Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow (RSS/Atom feed)

Pluralistic: William Gibson vs Margaret Thatcher (17 Mar 2026) # Today's links * [William Gibson vs Margaret Thatcher][1]: The Street Finds Its Own Alternatives For Things. * [Hey look at this][2]: Delights to delectate. * [Object permanence][3]: Prison for spamming; Dotcom layoffs; Ethernet action-figures; UK libel reform; "Poe's Detective"; God's customer service center; "Making Hay"; Alexa privacy Valdez. * [Upcoming appearances][4]: Where to find me. * [Recent appearances][5]: Where I've been. * [Latest books][6]: You keep readin' em, I'll keep writin' 'em. * [Upcoming books][7]: Like I said, I'll keep writin' 'em. * [Colophon][8]: All the rest. [Two boxers squaring off. One (with blue gloves) has the head of William Gibson. The other (red gloves) has the head of Margaret Thatcher. The background is an engraving of a 16th century complex machine.] # William Gibson vs Margaret Thatcher ([permalink][9]) William Gibson is one of history's most quotable sf writers: "The future is here, it's not evenly distributed"; "Don't let the little fuckers generation-gap you"; "Cyberspace is everting"; and the immortal: "The street finds its own uses for things": [https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/William_Gibson][10] "The street finds its own uses" is a surprisingly subtle and liberatory battle-cry. It stakes a claim by technology's *users* that is separate from the claims asserted by corporations that make technology (often under grotesque and cruel conditions) and market it (often for grotesque and cruel purposes). "The street finds its own uses" is a statement about technopolitics. It acknowledges that yes, there *are* politics embedded in our technology, the blood in the machine, but these politics are neither simple, *nor are they immutable*. The fact that a technology was born in sin does not preclude it from being put to virtuous ends. A technology's politics are up for grabs. In other words, it's the opposite of Audre Lorde's "The master's tools will never dismantle the master's house." It's an assertion that, in fact, the master's tools have all the driver-bits, hex-keys, and socket sets needed to completely dismantle the master's house, and, moreover, to build something better with the resulting pile of materials. And of *course* the street finds its own uses for things. Things – technology – don't appear out of nowhere. Everything is in a lineage, made from the things that came before it, destined to be transformed by the things that come later. Things can't come into existence until other things already exist. Take the helicopter. Lots of people have observed the action of a screw and the twirling of a maple key as it falls from a tree and thought, *perhaps that could be made to fly*. Da Vinci was drawing helicopters in the 15th century: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leonardo%27s_aerial_screw][11] But Da Vinci couldn't build a helicopter. No one could, until they did. To make the first helicopter, you need to observe the action of the screw and the twirling of a maple key, *and* you need to have lightweight, strong alloys and powerful internal combustion engines. Those other things had to be invented by other people first. Once they were, the next person who thought hard about screws and maple keys was bound to get a helicopter off the ground. That's why things tend to be invented simultaneously, by unrelated parties. TV, radio and the telephone all have multiple inventors, because these people were the cohort that happened to alight upon the insights needed to build these technologies *after* the adjacent technologies had been made and disseminated. If technopolitics were immutable – if the original sin of a technology could never be washed away – then *everything* is beyond redemption. Somewhere in the history of the lever, the pulley and the wheel are some absolute *monsters*. Your bicycle's bloodline includes some truly horrible ancestors. The computer is practically a crime against humanity: [https://pluralistic.net/2021/10/24/the-traitorous-eight-a…][12] A defining characteristic of purity culture is the belief that things are defined by their origins. An artist who was personally terrible must make terrible art – even if that art succeeds *artistically*, even if it moves, comforts and inspires you, it can't ever be separated from the politics of its maker. It is terrible because of its origins, not its merits. If you hate the sinner, you must also hate the sin. "The street finds its own uses" counsels us to hate the sinner and *love* the sin. The indisputable fact that HP Lovecraft was a racist creep is not a reason to write off Cthulhoid mythos – it's a reason to claim and refashion them: [https://pluralistic.net/2021/01/09/the-old-crow-is-gettin…][13] The claim that sin is a kind of forever-chemical contaminant that can't ever be rinsed away is the ideology of Mr Gotcha: > We should improve society somewhat. > > Yet you participate in society. Curious! [https://thenib.com/mister-gotcha/][14] In its right-wing form, it is Margaret Thatcher's "There is no alternative": [https://pluralistic.net/2024/10/15/piketty-pilled/#tax-ju…][15] Thatcher demanded that you accept all the injustices and oppressions of capitalism if you enjoyed its fruits. If capitalism put a roof over your head and groceries in your fridge, you can't complain about the people it hurts. There is no version of society that has the machines and practices that produced those things that does not also produce the injustice. The technological version of this is the one that tech bosses peddle: If you enjoy talking to your friends on Facebook, you can't complain about Mark Zuckerberg listening in on the conversation. There is no alternative. Wanting to talk to your friends out of Zuck's earshot is like wanting water that's not wet. It's unreasonable. But there's a left version of this, its doppelganger: the belief that a technology born in sin can never be redeemed. If you use an LLM running on your computer to find a typo, using an unmeasurably small amount of electricity in the process, you still sin – not because of anything that happens when you use that LLM, but because of LLMs' "structural properties," "the way they make it harder to learn and grow," "the way they make products worse," the "emissions, water use and e-waste": [https://tante.cc/2026/02/20/acting-ethical-in-an-imperfec…][16] The facts that finding punctuation errors in your own work using your own computer doesn't make it "harder to learn and grow," doesn't "make products worse," and doesn't add to "emissions, water use and e-waste" are irrelevant. The part that matters isn't the use of a technology, it's the *origin*. The fact that this technology is steeped in indisputable sin means that every use of it is sinful. The street can find as many uses as it likes for things, but it won't matter, because there is no alternative. When radical technologists scheme to liberate technology, they're not hoping to redeem *the gadget*, they're trying to liberate *people*. Information doesn't want to be free, because information doesn't and can't want anything. But *people* want to be free, and liberated access to information technology is a precondition for human liberation itself. Promethean leftists don't reject the master's tools: we *seize* them. The fact that Unix was born of a convicted monopolist who turned the screws on users at every turn isn't a reason to abandon Unix – it demands that we reverse-engineer, open, and *free* Unix: [https://pluralistic.net/2025/01/20/capitalist-unrealism/#…][17] We don't do this out of moral consideration for Unix. Unix is inert, it warrants no moral consideration. But billions of users of free operating systems that are resistant to surveillance and control *are* worthy of moral consideration and we set them free by seizing the means of computation. If a technology can do something to further human thriving, then we can love the sin, even as we hate the sinners in its lineage. We seize the means of computation, not because we care about computers, but because we care about *people*. Artifacts do have politics, but those politics are not immutable. Those politics are ours to seize and refashion: [https://faculty.cc.gatech.edu/~beki/cs4001/Winner.pdf][18] "The purpose of a system is what it does" (S. Beer). The important fact about a technology is what it *does*, not *how it came about*. Does a *use* of a technology harm someone? Does a *use* of a technology harm the environment? Does a *use* of a technology help someone do something that improves their life? Studying the origins of technology is good because it helps us avoid the systems and practices that hurt people. Knowing about the monsters in our technology's lineage helps us avoid repeating their sins. But there will *always* be sin in our technology's past, because our technology's past is the *entire* past, because technology is a lineage, not a gadget. If you reject things because of their origins – and not because of the things they do – then you'll end up rejecting *everything* (if you're honest), or twisting yourself into a series of dead-ends as you rationalize reasons that the exceptions you make out of necessity aren't really exceptions. (*Image: [Dylan Parker][19], [CC BY-SA 2.0][20], modified*) # Hey look at this ([permalink][21]) * Gone (Almost) Phishin’ [https://ma.tt/2026/03/gone-almost-phishin/][22] * The Foilies 2026 [https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2026/03/foilies-2026][23] * Why Voters Should Support Senator Klobuchar’s ‘‘Antitrust Accountability and Transparency Act’’ [https://www.thesling.org/why-voters-should-support-senato…][24] * Bombshell Document Details Watergate-Style Corruption at the Antitrust Division [https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/monopoly-round-up-bomb…][25] * Sodium-ion batteries hit the Midwestern grid in first-of-its-kind pilothttps://electrek.co/2026/03/11/sodium-ion-batteries-hit-t… (h/t Slashdot) [A shelf of leatherbound history books with a gilt-stamped series title, 'The World's Famous Events.'] # Object permanence ([permalink][26]) #25yrsago Prison for spamming [https://it.slashdot.org/story/01/03/15/1325251/spammers-f…][27] #25yrsago 1040 for laid-off dot com workers [][28] #25yrsago Sony ships a PalmOS device [https://web.archive.org/web/20010331181042/http://www.son…][29] #25yrsago “You Own Your Own Metadata” [https://www.feedmag.com/templates/default_a_id-1648][30] #20yrsago Action-figures made from Ethernet cable [https://basik.ru/handmade/2066/][31] #15yrsago Poor countries have more piracy because media costs too much — report [https://web.archive.org/web/20110310042425/http://piracy.