Pluralistic: A perfect distillation of the social uselessness of finance (18 Dec 2025) Today's links A perfect distillation of the social uselessness of finance: A final thought for the yule. Hey look at this: Delights to delectate. Object permanence: Droidflake; Spy Skymall; Malthus is a dope; Happy Public Domain Day 2025. Upcoming appearances: Where to find me. 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 perfect distillation of the social uselessness of finance (permalink) I'm about to sign off for the year – actually, I was ready to do it yesterday, but then I happened upon a brief piece of writing that was so perfect that I decided I'd do one more edition of Pluralistic for 2025. The piece in question is John Lanchester's "For Every Winner A Loser," in the London Review of Books, in which Lanchester reviews two books about the finance sector: Gary Stevenson's The Trading Game and Rob Copeland's The Fund: https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v46/n17/john-lanchester/for-every-winner-a-loser It's a long and fascinating piece and it's certainly left me wanting to read both books, but that's not what convinced me to do one more newsletter before going on break – rather, it was a brief passage in the essay's preamble, a passage that perfectly captures the total social uselessness of the finance sector as a whole. Lanchester starts by stating that while we think of the role of the finance sector as "capital allocation" – that is, using investors' money to fund new businesses and expansions for existing business – that hasn't been important to finance for quite some time. Today, only 3% of bank activity consists of "lending to firms and individuals engaged in the production of goods and services." The other 97% of finance is gambling. Here's how Stevenson breaks it down: say your farm grows mangoes. You need money before the mangoes are harvested, so you sell the future ownership of the harvest to a broker at $1/crate. The broker immediately flips that interest in your harvest to a dealer who believes (on the basis of a rumor about bad weather) that mangoes will be scarce this year and is willing to pay $1.10/crate. Next, an international speculator (trading on the same rumor) buys the rights from the broker at $1.20/crate. Now come the side bets: a "momentum trader" (who specializing in bets on market trends continuing) buys the rights to your crop for $1.30/crate. A contrarian trader (who bets against momentum traders) short-sells the momentum trader's bet at $1.20. More short sellers pile in and drive the price down to $1/crate. Now, a new rumor circulates, about conditions being ripe for a bounteous mango harvest, so more short-sellers appear, and push the price to $0.90/crate. This tempts the original broker back in, and he buys your crop back at $1/crate. That's when the harvest comes. You bring in the mangoes. They go to market, and fetch $1.10/crate. This is finance – a welter of transactions, only one of which (selling your mangoes to people who eat them) involves the real economy. Everything else is "speculation on the movement of prices." The nine transactions that took place between your planting the crop and someone eating the mangoes are all zero sum – every trade has an evenly matched winner and loser, and when you sum them all up, they come out to zero. In other words, no value was created. This is the finance sector. In a world where the real economy generates $105 trillion/year, the financial derivatives market adds up to $667 trillion/year. This is "the biggest business in the world" – and it's useless. It produces nothing. It adds no value. If you work a job where you do something useful, you are on the losing side of this economy. All the real money is in this socially useless, no-value-creating, hypertrophied, metastasized finance sector. Every gain in finance is matched by a loss. It all amounts to – literally – nothing. So that's what tempted me into one more blog post for the year – an absolutely perfect distillation of the uselessness of "the biggest business in the world," whose masters are the degenerate gamblers wh buy and sell our politicians, set our policy, and control our lives. They're the ones enshittifying the internet, burning down the planet, and pushing Elon Musk towards trillionairedom. It's their world, and we just live on it. For now. (Image: Sam Valadi, CC BY 2.0, modified) Hey look at this (permalink) Meta Is Considering Charging Business Pages To Post Links https://www.socialmediatoday.com/news/meta-considering-charging-business-pages-to-post-links/808099/ The original Mozilla "Dinosaur" logo artwork https://www.jwz.org/blog/2025/12/the-original-mozilla-dinosaur-logo-artwork/ A Local Self-Reliance Agenda for New York City: ILSR’s Memo to Mamdani https://ilsr.org/articles/memo-mamdani/ Apple loses its appeal of a scathing contempt ruling in iOS payments case https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2025/12/epic-celebrates-the-end-of-the-apple-tax-after-appeals-court-win-in-ios-payments-case/ The Internet’s Tollbooth Operators https://prospect.org/2025/12/10/internets-tollbooth-operators-wu-review/ Barnum's Law of CEOs https://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2025/12/barnums-law-of-ceos.html Google Starts Sharing All Your Text Messages With Your Employer https://archive.ph/wE2U7#selection-3936.0-3936.1 Object permanence (permalink) #15yrsago Star Wars droidflake https://twitpic.com/3guwfq #15yrsago TSA misses enormous, loaded .40 calibre handgun in carry-on bag https://web.archive.org/web/20101217223617/https://abclocal.go.com/ktrk/story?section=news/local&id=7848683 #15yrsago Brazilian TV clown elected to high office, passes literacy test https://web.archive.org/web/20111217233812/https://www.google.com/hostednews/afp/article/ALeqM5jmbXSjCjZBZ4z8VUcAZFCyY_n6dA?docId=CNG.b7f4655178d3435c9a54db2e30817efb.381 #15yrsago My Internet problem: an abundance of choice https://www.theguardian.com/technology/blog/2010/dec/17/internet-problem-choice-self-publishing #10yrsago LEAKED: The secret catalog American law enforcement orders cellphone-spying gear from https://theintercept.com/2015/12/16/a-secret-catalogue-of-government-gear-for-spying-on-your-cellphone/#10yrsago #10yrsago Putin: Give Sepp Blatter the Nobel; Trump should be president https://www.theguardian.com/football/2015/dec/17/sepp-blatter-fifa-putin-nobel-peace-prize #10yrsago Star Wars medical merch from Scarfolk, the horror-town stuck in the 1970s https://scarfolk.blogspot.com/2015/12/unreleased-star-wars-merchandise.html #10yrsago Some countries learned from America’s copyright mistakes: TPP will undo that https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2015/12/how-tpp-perpetuates-mistakes-dmca #10yrsago No evidence that San Bernardino shooters posted about jihad on Facebook https://web.archive.org/web/20151217003406/https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-nation/wp/2015/12/16/fbi-san-bernardino-attackers-didnt-show-public-support-for-jihad-on-social-media/ #10yrsago Exponential population growth and other unkillable science myths https://web.archive.org/web/20151217205215/http://www.nature.com/news/the-science-myths-that-will-not-die-1.19022 #10yrsago UK’s unaccountable crowdsourced blacklist to be crosslinked to facial recognition system https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2015/12/pre-crime-arrives-in-the-uk-better-make-sure-your-face-stays-off-the-crowdsourced-watch-list/ #1yrago Happy Public Domain Day 2025 to all who celebrate https://pluralistic.net/2024/12/17/dastar-dly-deeds/#roast-in-piss-sonny-bono Upcoming appearances (permalink) Hamburg: Chaos Communications Congress, Dec 27-30 https://events.ccc.de/congress/2025/infos/index.html Denver: Enshittification at Tattered Cover Colfax, Jan 22 https://www.eventbrite.com/e/cory-doctorow-live-at-tattered-cover-colfax-tickets-1976644174937 Colorado Springs: Guest of Honor at COSine, Jan 23-25 https://www.firstfridayfandom.org/cosine/ Recent appearances (permalink) Enshittificaition on The Last Show With David Cooper: https://www.iheart.com/podcast/256-the-last-show-with-david-c-31145360/episode/cory-doctorow-enshttification-december-16-2025-313385767 (Digital) Elbows Up (OCADU) https://vimeo.com/1146281673 How to Stop “Ensh*ttification” Before It Kills the Internet (Capitalisn't) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=34gkIvYiHxU Enshittification on The Daily Show https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d2e-c9SF5nE Enshittification with Four Ways to Change the World (Channel 4) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tZQaEeuuI3Q Latest books (permalink) "Canny Valley": A limited edition collection of the collages I create for Pluralistic, self-published, September 2025 "Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It," Farrar, Straus, Giroux, October 7 2025 https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374619329/enshittification/ "Picks and Shovels": a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about the heroic era of the PC, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), February 2025 (https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250865908/picksandshovels). "The Bezzle": a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about prison-tech and other grifts, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), February 2024 (thebezzle.org). "The Lost Cause:" a solarpunk novel of hope in the climate emergency, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), November 2023 (http://lost-cause.org). "The Internet Con": A nonfiction book about interoperability and Big Tech (Verso) September 2023 (http://seizethemeansofcomputation.org). Signed copies at Book Soup (https://www.booksoup.com/book/9781804291245). "Red Team Blues": "A grabby, compulsive thriller that will leave you knowing more about how the world works than you did before." Tor Books http://redteamblues.com. "Chokepoint Capitalism: How to Beat Big Tech, Tame Big Content, and Get Artists Paid, with Rebecca Giblin", on how to unrig the markets for creative labor, Beacon Press/Scribe 2022 https://chokepointcapitalism.com Upcoming books (permalink) "Unauthorized Bread": a middle-grades graphic novel adapted from my novella about refugees, toasters and DRM, FirstSecond, 2026 "Enshittification, Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It" (the graphic novel), Firstsecond, 2026 "The Memex Method," Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2026 "The Reverse-Centaur's Guide to AI," a short book about being a better AI critic, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, June 2026 Colophon (permalink) Today's top sources: John Naughton (https://memex.naughtons.org/). Currently writing: "The Reverse Centaur's Guide to AI," a short book for Farrar, Straus and Giroux about being an effective AI critic. LEGAL REVIEW AND COPYEDIT COMPLETE. "The Post-American Internet," a short book about internet policy in the age of Trumpism. PLANNING. A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING This work – excluding any serialized fiction – is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license. That means you can use it any way you like, including commercially, provided that you attribute it to me, Cory Doctorow, and include a link to pluralistic.net. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ Quotations and images are not included in this license; they are included either under a limitation or exception to copyright, or on the basis of a separate license. Please exercise caution. How to get Pluralistic: Blog (no ads, tracking, or data-collection): Pluralistic.net Newsletter (no ads, tracking, or data-collection): https://pluralistic.net/plura-list Mastodon (no ads, tracking, or data-collection): https://mamot.fr/@pluralistic Medium (no ads, paywalled): https://doctorow.medium.com/ Twitter (mass-scale, unrestricted, third-party surveillance and advertising): https://twitter.com/doctorow Tumblr (mass-scale, unrestricted, third-party surveillance and advertising): https://mostlysignssomeportents.tumblr.com/tagged/pluralistic "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. 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Pluralistic: Happy Public Domain Day 2026! (17 Dec 2025) Today's links Happy Public Domain Day 2026! The best way to cut through the hellishly complex thicket and bring our culture back to life. Hey look at this: Delights to delectate. Object permanence: Weird D&D advice; Email sabbaticals. Upcoming appearances: Where to find me. 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. Happy Public Domain Day 2026! (permalink) In 1998, Congress committed an act of mass cultural erasure, extending copyright by 20 years, including for existing works (including ones that were already in the public domain), and for 20 years, virtually nothing entered the US public domain. But then, on January 1, 2019, the public domain reopened. A crop of works from 1923 entered the public domain, to great fanfare – though honestly, precious few of those works were still known (that's what happens when you lock up 50 year old works for 20 years, ensuring they don't circulate, or get reissued or reworked). Sure, I sang Yes, We Have No Bananas along with everyone else, but the most important aspect of the Grand Reopening of the Public Domain was the works that were to come: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z2ryWm0bziE The mid/late-1920s were extraordinarily fecund, culturally speaking. A surprising volume of creative work from that era remains in our consciousness, and so, every January 1, we have been treated to a fresh delivery of gifts from the past, works that are free and open and ours to claim and copy and use and remix. No one chronicles this better than Jennifer Jenkins and James Boyle, the dynamic duo of copyright scholars who run Duke's Center for the Public Domain. During the 20 year public domain drought, Jenkins and Boyle kept the flame of hope, publishing an annual roundup of all the works that would have entered the public domain, but for Congress's act of wanton cultural vandalism. But starting in 2019, these yearly reports were transformed – no longer are they laments for the past we're losing; today, they are celebrations of the past that's showering down around us. 2024 marked another turning point for the public domain: that was the year that the first Mickey Mouse cartoons entered the public domain: https://pluralistic.net/2023/12/20/em-oh-you-ess-ee/#sexytimes Does that mean that Mickey Mouse is in the public domain? Well, it's complicated. Really complicated. To a first approximation, the aspects of Mickey that were present in those early cartoons enterted the public domain that year, while other, later aspects of his character design (e.g. the big white gloves) wouldn't enter the public domain until later. But that's not the whole story, because not every aspect of character design is even copyrightable, so some later refinements to The Mouse were immediately public. This is such a chewy subject that Jenkins devoted a whole separate (and brilliant) article to it: https://pluralistic.net/2023/12/15/mouse-liberation-front/#free-mickey You see, Jenkins is a generationally brilliant legal communicator, much sought after for her commentary of these abstract matters. You may have heard her giving her characteristically charming, crisp and clear commentaries on NPR's Planet Money: https://www.npr.org/2023/12/28/1197959250/the-indicator-from-planet-money-lets-get-it-on-in-court-12-28-2023 She and Boyle have produced some of the best copyright textbooks – from popular explainers to the definitive casebooks for classroom use – in circulation today, and they release these as free, shareable, open-access works: https://pluralistic.net/2024/07/30/open-and-shut-casebook/#stop-confusing-the-issue-with-relevant-facts Yesterday, Jenkins and Boyle published the 2026 edition of their Public Domain Day omnibus: https://web.law.duke.edu/cspd/publicdomainday/2026/ There are some spectacular works that are being freed on January 1: Dashiell Hammett's Maltese Falcon Agatha Christie's Murder at the Vicarage (Miss Marple's debut) The first four Nancy Drew books The first Dick and Jane book TS Eliot's Ash Wednesday Olaf Stapledon's Last and First Men Sigmund Freud's Civilization and Its Discontents (in German) Somerset Maugham's Cakes and Ale Bertrand Russell's The Conquest of Happiness That's just a small selection from thousands of books. Things are pretty amazing on the film side too: we're getting Academy Award winners like All Quiet on the Western Front, another Marx Brothers movie (Animal Crackers); the debut film appearance of two of the Three Stooges (Soup To Nuts); a Gary Cooper/Marlene Dietrich vehicle (Morocco); Garbo's first talkie (Anna Christie); John Wayne's big break (The Big Trail); a Hitchcock (Murder!); Jean Harlow's debut (Hell's Angels, directed by Howard Hughes); and so, so many more. Then there's music. On the composition side, there's some great Gershwins (I Got Rhythm, I've Got a Crush on You, Embraceable You). There's Hoagy Carmichael's Georgia On My Mind. There's Dream a Little Dream of Me, Sunny Side of the Street, Livin' in the Sunlight, Lovin' in the Moonlight, Just a Gigolo; and a Sousa march, The Royal Welch Fusiliers. There's also some banger recordings: Marian Anderson's Nobody Knows the Trouble I've Seen; Bessie Smith and Louis Armstrong's St Louis Blues; Clarence Williams’ Blue Five's Everybody Loves My Baby (but My Baby Don't Love Nobody but Me); Louis Armstrong's If I Lose, Let me Lose; and (again) so many more! On top of that, there's a bunch of 2D art, including a Mondrian, a Klee, and a ton more work from 1930, which means a lot of Deco, Constructivism, and Neoplasticism. As a collagist, I find this very exciting: https://pluralistic.net/2025/12/03/cannier-valley/#bricoleur As with previous editions, Jenkins and Boyle use this year's public domain report as a jumping-off point to explain some of the gnarlier aspects of copyright law. This year's casus belli is the bizarre copyright status of Betty Boop. https://web.law.duke.edu/cspd/publicdomainday/2026/#boopanchor On January 1, the first Betty Boop cartoon, Dizzy Dishes, will enter the public domain. But there are many aspects of Betty Boop that are already in the public domain, because the copyright on many later Boop cartoons was never renewed – until 1976, copyright holders were required to file some paperwork at fixed intervals to extend the copyright on their works. While the Fleischer studio (where Betty Boop was created) renewed the copyright on Dizzy Dishes, there were many other shorts that entered the public domain years ago. That means that all the aspects of Betty Boop that were developed for Dizzy Dishes are about to enter the public domain. But also, all the aspects of Betty Boop from those non-renewed shorts are already in the public domain. But some of the remaining aspects of Betty Boop's character design – those developed in subsequent shorts that were also renewed – are also in the public domain, because they aren't copyrightable in the first place, because they "generic," or "trivial," constitute "minuscule variations," or be so standard or indispensable that as to be a "scène à faire." On top of that, there are aspects of the Betty Boop design that may be in copyright, but no one is sure who they belong to, because a lot of the paperwork establishing title to those copyrights vanished during the various times when the Fleisher studio and its archives changed hands. But we're not done yet! Just because some later aspects of the Betty Boop character design are still in copyright, it doesn't follow that you aren't allowed to use them! US Copyright law has a broad set "limitations and exceptions," including fair use, and if your usage fits into one of these exceptions, you are allowed to reproduce, adapt, display and perform copyrighted works without permission from the copyright holder – even (especially) if the copyright holder objects. And finally, on top of all of this, there's trademark, which is often lumped in with copyright as part of an incoherent, messy category we call "intellectual property." But trademark is absolutely unlike copyright in virtually every way. Unlike copyright, trademarks don't automatically expire. Trademarks remain in force for so long as they are used in commerce (which is why a group of cheeky ex-Twitter lawyers are trying to get the rights to the Twitter trademarks that Musk abandoned when he rebranded the company as "X"): https://techcrunch.com/2025/12/16/x-updates-its-terms-files-countersuit-to-lay-claim-to-the-twitter-trademark-after-newcomers-challenge/ But also, trademark exists to prevent marketplace confusion, which means that you're allowed to use trademarks in ways that don't lead to consumers being misled about the origin of goods or services. Even the Supreme Court has (repeatedly) upheld the principle that trademark can't be used as a backdoor to extend copyright. That's important, because the current Betty Boop license-holders have been sending out baseless legal threats claiming that their trademarks over Betty Boop mean that she's not going into the public domain. They're not the only ones, either! This is a routine, petty scam perpetrated by marketing companies that have scooped up the (usually confused and difficult-to-verify) title to cultural icons and then gone into business extracting rent from people and businesses who want to make new works with them. Scammers in this mold energetically send out bullshit legal threats on behalf of the estates of Charlie Chaplin, Alfred Hitchcock, and Herge, salting their threats with nonsense about different terms of copyright in the UK and elsewhere. As Jenkins and Boyle point out, the thing that copyright expiration get us is clarity. When the heroic lawyer and Sherlockian Les Klinger succesfully wrestled the Sherlock Holmes rights out of the Doyle estate, he did us all a solid: https://esl-bits.eu/ESL.English.Listening.Short.Stories/Rendition/01/default.html But "wait until Les gets angry enough to spend five years in court" isn't a scalable solution to the scourge of copyfraud. It's only through the unambiguous expiry of copyright that we can all get clarity on which parts of our culture are free for all to use. Now, that being said, copyright's limitations and exceptions are also hugely important, because there are plenty of beneficial uses that arise long before a work enters the public domain. To take just one example: for the past week, the song in top rotation on my music player has been the newly (officially) released Fatboy Slim track Satisfaction Skank, a mashup of Slim's giant hit Rockefeller Skank and the Rolling Stones' even bigger hit (I Can't Get No) Satisfaction: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_c_V3oPCe-s This track is one of Fatboy Slim's all-time crowd-pleasers, the song he would bust out during live shows to get everyone on the dance-floor. But for more than 20 years, the track has been exclusive to his live shows – despite multiple overtures, Fatboy Slim couldn't get the Rolling Stones to respond to his attempts to license Satisfaction for an official release. That changed when – without explanation – the Rolling Stones reached out the Slim and offered to license the rights, even giving him access to the masters: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c2dzre3z96go This is a happy ending, but it's also a rarity. For every track like this – where the rightsholders decide to grant permission, even if it takes decades – there are thousands more that can't be officially released. This serves no one's interests – not musicians, not fans. The irony is that in the golden age of sampling, everyone operated from the presumption that sampling was fair use. High profile lawsuits and gunshy labels killed that presumption, and today, sampling remains a gigantic, ugly mess: https://memex.craphound.com/2011/07/08/creative-license-how-the-hell-did-sampling-get-so-screwed-up-and-what-the-hell-do-we-do-about-it/ Which is all to say that the ongoing growth of the public domain, after its 20-year coma, is a most welcome experience – but if you think the public domain is great, wait'll you see what fair use can do for creativity! (Image: Jennifer Jenkins and James Boyle, CC BY 4.0) Hey look at this (permalink) NVIDIA Isn't Enron – So What Is It? https://www.wheresyoured.at/nvidia-isnt-enron-so-what-is-it/ How Google Maps quietly allocates survival across London’s restaurants – and how I built a dashboard to see through it https://laurenleek.substack.com/p/how-google-maps-quietly-allocates Who do they think you are? https://hidden-selves.wove.co/ Datacenters in space are a terrible, horrible, no good idea. https://taranis.ie/datacenters-in-space-are-a-terrible-horrible-no-good-idea/ Mobile Voting Project’s vote-by-smartphone has real security gaps https://blog.citp.princeton.edu/2025/12/16/mobile-voting-projects-vote-by-smartphone-has-real-security-gaps/ Object permanence (permalink) #20yrago Sony DRM Debacle Roundup Part V https://memex.craphound.com/2005/12/16/sony-drm-debacle-roundup-part-v/ #15yrsago Weird D&D advice-column questions https://comicsalliance.com/weird-dd-questions-dungeons-dragons/ #10yrsago America’s permanent, ubiquitous tent-cities https://placesjournal.org/article/tent-city-america/ #10yrsago The changing world of webcomics business models https://web.archive.org/web/20151218130702/http://shadowbinders.com/webcomics-changing-business-model-podcast/ #10yrsago Cop who demanded photo of sexting-accused teen’s penis commits suicide https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2015/12/cop-who-wanted-to-take-pic-of-erection-in-sexting-case-commits-suicide/ #10yrsago Saudi millionaire acquitted of raping teen in London, says he tripped and accidentally penetrated her https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/crime/12052901/Ehsan-Abdulaziz-Saudi-millionaire-cleared-of-raping-teenager.html #10yrsago Someone snuck skimmers into Safeway stores https://krebso.com/2015/12/skimmers-found-at-some-calif-colo-safeways/ #10yrsago Philips promises new firmware to permit third-party lightbulbs https://web.archive.org/web/20151216182639/http://www.developers.meethue.com/content/friends-hue-program-update #5yrsago Jan 1 is Public Domain Day for 1925 https://pluralistic.net/2020/12/16/fraught-superpowers/#public-domain-day #5yrsago Landmark US financial transparency law https://pluralistic.net/2020/12/16/fraught-superpowers/#financial-secrecy #5yrsago Chaos Communications Congress https://pluralistic.net/2020/12/16/fraught-superpowers/#rc3 #5yrsago Email sabbaticals https://pluralistic.net/2020/12/16/fraught-superpowers/#email-sabbatical Upcoming appearances (permalink) Hamburg: Chaos Communications Congress, Dec 27-30 https://events.ccc.de/congress/2025/infos/index.html Denver: Enshittification at Tattered Cover Colfax, Jan 22 https://www.eventbrite.com/e/cory-doctorow-live-at-tattered-cover-colfax-tickets-1976644174937 Colorado Springs: Guest of Honor at COSine, Jan 23-25 https://www.firstfridayfandom.org/cosine/ Recent appearances (permalink) (Digital) Elbows Up (OCADU) https://vimeo.com/1146281673 How to Stop “Ensh*ttification” Before It Kills the Internet (Capitalisn't) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=34gkIvYiHxU Enshittification on The Daily Show https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d2e-c9SF5nE Enshittification with Four Ways to Change the World (Channel 4) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tZQaEeuuI3Q The Plan is to Make the Internet Worse. Forever. (Novarra Media) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7wE8G-d7SnY Latest books (permalink) "Canny Valley": A limited edition collection of the collages I create for Pluralistic, self-published, September 2025 "Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It," Farrar, Straus, Giroux, October 7 2025 https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374619329/enshittification/ "Picks and Shovels": a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about the heroic era of the PC, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), February 2025 (https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250865908/picksandshovels). "The Bezzle": a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about prison-tech and other grifts, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), February 2024 (thebezzle.org). "The Lost Cause:" a solarpunk novel of hope in the climate emergency, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), November 2023 (http://lost-cause.org). "The Internet Con": A nonfiction book about interoperability and Big Tech (Verso) September 2023 (http://seizethemeansofcomputation.org). Signed copies at Book Soup (https://www.booksoup.com/book/9781804291245). "Red Team Blues": "A grabby, compulsive thriller that will leave you knowing more about how the world works than you did before." Tor Books http://redteamblues.com. "Chokepoint Capitalism: How to Beat Big Tech, Tame Big Content, and Get Artists Paid, with Rebecca Giblin", on how to unrig the markets for creative labor, Beacon Press/Scribe 2022 https://chokepointcapitalism.com Upcoming books (permalink) "Unauthorized Bread": a middle-grades graphic novel adapted from my novella about refugees, toasters and DRM, FirstSecond, 2026 "Enshittification, Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It" (the graphic novel), Firstsecond, 2026 "The Memex Method," Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2026 "The Reverse-Centaur's Guide to AI," a short book about being a better AI critic, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, June 2026 Colophon (permalink) Today's top sources: Currently writing: "The Reverse Centaur's Guide to AI," a short book for Farrar, Straus and Giroux about being an effective AI critic. LEGAL REVIEW AND COPYEDIT COMPLETE. "The Post-American Internet," a short book about internet policy in the age of Trumpism. PLANNING. A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING This work – excluding any serialized fiction – is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license. That means you can use it any way you like, including commercially, provided that you attribute it to me, Cory Doctorow, and include a link to pluralistic.net. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ Quotations and images are not included in this license; they are included either under a limitation or exception to copyright, or on the basis of a separate license. Please exercise caution. How to get Pluralistic: Blog (no ads, tracking, or data-collection): Pluralistic.net Newsletter (no ads, tracking, or data-collection): https://pluralistic.net/plura-list Mastodon (no ads, tracking, or data-collection): https://mamot.fr/@pluralistic Medium (no ads, paywalled): https://doctorow.medium.com/ Twitter (mass-scale, unrestricted, third-party surveillance and advertising): https://twitter.com/doctorow Tumblr (mass-scale, unrestricted, third-party surveillance and advertising): https://mostlysignssomeportents.tumblr.com/tagged/pluralistic "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 https://pluralistic.net/2025/12/17/boop-oop-a-doop/

