Today's links How an AI moratorium can save AI bosses: If you can't impose switching costs, just eliminate the competition. Hey look at this: Delights to delectate. Object permanence: Flash Worms; This Film is Not Yet Rated; Libdem copyright sabotage; Religion worth more than Big Tech; Geographic tubemap; Selective censorship resistance. Upcoming appearances: Budapest, Edmonton, Boston, South Bend, Hudson, Calgary, Winnipeg, Vancouver, Victoria, Ottawa. Recent appearances: Where I've been. Latest books: You keep readin' em, I'll keep writin' 'em. Upcoming books: Like I said, I'll keep writin' 'em. Colophon: All the rest. How an AI moratorium can save AI bosses (permalink) There's lots of reasons to believe the "hyperscaler" model of AI can never be profitable, and not just because of its gigantic expenditures and negative unit economics (the companies lose money with every new customer and every new use, and they lose more money with each generation of their products): https://pluralistic.net/2025/09/27/econopocalypse/#subprime-intelligence The industry strenuously denies this, of course. They insist that they are only days away from turning their balance sheets right side up. All they have to do is fix those unit economics, then they can make back the cost of producing their models by selling access to them. The problem is that the evidence for those improving unit economics is weak, while the evidence that they're faking their finances is very strong: https://www.wheresyoured.at/exclusive-openai-financials/ Same goes for the claims that these companies are already profitable. Dig into those claims and you'll learn they depend on a new, special meaning of "profitable" that does not match the generally accepted accounting procedures (GAAP) definition, which is to say, these companies are claiming that they are so cool that their profitability can only be measured using a novel, secret form of mathematics: https://futurism.com/future-society/anthropic-claude-profit-ai-safety-development-finances This is the same wheeze that Softbank tried with Wework. Speaking in my capacity as an author of internationally bestselling technothrillers about accounting fraud, I can tell you that it was accounting fraud then, and it's accounting fraud now: https://www.ndtv.com/world-news/how-wework-went-from-being-47-billion-start-up-to-bankrupt-in-3-years-4552627 But let's give the AI bosses a momentary benefit of the doubt and stipulate that they are on the verge of acquiring positive unit-economics, which will let them start to pay off the massive expenditures they incurred by training their models and enter their long-anticipated profitability phase, when the money-furnaces they've been running for years turn into money printers, to the delight of the investors who've supplied the vast bales of $100 bills the companies have been shoveling into their models' coalboxes for years now. Basically, they're saying, "Sure, it cost us a lot to get these rails laid, but now that the railroad is complete we can start running cars over them and make a profit." Unfortunately (for bosses and investors), this proposition is every bit as dubious as their claims to improving unit economics. To understand why, just look at what happened the last time Anthropic shipped a major Claude update. Virtually overnight, all of OpenAI's best customers stopped paying for ChatGPT and started paying for Claude. That's because chatbots have very low switching costs: going from one chatbot to another costs almost nothing: https://www.businessinsider.com/why-ai-startup-founder-switched-chatgpt-to-claude-2026-3 Everyone using AI knows this to be true. When I walked the floor at CES last year, I asked every AI-powered gadget maker, "What will you do if your chatbot provider jacks up their prices?" and to a one, they said, "No problem, we've designed this thing so that we can switch chatbots with the click of a mouse": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WfhELBX8Jbs That means that you can't just "build the railroad and run the cars over it." The minute you finish your railroad, your rivals will announce that they've got a new, adjacent railroad that's even faster than yours, and you will have to get to work laying another set of tracks to support even faster trains. This is a disaster all around: the AI companies are locked in a Red Queen's Race, a fatal beggar-thy-neighbor doom-loop. The only way they could escape that trap is by signing a nonaggression pact amongst themselves promising not to compete anymore. But there's two giant problems with this: first, it is incredibly, fantastically illegal under antitrust law, because it represents a conspiracy among the dominant players to cease to compete with one another, and; second, it leaves the field open for the further development of Chinese "open weight" models that customers can run on their own modest, low-powered computers, which are presently lagging the US "frontier models" by a mere four months: https://arstechnica.com/ai/2026/09/exclusive-open-chinese-models-close-gap-with-silicon-valleys-frontier-ai-models/ Even if you don't trust Chinese models, you can extract their training through a process called distillation and transfer them to models you do trust: https://www.anthropic.com/news/detecting-and-preventing-distillation-attacks But what if there was a way for the AI companies to get government permission to violate antitrust law and cease to compete with one another, and secure a ban on the use of Chinese open weight models? Turns out, there is a way to call time on the Red Queen's Race: merely insist that you are on the verge of teaching so many words to the word-guessing program that it will wake up and devour us all, and call for a ban on "superintelligence": https://www.foxbusiness.com/technology/microsoft-ceo-says-superintelligence-must-remain-under-human-control Once the government stipulates that "superintelligence risk" is an existential crisis, it must grant the hyperscalers a consent decree absolving them from any violations of antitrust law stemming from a conspiracy to halt direct competition with one another: https://stephaniekelton.substack.com/p/brer-rabbit-and-ai-extinction Freaking out about "superintelligence" is a canonical example of "criti-hype," where critics repeat boosters' claims but append, "(and that's bad)" to them: https://peoples-things.ghost.io/youre-doing-it-wrong-notes-on-criticism-and-technology-hype/ Remember, the tech giants want to stop competing. Mark Zuckerberg and Sudar Pichai colluded to rig the ad-market with a secret program called "Jedi Blue": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jedi_Blue Every year, Google sends Apple a bribe of more than $20b in exchange for Apple not entering the search market: https://appleworld.today/2025/09/google-wont-be-barred-from-entering-into-search-agreements-with-companies-like-apple/ And the biggest tech companies in the world had a secret "no poach" agreement where they illegally promised not to try to hire one another's top engineers by offering them raises: https://chicagounbound.uchicago.edu/law_and_economics/1033/ The only thing Peter Thiel hates more than the Antichrist (spoiler, he's just talking about Greta Thunberg) is "wasteful competition": https://www.youtube.com/shorts/WmRC_NQh6aQ When an industry that is eating itself alive through "hyperscaling" demands that the government bless a conspiracy to halt competition and ban open source alternatives, you should be suspicious. When that industry is pursuing a venture that has lost more money than any other venture in human history, you should be very suspicious, especially when its "rogue AI hacking" story turns out to be a story about how a hacking tool did exactly what it was designed to do: https://pluralistic.net/2026/09/12/god-in-the-box/#llms-are-fake Peter Thiel is right: AI is full of wasteful competition, but not because competition is a waste – rather, it's because the companies are competing to convince people to use their expensive products for the cheapest applications. Elon Musk's SpaceX IPO depended on him losing billions of dollars by letting the world's stupidest chuds produce mountains of child porn and images of Sonic the Hedgehog with giant boobs. That is indeed wasteful (and reprehensible). That doesn't mean we should allow the AI companies to get the government to bless their conspiracy in restraint of trade; rather, it militates for having the government investigate them for securities fraud, trafficking in child sex abuse material, election finance violations, and a long list of other crimes and misdemeanors. Hey look at this (permalink) Henry Farrell and Abe Newman on Weaponized Interdependence https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/henry-farrell-and-abe-newman-on-weaponized The Enshittification Resistant Software Project https://er-certification.statichost.page/index.html The Life of Death and the Ensh*ttificator https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d6SPV4GZp-U Marginalia Search https://marginalia-search.com/ Why the Postpandemic Tech Bust Sent Billionaires to Trump https://www.wired.com/story/against-tech-oligarchy-book-excerpt-trump-billionaries/ Object permanence (permalink) #25yrago Flash Worms: Thirty Seconds to Infect the