…][32] #15yrsago Bahrain’s royals declare martial law [https://www.theguardian.com/world/2011/mar/15/bahrain-mar…][33] #15yrsago Libel reform in the UK: telling the truth won’t be illegal any longer? [https://www.theguardian.com/media/2011/mar/15/libel-law-r…][34] #15yrsago My weird femur printed in stainless steel [https://www.flickr.com/photos/doctorow/tags/femur][35] #15yrsago War on the PC and the network: copyright was just the start [https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2011/mar/15/comput…][36] #15yrsago Poe’s Detective: audio editions of Poe’s groundbreaking detective stories [https://memex.craphound.com/2011/03/15/poes-detective-aud…][37] #15yrsago New York slashes hospital spending, but can’t touch multimillion-dollar CEO paychecks [https://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/16/nyregion/16about.html?…][38] #10yrsago Leaked memo: Donald Trump volunteers banned from critizing him, for life [https://web.archive.org/web/20160315161328/http://www.dai…][39] #10yrsago Open letter from virtually every leading UK law light: Snooper’s Charter not fit for purpose [https://www.theguardian.com/law/2016/mar/14/investigatory…][40] #10yrsago Life inside God’s customer service prayer call-centre [https://web.archive.org/web/20160317153851/http://www.tor…][41] #10yrsago The post-Snowden digital divide: the ability to understand and use privacy tools [https://journal.radicallibrarianship.org/index.php/journa…][42] #10yrsago Some future for you: the radical rise of hope in the UK [https://thebaffler.com/salvos/despair-fatigue-david-graeber][43] #10yrsago America’s universities: Hedge funds saddled with inconvenient educational institutions [https://web.archive.org/web/20160309093147/https://www.th…][44] #10yrsago Office chairs made out of old Vespa scooters [https://belybel.com/][45] #5yrsago STREAMLINER [https://pluralistic.net/2021/03/15/free-markets/#streamliner][46] #5yrsago Free markets [https://pluralistic.net/2021/03/15/free-markets/#rent-see…][47] #5yrsago Making Hay [https://pluralistic.net/2021/03/15/free-markets/#making-hay][48] #1yrago Amazon annihilates Alexa privacy settings, turns on continuous, nonconsensual audio uploading [https://pluralistic.net/2025/03/15/altering-the-deal/#tel…][49] # Upcoming appearances ([permalink][50]) [A photo of me onstage, giving a speech, pounding the podium.] * Barcelona: Enshittification with Simona Levi/Xnet (Llibreria Finestres), Mar 20 [https://www.llibreriafinestres.com/evento/cory-doctorow/][51] * Berkeley: Bioneers keynote, Mar 27 [https://conference.bioneers.org/][52] * Montreal: Bronfman Lecture (McGill), Apr 10 [https://www.eventbrite.ca/e/artificial-intelligence-the-u…][53] * Montreal: Drawn and Quarterly, Apr 10 [https://mtl.drawnandquarterly.com/events/4863920260410][54] * London: Resisting Big Tech Empires (LSBU), Apr 25 [https://www.tickettailor.com/events/globaljusticenow/2042691][55] * Berlin: Re:publica, May 18-20 [https://re-publica.com/de/news/rp26-sprecher-cory-doctorow][56] * Berlin: Enshittification at Otherland Books, May 19 [https://www.otherland-berlin.de/de/event-details/cory-doc…][57] * Hay-on-Wye: HowTheLightGetsIn, May 22-25 [https://howthelightgetsin.org/festivals/hay/big-ideas-2][58] [A screenshot of me at my desk, doing a livecast.] # Recent appearances ([permalink][59]) * Do you feel screwed over by big tech? (Ontario Today) [https://www.cbc.ca/listen/live-radio/1-45-ontario-today/c…][60] * Launch for Cindy's Cohn's "Privacy's Defender" (City Lights) [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WuVCm2PUalU][61] * Chicken Mating Harnesses (This Week in Tech) [https://twit.tv/shows/this-week-in-tech/episodes/1074][62] * The Virtual Jewel Box (U Utah) [https://tanner.utah.edu/podcast/enshittification-cory-doc…][63] * Tanner Humanities Lecture (U Utah) [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i6Yf1nSyekI][64] [A grid of my books with Will Stahle covers..] # Latest books ([permalink][65]) * "Canny Valley": A limited edition collection of the collages I create for Pluralistic, self-published, September 2025 [https://pluralistic.net/2025/09/04/illustrious/#chairman-…][66] * "Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It," Farrar, Straus, Giroux, October 7 2025 [https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374619329/enshittifica…][67] * "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][68]). * "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][69]). * "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][70]). * "The Internet Con": A nonfiction book about interoperability and Big Tech (Verso) September 2023 ([http://seizethemeansofcomputation.org][71]). Signed copies at Book Soup ([https://www.booksoup.com/book/9781804291245][72]). * "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][73]. * "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][74] [A cardboard book box with the Macmillan logo.] # Upcoming books ([permalink][75]) * "The Reverse-Centaur's Guide to AI," a short book about being a better AI critic, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, June 2026 ([https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374621568/thereversece…][76]) * "Enshittification, Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It" (the graphic novel), Firstsecond, 2026 * "The Post-American Internet," a geopolitical sequel of sorts to *Enshittification*, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2027 * "Unauthorized Bread": a middle-grades graphic novel adapted from my novella about refugees, toasters and DRM, FirstSecond, 2027 * "The Memex Method," Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2027 # Colophon ([permalink][77]) Today's top sources: Currently writing: "The Post-American Internet," a sequel to "Enshittification," about the better world the rest of us get to have now that Trump has torched America (1018 words today, 50532 total) * "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/][78] 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][79] Newsletter (no ads, tracking, or data-collection): [https://pluralistic.net/plura-list][80] Mastodon (no ads, tracking, or data-collection): [https://mamot.fr/@pluralistic][81] Bluesky (no ads, possible tracking and data-collection): [https://bsky.app/profile/doctorow.pluralistic.net][82] Medium (no ads, paywalled): [https://doctorow.medium.com/][83] [https://twitter.com/doctorow][84] Tumblr (mass-scale, unrestricted, third-party surveillance and advertising): [https://mostlysignssomeportents.tumblr.com/tagged/plurali…][85] "*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 [1]: https://pluralistic.net/2026/03/17/technopolitics/#origin… [2]: https://pluralistic.net/2026/03/17/technopolitics/#linkdump [3]: https://pluralistic.net/2026/03/17/technopolitics/#retro [4]: https://pluralistic.net/2026/03/17/technopolitics/#upcoming [5]: https://pluralistic.net/2026/03/17/technopolitics/#recent [6]: https://pluralistic.net/2026/03/17/technopolitics/#latest [7]: https://pluralistic.net/2026/03/17/technopolitics/#upcomi… [8]: https://pluralistic.net/2026/03/17/technopolitics/#bragsheet [9]: https://pluralistic.net/2026/03/17/technopolitics/#origin… [10]: https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/William_Gibson [11]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leonardo%27s_aerial_screw [12]: https://pluralistic.net/2021/10/24/the-traitorous-eight-a… [13]: https://pluralistic.net/2021/01/09/the-old-crow-is-gettin… [14]: https://thenib.com/mister-gotcha/ [15]: https://pluralistic.net/2024/10/15/piketty-pilled/#tax-ju… [16]: https://tante.cc/2026/02/20/acting-ethical-in-an-imperfec… [17]: https://pluralistic.net/2025/01/20/capitalist-unrealism/#… [18]: https://faculty.cc.gatech.edu/~beki/cs4001/Winner.pdf [19]: [20]: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/deed.en [21]: https://pluralistic.net/2026/03/17/technopolitics/#linkdump [22]: https://ma.tt/2026/03/gone-almost-phishin/ [23]: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2026/03/foilies-2026 [24]: https://www.thesling.org/why-voters-should-support-senato… [25]: https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/monopoly-round-up-bomb… [26]: https://pluralistic.net/2026/03/17/technopolitics/#retro [27]: https://it.slashdot.org/story/01/03/15/1325251/spammers-f… [28]: [29]: https://web.archive.org/web/20010331181042/http://www.son… [30]: https://www.feedmag.com/templates/default_a_id-1648 [31]: https://basik.ru/handmade/2066/ [32]: https://web.archive.org/web/20110310042425/http://piracy.… [33]: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2011/mar/15/bahrain-mar… [34]: https://www.theguardian.com/media/2011/mar/15/libel-law-r… [35]: https://www.flickr.com/photos/doctorow/tags/femur [36]: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2011/mar/15/comput… [37]: https://memex.craphound.com/2011/03/15/poes-detective-aud… [38]: https://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/16/nyregion/16about.html?… [39]: https://web.archive.org/web/20160315161328/http://www.dai… [40]: https://www.theguardian.com/law/2016/mar/14/investigatory… [41]: https://web.archive.org/web/20160317153851/http://www.tor… [42]: https://journal.radicallibrarianship.org/index.php/journa… [43]: https://thebaffler.com/salvos/despair-fatigue-david-graeber [44]: https://web.archive.org/web/20160309093147/https://www.th… [45]: https://belybel.com/ [46]: https://pluralistic.net/2021/03/15/free-markets/#streamliner [47]: https://pluralistic.net/2021/03/15/free-markets/#rent-see… [48]: https://pluralistic.net/2021/03/15/free-markets/#making-hay [49]: https://pluralistic.net/2025/03/15/altering-the-deal/#tel… [50]: https://pluralistic.net/2026/03/17/technopolitics/#upcoming [51]: https://www.llibreriafinestres.com/evento/cory-doctorow/ [52]: https://conference.bioneers.org/ [53]: https://www.eventbrite.ca/e/artificial-intelligence-the-u… [54]: https://mtl.drawnandquarterly.com/events/4863920260410 [55]: https://www.tickettailor.com/events/globaljusticenow/2042691 [56]: https://re-publica.com/de/news/rp26-sprecher-cory-doctorow [57]: https://www.otherland-berlin.de/de/event-details/cory-doc… [58]: https://howthelightgetsin.org/festivals/hay/big-ideas-2 [59]: https://pluralistic.net/2026/03/17/technopolitics/#recent [60]: https://www.cbc.ca/listen/live-radio/1-45-ontario-today/c… [61]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WuVCm2PUalU [62]: https://twit.tv/shows/this-week-in-tech/episodes/1074 [63]: https://tanner.utah.edu/podcast/enshittification-cory-doc… [64]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i6Yf1nSyekI [65]: https://pluralistic.net/2026/03/17/technopolitics/#latest [66]: https://pluralistic.net/2025/09/04/illustrious/#chairman-… [67]: https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374619329/enshittifica… [68]: https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250865908/picksandshovels [69]: http://thebezzle.org [70]: http://lost-cause.org [71]: http://seizethemeansofcomputation.org [72]: https://www.booksoup.com/book/9781804291245 [73]: http://redteamblues.com [74]: https://chokepointcapitalism.com [75]: https://pluralistic.net/2026/03/17/technopolitics/#upcomi… [76]: https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374621568/thereversece… [77]: https://pluralistic.net/2026/03/17/technopolitics/#bragsheet [78]: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ [79]: http://pluralistic.net [80]: https://pluralistic.net/plura-list [81]: https://mamot.fr/@pluralistic [82]: https://bsky.app/profile/doctorow.pluralistic.net [83]: https://doctorow.medium.com/ [84]: https://twitter.com/doctorow [85]: https://mostlysignssomeportents.tumblr.com/tagged/plurali… https://pluralistic.net/2026/03/17/technopolitics/

