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Received — 4 August 2026 ⏭

Pluralistic: Post-American compute for a post-American Internet (04 Aug 2026)

✇Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
By: Cory Doctorow
4 August 2026 at 13:14


Today's links


A beautiful 17th century world map. It has been altered. Amongst the various creatures and ships that float in the map's seas now also float various 1950s and 1960s mainframes and components, along with Trump's disembodied hair and mouth.

Post-American compute for a post-American Internet (permalink)

Obviously, the non-American world has a digital sovereignty problem – Trump has means, motive and opportunity to order his tech companies to shut down any public official, large corporation, or individual who displeases him:

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

But Americans face the same digital sovereignty risk. America is a lawless place now, where a pliable Supreme Court and supine Congress have affirmed that "it's not a crime if the president does it." The same tech giants who sold out to Trump for tax breaks and protection from antitrust enforcement will happily disconnect any member of the American public, any American company, any American official who displeases Trump.

It's a strange irony that in this moment when so many of us are struggling to "de-Google" our lives, a forcible, sudden de-Googling amounts to a sort of digital death penalty:

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/08/21/technology/google-surveillance-toddler-photo.html

In a world dominated by tech monopolies, duopolies and cartels, there's every reason in the world to seek protection and insulation from these companies that are "too big to care" – and yet, the very same dominance that makes these companies such a danger also makes them indispensable.

Take "ICE Block," an iOS app that warns you if there's an ICE thug hunting people like you in your vicinity, which might save you from being kidnapped, disappeared, sent to a concentration camp, forced into slave labor in El Salvador, or simply murdered. In order to protect its relationship with the Trump regime (and the tax breaks, monopoly power and tariff-free access to Chinese labor that that relationship guarantees), Apple declared ICE officers to be a protected class and then removed ICE Block from its App Store:

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

Big Tech is key to Trump's pogroms. Without Oracle's databases, Microsoft's administrative tools, Amazon's cloud, and Google's location data, ICE would be frozen in place. Big Tech is the source of Americans' risk from authoritarian oppression. That means that Americans cannot rely on Big Tech to protect them from that authoritarianism.

And yet, after decades of regulatory forbearance and lax antitrust enforcement, Big Tech has forced nearly all its rivals out of business. Who can compete with companies that use Irish domicile to evade taxation and US domicile to evade privacy law?

There's a joke from eastern Canada I think of often in situations like this. Its punchline goes, "If you wanted to get there, I wouldn't start from here."

But here we are. And speaking of Canada, while it has many problems, it is not (as of time of writing) the USA, but it is connected to the USA via the internet. Which means that Americans could – hypothetically – source their computing infrastructure from suppliers that were based in Canada, and who strictly ensured that they had no dependency on US services and scrupulously avoided a US "enforcement nexus":

https://pluralistic.net/2023/03/05/theyre-still-trying-to-ban-cryptography/

That is exactly what some American – and international – human rights nonprofits have done. The Technology Freedom Cooperative is a brand new organization founded by the Human Rights Data Analysis Group (San Francisco), Kilómetro 0 (Puerto Rico), Invisible Institute (Chicago), Data Cívica (Mexico) and Innocence & Justice Louisiana:

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/techfreedomcoop-stuart-flack-8eipc/

All of these organizations are longstanding, highly effective human rights fighters. They have long, storied histories of collecting, analyzing, and presenting data to address systemic discrimination, false imprisonment, extrajudicial killings, war crimes and genocides. They have concluded that they can't rely on US tech and US servers with their data. Not after Trump and Microsoft colluded to kill the online accounts of the Chief Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court to punish him for swearing out a genocide warrant against Netanyahu:

https://apnews.com/article/icc-trump-sanctions-karim-khan-court-a4b4c02751ab84c09718b1b95cbd5db3

Tech Freedom Coop has federated computing resources in Canada, the United States, Mexico, Puerto Rico and Europe. By spreading out their data and computation across multiple jurisdictions, they seek to ensure that a US seizure or deletion of their data will not halt their work.

This federated system serves as a replacement for Big Tech's administrative tools – email hosting, cloud storage, document collaboration. More than that: Tech Freedom Coop is also building out its own AI infrastructure, locally hosted and managed.

Groups like HRDAG have decades of experience using cutting edge statistical techniques to uncover and reveal the extent of crimes committed during civil wars, hot wars, genocides and secret wars. They built the largest human rights database ever created, to track every death in the Colombian Civil War and estimate the likelihood that each killing was carried out by a CIA-backed militia, FARC guerrillas, or the Colombian military:

https://hrdag.org/colombia/

They conducted the first ever census of killing by US police officers:

https://hrdag.org/poli/

They partnered with Innocence Project New Orleans to sift through mountains of arrest reports to surface cases similar to successful exonerations, helping more innocents to win their freedom:

https://hrdag.org/2025/02/20/ipno/

Today, they are active across the USA, tracking and analyzing the crimes committed by the Trump regime:

https://hrdag.org/2026/07/05/naming-police-officers-who-kill-in-california/

And they are working in Gaza, to document the genocide so that someday, the truth can be acknowledged and the perpetrators brought to justice:

https://hrdag.org/pressroom/nyt-gaza-toll/

I've known Patrick Ball, the statistician and programmer who founded HRDAG, for more than 20 years, and every time we meet, I learn something from him. He's the person who comes to mind whenever people tell me that AI is useless and that programmers who claim otherwise are deluded. Patrick is one of the best programmers I know, he is the very best statistician I know, and he's found many, many ways to use coding assistants to help him perform massive data-analysis projects that are vital to human rights struggles. He's a "centaur" if ever there was one:

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

It's exciting to see Patrick and his colleagues and collaborators taking these decisive steps to begin building the post-American internet and a kind of post-bubble AI, where AI tools are treated as normal technologies, capable of helping skilled practitioners who have discernment born of experience to apply them wisely to achieve important things:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/07/28/hitl-ers/#ai-ai-oh

For more than 20 years, HRDAG has been impressing me with the things we can do using advanced statistical analysis. The current generation of AI tools are founded in advanced stats, too. No one should think that advanced stats can solve all your problems of course. The AI bubble is madness and will lead to ruin – environmental, economic, political:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/05/26/the-ai-will-continue/#until-morale-improves

The world would be a better place without the AI bubble. But AI? It's fine. It's another form of statistical analysis and inference. There's no reason to use all the planet's energy, computing and water to perform that analysis, but the correct and desirable amount of useful AI-style computation is nowhere near zero.

The coop is building good AI tools – ones grounded in a realistic assessment of their usefulness and a reasonable commitment of resources to them. They're running open models based on their own data, on computers they own and control. Their stated goal is to "help organizations test whether models are accurate, reproducible, secure, and appropriate for specific human rights use cases."

Which brings me to the final component of Tech Freedom Coop: training. They're teaching people who work in human rights how to administer their own servers, secure their data and communications, and analyze data. As their press release says, these are all "skills that are increasingly necessary for human rights organizations documenting abuses of power."

I've known this was coming for a while now, and I'm so pleased to see that it's finally launched. At last, the first steps towards a post-American internet.

Hey look at this (permalink)


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

Object permanence (permalink)

#25yrsago Asia Carrera’s makeup tips http://www.asiacarrera.com/makeup/welcome.html

#25yrsago Tommy Chong's Urine Luck https://web.archive.org/web/20010818124925/https://hempmasters.com/urineluck/

#15yrsago German cops call airport full-body pornoscanners “useless,” EU requires opt out from scanning https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2011/08/german_police_c.html

#15yrsago Write an adventure novel in three days, the Michael Moorcock way https://web.archive.org/web/20110705155756/https://wetasphalt.com/?q=content/how-write-book-three-days-lessons-michael-moorcock

#10yrsago DRM: You have the right to know what you’re buying! https://www.eff.org/files/2016/08/06/eff_request_for_investigation_re_labeling_drm-limited_products.pdf

#10yrsago Bureaucrats disqualify Hong Kong legislative candidates for insufficient loyalty https://globalvoices.org/2016/08/05/hong-kong-election-officials-disqualify-six-legislative-candidates-for-not-being-loyal-enough-to-china/

#10yrsago The Vlogbrothers guide to voting in every state in the union https://www.youtube.com/c/howtovoteineverystate

#10yrsago Vocal fry, uptalking, nasal: women’s voices can never be “right” https://www.thecut.com/2016/07/female-voice-anxiety-c-v-r.html

#5yrsago Facebook escalates war on accountability https://pluralistic.net/2021/08/05/comprehensive-sex-ed/#quis-custodiet-ipsos-zuck

#5yrsago Drone delivery crashes https://pluralistic.net/2021/08/05/comprehensive-sex-ed/#droned

#5yrsago Anti-vaxers cool the mark https://pluralistic.net/2021/08/05/comprehensive-sex-ed/#goffman

#5yrsago Meet the new generation of pro-abortion activists https://pluralistic.net/2021/08/05/comprehensive-sex-ed/#never-again

#1yrago Bragging about replacing coders with AI is a sales-pitch https://pluralistic.net/2025/08/05/ex-princes-of-labor/#hyper-criti-hype

Upcoming appearances (permalink)

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


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

Recent appearances (permalink)


A grid of my books with Will Stahle covers..

Latest books (permalink)


A cardboard book box with the Macmillan logo.

Upcoming books (permalink)

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

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

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

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


Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources:

Currently writing:

  • “Once Is Enemy Action,” a science fiction novel about the origins of modern technofascism. Today's words: 692 (692 total).

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

  • A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING

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

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

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

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Received — 27 July 2026 ⏭

Pluralistic: How the EU can punish Google (despite Trump) (27 Jul 2026)

✇Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
By: Cory Doctorow
27 July 2026 at 12:52


Today's links

  • How the EU can punish Google (despite Trump): Grant me the courage to change the things I can.
  • Hey look at this: Delights to delectate.
  • Object permanence: Chilling Effects; Billy Bragg v Myspace; Glenn Beck calls murdered Norwegian children "Hitler Youth"; Photog sues Getty for $1b copyfraud; Best paid CEOs perform worst; Olympics v "Olympics"; Alberta tar sands v "hot lesbians"; IoT security apocalypse; 3 Little Pigs in pidgin; The nasty party; Copyright extortionist infringed fellow extortionist; Grandpa mobbed for photographing grandson in park; Ice Bucket Challenge didn't cure ALS; Twiddling enshittifies your brain.
  • Upcoming appearances: 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.


A giant fist clutching the Android robot. The robot is orange and has Trump's hair. The fist extends from an EU-flag-blue cuff, and it is ringed with yellow EU flag stars. To the side is an old-timey western bar with a drunk, smoking, glaring Uncle Sam leaning on it. The background is a haunted, moonlit forest.