Internet https://web.archive.org/web/20011024012950/http://www.silicondefense.com/flash/ #20yrsago This Film is Not Rated – must-see doc about MPAA ratings https://memex.craphound.com/2006/09/16/this-film-is-not-rated-must-see-doc-about-mpaa-ratings/ #15yrsago Chinese netizens angered by “princelings” — spoiled children of the rich and powerful https://edition.cnn.com/2011/09/16/world/asia/china-elite-children/index.html?iref=allsearch #15yrsago LibDems get to vote on copyright reform, but who inserted the clause saying downloading should be a criminal act? https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2011/sep/16/libdems-vote-copyright-reform #15yrsago Insurer: music-festival tragedy caused by illegal downloading https://twitpic.com/6l5ap2 #10yrsago US religion is worth $1.2T/year, more than America’s 10 biggest tech companies, combined https://web.archive.org/web/20161019095803/http://www.religjournal.com/pdf/ijrr12003.pdf #10yrsago Geographically representative map of the London Underground https://web.archive.org/web/20240813111321/https://www.citymonitor.ai/analysis/map-londons-tube-shows-disused-stations-track-layout-and-more-2429/ #10yrsago Republican election officials block restrictions on foreign spending in US elections https://web.archive.org/web/20160916181403/https://theintercept.com/2016/09/16/fec-republicans-kill-attempt-to-block-foreign-money-in-u-s-elections/ #10yrsago Tommy Chong asks Obama to pardon him for his bullshit drug paraphernalia bust https://web.archive.org/web/20210720131834/https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/lifestyle/lifestyle-news/tommy-chong-seeks-obamas-pardon-928962/ #10yrsago Week two for the largest prison strike in US history https://web.archive.org/web/20160916143157/https://theintercept.com/2016/09/16/the-largest-prison-strike-in-u-s-history-enters-its-second-week/ #5yrsago Criminal entrepreneurship in Mexico’s high-tech drug cartels https://web.archive.org/web/20160917133449/https://motherboard.vice.com/read/how-drug-cartels-operate-like-silicon-valley-startups #1yrago No such thing as selective censorship resistance https://pluralistic.net/2025/09/16/too-many-throats-to-choke/#pluralism-is-resiliency Upcoming appearances (permalink) Budapest: Brain Bar, Sep 17 https://brainbar.com/munkatars/cory-doctorow Edmonton: Elbows Up (Edmonton Public Library), Sep 28 https://www.epl.ca/blogs/post/elbows-up-with-cory-doctorow/ Boston: The Post-American Internet: Possibilities for a new internet created by an American Hermit Kingdom (MIT Media Lab), Sep 30 https://www.media.mit.edu/events/the-post-american-internet-possibilities-for-a-new-internet-created-by-an-american-hermit-kingdom/ Boston: The Paradox of Enshittification and Reverse Centaurs (Harvard Berkman Klein), Sep 30 https://cyber.harvard.edu/events/running-harder-falling-faster-paradox-enshittification-and-reverse-centaurs South Bend: An Evening With Cory Doctorow (Notre Dame), Oct 6 https://franco.nd.edu/events/2026/10/06/an-evening-with-cory-doctorow/ Hudson, OH: Hudson Library, Oct 7 https://engagedpatrons.org/EventsExtended.cfm?SiteID=3850&EventID=596952&PK= Calgary: Wordfest, Oct 8 https://wordfest.com/2026/show/wordfest-presents-cory-doctorow-2026/ Winnipeg: McNally Robinson, Oct 9 https://www.mcnallyrobinson.com/event-18991/An-Evening-with-Cory-Doctorow Vancouver: Read, Resist, Repair, Rejoice (Vancouver Writers Festival), Oct 19 https://writersfest.bc.ca/festival-event-2026/01 Victoria: Munro's Books, Oct 20 https://www.munrobooks.com/events/6113620261020 Vancouver: Life After AI (Vancouver Writers Festival), Oct 22 https://writersfest.bc.ca/festival-event-2026/46 Ottawa: Life After AI (Ottawa Writers Festival), Oct 24 https://writersfestival.org/event/life-after-ai Vancouver: BC Policy Solutions Gala, Nov 12 https://bcpolicy.ca/gala/ Recent appearances (permalink) Are 'AI Apocalypse' Warnings Just Marketing? (What's Left) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IXd9HwIE5bo The Real AI Threat Isn’t What You’ve Been Told (The Tea with Myriam François) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vc8It00fRsA Fascists may come after the AI bubble bursts (You&AI) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J2WN64aQeYQ What Would a Normal Person Do (Trashfuture) https://www.patreon.com/trashfuture/posts/what-would-do-169247456 Pod Save the UK https://audioboom.com/posts/8950533-radicalised-organised-and-thick-as-s-t-nish-has-had-it-with-far-right-protests-plus-why Latest books (permalink) "The Reverse-Centaur's Guide to AI," a short book about being a better AI critic, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, June 2026 https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374621568/thereversecentaursguidetolifeafterai/ "Canny Valley": A limited edition collection of the collages I create for Pluralistic, self-published, September 2025 https://pluralistic.net/2025/09/04/illustrious/#chairman-bruce "Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It," Farrar, Straus, Giroux, October 7 2025 https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374619329/enshittification/ "Picks and Shovels": a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about the heroic era of the PC, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), February 2025 (https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250865908/picksandshovels). "The Bezzle": a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about prison-tech and other grifts, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), February 2024 (thebezzle.org). "The Lost Cause:" a solarpunk novel of hope in the climate emergency, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), November 2023 (http://lost-cause.org). "The Internet Con": A nonfiction book about interoperability and Big Tech (Verso) September 2023 (http://seizethemeansofcomputation.org). Signed copies at Book Soup (https://www.booksoup.com/book/9781804291245). "Red Team Blues": "A grabby, compulsive thriller that will leave you knowing more about how the world works than you did before." Tor Books http://redteamblues.com. "Chokepoint Capitalism: How to Beat Big Tech, Tame Big Content, and Get Artists Paid, with Rebecca Giblin", on how to unrig the markets for creative labor, Beacon Press/Scribe 2022 https://chokepointcapitalism.com Upcoming books (permalink) "The Post-American Internet," a geopolitical sequel of sorts to Enshittification, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2027 "Unauthorized Bread": a middle-grades graphic novel adapted from my novella about refugees, toasters and DRM, FirstSecond, April 20, 2027 "Enshittification, Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It" (the graphic novel), Firstsecond, 2027 "The Memex Method," Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2027 Colophon (permalink) Today's top sources: Currently writing: “Once Is Enemy Action,” a science fiction novel about the origins of modern technofascism. Today's words: 555 (15487 total). "The Post-American Internet," a sequel to "Enshittification," about the better world the rest of us get to have now that Trump has torched America. Fourth draft completed. Submitted to editor. A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING This work – excluding any serialized fiction – is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license. That means you can use it any way you like, including commercially, provided that you attribute it to me, Cory Doctorow, and include a link to pluralistic.net. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ Quotations and images are not included in this license; they are included either under a limitation or exception to copyright, or on the basis of a separate license. Please exercise caution. How to get Pluralistic: Blog (no ads, tracking, or data-collection): Pluralistic.net Newsletter (no ads, tracking, or data-collection): https://pluralistic.net/plura-list Mastodon (no ads, tracking, or data-collection): https://mamot.fr/@pluralistic Bluesky (no ads, possible tracking and data-collection): https://bsky.app/profile/doctorow.pluralistic.net Medium (no ads, paywalled): https://doctorow.medium.com/ Tumblr (mass-scale, unrestricted, third-party surveillance and advertising): https://mostlysignssomeportents.tumblr.com/tagged/pluralistic "When life gives you SARS, you make sarsaparilla" -Joey "Accordion Guy" DeVilla READ CAREFULLY: By reading this, you agree, on behalf of your employer, to release me from all obligations and waivers arising from any and all NON-NEGOTIATED agreements, licenses, terms-of-service, shrinkwrap, clickwrap, browsewrap, confidentiality, non-disclosure, non-compete and acceptable use policies ("BOGUS AGREEMENTS") that I have entered into with your employer, its partners, licensors, agents and assigns, in perpetuity, without prejudice to my ongoing rights and privileges. You further represent that you have the authority to release me from any BOGUS AGREEMENTS on behalf of your employer. ISSN: 3066-764X

YouTube video by Mystic Arts

Performance dates and tickets for The Truth About Harry Beck

What's Changed Json schema improvements by @andreirie in #103 Important! Template update for nf-core/tools v3.4.1 by @nf-core-bot in #111 Feat ribowaltz by @iraiosub in #113 Feat tubemap by @iraio...

