent me a photograph of vanilla wafers, without comment, and marked the breadcrumbs as unavailable. I had several modest counterproposals: Italian breadcrumbs, plain breadcrumbs, even a loaf of bread would do. But by the time I opened the app to make my case, my shopper had already checked out.

The vanilla wafers were on their way.

I was hardly alone in this experience. Across Reddit, TikTok and other corners of the internet, grocery delivery customers have taken to chronicling the peculiar challenges of having their groceries selected by men. I couldn’t entirely determine whether my own disappointing experiences had made me more attentive to these complaints or whether the memes had taught me to regard male shoppers with additional suspicion. Either way, the stories were remarkably familiar.

One Reddit user, who had been ordering groceries while caring for a partner with a concussion, described receiving three bags of parsley after three separate attempts to purchase cilantro. Another shopper had suggested replacing saffron with a canned drink. The commenter had spent considerable time walking delivery workers through specialty aisles and negotiating alternatives, an especially frustrating undertaking when dietary restrictions were involved.

“Someone needs to figure this out, provide training or something!” the commenter concluded.

Eventually, the complaints became sufficiently widespread that Instacart did what corporations increasingly do when confronted with an inconvenient internet phenomenon: It made the phenomenon into an advertisement.

In late July, the company launched “The Male Shopper Project,” a mock training camp starring comedian Hannah Berner and Antoni Porowski, the culinary expert from “Queer Eye.” Wearing drill-sergeant regalia, Porowski instructs a group of hapless male shopper actors in such supermarket fundamentals as distinguishing celery from leeks, checking expiration dates and identifying ripe bananas. The casting introduces its own familiar comic premise: the polished gay man enlisted to introduce his less domestically accomplished counterparts to the finer points of everyday living.

The accompanying press release was considerably more cheerful about the whole affair. There were jokes about “bad apples” and “bananas” substitutions, followed by a ten-dollar coupon (limited to 5,000 redemptions) and a reassuring inventory of the company’s quality-control features. Customers could specify how ripe they wanted their avocados, leave detailed instructions and select acceptable substitutions in advance. 

The company’s proposed solution to the difficulties of outsourcing grocery shopping seemed to involve becoming an increasingly attentive manager of one’s outsourced grocery shopping. But the campaign raises a question that isn’t easily settled by viral videos or produce puns: Are men genuinely worse at grocery shopping, or have they become the convenient faces of a much broader problem?

The available statistics are surprisingly swampy. According to Instacart’s 2025 economic impact report, 61% of surveyed shoppers identified as women. Uber’s 2024 environmental, social and governance report, meanwhile, found that women made up 18% of its U.S. drivers but 46% of its couriers. Those are different jobs, performed on different platforms, and neither figure tells us which workers are more likely to mistake parsley for cilantro. That would require comparative performance data.

Male shoppers, for their part, have been understandably irritated by the stereotype.

“As a male shopper I hate these posts,” one Reddit commenter wrote, explaining that he handled his family’s grocery shopping and knew his local stores intimately. “Bad shoppers are bad shoppers. Being male has nothing to do with it.”

Another man described an impressive record of completed orders, along with an ability to navigate cosmetics, feminine hygiene products and unfamiliar grocery aisles. He knew how to cook, understood substitutions and was perfectly capable of asking a store employee for help. Other delivery workers pointed out that the apps themselves sometimes recommend spectacularly inappropriate replacements, leaving shoppers to make sense of suggestions generated by software.

These are reasonable objections. A competent man shouldn’t be presumed incompetent because a stranger on the internet received three bags of parsley. And grocery shopping for other people is genuinely difficult. A customer may have exacting preferences, a store may rearrange its shelves and an apparently suitable replacement may turn out to contain an allergen.

Then there’s the unpleasant economic reality of gig work. Full-service Instacart shoppers are generally independent contractors, paid by the batch rather than a guaranteed hourly wage, with earnings varying according to the order, distance, demand and tips. The work involves driving, lifting, navigating stores and responding to customers, often without the protections and benefits associated with conventional employment. 

Spending another 15 minutes searching for a particular brand of yogurt may represent good service, but it also consumes time that a worker could otherwise spend completing another order.

It’s entirely possible, then, for the customer who has paid a premium for convenience and the shopper trying to make a reasonable living to feel equally ill-served by the arrangement.

And for what it’s worth, Instacart has, in fact, tried teaching people how to grocery shop. In 2021, the company promoted Carrot Academy, a collection of optional online lessons covering customer communication, produce selection and choosing appropriate replacements. Shoppers had identified substitutions as an area where they particularly wanted guidance. By 2025, the company had expanded the program to more than forty optional lessons, including short videos and personalized recommendations.

There is something mildly amusing about the distance between this real educational apparatus and the fictional boot camp, where the central problem is apparently that grown men need help identifying vegetables.

But there’s also something revealing about recruiting people to perform a form of labor that society has never been especially consistent about expecting everyone to learn. Grocery shopping requires accumulated knowledge of ingredients, cooking, nutrition, family preferences and the mysterious geography of supermarkets. Women have historically been expected to acquire much of that knowledge, often without much recognition that they’re developing expertise at all. (There is a particular additional irony in the fact that grocery shopping, long treated as women’s unpaid responsibility, has become a marketable service.)

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The gender disparity isn’t entirely anecdotal. A 2019 Pew Research Center analysis found that among married or cohabiting parents living with children, 80% of mothers said they were their household’s primary grocery shopper, compared with just 20% of fathers. That doesn’t mean men are incapable of doing the shopping. It means that, in many households, they have had considerably less practice.

In the churches where I grew up, the Proverbs 31 woman got a great deal of airtime. She cooked, cleaned, cared for her family and appeared to have discovered several additional hours in the day in which to accomplish it all. Later, during my brief stint in seminary — I dropped out to head to a liberal arts college after a semester — women sometimes joked about pursuing their “MRS. degrees.” Others clarified that they weren’t just there for an MRS. degree. Matrimony, apparently, was something of an unofficial concentration.

I’d like to report that these ideas about women’s domestic responsibilities have since retired to the church basement, alongside the folding chairs and industrial coffee urns. Unfortunately, they’ve proven remarkably well-traveled. Recently, I overheard a man tell a joke about how he and his housemates needed a wife to cook and clean for them; someone suggested that perhaps what they needed was a maid.