How the EU can punish Google (despite Trump) (permalink)

The "Serenity Prayer" (Serenity to accept things I can't change/Courage to change the things I can/Wisdom to know the difference) is usually cited as pop psychology or addiction recovery advice, but I think there's a place for it in policymaking.

Take the EU's fight against US Big Tech. During the Biden years, the EU's tech policy matured into something serious and ambitious, culminating in the Digital Markets Act (DMA) and Digital Services Act (DSA), a pair of big, muscular policies that would curb Big Tech's most abusive conduct. The EU's ambition didn't occur in a vacuum: it was part of a global wave of antitrust fervor whose top agenda item was reining in tech:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/06/28/mamdani/#trustbusting

In this fight, the EU had important partners all over the world. For example, South Korea and Japan used the facts uncovered through EU enforcement action against Google and Apple to pursue similar cases:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/10/an-injury-to-one/#is-an-injury-to-all

But the EU's most important partner in its fight against American Big Tech was America. Biden's trustbusters – Lina Khan, Rohit Chopra, Jonathan Kanter, Tim Wu, et al – were every bit as serious about Big Tech power as anyone in the EU. After all, the American public are always the first victims of any new tech scam, and America is the only country with a large, affluent population who lack modern, comprehensive consumer privacy protection, making Americans highly prized prey for tech companies:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/04/23/zuckerstreisand/#zdgaf

With America and the EU on the same side of the tech fight, the world had a fighting chance. Tech knew this, which is why Big Tech backed Trump hard during the 2024 election and aggressively curried his favor after he won. From the tech barons who paid $1m each to sit behind Trump on the inaugural dais to the millions tech companies donated to Trump's Epstein Ballroom at the White House, tech has made it clear that it supports anything Trump wants to do, provided he shields Big Tech from any attempt to limit their ability to spy on and steal from Americans and the world.

Even before he took office, Trump made it clear how he would reward tech's loyalty: weeks before the inauguration, Trump went to Davos and threatened the EU with reprisals if they enforced the DSA or DMA against his tech companies:

https://techcrunch.com/2025/01/23/trumps-not-happy-with-how-eu-regulators-have-treated-us-tech-giants/

Trump wasted no time leaning on US trading partners on behalf of Big Tech. He bullied Canadian PM Mark Carney into dropping his plan to tax US tech companies. Big Tech uses a variety of tax-cheating gambits to evade taxation around the world, making it impossible for (tax-paying) domestic companies to compete:

https://www.canada.ca/en/department-finance/news/2025/06/canada-rescinds-digital-services-tax-to-advance-broader-trade-negotiations-with-the-united-states.html

Trump also got UK PM Keir Starmer to drop his plan to tax tech:

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/apr/01/starmer-offered-big-us-tech-firms-tax-cuts-in-return-for-lower-trump-tariffs

And he got the EU to roll back its plan to regulate AI:

https://fortune.com/2025/11/07/eu-ai-act-weaken-regulation-delay-big-tech-trump-government/

None of the governments that caved to Trump got anything in return. As I've written:

Give Trump everything he asks for and he'll demand more. Deny Trump anything and he'll demand more. Sign a contract with Trump and he'll break it. Send Trump an invoice and he'll stiff you. For Trump, "the art of the deal" can be summed up in one word: renege.

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

Case in point: after the EU surrendered to Trump on AI regulation, Trump announced that a on ban EU officials who had worked on the Digital Services Act from traveling to the USA:

https://www.state.gov/releases/office-of-the-spokesperson/2025/12/announcement-of-actions-to-combat-the-global-censorship-industrial-complex/

Then, after the EU made more concessions to Trump, he announced a ban on even more EU officials:

https://www.lawfaremedia.org/article/the-trump-administration-targets-europe-s-content-moderation-laws

Trump ordered his tech giants to dig through EU officials' private correspondence so he can figure out who to ban next:

https://www.politico.eu/article/us-congress-judiciary-committee-big-tech-private-communication-eu-officials/

Trump's tech companies got the memo. When the EU ordered Apple to follow the law, Apple told the EU to fuck off:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/02/06/spoil-the-bunch/#dma

After all, Apple is a key partner in the Trump administration's mass deportations. Apple blocked an iPhone app that warns Apple customers if they're about to be kidnapped or murdered by ICE. Trump needs Apple, just as much as Apple needs Trump:

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

Despite this, the EU keeps trying to enforce its laws against Trump's companies. Last week, the Commission announced a $1b fine against Google for violating the Digital Services Act with conduct that cost Europeans many billions:

https://digital-markets-act.ec.europa.eu/commission-fines-google-eur890-million-breaches-digital-markets-act-2026-07-23_en

In other words, Google wasn't even being ordered to disgorge all the money it stole, just some of it. Remember, a fine is a price: the EU's fine here will only make this kind of cheating slightly less profitable.

Nevertheless, Trump responded immediately by threatening the EU with many billions more in tariffs if they continue to attempt to enforce the law against one of his companies:

https://www.lemonde.fr/en/international/article/2026/07/24/trump-says-eu-to-pay-very-big-price-for-890-million-google-fine_6755804_4.html

Trump, the European Commission and Google all know this is about more than one $1b fine. The DSA and DMA both provide for steeply rising fines and other penalties for repeat offenders, and Google clearly has no plan to end its very profitable European crime-spree. Trump's threats aren't a bid to kill this enforcement – Trump wants to kill all enforcement.

Retaliatory tariffs aren't the only weapon Trump has at his disposal. If the EU (or any other country) levies a serious fine against Google, Apple, Oracle, Microsoft, or any of Trump's other tech companies, Trump can order US banks not to turn over those fines, even after the EU sends them a court order for the money. If a bank defies Trump, he can threaten to yank its charter. Or he could just run the same swindle he pulled on Tiktok: stealing the whole company and selling it to one of his buddies, who will run it the way Trump wants.

The reality is that without America's assistance, the EU has precious little hope of forcing American companies to do things they don't want to do. In terms of the Serenity Prayer, this is "a thing they cannot change."

The Serenity Prayer doesn't stop with "things you can't change." The next line seeks "the courage to change the things I can." The EU has no control over Google's conduct, but it has total control over its own conduct.

Specifically, the EU could get rid of the laws that ban European companies from modifying US tech exports. The EU adopted the Copyright Directive in 2001. Article 6 of the EUCD makes it a crime to reverse-engineer and modify a device without the manufacturer's permission. This law was adopted under pressure from the US Trade Representative, who threatened the EU with tariffs on its exports unless it adopted an "anticircumvention rule" that banned EU technologists from making products that let Europeans prevent US tech companies from stealing their money and data":

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

This law is still in force in the EU, despite the fact that Trump (predictably) reneged on the US side of the bargain, hitting the EU with massive tariffs and even threatening to steal part of Denmark.

Article 6 of the Copyright Directive is the reason European tech companies can't jailbreak America's apps, whether that's to get its government and corporate data off of US platforms:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/10/15/freedom-of-movement/#data-dieselgate

Or to modify American social media apps to respect EU privacy laws:

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

The EU can't control what Apple or Google do. But the EU can absolutely decide whether Trump's companies can use Europe's courts to destroy European companies that defend the privacy and economic integrity of the European people.

If the EU kills off Article 6 of the Copyright Directive, they can use European companies to bring Google and Apple's defective tech exports into compliance with European law. Unlike Trump's companies, those companies can be forced to pay their taxes and respect their users' privacy, labor and consumer rights.

That's the Serenity Prayer's "wisdom to know the difference."

Hey look at this (permalink)


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

Object permanence (permalink)

#25yrsago Chilling Effects https://web.archive.org/web/20010801172448/http://eon.law.harvard.edu/chill/

#25yrsago 13-year-old hacker's book deal: “The Unofficial Guide to Ethical Hacking" https://web.archive.org/web/20011102164905/http://www.vnunet.com/News/1124279

#20yrsago France’s new copyright law slaughters kills use and open source https://web.archive.org/web/20060812223624/http://soufron.typhon.net/spip.php?article150

#20yrsago Billy Bragg gets MySpace’s terms of service changed https://web.archive.org/web/20100809150257/http://blogs.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=blog.view&friendID=34570397&blogID=137856388&MyToken=626131d4-c695-42ba-867b-754b9e2bfeaa

#15yrsago Buy an Old West town in South Dakota for $0.8M https://web.archive.org/web/20110728012824/https://edition.cnn.com/2011/US/07/27/south.dakota.town.sale/index.html

#15yrsago Glenn Beck compares murdered Norway campers to “Hitler Youth” https://www.latimes.com/archives/blogs/top-of-the-ticket/story/2011-07-25/opinion-glenn-beck-hits-new-low-compares-norway-victims-to-hitler-youth

#15yrsago 3 Little Pigs rendered into Papua New Guinea pidgin https://www.abc.net.au/reslib/200709/r184705_686227.mp3

#15yrsago Why they call the Tories “the nasty party” https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2011/jul/28/tory-lib-dems-clash-on-policy

#15yrsago US ISP/copyright deal: a one-sided private law for corporations, without public interest https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2011/07/graduated-response-deal-what-if-users-had-been

#15yrsago Copyright extortionist ripped off his competitor’s threatening material https://torrentfreak.com/anti-piracy-lawyers-rip-off-work-from-competitor-110727/

#15yrsago Karl Schroeder: Science fiction versus structured study of the future, sf as aspiration https://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2011/07/beyond-prediction.html

#15yrsago Norwegian PM refuses to let terrorist attacks drive his country to intolerance and paranoid “security” https://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/28/world/europe/28norway.html?_r=1

#15yrsago Man with camera in park who fled angry parent sought by police (turns out he was taking pix of his grandson) https://web.archive.org/web/20110829052009/https://pixiq.com/article/man-photographing-grandkid-in-park-deemed-suspicious

#10yrsago Laurie Penny at the DNC: “Dissent will not be tolerated. Protest will not be permitted.” https://medium.com/welcome-to-the-scream-room/bad-moon-rising-8cd348df50e9#.9lhcixjn1

#10yrsago The Ice Bucket Challenge did not fund a breakthrough in ALS treatment https://web.archive.org/web/20160914225439/http://www.healthnewsreview.org/2016/07/ice-bucket-challenge-breakthrough-experts-pour-cold-water-superficial-reporting/

#10yrsago Silicon Valley banks offer tech giants’ new hires 100% mortgages on 24 hours’ notice https://web.archive.org/web/20160727095557/http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-07-27/zero-down-on-a-2-million-house-is-no-problem-in-silicon-valley

#10yrsago Patent fighters attack the crown jewels of three of America’s worst patent trolls https://web.archive.org/web/20160727191625/https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2016/07/patent-defense-group-seeks-to-knock-out-top-three-trolls-of-2015/