Pluralistic: Tools vs uses (16 Mar 2026) # Today's links * [Tools vs uses][1]: Don't fall for it. * [Hey look at this][2]: Delights to delectate. * [Object permanence][3]: Amazon coders x Amazon warehouse workers; Bruces's ETECH speech; Steven King x unions; Tax-free S&P 500 companies; Make Pop Rocks; "Ain't Misbehavin'"; "Car Hacker's Handbook"; Pirates in Iceland. * [Upcoming appearances][4]: Where to find me. * [Recent appearances][5]: Where I've been. * [Latest books][6]: You keep readin' em, I'll keep writin' 'em. * [Upcoming books][7]: Like I said, I'll keep writin' 'em. * [Colophon][8]: All the rest. [A pegboard at a hardware store, festooned with tools, with smoke closing in on it from above and below.] # Tools vs uses ([permalink][9]) When you think of a legal loophole, you probably imagine a drafting error (or perhaps a sneaky insertion) that creates an advantage for a specific person or group of people. For example: Trump's 2017 "Big Beautiful Tax Cut" bill passed after its 479 pages were *covered* in hand-scrawled amendments and additions, which were not read or reviewed by lawmakers prior to voting: [https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/2017/12/02/handwritin…][10] But one change that *was* widely known was Senator Ron Johnson's last-minute amendment to create deductions for "pass through entities." Johnson announced that he would block the bill if his amendment didn't go through. That amendment made three of Johnson's constituents *at least half a billion dollars*: Uline owners Dick and Liz Uihlein and roofing tycoon Diane Hendricks (who collectively donated $20m to Johnson's campaign). All told, the Trump tax bill generated windfalls worth more than $1b for just 82 households, all of whom donated lavishly to the lawmakers who inserted incredibly specific amendments that benefited them, personally: [https://pluralistic.net/2021/08/11/the-canada-variant/#sh…][11] Here's another example: in 1999, a Congressional staffer named Mitch Glazier secured a last-minute, one-line amendment to the Satellite Home Viewer Improvement Act that took away musicians' ability to claim back the rights to their sound recordings after 35 years through a process called "Termination of Transfer": [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mitch_Glazier#Work_for_hire][12] This amendment whacked one group of musicians particularly hard: the Black "heritage acts" who had been coerced into signing *unbelievably shitty* contracts in the 1950s, 60s and 70s, who were increasingly using termination to get those rights back. For these beloved musicians, termination meant the difference between going hungry and buying a couple extra bags of groceries every month (if this sounds familiar, it might be because you read about it in my 2024 novel *The Bezzle*): [https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250865892/thebezzle/][13] Glazier's treachery was so outrageous that Congress actually convened a special session to repeal his amendment, and Glazier slunk out of Congress forever…so that he could take a job at $1.3m/year as CEO of the Recording Industry Association of America, where he squats to this day, insisting that he is fighting for musicians' rights: [https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/organizations/…][14] These are the traditional loopholes – obscure codicils in legislation that allow their beneficiaries to enrich themselves at others' expense. But there's another, equally pernicious kind of loophole that gets far less attention: a loophole that *neutralizes* a beneficial part of a law, *taking away* a right that the law seems to confer. I have spent most of my adult life fighting against one of these rights-confiscating reverse loopholes: the "exemptions" clause to Section 1201 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA 1201), which might just be the most dangerous technology law on the books: [https://pluralistic.net/2026/01/14/sole-and-despotic/#wor…][15] Under DMCA 1201, it's a felony – punishable by a 5-year sentence and a $500k fine – to bypass an "access control" for a copyrighted work. This means that altering the software (that is, "a copyrighted work") in a device you own – a car, a tractor, a hearing aid, a smart speaker, a printer, a phone, a console, etc, etc – is a crime, *even if your alteration does not break any other laws*. For example: there is no law requiring you to buy your printer ink from the company that sold you your printer. However, the cartel of companies that control the inkjet market all use software that is designed to block generic ink. You *could* turn this code off, but that would be a felony under Section 1201 of the DMCA, which means that, in practice, it's a felony to put generic ink in your printer. Jay Freeman calls it "felony contempt of business model." When the DMCA was being debated, lawmakers faced fierce criticism over this clause, so they inserted a "safety valve" into the law that was supposed to prevent the kind of abuse that allows printer companies to force you to pay $10,000/gallon for ink. That escape valve is called the "triennial exemptions process." Every three years, the US Copyright Office invites submissions for "exemptions" to DMCA 1201. They've granted lots of these – the right to circumvent access controls on video games for preservation purposes, on DVDs for film criticism, and on various kinds of electronics for repair. This process may strike you as a little cumbersome – do you really have to wait up to three years to pay a lawyer to beg the government for the right to make a legal use of your own property? But this is a reverse loophole, and that means that this isn't merely cumbersome, it's *farcical*. You see, the exemptions that the Copyright Office grants through the triennial process aren't *tools* exemptions, they're *use* exemptions. That means that when the Copyright Office grants an exemption giving you the right to jailbreak your car so that you can make sense of the manufacturer's diagnostic codes and turn your "check engine" light into a specific, actionable diagnosis. *You* have that right. Your *mechanic* does *not* have that right. *You* have the right to jailbreak your car and fix it. But it's worse than that: your right to jailbreak your car does not mean that anyone else gets the right to make a *tool* that allows you to make that *use*. You have a *use* exemption, but there is no *tool* exemption. That means that *you*, personally, must reverse-engineer the firmware in your car, identify a fault in the code, and leverage that to *personally* write software to turn the diagnostic codes into diagnoses. You are not allowed to talk to anyone else about this. You're not allowed to publish your findings. You're certainly not allowed to share the tool you create with anyone else. This is true of *all* the exemptions the Copyright Office grants. If you're a film professor who's been given the right to jailbreak DVDs, you are expected to write your own DVD decrypting software, without help from anyone else, and if you manage it, you can't tell anyone else how you did it. If you're an iPhone owner who's been granted the right to jailbreak your phone and install a different app store, then *you*, personally, must identify a vulnerability in iOS and develop it into an exploit that you are only allowed to use on your own devices. Every other iPhone owner has to do the same thing. DMCA 1201 has been copy-pasted into law-books all over the world. In Europe, it came in through Article 6 of the 2001 EU Copyright Directive (EUCD6). When Norway implemented this law, lawmakers included a bunch of use exemptions in a bid to placate the fierce opposition they faced. One of these exemptions allowed blind people to jailbreak ebooks so they could be used with Braille printers, screen readers, and other assistive devices. In 2003, I traveled to Oslo to debate the minister responsible for the bill. He proudly trumpeted this exemption, so I started asking him questions about it: > How do blind people get the software that jailbreaks their ebooks so they can make use of this exemption? Am I allowed to give them that tool? > > No, the minister said, you're not allowed to do that, that would be a crime. > > Is the Norwegian government allowed to give them that tool? No. How about a blind rights advocacy group? No, not them either. A university computer science department? Nope. A commercial vendor? Certainly not. > > No, the minister explained, under his law, a blind person would be expected to personally reverse-engineer a program like Adobe E-Reader, in hopes of discovering a defect that they could exploit by writing a program to extract the ebook text. > > Oh, I said. But if a blind person did manage to do this, could they supply that tool to other blind people? > > Well, no, the minister said. Each and every blind person must personally – without any help from anyone else – figure out how to reverse-engineer the ebook program, and then individually author their own alternative reader program that worked with the text of their ebooks. [https://pluralistic.net/2024/10/28/mcbroken/#my-milkshake…][16] I don't know for sure how many blind Norwegians have managed to take advantage of this use exemptions, but I'm pretty certain it's zero. Canada's anticircumvention law was passed in 2012 through Bill C-11, the Copyright Modernization Act. Like EUCD6, C-11 has all the defects of America's anticircumvention law. In 2024, Parliament passed a national Right to Repair law (Bill C-244) and a national Interoperability law (Bill C-294). Both of them grant *use* exemptions to Bill C-11 – they allow Canadians to jailbreak their devices to fix them or extend their functionality with interoperable code and hardware. But *neither* bill has a *tools* exemption, which means that they are *useless*, since they only grant Canadians the individual, personal right to jailbreak, but they don't allow Canadian businesses or tinkerers or user groups to make the tools that Canadians need to exercise the use rights that Parliament so generously granted: [https://pluralistic.net/2024/11/15/radical-extremists/#se…][17] Reverse loopholes are incredibly wicked. They exist solely to muddy the waters, to trick people into thinking that problems have been solved while those problems continue to fester. Hardly a week goes without my hearing from someone who's happened upon the use exemptions built into anticircumvention laws around the world