“What’s the difference?” he replied.

“The Male Shopper Project” also brought to mind how, right before the pandemic, I was having coffee with a friend whose husband had taken their young child to the supermarket. The coffee was years ago now, and I couldn’t reproduce most of the messages verbatim. But I remember the questions, and the rhythm of her phone buzzing on the table.

Did they need salted or unsalted butter?

Buzz.

Which cereal did their child like?

Buzz.

Where was the aluminum foil? What aisle?

Buzz.

Then came the one message I remember word for word:

“Nevermind.”

My friend chuckled. Then the chuckle caught in her throat and turned into a quiet, hiccuping sob. He did this all the time, she explained. I sat with her while she talked. She had found that it was easier to do things herself than to ask him to do them and then field a steady stream of questions. But she was exhausted either way.

She left him about a year later.

Sociologist Allison Daminger has studied this invisible dimension of household work: the planning, anticipation, decision-making and monitoring that continue even when someone else is performing the physical task. In her research, women assumed a disproportionate share of this mental labor, particularly the responsibility for anticipating needs and keeping track of whether tasks had been completed.

It’s the difference between buying groceries and knowing what groceries need to be bought. Between following a list and understanding why the items are on it.

And it helps explain why the male Instacart shopper meme has proven so durable. The central frustration isn’t necessarily that a man can’t find the right box of pasta. It’s that a woman who has paid to delegate a household task may find herself unexpectedly responsible for supervising its completion. The shopper sends a photograph. She studies it. He proposes an alternative. She explains why it won’t work. The groceries eventually arrive, and dinner still requires a trip to the corner store.

There are meaningful differences, of course, between a stranger navigating an unfamiliar shopping list and a husband who should know what his own family eats. But women who have spent years managing other people’s domestic uncertainty recognize the sensation. They thought they were handing off a task. Instead, they’ve acquired another person to manage.

By the end of Instacart’s fictional boot camp, the male recruits have learned to identify ripe bananas, read expiration dates and make sensible substitutions. The joke is that men can, in fact, be taught to buy groceries. The less amusing implication is how many have been allowed to reach adulthood without anyone expecting them to know how.

The post Why women dread male Instacart shoppers appeared first on Salon.com.

This story appeared in Today, Explained, a daily newsletter that helps you understand the most compelling news and stories of the day. Subscribe here.

Throughout his second term, President Donald Trump has saddled his party with no shortage of political liabilities — from the mass pardons of January 6 convictions to ICE killings of US citizens to questionable Reflecting Pool redesign choices.

For voters, however, there is one stain on Trump’s record more unsightly than all the rest: his failure to reduce Americans’ cost of living.

As the midterm campaign enters its home stretch, Americans’ expenses are rising — and the GOP’s prospects are consequently dimming.

Last month, consumer prices were 3.7 percent higher than they had been one year earlier, according to a Consumer Price Index report released on Wednesday. That represented an acceleration in the inflation rate, one driven largely by skyrocketing fuel prices: Gasoline was 9.1 percent more expensive in September than it had been in August. As a result, America’s average real wage has fallen by 44 cents since January.

In less than three weeks, Americans will head to the polls to decide which party controls Congress, along with a slew of state and local offices. As we count down to that momentous and potentially messy day, this newsletter is partnering with our colleague Astead Herndon and Vox’s The Midterms, Actually team for weekly editions on the biggest issues shaping the midterms. We’re breaking down one issue each week and suggesting further reading and races to watch in November.

Last week, we tackled the data center backlash. And this week, we’re digging into affordability.

Go a little deeper

These upward trends in prices aren’t lost on voters. In a recent Pew Research survey, just 21 percent of Americans said economic conditions were “excellent” or “good” — while 65 percent said that Trump’s policies had made the economy worse.

The high cost of living is weighing on Republican candidates in all battleground races. Maine provides just one example of how potent the issue could prove on Election Day.

From one angle, the state’s Senate race might seem like a gimme for Democrats. Kamala Harris won Maine by nearly 7 points in 2024. Thus, in 2026 — when Democrats are poised to win in a national landslide — one might expect the party to easily triumph.

But Republican incumbent Susan Collins is an unusually formidable foe. The race has been a dead heat, with Democratic nominee Troy Jackson leading by just 2 points in a recent Suffolk University poll.

Fortunately for Jackson, Mainers’ energy bills are expected to soar in the campaign’s final weeks, plausibly increasing voters’ appetite for change in the process. 

Maine is America’s second coldest state and unusually reliant on oil for home heat. As autumn advances, its residents will use more heating oil, thereby driving up both their personal bills and market prices. Thanks to the global energy crunch, a gallon of such fuel is already nearly twice as expensive as it was this time last year. 

Jackson has been hitting Collins on the issue relentlessly. That could put a chill in Collins’s reelection odds — and thus, the GOP’s hopes of retaining Senate control.

➨ Other races to watch:

• Similar dynamics are playing out in perennially icy Alaska, where Democratic Senate candidate Mary Peltola has hammered incumbent Republican Dan Sullivan for his complicity in sky-high diesel prices, which many Alaskans use for home heat.  
• In Ohio’s Senate race, Democrat Sherrod Brown has tried to pin rising electricity bills on Republican Sen. Jon Husted, due to his support for data center development. 
• And in Texas, Democratic Senate candidate James Talarico has attacked his Republican rival, state Attorney General Ken Paxton, for supporting “this disastrous war in Iran that’s driving up our costs.” 

In other news

• A brief ceasefire ends: Ukrainian drones attacked a Russian oil refinery early Thursday, days after Trump demanded both Russia and Ukraine halt such attacks.
• Execution livestream canceled: Trump canceled a plan to livestream the execution of Fort Hood shooter Nidal Malik Hasan by firing squad.
• On the podcast: A recent rash of violence between Saudi Arabia and Yemen’s Houthis threatens to destabilize the region — and make the Iran war much larger. Listen to the whole thing here.

One link for later

Rethink confidence. Research shows confidence is good for your job and good for your romantic prospects. Unsurprisingly, then, a whole industry has sprung up teaching people to be more confident. One writer signed up to work with a confidence coach for the first time, and ended up doubting that her self-doubt was all that bad.