#10yrsago Censorship company drops bogus lawsuit against researchers who outed them https://citizenlab.ca/research-interest/

#10yrsago Photographer sues Getty Images for $1B because they’re charging for pix she donated to LoC https://hyperallergic.com/photographer-files-1-billion-suit-against-getty-for-licensing-her-public-domain-images/

#10yrsago First-ever Michelin star for street food awarded to Singaporean hawker stalls https://web.archive.org/web/20160723174014/http://uk.reuters.com/article/us-singapore-food-hawkers-michelin-star-idUKKCN1021XA

#10yrsago Highest-paid CEOs generate lowest shareholder returns https://www.msci.com/documents/10199/91a7f92b-d4ba-4d29-ae5f-8022f9bb944d

#10yrsago Olympics to companies: mentioning “Olympics” in social media is a trademark violation #https://web.archive.org/web/20160727075209/https://www.espn.com/olympics/story/_/id/17120510/united-states-olympic-committee-battle-athletes-companies-sponsor-not-olympics

#10yrsago Pro-tar-sands activists say dirty Canadian oil is better because “lesbians are hot” https://www.joeydevilla.com/2016/07/26/this-ill-advised-hot-lesbians-ad-promoting-canadian-vs-saudi-oil-is-real-and-not-a-parody-by-the-onion/

#5yrsago The infosec apocalypse is nigh https://pluralistic.net/2021/07/27/gas-on-the-fire/#a-safe-place-for-dangerous-ideas

#1yrago How twiddling enshittifies your brain https://pluralistic.net/2025/07/28/twiddlehazard/#outboard-brains-considered-harmful

Upcoming appearances (permalink)

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


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

Recent appearances (permalink)


A grid of my books with Will Stahle covers..

Latest books (permalink)


A cardboard book box with the Macmillan logo.

Upcoming books (permalink)

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

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

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

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


Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources:

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

  • A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING

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

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

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

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

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

ISSN: 3066-764X

Received — 22 July 2026 ⏭

Pluralistic: Trump's America can't even win a rigged game (22 Jul 2026)

✇Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
By: Cory Doctorow
22 July 2026 at 10:58


Today's links


A vintage world map. The US has been obscured by a roiling black cloud from which squirm many questing tentacles. A large area around the US has been discolored.

Trump's America can't even win a rigged game (permalink)

Here's a sentence that stopped me in my tracks last week: "The statement that 'the cemeteries are full of indispensable people' is just as true of nations, and in particular the US":

https://crookedtimber.org/2026/07/16/55382/

The writer is John Quiggin, writing about the fact that, under Trump, the world has raced through a series of seismic shifts in how it organizes itself, rushing to fill an America-shaped void in its dealings.

This is a subject that's very much on my mind. As November Kelly says, Trump inherited a poker game rigged in his favor and then flipped the table over because he resented having to pretend to play at all. The "international rules-based order" that gave America oversight and control over the world's militaries, finances, trade, and communications was always a better deal for America than it was for the rest of the world.

The long persistence of this system doesn't mean that other countries liked it. The reason the American century endured for as long as it did was that the toll that America extracted from the world was always lower than the cost of making a new system. Just as people stay on Facebook because they love their friends more than they hate Mark Zuckerberg, the nations of the world let America control their systems because they feared the cost and difficulty of building a new system more than they resented letting America dictate and tax every part of their politics and economies.

That's where Trump comes in. The price of doing business with Trump is, effectively, infinity. If you buck Trump, he doubles down and demands twice as much. If you capitulate to Trump, he interprets it as weakness and comes back for three times as much. There are no deals to be made with Trump, only temporary measures that last until his next Fox and Friends binge or chance encounter with a ridiculous conspiracy theory.

Take Canada: in 2018, Trump tore up NAFTA – the deal that Bush Sr and Clinton crammed down Mexico and Canada's throats – and replaced it with USMCA, a trade treaty that was even more advantageous to America. Then, within months of his 2024 election, Trump tore up USMCA and replaced it with a chaotic series of tariffs that swung around wildly from 25% to 100% to (as of this week) 50%:

https://www.whitehouse.gov/fact-sheets/2026/07/fact-sheet-president-donald-j-trump-imposes-additional-tariffs-on-canada/

Trump has no coherent reason for this new tariff. Canada has bent over backwards to give Trump everything he wants and more. Despite some high-minded words at Davos about the need for "middle powers" to decouple from the USA, PM Mark Carney has given Trump everything he could ask for. Carney allowed Palantir – a company that makes no bones about being an agent of Trump's will – inside the most sensitive parts of the Canadian military. Carney dropped his plan to charge US tech companies a 3% tax. Carney is firing tens of thousands of civil servants and replacing them with chatbots, the majority of which will be operated by US companies, running on US servers.

Sure, Canada's imposed some retaliatory tariffs on US products, but that's just a way of making everything Canadians buy more expensive, which is a weird way of punishing America. It's like punching yourself in the face as hard as you can in the hopes that the downstairs neighbour says "ouch." Meanwhile, Carney has consistently ignored US interference in Canadian politics, including the tsunami of dark money pouring into the Alberta separatist movement – a bid by Trump to literally steal an entire province.

Give Trump everything he asks for and he'll demand more. Deny Trump anything and he'll demand more. Sign a contract with Trump and he'll break it. Send Trump an invoice and he'll stiff you. For Trump, "the art of the deal" can be summed up in one word: renege.

This is why – as David Dayen writes – there will likely be no peace deal in Iran for so long as Trump is in office. Why would the Iranians sign any deal with Trump when they know Trump will break it?

https://prospect.org/2026/07/10/aftermath-wars-on/

Last Christmas, I gave a speech in Hamburg about "the post-American internet" that the rest of the world has the chance to build now that Trump has zeroed-out all the value it used to get from playing by America's tech policy rules, even as Trump has weaponized US tech companies to attack world officials who buck his agenda:

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

After that speech, I wrote a book (The Post-American Internet) that Farrar, Straus and Giroux will publish in August 2027. In the book, I describe the role that "trusted third parties" (T3P) play in complex transactions. Think of an escrow agent who holds onto the deed for the house you're buying from the seller until you hand over the money, and then forwards the deed to you and the money to the seller.

The more complex a transaction is, the more it needs a T3P. For most of the past century, the US has been the world's T3P. Most of the world's transoceanic fiber optic lines make landfall in the US and interconnect to one another in US data centres. Most of the world's international transactions are conducted in dollars and are cleared through US-controlled platforms like SWIFT. Through its aid programs, the US sets the health and public services agenda for billions of non-Americans, and the US has military installations in more than 100 countries. The US trains the world's militaries, it supplies (and withholds) information from the world's intelligence agencies, and it runs the IT infrastructure powering the world's government agencies and critical infrastructure, from tractors to medical equipment.

Right from the start, the US was never an entirely trustworthy "trusted third party." There were plenty of instances where the US abused its control over its "neutral" platforms to serve the American national interest at the expense of the countries that relied on those platforms.

But those violations were either covert or carried out under some kind of legal rubric ("the rules-based international order"). You'd probably continue to trust an escrow agent that obeyed court orders to hold onto the money after handing over the deed. That trust might persist even if the escrow agent withheld the money on the say-so of a DA or sheriff, even without a court order. You might even continue to trust the escrow agent if they sometimes said, "I'm going to hang onto this money for 72 hours because I think there might be something weird in this deal."

Same goes for the escrow agent who has a secret side-hustle with the local land-registry office and realtors that lets them skim a few points off every deal and scoop up the best properties through a shell company. Provided you never find out about this, you'll happily hire that escrow agent to handle your property deal.

Trump is the escrow agent who keeps the money and the deed, then announces he did it because the seller was a fentanyl dealer and the buyer was a lizard-person; and then publishes a long screed on Truth Social calling everyone who criticises him a terrorist, promising to do it again next time.

Even if you need to sell your house, and even if Trump is the only escrow agent you can find, you're just not going to trust him with your deed or the money. As GW Bush says, "Fool me once, shame on…shame on you. Fool me – you can't get fooled again."

Back to Quiggin: the US was the world's indispensable nation, and the cemeteries of history are full of indispensable nations. As Quiggin writes, Europe and Ukraine have largely given up on US military protection from Russia and are building their own capacity, already surpassing the US in drone and artillery capabilities. The US can no longer credibly provide missiles and anti-missile defenses, not after Trump used up America's stockpiles in his pointless, endless war in Iran.

Quiggin notes that the consensus case against the EU as a military power held that Europe "lacks the capacity to project power globally" and that it is "too disunited to act effectively." Per Quiggin, these only matter if you believe that the post-American military order will look and act like the American system that Trump just trashed. Trump has a chud "Secretary of War" who kidnaps foreign leaders and can't reliably get oil through the Strait of Hormuz – if that's the dividend from "unity" and "projecting power," you can keep it.

On finance, Quiggin notes that the EU is racing to break its reliance on SWIFT, Visa and Mastercard, and the more Trump weaponizes these against institutions like the International Criminal Court, the faster this transition will go.

America's load-bearing private institutions – like the Big Four accounting firms and the bond rating agencies – have self-immolated, thanks to decades of lax regulation by successive US administrations through scandal after scandal. Quiggin points out that there's no reason to replace these giant, structurally important (but terrifyingly unreliable) cartels with trustworthy versions. It's cheaper and more robust to rebuild our economy so that it no longer serves the finance system, returning finance to "its pre-1970s role as a provider of a relatively limited set of services to the real economy."

On manufacturing, Quiggin points to the twin facts of Trump's chaotic tariffs and China's "economic nationalism," which have put the EU in the centre of a new trade order. Here, too, we're getting something new, not a Made-in-Europe version of "the failed globalist dream of the WTO" nor "Trump’s attempts to extort surplus through bilateral bullying":

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/07/12/opinion/america-trump-nato-europe-world.html

As I said, Quiggin's article has been rattling around in my mind ever since I read it last week, but there's one area where I think Quiggin's got it wrong: the relative difficulty of building a post-American internet.

First, because Quiggin says that the real challenge is building a post-American AI. Sovereign AI is, frankly, nonsense. If Trump turns off all of your country's chatbots, nothing changes. If Trump orders Microsoft to shut off your country's access to Office 365 (as he did to the International Criminal Court and a Brazilian judge who pissed him off), your country would simply cease to function:

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

And if Trump orders John Deere to brick all the tractors in your country, you're gonna starve to death:

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

In the face of these real, non-speculative, immediate, grave threats, focusing on AI – the money-losingest technology in human history, which has consistently underperformed relative to its boosters' promises – is just misguided. If you really want an "AI strategy" for your country, it should be this: wait for the bubble to burst, then buy hardware and talent at fire-sale prices in the wave of ensuing bankruptcies, and use them to extract more performance from free, open source models.