Today's links Decarbonization at a distance: A post-American century that runs on sunshine. Hey look at this: Delights to delectate. Object permanence: Human shields for Internet of Shit slumlords; Tubemap with one-bedroom flat prices; Years of Repair; Internet of Lying Things; Dieselgate for TVs; Apple kills Chinese RSS readers. Upcoming appearances: Where to find me. Recent appearances: Where I've been. Latest books: You keep readin' em, I'll keep writin' 'em. Upcoming books: Like I said, I'll keep writin' 'em. Colophon: All the rest. Decarbonization at a distance (permalink) In Bill McKibben's new book Here Comes the Sun, he frequently laments activists' tendency not to celebrate our wins, a habit that sees us always feeling as though we were losing, even when we're racking up massive victories: https://billmckibben.com/books/here-comes-the-sun/ Here Comes the Sun is an extraordinary, beautifully told, exhaustively researched and argued book about the remarkable progress of solar energy over the past five or so years. McKibben is speaking as much to his fellow activists as he is to the people on the sidelines, trying to get them to understand the quiet, profound changes to solar, to "update their priors" about whether a solar transition is possible, and what impediments stand between us and decarbonization. For example, you may have read that the material bill for solar is simply too large to pay – that there isn't enough copper, enough conflict minerals, enough lithium for the panels, wires and batteries we'll need for a solar transition: https://pluralistic.net/2024/08/06/with-great-power/#comes-great-responsibility This is just not true, for several reasons. First, the material bill for solarization is in freefall, with no end in sight. The amount of stuff we need to make panels, transmission lines and batteries keeps declining. Further: the efficiency gains of "clean" technology are astounding – meaning that, for example, it not only takes a lot less material to make a solar panel, the panel we make out of so much less stuff generates a lot more power. More: we keep finding ways to substitute more abundant materials for materials that are harder to find or refine (for example, swapping out lithium in batteries and replacing it with sodium, one of the most abundant minerals on Earth). Finally: we keep finding new sources of the materials that we can't readily substitute for. It turns out that when there's a lot more demand for a given mineral, people who've previously disregarded potential sources of that material suddenly pipe up with information about where (a lot) more of it can be found. None of that is to say that extracting and refining these materials is without cost or risk. The realpolitik of extraction means that mining and refining companies will preferentially target poor and indigenous communities for their mines and factories. That's totally true and completely unacceptable, and it means that our task is to demand climate justice (letting those communities decide for themselves whether and how they will be a part of this). That's important work, and it's very different from endlessly parroting 15-year old back-of-the-envelope calculations about the material bill for solarization. The material story is a really cool and exciting one. There is so much solar energy out there for the taking. A lot of the time, when we characterize high-tech products as "non-recyclable," what we mean is "it would take too much energy to recycle this device." As more and more solar comes online, we can reclaim literal tons of material from existing, superannuated tech. There's a solar-powered factory that ingests old solar panels, decomposes them into their source materials, and makes new, hyper-efficient solar panels out of them, reclaiming 99% of their materials: https://interestingengineering.com/energy/solarcycle-to-recycle-10-million-solar-panels-yearly Far from being an insurmountable barrier to a cleaner, better future, the material bill for solar is eminently tractable. What's more, the material bill for solar is superior in every way to the material bill for fossil fuels. The amount of stuff we need to dig up in order to solarize the planet is equal to one seventeenth of the fossil fuels we dig up every year. Remember, when you dig up a bunch of stuff to make a solar panel, that solar panel produces energy for decades afterwards, and when it finally reaches its end-of-life, we make it into another solar panel. When you dig up coal, you burn it and all that's left behind is a bunch of planet-destroying carbon dioxide and earth-and water-poisoning toxic ash. I can't emphasize this enough. Solar is a superior substitute for fossil fuels in more ways than one. Fossil fuels need to be continuously replenished, meaning that every fossil fuel-powered system in the world requires a continuous, ongoing stream of materials to produce energy. Replenishing this fuel doesn't merely require us to dig up enough old dead shit to burn in the machine, we also have to dig up tons more old dead shit to shlep that old dead shit around. The gas and coal being set on fire all around you right now required another mountain of fossil fuel to power the mining rig, the refinery, the ship and the truck that brought it to you. Making more solar involves digging stuff up and moving it too – but just once. Once those panels are on your roof (or over your parking lot or irrigation canal, or between the rows in your farm's fields) they convert abundant sunshine into efficient energy, without requiring any more materials: https://pluralistic.net/2024/08/06/with-great-power/#comes-great-responsibility So it's definitely time we rethink our assumptions about the solar transition. Here's one assumption I had to jettison after reading McKibben's book: I used to assume that whenever I heard about Europe or the US or Canada lowering CO2 emissions, that was mostly because these rich countries had exported their carbon to China, by shifting carbon-intensive manufacturing there. Back around the time of the Paris Accords, there was a raging debate about national carbon targets, with poor countries in the global south arguing that because rich northern countries were responsible for nearly all the CO2 in the atmosphere, the rich world should make the sacrifices needed to decarbonize, leaving China, India, and other poor countries to continue to enjoy the benefits of burning coal. China made an especially pointed case, insisting that their CO2 figures were grossly inflated because they made all the stuff that the rich world consumed. The carbon emissions from the appliances, consumer goods and industrial equipment and other exports from China were really the rich world's carbon, which had been offshored to "the world's factory" – China. This may have been true back then, but things have changed dramatically. China is running away from coal as fast as it can, and solarizing everything. China lights up a new solar generation facility with the capacity of a coal plant every eight hours. Trump can subsidize fossil fuels and throw up as many structural impediments to renewables as he can think of, and it won't change the fact that as a planet, we're on track to replace all of the embodied energy in the stuff the whole world uses with solar. So when you read that 54% of the energy in the EU is coming from renewables, that doesn't mean that they're cheating by offshoring their emissions to China. The EU is offshoring its manufacturing to China, but China has found a better way to manufacture Europe's stuff, without having to set old dead stuff on fire 24/7: https://electrek.co/2025/09/30/solar-leads-eu-electricity-generation-as-renewables-hit-54-percent/ Reading Here Comes the Sun is a forceful reminder that there's a big old world out there beyond America's borders. It's true that American policy was once very important to the whole world, but that was largely down to the things that Trump is hell-bent on destroying. American dollar-clearing and the SWIFT system gave the US a massive, global structural advantage, but the weaponization of SWIFT, the deliberate weakening of the US dollar, and the destruction of American monetarism via cryptocurrency scams has put dollar clearing into terminal decline: https://pluralistic.net/2023/10/10/weaponized-interdependence/#the-other-swifties Even US military might is in decline. US military spending remains off the charts, but Trump and Hegseth are purging the forces, targeting Black and brown people (disproportionately