Before you go…

• Did you know…there are four state laws regarding real estate and paranormal activity in the US? That’s because purported hauntings are just one of many factors that can affect home prices.
• Today’s trivia: What is the answer to the ultimate question of life, the universe, and everything in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy? (You can find this and other brain puzzles in Vox’s daily crossword. Look for the answer in tomorrow’s edition.)
• Yesterday’s trivia: We asked which percussion instrument is famously played by Mississippi State University fans at home football games. That would be the cowbell.

Former Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi always said that the only way for Democrats to win elections was to focus on the proverbial “kitchen table issues.” As the leader of the caucus for 20 years, she had quite a track record, presiding over quite a few big wins and many small ones, so she knew what she was talking about. According to her way of thinking, people are motivated to vote over concerns about their own material well-being, and in recent years, this has meant healthcare, job security and the cost of living — the basics.

Republicans, by contrast, tend to rely on a broader appeal to security in general. “Law and order” has been their bumper sticker, covering a wide range of free-floating anxieties in American society having to do with cultural changes, race and the loss of status of straight white males. Their answer to economic stress comes down to blaming the bogeyman of the day, whether it’s immigrants or the deficit, and the answer is always tax cuts and more tax cuts. 

Democrats have usually been trusted more on the kitchen-table issues, depending on whether they happen to be in office when some kind of economic crisis hits. Jimmy Carter paid a high price, losing his 1980 re-election bid after having inherited crippling stagflation from his GOP predecessors, and was hit with a big recession as a result of the Federal Reserve policies — which he supported — to break it. His successor, Ronald Reagan, reaped the benefit, a common consequence of painful Democratic policies necessarily deployed to clean up a Republican administration’s economic mess.

The GOP enjoyed 12 years in the White House after Carter’s loss, including a big boom which inevitably turned into a recession and helped ensure Bill Clinton’s victory over George H.W. Bush in the 1992 election. Clinton presided over an economic boom that saved his presidency, which was otherwise dogged by scandals largely perpetrated by the GOP’s final evolution from the party of mainline Protestants and main street business owners to one of ruthless street-fighters.

Economics, of course, aren’t the only issue that motivates voters. While more abstract notions of foreign policy and national security are rarely at the top of the agenda, war certainly can be. George W. Bush learned this in 2006, when the American people finally realized the Iraq war was a disaster. But something else was looming on the horizon. Bush had also made the fatal mistake of trying to privatize Social Security, breaking whatever trust people had in Republicans to safeguard their hard-won benefits. The Democrats won the midterm election in a rout.

Two years later, Barack Obama was hit with a double whammy. The war in Iraq was still the top issue, but at the height of his campaign against Arizona Sen. John McCain, the Republican nominee, the bottom fell out of the housing market and the world suffered the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression. At the same time, the healthcare crisis had reached a crescendo, with millions of people going bankrupt, and many suffering and dying due to the high price of insurance. After his win, those kitchen-table issues were front and center in shaping Obama’s presidency. In fact, two years into his first term, as the Great Recession continued to drag on, the American people let out the equivalent of a political primal scream and gave Democrats what Obama famously admitted was a “shellacking” in the 2010 midterms. Perversely, this was largely caused by the passage of the Affordable Care Act, the party’s healthcare plan, underscoring that no good deed goes unpunished.

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Then came Donald Trump. When he announced his candidacy for president in 2015, the economy was on the upswing, and just enough people were gulled by his phony reputation as a great businessman and promises to make everyone rich that he eked out an Electoral College win. Once in office, Trump basically just rode the recovery that was already underway and took credit for it. When the Covid-19 pandemic hit and his incompetence fully manifested itself, voters turned against him. If there was ever a kitchen-table issue, the pandemic was it: We were all stuck sitting around the table for months, wondering if the world was ever going to be the same. Trump failed to rise to the occasion.

But he was elected again after Joe Biden presided over the pandemic’s economic recovery, which was painful, ushering in inflation for the first time in decades to a chunk of a population that had never experienced it. The issue did him — and his vice president, Kamala Harris, who replaced him on the ticket — in, returning Trump to the White House on the promise that he would restore the economy to the alleged golden age of his first term. Unfortunately for America and the world, enough people bought into Trump’s chicanery once again, and here we are today in a crisis of chaos, mistrust, incompetence and despair over the radical policies wrought by a second Trump administration. 

Kitchen-table issues are still at the top of most voters’ lists. The cost of living remains high and keeps climbing. Housing is out of control, and gas prices are through the roof due to Trump’s war of choice with Iran. His much-ballyhooed tariffs have helped keep inflation high, and there is now little doubt what is driving the polls showing that Republicans are about to take a drubbing in the November midterms. 

But the concept of kitchen-table issues has its limits. Not everything in life is actually about money, and people’s perceptions of the economy are often colored by other issues that don’t appear at first glance to be directly related. Bush’s losses in 2006, for instance, were affected by his mishandling of Hurricane Katrina and the Iraq War, both of which contributed to a sense that the administration suffered from hubris and incompetence. There is little doubt that the backlash against Obama during his first term was also driven by the recoil on the right to his identity as the first Black president. Trump likewise benefited from the fact that misogyny and racism were in play in his victories over the first two women to win the nominations of a major party.

The problem is that Democrats have too often relied solely on the kitchen-table issue agenda and failed to address underlying anxieties that contribute to their distress. And with Donald Trump, they are legion. 

The unrelenting pandemonium of his presidency, from his brutal immigration crackdown to the flagrant corruption and degeneration of the president himself, as manifested in his obsession with gold and the building of personal monuments in a time of economic stress, is making the public depressed and angry. The fact that Trump broke one of his fundamental promises to not get the country into a war, as he whines constantly about being denied the Nobel Peace Prize, is maddening. His ongoing disregard of the rule of law and the assault on the democratic process are obvious. The disconnect between what average Americans are feeling and the way their leaders are behaving is a mile wide.

People have been yearning for a holistic explanation for this chaos and confusion — and Democrats have finally found a way to express it. As POLITICO recently noted, Sen. Jon Ossoff of Georgia, along with Senate candidates Dr. Abdul El-Sayed of Michigan and James Talarico of Texas, as different as they are individually, are “leaning hard into anti-corruption messaging in the final weeks of the campaign as new research suggests that linking corruption to Americans’ economic struggles can boost Democrats into the home stretch.”