The real digital challenge is building apps and data centres to run everyday administrative, telecoms and e-commerce software on, and then moving your country's, ministries', companies' and households' data over to the new platforms. The hardware and software are challenging, but ultimately straightforward. Raising capital for data centres is just a matter of convincing people to invest in being a kind of landlord, which is among the easier sells to make (and there's plenty of investors who are looking for real alternatives to getting sucked into the AI bubble).

Getting the apps is hard, but there's an army of technologists who are ready for more, after decades of doing fake startups for a Big Tech company to "acqui-hire" and/or toiling to improve ad click-throughs. These people yearn to follow Steve Jobs's injunction to "make a dent in the universe" and they are being chased out of Silicon Valley by ICE chuds who want to send them to Salvadoran slave-labor camps.

There's plenty of talent and capital for the taking.

The real hard part isn't writing or running the code – it's extracting the data, replacing the firmware, and bridging new systems – like post-American social media platforms – into the existing ones. This part is hard because every country in the world has agreed to a trade deal with America wherein they agreed to make it illegal to reverse-engineer US tech exports, in exchange for tariff-free access to US markets. Trump has made the case for abandoning these deals better than I ever could have:

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

Hey look at this (permalink)


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

Object permanence (permalink)

#20yrsago Fagin: Will Eisner’s retelling of Oliver Twist https://memex.craphound.com/2006/07/22/fagin-will-eisners-retelling-of-oliver-twist/

#20yrsago 95 Theses of Geek Activism: how to defend freedom with tech https://scienceaddiction.com/2006/07/23/95-theses-of-geek-activism/

#20yrsago Plane made of printed parts flies https://web.archive.org/web/20060823102012/http://www.newscientisttech.com/article.ns?id=dn9602&feedId=online-news_rss20

#20yrsago Scott McCloud on the future of comics https://web.archive.org/web/20060822133933/https://www.wired.com/news/culture/1,71434-0.html

#10yrsago Middle aged Singaporean media regulators rap about the national public-private content strategy https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ksw2UqTyhhc

#10yrsago Laurie Penny on hanging out with Milo Yiannopoulos and the gay trolls of the RNC https://medium.com/welcome-to-the-scream-room/im-with-the-banned-8d1b6e0b2932#.ftai0i9ra

#1yrago Conservatism considered as a movement of bitter rubes https://pluralistic.net/2025/07/22/all-day-suckers/#i-love-the-poorly-educated

Upcoming appearances (permalink)

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


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

Recent appearances (permalink)


A grid of my books with Will Stahle covers..

Latest books (permalink)


A cardboard book box with the Macmillan logo.

Upcoming books (permalink)

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

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

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

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


Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources:

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

  • A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING

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

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

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

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

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

ISSN: 3066-764X

Received — 25 June 2026 ⏭

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

✇Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
By: Cory Doctorow
25 June 2026 at 11:37


Today's links


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

Jailbreaking isn't theft (permalink)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Big Tech's margins are our opportunity.

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

Hey look at this (permalink)


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

Object permanence (permalink)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Upcoming appearances (permalink)

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


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

Recent appearances (permalink)


A grid of my books with Will Stahle covers..

Latest books (permalink)


A cardboard book box with the Macmillan logo.

Upcoming books (permalink)

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

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

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

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

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


Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources:

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

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

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

  • A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING

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

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

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

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

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

ISSN: 3066-764X

Received — 16 May 2026 ⏭

Pluralistic: Making sense of Trump's unscheduled sudden midair disassembly of the American empire (16 May 2026)

✇Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
By: Cory Doctorow
16 May 2026 at 10:35


Today's links


A detail from Dore's engraving depicting the drowning of the Leviathan - a great sea-serpent thrashing in a chaotic dark sea. The image has been altered: it has been hand-tinted. The sea serpent is wearing a MAGA hat. Drowning nearby are a beleagured Uncle Sam, an Android robot, and the Statue of Liberty.

Making sense of Trump's unscheduled sudden midair disassembly of the American empire (permalink)

For generations, the American empire was the most powerful force on earth, and so we tended to assume that it was the most durable force on earth – surely anything so powerful must also be eternal?

But power and durability aren't the same thing, as Le Guin reminded us with her oft-quoted maxim that "We live in capitalism, its power seems inescapable — but then, so did the divine right of kings":

https://www.ursulakleguin.com/nbf-medal

Monarchs may be powerful, but that power is derived from a manifestly incorrect belief in special blood, a belief that requires monarchs to inbreed. At best, this produces heads of state who can't stop bleeding and also can't tell you if their blood is blue or red; at worst, it yields heads of state who can't speak intelligibly, much less produce another generation of royals:

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

Oligarchy also produces a sequence of progressively weirder and more terrible rulers who rely on a mix of lies, flattery, coercion and personal cult nonsense to hold their coalition together in the face of mounting evidence for the system's bankruptcy. Thus Reagan begat GW Bush, who begat Trump, whose potential successors are a kennel of the least-charismatic chud podcasters ever to curse an RSS feed.

Trump's second term has resulted in a rapid, unscheduled, mid-air disassembly of the American empire. As Baldur Bjarnason writes, under Trump, America "first turned on their trading partners, then their allies in Europe, and then they delivered one of this century’s biggest economic and energy crises to their allies in Asia":

https://www.baldurbjarnason.com/2026/the-old-world-of-tech-is-dying/

The line comes from an excellent post entitled "The old world of tech is dying and the new cannot be born," about the impact of Trump's de-Americanization of the world on the US tech industry, and thus the world's relationship to tech more broadly. As Bjarnason writes, Trump's tech giants dominate the world because America dominates the world. It's not because the world likes American tech. As Bjarnason writes:

They are, more often than not, about as popular and respected as tobacco or pharmaceutical companies – some of them and their products are polling in terms of public sentiment in ranges similar to child molesters or authoritarian immigration enforcement entities – and their CEOs are some of the more despised public figures in recent history.

These very, very unpopular tech companies dominate because American trade policy insists that they must. They are allowed to violate local laws because stopping them from doing so would result in trade sanctions. It's true that US tech companies face fines abroad from time to time, but these are "the price list for inflicting societal suffering. Pick the one that suits your business model." US trading partners haven't really attempted to extinguish the unlawful conduct of US tech companies.

All of that is up for grabs now, thanks to Trump's uncontrollable compulsion to repeatedly hormuz himself (and America) in the foot. But – as Bjarnason writes – this didn't start with Trump. As ever, Trump is as much an effect as a cause, and the most important cause of Trump is the conversion of America into a financial economy, which started under Reagan, but was only finalized by Obama, who let the Wall Street looters who destroyed the world economy walk away unscathed, even as they stole the homes of millions of Americans:

https://web.archive.org/web/20170130083243/https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/jan/16/how-barack-obama-paved-way-donald-trump-racism

Financial economies "suck the air out of the rest of the economy and make it less competitive." Keeping billionaires in megayachts comes at the expense of "research, education, infrastructure, and healthcare." Countries that financialize lag behind countries where the economy is based on making things, not extracting or financing things.

Generations of both imperial looting and domestic investment made America the richest country on earth. That wealth cushioned America's transition to oligarchy: for a while, the country could survive both "finance and billionaire parasites sucking its blood" and continue to invest in itself. But while you can double the wealth of a billionaire at the expense of a town or two, doubling the wealth of a centibillionaire requires the destruction of whole regions.

As America looted itself into irrelevance, China – a very different kind of autocracy – invested in domestic capacity and domestic consumption. China's hardly a well-run place: like any autocracy, it functions according to the whims of extremely fallible officials, which produces real-estate bubbles and other crises of production (to say nothing of the demographic crisis of the One Child policy) and necessitates steadily increasing oppression, from online surveillance to concentration camps in Xinjiang.

Bjarnason writes about how this Chinese/US world presents a "double bind" for the EU. Siding with the US is increasingly untenable: the EU exists in large part to promote its domestic industries, but the US is no longer content to leave these alone. As Bjarnason says, US economic policy is now, "whatever our oligarchs want to steal this month, they get."

US tech has extended so many tendrils into so many sectors that it's not possible to defend any industrial sector without impinging on the "technopoly," where "the only ideas and thoughts that have social and cultural legitimacy are those that support, are supported by, and are mediated through technology."

This means that continuing to work within the American system means a steady transfer of economic and political control of every aspect of your life to the US, a decaying empire ruled over by a mad king. Nevertheless, there is a strong, vestigial reflex to protect American tech in the EU, which leaves European power-brokers scrambling to come up with reasons that the EU should confine its tech regulation to empty symbolic gestures, while avoiding meaningful action at all costs:

https://cerre.eu/wp-content/uploads/2026/02/CERRE_Horizontal-Interoperability-of-Social-Networking-Services.pdf

But the American tech sector relies on the other sources of American power – the ones that Trump is so bent on destroying. Trump's de-dollarization of the world economy is pushing the world away from using American tech for payment processing and networking. The American empire created the form of the US tech sector. As Bjarnason writes, "without the weight of the US political empire behind it – if Airbnb or Uber had been local startups – much fewer countries in the world would have loosened their regulations and consumer protections to accommodate them to the point where they prospered as they did."

Trump isn't the first US leader to make a strategic blunder (the US has lost every war it's fought since WWII, after all). But Trump's blunders are different in that they "deliberately signal the end [the US] empire." Hormuz and tariffs have driven people away from the US dollar, and everyone knows who to blame for the senseless deaths in the Gulf and the global privation caused by oil rationing.

That's bad news for a software industry that "shifted its entire value proposition from 'we make tools that help you make or save money' to using political clout and the dollar hegemony to capture, control, and loot entire sectors of the various economies of the world. That strategy only works when you’re in charge."

DOGE wiped out the health systems of the global south, and now Trump's trade negotiators are demanding that these countries promise to keep their hands off of US tech in exchange for reinstating a small trickle of the aid they lost. These countries are rejecting those demands:

https://www.reuters.com/business/healthcare-pharmaceuticals/zambia-says-us-health-deal-must-be-uncoupled-minerals-access-2026-05-04/

It's all up for grabs, in other words. The post-American internet is being born in a post-American world, and the shape of both is impossible to determine from this side of the veil. Bjarnason quotes Gramsci: "the old is dying and the new cannot be born."

I hold out high hopes for a world of international digital public goods: free and open software that replaces America's extractive, defective black boxes with transparent, auditable, trustworthy alternatives that are under the control of the people who use them:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/04/16/pascals-wager/#doomer-challenge

But – as Bjarnason says – even the intellectual property framework that the free/open source movement relies on to make its licenses enforceable is an artifact of the collapsing American empire. If the global copyright system collapses with America, there won't be any impediments to reverse-engineering and improving the tech around us – but there also won't be any way to enforce the free software licenses that keep that software open:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/04/02/limited-monopoly/#petardism

The whole essay is very good and – like so many great essays – it raises more questions than it answers. It's also full of standout one-liners like this one:

How do LLMs affect productivity and quality? (Much like leaded petrol. There’s some potential benefit for individual users with literally decades of expertise, provided nobody else uses LLMs. The results are catastrophic when everybody is using them.)