and have come to the reasonable conclusion that if a law gives you the right to do something, it must also give other people the right to *help you* do it. Lawmakers who pass these reverse loopholes know what they're doing. They're chaffing the policy airspace, ramming through unpopular legislation under cover of a blizzard of misleading legalese. # Hey look at this ([permalink][18]) * Being a Luddite Is Cool and All, but Have You Seen the Hilarious Tapestries These New Looms Are Making? [https://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/being-a-luddite-is-co…][19] * They Didn’t Want to Have C-Sections. A Judge Would Decide How They Gave Birth. [https://www.propublica.org/article/florida-court-ordered-…][20] * F-Droid says Google’s Android developer verification plan is an ‘existential’ threat to alternative app stores [https://thenewstack.io/f-droid-says-googles-android-devel…][21] * Meta to Shut Down Instagram End-to-End Encrypted Chat Support Starting May 2026 [https://thehackernews.com/2026/03/meta-to-shut-down-insta…][22] * The Removed DOGE Deposition Videos Have Already Been Backed Up Across the Internet [https://www.404media.co/the-removed-doge-deposition-video…][23] [A shelf of leatherbound history books with a gilt-stamped series title, 'The World's Famous Events.'] # Object permanence ([permalink][24]) #20yrsago Full text of Bruce Sterling’s ETECH speech from last week [https://web.archive.org/web/20060406025248/http://www.vir…][25] #20yrsago HOWTO build a glowing throne out of 4k AOL CDs [https://web.archive.org/web/20060408174929/https://stupid…][26] #20yrsago How Sweden’s “Pirate Bay” site resists the MPAA [https://web.archive.org/web/20060423222220/https://www.wi…][27] #15yrsago Stephen King sticks up for unions [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x1vW1zPmnKQ][28] #15yrsago Largest Wisconsin protests ever: 85,000+ people in Madison’s streets [https://web.archive.org/web/20110319152841/http://www.huf…][29] #15yrsago Why Borders failed [https://www.quora.com/Borders-Books/Why-is-Barnes-Noble-p…][30] #15yrsago HOWTO make Pop Rocks [https://www.instructables.com/Pop-Rocks/][31] #15yrsago Ain’t Misbehavin’: subject index to democratic parenting [https://memex.craphound.com/2011/03/14/aint-misbehavin-su…][32] #10yrsago 50 reasons the TPP is terrible beyond belief [https://www.michaelgeist.ca/2016/03/the-trouble-with-the-…][33] #10yrsago More high-profile resignations at Breitbart, after abused reporter thrown under Trump’s bus [https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/rosiegray/michelle-f…][34] #10yrsago If Iceland held its elections today, the Pirate Party would win [https://torrentfreak.com/pirate-party-to-dominate-icelan-…][35] #10yrsago The Car Hacker’s Handbook: a Guide for Penetration Testers [https://memex.craphound.com/2016/03/14/the-car-hackers-ha…][36] #10yrsago USA uses TPP-like trade-court to kill massive Indian solar project [https://web.archive.org/web/20160314085012/http://theanti…][37] #10yrsago These 27 profitable S&P 500 companies paid no tax last year [https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/markets/2016/03/07/2…][38] #10yrsago Family: police high-fived after tasering our handcuffed relative to death [https://web.archive.org/web/20160312165903/https://www.aj…][39] #1yrago The future of Amazon coders is the present of Amazon warehouse workers [https://pluralistic.net/2025/03/13/electronic-whipping/#y…][40] # Upcoming appearances ([permalink][41]) [A photo of me onstage, giving a speech, pounding the podium.] * Barcelona: Enshittification with Simona Levi/Xnet (Llibreria Finestres), Mar 20 [https://www.llibreriafinestres.com/evento/cory-doctorow/][42] * Berkeley: Bioneers keynote, Mar 27 [https://conference.bioneers.org/][43] * Montreal: Bronfman Lecture (McGill) Apr 10 [https://www.eventbrite.ca/e/artificial-intelligence-the-u…][44] * London: Resisting Big Tech Empires (LSBU) [https://www.tickettailor.com/events/globaljusticenow/2042691][45] * Berlin: Re:publica, May 18-20 [https://re-publica.com/de/news/rp26-sprecher-cory-doctorow][46] * Berlin: Enshittification at Otherland Books, May 19 [https://www.otherland-berlin.de/de/event-details/cory-doc…][47] * Hay-on-Wye: HowTheLightGetsIn, May 22-25 [https://howthelightgetsin.org/festivals/hay/big-ideas-2][48] [A screenshot of me at my desk, doing a livecast.] # Recent appearances ([permalink][49]) * Do you feel screwed over by big tech? (Ontario Today) [https://www.cbc.ca/listen/live-radio/1-45-ontario-today/c…][50] * Launch for Cindy's Cohn's "Privacy's Defender" (City Lights) [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WuVCm2PUalU][51] * Chicken Mating Harnesses (This Week in Tech) [https://twit.tv/shows/this-week-in-tech/episodes/1074][52] * The Virtual Jewel Box (U Utah) [https://tanner.utah.edu/podcast/enshittification-cory-doc…][53] * Tanner Humanities Lecture (U Utah) [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i6Yf1nSyekI][54] [A grid of my books with Will Stahle covers..] # Latest books ([permalink][55]) * "Canny Valley": A limited edition collection of the collages I create for Pluralistic, self-published, September 2025 [https://pluralistic.net/2025/09/04/illustrious/#chairman-…][56] * "Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It," Farrar, Straus, Giroux, October 7 2025 [https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374619329/enshittifica…][57] * "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][58]). * "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][59]). * "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][60]). * "The Internet Con": A nonfiction book about interoperability and Big Tech (Verso) September 2023 ([http://seizethemeansofcomputation.org][61]). Signed copies at Book Soup ([https://www.booksoup.com/book/9781804291245][62]). * "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][63]. * "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][64] [A cardboard book box with the Macmillan logo.] # Upcoming books ([permalink][65]) * "The Reverse-Centaur's Guide to AI," a short book about being a better AI critic, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, June 2026 * "Enshittification, Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It" (the graphic novel), Firstsecond, 2026 * "The Post-American Internet," a geopolitical sequel of sorts to *Enshittification*, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2027 * "Unauthorized Bread": a middle-grades graphic novel adapted from my novella about refugees, toasters and DRM, FirstSecond, 2027 * "The Memex Method," Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2027 # Colophon ([permalink][66]) Today's top sources: Currently writing: "The Post-American Internet," a sequel to "Enshittification," about the better world the rest of us get to have now that Trump has torched America ( words today, total) * "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/][67] 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][68] Newsletter (no ads, tracking, or data-collection): [https://pluralistic.net/plura-list][69] Mastodon (no ads, tracking, or data-collection): [https://mamot.fr/@pluralistic][70] Bluesky (no ads, possible tracking and data-collection): [https://bsky.app/profile/doctorow.pluralistic.net][71] Medium (no ads, paywalled): [https://doctorow.medium.com/][72] [https://twitter.com/doctorow][73] Tumblr (mass-scale, unrestricted, third-party surveillance and advertising): [https://mostlysignssomeportents.tumblr.com/tagged/plurali…][74] "*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. 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Pluralistic: Corrupt anticorruption (14 Mar 2026) # Today's links * [Corrupt anticorruption][1]: Notes from a target-rich environment. * [Hey look at this][2]: Delights to delectate. * [Object permanence][3]: Tentacle sphere; EU Venn; Obama v cryptography; Trump v protesters; Amazon coders x Amazon warehouse workers; Bruces's ETECH speech; Steven King x unions; Tax-free S&P 500 companies. * [Upcoming appearances][4]: Where to find me. * [Recent appearances][5]: Where I've been. * [Latest books][6]: You keep readin' em, I'll keep writin' 'em. * [Upcoming books][7]: Like I said, I'll keep writin' 'em. * [Colophon][8]: All the rest. [A Chinese porcelain sculpture depicting a Maoist struggle session; a cadre in uniform and CCCP cap stands by while a Party official forces a man in a dunce cap to his knees. The image has been altered. The cadre now has the 'fat baby' JD Vance head. The Party official has orange skin, Trump hair, and Trump's eyes and mouth. Both figures have US flag lapel pins. Behind them is a soiled US flag.] # Corrupt anticorruption ([permalink][9]) An amazing thing happened this week: a whopping bipartisan Senate majority (89:10!) passed Elizabeth Warren's housing bill, which severely limits private equity companies' ability to buy single-family homes to turn into rental properties: [https://prospect.org/2026/03/13/elizabeth-warrens-amazing…][10] It's a big deal. Since the Great Financial Crisis, US home ownership has fallen sharply, while corporate landlordism has skyrocketed. Rents are through the roof, and private equity bosses boast about gouging their tenants, with the CEO of Blackstone's Invitation Homes ordering the lickspittles to "juice this hog" with endless junk fees and calculated negligence: [https://www.aol.com/juice-hog-real-estate-companies-08030…][11] The corporate takeover of the housing market didn't fall out of the sky. It was a policy of the Obama administration, which directed the mass selloff of homes (foreclosed on by bailed-out banks) to corporate buyers: [https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/boom-senate-votes-to-b…][12] Sunsetting the American dream of home-ownership is the final straw. After all, once America killed off labor rights, the only path to wealth accumulation left for working people was assuming crippling debt to buy a house in hopes that its value would go up forever: [https://pluralistic.net/2021/06/06/the-rents-too-damned-h…][13] The affordability crisis isn't solely a matter of high shelter costs (we see you, grocery greedflation, health care and education!), but housing costs are *totally* out of control. Mamdani's earth-shaking mayoral campaign centered affordability, with housing taking center stage: [https://gothamist.com/news/mamdani-wants-to-take-building…][14] Trump – whose most important skill is his ability to sense vibe-shifts in his base – noticed, and started to make mouth sounds about tackling the affordability crisis, specifically blaming private equity landlords for high rents: [https://www.whitehouse.gov/fact-sheets/2026/01/fact-sheet…][15] But this isn't just a story about a stopped clock being right every now and again. It's a story about boss-politics anti-corruption, in which anti-corruption is pursued to corrupt ends. From 2012-2015, Xi Jinping celebrated his second term as the leader of China with a mass purge