The corruption argument is compelling. Beyond the hated war in Iran (and its resulting gas prices), Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner and old friend Steve Witkoff’s deals in the Middle East have come under scrutiny and outrage, as have the government contracts being handed out to companies in which Trump’s sons are invested. Pardons are being sold to anyone with enough cash, some of them to people convicted of healthcare fraud, even as the Republicans are cutting Medicaid and healthcare subsidies. Contrary to his blarney, Trump’s Louis XIV-style monuments to himself are being largely paid for by the taxpayers. On top of all that, there are the reports that Trump has made $2 billion since returning to the White House, a figure that is excessive, even for him. 

The shameless grifting is too obvious for voters to overlook, and the Democrats have finally realized that the critique of Trump and MAGA Republicans must go beyond the kitchen table because it is all connected. The chaos, incompetence, deceit and self-dealing are at the heart of America’s distress, and it’s benefiting Trump and his cronies at the expense of average taxpayers. 

Distilling all this into a media-ready indictment, a soundbite, is difficult, but “Washington is rigged to benefit the wealthy at the expense of everyday Americans” is about as good as it gets. Let’s hope Democrats can carry this message of reform past Election Day and actually do something about it.

The post Democrats have discovered the key to midterm victory appeared first on Salon.com.

Donald Trump lies. Telling untruths is not merely second nature to him; it is of the first order, automatic. He lies as naturally as he breathes.

From his claim to being a great businessman and dealmaker to calling himself not the worst president in U.S. history — which he is, by far — but the best, Trump has spewed a firehose of falsehoods to the public. But he has never reserved his lying only for his political opponents.

He has lied to his MAGA followers about, well, everything — bringing grocery prices down, ending this or that war “on day one,” the value of his cryptocurrency offerings, creating any number of “unbelievable” plans to fix our infrastructure, our healthcare, our economy. All those “beautiful” plans that were never plans but so-called concepts of plans. You know, back-of-the-envelope musings on critical national issues while heading off for another taxpayer-funded golf outing.

Suffice it to say: If you can name it, Trump has lied about it.

Journalists often write of Trump’s Big Lie about how the 2020 election was stolen from him, but that is only one of the big lies Republicans tell, and it is not the one that most adversely affects working Americans.

The biggest lie is the one Republicans have told for more than half a century — about how they are better than Democrats at managing the economy. A majority of Americans have believed this for my whole lifetime. But with Trump’s wild mismanagement of the economy, public sentiment is finally changing. More people now trust Democrats on the economy, and for good reason.

The idea of telling a lie so massive that not many people would think that it could be made out of whole cloth comes from Adolf Hitler’s 1925 book “Mein Kampf.” The failed artist and future German führer thought that most people would not believe that someone “could have the impudence to distort the truth so infamously.” This theory was later put to use by Joseph Goebbels, the Third Reich’s propaganda minister, to scapegoat and dehumanize Jewish people, and it led directly to the Holocaust — a horrible truth many Nazi-curious conservatives love to deny.

Trump, a fanboy of ruthless dictators, was determined to stay in office after losing the 2020 election decisively in both the Electoral College and the popular vote to Joe Biden, and he naturally turned to Hitler’s technique. (I say “naturally” because, according to his first wife Ivana, he kept a volume of Hitler’s speeches by his bedside. Also, after Trump’s first term, his former White House chief of staff Gen. John Kelly warned Americans that Trump very much admired Hitler.)

The Republican’s lie on the economy is such a whopper — so “colossal,” as Hitler put it — that it has defined American politics for decades. That’s the ruse of the colossal lie, which is not merely the propagandist’s use of repetition (Trump’s main go-to move) but a sort of verbal legerdemain. People are cunningly led to disbelieve what they see with their own eyes and feel in their own pocketbooks.

As we head into the November midterms, and as candidates begin to emerge in the 2028 presidential race, it’s a good time to refresh our memories of how costly the GOP’s colossal lie about trickle-down economics, which began with President Ronald Reagan, has been for Americans.

Running for the presidency, the former Republican California governor and B-list actor said that giving tax breaks to the wealthy and corporations would “trickle down” benefits to the working people of America. This sounded good in theory, but it was “voodoo economics” in practice, as George H. W. Bush, Reagan’s opponent in the 1980 Republican primaries, noted — until he was chosen as the Californian’s running mate).

In his two terms, Reagan’s tax cuts increased the national debt from $1.1 trillion to $2.7 trillion. But that’s nothing compared to Trump. While occupying the White House, the president has increased the national debt by a staggering $11.6 trillion so far, an increase of more than 25%.

As I’ve written before, Democratic presidents have almost always done better — I should say much better — than Republican presidents in managing the U.S. economy. According to a 2016 academic study by Alan S. Blinder and Mark W. Watson, this was true from the Truman administration through the first Obama term across all major macroeconomic measures: job creation, unemployment, national debt, GDP growth, growth in real wages and controlling inflation.

As Blinder and Watson concluded:

[T]here is a systematic and large gap between the U.S. economy’s performance when a Democrat is president of the United States versus when a Republican is. Democrats do better on almost every criterion.

We can tack on Biden’s term as well, which, amid the global inflation spikes caused by the COVID-19 pandemic shutting down supply chains, recovered far better than any other advanced country. As The Economist put it at the time, the quickly recovering economy under Biden was “the envy of the world.” People may not have felt “the vibe,” but things were on the right track by all standard economic measures.

In addition, in 2021, the Biden administration’s $1.2 trillion Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act was passed with bipartisan support to rebuild or upgrade the nation’s aging transportation, water and broadband systems. The following year, the $280 billion CHIPS and Science Act was enacted and called for microchip manufacturing to be started up in rural areas, mostly Republican-voting districts. Unlike Trump, Biden understood that the president is charged with working on behalf of all Americans, not just those who voted for him.

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Since the Republican President Dwight Eisenhower, about 70% of all jobs have been created during Democratic administrations, and in recent decades, the percentage is more than 90%. Of the 11 recessions the country suffered between 1953 and 2020 — when the pandemic began — 10 began while a Republican was in the White House.