Consider moving it to the top of your weekend reading.

Hey look at this (permalink)


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

Object permanence (permalink)

#25yrsago Is the law copyrighted?
https://web.archive.org/web/20010519134232/http://www.uniontrib.com/news/uniontrib/sun/news/news_1n13own.html

#15yrsago Canadian copyright collective wants a music tax on memory cards https://web.archive.org/web/20110517205114/https://www.michaelgeist.ca/content/view/5798/125/

#10yrsago FBI Director: viral videos make cops afraid to do their jobs https://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/12/us/comey-ferguson-effect-police-videos-fbi.html?_r=2

#10yrsago Banker implicated in one of history’s biggest frauds says boss beat him with a tiny baseball bat https://web.archive.org/web/20160516173952/http://www.ibtimes.co.uk/barclays-banker-accused-rigging-libor-rate-hit-assistant-baseball-bat-1559792

#10yrsago Infested: an itchy, fascinating natural history of the bed bug https://memex.craphound.com/2016/05/14/infested-an-itchy-fascinating-natural-history-of-the-bed-bug/

#5yrsago A weapon of mass financial destruction https://pluralistic.net/2021/05/14/billionaire-class-solidarity/#club-deals

#1yrago Are the means of computation even seizable? https://pluralistic.net/2025/05/14/pregnable/#checkm8

Upcoming appearances (permalink)

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


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

Recent appearances (permalink)


A grid of my books with Will Stahle covers..

Latest books (permalink)


A cardboard book box with the Macmillan logo.

Upcoming books (permalink)

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

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

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

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

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


Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources:

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

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

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

  • A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING

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

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

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

How to get Pluralistic:

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

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

ISSN: 3066-764X

Received — 5 May 2026 ⏭

Pluralistic: The three armies fighting for the post-American world (05 May 2026)

✇Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
By: Cory Doctorow
5 May 2026 at 14:31


Today's links


'The Spirit of 76,' a famous painting depicting three soldiers marching after a US Revolutionary War battle. The figures' heads have been swapped for a man in a top hat, Che Guevara, and a 19th century European general in a silly hat. The US flag in the background has been replaced with the EU flag. The fallen soldier at their feet sports a Trump wig and his skin has been tinted Cheeto orange.

The three armies fighting for the post-American world (permalink)

Political change is downstream of coalition building, and coalitions are fragile things, because by definition they are not fully aligned; they share some goals but often violently disagree about others. A coalition forms when groups set aside their differences to pursue the common elements of their agenda.

Trump is a master coalition builder. He wouldn't have been able to seize and wield so much power without a coalition that includes people who absolutely hate each other and want each other to die. Let's face it, Nick Fuentes wants to turn Ben Shapiro into a lampshade, but they both sent their followers to the ballot box for Trump. We've all seen those videos of Trump supporters railing against "elites" after watching the richest man on Earth cavorting with Trump while promising to give all of their jobs to AI and robots.

This contradiction isn't a bug, it's a feature: the bigger a coalition gets, the more power it has – provided you've got a Trump figure at the top, using his cult of personality to coerce and flatter his coalition members into playing nice with each other.

But Trump's incontinent belligerence, his bullying, and his cognitive decline mean that he's conjuring a new anti-Trump coalition into existence: groups of people who don't agree on much, but do agree on fighting Trumpismo and its leader. This is very visible in US domestic politics, where "Never-Trumper" conservatives find themselves on the same side as Democratic Socialists, at least on this narrow issue. The anti-Trump mass mobilizations – the Women's March, the anti-ICE demonstrations, the No Kings rallies – are visibly, palpably coalitional, made up of people carrying signs and banners for groups that are often at odds with one another…except when it comes to Trump.

But I'm much more interested in the international coalitions that are forming to fight Trump. It started with my longstanding fight for a good internet, free from surveillance, extraction and manipulation, the three evils inherent to the business models of America's shitty, enshittifying tech companies.

Under normal circumstances, you'd expect tech companies in other countries to capitalize on the fact that America exports its obviously defective tech products around the world. As Jeff Bezos often reminds his suppliers: "Your margin is my opportunity." Whether it's Apple taking a 30% margin on iPhone payments, Apple and Meta creaming 51 cents off every ad dollar, Amazon harvesting 50-60% from every platform seller, or inkjet printer companies marking up the colored water you use to print your grocery list by 25 quattuordecillion percent, there's a ton of opportunities to disrupt these comfortable ex-disruptors.

But no one does that, because the US Trade Representative bullied every US trading partner into enacting an "anticircumvention" law that makes it a crime to modify America's tech exports. The quid pro quo for this? Free trade with the USA – and tariffs for any country that didn't fall into line. Well, they all fell into line, and Trump tariffed them anyway.

That means that America's tech giants' margins are now everyone else's opportunity. The trillions that US tech companies extract could be someone else's billions – all they'd have to do is offer the interoperable goods and services that disenshittify America's tech products. They could sell the tools that let anyone in the world use independent app stores, or fix their cars and tractors, and put generic ink in their printers. A year ago, no country could afford to allow a company headquartered in its borders to get into this business, lest they be clobbered with tariffs. Today, any country that isn't thinking about this is a sucker that will end up buying these tools from another country that gets there first.

This means that digital rights hippies like me (who've been banging this drum for 25 years), suddenly have a new ally in the fight against enshittified tech products. Today, there are people who want to help you protect your pocketbook and your privacy, but not because they believe in human rights – rather, because they want to get really, really rich. They see Big Tech's margin as their opportunity.

But it's not just entrepreneurs and activists who want a post-American internet – we have a third member of our coalition: national security hawks. Trump wants to steal Greenland. He wants to steal Alberta. He wants to steal all the oil in Venezuela. He wants to interfere in foreign elections to keep his dictator cronies in office, lest they lose power and find themselves facing prison. And when Trump's allies do face justice, he wants to fire the judges who dare hold these corrupt, powerful men to account.

So when the International Criminal Court issued an arrest warrant for the genocidaire Benjamin Netanyahu, Trump had Microsoft shut down the court's IT systems. The Chief Justice of the ICC lost his Office 365 account, which means he can't access his email archives, his working files, his calendar or his address books. He can't even log in to his non-Microsoft accounts because they're tied to his Outlook email address.

The ICC was just a warmup: Trump did the same thing to the Brazilian high court judge who sentenced the dictator Jair Bolsonaro to prison for attempting a coup after he lost his re-election bid, having presided over a term of gross misrule.

All of this has inflamed concerns within every (former) US ally's national security establishment. These people all understand that Trump doesn't need to roll tanks to take over their countries: he can just brick their key ministries, major firms, and households. He doesn't need to send an army to steal Greenland, he can just shut down Denmark and cut off the world's supply of Lego, Ozempic and ferociously strong black licorice.

Combine the natsec hawks; the economic development wonks, entrepreneurs and investors; and the privacy and digital and human rights activists, and you've got a hell of an anti-Trump coalition around the world, all pulling together to build the post-American internet, a disenshittified and enshittification-resistant internet built on international digital public goods and running on servers outside of the USA:

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

But this coalition isn't limited to the post-American internet – you'll find a coalition much like it in every place where Comrade Trump is calling forth a post-American world. That's the shape of the coalition that's winning Trump's war on fossil fuels: climate activists (hippies), electrification manufacturers and installers (businesses) and national security hawks who don't want to get hormuzed:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/05/04/hope-in-the-dark/#hormuzed-into-the-gretacene

I'm not as plugged into the other areas where Trump has dismantled US hegemony, but it wouldn't surprise me to learn that a coalition much like this one is popping up in the countries where Trump and Musk doged the public health system into oblivion. The global south is full of countries that signed up to enforce US agricultural and pharmaceutical patents and US restrictions on birth control and abortion in exchange for the food-aid and health-aid that Elon Musk and his merry band of broccoli-haired brownshirts killed. It's easy to imagine that reproductive rights and health justice advocates in those countries are now on the same side as investors who'd like to get into business selling generic pharmaceuticals and agricultural inputs, and that they're being backed by people worried that their country's food and health sovereignty are at risk unless they hasten the transition to a post-American world.

I have been an activist all my life, and a digital rights activist for the majority of my adult life. I'm sure there are members of this post-American coalition who want things that are absolutely antithetical to my agenda. That's what makes us a coalition – we disagree about so much, but we all agree on this: it's past time for a post-American world, and Comrade Trump is delivering it.

Hey look at this (permalink)


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

Object permanence (permalink)

#25yrsago North Korean dictator's son arrested trying to sneak into Tokyo Disneyland https://www.nytimes.com/2001/05/03/world/japan-is-said-to-detain-son-of-north-korean-leader.html

#25yrsago Bruce Sterling on good design https://memex.craphound.com/2001/05/03/great-illustrated-bruce-sterling-rant/

#20yrsago Mainstream press: Colbert wasn’t funny at the White House Correspondents' Dinner, so we ignored him https://web.archive.org/web/20070207014019/http://www.salon.com/opinion/feature/2006/05/03/correspondents/index_np.html

#20yrsago Bush and cronies livid about Colbert’s White House gig https://web.archive.org/web/20060615113045/https://www.usnews.com/usnews/news/articles/060501/1whwatch.htm0

#20yrsago Identity thief rips off 3-week-old baby https://abcnews.com/US/story?id=155878&page=1

#20yrsago Network neutrality – why it matters, and how do we fix it? https://web.archive.org/web/20060507215106/http://www.slate.com/id/2140850/

#15yrsago Federal judge: open WiFi doesn’t make you liable for your neighbors’ misdeeds https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2011/05/after-botched-child-porn-raid-judge-sees-the-light-on-ip-addresses/

#10yrsago Taliban condemn Pakistan city’s first McDonald’s: “we don’t even consider it as a food.” https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/mcdonald-s-opens-quetta-pakistan-taliban-isn-t-lovin-it-n564651

#10yrsago Norway’s titanic sovereign wealth fund takes a stand against executive pay https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-36185925

#10yrsago TSA lines grow to 3 hours, snake outside the terminals, with no end in sight https://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/03/business/airport-security-lines.html?smid=pl-share&_r=0

#10yrsago Inside a Supreme Court case on cheerleader uniforms, a profound question about copyright https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2016/05/supreme-court-to-hear-copyright-fight-over-cheerleader-uniforms/

#5yrsago Dishwashers have become Iphones https://pluralistic.net/2021/05/03/cassette-rewinder/#disher-bob

Upcoming appearances (permalink)

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


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

Recent appearances (permalink)


A grid of my books with Will Stahle covers..