undertaken in the name of anti-corruption. Officials from every level of Chinese politics were fired, and many were imprisoned. This allowed Xi to consolidate his control over the CCP, which culminated in a rule-change that eliminated term-limits, paving the way for Xi to continue to rule China for so long as he breathes and wills to power. Xi's purge exclusively targeted officials in his rivals' power-base, kneecapping anyone who might have blocked his power-grab. But just because Xi targeted his rivals' princelings and foot-soldiers, it doesn't mean that Xi was targeting the innocent. A 2018 paper by an economist (Peter Lorentzen, USF) and a political scientist (Xi Lu, NUS) concluded that Xi's purge really did target corrupt officials: [https://web.archive.org/web/20181222163946/https://peterl…][16] The authors reached this conclusion by referencing the data published in the resulting corruption trials, which showed that these officials accepted and offered bribes and feathered their allies' nests at public expense. In other words, Xi didn't cheat by framing innocent officials for crimes they didn't commit. The way Xi cheated was by *exclusively targeting his rivals' allies*. Lorentzen and Lu's paper make it clear that Xi could easily have prosecuted many corrupt officials in his own power base, but he left them unmolested. This is corrupt anti-corruption. In an environment in which *everyone* in power is crooked, you can exclusively bring legitimate prosecutions, and *still* be doing corruption. You just need to confine your prosecutions to your political enemies, whether or not they are more guilty than your allies (think here of the GOP dragging the Clintons into Epstein depositions). 14 years later, Xi's anti-corruption purges continue apace, with 100 empty seats at this year's National People's Congress, whose former occupants are freshly imprisoned or awaiting trial: [https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c78xxyyqwe7o][17] I don't know the details of all 100 prosecutions, but China *absolutely* has a corruption problem that goes all the way to the upper echelon of the state. I find it easy to believe that the officials Xi has targeted are guilty – and I also wouldn't be surprised to hear that they are all supporters of Xi's internal rivals for control of the CCP. As the Epstein files demonstrate, anyone hoping to conduct a purge of America's elites could easily do so without having to frame anyone for crimes they didn't commit (remember, Epstein didn't just commit sex crimes – he was also a flagrant *financial* criminal and he implicated his network in those crimes). It's not just Epstein. As America's capital classes indulge their incestuous longings with an endless orgy of mergers, it's corporate Habsburg jaws as far as the eye can see. These mergers are all as illegal as hell, but if you fire a mouthy comedian, you can make serious bank: [https://www.aljazeera.com/economy/2025/7/18/cbs-cancels-c…][18] And if you pay the right MAGA chud podcaster a million bucks, he'll grease your $14b merger through the DoJ: [https://pluralistic.net/2026/02/13/khanservatives/#kid-ro…][19] And once these crooks merge to monopoly, they embark on programs of lawlessness that would shame Al Capone, but again, with the right podcaster on your side, you can keep on "robbing them blind, baby!" [https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/a-wild-day-as-trump-do…][20] The fact that these companies are *all* guilty is a foundational aspect of Trumpism. Boss-politics antitrust – and anti-corruption – doesn't need to manufacture evidence or pretexts to attack Trump's political rivals: [https://pluralistic.net/2026/02/13/khanservatives/#kid-ro…][21] When everyone is guilty, you have a target-rich environment for extorting bribes: [https://www.nytimes.com/2026/03/13/business/tiktok-invest…][22] Just because the anti-corruption has legit targets, it doesn't follow that the whole thing isn't corrupt. # Hey look at this ([permalink][23]) * The 49MB Web Page [https://thatshubham.com/blog/news-audit][24] * The Big Idea: Cindy Cohn [https://whatever.scalzi.com/2026/03/12/the-big-idea-cindy…][25] * Good Time Fun Wheel [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iSkeBUcKP4A][26] * The Washington Post Is Using Reader Data to Set Subscription Prices. How Does That Work? [https://washingtonian.com/2026/03/12/the-washington-post-…][27] * EFF Launches New Fight to Free the Law [https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2026/03/eff-launches-new-fi…][28] [A shelf of leatherbound history books with a gilt-stamped series title, 'The World's Famous Events.'] # Object permanence ([permalink][29]) #20yrsago Full text of Bruce Sterling’s ETECH speech from last week [https://web.archive.org/web/20060406025248/http://www.vir…][30] #20yrsago HOWTO build a glowing throne out of 4k AOL CDs [https://web.archive.org/web/20060408174929/https://stupid…][31] #20yrsago How Sweden’s “Pirate Bay” site resists the MPAA [https://web.archive.org/web/20060423222220/https://www.wi…][32] #15yrsago Stephen King sticks up for unions [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x1vW1zPmnKQ][33] #15yrsago Largest Wisconsin protests ever: 85,000+ people in Madison’s streets [https://web.archive.org/web/20110319152841/http://www.huf…][34] #15yrsago Sphere of tentacles [https://web.archive.org/web/20110315170007/http://www.nir…][35] #15yrsago Venn diagram illustrates all the different European unions, councils, zones and suchlike [https://web.archive.org/web/20110313034335/http://bigthin…][36] #10yrsago Obama: cryptographers who don’t believe in magic ponies are “fetishists,” “absolutists” [https://web.archive.org/web/20160312000011/https://theint…][37] #10yrsago Donald Trump hires plainclothes security to investigate and interdict protesters [https://www.politico.com/story/2016/03/donald-trump-rally…][38] #1yrago Firing the refs doesn't end the game [https://pluralistic.net/2025/03/12/epistemological-void/#…][39] #1yrago The future of Amazon coders is the present of Amazon warehouse workers [https://pluralistic.net/2025/03/13/electronic-whipping/#y…][40] # Upcoming appearances ([permalink][41]) [A photo of me onstage, giving a speech, pounding the podium.] * Barcelona: Enshittification with Simona Levi/Xnet (Llibreria Finestres), Mar 20 [https://www.llibreriafinestres.com/evento/cory-doctorow/][42] * Berkeley: Bioneers keynote, Mar 27 [https://conference.bioneers.org/][43] * Montreal: Bronfman Lecture (McGill) Apr 10 [https://www.eventbrite.ca/e/artificial-intelligence-the-u…][44] * London: Resisting Big Tech Empires (LSBU) [https://www.tickettailor.com/events/globaljusticenow/2042691][45] * Berlin: Re:publica, May 18-20 [https://re-publica.com/de/news/rp26-sprecher-cory-doctorow][46] * Berlin: Enshittification at Otherland Books, May 19 [https://www.otherland-berlin.de/de/event-details/cory-doc…][47] * Hay-on-Wye: HowTheLightGetsIn, May 22-25 [https://howthelightgetsin.org/festivals/hay/big-ideas-2][48] [A screenshot of me at my desk, doing a livecast.] # Recent appearances ([permalink][49]) * Do you feel screwed over by big tech? (Ontario Today) [https://www.cbc.ca/listen/live-radio/1-45-ontario-today/c…][50] * Launch for Cindy's Cohn's "Privacy's Defender" (City Lights) [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WuVCm2PUalU][51] * Chicken Mating Harnesses (This Week in Tech) [https://twit.tv/shows/this-week-in-tech/episodes/1074][52] * The Virtual Jewel Box (U Utah) [https://tanner.utah.edu/podcast/enshittification-cory-doc…][53] * Tanner Humanities Lecture (U Utah) [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i6Yf1nSyekI][54] [A grid of my books with Will Stahle covers..] # Latest books ([permalink][55]) * "Canny Valley": A limited edition collection of the collages I create for Pluralistic, self-published, September 2025 [https://pluralistic.net/2025/09/04/illustrious/#chairman-…][56] * "Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It," Farrar, Straus, Giroux, October 7 2025 [https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374619329/enshittifica…][57] * "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][58]). * "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][59]). * "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][60]). * "The Internet Con": A nonfiction book about interoperability and Big Tech (Verso) September 2023 ([http://seizethemeansofcomputation.org][61]). Signed copies at Book Soup ([https://www.booksoup.com/book/9781804291245][62]). * "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][63]. * "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][64] [A cardboard book box with the Macmillan logo.] # Upcoming books ([permalink][65]) * "The Reverse-Centaur's Guide to AI," a short book about being a better AI critic, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, June 2026 * "Enshittification, Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It" (the graphic novel), Firstsecond, 2026 * "The Post-American Internet," a geopolitical sequel of sorts to *Enshittification*, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2027 * "Unauthorized Bread": a middle-grades graphic novel adapted from my novella about refugees, toasters and DRM, FirstSecond, 2027 * "The Memex Method," Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2027 # Colophon ([permalink][66]) Today's top sources: Currently writing: "The Post-American Internet," a sequel to "Enshittification," about the better world the rest of us get to have now that Trump has torched America (1035 words today, 49526 total) * "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/][67] 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][68] Newsletter (no ads, tracking, or data-collection): [https://pluralistic.net/plura-list][69] Mastodon (no ads, tracking, or data-collection): [https://mamot.fr/@pluralistic][70] Bluesky (no ads, possible tracking and data-collection): [https://bsky.app/profile/doctorow.pluralistic.net][71] Medium (no ads, paywalled): [https://doctorow.medium.com/][72] [https://twitter.com/doctorow][73] Tumblr (mass-scale, unrestricted, third-party surveillance and advertising): [https://mostlysignssomeportents.tumblr.com/tagged/plurali…][74] "*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: Three more AI psychoses (12 Mar 2026) # Today's links * [Three more AI psychoses][1]: Everybody calm down. * [Hey look at this][2]: Delights to delectate. * [Object permanence][3]: "Jules, Penny and the Rooster"; Superinjunction; Harper Lee's kids v cheap paperbacks; 3D printed cat battle-armor; Black sf. * [Upcoming appearances][4]: Where to find me. * [Recent appearances][5]: Where I've been. * [Latest books][6]: You keep readin' em, I'll keep writin' 'em. * [Upcoming books][7]: Like I said, I'll keep writin' 'em. * [Colophon][8]: All the rest. [A cross-section of a man's head. His brain has been replaced with an intricate mass of wooden gearing, being pumped and cranked by three 16th century