represented in the US military because people from minority groups are typically poorer, and the US military recruits a lot of poor people without many other options): https://theintercept.com/2025/10/01/pete-hegseth-war-pentagon-beardos-dei/ American aid agendas used to give it a huge global footprint. When American evangelicals forced the government to ban aid that included birth control or helping gender minorities, countries all around the world saw surges in unwanted pregnancies and homophobic discrimination. Now that the US has cut off all that aid, the US can no longer set priorities for those countries. America's domestic research agenda used to set the standard for the world, because the brightest scholars in the world moved here to go to university and to pursue their research. This meant that the priorities behind US federal scientific and academic grants determined what the world's best and brightest worked on. Of course, that's dead, too. Trump hasn't just killed research funding in America – he's also singlehandedly reversed generations of work to lure the world's most talented scientists and scholars to the USA. Grad students, professors, engineers and researchers are leaving the US rather than risk being kidnapped to a gulag in El Salvador or imprisoned in Alligator Auschwitz. Our loss is everyone else's gain. It's not clear whether people will ever again aspire to come to America to pursue their research. The point is that things are very much up for grabs right now. The planet is solarizing at rates that beggar the imagination (and warm the heart). McKibben quotes many sources who've called China "the Saudi Arabia of solar," but he is skeptical of that characterization. The sun, after all, shines everywhere and once you've got the solar installed, China can't take it away from you. Or can they? Solar – and the whole cleantech sector – is the first truly successful "internet of things" application. From inverters to EVs to household batteries, the new, electric world is digital and networked, and that means that it's all terribly enshittification prone. Today, the US has the ability to remotely, permanently disable every John Deere tractor in the world and set off a global famine: https://pluralistic.net/2022/05/08/about-those-kill-switched-ukrainian-tractors/ Tomorrow, Chinese soft (and not-so-soft) power could be vested in the ability to remotely update, downgrade, disable, or brick whole countries' worth of cleantech: https://pluralistic.net/2025/09/23/our-friend-the-electron/#to-every-man-his-castle There's a way to prevent this, thankfully. The only reason that technologists around the world can't reverse-engineer and unlock these "smart" devices is that the US trade representative bullied every country into passing punitive IP laws that ban this practice: https://pluralistic.net/2025/01/15/beauty-eh/#its-the-only-war-the-yankees-lost-except-for-vietnam-and-also-the-alamo-and-the-bay-of-ham Absent these laws, there could be a roaring trade in jailbreaking smart devices of all kinds – from printers to ventilators, but also all of cleantech – so that owners of these devices could always change how they work, blocking field updates and restoring functionality that had been confiscated by the manufacturer, whether due to greed or geopolitics. The US trade rep got these IP laws passed abroad by threatening America's trading partners with tariffs. Tariffs: another source of power that Trump has vaporized. The threat of tariffs loomed over the whole world, and fear of losing access to American markets meant that policymakers all over the world kept laws on the books that allowed US tech companies to extract rent and extort their populations. But a deterrent only works if you don't use it. Now that everyone's been tariffed by Trump, the threat is dead. Happy Liberation Day, folks. It's these US tech-protecting laws that create the conditions for an eventual mass-enshittification of cleantech. It's these laws that Chinese firms – and the Chinese state – would use to secure their ability to truly be the Saudi Arabia of the sun: not just the source of the technology that converts sunshine to electrons, but also the landlord of those sunbeams, with the power to evict whole countries from their solar arrays, at the click of a mouse. Creating a legal and technical framework for local control over cleantech's software has many advantages. The mere existence of a killswitch (or any remote-update facility that device owners can't override) makes devices vulnerable to shutdown by malicious hackers as well as manufacturers. However, a world of cleantech devices that are under their owners' absolute control also poses some challenges to the solar revolution. If you want to build a virtual power plant by harnessing the batteries of thousands of homeowners, or relieve grid pressure by adjusting the thermostats and fridges of millions of utility subscribers, it's a lot easier if you know that you're communicating with devices that do what you tell them to do and faithfully communicate their operations to you. That's a tradeoff we're going to have to make, though. The incremental reliability of designing technology so its owners can't override remote instructions is swamped by the massive risk that this power will be abused to attack individuals, regions, and whole countries. As the US government turns its back on solar, the sun is setting on the American empire. It's not clear whether there will be elections next year. Trump says he'll use terrorism laws to arrest people who are "anti-Christian" or "anti-capitalist": https://jacobin.com/2025/10/trump-classifies-anti-capitalism-as-a-political-pre-crime/ Will China step in and become the world's unipower as America shits itself to death after drinking raw milk or coughs itself to death after boycotting vaccines? I don't know. I hope we end up with a multipolar world, and that someone picks up the research agendas that Trump has destroyed. Earlier this year, Elon Musk's DOGE killed all the NIH grants that included the word "systemic" (because they're racist against the idea of "systemic racism"). Speaking as a guy whose cancer diagnosis was just upgraded from "localized" to "systemic," I really want some other well-resourced entity to do this work. One way the EU can act as a hedge against Chinese hegemony is by turning itself to manufacturing and selling disenshittifying technology – tools to jailbreak computers, phones, consoles, and embedded systems in cars and solar inverters and medical devices. This is a giant market opportunity for the EU, and it's also key to actually moving to a "Eurostack" of technology that is independent from the American tech companies that Trump uses to project power into every company and government in the world (except China). It doesn't matter if the EU funds an Office365 clone if there's no way to migrate data from Microsoft to that made-in-Europe alternative. No government ministry, no large firm, no civil society group is going to manually move each of their documents, messages, edit histories, directories and permissions over from a US tech product to a Eurostack alternative. To do that work, you'll need automation: scrapers, jailbreaks of virtualized devices that directly access their RAM and instruction flow. What about America? Well, there's still the tattered remains of federalism. The states and localities have power – on paper, at least. Many of these localities (including ones in deepest, reddest Trumpland) have been able to seize control over their energy destiny. If you want to get involved in insulating your town from "the Saudi Arabia of oil" (AKA "Saudi Arabia"), check out the Institute for Local Self-Reliance's work on "Community Power": https://ilsr.org/article/energy-democracy/four-shortcuts-to-boost-your-states-community-power-score/ Do that work, and maybe you'll be able to keep the lights on in the coming American Dark Ages. Practically speaking, it's unlikely that the rest of the world is going to accept 250 million American refugees fleeing the 50 million Trump diehards who've looted the country and torched its future. Hey look at this (permalink) * The Government Has Been Shut Down for Months https://prospect.org/politics/2025-09-30-government-has-been-shut-down-for-months/ I’ve Written About Loads of Scams. This One Almost Got Me. https://www.nytimes.com/2025/09/18/nyregion/zelle-chase-banking-scam.html?unlocked_article_code=1.nE8.mifp.13j7oh96HfpC&smid=url-share Chat Control Is Back on the Menu in the EU. It Still Must