Latest books (permalink)


A cardboard book box with the Macmillan logo.

Upcoming books (permalink)

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

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

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

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

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


Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources:

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

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

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

  • A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING

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

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

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

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

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

ISSN: 3066-764X

Received — 20 April 2026 ⏭

Pluralistic: Comrade Trump (20 Apr 2026)

✇Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
By: Cory Doctorow
20 April 2026 at 18:44


Today's links

  • Comrade Trump: Burning down the American empire to save it.
  • Hey look at this: Delights to delectate.
  • Object permanence: MPAA's threat-based 'education'; Cuehack; Heinlein on GWB; AT&T v the internet; British tax-havens v HMG; What is neoliberalism?; Newspaper landlords; Watch-part motorcycle; Tax havens bad; Buscemi's eyes; Sesame Street on lead poisoning.
  • Upcoming appearances: San Francisco, London, Berlin, NYC, Barcelona, Hay-on-Wye, London, NYC.
  • Recent appearances: Where I've been.
  • Latest books: You keep readin' em, I'll keep writin' 'em.
  • Upcoming books: Like I said, I'll keep writin' 'em.
  • Colophon: All the rest.


A Soviet propaganda poster featuring Lenin pointing angrily into the distance. It has been altered. Lenin now has Trump's hair and his skin in orange. The hammer/sickle logo behind him has been replaced with a cross.

Comrade Trump (permalink)

There aren't a lot of things I agree with Mark Carney about, but there's one area where he and I are in total accord: the old, US-dominated, "rules-based international order" was total bullshit:

https://www.weforum.org/stories/2026/01/davos-2026-special-address-by-mark-carney-prime-minister-of-canada/

Unlike Carney, I never pretended to like that old order, and indeed, I spent my entire life fighting against it – literally, all the way back to childhood, organizing other children to march against Canada's participation in America's nuclear weapons programs:

https://www.flickr.com/photos/doctorow/53616011737/in/photolist-2pFS5kt

All of which means that my experience of the Trump years is decidedly weird. On the one hand, I exist in a near-perpetual state of anxious misery, as Trump and his chud army of Christian nationalists and degenerate gamblers pursue a program of gleeful genocide. But at the very same time, I'm living in a world in which Trump is (inadvertently) dismantling many of the worst aspects of the old order in favor of something decidedly better.

Take Trump's tariff policy. Back during Trump I, he decided that Americans couldn't buy Chinese solar anymore, which had the double benefit of allowing him to pursue the twin goals of throwing red meat to Sinophobic Cold War 2.0 freaks and delivering a giant gift to the planet-wrecking oil companies that had helped him buy his way into office.

This was really bad for America, of course, but those solar panels had to go somewhere. Mostly, they ended up in Pakistan, dumped there at such a massive discount that the country solarized virtually overnight. Pakistani solar installers learned their trade from Tiktok videos set to Tamil film soundtracks, and unwired the country so thoroughly that today, the national power company is in danger of going bust because no one buys their electricity from the grid anymore. Pakistani bridal dowries now routinely include four panels, an inverter and a battery:

https://billmckibben.substack.com/p/a-tale-of-two-countries

This is an inversion of the normal order of things, in which rich countries get all the good stuff first, and poor countries like Pakistan get scraps after we've gorged ourselves. Think of vaccine apartheid, in which monsters like Howard Dean insisted that we had to prevent countries in the global south from making their own covid vaccines, because poor brown people are too stupid and primitive to run a pharma manufacturing operation:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/04/08/howard-dino/#the-scream

But, thanks to Comrade Trump, Pakistan was first in line to become the world's solar capital. The country's LNG terminal – built with Chinese Belt-and-Road money – is now a stranded asset, because no one there needs gas.

That's gas whose supply has been choked off in the Strait of Epstein…which brings me to Trump's foreign policy and its impact on the global energy shift. Transitory energy shortages have small effects: when your energy bill goes up for a while (because of extreme weather, say), it makes you angry and sad and might result in an electoral loss for whatever politician presided over the price hike. But when you get genuine, prolonged shortages – the sort that are accompanied by rationing – you make permanent changes.

Rationing is so psychologically scarring that it induces people to make long-delayed investments that result in permanent changes to their consumption habits. Maybe you've known for a long time that an induction top would be better for your indoor air quality and your cooking than the gas range you have now, but you don't want to buy a whole new appliance and pay for an electrician to run a high-wattage line in expensive conduit from your breaker panel to your kitchen.

But if you're an Indian restaurateur who can no longer get any cooking gas – because it's being rationed for household use – then you are going out to buy whatever induction top you can lay hands on. Maybe it's a cheap, low-powered single burner one that plugs into your existing electrics, or maybe you're splashing out and swapping out your whole gas appliance. Whichever it is, you are no longer interested in your chef's insistence that real cooking gets done over gas. If your chef can't cook on an induction top, your chef will need to find employment elsewhere.

This is going on all over the world right now, as people buy EVs (and pay to have chargers installed at home – maybe getting a twofer on their conduit runs with two high power lines run through the same conduit infrastructure). In Australia – where the last shipment of gas for the foreseeable came into port last week – people are calling their local EV dealers and offering to buy whatever car is on the lot, sight unseen.

Meanwhile, in Ethiopia, a series of dollar-related crises caused the country to ban imports of internal combustion engines altogether (oil and gas are denominated in dollars, which means you can only get oil if you first sell stuff to Americans or others who'll pay in dollars). The country's fleet of noisy, dirty motorbikes is being swiftly replaced by ebikes that get eight miles to the penny:

https://www.ecofinagency.com/news-industry/0810-49366-ethiopia-expands-vehicle-import-ban-to-trucks-pushing-electric-transport

Ebikes are insanely great technology. Cheap, rugged and reliable, they're basically bicycles that abolish hills. Once you've gotten accustomed to an ebike – maybe you've invested in a folding helmet and a raincoat – you'll never go back. The advantages of an ebike commute over a car commute are legion, but my favorite little pleasure is the ability to easily make a stop at a nice coffee shop halfway between home and work, rather than being stuck buying shitty chain coffee near the office.

Four years ago, another mad emperor, Vladimir Putin, invaded Ukraine – and in so doing, catapulted Europe's energy transition into the Gretacene, with unimaginable defeats for the fossil fuel lobby. Not just subsidies for the clean energy transition, but also policy shifts in areas that had been deadlocked for a decade, like approvals for balcony solar, which is transforming the continent. Even the UK, one of the oil industry's most reliable vassal states, is now greenlighting balcony solar:

https://www.gov.uk/government/news/government-to-make-plug-in-solar-available-within-months

This may not sound like much, but the UK is a country whose politics is composed of 50% hatred of migrants and trans people, and 50% incredibly stupid planning battles. Great Britain is a magical land where your neighbors can ask the government to prevent you from installing double-glazing on the grounds that it will change the "historic character" of their neighborhood of terraced Victorian homes.

I once lost a fight to get permission to put a little glass greenhouse on my balcony on the grounds that it would "alter the facade" of the undistinguished low-rise 1960s industrial building I live on top of. The fact that HMG is going to tell your facade-obsessed neighbors to fuck off all the way into the sun so that you can hang solar panels off your balcony is nothing short of a miracle.

Comrade Putin's contribution to oil-soaked Britain's energy transition can't be overstated. Thanks to "free market" policies that sent energy prices soaring after the Ukraine invasion, Brits installed so much solar (despite the existing impediments to solarization) that now the government is begging us to use more energy this summer, because the grid can't absorb all those lovely free electrons:

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2026/apr/14/uk-households-power-renewables-soar

The UK is on a glide-path to adopting the Australian plan. Australia also benefited from Trump I's solar embargo, receiving a ton of cheap solar that would otherwise have ended up in America. Now Australia has so much solar that they're giving away electricity, with three free hours of unlimited energy every day. Stick your dishwasher, clothes-dryer and EV charger on a timer, invest in a battery or two, and fill your boots:

https://billmckibben.substack.com/p/free-electricity-like-at-no-cost

(Maybe at this point you're thinking dark thoughts about critical minerals and such. That's not the problem you think it is and it's getting better every day. To take just one example, lithium batteries are about to be replaced with sodium batteries. Sodium is the world's sixth-most abundant element:)

https://www.livescience.com/technology/electric-vehicles/china-puts-a-sodium-ion-battery-into-an-ev-for-the-first-time-it-can-drive-248-miles-on-a-single-charge

The Strait of Epstein crisis is going to do more to accelerate permanent, unidirectional migration away from fossil fuels to cleantech than decades of environmental activism. Cleantech is so much better than fossil fuels – cheaper, more reliable, cleaner – that anyone who tries it becomes an instant convert. That's why the fossil fuel industry has been so insistent that no one get to try it!

To take just one example here: Texas ranchers have been solarizing, thanks to the state's bizarre "free market" energy system that sees energy prices spiking so high during cold snaps that you literally have to choose between freezing to death and going bankrupt. Solar is great for agriculture, especially in climate-ravaged Texas, where it provides crucial shade for crops and livestock, while substantially reducing soil evaporation, resulting in substantial irrigation savings.

When the oil-captured Texas legislature introduced a bill to force electric companies to add one watt of fossil power for every watt of solar that their customers installed, furious ranchers from blood red Republican rural districts flooded their town hall meetings, decrying the plan as "DEI for fossil fuels." The bill died:

https://austinfreepress.org/renewables-are-now-the-costco-of-energy-production-bill-mckibben-says/

This is the template for the long-foreseeable future. Thanks to Trump's stupid, bloody, unforgivable war of choice in the Gulf, the world is going to install unimaginable amounts of cleantech. They are going to throw away their water heaters, motorbikes, furnaces and cars and replace them with all-electric versions. They're going to cover their roofs and balconies with panels. The battery industry will experience a sustained boom. The fortunes that fossil fuel companies are reaping from the current shortage is their last windfall.

The writing is on the wall. Trump opened Alaska for drilling and the oil companies noped out because they couldn't find a bank that would loan them the money needed to get started. Then it happened again in Venezuela. This de-fossilizing was already the direction of travel, the only question was the pace at which the transition would proceed – and Comrade Trump has just stomped all over the (liquid natural) gas pedal.

Energy is just one realm where Trump is doing praxis. One of the most exciting developments that Trumpismo's incontinent belligerence has induced is the global technology transition.