druges. Behind them is a blown up view of a microchip. Behind the head is a stylized illustration of grey matter, blown out with lots of saturation and blended in places with tumbled rocks.] # Three more AI psychoses ([permalink][9]) "AI psychosis" is one of those terms that is incredibly useful and also almost certainly going to be deprecated in smart circles in short order because it is: a) useful; b) easily colloquialized to describe related phenomena; and c) adjacent to medical issues, and there's a group of people who feel very strongly any metaphor that implicates human health is intrinsically stigmatizing and must be replaced with an awkward, lengthy phrase that no one can remember and only insiders understand. So while we still can, let us revel in this useful term to talk about some very real pathologies in our world. Formally, "AI psychosis" describes people who have delusions that are possibly induced, and definitely reinforced and magnified, by a chatbot. AI psychosis is clearly alarming for people whose loved ones fall prey to it, and it has been the subject of much press and popular attention, especially in the extreme cases where it has resulted in injury or death. It's possible for AI psychosis to be both a new and alarming phenomenon and also to be on a continuum with existing phenomena. Paranoid delusions aren't new, of course. Take "Morgellons Disease," a psychosomatic belief that you have wires growing in your body, which causes sufferers to pick at their skin to the point of creating suppurating wounds. Morgellons emerged in the 2000s, but the name refers to a 17th-century case-report of a patient who suffered from a similar delusion: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Letter_to_a_Friend][10] Morgellons is *both* a 400 year old phenomenon and an internet pathology. How can that be? Because the internet makes it easier for people with sparsely distributed traits to locate one another, which is why the internet era is characterized by the coherence of people with formerly fringe characteristics into organized blocs, for better (gender minorities, #MeToo) and worse (Nazis). Morgellons is rare, but if you suffer from it, it's easy for you to locate virtually *every* other person in the world with the same delusion and for all of you to reinforce and egg on your delusional beliefs. Morgellons isn't the only delusion that the internet reinforces, of course. "Gang stalking delusion" is a belief in a shadowy gang of sadistic tormentors who sneak hidden messages into song lyrics and public signage and innuendo in overheard snatches of other people's conversations. It is an incredibly damaging delusion that ruins people's lives. Gang stalking delusion isn't new, either – as with Morgellons, there are historical accounts of it going back centuries. But the internet supercharged gang stalking delusion by making it easy for GSD sufferers to find one another and reinforce one another's beliefs, helping each other spin elaborate explanations for why the relatives, therapists, and friends who try to help them are actually in on the conspiracy. The result is that GSD sufferers end up ever more isolated from people who are trying mightily to save them, and more connected to people who drive them to self-harm. Enter chatbots. Ready access to eager-to-please LLMs at every hour of the day or night means that you don't even have to find a forum full of people with the same delusion as you, nor do you have to wait for a reply to your anguished message. The LLM is always there, ready to fire back a "yes-and" improv-style response that drives you deeper and deeper into delusion: [https://pluralistic.net/2025/09/17/automating-gang-stalki…][11] It's possible that there are delusions that are even more rare than GSD or Morgellons that AI is surfacing. Imagine if you were prone to fleeting delusional beliefs (and whomst amongst us hasn't experienced the bedrock certainty that we put something down *right here*, only to find it somewhere else and not have any idea how that happened?). Under normal circumstances, these cognitive misfires might be fleeting moments of discomfort, quickly forgotten. But if you are already habituated to asking a chatbot to explain things you don't understand, it might well yes-and you into an internally consistent, entirely wrong belief – that is, a delusion. Think of how often you noticed "42" after reading *Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy*, or how many times "6-7" crops up once you've experienced a baseline of exposure to adolescents. Now imagine that an obsequious tale-spinner was sitting at your elbow, helpfully noting these coincidences and fitting them into a folie-a-deux mystery play that projected a grand, paranoid narrative onto the world. Every bit of confirming evidence is lovingly cataloged, all disconfirming evidence is discounted or ignored. It's fully automated luxury QAnon – a self-baking conspiracy that harnesses an AI in service to driving you deeper and deeper into madness: That's the original "AI psychosis" that the term was coined to describe. As Sam Cole notes in her excellent "How to Talk to Someone Experiencing 'AI Psychosis,'" mental health practitioners are not entirely comfortable with the "psychosis" label: [https://www.404media.co/ai-psychosis-help-gemini-chatgpt-…][12] "Psychosis" here is best understood as an *analogy*, not a diagnosis, and, as already noted, there is a large cohort of very persistent people who make it their business to eradicate analogies that make reference to medical or health-related phenomena. But these analogies are very hard to kill, because they do useful work in connecting unfamiliar, novel phenomena with things we already understand. It's true that these analogies *can* be stigmatizing, but they *needn't* be. As someone with an autoimmune disorder, I am not bothered by people who describe ICE as an autoimmune disorder in which antibodies attack the host, threatening its very life. I am capable of understanding "autoimmune disorder" as referring to both a literal, medical phenomenon; *and* a figurative, political one. I have never found myself confusing one for the other. "AI psychosis" is one of those very useful analogies, and you can tell, because "AI psychosis" has found even *more* metaphorical uses, describing *other* bad beliefs about AI. Today, I want to talk about three of these AI psychoses, and how they relate to one another: the investor AI delusion, the boss AI delusion, and the critic AI delusion. Let's start with the investors' delusion. AI started as an investment project from the usual suspects: venture capitalists, private wealth funds, and tech monopolists with large cash reserves and ready access to loans during the cheap credit bubble. These entities are accustomed to making large, long-shot bets, and they were extremely motivated to find new markets to grow into and take over. Growing companies *need* to keep growing, but not because they have "the ideology of a tumor." Growing companies' imperative to keep growing isn't ideological at all – it's material. Growth companies' stock trade at a high multiple of their "price to earnings ratio" (PE ratio), which means that they can use their stock like money when buying other companies and hiring key employees. But once those companies' growth slows down, investors revalue those shares at a much lower PE multiplier, which makes individual executives at the company (who are primarily paid in stock) *personally* much poorer, prompting their departure, while simultaneously kneecapping the company's ability to grow through acquisition and hiring, because a company with a falling share price has to buy things with cash, not stock. Companies can make more of their own stock on demand, simply by typing zeroes into a spreadsheet – but they can only get cash by convincing a customer, creditor or investor to part with some of their own: [https://pluralistic.net/2025/03/06/privacy-last/#exceptio…][13] Tech companies have absurdly large market shares – think of Google's 90% search dominance – and so they've spent 15+ years coming up with increasingly absurd gambits to convince investors that they will continue to grow by capturing *other* markets. At first, these companies claimed that they were on the verge of eating one another's lunches (Google would destroy Facebook with G+; Facebook would do the same to Youtube with the "pivot to video"). This has a real advantage in that one need not speculate about the potential value of Facebook's market – you only have to look at Facebook's quarterly reports. But the downside is that Facebook has its own ideas about whether Google is going to absorb its market, and they are prone to forcefully make the case that this won't happen. After a few tumultuous years, tech giants switched to promoting growth via speculative new markets – metaverse, web3, crypto, blockchain, etc. Speculative new markets are *speculative*, and the weakness of that is that no one can say how big those markets might be. But that's also the *strength* of those markets, because if no one can say how big those markets might be, then who's to say that they won't be *very* big indeed? There's a different advantage to confining your concerns to imaginary things: imaginary things don't exist, so they don't contest your public statements about them, nor do they make demands on you. Think of how the right concerns itself with imaginary children (unborn babies, children in Wayfair furniture; children in nonexistent pizza parlor basements, children undergoing gender confirmation surgery). These are very convenient children to advocate for, since, unlike real children (hungry children, children killed in the Gaza genocide, children whose parents have been kidnapped by ICE, children whom Matt Goetz and Donald Trump trafficked for sex, children in cages at the US border, trans kids driven to self-harm and suicide after being denied care), nonexistent children don't want anything from you and they never make public pronouncements about whether you have their best interests at heart. But as the AI project has required larger and larger sums to keep the wheels spinning, the usual suspects have started to run out of money, and now AI hustlers are increasingly looking to tap *public* markets for capital. They want you to invest your pension savings in their growth narrative machine, and they're relying on the fact that you don't understand the technology to trick you into handing over your money. There's a name for this: it's called the "Byzantine premium" – that's the premium that an investment opportunity attracts by being so complicated and weird that investors don't understand it, making them easy to trick: [https://pluralistic.net/2022/03/13/the-byzantine-premium/][14] AI is a terrible economic phenomenon. It has lost more money than any other project in human history – $600-700b and counting, with *trillions* more demanded by the likes of OpenAI's Sam Altman. AI's core assets – data