Be Stopped https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2025/09/chat-control-back-menu-eu-it-still-must-be-stopped-0 18 Lawyers Caught Using AI Explain Why They Did It https://www.404media.co/18-lawyers-caught-using-ai-explain-why-they-did-it/ The Ann Arbor District Library Plans to Acquire the Ann Arbor Observer https://aadl.org/node/647334 Blippo+ Stands Against the Enshittification of TV https://www.endlessmode.com/video-games/blippo/blippo-stands-against-the-enshittification-of-tv Object permanence (permalink) #15yrsago Stuttgart police use overwhelming force against peaceful protestors concerned about new train station https://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/the-world-from-berlin-germany-shocked-by-disproportionate-police-action-in-stuttgart-a-720735.html #10yrago Apple removes Ifixit’s repair manuals from App Store https://www.ifixit.com/News/7401/ifixit-app-pulled #10yrsago Theoretical “auto-brothel” attack on mechanics’ computers could infect millions of cars https://www.wired.com/2015/10/car-hacking-tool-turns-repair-shops-malware-brothels/ #10yrsago France’s plan to legalize mass surveillance will give it the power to spy on the world https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2015/09/frances-government-aims-give-itself-and-nsa-carte-blanche-spy-world #10yrsago Tube-map labelled with one-bedroom flat rental rates https://www.thrillist.com/lifestyle/london/london-underground-rent-map #10yrsago Nuanced profile of the Oklahoma County where “no one believes in climate change” https://www.cnn.com/2015/08/03/opinions/sutter-climate-skeptics-woodward-oklahoma/index.html?eref=rss_topstories #10yrsago Judge John Hodgman is back in the NYThttps://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/04/magazine/judge-john-hodgman-on-a-christmas-wish.html?_r=0 #10yrsago Fuerdai: Paris Hilton with Chinese characteristics https://web.archive.org/web/20151002094642/https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2015-10-01/children-of-the-yuan-percent-everyone-hates-china-s-rich-kids #10yrago New $50 Kindle Fire won’t recognize sideloaded ebooks on SD cards https://web.archive.org/web/20151002213918/https://teleread.com/chris-meadows/first-look-amazons-50-fire-tablet/ #10yrsago Landmark patent case will determine whether you can ever truly own a device againhttps://www.wired.com/2015/10/can-use-gadgets-may-hinge-printer-ink-case/?mbid=social_twitter #10yrsago Internet of Things That Lie: the future of regulation is demonology https://web.archive.org/web/20151002063110/http://ieet.org/index.php/IEET/more/rinesi20150925 #10yrsago Dieselgate for TVs: Samsung accused of programming TVs to cheat energy efficiency ratings https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2015/oct/01/samsung-tvs-appear-more-energy-efficient-in-tests-than-in-real-life #10yrsago Pope: I don’t support homophobic civic layabout Kim Davis https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-34425450 #10yrsago Arbitration: how America’s corporations got their own private legal system https://web.archive.org/web/20151004171307/http://www.onthecommons.org/magazine/we-now-have-a-justice-system-just-for-corporations #10yrsago Voter suppression act two: closing driver’s license offices in Alabama’s Black Belt https://www.al.com/opinion/2015/09/voter_id_and_drivers_license_o.html #10yrsago Why an obscure left-wing MP won the UK Labour leadership by the biggest margin in history https://mondediplo.com/2015/10/04corbyn #5yrsago Apple kills RSS readers in China https://pluralistic.net/2020/10/02/chickenized-by-arise/#rss-ccp-rip #5yrsago Call center workers pay for the privilege https://pluralistic.net/2020/10/02/chickenized-by-arise/#arise #5yrsago Block Google-Fitbit https://pluralistic.net/2020/10/01/the-years-of-repair/#google-fitbit #5yrsago The Years of Repair https://pluralistic.net/2020/10/01/the-years-of-repair/#leap-manifesto #5yrsago Private equity's profitable murder https://pluralistic.net/2020/10/01/the-years-of-repair/#mass-murder #5yrsago Witch https://pluralistic.net/2020/10/01/the-years-of-repair/#witch #1yrago Everyday homeowners are human shields for Wall Street's Internet of Shit slumlords https://pluralistic.net/2024/10/01/housing-is-a-human-right/# #1yrago Epic Systems, a lethal health record monopolist https://pluralistic.net/2024/10/02/upcoded-to-death/#thanks-obama Upcoming appearances (permalink) Boston: Enshittification with Randall Munroe (Brattle Theater), Oct 7 https://www.eventbrite.com/e/cory-doctorow-at-the-brattle-theatre-tickets-1591235180259?aff=oddtdtcreator DC: Enshittification with Rohit Chopra (Politics and Prose), Oct 8 https://politics-prose.com/cory-doctorow-10825 NYC: Enshittification with Lina Khan (Brooklyn Public Library), Oct 9 https://www.bklynlibrary.org/calendar/cory-doctorow-discusses-central-library-dweck-20251009-0700pm New Orleans: DeepSouthCon63, Oct 10-12 http://www.contraflowscifi.org/ New Orleans: Enshittification at Octavia Books, Oct 12 https://www.octaviabooks.com/event/enshittification-cory-doctorow Chicago: How Platforms Die with Rick Perlstein (University Club), Oct 14 https://www.eventbrite.com/e/how-platforms-die-with-cory-doctorow-tickets-1747916117159 Los Angeles: Enshittification with David Dayen (Diesel), Oct 16 https://dieselbookstore.com/event/2025-10-16/cory-doctorow-enshittification San Francisco: Enshittification at Public Works with Jenny Odell (The Booksmith), Oct 20 https://app.gopassage.com/events/doctorow25 PDX: Enshittification at Powell's, Oct 21 https://www.powells.com/events/cory-doctorow-10-21-25 Seattle: Enshittification and the Rot Economy, with Ed Zitron (Clarion West), Oct 22 https://www.clarionwest.org/event/2025-deep-dives-cory-doctorow/ Vancouver: Enshittification with David Moscrop (Vancouver Writers Festival), Oct 23 https://www.showpass.com/2025-festival-39/ Montreal: Montreal Attention Forum keynote, Oct 24 https://www.attentionconferences.com/conferences/2025-forum Ottawa: Enshittification (Ottawa Writers Festival), Oct 25 https://writersfestival.org/events/fall-2025/enshittification Toronto: Enshittification with Dan Werb (Type Books), Oct 27 https://www.instagram.com/p/DO81_1VDngu/?img_index=1 Barcelona: Conferencia EUROPEA 4D (Virtual), Oct 28 https://4d.cat/es/conferencia/ Miami: Enshittification at Books & Books, Nov 5 https://www.eventbrite.com/e/an-evening-with-cory-doctorow-tickets-1504647263469 Miami: Cloudfest, Nov 6 https://www.cloudfest.com/usa/ Burbank: Burbank Book Festival, Nov 8 https://www.burbankbookfestival.com/ Lisbon: A post-American, enshittification-resistant internet, with Rabble (Web Summit), Nov 12 https://websummit.com/sessions/lis25/92f47bc9-ca60-4997-bef3-006735b1f9c5/a-post-american-enshittification-resistant-internet/ Cardiff: Hay Festival After Hours, Nov 13 https://www.hayfestival.com/c-203-hay-festival-after-hours.aspx Recent appearances (permalink) Enshittification (The.Ink) https://the.ink/p/watch-cory-doctorow-on-why-everything Why Everything Is Getting Worse (Majority Report) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EQW6UxY144Q Enshittification (Cornell) https://ecornell.cornell.edu/keynotes/view/K091225/ Latest books (permalink) "Picks and Shovels": a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about the heroic era of the PC, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), February 2025 (https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250865908/picksandshovels). "The Bezzle": a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about prison-tech and other grifts, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), February 2024 (the-bezzle.org). "The Lost Cause:" a solarpunk novel of hope in the climate emergency, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), November 2023 (http://lost-cause.org). "The Internet Con": A nonfiction book about interoperability and Big Tech (Verso) September 2023 (http://seizethemeansofcomputation.org). Signed copies at Book Soup (https://www.booksoup.com/book/9781804291245). "Red Team Blues": "A grabby, compulsive thriller that will leave you knowing more about how the world works than you did before." Tor Books http://redteamblues.com. "Chokepoint Capitalism: How to Beat Big Tech, Tame Big Content, and Get Artists Paid, with Rebecca Giblin", on how to unrig the markets for creative labor, Beacon Press/Scribe 2022 https://chokepointcapitalism.com Upcoming books (permalink) "Canny Valley": A limited edition collection of the collages I create for Pluralistic, self-published, September 2025 "Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It," Farrar, Straus, Giroux, October 7 2025 https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374619329/enshittification/ "Unauthorized Bread": a middle-grades graphic novel adapted from my novella about refugees, toasters and DRM, FirstSecond, 2026 "Enshittification, Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It" (the graphic novel), Firstsecond, 2026 "The Memex Method," Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2026 "The Reverse-Centaur's Guide to AI," a short book about being a better AI critic, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2026 Colophon (permalink) Today's top sources: Currently writing: "The Reverse Centaur's Guide to AI," a short book for Farrar, Straus and Giroux about being an effective AI critic. FIRST DRAFT COMPLETE AND SUBMITTED. A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING This work – excluding any serialized fiction – is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license. That means you can use it any way you like, including commercially, provided that you attribute it to me, Cory Doctorow, and include a link to pluralistic.net. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ Quotations and images are not included in this license; they are included either under a limitation or exception to copyright, or on the basis of a separate license. Please exercise caution. How to get Pluralistic: Blog (no ads, tracking, or data-collection): Pluralistic.net Newsletter (no ads, tracking, or data-collection): https://pluralistic.net/plura-list Mastodon (no ads, tracking, or data-collection): https://mamot.fr/@pluralistic Medium (no ads, paywalled): https://doctorow.medium.com/ Twitter (mass-scale, unrestricted, third-party surveillance and advertising): https://twitter.com/doctorow Tumblr (mass-scale, unrestricted, third-party surveillance and advertising): https://mostlysignssomeportents.tumblr.com/tagged/pluralistic "When life gives you SARS, you make sarsaparilla" -Joey "Accordion Guy" DeVilla READ CAREFULLY: By reading this, you agree, on behalf of your employer, to release me from all obligations and waivers arising from any and all NON-NEGOTIATED agreements, licenses, terms-of-service, shrinkwrap, clickwrap, browsewrap, confidentiality, non-disclosure, non-compete and acceptable use policies ("BOGUS AGREEMENTS") that I have entered into with your employer, its partners, licensors, agents and assigns, in perpetuity, without prejudice to my ongoing rights and privileges. You further represent that you have the authority to release me from any BOGUS AGREEMENTS on behalf of your employer. ISSN: 3066-764X

My Springsteen discography map: Greetings from Asbury Park (1973) to his latest, the E Street Band. Called "truly amazing" by The Bruce Springsteen Archive.

# Today's links * How an AI moratorium can save AI bosses: If you can't impose switching costs, just eliminate the competition. * Hey look at this: Delights to delectate. * Object permanence: Flash Worms; This Film is Not Yet Rated; Libdem copyright sabotage; Religion worth more than Big Tech; Geographic tubemap; Selective censorship resistance. * Upcoming appearances: Budapest, Edmonton, Boston, South Bend, Hudson, Calgary, Winnipeg, Vancouver, Victoria, Ottawa. * Recent appearances: Where I've been. * Latest books: You keep readin' em, I'll keep writin' 'em. * Upcoming books: Like I said, I'll keep writin' 'em. * Colophon: All the rest. * * * # How an AI moratorium can save AI bosses (permalink) There's lots of reasons to believe the "hyperscaler" model of AI can never be profitable, and not just because of its gigantic expenditures and negative unit economics (the companies lose money with every new customer and every new use, and they lose more money with each generation of their products): https://pluralistic.net/2025/09/27/econopocalypse/#subprime-intelligence The industry strenuously denies this, of course. They insist that they are only days away from turning their balance sheets right side up. All they have to do is fix those unit economics, then they can make back the cost of producing their models by selling access to them. The problem is that the evidence for those improving unit economics is weak, while the evidence that they're faking their finances is _very_ strong: https://www.wheresyoured.at/exclusive-openai-financials/ Same goes for the claims that these companies are _already_ profitable. Dig into those claims and you'll learn they depend on a new, special meaning of "profitable" that does not match the generally accepted accounting procedures (GAAP) definition, which is to say, these companies are claiming that they are _so cool_ that their profitability can only be measured using a novel, secret form of mathematics: https://futurism.com/future-society/anthropic-claude-profit-ai-safety-development-finances This is the same wheeze that Softbank tried with Wework. Speaking in my capacity as an author of internationally bestselling technothrillers about accounting fraud, I can tell you that it was accounting fraud then, and it's accounting fraud now: https://www.ndtv.com/world-news/how-wework-went-from-being-47-billion-start-up-to-bankrupt-in-3-years-4552627 But let's give the AI bosses a momentary benefit of the doubt and stipulate that they are on the verge of acquiring positive unit-economics, which will let them start to pay off the massive expenditures they incurred by training their models and enter their long-anticipated profitability phase, when the money-furnaces they've been running for years turn into money _printers_ , to the delight of the investors who've supplied the vast bales of $100 bills the companies have been shoveling into their models' coalboxes for years now. Basically, they're saying, "Sure, it cost us a lot to get these rails laid, but now that the railroad is complete we can start running cars over them and make a profit." Unfortunately (for bosses and investors), this proposition is every bit as dubious as their claims to improving unit economics. To understand why, just look at what happened the last time Anthropic shipped a major Claude update. Virtually overnight, all of OpenAI's best customers stopped paying for ChatGPT and started paying for Claude. That's because chatbots have very low _switching costs_ : going from one chatbot to another costs almost nothing: https://www.businessinsider.com/why-ai-startup-founder-switched-chatgpt-to-claude-2026-3 Everyone using AI knows this to be true. When I walked the floor at CES last year, I asked every AI-powered gadget maker, "What will you do if your chatbot provider jacks up their prices?" and to a one, they said, "No problem, we've designed this thing so that we can switch chatbots with the click of a mouse": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WfhELBX8Jbs That means that you can't just "build the railroad and run the cars over it." The minute you finish your railroad, your rivals will announce that they've got a new, adjacent railroad that's even faster than yours, and you will have to get to work laying _another_ set of tracks to support _even faster_ trains. This is a disaster all around: the AI companies are locked in a Red Queen's Race, a fatal beggar-thy-neighbor doom-loop. The only way they could escape that trap is by signing a nonaggression pact amongst themselves promising not to compete anymore. But there's two giant problems with this: first, it is incredibly, fantastically illegal under antitrust law, because it represents a conspiracy among the dominant players to cease to compete with one another, and; second, it leaves the field open for the further development of Chinese "open weight" models that customers can run on their own modest, low-powered computers, which are presently lagging the US "frontier models" by a mere four months: https://arstechnica.com/ai/2026/09/exclusive-open-chinese-models-close-gap-with-silicon-valleys-frontier-ai-models/ Even if you don't trust Chinese models, you can extract their training through a process called distillation and transfer them to models you _do_ trust: https://www.anthropic.com/news/detecting-and-preventing-distillation-attacks But what if there was a way for the AI companies to get government permission to violate antitrust law and cease to compete with one another, _and_ secure a ban on the use of Chinese open weight models? Turns out, there _is_ a way to call time on the Red Queen's Race: merely insist that you are on the verge of teaching so many