Pluralistic: America's collapsing consumption is the world's disenshittification opportunity (16 Dec 2025) Today's links America's collapsing consumption is the world's disenshittification opportunity: America's loss is the post-American internet's gain. Hey look at this: Delights to delectate. Object permanence: DanKam; Backyard M*A*S*H; Blockchain voting is bullshit. Upcoming appearances: Where to find me. 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. America's collapsing consumption is the world's disenshittification opportunity (permalink) We are about to get a "post-American internet," because we are entering a post-American era and a post-American world. Some of that is Trump's doing, and some of that is down to his predecessors. When we think about the American century, we rightly focus on America's hard power – the invasions, military bases, arms exports, and CIA coups. But it's America's soft power that established and maintained true American dominance, the "weaponized interdependence" that Henry Farrell and Abraham Newman describe in their 2023 book The Hidden Empire: https://pluralistic.net/2023/10/10/weaponized-interdependence/#the-other-swifties As Farrell and Newman lay out, America established itself as a more than a global power – it is a global platform. If you want to buy things from another country, you use dollars, which you keep in an account at the US Federal Reserve, and which you exchange using the US-dominated SWIFT system. If you want to transmit data across a border, chances were you're use a fiber link that makes its first landfall on the USA, the global center of the world's hub-and-spoke telecoms system. No one serious truly believed that these US systems were entirely trustworthy, but there was always an assumption that if the US were to instrumentalize (or, less charitably, weaponize) the dollar, or fiber, that they would do so subtly, selectively, and judiciously. Instead, we got the Snowden revelations that the US was using its position in the center of the world's fiber web to spy on pretty much every person in the world – lords and peasants, presidents and peons. Instead, we got the US confiscating Argentina's foreign reserves to pay back American vulture capitalists who bought distressed Argentine bonds for pennies on the dollar and then got to raid a sovereign nation's treasury in order to recoup a loan they never issued. Instead we saw the SWIFT system mobilized to achieve tactical goals from the War on Terror and Russia-Ukraine sanctions. These systems are now no longer trustworthy. Is as though the world's brakes have started to fail intermittently, but we are still obliged to drive down the road at 100mph, desperately casting about for some other way to control the system, and forced to rely on this critical, unreliable mechanism while we do: https://pluralistic.net/2025/11/26/difficult-multipolarism/#eurostack This process was well underway before Trump, but Trump's incontinent belligerence has only accelerated the process – made us keenly aware that a sudden stop might be in our immediate future, heightening the urgency of finding some alternative to America's faulty brakes. Through trade policy (tariffs) and rhetoric, Trump has called the question: https://archive.is/WAMWI One of the most urgent questions Trump has forced the world to confront is what we will do about America's control over the internet. By this, I mean both the abstract "governance" control (such as the fact that ICANN is a US corporation, subject to US government coercion), and the material fact that virtually every government, large corporation, small business and household keeps its data (files, email, records) in a US Big Tech silo (also subject to US government control). When Trump and Microsoft colluded to shut down the International Criminal Court by killing its access to Outlook and Office365 (in retaliation for the ICC issuing an arrest warrant for the génocidaire Benjamin Netanyahu), the world took notice. Trump and Microsoft bricked the ICC, effectively shuttering its operations. If they could do that to the ICC, they could do it to any government agency, any nationally important corporation, any leader – anyone. It was an act of blatant cyberwarfare, no different from Russian hackers bricking Ukrainian power plants (except that Microsoft didn't have to hack Outlook, they own it). The move put teeth into Trump's frequent reminders that America no longer has allies or trading partners – it only has rivals and adversaries. That has been the subtext – and overt message – of the Trump tariffs, ever since "liberation day" on April 2, 2025. When Americans talk about the Trump tariffs, they focus on what these will do to the cost of living in the USA. When other countries discuss the tariffs, they focus on what this will do to their export markets, and whether their leaders will capitulate to America's absurd demands. This makes sense: America is gripped by a brutal cost of living crisis, and contrary to Trump's assertions, this is not a Democratic hoax. We know this because (as The Onion points out), "Democrats would never run on a salient issue": https://theonion.com/fact-checking-trump-on-affordability/ It also makes sense that Canadians and Britons would focus on this because Prime Ministers Carney and Starmer have caved on their plans to tax US Big Tech, ensuring that these companies will always have a cash-basis advantage over domestic rivals (Starmer also rolled over by promising to allow American pharma companies to gouge the NHS): https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/nhs-drug-prices-starmer-trump-tariffs-b2841490.html But there's another, highly salient aspect to tariffs that is much neglected – one that is, ultimately, far more important than these short-run changes to other countries' plans to tax American tech giants. Namely: for decades, the US has used the threat of tariffs to force its trading partners into policies that keep their tech companies from competing with American tech giants. The most important of these Big Tech-defending policy demands is something called "anticircumvention law." This is a law that bans changing how a product works without the manufacturer's permission: for example, modifying your printer so it can use generic ink, or modifying your car so it can be fixed by an independent repair depot, or modifying your phone or games console so it can use a third-party app store. This ban on modification means that when a US tech giant uses its products to steal money and/or private information from the people in your country (that is, "enshittification"), no one is allowed to give your people the tools to escape these scams. Your domestic investors can't invest in your domestic technologists' startups, which cannot make the disenshittifying products that also cannot be exported globally, to anyone with an internet connection and a payment method. It's a double whammy: your people are plundered, and your businesses are strangled. The whole world has been made poorer, to the tune of trillions of dollars, by this scam. And the only reason everyone puts up with it is was that the US threatened them with tariffs if they didn't. So now we have tariffs, and if someone threatens to burn your house down unless you follow orders, and then they burn it down anyway, you really don't have to keep following their orders. This is a point I've been making in many forums lately, including, most recently, on a stage in Canada, where I made the case that rather than whacking Americans with retaliatory tariffs, Canada should legalize reverse-engineering and go into business directly attacking the highest margin lines of business of America's most profitable corporations, making everything in Canada cheaper and better, and turning America's trillions in Big Tech ripoffs into Canadian billions by selling these tools to everyone else in the world: https://pluralistic.net/2025/11/28/disenshittification-nation/#post-american-internet There's lots of reasons to like this plan. Not only is it a double reverse whammy – making everything cheaper and making billions for a new, globally important domestic tech sector – but it's also unambiguously within Canada's power to do. After all, it's very hard to get American tech giants to do things they don't want to do. Canada tried to do this with Facebook, and failed miserably: https://www.cbc.ca/radio/podcastnews/understood-who-broke-the-internet-episode-4-transcript-1.7615096 The EU – a far more powerful entity than Canada – has been trying to get Apple to open up its App Store, and Apple has repeatedly told them to go fuck themselves: https://pluralistic.net/2025/09/26/empty-threats/#500-million-affluent-consumers Apple, being a truly innovative company, has come up with a whole lot of exciting new ways to tell the EU to fuck itself: https://www.theregister.com/2025/12/16/apple_dma_complaint/ But anticircumvention law is something that every government has total, absolutely control over. Maybe Canada can't order Apple, Google and Facebook to pay their taxes, but it can absolutely decide to stop giving these American companies access to Canada's courts to shut down Canadian competitors so that US companies can go on stealing data and money from the Canadian people: https://pluralistic.net/2025/11/01/redistribution-vs-predistribution/#elbows-up-eurostack Funnily enough, this case is so convincing that I've started to hear from Canadian Trump appeasers who insist that we must not repeal our anticircumvention laws because this would work too well. It would inflict too much pain on America's looting tech sector, and save Canadians too much money, and make too much money for Canadian tech businesses. If Canada becomes the world's first disenshittification nation (they say), we will make Trump too angry. Apparently, these people think that Canada should confine its tariff response to measures that don't work, because anything effective would provoke Trump. When I try to draw these critics out about what the downside of "provoking Trump" is, they moot the possibility that Trump would roll tanks across the Rainbow Bridge and down Lundy's Lane. This seems a remote possibility to me – and ultimately, they agree. The international response to Trump invading Canada because we made it easier for people (including Americans) to buy cheap printer ink would be…intense. Next, they mumble something about tariffs. When I point out that the US is already imposing tariffs on Canadian exports, they say "well, it could be worse," and point to various moments when Trump has hiked the tariffs on Canada, e.g. because he was angry to be reminded that Ronald Reagan would have hated his guts: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dCKmMEFiLrI But of course, the fact that Trump's tariffs yo-yo up and down depending on the progress of his white matter disease means that anyone trying to do forward planning for something they anticipate exporting to America should assume that there might be inifinity tariffs the day they load up their shipping container. But there's another way in which the threat of tariffs is ringing increasingly hollow: American consumption power is collapsing, because billionaires and looters have hoarded all the country's wealth, and no one can afford to buy things anymore. America is in the grips of its third co "K-shaped recovery": https://prospect.org/2025/12/01/premiumization-plutonomy-middle-class-spending-gilded-age/ A K-shaped recovery is when the richest people get richer, but everyone else gets worse off. Working people in America have gotten steadily poorer since the 1970s, even as America's wealthiest have saw their net worth skyrocket. The declining economic power of everyday Americans has multiple causes: stagnating wages, monopoly price-gouging, and the blistering increase in education, housing and medical debt. These all have the same underlying cause, of course: the capture of both political parties – and the courts and administrative agencies – by billionaires, who have neutered antitrust law, jacked up the price of health care and a college educaton, smashed unions, and cornered entire housing markets. For decades, America's consumption power has been kept on life-support through consumer debt and second (or third, or fourth) mortgages. But America's monopoly credit card companies are every bit as capable of price-gouging as America's hospitals, colleges and landlords are, and Americans don't just carry more credit-card debt than their foreign counterparts, they also pay more to service that debt: https://www.justice.gov/archives/opa/pr/justice-department-sues-visa-monopolizing-debit-markets The point is that every dollar that goes into servicing a debt is a dollar that can't be used to buy something useful. A dollar spent on consumption has the potential to generate multiple, knock-on transactions, as the merchant spends your dollar on a coffee, and the coffee-shop owner spends it on a meal out, and the restaurateur spends it on a local printer who runs off a new set of menus. But a dollar that's shoveled into the debt markets is almost immediately transferred out of the real economy and into the speculative financial economy, landing in the pocket of a one-percenter who buys stocks or other assets with it. The rich just don't buy enough stuff. There's a limit to how many Lambos, Picassos, and Sub-Zero fridges even the most guillotineable plute can useful own. Meanwhile, consumers keep having their consumption power siphoned off by debt-collectors and price-gougers, with Trump's help. The GOP just forced eight million student borrowers back into repayment: https://prospect.org/2025/12/16/gop-forcing-eight-million-student-loan-borrowers-into-repayment/ They've killed a monopolization case against Pepsi and Walmart for colluding to rig grocery prices across the entire economy: https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/secret-documents-show-pepsi-and-walmart They've sanctioned the use of price-fixing algorithms to raise rent: https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/an-odd-settlement-on-rent-fixing As Tim Wu points out in his new book, The Age of Extraction, one consequence of allowing monopoly pricing is that it reduces spending power across the entire economy: https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/691177/the-age-of-extraction-by-tim-wu/ Take electricity: you would probably pay your power bill even if it tripled. Sure, you'd find ways to conserve electricity and eliminate many discretionary power uses, but anyone who can pay for electricity will, if the alternative is no electricity. Electricity – like health, shelter, food, and education – is so essential that you'd forego a vacation, a new car, Christmas gifts, dinners out, a new winter coat, or a vet's visit for your cat if that was the only way to keep the lights on. Trump's unshakable class solidarity with rent extractors, debt collectors and price gougers has significantly accelerated the collapse of the consumption power of Americans (AKA "the affordability crisis"). But it gets worse: Americans' consumption power isn't limited to the dollars they spend, it also includes the dollars that the government spends on their behalf, through programs like SNAP (food stamps) and Medicaid/Medicare. Those programs have been slashed to the bone and beyond by Trump, Musk, DOGE and the Republican majority in Congress and the Senate. The reason that other countries took the threat of US tariffs so seriously – seriously enough to hamstring their own tech sector and render their own people defenseless against US tech – is that the US has historically bought a lot of stuff. For any export economy, the US was a critical market, a must-have. But that has been waning for a generation, as the Lambo-and-Sub-Zero set hoarded more and more of the wealth and the rest of us were able to afford less and less. In less than a year, Trump has slashed the consumption power of the an increasing share of the American public to levels approaching the era of WWII ration-books. The remaining American economy is a collection of cheap gimmicks that are forever on the brink of falling apart. Most of the economy is propped up by building data-centers for AI that no one wants and that can't be powered thanks to Trump's attacks on renewables. The remainder consists of equal parts MLMs, Labubus, Lafufus, cryptocurrency speculation, and degenerate app-based gambling. None of this is good. This is all fucking terrible. But I raise it here to point out that "Do as I say or Americans won't buy your stuff anymore" starts to ring hollow once most Americans can't afford to buy anything anymore. America is running out levers to pull in order to get the rest of the world to do its bidding. American fossil fuels are increasingly being outcompeted by an explosion of cheap, evergreen Chinese solar panels, inverters, batteries, and related technology: https://pluralistic.net/2025/10/02/there-goes-the-sun/#carbon-shifting And the US can't exactly threaten to withhold foreign aid to get leverage over other countries – US foreign aid has dropped to homeopathic levels: https://www.factcheck.org/2025/02/sorting-out-the-facts-on-waste-and-abuse-at-usaid/ What's more, it's gonna be increasingly difficult for the US to roll tanks anywhere, even across the Rainbow Bridge, now that Pete Hegseth is purging the troops of anyone who can't afford Ozempic: https://www.militarytimes.com/news/pentagon-congress/2025/09/30/hegseth-blasts-fat-troops-in-rare-gathering-with-military-brass/ And Congress just gutted the US military's Right to Repair, meaning that the Pentagon will be forced to continue its proud tradition of shipping busted generators, vehicles and materiel back to the USA for repair: https://federalnewsnetwork.com/congress/2025/12/congress-quietly-strips-right-to-repair-provisions-from-2026-ndaa-despite-wide-support/ Eventually, some foreign government is going to wake up to the fact that they can make billions by raiding the US tech giants that have been draining their economy, and, in so doing, defend themselves against Trump's cyberwar threat to order Microsoft (or Oracle, or Apple, or Google) to brick their key ministries and corporations. When they do, US Big Tech will squeal, the way they always do: https://economicpopulist.substack.com/p/big-tech-zeal-to-weaponize-trade But money talks and bullshit walks. There's a generation of shit-hot technologists who've been chased out of America by mask-wearing ICE goons who wanted to throw them in a gulag, and a massive cohort of investors looking for alpha who don't want to have to budget for a monthly $TRUMP coin spend in order to remain in business. And when we do finally get a disenshittification nation, it will be great news for Americans. After all, everyday Americans either own no stock, or so little stock as to be indistinguishable from no stock. We don't benefit from US tech companies' ripoffs – we are the victims of those ripoffs. America is ground zero for every terrible scam and privacy invasion that a US tech giant can conceive of. No one needs the disenshittification tools that let us avoid surveillance, rent-seeking and extraction more than Americans. And once someone else goes into business selling them, we'll be able to buy them. Buying digital tools that are delivered over the internet is a hell of a lot simpler than buying cheap medicine online and getting it shipped from a Canadian pharmacy. For an America First guy, Trump is sure hell-bent on ending the American century. Hey look at this (permalink) The Ross Dowson Archive https://archive.org/details/rossdowson?tab=collection The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Criticizing AI https://distro.f-91w.club/reverse-centaur/reverse-centaur_imposed.pdf Daddy-Daughter Podcast, 2025 Edition https://craphound.com/news/2025/12/14/daddy-daughter-podcast-2025-edition/ Old Teslas Are Falling Apart https://futurism.com/advanced-transport/old-teslas-falling-apart EFF Launches Age Verification Hub as Resource Against Misguided Laws https://www.eff.org/press/releases/eff-launches-age-verification-hub-resource-against-misguided-laws Object permanence (permalink) #20yrsago PSP 2.01 firmware unlocked https://web.archive.org/web/20060115012844/https://psp3d.com/showthread.php?t=874 #20yrsago HOWTO make a DRM CD https://blog.citp.princeton.edu/2005/12/15/make-your-own-copy-protected-cd-passive-protection/ #15yrsago DanKam: mobile app to correct color blindness https://web.archive.org/web/20101217043921/https://dankaminsky.com/2010/12/15/dankam/ #15yrsago UBS’s 43-page dress code requires tie-knots that match your facial morphology https://web.archive.org/web/20151115074222/https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424052748704694004576019783931381042 #15yrsago UK demonstrator challenges legality of “kettling” protestors https://web.archive.org/web/20101219075643/https://www.google.com/hostednews/ukpress/article/ALeqM5hK97JtRIOOeKUxESqXRLSeUDBTJw?docId=B39208111292330372A000 #15yrsago Backyard MAS*H set replica https://imgur.com/a/mash-ztcon #15yrsago Bottle-opener shaped like a prohibitionist https://web.archive.org/web/20101222062101/https://blog.modernmechanix.com/2010/12/15/booze-foe-image-opens-bottles/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+ModernMechanix+(Modern+Mechanix) #15yrsago Typewriter ribbon tins https://thedieline.com/vintage-packaging-typewriter-tins.html/ #10yrsago Sometimes, starting the Y-axis at zero is the BEST way to lie with statistics https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=14VYnFhBKcY #10yrsago DEA ignored prosecutor’s warning about illegal wiretap warrants, now it’s losing big https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/2015/12/09/illegal-dea-wiretap-riverside-money-laundering/77050442/ #10yrsago Lifelock anti-identity theft service helped man stalk his ex-wife https://www.azcentral.com/story/money/business/consumers/2015/11/23/lifelock-used-electronically-track-arizona-woman/75535470/ #10yrsago EFF and Human Rights Watch force DEA to destroy its mass surveillance database https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2015/12/victory-privacy-and-transparency-hrw-v-dea #10yrsago Do Androids Dream of Electric Victim-Blamers? https://neverbeenmad.tumblr.com/post/134528463529/voight-kampff-empathy-test-2015-by-smlxist-and #10yrsago Billionaire GOP superdonors aren’t getting what they paid for https://web.archive.org/web/20181119192737/https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2015/12/gop-billionaires-cant-seem-to-buy-this-election.html #5yrsago EU competition rules have real teeth https://pluralistic.net/2020/12/15/iowa-vs-16-tons-of-bricks/#dsm #5yrsago Asset forfeiture is just theft https://pluralistic.net/2020/12/15/iowa-vs-16-tons-of-bricks/#stand-and-delivery #5yrsago Pornhub and payment processors https://pluralistic.net/2020/12/15/iowa-vs-16-tons-of-bricks/#chokepoints #5yrsago Blockchain voting is bullshit https://pluralistic.net/2020/12/15/iowa-vs-16-tons-of-bricks/#sudoku-voting Upcoming appearances (permalink) Hamburg: Chaos Communications Congress, Dec 27-30 https://events.ccc.de/congress/2025/infos/index.html Denver: Enshittification at Tattered Cover Colfax, Jan 22 https://www.eventbrite.com/e/cory-doctorow-live-at-tattered-cover-colfax-tickets-1976644174937 Colorado Springs: Guest of Honor at COSine, Jan 23-25 https://www.firstfridayfandom.org/cosine/ Recent appearances (permalink) (Digital) Elbows Up (OCADU) https://vimeo.com/1146281673 How to Stop “Ensh*ttification” Before It Kills the Internet (Capitalisn't) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=34gkIvYiHxU Enshittification on The Daily Show https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d2e-c9SF5nE Enshittification with Four Ways to Change the World (Channel 4) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tZQaEeuuI3Q The Plan is to Make the Internet Worse. Forever. (Novarra Media) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7wE8G-d7SnY Latest books (permalink) "Canny Valley": A limited edition collection of the collages I create for Pluralistic, self-published, September 2025 "Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It," Farrar, Straus, Giroux, October 7 2025 https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374619329/enshittification/ "Picks and Shovels": a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about the heroic era of the PC, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), February 2025 (https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250865908/picksandshovels). "The Bezzle": a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about prison-tech and other grifts, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), February 2024 (thebezzle.org). "The Lost Cause:" a solarpunk novel of hope in the climate emergency, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), November 2023 (http://lost-cause.org). "The Internet Con": A nonfiction book about interoperability and Big Tech (Verso) September 2023 (http://seizethemeansofcomputation.org). Signed copies at Book Soup (https://www.booksoup.com/book/9781804291245). "Red Team Blues": "A grabby, compulsive thriller that will leave you knowing more about how the world works than you did before." Tor Books http://redteamblues.com. "Chokepoint Capitalism: How to Beat Big Tech, Tame Big Content, and Get Artists Paid, with Rebecca Giblin", on how to unrig the markets for creative labor, Beacon Press/Scribe 2022 https://chokepointcapitalism.com Upcoming books (permalink) "Unauthorized Bread": a middle-grades graphic novel adapted from my novella about refugees, toasters and DRM, FirstSecond, 2026 "Enshittification, Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It" (the graphic novel), Firstsecond, 2026 "The Memex Method," Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2026 "The Reverse-Centaur's Guide to AI," a short book about being a better AI critic, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, June 2026 Colophon (permalink) Today's top sources: Currently writing: "The Reverse Centaur's Guide to AI," a short book for Farrar, Straus and Giroux about being an effective AI critic. LEGAL REVIEW AND COPYEDIT COMPLETE. "The Post-American Internet," a short book about internet policy in the age of Trumpism. PLANNING. A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING This work – excluding any serialized fiction – is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license. That means you can use it any way you like, including commercially, provided that you attribute it to me, Cory Doctorow, and include a link to pluralistic.net. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ Quotations and images are not included in this license; they are included either under a limitation or exception to copyright, or on the basis of a separate license. Please exercise caution. How to get Pluralistic: Blog (no ads, tracking, or data-collection): Pluralistic.net Newsletter (no ads, tracking, or data-collection): https://pluralistic.net/plura-list Mastodon (no ads, tracking, or data-collection): https://mamot.fr/@pluralistic Medium (no ads, paywalled): https://doctorow.medium.com/ Twitter (mass-scale, unrestricted, third-party surveillance and advertising): https://twitter.com/doctorow Tumblr (mass-scale, unrestricted, third-party surveillance and advertising): https://mostlysignssomeportents.tumblr.com/tagged/pluralistic "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 https://pluralistic.net/2025/12/16/k-shaped-recovery/