For decades, the only people pointing out the dangers of using America's cash-grabbing, privacy invading defective tech exports were digital rights hippies like me, and our victories were modest and far between. Despite the Snowden revelations, despite the tech industry's prolific snood-cocking at EU privacy regulators and Canadian lawmakers, we all just carried on using these incredibly dangerous, steadily enshittifying Big Tech products. We even run our governments and structurally important companies off Big Tech. We let US tech companies update (that is, downgrade) the software on our cars and tractors, our pacemakers and ventilators, our power plants and telephone switches.

There's lots of reasons for this. For one thing, ripping out and replacing all that software and firmware is a prodigious challenge, as is building the data-centers to host it for every "digitally sovereign" country. Add to that the complexity of successfully migrating data, edit histories, archives and identities and you're looking at a very big lift. So long as the American tech bosses kept their enshittificatory gambits to a measured, slow flow, they could keep the pain beneath the threshold where it was worth us boiling frogs leaping out of their pot.

But the most important force defending American internet hegemony was free trade: specifically, the US forced all of its trading partners to adopt "anticircumvention" laws that make it illegal to modify US tech exports. That means that you can't go into business selling your neighbors the tools to use generic ink or an independent app store, much less make a fortune exporting those tools to the rest of the world:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/03/16/whittle-a-webserver/#mere-ornaments

Enter Comrade Trump. When Trump started weaponizing US tech platforms to take away the working files, email accounts and cloud calendars of judges who pissed him off (by sentencing Bolsonaro to prison, and by swearing out a genocide warrant for Netanyahu), he put the whole world on notice that he could shut down their governments, judiciaries or companies at the click of a mouse:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/04/16/pascals-wager/#doomer-challenge

And of course, he's whacked the whole world with tariffs that violate the trade agreements that imposed the anticircumvention obligations that protect America's defective tech exports. Now there's no longer any reason to keep those laws on the books. Happy Liberation Day, everyone! The post-American internet is at hand:

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

But Trump has even more praxis up his spraytan-stained sleeves. Trump is succeeding where Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren and AOC failed: he's making the case for Democrats to defenestrate their useless, sellout, Epstein-poisoned leaders. All across the country, radical Dems and avowed socialists are sweeping primaries and elections, as voters realize that Blue No Matter Who will doom them to eternal torment in the Manchin-Synematic Universe:

https://prospect.org/2026/02/11/progressive-win-new-jersey-anti-ice-organizing-mejia/

Fury over Trumpismo is pushing even the most useless Democratic leaders to sign up for billionaire taxes:

https://jacobin.com/2026/04/zohran-tax-rich-hochul-nyc

Thanks to Comrade Trump, the median Democratic voter will no longer be satisfied with Kente cloth photo-ops and little ping-pong paddles stenciled with "down with this sort of thing":

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

Thanks to Trump, we might see criminal prosecutions – and a primary challenge for any Dem that gets in the way of a serious, Nuremberg-style reckoning with Trumpismo and its gangsters:

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

Look, all things being equal, I would have preferred that Trump had keeled over from a mid-burger stroke on the campaign trail in 2016. But when life gives you SARS, you make sarsaparilla. This is a deeply shitty timeline, but Comrade Trump keeps tripping over his red tie. Let's take the wins.

Hey look at this (permalink)


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

Object permanence (permalink)

#25yrsago The MPAA 'educates the public' with threatening letters https://web.archive.org/web/20120318060108/http://news.cnet.com/2100-1023-255961.html&tag=tp_pr

#25yrsago Cuehack for the :CueCat https://web.archive.org/web/20010803172853/http://www.rtmark.com/cuejack/

#25yrsago Microsoft Technical Support vs The Psychic Friends Network https://web.archive.org/web/20010410171616/http://www.bmug.org/news/articles/MSvsPF.html

#20yrsago The novel Heinlein would have written about GW Bush’s America https://memex.craphound.com/2006/04/17/the-novel-heinlein-would-have-written-about-gw-bushs-america/

#20yrsago Hilarious hijinx with security guards who hate building-photographers https://thomashawk.com/2006/04/photographing-architecture-is-not.html

#20yrsago Hundreds ask Smithsonian not to sell out to Showtime https://web.archive.org/web/20060420031124/https://www.americanprogress.org/site/pp.asp?c=biJRJ8OVF&b=1554385

#20yrsago How AT&T wants to turn the Internet into mere TV https://web.archive.org/web/20060620095643/http://www.salon.com/tech/feature/2006/04/17/toll/index_np.html

#20yrsago NOLA mayoral candidate doctors Disneyland photo – again https://web.archive.org/web/20060422010054/https://www.wonkette.com/politics/new-orleans/kimberly-williamson-butler-continues-to-astound-us-167923.php

#20yrsago Where He-Man came from https://web.archive.org/web/20060423061651/https://thesneeze.com/mt-archives/000500.php

#20yrsago FBI demand chance to censor muckracking journo’s papers https://web.archive.org/web/20060421045340/https://www.chronicle.com/free/2006/04/2006041801n.htm

#15yrsago Ethiopia’s “newspaper landlords” rent the want-ads by the minute https://www.cnn.com/2011/BUSINESS/04/19/newspaper.rental.ethiopia/index.html

#15yrsago It’s people like us what makes trouble: the pernicious influence of immigrants in the UK. https://web.archive.org/web/20080314013819/http://feorag.newsvine.com/_news/2008/03/10/1356131-the-pernicious-influence-of-immigrants-in-the-uk

#15yrsago China’s “Jasmine Revolution”: anonymous out-of-country bloggers troll the politburo https://web.archive.org/web/20110412063347/http://globalguerrillas.typepad.com/globalguerrillas/2011/04/the-jasmine-revolution.html

#15yrsago Motorcycles made from watch parts https://www.deviantart.com/dkart71/art/Motorcycles-out-of-watch-parts-18a-204941090

#15yrsago Steve Buscemi’s Eyes: the printable mask https://eyesuckink.blogspot.com/2011/04/free-home-version-of-steve-buscemis.html

#15yrsago Privacy, Facebook, politics and kids https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/video/2011/apr/18/cory-doctorow-networking-technologies-video?CMP=twt_fd

#15yrsago NZ MP votes for anti-piracy law hours after tweeting about her love of pirated music https://torrentfreak.com/kiwi-mp-called-out-as-pirate-after-passing-anti-piracy-law-110415/

#15yrsago Righthaven copyright trolls never had the right to sue, have their asses handed to them by the EFF https://web.archive.org/web/20110418001051/http://paidcontent.org/article/419-righthavens-secret-contract-is-revealedwill-its-strategy-collapse/

#15yrsago TSA considers being upset at screening procedures to be an indicator of terrorist intentions https://www.cnn.com/2011/TRAVEL/04/15/tsa.screeners.complain/

#10yrsago The saga of Ian Bogost’s pressure-washer https://bogostpressurewasherstatus.tumblr.com/

#10yrsago Heads of UK’s tax havens to Her Majesty’s Government: go fuck yourself https://web.archive.org/web/20160411112631/http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/tax-haven-corporate-tax-avoidance-uk-ministers-humiliated-after-cayman-bvi-british-virgin-islands-a6974956.html

#10yrsago George Clooney’s neighbor threw a $27/plate Sanders fundraiser to counter Clooney’s $33K/head Hillary event https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/2016-election/sanders-supporters-shower-clinton-motorcade-1-bills-n557191

#10yrsago What is neoliberalism? https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/apr/15/neoliberalism-ideology-problem-george-monbiot?CMP=twt_books_b-gdnbooks

#10yrsago No, tax-havens aren’t good for society (duh) https://web.archive.org/web/20160602053124/https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/five-myths-about-tax-havens/2016/04/15/76d001d2-0255-11e6-b823-707c79ce3504_story.html

#10yrsago John Oliver and the cast of Sesame Street on lead poisoning https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GUizvEjR-0U

#10yrsago Supreme Court sends Authors Guild packing, won’t hear Google Books case https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2016/04/fair-use-prevails-as-supreme-court-rejects-google-books-copyright-case/

#10yrsago Four years later, Popehat’s favorite con-artist is indicted https://web.archive.org/web/20160419031946/https://popehat.com/2016/04/18/anatomy-of-a-scam-investigation-chapter-14-the-indictment/

#10yrsago Hacking Team supplied cyber-weapons to corrupt Latin American governments for human rights abuses https://www.derechosdigitales.org/wp-content/uploads/malware-para-la-vigilancia.pdf

#10yrsago High profits mean capitalism is cooked https://www.promarket.org/2016/04/16/are-we-all-rent-seeking-investors/

#10yrsago A look back at the D&D moral panic https://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/18/us/when-dungeons-dragons-set-off-a-moral-panic.html

#10yrsago Petition to reassign head of Canada Post to deliver letters at $500k/year https://www.ipetitions.com/petition/help-canada-post-ceo-deepak-chopra-keep-his-job

#1yrago Mark Zuckerberg personally lost the Facebook antitrust case https://pluralistic.net/2025/04/18/chatty-zucky/#is-you-taking-notes-on-a-criminal-fucking-conspiracy

Upcoming appearances (permalink)

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


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

Recent appearances (permalink)


A grid of my books with Will Stahle covers..

Latest books (permalink)


A cardboard book box with the Macmillan logo.

Upcoming books (permalink)

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

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

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

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

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


Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources:

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

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

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

  • A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING

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

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

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

How to get Pluralistic:

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

Pluralistic.net

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https://pluralistic.net/plura-list

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https://mamot.fr/@pluralistic

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

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

ISSN: 3066-764X

Received — 16 April 2026 ⏭

Pluralistic: A Pascal's Wager for AI Doomers (16 Apr 2026)

✇Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
By: Cory Doctorow
16 April 2026 at 13:09


Today's links


A killer 1940s robot zapping two large domes with eye-lasers; trapped under the domes are two children, taken from 1910s photos of child laborers; one, a little girl in a straw hat, is holding two heavy buckets. The other, a newsie with a shoulder bag, is picking his nose. The background is the collapsing pillars seen in Dore's engraving of The Death of Solomon.

A Pascal's Wager for AI Doomers (permalink)

Lest anyone accuse me of bargaining in bad faith here, let me start with this admission: I don't think AI is intelligent; nor do I think that the current (admittedly impressive) statistical techniques will lead to intelligence. I think worrying about what we'll do if AI becomes intelligent is at best a distraction and at worst a cynical marketing ploy:

https://locusmag.com/feature/cory-doctorow-full-employment/

Now, that said: among some of the "AI doomers," I recognize kindred spirits. I, too, worry about technologies controlled by corporations that have grown so powerful that they defy regulation. I worry about how those technologies are used against us, and about how the corporations that make them are fusing with authoritarian states to create a totalitarian nightmare. I worry that technology is used to spy on and immiserate workers.

I just don't think we need AI to do those things. I think we should already be worried about those things.