What Blinder and Watson studied was independently updated in 2024 with similar findings of a “striking” positive difference on the U.S. economy when a Democrat is in the White House. One doesn’t need academics or economics experts to tell that Republicans never look out for the interests of the working class, or even the middle class. But for those who still like evidence, a series of charts by Steven Rattner and graphic artist Taylor Maggiacomo tell the story of Trump’s promises on the economy and his results so far.

What these charts cannot show is the long-term economic disaster of lost markets for farmers and U.S. manufacturers caused by Trump’s tariffs and his disparagement of our trading partners, or what it will mean to our economy as countries move to de-Americanize their tech — which they must do to protect themselves from Trump.

Although he had once headed the Screen Actors Guild, Reagan kicked off the GOP’s modern union-busting zeal, treating union members as badly as he did university kids, our infrastructure of the future, as governor of California. This points to another factor that macroeconomic statistics do not tell us: Democrats are not only better stewards of the economy, but they also want the wealth created by American workers to be shared more equitably and for the social safety net to be made more robust, so Americans can better weather any financial vicissitudes.

Democrats also understand that the economy depends on healthy, educated, informed workers, and that the performance of parents in the workforce increases when they have access to affordable quality childcare.

Do I need to point out that Republicans have little to no desire to help workers and those in need, outside of, say, charitable contributions or church work? Indeed, rather than looking out for the poor or loving the stranger — and growing increasingly annoyed by those darned Biblical verses about a camel passing through the eye of a needle — the wealthy and powerful long ago undertook to remake American Christianity.

As Salon’s Amanda Marcotte recently noted, the right’s perversion of the message of Jesus knows no bounds; to justify their greed and avarice, they are taught that it is inconceivable to be Christian and vote other than Republican, which is yet another colossal lie by the GOP.

Public sentiment about which party does best in managing the economy has finally shifted to Democrats in the face of Trump’s gross mismanagement of the recovering Biden economy. Trump’s tax cuts, tariffs, attacks on education and journalists, his disparagement of historical allies and his war of choice with Iran have undermined nearly every aspect of what has made the United States prosperous.

But it is up to journalists to regularly tell this truth to the public in the face of the colossal Republican lie about the economy that began with Reagan, a man who had the sheer audacity to claim that the budget deficit was affected by restaurant servers not declaring their tips.

Today’s Republicans are even more Dickensian, focused as they are on deporting hard-working immigrants who long to be American citizens and taking healthcare and even food stamps away from struggling American families.

Why are Republicans terrible with the economy? Because they do not believe in government — unless it helps them.

The post The biggest GOP lie isn’t about elections — it’s the economy appeared first on Salon.com.

Everyone knows how much gasoline prices matter. The recent spike in gas prices triggered by the war with Iran has fueled deep pessimism about the economy and weighed heavily on President Donald Trump’s approval ratings.

But diesel fuel — the lifeblood of shipping, agriculture, and heavy industry — usually flies under the radar. Its price has surged too, and while truckers and farmers are feeling the initial blow, the rest of the country won’t be far behind.

“Most products in America are shipped along the road via trucks,” Nathan Bomey, a business reporter at Axios, told Today, Explained co-host Noel King. Diesel prices “directly affect their cost of doing business, which then eventually trickles down and affects the consumer.”

On the podcast, Bomey discusses what’s driving the price spike, how quickly it’s going to become a problem for everyday consumers, and whether electric semi trucks could offer a way out.

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

What is happening with diesel?

There was one major geopolitical event this year that disrupted the entire energy economy, which is the US and Israel attacking Iran. Iran is at the center of the oil economy in some ways, but primarily you have to look at the closure of the Strait of Hormuz and the jockeying over it that has happened in the months since.

Once they closed the strait, it disrupted the entire global energy economy because it handles a substantial portion of the shipping bringing supplies out of the Middle East. That affected diesel prices, gasoline prices, jet fuel prices, and effectively everything based on crude oil.

Who are the people right now that are profoundly freaked out about the cost of diesel?

First off, truckers are freaked out because their cost of doing business is going much higher. Farmers are also freaked out because they’re already facing real pressures from trade wars and things that are out of control, like climate issues, that have caused their costs to go higher. 

The price of diesel affecting farmers eventually affects the price they charge, which ultimately gets to the consumer because it ends up costing more to pay for things like an ear of corn.

How stark do you think this might be? In a month or two, do you think I could go down to Walmart and see that something I buy all the time is now a dollar more expensive? 

I think the impact is imminent. This flows through very quickly. We’re not talking about months; we’re talking about weeks, if not days, before people will start to notice increases, especially in the grocery aisle. That’s the first place people will notice it because fresh food has to be shipped on a weekly basis. Diesel prices are going to have a big effect on food inflation. This is coming off of several years of food price increases that we experienced in the wake of the pandemic.

We’re also barreling toward the holiday shopping season, which is going to be affected by this as well. If a toy, for example, is made with a resin affected by the cost of crude oil, which also affects the cost of diesel, and then it’s shipped over the road to Walmart in a truck that uses diesel, all of these things add up and will probably lead to higher prices.

We’ve also got an issue with heating oil, which is a fuel used primarily by households in the Northeast to heat their homes. Heating oil, diesel, and all of these oil-based products are caught up in this vortex right now. Ultimately, it is not something the ordinary person can do much about.

Do the industries that rely on diesel have any other options?

There are definitely alternatives to diesel, but in many cases, they cannot be switched to quickly. If you think about the trucking industry, they are invested heavily in big rigs that take products from place A to place B. If you are invested in a truck, yes, you could theoretically switch, but you would be scrapping this huge investment you’ve made. Diesel trucks are not really going anywhere immediately. A lot of times, they’re simply still the best way to get somewhere.

You can switch to rail; railroads are definitely a competitor to trucking, but really only best for certain types of products. There are other types of trucks you can buy. Compressed natural gas or liquid natural gas is an alternative fuel for some trucks, and biodiesel can actually be good. Hydrogen is more of a futuristic thing down the road.

In the short term, there is the possibility of using electric trucks. That is starting to become more realistic. In fact, in recent days, Tesla began major production of the Tesla Semi, an electric semitruck we’ve been waiting for for years. I remember covering this in 2018 when Tesla debuted the semi, and we all thought it was going to be coming out soon.