Pluralistic: Break up bad companies; replace bad union bosses (15 Dec 2025) Today's links Break up bad companies; replace bad union bosses: Labor should be fixed, capital should be vanquished. Hey look at this: Delights to delectate. Object permanence: "Star Island"; "Mediactive"; Afraid of solar; Well-Armed Peasants; Dumpster fire exits; Wikipedia v Brittanica; Pentagon v Quakers; Stealing whole houses; "Situation Normal." Upcoming appearances: Where to find me. 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. Break up bad companies; replace bad union bosses (permalink) Unions are not perfect. Indeed, it is possible to belong to a union that is bad for workers: either because it is weak, or corrupt, or captured (or some combination of the three). Take the "two-tier contract." As unions lost ground – thanks to changes in labor law enforcement under a succession of both Republican and Democratic administrations – labor bosses hit on a suicidal strategy for contract negotiations. Rather than bargaining for a single contract that covered all the union's dues-paying members, these bosses negotiated contracts that guaranteed benefits for existing members, but did not extend these benefits to new members: https://pluralistic.net/2021/11/25/strikesgiving/#shed-a-tier A two-tier contract is one where all workers pay dues, but only the dwindling rump of older, more established workers get any protection or representation from their union. An ever-larger portion of the membership have to pay dues, but get nothing for them. You couldn't come up with a better way to destroy unions if you tried. Thankfully, union workers figured out that the answer to this problem was firing their leaders and replacing them with militant, principled leaders who cared about workers, not just a subsection of their members. Radicals in big unions – like the UAW – teamed up with comrades from university grad students' unions to master the arcane rules that had been weaponized by corrupt bosses to prevent free and fair union elections. Together, they forced the first legitimate union elections in generations, and then the newly elected leaders ran historic strikes that won huge gains for workers (and killed off the two-tier contract): https://theintercept.com/2023/04/07/deconstructed-union-dhl-teamsters-uaw/ Corrupt unions aren't the only life-destroying institutions that radicals have set their sights on this decade. Concentrated corporate power is the most dangerous force in the world today (indeed, it's large, powerful corporations that corrupted those unions). Antitrust activists, environmental activists, consumer rights activists, privacy activists and labor activists have stepped up the global war on big business all through this decade. From new antitrust laws to antitrust lawsuits to strikes to boycotts to mass protests and direct action, this decade has marked a turning point in the global consciousness about the danger of corporate power and the need to fight it. But there's a big, important difference between bad corporations and bad unions: what we should do about them. The answer to a powerful, corrupt corporation is to take action that strips it of its power: break the company up, whack it with fines, take away its corporate charter, strip its executives of their fortunes, even put them in prison. That's because corporations are foundationally undemocratic institutions, governed by "one share, one vote" (and the billionaires who benefit from corporate power are building a society that's "one dollar, one vote"). They fundamentally exist to consolidate power at the expense of workers, suppliers and customers, to extract wealth by imposing costs on the rest of us, from pollution to political corruption. When a corporation gets big enough to pose a risk to societal wellbeing, we need to smash that corporation, not reform it. But the answer to a corrupt union is to fire the union bosses and replace them with better ones. The mission of a union is foundationally pro-democratic. A unionized workplace is a democratic workplace. As in any democracy, workplace democracies can be led by bad or incompetent people. But, as with any democracy, the way you fix this is by swapping out the bad leaders for good ones – not by abolishing democracy and replacing it with an atomized society in which it's every worker for themself, bargaining with a boss who will always win a one-on-one fight in the long run. I raise this because a general strike is back on the table, likely for May Day 2028 (5/1/28): https://labornotes.org/2025/12/maybe-general-strike-isnt-so-impossible-now Unions are an important check against fascism. That's why fascists always start by attacking organized labor: solidarity is the opposite of fascism. To have unions that are fit for purpose in this existential battle for the future of the nation – and, quite possibly, the human race – we desperately need better leaders. Like the union bosses who gave us the two-tier contract, many of our union leaders see their mission as narrowly serving their existing members, and not other workers – not even workers who might someday become their members. To get a sense of how bad it's gotten, consider these five facts: I. Public support for unions is at its highest level since the Carter administration; II. More workers want to join unions than at any time in living memory; III. Unions have larger cash reserves than at any time in history; IV. Under Biden, the National Labor Relations Board was more friendly to unions than at any time in generations; and V. During the Biden years, the number of unionized workers in America went down, not up. That's because union bosses – sitting on a mountain of cash, surrounded by workers begging to be organized – decided that their priority was their existing members, and declined to spend more than a pittance of their cash reserves on organizing efforts. This is suicidal – as self-destructive as the two-tier contract was. To pull off a general strike, we will need mass civil disobedience, a willingness to ignore the Taft-Hartley Act's ban on solidarity strikes. Trump's NLRB isn't just hostile to workers – he's illegally fired so many of its commissioners that they can't even perform most of their functions. But a militant labor movement could turn that to its advantage, because militants know that when Trump fires the refs, you don't have to stop the game – you can throw out the rule book: https://pluralistic.net/2025/01/29/which-side-are-you-on-2/#strike-three-yer-out This is the historic opportunity and challenge before us – to occupy our unions, save our workplace democracies, and then save our national democracy itself. Hey look at this (permalink) Secret Documents Show Pepsi and Walmart Colluded to Raise Food Prices Across the Economy https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/secret-documents-show-pepsi-and-walmart 20 Years of Digital Life, Gone in an Instant, thanks to Apple https://hey.paris/posts/appleid/ Enjoy the new year in your headset https://brucesterling.tumblr.com/post/802750890885906432/gartner-predicts-25-of-people-will-spend-at-least Merry Mixmas 2025 https://djriko.com/merry-mixmas-mixes/ I Wasted 8 Years of My Life in Crypto https://x.com/kenchangh/status/1994854381267947640 Object permanence (permalink) #20yrsago Sony Artists offering home-burned CDs to replace spyware-infected discs https://web.archive.org/web/20060719082355/http://www.rollingstone.com/news/story/8950981/copyprotection_troubles_grow #20yrsago Pentagon bravely vigilant against sinister, threatening Quakers https://www.nbcnews.com/id/wbna10454316 #20yrsago Brooklyn camera-store crooks threaten activist’s life https://thomashawk.com/2005/12/brooklyn-photographer-don-wiss.html #20yrsago Britannica averages 3 bugs per entry; Wikipedia averages 4 https://www.nature.com/articles/438900a #20yrsago Diane Duane wonders if she should self-publish trilogy conclusion https://web.archive.org/web/20051215151654/https://outofambit.blogspot.com/archives/2005_12_01_outofambit_archive.html#113446948274092674 #20yrsago Table coverts to truncheon and shield http://www.jamesmcadam.co.uk/portfolio_html/sb_table.html #20yrsago Royal Society members speak out for open access science publishing https://web.archive.org/web/20051210023301/https://www.frsopenletter.org/ #20yrsago TiVo upgrading company offers $25k for hacks to the new DirecTV PVR https://web.archive.org/web/20051215050848/https://www.wkblog.com/2005/12/weaknees_offers_up_to_25000_fo.html #20yrsago Michigan HS students will need to take online course to graduate https://web.archive.org/web/20051215052603/https://www.chronicle.com/free/2005/12/2005121301t.htm #15yrsago Hiaasen’s STAR ISLAND: blisteringly funny tale of sleazy popstars and paparazzi https://memex.craphound.com/2010/12/13/hiaasens-star-island-blisteringly-funny-tale-of-sleazy-popstars-and-paparazzi/ #15yrsago Dan Gillmor’s Mediactive: masterclass in 21st century journalism demands a net-native news-media https://memex.craphound.com/2010/12/13/dan-gillmors-mediactive-masterclass-in-21st-century-journalism-demands-a-net-native-news-media/ #15yrsago Council of Europe accuses Kosovo’s prime minister of organlegging https://www.theguardian.com/world/2010/dec/14/kosovo-prime-minister-llike-mafia-boss #15yrsago Gold pills turn your innermost parts into chambers of wealth https://web.archive.org/web/20110930011010/https://www.citizen-citizen.com/collections/all/products/gold-pills #10yrsago The Red Cross brought in an AT&T exec as CEO and now it’s a national disaster https://www.propublica.org/article/the-corporate-takeover-of-the-red-cross #10yrsago Philips pushes lightbulb firmware update that locks out third-party bulbs https://www.techdirt.com/2015/12/14/lightbulb-drm-philips-locks-purchasers-out-third-party-bulbs-with-firmware-update/ #10yrsago UK spy agency posts data-mining software to Github https://github.com/gchq/Gaffer #10yrsago Cybercrime 3.0: stealing whole houses https://memex.craphound.com/2015/12/14/cybercrime-3-0-stealing-whole-houses/ #10yrsago US politicians, ranked by their willingness to lie https://www.nytimes.com/2015/12/13/opinion/campaign-stops/all-politicians-lie-some-lie-more-than-others.html #10yrsago 24 privacy tools — not messaging apps — that don’t exist https://dymaxion.org/essays/pleasestop.html #10yrsago North Carolina town rejects solar because it’ll suck up sunlight and kill the plants https://web.archive.org/web/20250813151735/https://www.roanoke-chowannewsherald.com/2015/12/08/woodland-rejects-solar-farm/ #10yrsago Giant hats were the cellphones of the silent movie era https://pipedreamdragon.tumblr.com/post/135065922736/movie-movie-etiquette-warnings-shown-before #10yrsago Plaid Lumberjack Cake https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_1hDl53c-kw #10yrsago MRA Scott Adams: pictures and words by Scott Adams, together at last https://web.archive.org/web/20151214002415/https://mradilbert.tumblr.com/ #10yrsago American rents reach record levels of unaffordability https://www.nbcnews.com/business/economy/its-not-just-poor-who-cant-make-rent-n478501 #5yrsago Well-Armed Peasants https://pluralistic.net/2020/12/13/art-thou-down/#forsooth #5yrsago Where money comes from https://pluralistic.net/2020/12/14/situation-normal/#mmt #5yrsago China's best investigative stories of 2020 https://pluralistic.net/2020/12/14/situation-normal/#gijn #5yrsago Situation Normal https://pluralistic.net/2020/12/14/situation-normal/#more-constellation-games #1yrago Social media needs (dumpster) fire exits https://pluralistic.net/2024/12/14/fire-exits/#graceful-failure-modes #1yrago The GOP is not the party of workers https://pluralistic.net/2024/12/13/occupy-the-democrats/#manchin-synematic-universe Upcoming appearances (permalink) Hamburg: Chaos Communications Congress, Dec 27-30 https://events.ccc.de/congress/2025/infos/index.html Denver: Enshittification at Tattered Cover Colfax, Jan 22 https://www.eventbrite.com/e/cory-doctorow-live-at-tattered-cover-colfax-tickets-1976644174937 Colorado Springs: Guest of Honor at COSine, Jan 23-25 https://www.firstfridayfandom.org/cosine/ Recent appearances (permalink) (Digital) Elbows Up (OCADU) https://vimeo.com/1146281673 How to Stop “Ensh*ttification” Before It Kills the Internet (Capitalisn't) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=34gkIvYiHxU Enshittification on The Daily Show https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d2e-c9SF5nE Enshittification with Four Ways to Change the World (Channel 4) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tZQaEeuuI3Q The Plan is to Make the Internet Worse. Forever. (Novarra Media) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7wE8G-d7SnY Latest books (permalink) "Canny Valley": A limited edition collection of the collages I create for Pluralistic, self-published, September 2025 "Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It," Farrar, Straus, Giroux, October 7 2025 https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374619329/enshittification/ "Picks and Shovels": a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about the heroic era of the PC, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), February 2025 (https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250865908/picksandshovels). "The Bezzle": a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about prison-tech and other grifts, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), February 2024 (thebezzle.org). "The Lost Cause:" a solarpunk novel of hope in the climate emergency, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), November 2023 (http://lost-cause.org). "The Internet Con": A nonfiction book about interoperability and Big Tech (Verso) September 2023 (http://seizethemeansofcomputation.org). Signed copies at Book Soup (https://www.booksoup.com/book/9781804291245). "Red Team Blues": "A grabby, compulsive thriller that will leave you knowing more about how the world works than you did before." Tor Books http://redteamblues.com. "Chokepoint Capitalism: How to Beat Big Tech, Tame Big Content, and Get Artists Paid, with Rebecca Giblin", on how to unrig the markets for creative labor, Beacon Press/Scribe 2022 https://chokepointcapitalism.com Upcoming books (permalink) "Unauthorized Bread": a middle-grades graphic novel adapted from my novella about refugees, toasters and DRM, FirstSecond, 2026 "Enshittification, Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It" (the graphic novel), Firstsecond, 2026 "The Memex Method," Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2026 "The Reverse-Centaur's Guide to AI," a short book about being a better AI critic, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, June 2026 Colophon (permalink) Today's top sources: Currently writing: "The Reverse Centaur's Guide to AI," a short book for Farrar, Straus and Giroux about being an effective AI critic. LEGAL REVIEW AND COPYEDIT COMPLETE. "The Post-American Internet," a short book about internet policy in the age of Trumpism. PLANNING. A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING This work – excluding any serialized fiction – is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license. That means you can use it any way you like, including commercially, provided that you attribute it to me, Cory Doctorow, and include a link to pluralistic.net. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ Quotations and images are not included in this license; they are included either under a limitation or exception to copyright, or on the basis of a separate license. Please exercise caution. How to get Pluralistic: Blog (no ads, tracking, or data-collection): Pluralistic.net Newsletter (no ads, tracking, or data-collection): https://pluralistic.net/plura-list Mastodon (no ads, tracking, or data-collection): https://mamot.fr/@pluralistic Medium (no ads, paywalled): https://doctorow.medium.com/ Twitter (mass-scale, unrestricted, third-party surveillance and advertising): https://twitter.com/doctorow Tumblr (mass-scale, unrestricted, third-party surveillance and advertising): https://mostlysignssomeportents.tumblr.com/tagged/pluralistic "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 https://pluralistic.net/2025/12/15/class-war-labor-peace/

Pluralistic: Federal Wallet Inspectors (13 Dec 2025) Today's links Federal Wallet Inspectors: Does tech *really* move too fast to regulate? Hey look at this: Delights to delectate. Object permanence: Soda can Van de Graff; Amazon rents a copy of the web; Boardgame Remix Kit; No furniture photos please we're British; Youtube vs fair use; Carbon offsets are bullshit; Arkham model railroad; Happy Birthday is in the public domain; Ted Cruz hires Cambridge Analytica; The kid who wanted to join the NSA; Daddy Daughter Xmas Podcast 2020. Upcoming appearances: Where to find me. 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. Federal Wallet Inspectors (permalink) Look, I'm not trying to say that new technologies never raise gnarly new legal questions, but what I am saying is that a lot of the time, the "new legal challenges" raised by technology are somewhere between 95-100% bullshit, ginned up by none-too-bright tech bros and their investors, and then swallowed by regulators and lawmakers who are either so credulous they'd lose a game of peek-a-boo, or (likely) in on the scam. Take "fintech." As Trashhfuture's Riley Quinn is fond of saying, "when you hear 'fintech,' think 'unregulated bank'": https://pluralistic.net/2022/03/02/shadow-banking-2-point-oh/#leverage I mean, the whole history of banking is: "Bankers think of a way to do reckless things that are wildly profitable (in the short term) and catastrophic (in the long term). They offer bribes and other corrupt incentives to their watchdogs to let them violate the rules, which leads to utter disaster." From the 19th century "panics" to the crash of '29 to the S&L collapse to the 2008 Great Financial Crisis and beyond, this just keeps happening. Much of the time, the bankers involved have some tissue-thin explanation for why what they're doing isn't really a violation of the rules. Think of the lenders who, in the runup to the Great Financial Crisis, insisted that they weren't engaged in risky lending because they had a fancy equation that proved that the mortgage-backed securities they were issuing were all sound, and it was literally impossible that they'd all default at once. The fact that regulators were bamboozled by this is enraging. In hindsight (and for many of us at least, at the time), it's obvious that the bankers went to their watchdogs and said, "We'd like to break the law," and the watchdogs said, "Sure, but would you mind coming up with some excuse that I can repeat later when someone asks me why I let you do this crime?" It's like in the old days of medical marijuana, where you'd get on a call with a dial-a-doc and say, "Please can I have some weed?" and the doc would say, "Tell me about your headaches," and you'd say, "Uh, I have headaches?" and they'd say "Great, here's your weed!" The alternative is that these regulators are so bafflingly stupid that they can't be trusted to dress themselves. "My stablecoin is a fit financial instrument to integrate into the financial system" is as credible a wheeze as some crypto bro walking up to Cory Booker, flashing a homemade badge, and snapping out, "Federal Wallet Inspector, hand it over." I mean, at that point, I kind of hope they're corrupt, because the alternative is that they are basically a brainstem and a couple of eyestalks in a suit. What I'm saying is, "We just can't figure out if crypto is violating finance laws" is a statement that can only be attributed to someone very stupid, or in on the game. Speaking of "someone very stupid, or in on the game," Congress just killed a rule that would have guaranteed that the US military could repair its own materiel: https://federalnewsnetwork.com/congress/2025/12/congress-quietly-strips-right-to-repair-provisions-from-2026-ndaa-despite-wide-support/ Military right to repair is the most brainless of all possible no-brainers. When a generator breaks down in the field – even in an active war-zone – the US military has to ship it back to America to be serviced by the manufacturer. That's not because you can't train a Marine to fix a generator – it's because the contractual and technical restrictions that military contractors insist on ban the military from fixing its stuff: https://www.pogo.org/fact-sheets/fact-sheet-the-right-to-repair-for-the-united-states-military This violates a very old principle in sound military administration. Abraham Lincoln insisted that the contractors who supplied the Union army had to use standardized tooling and ammo, because it would be very embarrassing for the Commander-in-Chief to have to stand on the field at Gettysburg with a megaphone and shout, "Sorry boys, war's canceled this week, our sole supplier's gone on vacation." And yet, after mergers of large military contractors resulted in just a handful of "primary" companies serving the Pentagon, private equity vampires snapped up all the subcontractors who were sole-source suppliers of parts to those giants. They slashed the prices of those parts so that the primary contractors used as many as possible in the materiel they provided to the US DoD, and then raised the prices of replacement parts, some with 10,000% margins, which the Pentagon now has to pay for so long as they own those jets and other big-ticket items: https://pluralistic.net/2021/01/29/fractal-bullshit/#dayenu This isn't a complicated scam. It's super straightforward, and the right to repair rule that Congress killed addressed it head on. But Congressional enemies of this bill insisted that it would have untold "unintended consequences" and instead passed a complex rule, riddled with loopholes, because there was something unique and subtle about the blunt issue of price-gouging: https://www.warren.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/final_-_warren_letter_to_dod_re_right_to_repair_consequences_092524.pdf Either these lawmakers are so stupid that they fell for the ole "Federal Wallet Inspector" gambit, or they're in on the game. I know which explanation my money is on. Maybe this has already occurred to you, but lately I've come to realize that there's another dimension to this, a way in which critics of tech help this gambit along. After all, it's pretty common for tech critics to preface their critiques with words to the effect of, "Of course, this technology has raced ahead of regulators to keep pace with it. Those dastardly tech-bros have slipped the net once again!" The unspoken (and sometimes very loudly spoken) corollary of this is, "Only a tech-critic as perspicacious and forward looking as me is capable of matching wits with those slippery tech-bros, and I have formulated a sui generis policy prescription that can head them off at the pace." Take the problem of deepfakes, including deepfake porn. There's a pretty straightforward policy response to this: a privacy law that allows you to prevent the abuse of your private information (including to create deepfakes) that unlawfully process your personal information for an illegitimate purpose. To make sure that this law can be enforced, include a "private right of action," which means that individual can sue to enforce it (and activist orgs and no-win/no-fee lawyers can sue on their behalf). That way, you can get justice even if the state Attorney General or the federal Department of Justice decides not to take your case. Privacy law is a great idea. It can navigate nuances, like the fact that privacy is collective, not individual – for example, it can intervene when your family members give their (your) DNA to a scam like 23andme, or when a friend posts photos of you online: https://jacobin.com/2021/05/cory-doctorow-interview-bill-gates-intellectual-property But privacy law gets a bad rap. In the EU, they've had the GDPR – a big, muscular privacy law – for nine years, and all it's really done is drown the continent in cookie-consent pop-ups. But that's not because the GDPR is flawed, it's because Ireland is a tax-haven that has lured in the world's worst corporate privacy-violators, and to keep them from moving to another tax haven (like Malta or Cyprus or Luxembourg), it has to turn itself into a crime-haven. So for the entire life of the GDPR, all the important privacy cases in Europe have gone to Ireland, and died there: https://pluralistic.net/2025/12/01/erin-go-blagged/#big-tech-omerta Now, again, this isn't a complicated technical question that is hard to resolve through regulation. It's just boring old corruption. I'm not saying that corruption is easy to solve, but I am saying that it's not complicated. Irish politicians made the country's economy dependent on the Irish state facilitating criminal activity by American firms. The EU doesn't want to provoke a constitutional crisis by forcing Ireland (and the EU's other crime-havens) to halt this behavior. That's a hard thing to do! It's just not a complicated thing to do. The routine violations of EU privacy law by American tech companies isn't the result of "tech racing ahead of the law." It's just corruption. You can't fix corruption by passing more laws; they'll just be corruptly enforced, too. But thanks to a mix of bad incentives – politicians wanting to be seen to do something without actually upsetting the apple-cart; AI critics wanting to inflate their importance by claiming that they're fighting something novel and complex, as opposed to something that's merely boring and hard – we get policy proposals that will likely worsen the problem. Take Denmark's decision to fight deepfakes by creating a new copyright over your likeness: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/jun/27/deepfakes-denmark-copyright-law-artificial-intelligence Copyright – a property right – is an incredibly bad way to deal with human rights like privacy. For one thing, it makes privacy into a luxury good that only the wealthy can afford (remember, a discount for clicking through a waiver of your privacy right is the same thing as an extra charge for not waiving your privacy rights). For another, property rights are very poorly suited to managing things that have joint ownership, such as private information. As soon as you turn private information into private property, you have to answer questions like, "Which twin owns the right to their face" and "Who owns the right to the fact that your abusive mother is your mother – you, or her? And if it's her, does she get to stop you from publishing a memoir about the abuse?" Copyright – a state-backed transferable monopoly over expression – is really hard to get right. Legislatures and courts have struggled to balance free expression and copyright for centuries, and there's a complex web of "limitations and exceptions" to copyright. Privacy is also incredibly complex, and has its own limitations and exceptions, and they are very different from copyright's limits. I mean, they have to be: privacy rules defend your human right to a personal zone of autonomy; copyright is intended to create economic incentives to produce new creative works. It would be very weird if the same rules served both ends. I can't believe that Denmark's legislators failed to consider privacy as the solution to deepfakes. If they did, they are very, very stupid. Rather, they decided that fighting the corruption that keeps privacy law from being enforced in the EU was too hard, so they just did something performative, creating a raft of new problems, without solving the old one. Here in the USA, there's lots of lawmakers who are falling into this trap. Take the response to chatbots that give harmful advice to children and teens. The answer that many American politicians (as well as lawmakers abroad, in Australia, Canada, the UK and elsewhere) have come up with is to force AI companies to identify who is and is not a child and treat them differently. This boils down to a requirement for AI companies to collect much more information on their users (to establish their age), which means that all the AI harms that stem from privacy violations (AI algorithms that steal wages, hike prices, discriminate in hiring and lending and policing, etc) are now even harder to stop. A simple alternative to this would be updating privacy law to limit how AI companies can gather and use everyone's data – which would mean that you could protect kids from privacy invasions without (paradoxically) requiring them (and you) to disclose all kinds of private information to determine how old they are. The insistence – by AI critics and AI boosters – that AI is so different from other technologies that you can't address it by limiting the collection, retention and processing of private information is a way in which AI critics and AI hucksters end up colluding to promote a view of AI as an exceptional technology. It's not. AI is a normal technology: https://www.aisnakeoil.com/p/ai-as-normal-technology Sometimes this argument descends into grimly hilarious parody. Argue for limits on AI companies' collection, retention and processing of private information and AI boosters will tell you that this would require so much labor-intensive discernment about training data that it would make it impossible to continue training AI until it becomes intelligent enough to solve all our problems. But also, when you press they issue, they'll sometimes say that AI is already so "intelligent" that it can derive (that is, guess) private information about you without needing your data, so a new privacy law won't help. In other words, applying privacy limitations to AI means we'll never get a "superintelligence,"; and also, we already have a superintelligence so there's no point in applying privacy limitations to AI. It's true that technology can give rise to novel regulatory challenges, but it's also true that claiming that a technology is so novel that existing regulation can't resolve its problems is just a way of buying time to commit more crimes before the regulators finally realize that your flashy new technology is just a boring old scam. Hey look at this (permalink) Every Drink in “Casablanca” (1942) https://bruces.medium.com/every-drink-in-casablanca-1942-348e7c543810 clbre is a fork of calibre with the aim of stripping out the AI integration https://github.com/grimthorpe/clbre EU Report Distills AI-Training Lessons from Napster Piracy Era: Don’t Sue, License https://torrentfreak.com/eu-report-distills-ai-training-lessons-from-napster-piracy-era-dont-sue-license/ Rebuilding Imaginary Futures: Il Versificatore, 2025 https://bruces.medium.com/rebuilding-imaginary-futures-il-versificatore-2025-3178a12be2aa John Varley, 1947-2025 https://floggingbabel.blogspot.com/2025/12/john-varley-1947-2025.html Object permanence (permalink) #20yrsago Americans smile, Brits grimace? https://www.nytimes.com/2005/12/11/magazine/national-smiles.html #20yrsago HOWTO make a soda-can Van de Graaf https://scitoys.com/scitoys/scitoys/electro/electro6.html #20yrsago Credit-card-sized USB drive https://web.archive.org/web/20051214084824/http://walletex.com/ #20yrsago Homeland Security: Mini-golf courses are terrorist targets https://web.archive.org/web/20060215153821/https://www.kron.com/Global/story.asp?S=4226663 #20yrsago Amazon rents access to a copy of the Web https://battellemedia.com/archives/2005/12/alexa_make_that_amazon_looks_to_change_the_game #15yrsago Pornoscanners trivially defeated by pancake-shaped explosives https://web.archive.org/web/20101225211840/http://springerlink.com/content/g6620thk08679160/fulltext.pdf #10yrsago HO fhtagn! Detailed model railroad layout recreates HP Lovecraft’s Arkham https://web.archive.org/web/20131127042302/http://www.ottgallery.com/MRR.html #10yrsago Suicide rates are highest in spring — not around Christmas https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2015/12/no-suicides-dont-rise-during-the-holidays/419436/ #10yrsago Airbnb hosts consistently discriminate against black people https://www.benedelman.org/publications/airbnb-011014.pdf #10yrsago What will it take to get MIT to stand up for its own students and researchers? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cQdl_JdTars #10yrsago Experts baffled to learn that 2 years olds are being prescribed psychiatric drugs https://www.nytimes.com/2015/12/11/us/psychiatric-drugs-are-being-prescribed-to-infants.html?_r=0 #10yrsago Happy Birthday’s copyright status is finally, mysteriously settled https://www.nytimes.com/2015/12/10/business/media/happy-birthday-copyright-case-reaches-a-settlement.html?_r=0 #10yrsago Proposal: keep the nuclear launch codes in an innocent volunteer’s chest-cavity https://blog.nuclearsecrecy.com/2012/09/19/the-heart-of-deterrence/ #10yrsago Obama promises statement on encryption before Xmas (maybe) https://web.archive.org/web/20151211042128/https://www.dailydot.com/politics/white-house-encryption-policy-response-petition/ #10yrsago Harlem Cryptoparty: Crypto matters for #blacklivesmatter https://web.archive.org/web/20151218183924/https://motherboard.vice.com/read/the-black-community-needs-encryption #10yrsago Backslash: a toolkit for protesters facing hyper-militarized, surveillance-heavy police https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2015/12/backslash-anti-surveillance-gadgets-for-protesters/ #10yrsago Ted Cruz campaign hires dirty data-miners who slurped up millions of Facebook users’ data https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/dec/11/senator-ted-cruz-president-campaign-facebook-user-data #10yrsago The Tor Project has a new executive director: former EFF director Shari Steele! https://blog.torproject.org/greetings-tors-new-executive-director/ #10yrsago What I told the kid who wanted to join the NSA https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/dec/11/west-point-cybersecurity-nsa-privacy-edward-snowden #10yrsago Copyfraud: Disney’s bogus complaint over toy photo gets a fan kicked off Facebook https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2015/12/disney-initially-drops-then-doubles-down-on-dmca-claim-over-star-wars-figure-pic/ #15yrsago Sales pitch from an ATM-skimmer vendor https://krebso.com/2010/12/why-gsm-based-atm-skimmers-rule/ #15yrsago Boardgame Remix Kit makes inspired new games out of old Monopoly, Clue, Trivial Pursuit and Scrabble sets https://web.archive.org/web/20101214210548/http://www.boardgame-remix-kit.com/sample/boardgame-remix-kit-sample.pdf #10yrsago Britons will need copyright licenses to post photos of their own furniture https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2015/12/you-may-soon-need-a-licence-to-take-photos-of-that-classic-designer-chair-you-bought/ #5yrsago Outgoing Facebookers blast the company https://pluralistic.net/2020/12/12/fairy-use-tale/#badge-posts #5yrsago Carbon offsets are bullshit https://pluralistic.net/2020/12/12/fairy-use-tale/#greenwashing #5yrsago Youtube, fair use, competition, and the death of the artist https://pluralistic.net/2020/12/12/fairy-use-tale/#content-id #5yrsago A lethally boring story https://pluralistic.net/2020/12/11/number-eight/#erisa #5yrsago Daddy Daughter Xmas Podcast 2020 https://pluralistic.net/2020/12/11/number-eight/#youll-go-down-in-mystery #5yrsago Antitrust and Facebook's paid disinformation https://pluralistic.net/2020/12/11/number-eight/#curse-of-bigness #1yrago The housing emergency and the second Trump term https://pluralistic.net/2024/12/11/nimby-yimby-fimby/#home-team-advantage #1yrago A Democratic media strategy to save journalism and the nation https://pluralistic.net/2024/12/12/the-view-from-somewhere/#abolish-rogan Upcoming appearances (permalink) Hamburg: Chaos Communications Congress, Dec 27-30 https://events.ccc.de/congress/2025/infos/index.html Denver: Enshittification at Tattered Cover Colfax, Jan 22 https://www.eventbrite.com/e/cory-doctorow-live-at-tattered-cover-colfax-tickets-1976644174937 Colorado Springs: Guest of Honor at COSine, Jan 23-25 https://www.firstfridayfandom.org/cosine/ Recent appearances (permalink) How to Stop “Ensh*ttification” Before It Kills the Internet (Capitalisn't) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=34gkIvYiHxU Enshittification on The Daily Show https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d2e-c9SF5nE Enshittification with Four Ways to Change the World (Channel 4) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tZQaEeuuI3Q The Plan is to Make the Internet Worse. Forever. (Novarra Media) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7wE8G-d7SnY Enshittification (Future Knowledge) https://futureknowledge.transistor.fm/episodes/enshittification Latest books (permalink) "Canny Valley": A limited edition collection of the collages I create for Pluralistic, self-published, September 2025 "Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It," Farrar, Straus, Giroux, October 7 2025 https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374619329/enshittification/ "Picks and Shovels": a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about the heroic era of the PC, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), February 2025 (https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250865908/picksandshovels). "The Bezzle": a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about prison-tech and other grifts, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), February 2024 (thebezzle.org). "The Lost Cause:" a solarpunk novel of hope in the climate emergency, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), November 2023 (http://lost-cause.org). "The Internet Con": A nonfiction book about interoperability and Big Tech (Verso) September 2023 (http://seizethemeansofcomputation.org). Signed copies at Book Soup (https://www.booksoup.com/book/9781804291245). "Red Team Blues": "A grabby, compulsive thriller that will leave you knowing more about how the world works than you did before." Tor Books http://redteamblues.com. "Chokepoint Capitalism: How to Beat Big Tech, Tame Big Content, and Get Artists Paid, with Rebecca Giblin", on how to unrig the markets for creative labor, Beacon Press/Scribe 2022 https://chokepointcapitalism.com Upcoming books (permalink) "Unauthorized Bread": a middle-grades graphic novel adapted from my novella about refugees, toasters and DRM, FirstSecond, 2026 "Enshittification, Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It" (the graphic novel), Firstsecond, 2026 "The Memex Method," Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2026 "The Reverse-Centaur's Guide to AI," a short book about being a better AI critic, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, June 2026 Colophon (permalink) Today's top sources: Currently writing: "The Reverse Centaur's Guide to AI," a short book for Farrar, Straus and Giroux about being an effective AI critic. LEGAL REVIEW AND COPYEDIT COMPLETE. "The Post-American Internet," a short book about internet policy in the age of Trumpism. PLANNING. A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING This work – excluding any serialized fiction – is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license. That means you can use it any way you like, including commercially, provided that you attribute it to me, Cory Doctorow, and include a link to pluralistic.net. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ Quotations and images are not included in this license; they are included either under a limitation or exception to copyright, or on the basis of a separate license. Please exercise caution. How to get Pluralistic: Blog (no ads, tracking, or data-collection): Pluralistic.net Newsletter (no ads, tracking, or data-collection): https://pluralistic.net/plura-list Mastodon (no ads, tracking, or data-collection): https://mamot.fr/@pluralistic Medium (no ads, paywalled): https://doctorow.medium.com/ Twitter (mass-scale, unrestricted, third-party surveillance and advertising): https://twitter.com/doctorow Tumblr (mass-scale, unrestricted, third-party surveillance and advertising): https://mostlysignssomeportents.tumblr.com/tagged/pluralistic "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 https://pluralistic.net/2025/12/13/uncle-sucker/

Pluralistic: Instacart reaches into your pocket and lops a third off your dollars (11 Dec 2025) Today's links Instacart reaches into your pocket and lops a third off your dollars: A/B splitting your way into doing a total fucking racism. Hey look at this: Delights to delectate. Object permanence: Predicting the present; Caller eye-deer; RIP Robert Sheckley; Student protesters and Google Maps vs kettling; If your kids like computers, they're criminals; A billion CC licenses; The moral character of cryptographic work; EC resurrects link-taxes. Upcoming appearances: Where to find me. 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. Instacart reaches into your pocket and lops a third off your dollars (permalink) There's a whole greedflation-denial cottage industry that insists that rising prices are either the result of unknowable, untameable and mysterious economic forces, or they're the result of workers having too much money and too many jobs. The one thing we're absolutely not allowed to talk about is the fact that CEOs keep going on earnings calls to announce that they are hiking prices way ahead of any increase in their costs, and blaming inflation: https://pluralistic.net/2021/11/20/quiet-part-out-loud/#profiteering Nor are we supposed to notice the "price consultancies" that let the dominant firms in many sectors – from potatoes to meat to rental housing – fix prices in illegal collusive arrangements that are figleafed by the tissue-thin excuse that "if you use an app to fix prices, it's not a crime": https://pluralistic.net/2025/01/25/potatotrac/#carbo-loading And we're especially not supposed to notice the proliferation of "personalized pricing" businesses that use surveillance data to figure out how desperate you are and charge you a premium based on that desperation: https://pluralistic.net/2024/06/05/your-price-named/#privacy-first-again Surveillance pricing – when you are charged more for the same goods than someone else, based on surveillance data about the urgency of your need and the cash in your bank account – is a way for companies to reach into your pocket and devalue the dollars in your wallet. After all, if you pay $2 for something that I pay $1 for, that's just the company saying that your dollars are only worth half as much as mine: https://pluralistic.net/2025/06/24/price-discrimination/ It's a form of cod-Marxism: "from each according to their desperation": https://pluralistic.net/2025/01/11/socialism-for-the-wealthy/#rugged-individualism-for-the-poor The economy is riddled with surveillance pricing gouging. You are almost certainly paying more than your neighbors for various items, based on algorithmic price-setting, every day. Case in point: More Perfect Union and Groundwork Collaborative teamed up with Consumer Reports to recruit 437 volunteers from across America to login to Instacart at the same time and buy the same two items from 15 stores, and found evidence of surveillance pricing at Albertsons, Costco, Kroger, and Sprouts Farmers Market: https://groundworkcollaborative.org/work/instacart/ The price-swings are wild. Some test subjects are being charged 23% more than others. The average variance for "the exact same items, from the exact same locations, at the exact same time" comes out to 7%, or "$1,200 per year for groceries" for a family of four. The process by which your greedflation premium is assigned is opaque. The researchers found that Instacart shoppers ordering from Target clustered into seven groups, but it's not clear how Instacart decides how much extra to charge any given shopper. Instacart – who acquired Eversight, a surveillance pricing company, in 2022 – blamed the merchants (who, in turn, blamed Instacart). Instacart also claimed that they didn't use surveillance data to price goods, but hedged, admitting that the consumer packaged goods duopoly of Unilever and Procter & Gamble do use surveillance data in connection with their pricing strategies. Finally, Instacart claimed that this was all an "experiment" to "learn what matters most to consumers and how to keep essential items affordable." In other words, they were secretly charging you more (for things like eggs and bread) because somehow that lets them "keep essential items affordable." Instacart said their goal was to help "retail partners understand consumer preferences and identify categories where they should invest in lower prices." Anyone who's done online analytics can easily pierce this obfuscation, but for those of you who haven't had the misfortune of directing an iterated, A/B tested optimization effort, I'll unpack this statement. Say you have a pool of users and a bunch of variations on a headline. You randomly assign different variants to different users and measure clickthroughs. Then you check to see which variants performed best, and dig into the data you have on those users to see if there are any correlations that tie together users who liked a given approach. This might let you discover that, say, women over 40 click more often on headlines that mention kittens. Then you generate more variations based on these conclusions – different ways of mentioning kittens – and see which of these variations perform best, and whether the targeted group of users split into smaller subgroups (women over 40 in the midwest prefer "tabby kitten" while their southern sisters prefer "kitten" without a mention of breed). By repeatedly iterating over these steps, you can come up with many highly refined variants, and you can use surveillance data to target them to ever narrower, more optimized slices of your user-base. Obviously, this is very labor intensive. You have to do a lot of tedious analysis, and generate a lot of variants. This is one of the reasons that slopvertising is so exciting to the worst people on earth: they imagine that they can use AI to create a self-licking ice-cream cone, performing the analysis and generating endless new variations, all untouched by human hands. But when it comes to prices, it's much easier to produce variants – all you're doing is adding or subtracting from the price you show to shoppers. You don't need to get the writing team together to come up with new ways of mentioning kittens in a headline – you can just raise the price from $6.23 to $6.45 and see if midwestern women over 40 balk or add the item to their shopping baskets. And here's the kicker: you don't need to select by gender, racial or economic criteria to end up with a super-racist and exploitative arrangement. That's because race, gender and socioeconomic status have broad correlates that are easily discoverable through automated means. For example, thanks to generations of redlining, discriminatory housing policy, wage discrimination and environmental racism, the poorest, sickest neighborhoods in the country are also the most racialized and are also most likely to be "food deserts" where you can't just go to the grocery store and shop for your family. What's more, the private equity-backed dollar store duopoly have waged a decades-long war on community grocery stores, enveloping them with dollar stores that use their access to preferential discounts (from companies like Unilever and Procter & Gamble, another duopoly) to force grocers out of business: https://pluralistic.net/2023/03/27/walmarts-jackals/#cheater-sizes Then these dollar stores run a greedflation scam that is so primitive, it's almost laughable: they just charge customers much higher amounts than the prices shown on the shelves and price-tags: https://www.consumeraffairs.com/news/do-all-those-low-dollar-store-prices-really-add-up-120325.html When you live in a food desert where your only store is a Dollar General that defrauds you at the cash-register, you are more likely to accept a higher price from Instacart, because you have fewer choices than someone in a middle-class neighborhood with two or three competing grocers. And the people who live in those food deserts are more likely to be poor, which, in America, is an excellent predictor of whether they are Black or brown. Which is to say, without ever saying, "Charge Black people more for groceries," Instacart can easily A/B split its way into a system where they predictably and reliably charges Black people more for groceries. That's the old cod-Marxism at work: "from each according to their desperation." This is so well-understood that anyone who sets one of these systems in motion should be understood to be deliberately seeking to do racist profiteering under cover of an algorithm. It's empiricism-washing: "I'm not racist, I just did some math" (that produced a predictably racist outcome): https://www.reuters.com/article/world/insight-amazon-scraps-secret-ai-recruiting-tool-that-showed-bias-against-women-idUSKCN1MK0AG/ This is the dark side and true meaning of "business optimization." The optimal business pays its suppliers and workers nothing, and charges its customers everything it can. Obviously, businesses need to settle for suboptimal outcomes, because workers won't show up if they don't get paid, and customers won't buy things that cost everything they have⹋. ⹋ Unless, of course, you are an academic publisher, in which case this is just how you do business. A business "optimizes" its workforce by finding ways to get them to accept lower wages. For example, they can bind their workers with noncompete "agreements" that ban Wendy's cashiers from quitting their job and making $0.25 more per hour at the McDonald's next door (one in 18 American workers have been locked into one of these contracts): https://pluralistic.net/2025/09/09/germanium-valley/#i-cant-quit-you Or they can lock their workers in with "training repayment agreement provisions" (TRAPs) – contractual clauses that force workers to pay their bosses thousands of dollars if they quit or get fired: https://pluralistic.net/2022/08/04/its-a-trap/#a-little-on-the-nose But the most insidious form of worker optimization is "algorithmic wage discrimination." That's when a company uses surveillance data to lower the wages of workers. For example, contract nurses are paid less if the app that hires them discovers (through the unregulated data-broker sector) that they have a lot of credit-card debt. After all, nurses who are heavily indebted can't afford to be choosy and turn down lowball offers: https://pluralistic.net/2024/12/18/loose-flapping-ends/#luigi-has-a-point This is the other form of surveillance pricing: pricing labor based on surveillance data. It's more cod-Marxism: "From each according to their desperation." Forget "becoming ungovernable": to defeat these evil fuckers, we have to become unoptimizable: https://pluralistic.net/2025/08/20/billionaireism/#surveillance-infantalism How do we do that? Well, nearly every form of "optimization" begins with surveillance. They can't figure out whether they can charge you more if they can't spy on you. They can't figure out whether they can pay you less if they can't spy on you, either. And the reason they can spy on you is because we let them. The last consumer privacy law to pass out of Congress was a 1988 bill that bans video-store clerks from disclosing your VHS rental history. Every other form of consumer surveillance is permitted under US federal law. So step one of this process is to ban commercial surveillance. Banning algorithmic price discrimination is all well and good, but it is, ultimately, a form of redistribution. We're trying to make the companies share some of the excess they extract from our surveillance data. But predistribution – ending surveillance itself, in this case – is always far more effective than redistribution: https://pluralistic.net/2025/10/31/losing-the-crypto-wars/#surveillance-monopolism How do we do that? Well, we need to build a coalition. At the Electronic Frontier Foundation, we call this "privacy first": you can't solve all the internet's problems by fixing privacy, but you won't fix most of them unless we get privacy right, and so the (potential) coalition for a strong privacy regime is large and powerful: https://pluralistic.net/2023/12/06/privacy-first/#but-not-just-privacy But of course, "privacy first," doesn't mean "just privacy." We also need tools that target algorithmic pricing per se. In New York State, there's a new law that requires disclosure of algorithmic pricing, in the form of a prominent notification reading, "THIS PRICE WAS SET BY AN ALGORITHM USING YOUR PERSONAL DATA." This is extremely weaksauce, and might even be worse than nothing. In California we have Prop 65, a rule that requires businesses to post signs and add labels any time they expose you to chemicals "known to the state of California to cause cancer." This caveat emptor approach (warn people, let them vote with their wallets) has led to every corner of California's built environment to be festooned with these warnings. Today, Californians just ignore these warnings, the same way that web users ignore the "privacy policy" disclosures on the sites they visit: https://pluralistic.net/2025/04/19/gotcha/#known-to-the-state-of-california-to-cause-cancer The right approach isn't to (merely) warn people about carcinogens (or privacy risks). The right approach is regulating harmful business practices, whether those practices give you a tumor or pick your pocket. Under Biden, former FTC chair Lina Khan undertook proceedings to ban algorithmic pricing altogether. Trump's FTC killed that, along with all the other quality-of-life enhancing measures the FTC had in train (Trump's FTC chair replaced these with a program to root out "wokeness" in the agency). Today, Khan is co-chair of Zohran Mamdani's transition team, and she will use the mayor's authority (under the New York City Consumer Protection Law of 1969, which addresses "unconscionable" commercial practices) to ban algorithmic pricing in NYC: https://pluralistic.net/2025/11/15/unconscionability/#standalone-authority Khan wasn't Biden's only de-optimizer. Under chair Rohit Chopra, Biden's Consumer Finance Protection Bureau actually banned the data-brokers who power surveillance pricing: https://pluralistic.net/2023/08/16/the-second-best-time-is-now/#the-point-of-a-system-is-what-it-does And of course, Trump's CFPB (neutered by Musk and his broccoli-haired brownshirts at DOGE) killed that effort: https://pluralistic.net/2025/05/15/asshole-to-appetite/#ssn-for-sale But the CFPB staffer who ran that effort has gone to work on an effort to leverage a New Jersey state privacy law to crush the data-broker industry: https://www.wired.com/story/daniels-law-new-jersey-online-privacy-matt-adkisson-atlas-lawsuits/ These are efforts to optimize corporations for human thriving, by making them charge us less and pay us more. For while we are best off when we are unoptimizable, we are also best off when corporations are totally optimized – for our benefit. (Image: Cryteria, CC BY 3.0, modified) Hey look at this (permalink) Uber is selling your ride and food ordering data to advertisers for marketing insights https://boingboing.net/2025/12/08/uber-is-selling-your-ride-and-food-ordering-data-to-advertisers-for-marketing-insights.html 404 Media Is Making a Zine https://www.404media.co/404-media-is-making-a-zine/ Maybe a General Strike Isn’t So Impossible Now https://labornotes.org/2025/12/maybe-general-strike-isnt-so-impossible-now The Naibbe cipher: a substitution cipher that encrypts Latin and Italian as Voynich Manuscript-like ciphertext https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/01611194.2025.2566408 Bringing organizational maturity to radical groups https://blog.bl00cyb.org/2025/12/bringing-organizational-maturity-to-radical-groups/ Object permanence (permalink) #20yrsago Free voicemail helps homeless people get jobs https://web.archive.org/web/20051210021850/http://www.cvm.org/ #20yrsago Anti-P2P company decides to focus on selling music instead https://de.advfn.com/borse/NASDAQ/LOUD/nachrichten/13465769/loudeye-to-exit-content-protection-services-busine #20yrsago Caller Eye-Deer’s eyes glow when phone rings https://www.flickr.com/photos/84221353@N00/71889050/in/pool-69453349@N00 #20yrsago EFF to Sunncomm: release a list of all infected CDs! https://web.archive.org/web/20051212072537/https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/archives/004245.php #20yrsago Only 2% of music-store downloaders care about legality of their music https://web.archive.org/web/20051225200658/http://www.mp3newswire.net/stories/5002/tempo2005.html #20yrsago Dykes on Bikes gives the Trademark Office a linguistics lesson https://web.archive.org/web/20060523133217/https://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2005/12/09/MNGQOG5D7P1.DTL&type=printable #20yrsago Robert Sheckley has died https://nielsenhayden.com/makinglight/archives/007078.html #20yrsago Xbox 360 DRM makes your rip your CDs again https://www.gamespot.com/articles/microsoft-xbox-360-hands-on-report/1100-6139672/ #20yrsago Music publishers: Jail for lyric-sites http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/entertainment/4508158.stm #15yrsago 2600 Magazine condemns DDoS attacks against Wikileaks censors https://web.archive.org/web/20101210213130/https://www.2600.com/news/view/article/12037 #15yrsago UK supergroup records 4’33”, hopes to top Xmas charts https://www.theguardian.com/music/2010/dec/06/cage-against-machine-x-factor #15yrsago FarmVille’s secret: making you anxious https://web.archive.org/web/20101211120105/http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/6224/catching_up_with_jonathan_blow.php?print=1 #15yrsago Rogue Archivist beer https://web.archive.org/web/20101214060929/https://livingproofbrewcast.com/2010/12/giving-the-rogue-archivist-to-its-namesake/ #15yrsago Hossein “Hoder” Derakhshan temporarily released from Iranian prison https://cyrusfarivar.com/blog/2010/12/09/iranian-blogging-pioneer-temporarily-released-from-prison/ #15yrsago Student protesters in London use Google Maps to outwit police “kettling” https://web.archive.org/web/20101212042006/https://bengoldacre.posterous.com/student-protestors-using-live-tech-to-outwit #15yrsago Google foreclosure maps https://web.archive.org/web/20170412162114/http://ritholtz.com/2010/12/google-map-foreclosures/ #15yrsago Theory and practice of queue design https://passport2dreams.blogspot.com/2010/12/third-queue.html #15yrsago Legal analysis of the problems of superherodom https://lawandthemultiverse.com/ #10yrsago A great, low-tech hack for teaching high-tech skills https://miriamposner.com/blog/a-better-way-to-teach-technical-skills-to-a-group/ #10yrsago In case you were wondering, there’s no reason to squirt coffee up your ass https://scienceblogs.com/insolence/2015/12/10/starbutts-or-how-is-it-still-a-thing-that-people-are-shooting-coffee-up-their-nether-regions #10yrsago Survey of wealthy customers leads insurer to offer “troll insurance” https://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/newsbysector/banksandfinance/insurance/12041832/Troll-insurance-to-cover-the-cost-of-internet-bullying.html #10yrsago US State Department staffer sexually blackmailed women while working at US embassy https://web.archive.org/web/20151210230259/https://www.networkworld.com/article/3013633/security/ex-us-state-dept-worker-pleads-guilty-to-extensive-sextortion-hacking-and-cyberstalking-acts.html #10yrsago Robert Silverberg’s government-funded guide to the psychoactive drugs of sf https://web.archive.org/web/20151211050648/https://motherboard.vice.com/read/the-us-government-funded-an-investigation-into-sci-fi-drug-use-in-the-70s #10yrsago Toy demands that kids catch crickets and stuff them into an electronic car https://www.wired.com/2015/12/um-so-the-bug-racer-is-an-actual-toy-car-driven-by-crickets/ #10yrsago The crypto explainer you should send to your boss (and the FBI) https://web.archive.org/web/20151209011457/https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2015/12/08/you-already-use-encryption-heres-what-you-need-to-know-about-it/ #10yrsago French PM defies Ministry of Interior, says he won’t ban open wifi or Tor https://web.archive.org/web/20160726031106/https://www.connexionfrance.com/Wifi-internet-ban-banned-17518-view-article.html #10yrsago The no-fly list really is a no-brainer https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/dec/09/no-fly-list-errors-gun-control-obama #10yrsago America: shrinking middle class, growing poverty, the rich are getting richer https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2015/12/09/the-american-middle-class-is-losing-ground/ #10yrsago Marriott removing desks from its hotel rooms “because Millennials” https://web.archive.org/web/20151210034312/http://danwetzelsports.tumblr.com/post/134754150507/who-stole-the-desk-from-my-hotel-room #10yrsago China’s top Internet censor: “There’s no Internet censorship in China” https://hongkongfp.com/2015/12/09/there-is-no-internet-censorship-in-china-says-chinas-top-censor/ #10yrsago Stolen-card crime sites use “cop detection” algorithms to flag purchases https://krebso.com/2015/12/when-undercover-credit-card-buys-go-bad/ #10yrsago UK National Crime Agency: if your kids like computers, they’re probably criminals https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DjYrxzSe3DU #10yrsago US immigration law: so f’ed up that Trump’s no-Muslim plan would be constitutional https://www.nytimes.com/2015/12/10/opinion/trumps-anti-muslim-plan-is-awful-and-constitutional.html?