centers and GPUs – last 2-3 years, though AI bosses insist on depreciating them over five years, which is unequivocal accounting fraud, a way to obscure the losses the companies are incurring. But it doesn't actually matter whether the assets need to be replaced every two years, every three years, or every five years, because all the AI companies *combined* are claiming no more than $60b/year in revenue (that number is grossly inflated). You can't reach the $700b break-even point at $60b/year in two years, three years, *or* five years. Now, some exceptionally valuable technologies *have* attained profitability after an extraordinarily long period in which they lost money, like the web itself. But these turnaround stories all share a common trait: they had good "unit economics. Every new web user reduced the amount of money the web industry was losing. Every time a user logged onto the web, they made the industry more profitable. Every generation of web technology was more profitable than the last. Contrast this with AI: every user – paid or unpaid – that an AI company signs up costs them money. Every time that user logs into a chatbot or enters a prompt, the company loses more money. The more a user uses an AI product, the more money that product loses. And each generation of AI tech loses more money than the generation that preceded it. To make AI look like a good investment, AI bosses and their pitchmen have to come up with a story that somehow addresses this phenomenon. Part of that story relies on the Byzantine premium: "Sure, you don't understand AI, but why would all these smart people commit hundreds of billions of dollars to AI if they weren't confident that they would make a lot of money from it?" In other words, "A pile of shit *this big* must have a pony underneath it *somewhere*!" This is a great narrative trick, because it turns losing money into a virtue. If you've convinced a mark that the upside of the project is a multiple of the capital committed to it, then the more money you're losing, the better the investment seems. So this is the first AI psychosis: the idea that we should bet the world's economy on these highly combustible GPUs and data centers with terrible unit economics and no path to break-even, much less profitability. Investors' AI psychosis is cross-fertilized by our second form of AI psychosis, which is the *bosses'* AI psychosis: bosses' bottomless passion for firing workers and replacing them with automation. Bosses are easy marks for anything that lets them fire workers. After all, the ideal firm is one that charges infinity for its outputs (hence the market's passion for monopolies) and pays nothing for its inputs (e.g. "academic publishing"). This means that the fact that a chatbot can't do your job isn't nearly as important as the fact that an AI salesman can convince your boss to fire you and replace you with a chatbot that *can't* do your job. Bosses keep replacing humans with defective chatbots, with *catastrophic* consequences, like Amazon's cloud service crashing: [https://www.techradar.com/pro/recent-aws-outages-blamed-o…][15] Bosses are haunted by the ego-shattering knowledge that they aren't in the driver's seat: if the boss doesn't show up for work, everything continues to operate just fine. If the *workers* all stay home, the business grinds to a halt. In their secret hearts, bosses know that they're not in the driver's seat – they're in the back seat, playing with a Fisher Price steering wheel. AI dangles the possibility of wiring that toy steering wheel directly into the drive-train, so that the company's products go directly from the boss's imagination to the public without the boss having to ask people who know how to *do things* to execute their cockamamie schemes: [https://pluralistic.net/2026/01/05/fisher-price-steering-…][16] This is a powerfully erotic proposition for bosses, the realization of the libidinal fantasy in which sky-high CEO salaries can be justified by the fact that everything that happens in the company is truly, directly attributable to the boss. Like the delusional person who can be led deeper and deeper into a fantasy world by a chatbot, a boss's delusion that they are worth thousands of times more than their workers makes them easy prey for a chatbot *salesman* that pushes them deeper and deeper into that delusion, until they bet the whole company on it. Now we come to the third and final novel AI psychosis, the *critics'* psychosis, that AI is an abnormally terrible *technology*. This is a species of "criti-hype," which is when critics repeat the hyped-up claims of the companies they're targeting, but as criticism (think of all the people who believed and uncritically amplified the ad-tech industry's self-serving claims of being able to control our minds by "hacking our dopamine loops"): [https://peoples-things.ghost.io/youre-doing-it-wrong-note…][17] AI is a *normal* technology. The people who made it, and the circumstances under which it was made, are normal. Its uses and abuses are normal. That doesn't make it *good*, but it does make it *unexceptional*: [https://www.normaltech.ai/p/a-guide-to-understanding-ai-a…][18] The *exceptional* part of AI isn't the technology, it's the *bubble*. There's nothing about AI *per se* that makes it exceptionally prone to devouring our natural resources, or endangering our jobs, or abetting war crimes. That's all because of the *bubble*, and the bubble relies on the idea that AI is *exceptional*, not normal. Repeating and amplifying claims about AI's exceptionalism *helps* the AI companies, because they rely on exceptionalism to keep the capital flowing and the bubble inflating. AI is a normal technology. It's normal for a technology to be invented by unlikable and immoral people and institutions. Not every technology is invented by a shitty person, but shitty people and institutions are well represented (and possibly disproportionately represented) in the history of technology. Charles Babbage invented the idea of general purpose computers as a way of improving labor control on slave plantations: [https://logicmag.io/supa-dupa-skies/origin-stories-planta…][19] Ada Lovelace wasn't interested in making slavery more efficient, but neither was she driven by pure scientific inquiry. She invented programming to help her bet on the horses (it didn't work): [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ada_Lovelace][20] The silicon transistor was co-invented by William Shockley, one of history's great pieces of shit, a eugenicist who was committed to exterminating all non-white people that he never managed to ship a commercial product: [https://pluralistic.net/2021/10/24/the-traitorous-eight-a…][21] IBM built the tabulators for Auschwitz. HP were the Pentagon's go-to contractors for any tech project that was so dirty no one else would touch it. We only got Unix because Bell Labs committed so many antitrust violations that they weren't allowed to productize it themselves. It's not exceptional for AI companies to have terrible, piece-of-shit founders. It's not exceptional for these companies to participate in war crimes. It's not exceptional for these founders to want to pauperize workers. It's not exceptional for these companies to lie about their products, bankrupt naive investors through stock swindles, and pitch themselves to investors as a way for capital to win the class war. *None of this means that AI companies are good*, it just means that they are not *exceptional*. And because they aren't exceptional, the same dynamics that govern other technologies apply to AI companies' products. Their utility is a function of what they *do*, not who made them or how they were sold. The *utility* of AI products is based on whether people find ways to use them that make them happy – not whether the people who made those technologies are good people, or whether the funding for the technology was fraudulent, or whether other people use the technology to harm others. Automation comes in two flavors: there's automation that produces things *more quickly* (and hence more cheaply), and there's automation that makes *better* things. Generally, capital prefers to use automation to increase the pace at which things are made, while workers prefer to use automation to improve the quality of the things they make. Think of a hobbyist who pines for an automated soldering machine. That hobbyist longs to make board-level repairs and modifications that require precision that humans struggle to match. The hobbyist is a centaur, using a machine to help achieve human goals. Now think of a factory owner who invests in an assembly line of the same machines: that boss wants to fire a bunch of workers and make the survivors of the purge take up the slack. The boss want to achieve *corporate* goals, to "sweat the assets," making maximum use of the soldering machines. The pace at which the line runs is set to be the maximum that the workers can match. The workers on the line are "reverse centaurs" – humans who are pressed into service as peripherals for machines, at a pace that is constantly at the very limit of their endurance. Reverse centaurs are trapped in capital's automation plan – to make everything faster and cheaper. But that's the result of *bosses*. It's not the result of *technology*. This is not to say that technology is apolitical. Only a fool would imagine that there are no politics embedded in technology. But you'd be a far greater fool if you asserted that the politics of a technology were *simple*, *clear*, and *immutable*. Nor is this to say that when workers get to decide when and how to use technology, we will always make wise decisions. Perhaps the hobbyist who opts for an automated soldering machine will lose out on the opportunity to refine their hand-eye coordination in ways that will have many other benefits to their practice. Or perhaps attempting to improve their hand-eye coordination to that point will wreck so many projects that they grow discouraged and give up altogether. Others' choices that seem unwise to you might have perfectly good explanations that aren't visible from your perspective. Ultimately, the world is a better place where workers get to decide which parts of their jobs they want to automate and which parts they want to lean into. This is an extremely *normal* technological situation: for a new technology to be promoted and productized by shitty people who have grandiose goals that would be apocalyptic should they ever come to pass – and for some people to find uses of that technology that are nevertheless beneficial to them and their communities. The belief that AI is an exceptionally bad *technology* (as opposed to an exceptionally bad *economic bubble*) drives AI critics into their own absurd *culs-de-sac*. There are many, many skilled and reliable practitioners of technical and creative trades who've found extremely reasonable, normal ways in which AI has automated some part of their job. They aren't hyperventilating