It has taken nearly a decade for this to finally become a reality in large proportions, but the Tesla Semi is an electric truck that could be an alternative for some. There are other companies making electric trucks too, so that could be viable. But the problem with electric trucks is that the battery is so heavy, making it tough to compete with diesel on shipping heavy items.

It was often joked that when the Tesla Semi first debuted, the very first thing it shipped was a bunch of bags of Cheetos because they were so light and the truck couldn’t handle extra weight. They had a deal with PepsiCo, and it wasn’t ready at the time to ship anything heavy. 

It’s a lot better now, but the issue is still how heavy electric truck batteries are, which will make them somewhat limited in capacity. However, we are seeing some demand for the Tesla Semi that indicates it might become more competitive because of the price of diesel.

So when prices are high, generally somebody somewhere is benefiting. Who is it, in this case?

The people benefiting from diesel prices being so high are the refineries, which a lot of people don’t think about much because they’re the middle person in this entire process. They take the crude oil and turn it into usable diesel for a pickup truck, a semi truck, or farming equipment. 

The refinery business is experiencing high demand right now, and there’s limited capacity to do this because of issues in Russia, Iran, and other places throughout the world. There’s really nowhere else to do this, and therefore they can charge higher prices. That means higher profits for the refineries.

All of this is shaping up to potentially mean a really ugly winter. One thing I think about a lot is that American consumers will accept a lot of pain. We had Covid — the inflation, and shortages of literally everything. Then we had the war in Ukraine, and prices went up again. 

People still keep spending money, even as we predict this one’s going to get bad. People go to the store and spend money, and maybe they gripe, but it’s not like we’re out in the streets. Do you think this coming diesel shock — imminent, in your words — is going to be different?

I’m not an economist, but there is an interesting phenomenon emerging in the economy where consumer sentiment is at rock bottom, but consumer spending is actually really strong. There’s a gap emerging between what people say they feel and what they’re actually doing — in this case, they’re still spending. 

Maybe it’s YOLO spending. They’re thinking they don’t have much going for them, so they’re just going to keep spending. I’ve experienced that a little bit, so I don’t blame anybody.

At the end of the day, the numbers matter a little bit more than what people say they feel. But I do think people are going to hit a breaking point because they simply cannot continue this level of spending if the underlying fundamentals of the economy start to collapse.

Today's links

• Workplace "flexibility" isn't: What the gig economy calls flexibility is just risk-shifting.
• Hey look at this: Delights to delectate.
• Object permanence: "Alanya to Alanya"; ToS are the internet's biggest lie; Soviet jokes; Fox rapists v gag orders; GBAO is the future; "Fun Family"; Sacklers get to keep the loot.
• Upcoming appearances: London, Edinburgh, Sydney, Melbourne, Brighton, London, South Bend.
• Recent appearances: Where I've been.
• Latest books: You keep readin' em, I'll keep writin' 'em.
• Upcoming books: Like I said, I'll keep writin' 'em.
• Colophon: All the rest.

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Workplace "flexibility" isn't (permalink)

Here's an irony: the "gig economy" is a statistical black hole. Workers, customers and regulators know very little about the most basic aspects of it: how much workers get paid, for example, or much unpaid time on the clock a worker puts in before they get a job from the app.

The reason this is ironic is that the "gig economy" is dominated by a handful of massive, data-driven firms that know the precise, up-to-the-second answer to these questions. The problem is that they won't share the data. Of course, workers and customers have the data, too, but our data is widely diffused, with each worker and each customer only representing a single, infinitesimal pixel in this massive picture.

Most of our industry-wide figures about the sector come from painstaking, expensive survey work. The expense and effort involved in conducting this analysis means that the public's understanding of the gig companies' business is fragmentary and thin.

But every now and again, we get a flashbulb glimpse of the full picture. One of those glimpses was captured by David Weil, the former labor standards boss at the US Department of Labor. In 2024, the Massachusetts Attorney General sued Uber over worker misclassification, with Weil serving as an expert witness, who was able to access the raw data on Uber's business operations.

In a new American Prospect longread called "The Dangerous Myth of Flexibility," Weil builds on the public record developed in the case to demolish the central myth of the gigwork companies: that they enter into a mutually beneficial arrangement with their workers by offering "flexibility" that lets workers "choose work that fits the rhythms of their lives, not the other way around":

https://prospect.org/2026/07/09/dangerous-myth-of-flexibility-uber-lyft-gig-economy/

This quote comes from Tony West, the Uber executive who has led the company's efforts to formalize its worker misclassification program, notably California's Prop 22, a $225m statewide campaign that overturned the state's landmark gig work standards. West is also Kamala Harris's brother-in-law, and he served as her campaign's corporate liaison, senior strategist and economic policy advisor.

On its face, West's statement sounds reasonable, and most of us have heard a version of it, possibly even from an Uber driver. But what Uber calls "flexibility" is really a way for the company to offload its operational risks onto its drivers.

Anyone who runs a business has to manage a key operational risk: staffing levels. A restaurateur who doesn't schedule enough cooks, bussers and servers might have to turn away business at the door if there's a rush. But if the restaurateur schedules too many people for a shift, they'll end up paying for those workers to stand around scrolling Tiktok.

In America, Congress and state legislatures have created a system that allows restaurateurs to transfer this risk onto their employees: the "tipped minimum wage." Federally, the minimum wage for tipped employees is only $2.13/hour, with the caveat that employees are obliged to "top up" their workers' pay if the tips from their shift don't add up to $7.25/hour. So if you work five hours and don't wait on a single table, your boss has to pay you $36.25 ($7.25/hour * 5 hours). But if you have a busy shift and you make $40 in tips, your boss only has to pay you $10.65 ($2.13 * 5 – the tipped minimum).

This is a transfer of risk from bosses to workers. The boss can schedule extra servers and offload most of their wages to diners who come through the doors. If your boss overestimates the amount of business, much of the cost of that miscalculation comes out of your paycheck.

This is quite a sweet deal for bosses. After all, servers have virtually no control over the amount of business a restaurant attracts. It's the boss, not the server, who decides where the restaurant will be, which hours it will keep, which food it will serve, how much the food costs, what advertisements to run, and where and when to run them. The boss controls the decor, staff attire and the music. They make the decisions, and workers pay the price if they decide poorly.