_r=0 #10yrsago Ecuador’s draft copyright law: legal to break DRM to achieve fair use https://medium.com/@AndresDelgadoEC/big-achievement-for-creative-commons-in-ecuador-national-assembly-decides-that-fair-use-trumps-drm-c8cdd9c57e01#.n1vkccd3r #10yrsago One billion Creative Commons licenses in use https://stateof.creativecommons.org/2015/ #10yrsago The moral character of cryptographic work https://web.cs.ucdavis.edu/~rogaway/papers/moral-fn.pdf #10yrsago Everybody knows: FBI won’t confirm or deny buying cyberweapons from Hacking Team https://web.archive.org/web/20151209163839/https://motherboard.vice.com/read/the-fbi-wont-confirm-or-deny-buying-hacking-team-spyware-even-though-it-did #10yrsago European Commission resurrects an unkillable stupid: the link tax https://web.archive.org/web/20160913095014/https://openmedia.org/en/bad-idea-just-got-worse-how-todays-european-copyright-plans-will-damage-internet #5yrsago Why we can't have nice things https://pluralistic.net/2020/12/10/borked/#bribery #5yrsago Facebook vs Robert Bork https://pluralistic.net/2020/12/10/borked/#zucked #1yrago Tech's benevolent-dictator-for-life to authoritarian pipeline https://pluralistic.net/2024/12/10/bdfl/#high-on-your-own-supply #1yrago Predicting the present https://pluralistic.net/2024/12/09/radicalized/#deny-defend-depose Upcoming appearances (permalink) Hamburg: Chaos Communications Congress, Dec 27-30 https://events.ccc.de/congress/2025/infos/index.html Denver: Enshittification at Tattered Cover Colfax, Jan 22 https://www.eventbrite.com/e/cory-doctorow-live-at-tattered-cover-colfax-tickets-1976644174937 Colorado Springs: Guest of Honor at COSine, Jan 23-25 https://www.firstfridayfandom.org/cosine/ Recent appearances (permalink) How to Stop “Ensh*ttification” Before It Kills the Internet (Capitalisn't) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=34gkIvYiHxU Enshittification on The Daily Show https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d2e-c9SF5nE Enshittification with Four Ways to Change the World (Channel 4) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tZQaEeuuI3Q The Plan is to Make the Internet Worse. Forever. (Novarra Media) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7wE8G-d7SnY Enshittification (Future Knowledge) https://futureknowledge.transistor.fm/episodes/enshittification Latest books (permalink) "Canny Valley": A limited edition collection of the collages I create for Pluralistic, self-published, September 2025 "Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It," Farrar, Straus, Giroux, October 7 2025 https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374619329/enshittification/ "Picks and Shovels": a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about the heroic era of the PC, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), February 2025 (https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250865908/picksandshovels). "The Bezzle": a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about prison-tech and other grifts, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), February 2024 (the-bezzle.org). "The Lost Cause:" a solarpunk novel of hope in the climate emergency, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), November 2023 (http://lost-cause.org). "The Internet Con": A nonfiction book about interoperability and Big Tech (Verso) September 2023 (http://seizethemeansofcomputation.org). Signed copies at Book Soup (https://www.booksoup.com/book/9781804291245). "Red Team Blues": "A grabby, compulsive thriller that will leave you knowing more about how the world works than you did before." Tor Books http://redteamblues.com. "Chokepoint Capitalism: How to Beat Big Tech, Tame Big Content, and Get Artists Paid, with Rebecca Giblin", on how to unrig the markets for creative labor, Beacon Press/Scribe 2022 https://chokepointcapitalism.com Upcoming books (permalink) "Unauthorized Bread": a middle-grades graphic novel adapted from my novella about refugees, toasters and DRM, FirstSecond, 2026 "Enshittification, Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It" (the graphic novel), Firstsecond, 2026 "The Memex Method," Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2026 "The Reverse-Centaur's Guide to AI," a short book about being a better AI critic, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, June 2026 Colophon (permalink) Today's top sources: Currently writing: "The Reverse Centaur's Guide to AI," a short book for Farrar, Straus and Giroux about being an effective AI critic. LEGAL REVIEW AND COPYEDIT COMPLETE. "The Post-American Internet," a short book about internet policy in the age of Trumpism. PLANNING. A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING This work – excluding any serialized fiction – is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license. That means you can use it any way you like, including commercially, provided that you attribute it to me, Cory Doctorow, and include a link to pluralistic.net. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ Quotations and images are not included in this license; they are included either under a limitation or exception to copyright, or on the basis of a separate license. Please exercise caution. How to get Pluralistic: Blog (no ads, tracking, or data-collection): Pluralistic.net Newsletter (no ads, tracking, or data-collection): https://pluralistic.net/plura-list Mastodon (no ads, tracking, or data-collection): https://mamot.fr/@pluralistic Medium (no ads, paywalled): https://doctorow.medium.com/ Twitter (mass-scale, unrestricted, third-party surveillance and advertising): https://twitter.com/doctorow Tumblr (mass-scale, unrestricted, third-party surveillance and advertising): https://mostlysignssomeportents.tumblr.com/tagged/pluralistic "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 https://pluralistic.net/2025/12/11/nothing-personal/

Pluralistic: Big Tech joins the race to build the world's heaviest airplane (09 Dec 2025) Today's links Big Tech joins the race to build the world's heaviest airplane: Die as Microsoft, or live to become the IBM you overthrew. Hey look at this: Delights to delectate. Object permanence: Bean-sprouting keyboard; Ink rant; FBI wanted to deport John Lennon; "Concrete Park"; Plutocratic lane-changes. Upcoming appearances: Where to find me. 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. Big Tech joins the race to build the world's heaviest airplane (permalink) I have a weird fascination with early-stage Bill Gates, after his mother convinced a pal of hers – chairman of IBM's board of directors – to give her son the contract to provide the operating system for the new IBM PC. Gates and his pal Paul Allen tricked another programmer into selling them the rights to DOS, which they sold to IBM, setting Microsoft on the path to be one of the most profitable businesses in human history. IBM could have made its own OS, of course. They were just afraid to, because they'd just narrowly squeaked out of a 12-year antitrust war with the Department of Justice (evocatively memorialized as "Antitrust's Vietnam"): https://pluralistic.net/2022/10/02/the-true-genius-of-tech-leaders/ The US government traumatized IBM so badly that they turned over their crown jewels to these two prep-school kids, who scammed a pal out of his operating system for $50k and made billions from it. Despite owing his business to IBM (or perhaps because of this fact), Gates routinely mocked IBM as a lumbering dinosaur that was headed for history's scrapheap. He was particularly scornful of IBM's software development methodology, which, to be fair, was pretty terrible: IBM paid programmers by the line of code. Gates called this "the race to build the world's heaviest airplane." After all, judging software by lines of code is a terrible idea. To the extent that "number of lines of code" has any correlation with software quality, reliability or performance, it has a negative correlation. While it's certainly possible to write software with too few lines of code (e.g. when instructions are stacked on a single line, obfuscating its functionality and making it hard to maintain), it's far more common for programmers to use too many steps to solve a problem. The ideal software is just right: verbose enough to be legible to future maintainers, streamlined enough to omit redundancies. This is broadly true of many products, and not just airplanes. Office memos should be long enough to be clear, but no longer. Home insulation should be sufficient to maintain the internal temperature, but no more. Ironically, enterprise tech companies' bread and butter is selling exactly this kind of qualitative measurements for bosses who want an easy, numeric way to decide which of their workers to fire, and leading the pack is Microsoft, whose flagship Office365 lets bosses assess their workers' performance on meaningless metrics like how many words they type, ranking each worker against other workers within the division, with rival divisions and within rival firms. Yes, Microsoft actually boasts to companies about the fact that if you use their products, they will gather sensitive data about how your workers perform individually and as a team, and share than information with your competitors! https://pluralistic.net/2020/11/25/the-peoples-amazon/#clippys-revenge But while tech companies employed programmers to develop this kind of bossware to be used on other companies' employees, they were loathe to apply them to their own workers. For one thing, it's just a very stupid way to manage a workforce, as Bill Gates himself would be the first to tell you (candidly, provided he wasn't trying to sell you an enterprise Office 365 license). For another, tech workers wouldn't stand for it. After all, these were the "princes of labor," each adding a million dollars or more to their boss's bottom line, and in such scarce supply that a coder could quit a job after the morning scrum and have a new one by the pre-dinner pickleball break: https://pluralistic.net/2025/04/27/some-animals/#are-more-equal-than-others Tech workers mistook the fear this dynamic instilled in their bosses for respect. They thought the reason their bosses gave them free massage therapists and kombucha on tap and a gourmet cafeteria was that their bosses liked them. After all, these bosses were all techies. A coder wasn't a worker, they were a temporarily embarrassed founder. That's why Zuck and Sergey tuned into those engineering town hall meetings and tolerated being pelted with impertinent questions about the company's technology and business strategy. Actually, tech bosses didn't like tech workers. They didn't see them as peers. They saw them workers. Problem workers, at that. Problems to be solved. And wouldn't you know it, supply caught up with demand and tech companies instituted a program of mass layoffs. When Google laid off 12,000 workers (just before a $80b stock buyback that would have paid their wages for 27 years), they calmed investors by claiming that they weren't doing this because business was bad – they were just correcting some pandemic-era overhiring. But Google didn't just fire junior programmers – they targeted some of their most senior (and thus mouthiest and highest-paid) techies for the chop. Today, Sergey and Zuck no longer attend engineering meetings ("Not a good use of my time" -M. Zuckerberg). Tech workers are getting laid off at the rate of naughts. And none of these bastards can shut up about how many programmers they plan on replacing with AI: https://pluralistic.net/2025/08/05/ex-princes-of-labor/#hyper-criti-hype And wouldn't you know it, the shitty monitoring and ranking technology that programmers made to be used on other workers is finally being used on them: https://www.theregister.com/2025/10/10/microsoft_copilot_viva_insights/ Naturally, the excuse is monitoring AI usage. Microsoft – along with all the other AI-peddling tech companies – keep claiming that their workers adore using AI to write software, but somehow, also have to monitor workers so they can figure out which ones to fire because they're not using AI enough: https://www.itpro.com/software/development/microsoft-claims-ai-is-augmenting-developers-rather-than-replacing-them This is the "shitty technology adoption curve" in action. When you have a terrible, destructive technology, you can't just deploy it on privileged people who get taken seriously in policy circles. You start with people at the bottom of the privilege gradient: prisoners, mental patients, asylum-seekers. Then, you work your way up the curve – kids, gig workers, blue collar workers, pink collar workers. Eventually, it comes for all of us: https://pluralistic.net/2021/02/24/gwb-rumsfeld-monsters/#bossware As Ed Zitron writes, tech hasn't had a big, successful product (on the scale of, say, the browser or the smartphone) in more than a decade. Tech companies have seemingly run out of new trillion-dollar industries to spawn. Tech bosses are pulling out all the stops to make their companies seem as dynamic and profitable as they were in tech's heyday. Firing workers and blaming it on AI lets tech bosses transform a story that would freak out investors ("Our business is flagging and we had to fire a bunch of valuable techies") into one that will shake loose fresh billions in capital ("Our AI product is so powerful it let us fire a zillion workers!"). And for tech bosses, mass layoffs offer another, critical advantage: pauperizing those princes of labor, so that they can shed their company gyms and luxury commuter busses, cut wages and benefits, and generally reset the working expectations of the tech workers who sit behind a keyboard to match the expectations of tech workers who assemble iPhones, drive delivery vans, and pack boxes in warehouses. For tech workers who currently don't have a pee bottle or a suicide net at their job-site, it's long past time to get over this founder-in-waiting bullshit and get organized. Recognize that you're a worker, and that workers' only real source of power isn't ephemeral scarcity, it's durable solidarity: https://techworkerscoalition.org/ (Image: Cryteria, CC BY 3.0, modified) Hey look at this (permalink) Your Data Might Determine How Much You Pay for Eggs https://www.wired.com/story/algorithmic-pricing-eggs-ny-law/ Judge hints Vizio TV buyers may have rights to source code licensed under GPL https://www.theregister.com/2025/12/05/vizio_gpl_source_code_ruling/ Chamberlain blocks smart home integrations with its garage door openers — again https://www.theverge.com/tech/839294/chamberlain-myq-garage-door-opener-update-blocks-aftermarket-controllers Smart Garage Door Opener https://3reality.com/product/smartgarage-door-opener/ The Best Books in eBooks and Audiobooks of 2025 https://www.kobo.com/us/en/p/best-books-of-2025 Object permanence (permalink) #20yrsago WaWa Digital Cameras threatens to break customer’s neck https://thomashawk.com/2005/12/abusive-new-york-camera-store.html #20yrsago Keyboard used as bean-sprouting medium https://web.archive.org/web/20051205011830/http://www.nada.kth.se/~hjorth/krasse/english.html #15yrsago Judge to copyright troll: get lost https://torrentfreak.com/acslaw-take-alleged-file-sharers-to-court-but-fail-on-a-grand-scale-101209/ #15yrsago Ink cartridge rant https://web.archive.org/web/20101211080931/http://www.inkcartridges.uk.com/Remanufactured-HP-300-CC640EE-Black.html #15yrsago 1.1 billion US$100 notes out of circulation due to printing error https://www.cnbc.com/2010/12/07/the-fed-has-a-110-billion-problem-with-new-benjamins.html #15yrsago EFF wants Righthaven to pay for its own ass-kicking https://web.archive.org/web/20101211011932/https://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2010/12/payup-troll/ #15yrsago danah boyd explains email sabbaticals https://www.zephoria.org/thoughts/archives/2010/12/08/i-am-offline-on-email-sabbatical-from-december-9-january-12.html #15yrsago TSA subjects India’s US ambassador to public grope because of her sari https://web.archive.org/web/20101211113821/http://travel.usatoday.com/flights/post/2010/12/india-diplomat-gets-humiliating-pat-down-at-mississippi-airport-/134197/5?csp=outbrain&csp=obnetwork #15yrsago California’s safety codes are now open source! https://code.google.com/archive/p/title24/ #10yrsago When the INS tried to deport John Lennon, the FBI pitched in to help https://www.muckrock.com/news/archives/2015/dec/08/john-lennons-fbi-file-1/ #10yrsago The Big List of What’s Wrong with the TPP https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2015/12/how-tpp-will-affect-you-and-your-digital-rights #10yrsago Concrete Park: apocalyptic, afrofuturistic graphic novel of greatness https://memex.craphound.com/2015/12/08/concrete-park-apocalyptic-afrofuturistic-graphic-novel-of-greatness/ #10yrsago Denmark’s top anti-piracy law firm pocketed $25m from rightsholders, then went bankrupt https://torrentfreak.com/anti-piracy-lawyer-milked-copyright-holders-for-millions-151208/ #5yrsago Uber pays to get rid of its self-driving cars https://pluralistic.net/2020/12/08/required-reading/#goober #5yrsago All the books I reviewed in 2020 https://pluralistic.net/2020/12/08/required-reading/#recommended-reading #5yrsago Ford patents plutocratic lane-changes https://pluralistic.net/2020/12/08/required-reading/#walkaway Upcoming appearances (permalink) Hamburg: Chaos Communications Congress, Dec 27-30 https://events.ccc.de/congress/2025/infos/index.html Denver: Enshittification at Tattered Cover Colfax, Jan 22 https://www.eventbrite.com/e/cory-doctorow-live-at-tattered-cover-colfax-tickets-1976644174937 Colorado Springs: Guest of Honor at COSine, Jan 23-25 https://www.firstfridayfandom.org/cosine/ Recent appearances (permalink) Enshittification with Four Ways to Change the World (Channel 4) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tZQaEeuuI3Q The Plan is to Make the Internet Worse. Forever. (Novarra Media) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7wE8G-d7SnY Enshittification (Future Knowledge) https://futureknowledge.transistor.fm/episodes/enshittification We have become slaves to Silicon Valley (Politics JOE) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JzEUvh1r5-w How Enshittification is Destroying The Internet (Frontline Club) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oovsyzB9L-s Latest books (permalink) "Canny Valley": A limited edition collection of the collages I create for Pluralistic, self-published, September 2025 "Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It," Farrar, Straus, Giroux, October 7 2025 https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374619329/enshittification/ "Picks and Shovels": a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about the heroic era of the PC, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), February 2025 (https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250865908/picksandshovels). "The Bezzle": a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about prison-tech and other grifts, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), February 2024 (the-bezzle.org). "The Lost Cause:" a solarpunk novel of hope in the climate emergency, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), November 2023 (http://lost-cause.org). "The Internet Con": A nonfiction book about interoperability and Big Tech (Verso) September 2023 (http://seizethemeansofcomputation.org). Signed copies at Book Soup (https://www.booksoup.com/book/9781804291245). "Red Team Blues": "A grabby, compulsive thriller that will leave you knowing more about how the world works than you did before." Tor Books http://redteamblues.com. "Chokepoint Capitalism: How to Beat Big Tech, Tame Big Content, and Get Artists Paid, with Rebecca Giblin", on how to unrig the markets for creative labor, Beacon Press/Scribe 2022 https://chokepointcapitalism.com Upcoming books (permalink) "Unauthorized Bread": a middle-grades graphic novel adapted from my novella about refugees, toasters and DRM, FirstSecond, 2026 "Enshittification, Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It" (the graphic novel), Firstsecond, 2026 "The Memex Method," Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2026 "The Reverse-Centaur's Guide to AI," a short book about being a better AI critic, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, June 2026 Colophon (permalink) Today's top sources: Currently writing: "The Reverse Centaur's Guide to AI," a short book for Farrar, Straus and Giroux about being an effective AI critic. LEGAL REVIEW AND COPYEDIT COMPLETE. "The Post-American Internet," a short book about internet policy in the age of Trumpism. PLANNING. A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING This work – excluding any serialized fiction – is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license. That means you can use it any way you like, including commercially, provided that you attribute it to me, Cory Doctorow, and include a link to pluralistic.net. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ Quotations and images are not included in this license; they are included either under a limitation or exception to copyright, or on the basis of a separate license. Please exercise caution. How to get Pluralistic: Blog (no ads, tracking, or data-collection): Pluralistic.net Newsletter (no ads, tracking, or data-collection): https://pluralistic.net/plura-list Mastodon (no ads, tracking, or data-collection): https://mamot.fr/@pluralistic Medium (no ads, paywalled): https://doctorow.medium.com/ Twitter (mass-scale, unrestricted, third-party surveillance and advertising): https://twitter.com/doctorow Tumblr (mass-scale, unrestricted, third-party surveillance and advertising): https://mostlysignssomeportents.tumblr.com/tagged/pluralistic "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 https://pluralistic.net/2025/12/09/temporarily-embarrassed-founders/