words to the word-guessing program that it will wake up and devour us all, and call for a ban on "superintelligence": https://www.foxbusiness.com/technology/microsoft-ceo-says-superintelligence-must-remain-under-human-control Once the government stipulates that "superintelligence risk" is an existential crisis, it _must_ grant the hyperscalers a consent decree absolving them from any violations of antitrust law stemming from a conspiracy to halt direct competition with one another: https://stephaniekelton.substack.com/p/brer-rabbit-and-ai-extinction Freaking out about "superintelligence" is a canonical example of "criti-hype," where critics repeat boosters' claims but append, "(and that's bad)" to them: https://peoples-things.ghost.io/youre-doing-it-wrong-notes-on-criticism-and-technology-hype/ Remember, the tech giants _want_ to stop competing. Mark Zuckerberg and Sudar Pichai colluded to rig the ad-market with a secret program called "Jedi Blue": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jedi_Blue Every year, Google sends Apple a bribe of more than $20b in exchange for Apple not entering the search market: https://appleworld.today/2025/09/google-wont-be-barred-from-entering-into-search-agreements-with-companies-like-apple/ And the biggest tech companies in the world had a secret "no poach" agreement where they illegally promised not to try to hire one another's top engineers by offering them raises: https://chicagounbound.uchicago.edu/law_and_economics/1033/ The only thing Peter Thiel hates more than the Antichrist (spoiler, he's just talking about Greta Thunberg) is "wasteful competition": https://www.youtube.com/shorts/WmRC_NQh6aQ When an industry that is eating itself alive through "hyperscaling" demands that the government bless a conspiracy to halt competition and ban open source alternatives, you should be suspicious. When that industry is pursuing a venture that has lost more money than any other venture in human history, you should be _very_ suspicious, especially when its "rogue AI hacking" story turns out to be a story about how a hacking tool did _exactly what it was designed to do_ : https://pluralistic.net/2026/09/12/god-in-the-box/#llms-are-fake Peter Thiel is right: AI is full of wasteful competition, but not because competition is a waste – rather, it's because the companies are competing to convince people to use their expensive products for the cheapest applications. Elon Musk's SpaceX IPO depended on him losing billions of dollars by letting the world's stupidest chuds produce mountains of child porn and images of Sonic the Hedgehog with giant boobs. That is indeed _wasteful_ (and reprehensible). That doesn't mean we should allow the AI companies to get the government to bless their conspiracy in restraint of trade; rather, it militates for having the government investigate them for securities fraud, trafficking in child sex abuse material, election finance violations, and a long list of other crimes and misdemeanors. * * * # Hey look at this (permalink) * Henry Farrell and Abe Newman on Weaponized Interdependence https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/henry-farrell-and-abe-newman-on-weaponized * The Enshittification Resistant Software Project https://er-certification.statichost.page/index.html * The Life of Death and the Ensh*ttificator https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d6SPV4GZp-U * Marginalia Search https://marginalia-search.com/ * Why the Postpandemic Tech Bust Sent Billionaires to Trump https://www.wired.com/story/against-tech-oligarchy-book-excerpt-trump-billionaries/ * * * # Object permanence (permalink) #25yrago Flash Worms: Thirty Seconds to Infect the Internet https://web.archive.org/web/20011024012950/http://www.silicondefense.com/flash/ #20yrsago This Film is Not Rated – must-see doc about MPAA ratings https://memex.craphound.com/2006/09/16/this-film-is-not-rated-must-see-doc-about-mpaa-ratings/ #15yrsago Chinese netizens angered by “princelings” — spoiled children of the rich and powerful https://edition.cnn.com/2011/09/16/world/asia/china-elite-children/index.html?iref=allsearch #15yrsago LibDems get to vote on copyright reform, but who inserted the clause saying downloading should be a criminal act? https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2011/sep/16/libdems-vote-copyright-reform #15yrsago Insurer: music-festival tragedy caused by illegal downloading https://twitpic.com/6l5ap2 #10yrsago US religion is worth $1.2T/year, more than America’s 10 biggest tech companies, combined https://web.archive.org/web/20161019095803/http://www.religjournal.com/pdf/ijrr12003.pdf #10yrsago Geographically representative map of the London Underground https://web.archive.org/web/20240813111321/https://www.citymonitor.ai/analysis/map-londons-tube-shows-disused-stations-track-layout-and-more-2429/ #10yrsago Republican election officials block restrictions on foreign spending in US elections https://web.archive.org/web/20160916181403/https://theintercept.com/2016/09/16/fec-republicans-kill-attempt-to-block-foreign-money-in-u-s-elections/ #10yrsago Tommy Chong asks Obama to pardon him for his bullshit drug paraphernalia bust https://web.archive.org/web/20210720131834/https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/lifestyle/lifestyle-news/tommy-chong-seeks-obamas-pardon-928962/ #10yrsago Week two for the largest prison strike in US history https://web.archive.org/web/20160916143157/https://theintercept.com/2016/09/16/the-largest-prison-strike-in-u-s-history-enters-its-second-week/ #5yrsago Criminal entrepreneurship in Mexico’s high-tech drug cartels https://web.archive.org/web/20160917133449/https://motherboard.vice.com/read/how-drug-cartels-operate-like-silicon-valley-startups #1yrago No such thing as selective censorship resistance https://pluralistic.net/2025/09/16/too-many-throats-to-choke/#pluralism-is-resiliency * * * # Upcoming appearances (permalink) * Budapest: Brain Bar, Sep 17 https://brainbar.com/munkatars/cory-doctorow * Edmonton: Elbows Up (Edmonton Public Library), Sep 28 https://www.epl.ca/blogs/post/elbows-up-with-cory-doctorow/ * Boston: The Post-American Internet: Possibilities for a new internet created by an American Hermit Kingdom (MIT Media Lab), Sep 30 https://www.media.mit.edu/events/the-post-american-internet-possibilities-for-a-new-internet-created-by-an-american-hermit-kingdom/ * Boston: The Paradox of Enshittification and Reverse Centaurs (Harvard Berkman Klein), Sep 30 https://cyber.harvard.edu/events/running-harder-falling-faster-paradox-enshittification-and-reverse-centaurs * South Bend: An Evening With Cory Doctorow (Notre Dame), Oct 6 https://franco.nd.edu/events/2026/10/06/an-evening-with-cory-doctorow/ * Hudson, OH: Hudson Library, Oct 7 https://engagedpatrons.org/EventsExtended.cfm?SiteID=3850&EventID=596952&PK= * Calgary: Wordfest, Oct 8 https://wordfest.com/2026/show/wordfest-presents-cory-doctorow-2026/ * Winnipeg: McNally Robinson, Oct 9 https://www.mcnallyrobinson.com/event-18991/An-Evening-with-Cory-Doctorow * Vancouver: Read, Resist, Repair, Rejoice (Vancouver Writers Festival), Oct 19 https://writersfest.bc.ca/festival-event-2026/01 * Victoria: Munro's Books, Oct 20 https://www.munrobooks.com/events/6113620261020 * Vancouver: Life After AI (Vancouver Writers Festival), Oct 22 https://writersfest.bc.ca/festival-event-2026/46 * Ottawa: Life After AI (Ottawa Writers Festival), Oct 24 https://writersfestival.org/event/life-after-ai * Vancouver: BC Policy Solutions Gala, Nov 12 https://bcpolicy.ca/gala/ * * * # Recent appearances (permalink) * Are 'AI Apocalypse' Warnings Just Marketing? (What's Left) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IXd9HwIE5bo * The Real AI Threat Isn’t What You’ve Been Told (The Tea with Myriam François) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vc8It00fRsA * Fascists may come after the AI bubble bursts (You&AI) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J2WN64aQeYQ * What Would a Normal Person Do (Trashfuture) https://www.patreon.com/trashfuture/posts/what-would-do-169247456 * Pod Save the UK https://audioboom.com/posts/8950533-radicalised-organised-and-thick-as-s-t-nish-has-had-it-with-far-right-protests-plus-why * * * # Latest books (permalink) * "The Reverse-Centaur's Guide to AI," a short book about being a better AI critic, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, June 2026 https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374621568/thereversecentaursguidetolifeafterai/ * "Canny Valley": A limited edition