For most businesses, workers are less exposed to risks from their boss's strategic errors. If your boss screws up, you might see a lower annual bonus, or take a career hit thanks to the bad company's presence on your CV. Of course, if your boss really messes up they might lay you off or go out of business altogether, but it's a rare business that gets to externalize its risks onto its workers on a shift-by-shift basis the way restaurants get to.

But as sweet as restaurateurs have it, that's nothing compared to the incredible deal that gig platforms get. Companies like Uber and Lyft get to shift nearly all their risk to their workers, and then insist that they're doing workers a favor by offering them "flexibility." Like a restaurateur, Uber and Lyft control all the mechanisms by which the number of riders is set. They decide how to advertise and how to price their rides. When a driver signs on and makes themselves available – at no charge – to Uber, it is the company's actions, not the driver's, that determine whether that driver gets a job, and how much they'll get paid.

Uber and Lyft claim that drivers have control, too – when (if) they're offered a job, they get to decide whether to take it. This is true, but it's more complicated than that. Drivers get about 15 seconds (!) to decide whether to accept a job, which means they have 15 seconds to calculate the mileage and time-based rate on offer, all while operating a vehicle in traffic. Drivers who accept lowball offers risk having their base pay permanently eroded through "algorithmic wage discrimination," which is when the gig platforms infer that workers who accept very low wages are economically desperate and can be offered even lower wages in the future:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/04/12/algorithmic-wage-discrimination/#fishers-of-men

But workers can't simply refuse offers and wait for the wage on offer to increase. That increase may happen, but if a driver is too picky, the platform will punish them for turning down too many offers by excluding them from future opportunities. If this happens often enough, the driver may end up broke enough to start accepting those lowballs, triggering the inexorable downward trajectory of their expected earnings.

This is "flexibility," but mostly it's flexibility for Uber, not for drivers. Uber controls when a driver gets paid, and they control the data about that payment. This allows Uber to claim to be paying well north of minimum wage, while drivers average less than $2.50/hour. Uber exploits its information asymmetry to publish only the numerator (the amount a driver makes when a passenger is in the car) while hiding the denominator (how many hours it takes for Uber to put a passenger in that car):

https://pluralistic.net/2024/02/29/geometry-hates-uber/#toronto-the-gullible

Uber has perfected a system of algorithmic pricing that allows it to dangle just enough money in front of drivers to maximize their number on the road, irrespective of how many riders are looking for cars. The fact that they have all the information (while drivers have none) allows them to extract vast amounts of totally unpaid labor from those drivers. And then, once a passenger gets in the car, Uber's informational systems let it pay that driver the absolute minimum they will accept for the ride.

Of course, it works the same way for passengers, each of whom is offered a different price for the same ride, based on the company's surveillance data and its realtime calculations about how much the rider is willing to pay. When Uber launched, driver pay and passenger fares were linked (the same way a server's tips and the cost of a meal are linked). Today, these are fully decoupled. Uber runs a kind of cod-Marxist operation where workers are paid according to their desperation, and passengers are gouged according to their ability to pay:

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

This works so well (for Uber) that Uber has launched a side hustle selling algorithmic pricing and algorithmic wage discrimination systems to companies in other sectors, so expect this arrangement to infect ever-wider swathes of the economy:

https://investor.uber.com/news-events/news/press-release-details/2025/Uber-Expands-AI-Data-Platform-to-Power-Next-Gen-Enterprise-and-AI-Lab-Needs/default.aspx

(And this is neither here nor there, but holy shit, is Uber's investor relations site seriously serving ASPX pages in 2026?! Hey Khosrowshahi, the DOJ called and it wants its Clinton-era antitrust evidence back!)

Back to algorithmic pricing: this opaque, take-it-or-leave-it algorithmic pricing arrangement sets Uber apart from other platforms where sellers offer temporary use of their property to buyers. As Weil writes, at least Airbnb hosts get to override the nightly rate suggested by the platform (though I'd add that the platforms will downrank and bury people who resist their suggestions).

As Weil points out, even if Uber had to pay the minimum wage and assume other operational risks associated with running a business, they'd still have access to these algorithmic tools, albeit with different parameters. Rather than setting the wage floor for drivers at $0/hour, they'd have to pay $7.25/hour (the federal minimum wage, or more, depending on the state). This would force the company to refuse shifts to drivers when there were enough workers on the road to handle demand, but drivers would benefit from this arrangement – rather than driving around for a shift, burning gas and putting wear on your car without getting paid, Uber would just tell you to stay home.

Uber could try to offload those risks onto passengers, but remember, Uber is already charging riders a personalized price based on massive troves of surveillance data that is continuously re-analyzed to guess the largest sum you're willing to pay for any given ride. You're already paying the highest price Uber can set for you, in other words.

Weil has been in many forums – including that Massachusetts courtroom – where Uber touted its "flexibility" as a benefit to drivers. But as he shows, Uber could offer all the same flexibility to drivers without the downside risk of driving around for hours without earning a dime. Sure, forcing Uber and Lyft to extend rights and protections that every employee gets would raise their costs – but "the same is true for any company having to comply with employment law and work protections."

Outside of the US, these companies are being forced to shift the risk from their workers' backs to their own balance sheets. As Weil writes, the UN's International Labor Organization has set binding labor standards for gig companies, called Convention 193, "Decent Work in the Platform Economy":

https://onlabor.org/a-win-for-platform-workers-ilo-convention-no-193/

The US government is pulling out all the stops to prevent these standards from being applied to US gig companies, even abroad. Trump's labor boss Keith Sonderling told the world that the US government "will not sit on the sidelines while some foreign governments push to hamper American innovation in the gig economy worldwide":

https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/3435961/america-must-lead-gig-economy/

But, as Weil says, this isn't about innovation, flexibility or AI. It's about gig companies changing the distributional outcome of whole sectors, to shift money from workers to investors.

The rest of the world has its own ideas. In Switzerland, the Supreme Court found that gig companies' businesses were illegal and ordered them to extend normal labor protections to gig workers. Naturally, the gig companies just ignored the law and continued to screw those workers. Gig workers, as noted, are diffused. They don't work in the same place. They have no way to find out who else works for the same boss as they do. The same factors that keep us from gathering stats on gig work also keeps gig workers from comparing notes on how they're getting shafted.