Pluralistic: Elon Musk's Blue Tick scam (08 Dec 2025) Today's links Elon Musk's Blue Tick scam: The EU bans giant teddybears. Hey look at this: Delights to delectate. Object permanence: Denver bomb squad vs 8" toy robot; Iceland's atheist religion; Largest strike in human history; Ad-tech is a bubble; Battery rationality; Pasta carpet; "With a Little Help"; Crooked Timber on Pikett; Tiki-mug menorah; China vs Big Data-backstabbing. Upcoming appearances: Where to find me. 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. Elon Musk's Blue Tick scam (permalink) In my book Enshittification, I develop the concept of "giant teddybears," a scam that has been transposed from carnival midway games to digital platforms. The EU has just fined Elon Musk $140m for running a giant teddybear scam on Twitter: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2025/12/elon-musks-x-first-to-be-fined-under-eus-digital-service-act/ Growing up, August 15 always meant two things for my family: my mother's birthday and the first day of the CNE, a giant traveling fair that would park itself on Toronto's waterfront for the last three weeks of summer. We'd get there early, and by 10AM, there'd always be some poor bastard lugging around a galactic-scale giant teddybear that was offered as a prize at one of the midway games. Now, nominally, the way you won a giant teddybear was by getting five balls in a peach basket. To a first approximation, this is a feat that no one has ever accomplished. Rather, a carny had beckoned this guy over and said, "Hey, fella, I like your face. Tell you what I'm gonna do: you get just one ball in the basket and I'll give you one of these beautiful, luxurious keychains. If you win two keychains, I'll let you trade them in for one of these gigantic teddybears." Why would the carny do this? Because once this poor bastard took possession of the giant teddybear, he was obliged to conspicuously lug it around the CNE midway in the blazing, muggy August heat. All who saw him would think, "Hell if that dumbass can win a giant teddybear, I'm gonna go win one, too!" Charitably, you could call him a walking advertisement. More accurately, though, he was a Judas goat. Digital platforms have the ability to give out giant teddybears at scale. Because digital platforms have the flexibility that comes with running things on computers, platforms can pick out individual platform participants and make them King For the Day, showering them in riches that they will boast of, luring in other suckers who will lose everything: https://pluralistic.net/2023/02/19/twiddler/ That's how Tiktok works: the company's "heating tool" lets them drive traffic to Tiktok performers by cramming their videos into millions of random people's feeds, overriding Tiktok's legendary recommendation algorithm. Those "heated" performers get millions of views on their videos and go on to spam all the spaces where similar performers hang out, boasting of the fame and riches that await other people in their niche if they start producing for Tiktok: https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/21/potemkin-ai/#hey-guys Uber does it, too: as Veena Dubal documents in her work on "algorithmic wage discrimination," Uber offers different drivers wildly different wages for performing the same work. The lucky few who get an Uber giant teddybear hang out in rideshare groupchats and forums, trumpeting their incredible gains from the platform, while everyone else blames themselves for "being bad at the app," as they drive and drive, only to go deeper and deeper into debt: https://pluralistic.net/2023/04/12/algorithmic-wage-discrimination/#fishers-of-men Everywhere you look online, you see giant teddybears. Think of Joe Rogan being handed hundreds of millions of dollars to relocate his podcast to Spotify, an also-ran podcast platform that is desperately trying to capture the medium of podcasting, turning an open protocol into a proprietary, enclosed, Spotify-exclusive content stream: https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/27/enshittification-resistance/#ummauerter-garten-nein The point of the conspicuous, over-the-odds payment to Rogan isn't just to get Rogan onto Spotify – it's to convince every other podcaster that Spotify is a great place to make podcasts for. It isn't, though: when Spotify bought Gimlet Media, they locked Gimlet's podcasts inside Spotify's walled garden/maximum security prison. If you wanted to listen to a Gimlet podcast, you'd have to switch to using Spotify's app (and submitting to Spotify's invasive surveillance and restrictions on fast-forwarding through ads, etc). Pretty much no one did this. After an internal revolt by Gimlet podcast hosts – whose podcasts were dwindling to utter irrelevance because no one was listening to them anymore – Spotify moved those Gimlet podcasts back onto the real internet, where they belong. When Musk bought Twitter, he started handing out tons of giant teddybears – most notably, he created an opaque monetization scheme for popular Twitter posters, which allowed him to thumb the scales for a few trolls he liked, who obliged him by loudly proclaiming just how much money you could make by trolling professionally on Twitter. Needless to say, the vast majority of people who try this make either nothing, or a sum so small that it rounds to nothing. But Musk's main revenue plan for Twitter – the thing he repeatedly promised would allow him to recoup the tens of billions he borrowed to buy the platform – was selling blue tick verification. Twitter created blue ticks to solve a serious platform problem. Twitter users kept getting sucked in by impersonators who would trick them into participating in scams or believing false things. To protect those users, Twitter offered a verification scheme for "notable people" who were likely to face impersonation. The verification system was never very good – I successfully lobbied them to improve it a little when I was being impersonated on Twitter (I got them to stop insisting that users fax them a scan of their ID, or, more realistically, to send them ID via a random, i email-to-fax gateway). But it did the job reasonably well. Predictably, though, the verification scheme also became something of a (weird and unimportant) status-symbol, allowing a certain kind of culture warrior to peddle grievances about how only "lamestream media libs" were getting blue ticks, while brave Pizzagaters and 4chan refugees were denied this important recognition. Musk's plan to sell blue ticks leaned heavily into these grievances. He promised to "democratize" verification, for $8/month (or, for businesses, many thousands of dollars per month). Users who didn't buy blue ticks would have their content demoted and hidden from their own followers. Users who paid for blue ticks would have their content jammed into everyone's feeds, irrespective of whether Twitter's own content recommendation algorithms predicted those users would enjoy it. Best of all, Twitter wouldn't do much verifying – you could give Twitter $8, claim to be anyone at all, and chances are, you would be able to assume any identity you wanted, post any bullshit you wanted, and get priority placement in millions of users' feeds. This was a massive gift to scammers, trolls and disinformation peddlers. For $8, you could pretend to be a celebrity in order to endorse a stock swindle, shitcoin hustle, or identity theft scheme. You could post market-moving disinformation from official-looking corporate accounts. You could pose as a campaigning politician or a reporter and post reputation-destroying nonsense. This is where the EU comes in. In 2024, the EU enacted a pair of big, muscular Big Tech antitrust laws, the Digital Services Act (DSA) and the Digital Markets Act (DMA). These are complex pieces of legislation, and I don't like everything in them, but some parts of them are amazing: bold and imaginative breaks from the dismal history of ineffective or counterproductive tech regulation. Under the DSA, the EU has fined Twitter about $140m for exposing users to scams via this blue tick giant teddybear wheeze (much of that sum is punitive, because Twitter flagrantly obstructed the Commission's investigations). The DSA (sensibly) doesn't require user verification, but it does expect companies that tell their users that some accounts are verified and can be trusted, to actually verify that they actually can be trusted. I think there's a second DSA claim to be made here, beyond the failure to verify. Musk's plan to sell blue ticks was a disaster: while many, many scammers (and a few trolls) bought blue ticks, no one else did. The blue tick – which Musk thought of as a valuable status symbol that he could sell – was quickly devalued. "Account with a blue tick" was never all that prestigious, but under Musk, it came to mean "account that pushes scams, gore, disinformation, porn and/or hate." So Musk did something very funny and sweaty. He restored blue ticks to millions of high-follower accounts (including my own). And despite the fact that Musk had created about a million different kinds of blue ticks that denoted different kinds of organizations and payment schemes, these free blue ticks were indistinguishable from the paid ones. In other words, Musk set out to trick users into thinking that the most prominent people they followed believed that it was worth spending $8/month on a blue tick. It was an involuntary giant teddybear scam. Every time a prominent user with a free blue tick posts, they help Musk trick regular Twitter users into thinking that these worthless $8/month subscriptions are worth shelling out for. I think the Commission could run another, equally successful enforcement action against Musk and Twitter over this scam, too. Trump has been bellyaching nonstop about the DSA and DMA, threatening EU nations and businesses with tariffs and other TACO retribution if they go ahead with DSA/DMA enforcement. Let's hope the EU calls his bluff. Of course, Musk could get out of paying these fines by moving all his businesses out of the EU, which, frankly, would be a major result for Europe. (Image: Gage Skidmore, CC BY-SA 4.0, modified) Hey look at this (permalink) Netflix Is Trying to Buy Warner Bros Discovery. That Would Be a Disaster for America. https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/netflix-is-trying-to-buy-warner-bros How popular is ecosocialist transformation? https://jasonhickel.substack.com/p/how-popular-is-ecosocialist-transformation Luigi Mangione Official Legal Fund for all 3 Cases https://www.givesendgo.com/luigi-defense-fund Trump’s Katrina Is Coming https://prospect.org/2025/12/05/trumps-katrina-is-coming-fema/ DEFT: DSPs for Equitable and Fair Treatment https://deft-us.com/ Object permanence (permalink) #20yrsago What’s involved in different publishing jobs? https://web.archive.org/web/20050306095536/http://www.penguin.co.uk/static/packages/uk/aboutus/jobs_workingpeng.html #20yrsago Sony finally releases rookit uninstaller — sort of https://web.archive.org/web/20051204015131/http://cp.sonybmg.com/xcp/english/updates.html #20yrsago EFF forces Sony/Suncomm to fix its spyware https://web.archive.org/web/20051210024413/https://www.eff.org/news/archives/2005_12.php#004234 #20yrsago Warner Music attacks specialized web-browser https://web.archive.org/web/20051210024927/http://www.pearworks.com/pages/pearLyrics.html #20yrsago Sony’s DRM security fix leaves your computer more vulnerable https://blog.citp.princeton.edu/2005/12/07/mediamax-bug-found-patch-issued-patch-suffers-same-bug/ #15yrsago Internet furnishes fascinating tale of a civil rights era ghosttown on demandhttps://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/eddwx/what_the_hell_happened_to_cairo_illinois/ #15yrsago Pasta carpet! https://wemakecarpets.wordpress.com/2010/11/02/pasta-carpet-2/ #15yrsago With a Little Help launch! https://memex.craphound.com/2010/12/07/with-a-little-help-launch/ #15yrsago Denver bomb squad defeats 8″ toy robot after hours-long standoff https://www.denverpost.com/2010/12/01/toy-robot-detours-traffic-near-coors-field/ #15yrsago UK govt demands an end to evidence-based drug policy https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2010/dec/05/government-scientific-advice-drugs-policy?& #10yrsago Iceland’s fastest-growing “religion” courts atheists by promising to rebate religious tax https://icelandmonitor.mbl.is/news/politics_and_society/2015/12/01/icelanders_flocking_to_the_zuist_religion/ #10yrsago Springer Nature to release 100,000 titles as DRM-free bundles https://web.archive.org/web/20151210051243/https://www.digitalbookworld.com/2015/bitlit-partners-with-springer-to-offer-ebook-bundles/ #10yrsago Solo: Hope Larson’s webcomic of rock-n-roll, romance, and desperation https://memex.craphound.com/2015/12/07/solo-hope-larsons-webcomic-of-rock-n-roll-romance-and-desperation/ #10yrsago Body-painted models disappear into the Wonders of the World https://www.trinamerry.com/trinamerryblog/sevenwondersbodypaint #10yrsago Make: the simplest electric car toy, a homopolar motor https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oPzJr1jjHnQ #10yrsago Thomas Piketty seminar on Crooked Timber https://crookedtimber.org/2016/01/04/thomas-piketty-seminar/ #10yrsago MAKE: a tiki-mug menorah https://web.archive.org/web/20151208123229/http://news.critiki.com/2015/12/05/tiki-mug-menorah-a-how-to-from-poly-hai/ #10yrsago Harvard Business School: Talented assholes are more trouble than they’re worth https://www.hbs.edu/ris/Publication #10yrsago Multi-generational cruelty: America’s prisons shutting down kids’ visitations https://web.archive.org/web/20151204063410/https://www.thenation.com/article/2-7m-kids-have-parents-in-prison-theyre-losing-their-right-to-visit/ #10yrsago READ: Kim Stanley Robinson’s first standalone story in 25 years! https://reactormag.com/oral-argument-kim-stanley-robinson// #10yrsago French Ministry of Interior wants to ban open wifi, Tor https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2015/12/france-looking-at-banning-tor-blocking-public-wi-fi/ #5yrsago China’s war on big data backstabbing https://pluralistic.net/2020/12/07/backstabbed/#big-data-backstabbing #5yrsago The largest strike in human history https://pluralistic.net/2020/12/06/surveillance-tulip-bulbs/#modi-miscalulation #5yrsago Ad-tech as a bubble overdue for a bursting https://pluralistic.net/2020/12/06/surveillance-tulip-bulbs/#adtech-bubble #1yrago Battery rationality https://pluralistic.net/2024/12/06/shoenabombers/#paging-dick-cheney #1yrago A year in illustration (2024) https://pluralistic.net/2024/12/07/great-kepplers-ghost/#art-adjacent Upcoming appearances (permalink) Virtual: Poetic Technologies with Brian Eno (David Graeber Institute), Dec 8 https://davidgraeber.institute/poetic-technologies-with-cory-doctorow-and-brian-eno/ Madison, CT: Enshittification at RJ Julia, Dec 8 https://rjjulia.com/event/2025-12-08/cory-doctorow-enshittification Hamburg: Chaos Communications Congress, Dec 27-30 https://events.ccc.de/congress/2025/infos/index.html Denver: Enshittification at Tattered Cover Colfax, Jan 22 https://www.eventbrite.com/e/cory-doctorow-live-at-tattered-cover-colfax-tickets-1976644174937 Colorado Springs: Guest of Honor at COSine, Jan 23-25 https://www.firstfridayfandom.org/cosine/ Recent appearances (permalink) > The Plan is to Make the Internet Worse. Forever. (Novarra Media) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7wE8G-d7SnY Enshittification (Future Knowledge) https://futureknowledge.transistor.fm/episodes/enshittification We have become slaves to Silicon Valley (Politics JOE) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JzEUvh1r5-w How Enshittification is Destroying The Internet (Frontline Club) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oovsyzB9L-s Escape Forward with Cristina Caffarra https://escape-forward.com/2025/11/27/enshittification-of-our-digital-experience/ Latest books (permalink) "Canny Valley": A limited edition collection of the collages I create for Pluralistic, self-published, September 2025 "Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It," Farrar, Straus, Giroux, October 7 2025 https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374619329/enshittification/ "Picks and Shovels": a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about the heroic era of the PC, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), February 2025 (https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250865908/picksandshovels). "The Bezzle": a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about prison-tech and other grifts, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), February 2024 (the-bezzle.org). "The Lost Cause:" a solarpunk novel of hope in the climate emergency, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), November 2023 (http://lost-cause.org). "The Internet Con": A nonfiction book about interoperability and Big Tech (Verso) September 2023 (http://seizethemeansofcomputation.org). Signed copies at Book Soup (https://www.booksoup.com/book/9781804291245). "Red Team Blues": "A grabby, compulsive thriller that will leave you knowing more about how the world works than you did before." Tor Books http://redteamblues.com. "Chokepoint Capitalism: How to Beat Big Tech, Tame Big Content, and Get Artists Paid, with Rebecca Giblin", on how to unrig the markets for creative labor, Beacon Press/Scribe 2022 https://chokepointcapitalism.com Upcoming books (permalink) "Unauthorized Bread": a middle-grades graphic novel adapted from my novella about refugees, toasters and DRM, FirstSecond, 2026 "Enshittification, Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It" (the graphic novel), Firstsecond, 2026 "The Memex Method," Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2026 "The Reverse-Centaur's Guide to AI," a short book about being a better AI critic, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, June 2026 Colophon (permalink) Today's top sources: Currently writing: "The Reverse Centaur's Guide to AI," a short book for Farrar, Straus and Giroux about being an effective AI critic. LEGAL REVIEW AND COPYEDIT COMPLETE. "The Post-American Internet," a short book about internet policy in the age of Trumpism. PLANNING. A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING This work – excluding any serialized fiction – is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license. That means you can use it any way you like, including commercially, provided that you attribute it to me, Cory Doctorow, and include a link to pluralistic.net. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ Quotations and images are not included in this license; they are included either under a limitation or exception to copyright, or on the basis of a separate license. Please exercise caution. How to get Pluralistic: Blog (no ads, tracking, or data-collection): Pluralistic.net Newsletter (no ads, tracking, or data-collection): https://pluralistic.net/plura-list Mastodon (no ads, tracking, or data-collection): https://mamot.fr/@pluralistic Medium (no ads, paywalled): https://doctorow.medium.com/ Twitter (mass-scale, unrestricted, third-party surveillance and advertising): https://twitter.com/doctorow Tumblr (mass-scale, unrestricted, third-party surveillance and advertising): https://mostlysignssomeportents.tumblr.com/tagged/pluralistic "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 https://pluralistic.net/2025/12/08/giant-teddybears/

Pluralistic: The Reverse-Centaur’s Guide to Criticizing AI (05 Dec 2025) Today's links The Reverse Centaur’s Guide to Criticizing AI: My speech for U Washington's Neuroscience, AI and Society lecture series. Hey look at this: Delights to delectate. Object permanence: Pac Man ghost algorithms; The US wrote Spain's copyright law; Illinois makes prisoners rent their cells; "Urban Transport Without the Hot Air"; "Ministry for the Future": Canada sues Google; In defense of 230; NYPD racist murder postmortem; Student debt trap; "That makes me smart." Upcoming appearances: Where to find me. 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. The Reverse Centaur’s Guide to Criticizing AI (permalink) Last night, I gave a speech for the University of Washington's "Neuroscience, AI and Society" lecture series, through the university's Computational Neuroscience Center. It was called "The Reverse Centaur’s Guide to Criticizing AI," and it's based on the manuscript for my next book, "The Reverse Centaur’s Guide to Life After AI," which will be out from Farrar, Straus and Giroux next June: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/future-tense-neuroscience-ai-and-society-with-cory-doctorow-tickets-1735371255139 The talk was sold out, but the video will be available soon. In the meantime, here's the text of my lecture. I'm very grateful to UW for the opportunity, and for a lovely visit to Seattle! == I'm a science fiction writer, which means that my job is to make up futuristic parables about our current techno-social arrangements to interrogate not just what a gadget does, but who it does it for, and who it does it to. What I don't do is predict the future. No one can predict the future, which is a good thing, since if the future were predictable, that would mean that what we all do couldn't change it. It would mean that the future was arriving on fixed rails and couldn't be steered. Jesus Christ, what a miserable proposition! Now, not everyone understands the distinction. They think sf writers are oracles, soothsayers. Unfortunately, even some of my colleagues labor under the delusion that they can "see the future." But for every sf writer who deludes themselves into thinking that they are writing the future, there are a hundred sf fans who believe that they are reading the future, and a depressing number of those people appear to have become AI bros. The fact that these guys can't shut up about the day that their spicy autocomplete machine will wake up and turn us all into paperclips has led many confused journalists and conference organizers to try to get me to comment on the future of AI. That's a thing I strenuously resisted doing, because I wasted two years of my life explaining patiently and repeatedly why I thought crypto was stupid, and getting relentless bollocked by cryptocurrency cultists who at first insisted that I just didn't understand crypto. And then, when I made it clear that I did understand crypto, insisted that I must be a paid shill This is literally what happens when you argue with Scientologists, and life is Just. Too. Short. So I didn't want to get lured into another one of those quagmires, because on the one hand, I just don't think AI is that important of a technology, and on the other hand, I have very nuanced and complicated views about what's wrong, and not wrong, about AI, and it takes a long time to explain that stuff. But people wouldn't stop asking, so I did what I always do. I wrote a book. Over the summer I wrote a book about what I think about AI, which is really about what I think about AI criticism, and more specifically, how to be a good AI critic. By which I mean: "How to be a critic whose criticism inflicts maximum damage on the parts of AI that are doing the most harm." I titled the book The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI, and Farrar, Straus and Giroux will publish it in June, 2026. But you don't have to wait until then because I am going to break down the entire book's thesis for you tonight, over the next 40 minutes. I am going to talk fast. # Start with what a reverse centaur is. In automation theory, a "centaur" is a person who is assisted by a machine. You're a human head being carried around on a tireless robot body. Driving a car makes you a centaur, and so does using autocomplete. And obviously, a reverse centaur is machine head on a human body, a person who is serving as a squishy meat appendage for an uncaring machine. Like an Amazon delivery driver, who sits in a cabin surrounded by AI cameras, that monitor the driver's eyes and take points off if the driver looks in a proscribed direction, and monitors the driver's mouth because singing isn't allowed on the job, nd rats the driver out to the boss if they don't make quota. The driver is in that van because the van can't drive itself and can't get a parcel from the curb to your porch. The driver is a peripheral for a van, and the van drives the driver, at superhuman speed, demanding superhuman endurance. But the driver is human, so the van doesn't just use the driver. The van uses the driver up. Obviously, it's nice to be a centaur, and it's horrible to be a reverse centaur. There are lots of AI tools that are potentially very centaur-like, but my thesis is that these tools are created and funded for the express purpose of creating reverse-centaurs, which is something none of us want to be. But like I said, the job of an sf writer is to do more than think about what the gadget does, and drill down on who the gadget does it for and who the gadget does it to. Tech bosses want us to believe that there is only one way a technology can be used. Mark Zuckerberg wants you to think that it's technologically impossible to have a conversation with a friend without him listening in. Tim Cook wants you to think that it's technologically impossible for you to have a reliable computing experience unless he gets a veto over which software you install and without him taking 30 cents out of every dollar you spend. Sundar Pichai wants you think that it's impossible for you to find a webpage unless he gets to spy on you from asshole to appetite This is all a kind of vulgar Thatcherism. Margaret Thatcher's mantra was "There is no alternative." She repeated this so often they called her "TINA" Thatcher: There. Is. No. Alternative. TINA. "There is no alternative" is a cheap rhetorical slight. It's a demand dressed up as an observation. "There is no alternative" means "STOP TRYING TO THINK OF AN ALTERNATIVE." Which, you know, fuck that. I'm an sf writer, my job is to think of a dozen alternatives before breakfast. So let me explain what I think is going on here with this AI bubble, and sort out the bullshit from the material reality, and explain how I think we could and should all be better AI critics. # Start with monopolies: tech companies are gigantic and they don't compete, they just take over whole sectors, either on their own on in cartels. Google and Meta control the ad market. Google and Apple control the mobile market, and Google pays Apple more than $20 billion/year not to make a competing search engine, and of course, Google has a 90% Search market-share. Now, you'd think that this was good news for the tech companies, owning their whole sector. But it's actually a crisis. You see, when a company is growing, it is a "growth stock," and investors really like growth stocks. When you buy a share in a growth stock, you're making a bet that it will continue to grow. So growth stocks trade at a huge multiple of their earnings. This is called the "price to earnings ratio" or "P/E ratio." But once a company stops growing, it is a "mature" stock, and it trades at a much lower P/E ratio. So for ever dollar that Target – a mature company – brings in, it is worth ten dollars. It has a PE ratio of 10, while Amazon has a PE ratio of 36, which means that for ever dollar Amazon brings in, the market values it at $36. It's wonderful to run a company that's got a growth stock. Your shares are as good as money. If you want to buy another company, or hire a key worker, you can offer stock instead of cash. And stock is very easy for companies to get, because shares are manufactured right there on the premises, all you have to do is type some zeroes into a spreadsheet, while dollars are much harder to come by. A company can only get dollars from customers or creditors. So when Amazon bids against Target for a key acquisition, or a key hire, Amazon can bid with shares they make by typing zeroes into a spreadsheet, and Target can only bid with dollars they get from selling stuff to us, or taking out loans. which is why Amazon generally wins those bidding wars. That's the upside of having a growth stock. But here's the downside: eventually a company has to stop growing. Like, say you get a 90% market share in your sector, how are you gonna grow? Once the market decides that you aren't a growth stock, once you become mature, your stocks are revalued, to a P/E ratio befitting a mature stock. If you are an exec at a dominant company with a growth stock, you have to live in constant fear that the market will decide that you're not likely to grow any further. Think of what happened to Facebook in the first quarter of 2022. They told investors that they experienced slightly slower growth in the USA than they had anticipated, and investors panicked. They staged a one-day, $240B sell off. A quarter-trillion dollars in 24 hours! At the time, the largest, most precipitous drop in corporate valuation in human history. That's a monopolist's worst nightmare, because once you're presiding over a "mature" firm, the key employees you've been compensating with stock, experience a precipitous pay-drop and bolt for the exits, so you lose the people who might help you grow again, and you can only hire their replacements with dollars. With dollars, not shares. And the same goes for acquiring companies that might help you grow, because they, too, are going to expect money, not stock. This is the paradox of the growth stock. While you are growing to domination, the market loves you, but once you achieve dominance, the market lops 75% or more off your value in a single stroke if they don't trust your pricing power. Which is why growth stock companies are always desperately pumping up one bubble or another, spending billions to hype the pivot to video, or cryptocurrency, or NFTs, or Metaverse, or AI. I'm not saying that tech bosses are making bets they don't plan on winning. But I am saying that winning the bet – creating a viable metaverse – is the secondary goal. The primary goal is to keep the market convinced that your company will continue to grow, and to remain convinced until the next bubble comes along. So this is why they're hyping AI: the material basis for the hundreds of billions in AI investment. # Now I want to talk about how they're selling AI. The growth narrative of AI is that AI will disrupt labor markets. I use "disrupt" here in its most disreputable, tech bro sense The promise of AI – the promise AI companies make to investors – is that there will be AIs that can do your job, and when your boss fires you and replaces you with AI, he will keep half of your salary for himself, and give the other half to the AI company. That's it. That's the $13T growth story that MorganStanley is telling. It's why big investors and institutionals are giving AI companies hundreds of billions of dollars. And because they are piling in, normies are also getting sucked in, risking their retirement savings and their family's financial security. Now, if AI could do your job, this would still be a problem. We'd have to figure out what to do with all these technologically unemployed people. But AI can't do your job. It can help you do your job, but that doesn't mean it's going to save anyone money. Take radiology: there's some evidence that AIs can sometimes identify solid-mass tumors that some radiologists miss, and look, I've got cancer. Thankfully, it's very treatable, but I've got an interest in radiology being as reliable and accurate as possible If my Kaiser hospital bought some AI radiology tools and told its radiologists: "Hey folks, here's the deal. Today, you're processing about 100 x-rays per day. From now on, we're going to get an instantaneous second opinion from the AI, and if the AI thinks you've missed a tumor, we want you to go back and have another look, even if that means you're only processing 98 x-rays per day. That's fine, we just care about finding all those tumors" If that's what they said, I'd be delighted. But no one is investing hundreds of billions in AI companies because they think AI will make radiology more expensive, not even if it that also makes radiology more accurate. The market's bet on AI is that an AI salesman will visit the CEO of Kaiser and make this pitch: "Look, you fire 9/10s of your radiologists, saving $20m/year, you give us $10m/year, and you net $10m/year, and the remaining radiologists' job will be to oversee the diagnoses the AI makes at superhuman speed, and somehow remain vigilant as they do so, despite the fact that the AI is usually right, except when it's catastrophically wrong. "And if the AI misses a tumor, this will be the human radiologist's fault, because they are the 'human in the loop.' It's their signature on the diagnosis." This is a reverse centaur, and it's a specific kind of reverse-centaur: it's what Dan Davies calles an "accountability sink." The radiologist's job isn't really to oversee the AI's work, it's to take the blame for the AI's mistakes. This is another key to understanding – and thus deflating – the AI bubble. The AI can't do your job, but an AI salesman can convince your boss to fire you and replace you with an AI that can't do your job. This is key because it helps us build the kinds of coalitions that will be successful