Last week, I had a version of this discussion in front of several hundred people at the Bronfman Lecture in Montreal, where I appeared with Astra Taylor and Yoshua Bengio (co-winner of the Turing Prize for his work creating the "deep learning" techniques powering today's AI surge), on a panel moderated by CBC Ideas host Nahlah Ayed:

https://www.eventbrite.ca/e/artificial-intelligence-the-ultimate-disrupter-tickets-1982706623885

It's safe to say that Bengio and I mostly disagree about AI. He's running an initiative called "Lawzero," whose goal is to create an international AI consortium that produces AI as a "digital public good" that is designed to be open, auditable, transparent and safe:

http://lawzero.org

Bengio said he'd started Lawzero because he was convinced that AI was going to get a lot more powerful, and, in the absence of some public-spirited version of AI, we would be subject to all kinds of manipulation and surveillance, and that the resulting chaos would present a civilizational risk.

Now, as I've stated (and as I said onstage) I am not worried about any of this. I am worried about AI, though. I'm worried a fast-talking AI salesman will convince your boss to fire you and replace you with an AI that can't do your job (the salesman will be pushing on an open door, since if there's one thing bosses hate, it's paying workers).

I'm worried that the seven companies that comprise 35% of the S&P 500 are headed for bankruptcy, as soon as someone makes them stop passing around the same $100b IOU while pretending it's in all their bank accounts at once. I'm worried that when that happens, the chatbots that badly do the jobs of the people who were fired because of the AI salesman will go away, and nothing and no one will do those jobs. I'm worried that the chaos caused by vaporizing a third of the stock market will lead to austerity and thence to fascism:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/04/13/always-great/#our-nhs

I worry that the workers who did those jobs will be scattered to the four winds, retrained or "discouraged" or retired, and that the priceless process knowledge they developed over generations will be wiped out and we will have to rebuild it amidst the economic and political chaos of the burst AI bubble:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/04/08/process-knowledge-vs-bosses/#wash-dishes-cut-wood

In short, I worry that AI is the asbestos we're shoveling into our civilization's walls, and our descendants will be digging it out for generations:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/01/06/1000x-liability/#graceful-failure-modes

But Bengio disagrees. He's very smart, and very accomplished, and he's very certain that AI is about to become "superhuman" and do horrible things to us if we don't get a handle on it. Several times at our events, he insisted that the existence of this possibility made it wildly irresponsible not to take measures to mitigate this risk.

Though I didn't say so at the time, this struck me as an AI-inflected version of Pascal's wager:

A rational person should adopt a lifestyle consistent with the existence of God and should strive to believe in God… if God does not exist, the believer incurs only finite losses, potentially sacrificing certain pleasures and luxuries; if God does exist, the believer stands to gain immeasurably, as represented for example by an eternity in Heaven in Abrahamic tradition, while simultaneously avoiding boundless losses associated with an eternity in Hell.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pascal%27s_wager

Smarter people than me have been poking holes in Pascal's wager for more than 350 years. But when it comes to this modern Pascal's AI Wager, I have my own objection: how do you know when you've lost?

As of this moment, the human race has lit more than $1.4t on fire to immanentize this eschaton, and it remains stubbornly disimmanentized. How much more do we need to spend before we're certain that god isn't lurking in the word-guessing program? Sam Altman says it'll take another $2-3t – call it six months' worth of all US federal spending. If we do that and we still haven't met god, are we done? Can we call it a day?

Not according to Elon Musk. Musk says we need to deconstruct the solar system and build a Dyson sphere out of all the planets to completely encase the sun, so we can harvest every photon it emits to power our word-guessing programs:

https://www.pcmag.com/news/elons-next-big-swing-dyson-sphere-satellites-that-harness-the-suns-power

So let's say we do that and we still haven't met god – are we done? I don't see why we would be. After all, Musk's contention isn't that our sun emits one eschaton's worth of immanentizing particles. Musk just thinks that we need a lot of these sunbeams to coax god into our plane of existence. If one sun won't do it, perhaps two? Or two hundred? Or two thousand? Once we've committed the entire human species to this god-bothering project to the extent of putting two kilosuns into harness, wouldn't we be nuts to stop there? What if god is lurking in the two thousand and first sun? Making god out of algorithms is like spelling "banana" – easy to start, hard to stop.

But as Bengio and I got into it together on stage at the Montreal Centre, it occurred to me that maybe there was some common ground between us. After all, when someone starts talking about "humane technology" that respects our privacy and works for people rather than their bosses, my ears grow points. Throw in the phrase "international digital public goods" and you've got my undivided attention.

Because there's a sense in which Bengio and I are worried about exactly the same thing. I'm terrified that our planet has been colonized by artificial lifeforms that we constructed, but which have slipped our control. I'm terrified that these lifeforms corrupt our knowledge-creation process, making it impossible for us to know what's true and what isn't. I'm terrified that these lifeforms have conquered our apparatus of state – our legislatures, agencies and courts – and so that these public bodies work against the public and for our colonizing alien overlords.

The difference is, the artificial lifeforms that worry me aren't hypothetical – they're here today, amongst us, endangering the very survival of our species. These artificial lifeforms are called "limited liability corporations" and they are a concrete, imminent risk to the human race:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/04/15/artificial-lifeforms/#moral-consideration

What's more, challenging these artificial lifeforms will require us to build massive, "international, digital public goods": a post-American internet of free/open, auditable, transparent, enshittification-resistant platforms and firmware for every purpose and device currently in service:

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

And even after we've built that massive, international, digital public good, we'll still face the challenge of migrating all of our systems and loved ones out of the enshitternet of defective, spying, controlling American tech exports:

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

Every moment that we remain stuck in the enshitternet is a moment of existential risk. At the click of a mouse, Trump could order John Deere to switch off all the tractors in your country:

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

He doesn't need tanks to steal Greenland. He can just shut off Denmark's access to American platforms like Office365, iOS and Android and brick the whole damned country. It would be another Strait of Hormuz, but instead of oil and fertilizer, he'd control the flow of Lego, Ozempic and deliciously strong black licorice:

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

These aren't risks that could develop in the future. They're the risks we're confronted with today and frankly, they're fucking terrifying.

So here's my side-bet on Pascal's Wager. If you think we need to build "international digital public goods" to head off the future risk of a colonizing, remorseless, malevolent artificial lifeform, then let us agree that the prototype for that project is the "international digital public goods" we need right now to usher in the post-American internet and save ourselves from the colonizing, remorseless, malevolent artificial lifeforms that have already got their blood-funnels jammed down our throats.

Once we defeat those alien invaders, we may find that all the people who are trying to summon the evil god have lost the wherewithal to do so, and your crisis will have been averted. But if that's not the case and the evil god still looms on our horizon, then I will make it my business to help you mobilize the legions of skilled international digital public goods producers who are still flush from their victory over the limited liability corporation, and together, we will fight the evil god you swear is in our future.

I think that's a pretty solid offer.

Hey look at this (permalink)


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

Object permanence (permalink)

#25yrsago Every pirate ebook on the internet https://web.archive.org/web/20010724030402/https://citizen513.cjb.net/

#20yrsago Retired generals diss Donald Rumsfeld https://nielsenhayden.com/makinglight/archives/007432.html#007432

#20yrsago How to break HDCP https://blog.citp.princeton.edu/2006/04/14/making-and-breaking-hdcp-handshakes/

#20yrsago How Sun’s “open DRM” dooms them and all they touch https://memex.craphound.com/2006/04/14/how-suns-open-drm-dooms-them-and-all-they-touch/

#20yrsago Benkler's "Wealth of Networks" http://www.congo-education.net/wealth-of-networks/

#15yrsago Scientific management’s unscientific grounding: the Management Myth https://web.archive.org/web/20120823212827/https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2006/06/the-management-myth/304883/

#15yrsago 216 “untranslatable” emotional words from non-English languages https://www.drtimlomas.com/lexicography/cm4mi/lexicography#!lexicography/cm4mi

#10yrsago New York public employees union will vote on pulling out of hedge funds https://web.archive.org/web/20160414230326/https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-04-13/nyc-pension-weighs-liquidating-1-5-billion-hedge-fund-portfolio

#10yrsago Panama’s public prosecutor says he can’t find any evidence of Mossack-Fonseca’s lawbreaking https://web.archive.org/web/20160419165306/https://www.thejournal.ie/mossack-fonseca-prosecution-2714795-Apr2016/?utm_source=twitter_self

#10yrsago Bernie Sanders responds to CEOs of Verizon and GE: “I welcome their contempt” https://web.archive.org/web/20160415165051/https://www.businessinsider.com/bernie-sanders-verizon-contempt-2016-4

#10yrsago Let’s Encrypt is actually encrypting the whole Web https://www.wired.com/2016/04/scheme-encrypt-entire-web-actually-working/

#10yrsago City of San Francisco tells man he can’t live in wooden box in friend’s living room https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/apr/13/san-francisco-new-home-rented-box-illegal?CMP=tmb_gu

#10yrsago How the UK’s biggest pharmacy chain went from family-run public service to debt-laden hedge-fund disaster https://www.theguardian.com/news/2016/apr/13/how-boots-went-rogue

#10yrsago Ohio newspaper chain owner says his papers don’t publish articles about LGBTQ people https://ideatrash.net/2016/04/the-owner-of-four-town-papers-in-ohio.html

#10yrsago How British journalists talk about people they’re not allowed to talk about https://web.archive.org/web/20160414152933/https://popbitch.com/home/2016/03/31/up-the-injunction/

#10yrsago Brussels terrorists kept their plans in an unencrypted folder called “TARGET” https://www.techdirt.com/2016/04/14/brussels-terrorist-laptop-included-details-planned-attack-unencrypted-folder-titled-target/

#10yrsago Ron Wyden vows to filibuster anti-cryptography bill https://www.techdirt.com/2016/04/14/burr-feinstein-officially-release-anti-encryption-bill-as-wyden-promises-to-filibuster-it/

#10yrsago Paramount wants to kill a fan-film by claiming copyright on the Klingon language https://torrentfreak.com/paramount-we-do-own-the-klingon-language-and-warships-160414/

#5yrsago Murder Offsets https://pluralistic.net/2021/04/14/for-sale-green-indulgences/#killer-analogy

#5yrsago The FCC wants your broadband measurements https://pluralistic.net/2021/04/14/for-sale-green-indulgences/#fly-my-pretties

#1yrago Machina economicus https://pluralistic.net/2025/04/14/timmy-share/#a-superior-moral-justification-for-selfishness

Upcoming appearances (permalink)

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


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

Recent appearances (permalink)


A grid of my books with Will Stahle covers..

Latest books (permalink)


A cardboard book box with the Macmillan logo.

Upcoming books (permalink)

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

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

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

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

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


Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources:

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

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

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

  • A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING

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Received — 6 July 2023 ⏭
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