What's a labor organizer to do? The Swiss labor union Syndicom came up with an ingenious solution. They partnered with a popular, pro-union pizza restaurant, listed it on the delivery platforms, and then placed orders for tons of pizzas through the scofflaw food-delivery platforms. They transformed the pizzeria into a pop-up union labor hub, and had an organizing conversation with every rider the company dispatched to the restaurant:

https://vimeo.com/1203473793

This is deliciously ingenious, and the labor organizing need not stop there. Companies like Para have shown how, by jailbreaking the apps used by gig workers, they can allow those workers to comparison shop for the best wage. Rather than getting 15 seconds while navigating traffic to decide whether a job is worth taking, drivers and riders could use a "counter-app" that evaluates all the offers on all the platforms and coordinates with other workers to mass-reject lowball offers:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/08/07/hr-4193/#boss-app

The only problem is the "anticircumvention" laws that criminalize this kind of reverse-engineering and modifications of apps. These laws make it a literal crime to change how an app running on your own phone works. These laws were invented in America, with 1998's Digital Millennium Copyright Act, but in the ensuing years, the US Trade Rep has used the threat of tariffs to force every country in the world to adopt their own anticircumvention laws. By caving into US bullying, all of America's trading partners have left their workers and consumers vulnerable to technological surveillance, manipulation and price-gouging, to the great benefit of the US tech companies that have fused with the Trump regime.

This is the hidden silver lining to Trump's lunatic tariffs: they take away the threat that kept all those US-protecting foreign IP laws in force. When someone threatens to burn your house down unless you do as you're told, and then they burn your house down anyway, you really don't have to keep complying:

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

The possibilities for counterapps in gig work are endless. In Indonesia, gig rider co-ops commission "Tuyul" apps that mod their dispatch apps in ways small (upsizing the font) and large (spoofing the GPS):

https://pluralistic.net/2021/07/08/tuyul-apps/#gojek

In his article, Weil cites a study showing that customers for gig apps tend not to comparison shop – once you choose your default taxi-hailing app, that becomes your go-to. But with counter-apps, your default could be a price-comparison app that bids out your job to all the platforms and chooses the cheapest one, forcing the gig companies to compete with each other:

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=5729723

The platforms like to pitch themselves as "frictionless," but the reality is that they don't reduce friction so much as reallocate it. Because they control the technology, because the law makes it a literal crime to wrestle that control away, they can shift all the friction from their side of the ledger to yours, whether you're a worker or a customer:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/08/23/become-unoptimizable/#downward-redistribution

Tony West isn't lying when he says Uber values flexibility – they value their flexibility, which arises out of the constraints (technical, legal) they impose on us: the drivers and passengers.

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Hey look at this (permalink)

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• Brown Professor Suspects Most of His Class Used AI to Cheat https://www.insidehighered.com/news/faculty/learning-assessment/2026/07/08/brown-professor-suspects-most-his-class-used-ai-cheat

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Object permanence (permalink)

#20yrsago Alanya to Alanya: feminist science fiction adventure https://memex.craphound.com/2006/07/12/alanya-to-alanya-feminist-science-fiction-adventure/

#20yrsago Soviet jokes https://web.archive.org/web/20060708144926/http://www.prospect-magazine.co.uk/article_details.php?id=7412

#10yrsago Empirical proof that Terms of Service are “the biggest lie on the Internet” https://web.archive.org/web/20160712233511/https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2016/07/nobody-reads-tos-agreements-even-ones-that-demand-first-born-as-payment/

#10yrsago Fox’s employee contracts may mean Gretchen Carlson will never get her day in court https://web.archive.org/web/20160712123858/https://thinkprogress.org/justice/2016/07/11/3797060/dirty-trick-fox-news-using-undercut-gretchen-carlsons-sexual-harassment-suit/

#10yrsago To see the future, visit the most remote areas of the GBAO https://medium.com/studio-d/6-1-glimpses-of-the-future-e3fdb510dcc1#.iwyo4x141

#10yrsago Benjamin Frisch’s “Fun Family”: good old American narcissism https://memex.craphound.com/2016/07/12/benjamin-frischs-fun-family-good-old-american-narcissism/

#5yrsago The Sacklers will get to keep billions https://pluralistic.net/2021/07/12/monopolist-solidarity/#sacklers-billions

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Upcoming appearances (permalink)

• London: Idler Festival, Jul 11
  https://www.idler.co.uk/festival/

• Edinburgh International Book Festival with Jimmy Wales, Aug 17
  https://www.edbookfest.co.uk/events/the-front-list-cory-doctorow-and-jimmy-wales

• Sydney: The Festival of Dangerous Ideas, Aug 23-24
  https://festivalofdangerousideas.com/cory-doctorow/

• Melbourne: Enshittification at the Wheeler Centre, Aug 25
  https://www.wheelercentre.com/events-tickets/season-2026/cory-doctorow-enshittification

• Brighton: The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI with Carole Cadwalladr (Brighton Dome), Sep 8
  https://brightondome.org/whats-on/LSC-cory-doctorow-the-reverse-centaurs-guide-to-life-after-ai/

• London: The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI with Riley Quinn (Foyle's Picadilly), Sep 9
  https://www.foyles.co.uk/events/enshittification-cory-doctorow-riley-quinn

• South Bend: An Evening With Cory Doctorow (Notre Dame), Oct 6
  https://franco.nd.edu/events/2026/10/06/an-evening-with-cory-doctorow/

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Recent appearances (permalink)

• You Bought it, They Break It (What Now? with Trevor Noah)
  https://www.podbean.com/media/share/dir-ir36t-2f4a1ac6

• Can AI be Saved From Capitalism? (Everyday Anarchism)
  https://www.everydayanarchism.com/192-can-ai-be-saved-from-capitalism-cory-doctorow/

• Lawfare Daily
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T1KIwaYRs1g

• How to Think About AI (Organized Money)
  https://www.organizedmoney.fm/p/how-to-think-about-ai-with-cory-doctorow

• Breaking Points
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VJmUbkRqXeE

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Latest books (permalink)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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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

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Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources:

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

• A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING

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