in the fight against the AI bubble If you're someone who's worried about cancer, and you're being told that the price of making radiology too cheap to meter, is that we're going to have to re-home America's 32,000 radiologists, with the trade-off that no one will every be denied radiology services again, you might say, "Well, OK, I'm sorry for those radiologists, and I fully support getting them job training or UBI or whatever. But the point of radiology is to fight cancer, not to pay radiologists, so I know what side I'm on." AI hucksters and their customers in the C-suites want the public on their side. They want to forge a class alliance between AI deployers and the people who enjoy the fruits of the reverse centaurs' labor. They want us to think of ourselves as enemies to the workers. Now, some people will be on the workers' side because of politics or aesthetics. They just like workers better than their bosses. But if you want to win over all the people who benefit from your labor, you need to understand and stress how the products of the AI will be substandard. That they are going to get charged more for worse things. That they have a shared material interest with you. Will those products be substandard? There's every reason to think so. Earlier, I alluded to "automation blindness, "the physical impossibility of remaining vigilant for things that rarely occur. This is why TSA agents are incredibly good at spotting water bottles. Because they get a ton of practice at this, all day, every day. And why they fail to spot the guns and bombs that government red teams smuggle through checkpoints to see how well they work, because they just don't have any practice at that. Because, to a first approximation, no one deliberately brings a gun or a bomb through a TSA checkpoint. Automation blindness is the Achilles' heel of "humans in the loop." Think of AI software generation: there are plenty of coders who love using AI, and almost without exception, they are senior, experienced coders, who get to decide how they will use these tools. For example, you might ask the AI to generate a set of CSS files to faithfully render a web-page across multiple versions of multiple browsers. This is a notoriously fiddly thing to do, and it's pretty easy to verify if the code works – just eyeball it in a bunch of browsers. Or maybe the coder has a single data file they need to import and they don't want to write a whole utility to convert it. Tasks like these can genuinely make coders more efficient and give them more time to do the fun part of coding, namely, solving really gnarly, abstract puzzles. But when you listen to business leaders about their AI plans for coders, it's clear they're not looking to make some centaurs. They want to fire a lot of tech workers – 500,000 over the past three years – and make the rest pick up their work with coding, which is only possible if you let the AI do all the gnarly, creative problem solving, and then you do the most boring, soul-crushing part of the job: reviewing the AIs' code. And because AI is just a word guessing program, because all it does is calculate the most probable word to go next, the errors it makes are especially subtle and hard to spot, because these bugs are literally statistically indistinguishable from working code (except that they're bugs). Here's an example: code libraries are standard utilities that programmers can incorporate into their apps, so they don't have to do a bunch of repetitive programming. Like, if you want to process some text, you'll use a standard library. If it's an HTML file, that library might be called something like lib.html.text.parsing; and if it's a DOCX file, it'll be lib.docx.text.parsing. But reality is messy, humans are inattentive and stuff goes wrong, so sometimes, there's another library, this one for parsing PDFs, and instead of being called lib.pdf.text.parsing, it's called lib.text.pdf.parsing. Now, because the AI is a statistical inference engine, because all it can do is predict what word will come next based on all the words that have been typed in the past, it will "hallucinate" a library called lib.pdf.text.parsing. And the thing is, malicious hackers know that the AI will make this error, so they will go out and create a library with the predictable, hallucinated name, and that library will get automatically sucked into your program, and it will do things like steal user data or try and penetrate other computers on the same network. And you, the human in the loop – the reverse centaur – you have to spot this subtle, hard to find error, this bug that is literally statistically indistinguishable from correct code. Now, maybe a senior coder could catch this, because they've been around the block a few times, and they know about this tripwire. But guess who tech bosses want to preferentially fire and replace with AI? Senior coders. Those mouthy, entitled, extremely highly paid workers, who don't think of themselves as workers. Who see themselves as founders in waiting, peers of the company's top management. The kind of coder who'd lead a walkout over the company building drone-targeting systems for the Pentagon, which cost Google ten billion dollars in 2018. For AI to be valuable, it has to replace high-wage workers, and those are precisely the experienced workers, with process knowledge, and hard0won intuition, who might spot some of those statistically camouflaged AI errors. Like I said, the point here is to replace high-waged workers And one of the reasons the AI companies are so anxious to fire coders is that coders are the princes of labor. They're the most consistently privileged, sought-after, and well-compensated workers in the labor force. If you can replace coders with AI, who cant you replace with AI? Firing coders is an ad for AI. Which brings me to AI art. AI art – or "art" – is also an ad for AI, but it's not part of AI's business model. Let me explain: on average, illustrators don't make any money. They are already one of the most immiserated, precartized groups of workers out there. They suffer from a pathology called "vocational awe." That's a term coined by the librarian Fobazi Ettarh, and it refers to workers who are vulnerable to workplace exploitation because they actually care about their jobs – nurses, librarians, teachers, and artists. If AI image generators put every illustrator working today out of a job, the resulting wage-bill savings would be undetectable as a proportion of all the costs associated with training and operating image-generators. The total wage bill for commercial illustrators is less than the kombucha bill for the company cafeteria at just ONE of Open AI's campuses. The purpose of AI art – and the story of AI art as a death-knell for artists – is to convince the broad public that AI is amazing and will do amazing things. It's to create buzz. Which is not to say that it's not disgusting that former OpenAI CTO Mira Murati told a conference audience that "some creative jobs shouldn't have been there in the first place," and that it's not especially disgusting that she and her colleagues boast about using the work of artists to ruin those artists' livelihoods. It's supposed to be disgusting. It's supposed to get artists to run around and say, "The AI can do my job, and it's going to steal my job, and isn't that terrible?" Because the customers for AI – corporate bosses – don't see AI taking workers' jobs as terrible. They see it as wonderful. But can AI do an illustrator's job? Or any artist's job? Let's think about that for a second. I've been a working artist since I was 17 years old, when I sold my first short story, and I've given it a lot of thought, and here's what I think art is: it starts with an artist, who has some vast, complex, numinous, irreducible feeling in their mind. And the artist infuses that feeling into some artistic medium. They make a song, or a poem, or a painting, or a drawing, or a dance, or a book, or a photograph. And the idea is, when you experience this work, a facsimile of the big, numinous, irreducible feeling will materialize in your mind. Now that I've defined art, we have to go on a little detour. I have a friend who's a law professor, and before the rise of chatbots, law students knew better than to ask for reference letters from their profs, unless they were a REALLY good student. Because those letters were a pain in the ass to write. So if you advertised for a postdoc and you heard from a candidate with a reference letter from a respected prof, the mere existence of that letter told you that the prof really thought highly of that student. But then we got chatbots, and everyone knows that you generate a reference letter by feeding three bullet points to an LLM, and it'll barf up five paragraphs of florid nonsense about the student. So when my friend advertises for a postdoc, they are flooded with reference letters, and they deal with this flood by feeding all these letters to another chatbot, and ask it to reduce them back to three bullet points. Now, obviously, they won't be the same bullet-points, which makes this whole thing terrible. But just as obviously, nothing in that five-paragraph letter except the original three bullet points are relevant to the student. The chatbot doesn't know the student. It doesn't know anything about them. It cannot add a single true or useful statement about the student to the letter. What does this have to do with AI art? Art is a transfer of a big, numinous, irreducible feeling from an artist to someone else. But the image-gen program doesn't know anything about your big, numinous, irreducible feeling. The only thing it knows is whatever you put into your prompt, and those few sentences are diluted across a million pixels or a hundred thousand words, so that the average communicative density of the resulting work is indistinguishable from zero. It's possible to infuse more communicative intent into a work: writing more detailed prompts, or doing the selective work of choosing from among many variants, or directly tinkering with the AI image after the fact, with a paintbrush or Photoshop or The Gimp. And if there will every be a piece of AI art that is good art – as opposed to merely striking, or interesting, or an example of good draftsmanship – it will be thanks to those additional infusions of creative intent by a human. And in the meantime, it's bad art. It's bad art in the sense of being "eerie," the word Mark Fisher uses to describe "when there is something present where there should be nothing, or is there is nothing present when there should be something." AI art is eerie because it seems like there is an intender and an intention behind every word and every pixel, because we have a lifetime of experience that tells us that paintings have painters, and writing has writers. But it's missing something. It has nothing to say, or whatever it has to say is so diluted that it's undetectable. The images were striking before we figured out the trick, but now they're just like the images we imagine in clouds or piles of leaves. We're the ones drawing a frame around part of the scene, we're the ones focusing on some contours and ignoring the others. We're looking at an inkblot, and it's not telling us anything. Sometimes that can be visually arresting, and to the extent that it amuses people in a community of prompters and viewers, that's harmless. I know someone who plays a weekly Dungeons and Dragons game over Zoom. It's transcribed by an open source model running locally on the dungeon master's computer, which summarizes the night's session and prompts an image generator to create illustrations of key moments. These summaries and images are hilarious because they're full of errors. It's a bit of harmless fun, and it bring a small amount of additional pleasure to a small group of people. No one is going to fire an illustrator because D&D players are image-genning funny illustrations where seven-fingered paladins wrestle with orcs that have an extra hand. But bosses have and will fire illustrators, because they fantasize about being able to dispense with creative professionals and just prompt an AI. Because even though the AI can't do the illustrator's job, an AI salesman can convince the illustrator's boss to fire them and replace them with an AI that can't do their job. This is a disgusting and terrible juncture, and we should not simply shrug our shoulders and accept Thatcherism's fatalism: "There is no alternative." So what is the alternative? A lot of artists and their allies think they have an answer: they say we should extend copyright to cover the activities associated with training a model. And I'm here to tell you they are wrong:w rong because this would inflict terrible collateral damage on socially beneficial activities, and it would represent a massive expansion of copyright over activities that are currently permitted – for good reason!. Let's break down the steps in AI training. First, you scrape a bunch of web-pages This is unambiguously legal under present copyright law. You do not need a license to make a transient copy of a copyrighted work in order to analyze it, otherwise search engines would be illegal. Ban scraping and Google will be the last search engine we ever get, the Internet Archive will go out of business, that guy in Austria who scraped all the grocery store sites and proved that the big chains were colluding to rig prices would be in deep trouble. Next, you perform analysis on those works. Basically, you count stuff on them: count pixels and their colors and proximity to other pixels; or count words. This is obviously not something you need a license for. It's just not illegal to count the elements of a copyrighted work. And we really don't want it to be, not if you're interested in scholarship of any kind. And it's important to note that counting things is legal, even if you're working from an illegally obtained copy. Like, if you go to the flea market, and you buy a bootleg music CD, and you take it home and you make a list of all the adverbs in the lyrics, and you publish that list, you are not infringing copyright by doing so. Perhaps you've infringed copyright by getting the pirated CD, but not by counting the lyrics. This is why Anthropic offered a $1.5b settlement for training its models based on a ton of books it downloaded from a pirate site: not because counting the words in the books infringes anyone's rights, but because they were worried that they were going to get hit with $150k/book statutory damages for downloading the files. OK, after you count all the pixels or the words, it's time for the final step: publishing them. Because that's what a model is: a literary work (that is, a piece of software) that embodies a bunch of facts about a bunch of other works, word and pixel distribution information, encoded in a multidimensional array. And again, copyright absolutely does not prohibit you from publishing facts about copyrighted works. And again, no one should want to live in a world where someone else gets to decide which truthful, factual statements you can publish. But hey, maybe you think this is all sophistry. Maybe you think I'm full of shit. That's fine. It wouldn't be the first time someone thought that. After all, even if I'm right about how copyright works now, there's no reason we couldn't change copyright to ban training activities, and maybe there's even a clever way to wordsmith the law so that it only catches bad things we don't like, and not all the good stuff that comes from scraping, analyzing and publishing. Well, even then, you're not gonna help out creators by creating this new copyright. If you're thinking that you can, you need to grapple with this fact: we have monotonically expanded copyright since 1976, so that today, copyright covers more kinds of works, grants exclusive rights over more uses, and lasts longer. And today, the media industry is larger and more profitable than it has ever been, and also: the share of media industry income that goes to creative workers is lower than its ever been, both in real terms, and as a proportion of those incredible gains made by creators' bosses at the media company. So how it is that we have given all these new rights to creators, and those new rights have generated untold billions, and left creators poorer? It's because in a creative market dominated by five publishers, four studios, three labels, two mobile app stroes, and a single company that controls all the ebooks and audiobooks, giving a creative worker extra rights to bargain with is like giving your bullied kid more lunch money. It doesn't matter how much lunch money you give the kid, the bullies will take it all. Give that kid enough money and the bullies will hire an agency to run a global campaign proclaiming "think of the hungry kids! Give them more lunch money!" Creative workers who cheer on lawsuits by the big studios and labels need to remember the first rule of class warfare: things that are good for your boss are rarely what's good for you. The day Disney and Universal filed suit against Midjourney, I got a press release from the RIAA, which represents Disney and Universal through their recording arms. Universal is the largest label in the world. Together with Sony and Warner, they control 70% of all music recordings in copyright today. It starts: "There is a clear path forward through partnerships that both further AI innovation and foster human artistry." It ends: "This action by Disney and Universal represents a critical stand for human creativity and responsible innovation." And it's signed by Mitch Glazier, CEO of the RIAA. It's very likely that name doesn't mean anything to you. But let me tell you who Mitch Glazier is. Today, Mitch Glazier is the CEO if the RIAA, with an annual salary of $1.3m. But until 1999, Mitch Glazier was a key Congressional staffer, and in 1999, Glazier snuck an amendment into an unrelated bill, the Satellite Home Viewer Improvement Act, that killed musicians' right to take their recordings back from their labels. This is a practice that had been especially important to "heritage acts" (which is a record industry euphemism for "old music recorded by Black people"), for whom this right represented the difference between making rent and ending up on the street. When it became clear that Glazier had pulled this musician-impoverishing scam, there was so much public outcry, that Congress actually came back for a special session, just to vote again to cancel Glazier's amendment. And then Glazier was kicked out of his cushy Congressional job, whereupon the RIAA started paying more than $1m/year to "represent the music industry." This is the guy who signed that press release in my inbox. And his message was: The problem isn't that Midjourney wants to train a Gen AI model on copyrighted works, and then use that model to put artists on the breadline. The problem is that Midjourney didn't pay RIAA members Universal and Disney for permission to train a model. Because if only Midjourney had given Disney and Universal several million dollars for training right to their catalogs, the companies would have happily allowed them to train to their heart's ccontent, and they would have bought the resulting models, and fired as many creative professionals as they could. I mean, have we already forgotten the Hollywood strikes? I sure haven't. I live in Burbank, home to Disney, Universal and Warner, and I was out on the line with my comrades from the Writers Guild, offering solidarity on behalf of my union, IATSE 830, The Animation Guild, where I'm a member of the writers' unit. And I'll never forget when one writer turned to me and said, "You know, you prompt an LLM exactly the same way an exec gives shitty notes to a writers' room. You know: 'Make me ET, except it's about a dog, and put a love interest in there, and a car chase in the second act.' The difference is, you say that to a writers' room and they all make fun of you and call you a fucking idiot suit. But you say it to an LLM and it will cheerfully shit out a terrible script that conforms exactly to that spec (you know, Air Bud)." These companies are desperate to use AI to displace workers. When Getty Images sues AI companies, it's not representing the interests of photographers. Getty hates paying photographers! Getty just wants to get paid for the training run, and they want the resulting AI model to have guardrails, so it will refuse to create images that compete with Getty's images for anyone except Getty. But Getty will absolutely use its models to bankrupt as many photographers as it possibly can. A new copyright to train models won't get us a world where models aren't used to destroy artists, it'll just get us a world where the standard contracts of the handful of companies that control all creative labor markets are updated to require us to hand over those new training rights to those companies. Demanding a new copyright just makes you a useful idiot for your boss, a human shield they can brandish in policy fights, a tissue-thin pretense of "won't someone think of the hungry artists?" When really what they're demanding is a world where 30% of the investment capital of the AI companies go into their shareholders' pockets. When an artist is being devoured by rapacious monopolies, does it matter how they divvy up the meal? We need to protect artists from AI predation, not just create a new way for artists to be mad about their impoverishment. And incredibly enough, there's a really simple way to do that. After 20+ years of being consistently wrong and terrible for artists' rights, the US Copyright Office has finally done something gloriously, wonderfully right. All through this AI bubble, the Copyright Office has maintained – correctly – that AI-generated works cannot be copyrighted, because copyright is exclusively for humans. That's why the "monkey selfie" is in the public domain. Copyright is only awarded to works of human creative expression that are fixed in a tangible medium. And not only has the Copyright Office taken this position, they've defended it vigorously in court, repeatedly winning judgments to uphold this princple. The fact that every AI created work is in the public domain means that if Getty or Disney or Universal or Hearst newspapers use AI to generate works – then anyone else can take those works, copy them, sell them, or give them away for free. And the only thing those companies hate more than paying creative workers, is having other people take their stuff without permission. The US Copyright Office's position means that the only way these companies can get a copyright is to pay humans to do creative work. This is a recipe for centaurhood. If you're a visual artist or writer who uses prompts to come up with ideas or variations, that's no problem, because the ultimate work comes from you. And if you're a video editor who uses deepfakes to change the eyelines of 200 extras in a crowd-scene, then sure, those eyeballs are in the public domain, but the movie stays copyrighted. But creative workers don't have to rely on the US government to rescue us from AI predators. We can do it ourselves, the way the writers did in their historic writers' strike. The writers brought the studios to their knees. They did it because they are organized and solidaristic, but also are allowed to do something that virtually no other workers are allowed to do: they can engage in "sectoral bargaining," whereby all the workers in a sector can negotiate a contract with every employer in the sector. That's been illegal for most workers since the late 1940s, when the Taft-Hartley Act outlawed it. If we are gonna campaign to get a new law passed in hopes of making more money and having more control over our labor, we should campaign to restore sectoral bargaining, not to expand copyright. Our allies in a campaign to expand copyright are our bosses, who have never had our best interests at heart. While our allies in the fight for sector bargaining are every worker in the country. As the song goes, "Which side are you on?" OK, I need to bring this talk in for a landing now, because I'm out of time, so I'm going to close out with this: AI is a bubble and bubbles are terrible. Bubbles transfer the life's savings of normal people who are just trying to have a dignified retirement to the wealthiest and most unethical people in our society, and every bubble eventually bursts, taking their savings with it. But not every bubble is created equal. Some bubbles leave behind something productive. Worldcom stole billions from everyday people by defrauding them about orders for fiber optic cables. The CEO went to prison and died there. But the fiber outlived him. It's still in the ground. At my home, I've got 2gb symmetrical fiber, because AT&T lit up some of that old Worldcom dark fiber. All things being equal, it would have been better if Worldcom hadn't ever existed, but the only thing worse than Worldcom committing all that ghastly fraud would be if there was nothing to salvage from the wreckage. I don't think we'll salvage much from cryptocurrency, for example. Sure, there'll be a few coders who've learned something about secure programming in Rust. But when crypto dies, what it will leave behind is bad Austrian economics and worse monkey JPEGs. AI is a bubble and it will burst. Most of the companies will fail. Most of the data-centers will be shuttered or sold for parts. So what will be left behind? We'll have a bunch of coders who are really good at applied statistics. We'll have a lot of cheap GPUs, which'll be good news for, say, effects artists and climate scientists, who'll be able to buy that critical hardware at pennies on the dollar. And we'll have the open source models that run on commodity hardware, AI tools that can do a lot of useful stuff, like transcribing audio and video, describing images, summarizing documents, automating a lot of labor-intensive graphic editing, like removing backgrounds, or airbrushing passersby out of photos. These will run on our laptops and phones, and open source hackers will find ways to push them to do things their makers never dreamt of. If there had never been an AI bubble, if all this stuff arose merely because computer scientists and product managers noodled around for a few year coming up with cool new apps for back-propagation, machine learning and generative adversarial networks, most people would have been pleasantly surprised with these interesting new things their computers could do. We'd call them "plugins." It's the bubble that sucks, not these applications. The bubble doesn't want cheap useful things. It wants expensive, "disruptive" things: Big foundation models that lose billions of dollars every year. When the AI investment mania halts, most of those models are going to disappear, because it just won't be economical to keep the data-centers running. As Stein's Law has it: "Anything that can't go on forever eventually stops." The collapse of the AI bubble is going to be ugly. Seven AI companies currenly account for more than a third of the stock market, and they endlessly pass around the same $100b IOU. Bosses are mass-firing productive workers and replacing them with janky AI, and when the janky AI is gone, no one will be able to find and re-hire most of those workers, we're going to go from disfunctional AI systems to nothing. AI is the asbestos in the walls of our technological society, stuffed there with wild abandon by a finance sector and tech monopolists run amok. We will be excavating it for a generation or more. So we need to get rid of this bubble. Pop it, as quickly as we can. To do that, we have to focus on the material factors driving the bubble. The bubble isn't being driven by deepfake porn, oOr election disinformation, or AI image-gen, or slop advertising. All that stuff is terrible and harmful, but it's not driving investment. The total dollar figure represented by these apps doesn't come close to making a dent in the capital expenditures and operating costs of AI. They are peripheral, residual uses: flashy, but unimportant to the bubble. Get rid of all those uses and you reduce the expected income of AI companies by a sum so small it rounds to zero. Same goes for all that "AI Safety" nonsense, that purports to concern itself with preventing an AI from attaining sentience and turning us all into paperclips. First of all, this is facially absurd. Throwing more words and GPUs into the word-guessing program won't make it sentient. That's like saying, "Well, we keep breeding these horses to run faster and faster, so it's only a matter of time until one of our mares gives birth to a locomotive." A human mind is not a word-guessing program with a lot of extra words. I'm here for science fiction thought experiments, don't get me wrong. But also, don't mistake sf for prophesy. SF stories about superintelligence are futuristic parables, not business plans, roadmaps, or predictions. The AI Safety people say they are worried that AI is going to end the world, but AI bosses love these weirdos. Because on the one hand, if AI is powerful enough to destroy the world, think of how much money it can make! And on the other hand, no AI business plan has a line on its revenue projections spreadsheet labeled "Income from turning the