about how AI has changed everything forever and the world is about to end. They're not mistaking AI for god, or a therapist. They're just treating AI like a normal technology, like a plugin. Programmers' tools have acquired useful automation plugins at regular intervals for decades – syntax checkers, advanced debuggers, automated wireframe utilities. For many programmers – including several of my acquaintance, whom I know to be both thoughtful and skilled – AI is another plugin, one they find useful enough to be modestly enthusiastic about. It is *nuts* to deny the experiences these people are having. They're not vibe-coding mission-critical AWS modules. They're not generating tech debt at scale: [https://pluralistic.net/2026/01/06/1000x-liability/#grace…][22] They're just adding another automation tool to a highly automated practice, and using it when it makes sense. Perhaps they won't always choose wisely, but that's normal too. There's plenty of ways that pre-AI automation tools for software development led programmers astray. A skilled, centaur-configured programmer learns from experience which automation tools they should trust, and under which circumstances, and guides themselves accordingly. It's only the belief that AI is *exceptional* – exceptionally wicked, but exceptional nevertheless – that leads critics to decide that they are a better judge of whether a skilled worker should or should not use certain automation tools, and to make that judgment not based on the quality of the work in question, but on the moral character of the tool itself. AI is just normal. The bubble is what drives the environmental costs. If the only LLMs were a couple big data-centers at Sandia National Labs, no one would be particularly exercised about the water and energy demands they represented. Big scientific endeavors – from NASA launches to the large Hadron Collider – often come with immense material and energy needs. The bubble causes massive, wasteful, duplicative efforts that chase diminishing returns through farcical scale. Nor are AI bros exceptional. The stock swindlers who've blown $700b (and counting) on AI aren't cyber-Svengalis with the power to cloud investors' minds. They're just running the same con that tech has been running ever since its returns started to taper off and survival became a matter of ginning up enthusiasm for speculative new ventures. That doesn't mean those people aren't awful shits. *Fuck those people*. It just means that they're *normal* awful shits. We don't have to burnish their reputations by elevating them to the status of archdemons who taint everything they touch with unwashable sin. Sam Altman isn't Lex Luthor. He's just a conman: [https://open.substack.com/pub/garymarcus/p/breaking-sam-a…][23] The fact that these bros are just normal assholes means that we don't have to treat everything they do as a sin. Scraping the entirety of human knowledge to make something new out of it isn't "stealing." Depending on why you're doing it, it can be *archiving*, or *making a search engine*: [https://pluralistic.net/2023/09/17/how-to-think-about-scr…][24] Too many AI critics have started from the undeniable fact that these guys are odious creeps who boast about wanting to ruin the lives of workers and then worked backwards to find the sin. The sin isn't performing mathematical analysis on all the books ever written. That's actually kind of awesome. It's the kind of thing Aaron Swartz used to do – like when he ingested every law review article ever published and used it to trace the way that oil companies' donations to law schools resulted in profs writing articles about why Big Oil can't be held liable for trashing the planet: [https://web.archive.org/web/20111129181943/https://www.st…][25] AI bros' sin isn't making copies of published works. Hammering servers with badly behaved crawlers *is* a dick move and fuck them for doing it. But if these jerks made well-behaved scrapers that placed no abnormal demand on servers, it's not like their critics would say, "Oh, I guess it's fine, then." AI bros' sin is running an economy-destroying, planet-wrecking stock swindle whose raison d'etre is pauperizing every worker and transferring 100% of the dying world's wealth to a small cadre of morbidly wealthy, eminently guillotineable plutes. Making plugins? That's not exceptional. It's just normal. The fact that something is normal doesn't make it good. There's a lot of normal things that I'd like to throw into the Sun. But we don't do ourselves any favors when we amplify our enemies' self-aggrandizing narratives by accusing them of being exceptional, even when we mean "exceptionally evil." They're normal assholes. Fuck 'em. (*Image: [ZeptoBars][26], [CC BY 3.0][27], modified*) # Hey look at this ([permalink][28]) * E is for…. Enshittification [https://www.evanshunt.com/enshittification/][29] * Calicornication: Postcards of Giant Produce (1909) [https://publicdomainreview.org/collection/giant-produce-p…][30] * Organized Money: Why Your Lamp Sucks [https://prospect.org/2026/03/11/organized-money-lamps-lig…][31] * The Live Nation settlement has industry insiders baffled [https://www.theverge.com/policy/893272/live-nation-ticket…][32] * Public speakerphone use is officially out of control [https://arstechnica.com/culture/2026/03/explain-it-like-i…][33] [A shelf of leatherbound history books with a gilt-stamped series title, 'The World's Famous Events.'] # Object permanence ([permalink][34]) #15yrsago Notorious financier gets a “super-injunction” prohibiting the press from revealing that he is a banker [https://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/newsbysector/banksand…][35] #10yrsago Shortly after her death, Harper Lee’s heirs kill cheap paperback edition of To Kill a Mockingbird [https://newrepublic.com/article/131400/mass-market-editio…][36] #10yrsago Web security company breached, client list (including KKK) dumped, hackers mock inept security [https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2016/03/af…][37] #10yrsago Microsoft spams corporate users with messages denigrating their IT departments [https://web.archive.org/web/20160309195537/https://www.in…][38] #10yrsago Cycle and Recycle: gorgeous photos of the European recycling process [https://www.wired.com/2016/03/paul-bulteel-cycle-recyle-e…][39] #10yrsago Fellowships for “Robin Hood” hackers to help poor people get access to the law [https://web.archive.org/web/20160304221459/https://labs.r…][40] #10yrsago 3D printed battle-armor for cats [https://web.archive.org/web/20160311224139/http://sinkhac…][41] #10yrsago Great moments in the history of black science fiction [https://web.archive.org/web/20160308034421/http://www.fan…][42] #1yrago Daniel Pinkwater's "Jules, Penny and the Rooster" [https://pluralistic.net/2025/03/11/klong-you-are-a-pickle…][43] # Upcoming appearances ([permalink][44]) [A photo of me onstage, giving a speech, pounding the podium.] * Barcelona: Enshittification with Simona Levi/Xnet (Llibreria Finestres), Mar 20 [https://www.llibreriafinestres.com/evento/cory-doctorow/][45] * Berkeley: Bioneers keynote, Mar 27 [https://conference.bioneers.org/][46] * Montreal: Bronfman Lecture (McGill) Apr 10 [https://www.eventbrite.ca/e/artificial-intelligence-the-u…][47] * London: Resisting Big Tech Empires (LSBU) [https://www.tickettailor.com/events/globaljusticenow/2042691][48] * Berlin: Re:publica, May 18-20 [https://re-publica.com/de/news/rp26-sprecher-cory-doctorow][49] * Berlin: Enshittification at Otherland Books, May 19 [https://www.otherland-berlin.de/de/event-details/cory-doc…][50] * Hay-on-Wye: HowTheLightGetsIn, May 22-25 [https://howthelightgetsin.org/festivals/hay/big-ideas-2][51] [A screenshot of me at my desk, doing a livecast.] # Recent appearances ([permalink][52]) * Launch for Cindy's Cohn's "Privacy's Defender" (City Lights) [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WuVCm2PUalU][53] * Chicken Mating Harnesses (This Week in Tech) [https://twit.tv/shows/this-week-in-tech/episodes/1074][54] * The Virtual Jewel Box (U Utah) [https://tanner.utah.edu/podcast/enshittification-cory-doc…][55] * Tanner Humanities Lecture (U Utah) [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i6Yf1nSyekI][56] * The Lost Cause [https://streets.mn/2026/03/02/book-club-the-lost-cause/][57] [A grid of my books with Will Stahle covers..] # Latest books ([permalink][58]) * "Canny Valley": A limited edition collection of the collages I create for Pluralistic, self-published, September 2025 [https://pluralistic.net/2025/09/04/illustrious/#chairman-…][59] * "Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It," Farrar, Straus, Giroux, October 7 2025 [https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374619329/enshittifica…][60] * "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][61]). * "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][62]). * "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][63]). * "The Internet Con": A nonfiction book about interoperability and Big Tech (Verso) September 2023 ([http://seizethemeansofcomputation.org][64]). Signed copies at Book Soup ([https://www.booksoup.com/book/9781804291245][65]). * "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][66]. * "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][67] [A cardboard book box with the Macmillan logo.] # Upcoming books ([permalink][68]) * "The Reverse-Centaur's Guide to AI," a short book about being a better AI critic, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, June 2026 * "Enshittification, Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It" (the graphic novel), Firstsecond, 2026 * "The Post-American Internet," a geopolitical sequel of sorts to *Enshittification*, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2027 * "Unauthorized Bread": a middle-grades graphic novel adapted from my novella about refugees, toasters and DRM, FirstSecond, 2027 * "The Memex Method," Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2027 # Colophon ([permalink][69]) Today's top sources: Currently writing: "The Post-American Internet," a sequel to "Enshittification," about the better world the rest of us get to have now that Trump has torched America (1081 words today, 48461 total) * "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/][70] 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][71] Newsletter (no ads, tracking, or data-collection): [https://pluralistic.net/plura-list][72] Mastodon (no ads, tracking, or data-collection): [https://mamot.fr/@pluralistic][73] Bluesky (no ads, possible tracking and data-collection): [https://bsky.app/profile/doctorow.pluralistic.net][74] Medium (no ads, paywalled): [https://doctorow.medium.com/][75] [https://twitter.com/doctorow][76] Tumblr (mass-scale, unrestricted, third-party surveillance and advertising): [https://mostlysignssomeportents.tumblr.com/tagged/plurali…][77] "*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. 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