human race into paperclips." So even if we ban AI companies from doing this, we won't cost them a dime in investment capital. To pop the bubble, we have to hammer on the forces that created the bubble: the myth that AI can do your job, especially if you get high wages that your boss can claw back; the understanding that growth companies need a succession of ever-more-outlandish bubbles to stay alive; the fact that workers and the public they serve are on one side of this fight, and bosses and their investors are on the other side. Because the AI bubble really is very bad news, it's worth fighting seriously, and a serious fight against AI strikes at its roots: the material factors fuelling the hundreds of billions in wasted capital that are being spent to put us all on the breadline and fill all our walls will high-tech asbestos. (Image: Cryteria, CC BY 3.0, modified) Hey look at this (permalink) Politics and Capitalist Stagnation https://www.unpopularfront.news/p/politics-and-capitalist-stagnation An Analysis of the Proposed Spirit Financial-Credit Union 1 Merger. The Consequences for the Credit Union System https://chipfilson.com/2025/12/an-analysis-of-the-proposed-spirit-financal-credit-union-1-merger/ Zillow deletes climate risk data from listings after complaints it harms sales https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2025/dec/01/zillow-removes-climate-risk-data-home-listings After Years of Controversy, the EU’s Chat Control Nears Its Final Hurdle: What to Know https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2025/12/after-years-controversy-eus-chat-control-nears-its-final-hurdle-what-know How the dollar-store industry overcharges cash-strapped customers while promising low prices https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/dec/03/customers-pay-more-rising-dollar-store-costs Object permanence (permalink) #20yrsago Haunted Mansion papercraft model adds crypts and gates https://www.haunteddimensions.raykeim.com/index313.html #20yrsago Print your own Monopoly money https://web.archive.org/web/20051202030047/http://www.hasbro.com/monopoly/pl/page.treasurechest/dn/default.cfm #15yrsago Bunnie explains the technical intricacies and legalities of Xbox hacking https://www.bunniestudios.com/blog/2010/usa-v-crippen-a-retrospective/ #15yrsago How Pac Man’s ghosts decide what to do: elegant complexity https://web.archive.org/web/20101205044323/https://gameinternals.com/post/2072558330/understanding-pac-man-ghost-behavior #15yrsago Glorious, elaborate, profane insults of the world https://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/efee7/what_are_your_favorite_culturally_untranslateable/?sort=confidence #15yrsago Walt Disney World castmembers speak about their search for a living wage https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f5BMQ3xQc7o #15yrsago Wikileaks cables reveal that the US wrote Spain’s proposed copyright law https://web.archive.org/web/20140723230745/https://elpais.com/elpais/2010/12/03/actualidad/1291367868_850215.html #15yrsago Cities made of broken technology https://web.archive.org/web/20101203132915/https://agora-gallery.com/artistpage/Franco_Recchia.aspx #10yrsago The TPP’s ban on source-code disclosure requirements: bad news for information security https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2015/12/tpp-threatens-security-and-safety-locking-down-us-policy-source-code-audit #10yrsago Fossil fuel divestment sit-in at MIT President’s office hits 10,000,000,000-hour mark https://twitter.com/FossilFreeMIT/status/672526210581274624 #10yrsago Hacker dumps United Arab Emirates Invest Bank’s customer data https://www.dailydot.com/news/invest-bank-hacker-buba/ #10yrsago Illinois prisons spy on prisoners, sue them for rent on their cells if they have any money https://www.chicagotribune.com/2015/11/30/state-sues-prisoners-to-pay-for-their-room-board/ #10yrsago Free usability help for privacy toolmakers https://superbloom.design/learning/blog/apply-for-help/ #10yrsago In the first 334 days of 2015, America has seen 351 mass shootings (and counting) https://web.archive.org/web/20151209004329/https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2015/11/30/there-have-been-334-days-and-351-mass-shootings-so-far-this-year/ #10yrsago Not even the scapegoats will go to jail for BP’s murder of the Gulf Coast https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2015/12/manslaughter-charges-dropped-in-bp-spill-case-nobody-from-bp-will-go-to-prison/ #10yrsago Urban Transport Without the Hot Air: confusing the issue with relevant facts! https://memex.craphound.com/2015/12/03/urban-transport-without-the-hot-air-confusing-the-issue-with-relevant-facts/ #5yrsago Breathtaking Iphone hack https://pluralistic.net/2020/12/03/ministry-for-the-future/#awdl #5yrsago Graffitists hit dozens of NYC subway cars https://pluralistic.net/2020/12/03/ministry-for-the-future/#getting-up #5yrsago The Ministry For the Future https://pluralistic.net/2020/12/03/ministry-for-the-future/#ksr #5yrsago Monopolies made America vulnerable to covid https://pluralistic.net/2020/12/03/ministry-for-the-future/#big-health #5yrsago Section 230 is Good, Actually https://pluralistic.net/2020/12/04/kawaski-trawick/#230 #5yrsago Postmortem of the NYPD's murder of a Black man https://pluralistic.net/2020/12/04/kawaski-trawick/#Kawaski-Trawick #5yrsago Student debt trap https://pluralistic.net/2020/12/04/kawaski-trawick/#strike-debt #1yrago "That Makes Me Smart" https://pluralistic.net/2024/12/04/its-not-a-lie/#its-a-premature-truth #1yrago Canada sues Google https://pluralistic.net/2024/12/03/clementsy/#can-tech Upcoming appearances (permalink) Virtual: Poetic Technologies with Brian Eno (David Graeber Institute), Dec 8 https://davidgraeber.institute/poetic-technologies-with-cory-doctorow-and-brian-eno/ Madison, CT: Enshittification at RJ Julia, Dec 8 https://rjjulia.com/event/2025-12-08/cory-doctorow-enshittification Hamburg: Chaos Communications Congress, Dec 27-30 https://events.ccc.de/congress/2025/infos/index.html Denver: Enshittification at Tattered Cover Colfax, Jan 22 https://www.eventbrite.com/e/cory-doctorow-live-at-tattered-cover-colfax-tickets-1976644174937 Recent appearances (permalink) Enshittification (Future Knowledge) https://futureknowledge.transistor.fm/episodes/enshittification We have become slaves to Silicon Valley (Politics JOE) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JzEUvh1r5-w How Enshittification is Destroying The Internet (Frontline Club) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oovsyzB9L-s Escape Forward with Cristina Caffarra https://escape-forward.com/2025/11/27/enshittification-of-our-digital-experience/ Why Every Platform Betrays You (Trust Revolution) https://fountain.fm/episode/bJgdt0hJAnppEve6Qmt8 Latest books (permalink) "Canny Valley": A limited edition collection of the collages I create for Pluralistic, self-published, September 2025 "Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It," Farrar, Straus, Giroux, October 7 2025 https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374619329/enshittification/ "Picks and Shovels": a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about the heroic era of the PC, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), February 2025 (https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250865908/picksandshovels). "The Bezzle": a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about prison-tech and other grifts, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), February 2024 (the-bezzle.org). "The Lost Cause:" a solarpunk novel of hope in the climate emergency, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), November 2023 (http://lost-cause.org). "The Internet Con": A nonfiction book about interoperability and Big Tech (Verso) September 2023 (http://seizethemeansofcomputation.org). Signed copies at Book Soup (https://www.booksoup.com/book/9781804291245). "Red Team Blues": "A grabby, compulsive thriller that will leave you knowing more about how the world works than you did before." Tor Books http://redteamblues.com. "Chokepoint Capitalism: How to Beat Big Tech, Tame Big Content, and Get Artists Paid, with Rebecca Giblin", on how to unrig the markets for creative labor, Beacon Press/Scribe 2022 https://chokepointcapitalism.com Upcoming books (permalink) "Unauthorized Bread": a middle-grades graphic novel adapted from my novella about refugees, toasters and DRM, FirstSecond, 2026 "Enshittification, Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It" (the graphic novel), Firstsecond, 2026 "The Memex Method," Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2026 "The Reverse-Centaur's Guide to AI," a short book about being a better AI critic, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, June 2026 Colophon (permalink) Today's top sources: Currently writing: "The Reverse Centaur's Guide to AI," a short book for Farrar, Straus and Giroux about being an effective AI critic. LEGAL REVIEW AND COPYEDIT COMPLETE. "The Post-American Internet," a short book about internet policy in the age of Trumpism. PLANNING. A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING This work – excluding any serialized fiction – is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license. That means you can use it any way you like, including commercially, provided that you attribute it to me, Cory Doctorow, and include a link to pluralistic.net. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ Quotations and images are not included in this license; they are included either under a limitation or exception to copyright, or on the basis of a separate license. Please exercise caution. How to get Pluralistic: Blog (no ads, tracking, or data-collection): Pluralistic.net Newsletter (no ads, tracking, or data-collection): https://pluralistic.net/plura-list Mastodon (no ads, tracking, or data-collection): https://mamot.fr/@pluralistic Medium (no ads, paywalled): https://doctorow.medium.com/ Twitter (mass-scale, unrestricted, third-party surveillance and advertising): https://twitter.com/doctorow Tumblr (mass-scale, unrestricted, third-party surveillance and advertising): https://mostlysignssomeportents.tumblr.com/tagged/pluralistic "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 https://pluralistic.net/2025/12/05/pop-that-bubble/

Pluralistic: A year in illustration (2025 edition) (03 Dec 2025) Today's links A year in illustration (2025 edition): I think I'm getting the hang of this? Hey look at this: Delights to delectate. Object permanence: HADOPI is born; Tea Party wants to disenfranchise renters; How to kill TPP; Mozilla ejects Thunderbird; Rosa Parks was a lifelong radical activist. Upcoming appearances: Where to find me. 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 year in illustration (2025 edition) (permalink) One of the most surprising professional and creative developments of my middle-age has been discovering my love of collage. I have never been a "visual" person – I can't draw, I can't estimate whether a piece of furniture will fit in a given niche, I can't catch a ball, and I can't tell you if a picture is crooked. When Boing Boing started including images with our posts in the early 2000s, I hated it. It was such a chore to find images that were open licensed or public domain, and so many of the subjects I wrote about are abstract and complex and hard to illustrate. Sometimes, I'd come up with a crude visual gag and collage together a few freely usable images as best as I could and call it a day. But over the five years that I've been writing Pluralistic, I've found myself putting more and more effort and thought into these header images. Without realizing it, I put more and more time into mastering The GIMP (a free/open Photoshop alternative), watching tutorial videos and just noodling from time to time. I also discovered many unsuspected sources of public domain work, such as the Library of Congress, whose search engine sucks, but whose collection is astounding (tip: use Kagi or Google to search for images with the "site:loc.gov" flag). I also discovered the Met's incredible collection: https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search And the archives of H Armstrong Roberts, an incredibly prolific stock photographer whose whole corpus is in the public domain. You can download more than 14,000 of his images from the Internet Archive (I certainly did!): https://archive.org/details/h-armstrong-roberts Speaking of the Archive and search engine hacks, I've also developed a method for finding hi-rez images that are otherwise very hard to get. Often, an image search will turn up public domain results on commercial stock sites like Getty. If I can't find public domain versions elsewhere (e.g. by using Tineye reverse-image search), I look for Getty's metadata about the image's source (that is, which book or collection it came from). Then I search the Internet Archive and other public domain repositories for high-rez PDF scans of the original work, and pull the images out of there. Many of my demons come from Compendium rarissimum totius Artis Magicae sistematisatae per celeberrimos Artis hujus Magistros, an 18th century updating of a 11th century demonolgy text, which you can get as a hi-rez at the Wellcome Trust: https://wellcomecollection.org/works/cvnpwy8d Five years into my serious collage phase, I find myself increasingly pleased with the work I'm producing. I actually self-published a little book of my favorites this year (Canny Valley), which Bruce Sterling provided an intro for and which the legendary book designed John Berry laid out fot me, and I'm planning future volumes: https://pluralistic.net/2025/09/04/illustrious/#chairman-bruce I've been doing annual illustration roundups for the past several years, selecting my favorites from the year's crop: 2022: https://pluralistic.net/2022/12/25/a-year-in-illustration/ 2023: https://pluralistic.net/2023/12/21/collages-r-us/ 2024: https://pluralistic.net/2024/12/07/great-kepplers-ghost/ It's a testament to how much progress I've made that when it came time to choose this year's favorites, I had 33 images I wanted to highlight. Much of this year's progress is down to my friend and neighbor Alistair Milne, an extremely talented artist and commercial illustrator who has periodically offered me little bits of life-changing advice on composition and technique. I've also found a way to use these images in my talks: I've pulled together a slideshow of my favorite (enshittification-related) images, formatted for 16:9 (the incredibly awkward aspect ratio that everyone seems to expect these days), with embedded Creative Commons attributions. When I give a talk, I ask to have this run behind me in "kiosk mode," looping with a 10-second delay between each slide. Here's an up-to-date (as of today) version: https://archive.org/download/enshittification-slideshow/enshittification.pptx If these images intrigue you and you'd like hi-rez versions to rework on your own, you can get full rez versions of all my blog collagesin my "Pluralistic Collages" Flickr set: https://www.flickr.com/photos/doctorow/albums/72177720316719208 They're licensed CC BY-SA 4.0, though some subelements may be under different licenses (check the image descriptions for details). But everything is licensed for remix and commercial distribution, so go nuts! All the books I reviewed in 2025 The underlying image comes from the Library of Congress (a search for "reading + book") (because "reading" turns up pictures of Reading, PA and Reading, UK). I love the poop emoji from the cover of the US edition of Enshittification and I'm hoping to get permission to do a lot more with it. https://pluralistic.net/2025/12/02/constant-reader/#too-many-books Meta's new top EU regulator is contractually prohibited from saying mean things about Meta Mark Zuckerberg's ghastly Metaverse avatar is such a gift to his critics. I can't believe his comms team let him release it! The main image is an H Armstrong Roberts classic of a beat cop wagging his finger at a naughty lad on a bicycle. The Wachowskis' 'code waterfall' comes from this generator: https://github.com/yeaayy/the-matrix https://pluralistic.net/2025/12/01/erin-go-blagged/#big-tech-omerta The long game In my intro to last year's roundup, I wrote about Joseph Keppler, the incredibly prolific illustrator and publisher who founded Puck magazine and drew hundreds of illustrations, many of them editorial cartoons that accompanied articles that criticized monopolies and America's oligarch class. As with so much of his work, Keppler's classic illustration of Rockefeller as a shrimpy, preening king updates very neatly to today's context, through the simple expedient of swapping in Zuck's metaverse avatar. https://pluralistic.net/2025/11/20/if-you-wanted-to-get-there/#i-wouldnt-start-from-here There's one thing EVERY government can do to shrink Big Tech This is another Keppler/Roberts mashup. Keppler's original is Teddy Roosevelt as a club-wielding ("speak softly and carry a big stick") trustbusting Goliath. The crying baby and money come from an H Armstrong Roberts tax-protest stock photo (one of the money sacks was originally labeled "TAXES"). This one also includes one of my standbys, Cryteria's terrific vector image of HAL 9000's glaring red eye, always a good symbolic element for stories about Big Tech, surveillance, and/or AI: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:HAL9000.svg https://pluralistic.net/2025/11/01/redistribution-vs-predistribution/#elbows-up-eurostack When AI prophecy fails The chain-gang photo comes from the Library of Congress. That hacker hoodie is a public domain graphic ganked from Wikimedia Commons. I love how the HAL 9000 eye pops as the only color element in this one. https://pluralistic.net/2025/10/29/worker-frightening-machines/#robots-stole-your-jerb-kinda Checking in on the state of Amazon's chickenized reverse-centaurs Another H Armstrong Roberts remix: originally, this was a grinning delivery man jugging several parcels. I reskinned him and his van with Amazon delivery livery, and matted in the horse-head to create a "reverse centaur" (another theme I return to often). I used one of Alistair Milne's tips to get that horse's head right: rather than trying to trace all the stray hairs on the mane, I traced them with a fine brush tool on a separate layer, then erased the strays from the original and merged down to get a nice, transparency-enabled hair effect. https://pluralistic.net/2025/10/23/traveling-salesman-solution/#pee-bottles The mad king's digital killswitch The Uncle Sam image is Keppler's (who else?). In the original (which is about tariffs! everything old is new!), Sam's legs have becoome magnets that are drawing in people and goods from all over the world. The Earth-from-space image is a NASA pic. Love that all works of federal authorship are born in the public domain! https://pluralistic.net/2025/10/20/post-american-internet/#huawei-with-american-characteristics Microsoft, Tear Down That Wall! Clippy makes a perfect element for posts about chatbots. It's hard to think that Microsoft shipped a product with such a terrible visual design, but at the same time, I gotta give 'em credit, it's so awful that it's still instantly recognizable, 25 years later. https://pluralistic.net/2025/10/15/freedom-of-movement/#data-dieselgate A disenshittification moment from the land of mass storage Another remix of Keppler's excellent Teddy Roosevelt/trustbuster giant image, this time with Ben Franklin's glorious C-note phiz. God, I love using images from money! https://pluralistic.net/2025/10/10/synology/#how-about-nah Apple's unlawful evil Alistair Milne helped me work up a super hi-rez version of Trump's hair from his official (public domain) 2024 presidential portrait. Lots of tracing those fine hairs, and boy does it pay off. Apple's "Think Different" wordmark (available as a vector on Wikimedia Commons) is a gift to the company's critics. The fact that the NYPD actually routinely show up for protests dressed like this makes my job too easy. https://pluralistic.net/2025/10/06/rogue-capitalism/#orphaned-syrian-refugees-need-not-apply Blue Bonds Another C-note remix. One of the things I love about remixing US currency is that every part of it is so immediately identifiable, meaning that just about any crop works. The California bear comes from a public domain vector on Wikimedia Commons. I worked hard to get the intaglio effect to transfer to the bear, but only with middling success. Thankfully, I was able to work at massive resolution (like, 4,000 px wide) and reduce the image, which hides a lot of my mistakes. https://pluralistic.net/2025/10/04/fiscal-antifa/#post-trump The real (economic) AI apocalypse is nigh Another money scan, this time a hyperinflationary Zimbabwean dollar (I also looked at some Serbian hyperinflationary notes, but the Zimbabwean one was available at a higher rez). Not thrilled about the engraving texture on the HAL 9000, but the Sam Altman intaglio kills. I spent a lot of time tweaking that using G'mic, a good (but uneven) plugin suite for the GIMP. https://pluralistic.net/2025/09/27/econopocalypse/#subprime-intelligence Rage Against the (Algorithmic Management) Machine This one made this year's faves list purely because I was so happy with how the Doordash backpack came out. The belligerent worker is part of a Keppler diptych showing a union worker and a boss facing off against one another with a cowering consumer caught in the crossfire. I'm not thrilled about this false equivalence, but I'll happily gank the figures, which are great. https://pluralistic.net/2025/09/25/roboboss/#counterapps The enshittification of solar (and how to stop it) I spent a lot of time tweaking the poop emoji on those solar panels, eventually painstakingly erasing the frames from the overlay image. It was worth it. https://pluralistic.net/2025/09/23/our-friend-the-electron/#to-every-man-his-castle AI psychosis and the warped mirror One of those high-concept images that came out perfect. Replacing Narcissus's face (and reflection) with HAL 9000 made for a striking image that only took minutes to turn out. https://pluralistic.net/2025/09/17/automating-gang-stalking-delusion/#paranoid-androids Reverse centaurs are the answer to the AI paradox https://pluralistic.net/2025/09/11/vulgar-thatcherism/#there-is-an-alternative Radical juries Another high-concept image that just worked. It took me more time to find a good public domain oil painting of a jury than it did to transform each juror into Karl Marx. I love how this looks. https://pluralistic.net/2025/08/22/jury-nullification/#voir-dire LLMs are slot-machines It's surprisingly hard to find a decent public domain photo of a slot machine in use. I eventually started to wonder if Vegas had a no-cameras policy in the early years. Eventually, the Library of Commerce came through with a scanned neg that was high enough rez that I could push the elements I wanted to have stand out from an otherwise muddy, washed-out image. https://pluralistic.net/2025/08/16/jackpot/#salience-bias Zuckermuskian solipsism The laborers come from an LoC collection of portraits of children who worked in coal mines in the 1910s. They're pretty harrowing stuff. I spent a long plane ride cropping each individual out of several of these images. https://pluralistic.net/2025/08/18/seeing-like-a-billionaire/#npcs Good ideas are popular The original crowd scene (a presidential inauguration, if memory serves) was super high-rez, which made it very easy to convincingly matte in the monkeys and the Congressional dome. I played with tinting this one, but pure greyscale looked a lot better. https://pluralistic.net/2025/08/07/the-people-no-2/#water-flowing-uphill By all means, tread on those people Another great high concept. The wordiness of Wilhoit's Law makes this intrinsically funny. There's a public domain vector-art Gadsen flag on Wikimedia Commons. I found a Reddit forum where font nerds had sleuthed out the typeface for the words on the original. https://pluralistic.net/2025/08/26/sole-and-despotic-dominion/#then-they-came-for-me AI's pogo-stick grift The pogo stick kid is another H Armstrong Roberts gank. I spent ages trying to get the bounce effect to look right, and then Alistair Milne fixed it for me in like 10 seconds. The smoke comes from an oil painting of the eruption of Vesuvius from the Met. It's become my go-to "hellscape" background. https://pluralistic.net/2025/08/02/inventing-the-pedestrian/#three-apis-in-a-trenchcoat The worst possible antitrust outcome The smoke from Vesuvius makes another appearance. I filled the Android droid with tormented figures from Bosch's "Garden of Early Delights," which is an amazing painting that is available as a more than 15,000 pixel wide (!) scan on Wikimedia Commons. https://pluralistic.net/2025/09/03/unpunishing-process/#fucking-shit-goddammit-fuck Conservatism considered as a movement of bitter rubes Boy, I love this one. The steamship image is from the Met. The carny barker is a still of WC Fields, whose body language is impeccable. It took a long-ass time to get a MAGA hat in the correct position, but I eventually found a photo of an early 20th C baseball player and then tinted his hat and matted in the MAGA embroidery. https://pluralistic.net/2025/07/22/all-day-suckers/#i-love-the-poorly-educated Your Meta AI prompts are in a live, public feed These guys on the sofa come from Thomas Hawke, who has recovered and scanned nearly 30,000 "found photos" – collections from estates, yard-sales, etc: https://www.flickr.com/search/?sort=date-taken-desc&safe_search=1&tags=foundphotograph&user_id=51035555243%40N01&view_all=1 The Shining-esque lobby came from the Library of Congress, where it is surprisingly easy to find images of buildings with scary carpets. https://pluralistic.net/2025/06/19/privacy-breach-by-design/#bringing-home-the-beacon Strange Bedfellows and Long Knives Another great high-concept that turned out great. I think that matting the Heritage Foundation chiselwork into the background really pulls it together, and I'm really happy with the glow-up I did for the knives. https://pluralistic.net/2025/05/21/et-tu-sloppy-steve/#fractured-fairytales Are the means of computation even seizable? I spent so long cutting out this old printing press, but boy has it stood me in good stead. I think there's like five copies of that image layered on top of each other here. The figure is an inside joke for all my Luddite trufan pals outthere, a remix of a classic handbill depicting General Ned Ludd. https://pluralistic.net/2025/05/14/pregnable/#checkm8 Mark Zuckerberg announces mind-control ray (again) I was worried that this wouldn't work unless you were familiar with the iconic portrait photo of Rasputin, but that guy was such a creepy-ass-looking freak, and Zuck's metaverse avatar is so awful, that it works on its own merits, too. https://pluralistic.net/2025/05/07/rah-rah-rasputin/#credulous-dolts Mike Lee and Jim Jordan want to kill the law that bans companies from cheating you The original image was so grainy, but it was also fantastic and I spent hours rehabbing it. It's a posed, comedic photo of two Australian miners in the bush cheating at cards, rooking a third man. The Uncle Sam is (obviously) from Keppler. https://pluralistic.net/2025/04/29/cheaters-and-liars/#caveat-emptor-brainworms Mark Zuckerberg personally lost the Facebook antitrust case This one got more, "Wow is that ever creepy" comments than any of the other ones. I was going for Chatty Cathy, but that Zuck metaverse avatar is so weird and bad that it acts like visual MSG in any image, amplifying its creepiness to incredible heights. https://pluralistic.net/2025/04/18/chatty-zucky/#is-you-taking-notes-on-a-criminal-fucking-conspiracy Machina economicus The image is from an early illustrated French edition of HG Wells's War of the Worlds. I love how this worked out, and a family of my fans in Ireland commissioned a paint-by-numbers of it and painted it in and mailed it to me. It's incredible. If I re-use this, I will probably swap out the emoji for the graphic from the book's cover. https://pluralistic.net/2025/04/14/timmy-share/#a-superior-moral-justification-for-selfishness How the world's leading breach expert got phished I don't understand how composition works, but I know when I've lucked into a good composition. This is a good composition! I made this on the sofa of Doc and Joyce Searles in Bloomington, Indiana while I was in town for my Picks and Shovels book tour. https://pluralistic.net/2025/04/05/troy-hunt/#teach-a-man-to-phish Anyone who trusts an AI therapist needs their head examined I worked those tentacles for so long, trying to get Freud/Cthulhu/HAL's lower half just right. In the end, it all paid off. https://pluralistic.net/2025/04/01/doctor-robo-blabbermouth/#fool-me-once-etc-etc You can't save an institution by betraying its mission The "fireman" is an image from the Department of Defense of a soldier demoing a flamethrower (I hacked in the firefighter's uniform). I spent a lot of time trying to get a smoky look for the foreground here, but I don't think it succeeded. https://pluralistic.net/2025/03/19/selling-out/#destroy-the-village-to-save-it https://pluralistic.net/2025/12/03/cannier-valley/