collection of the collages I create for Pluralistic, self-published, September 2025 https://pluralistic.net/2025/09/04/illustrious/#chairman-bruce * "Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It," Farrar, Straus, Giroux, October 7 2025 https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374619329/enshittification/ * "Picks and Shovels": a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about the heroic era of the PC, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), February 2025 (https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250865908/picksandshovels). * "The Bezzle": a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about prison-tech and other grifts, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), February 2024 (thebezzle.org). * "The Lost Cause:" a solarpunk novel of hope in the climate emergency, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), November 2023 (http://lost-cause.org). * "The Internet Con": A nonfiction book about interoperability and Big Tech (Verso) September 2023 (http://seizethemeansofcomputation.org). Signed copies at Book Soup (https://www.booksoup.com/book/9781804291245). * "Red Team Blues": "A grabby, compulsive thriller that will leave you knowing more about how the world works than you did before." Tor Books http://redteamblues.com. * "Chokepoint Capitalism: How to Beat Big Tech, Tame Big Content, and Get Artists Paid, with Rebecca Giblin", on how to unrig the markets for creative labor, Beacon Press/Scribe 2022 https://chokepointcapitalism.com * * * # Upcoming books (permalink) * "The Post-American Internet," a geopolitical sequel of sorts to _Enshittification_ , Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2027 * "Unauthorized Bread": a middle-grades graphic novel adapted from my novella about refugees, toasters and DRM, FirstSecond, April 20, 2027 * "Enshittification, Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It" (the graphic novel), Firstsecond, 2027 * "The Memex Method," Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2027 * * * # Colophon (permalink) Today's top sources: **Currently writing:** * “Once Is Enemy Action,” a science fiction novel about the origins of modern technofascism. Today's words: 555 (15487 total). * "The Post-American Internet," a sequel to "Enshittification," about the better world the rest of us get to have now that Trump has torched America. Fourth draft completed. Submitted to editor. * A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING * * * This work – excluding any serialized fiction – is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license. That means you can use it any way you like, including commercially, provided that you attribute it to me, Cory Doctorow, and include a link to pluralistic.net. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ Quotations and images are not included in this license; they are included either under a limitation or exception to copyright, or on the basis of a separate license. Please exercise caution. * * * # How to get Pluralistic: Blog (no ads, tracking, or data-collection): Pluralistic.net Newsletter (no ads, tracking, or data-collection): https://pluralistic.net/plura-list Mastodon (no ads, tracking, or data-collection): https://mamot.fr/@pluralistic Bluesky (no ads, possible tracking and data-collection): https://bsky.app/profile/doctorow.pluralistic.net Medium (no ads, paywalled): https://doctorow.medium.com/ Tumblr (mass-scale, unrestricted, third-party surveillance and advertising): https://mostlysignssomeportents.tumblr.com/tagged/pluralistic "_When life gives you SARS, you make sarsaparilla_ " -Joey "Accordion Guy" DeVilla READ CAREFULLY: By reading this, you agree, on behalf of your employer, to release me from all obligations and waivers arising from any and all NON-NEGOTIATED agreements, licenses, terms-of-service, shrinkwrap, clickwrap, browsewrap, confidentiality, non-disclosure, non-compete and acceptable use policies ("BOGUS AGREEMENTS") that I have entered into with your employer, its partners, licensors, agents and assigns, in perpetuity, without prejudice to my ongoing rights and privileges. You further represent that you have the authority to release me from any BOGUS AGREEMENTS on behalf of your employer. ISSN: 3066-764X ### Like this: Like Loading…

Today's links Decarbonization at a distance: A post-American century that runs on sunshine. Hey look at this: Delights to delectate. Object permanence: Human shields for Internet of Shit slumlords; Tubemap with one-bedroom flat prices; Years of Repair; Internet of Lying Things; Dieselgate for TVs; Apple kills Chinese RSS readers. Upcoming appearances: Where to find me. Recent appearances: Where I've been. Latest books: You keep readin' em, I'll keep writin' 'em. Upcoming books: Like I said, I'll keep writin' 'em. Colophon: All the rest. Decarbonization at a distance (permalink) In Bill McKibben's new book Here Comes the Sun, he frequently laments activists' tendency not to celebrate our wins, a habit that sees us always feeling as though we were losing, even when we're racking up massive victories: https://billmckibben.com/books/here-comes-the-sun/ Here Comes the Sun is an extraordinary, beautifully told, exhaustively researched and argued book about the remarkable progress of solar energy over the past five or so years. McKibben is speaking as much to his fellow activists as he is to the people on the sidelines, trying to get them to understand the quiet, profound changes to solar, to "update their priors" about whether a solar transition is possible, and what impediments stand between us and decarbonization. For example, you may have read that the material bill for solar is simply too large to pay – that there isn't enough copper, enough conflict minerals, enough lithium for the panels, wires and batteries we'll need for a solar transition: https://pluralistic.net/2024/08/06/with-great-power/#comes-great-responsibility This is just not true, for several reasons. First, the material bill for solarization is in freefall, with no end in sight. The amount of stuff we need to make panels, transmission lines and batteries keeps declining. Further: the efficiency gains of "clean" technology are astounding – meaning that, for example, it not only takes a lot less material to make a solar panel, the panel we make out of so much less stuff generates a lot more power. More: we keep finding ways to substitute more abundant materials for materials that are harder to find or refine (for example, swapping out lithium in batteries and replacing it with sodium, one of the most abundant minerals on Earth). Finally: we keep finding new sources of the materials that we can't readily substitute for. It turns out that when there's a lot more demand for a given mineral, people who've previously disregarded potential sources of that material suddenly pipe up with information about where (a lot) more of it can be found. None of that is to say that extracting and refining these materials is without cost or risk. The realpolitik of extraction means that mining and refining companies will preferentially target poor and indigenous communities for their mines and factories. That's totally true and completely unacceptable, and it means that our task is to demand climate justice (letting those communities decide for themselves whether and how they will be a part of this). That's important work, and it's very different from endlessly parroting 15-year old back-of-the-envelope calculations about the material bill for solarization. The material story is a really cool and exciting one. There is so much solar energy out there for the taking. A lot of the time, when we characterize high-tech products as "non-recyclable," what we mean is "it would take too much energy to recycle this device." As more and more solar comes online, we can reclaim literal tons of material from existing, superannuated tech. There's a solar-powered factory that ingests old solar panels, decomposes them into their source materials, and makes new, hyper-efficient solar panels out of them, reclaiming 99% of their materials: https://interestingengineering.com/energy/solarcycle-to-recycle-10-million-solar-panels-yearly Far from being an insurmountable barrier to a cleaner, better future, the material bill for solar is eminently tractable. What's more, the material bill for solar is superior in every way to the material bill for fossil fuels. The amount of stuff we need to dig up in order to solarize the planet is equal to one seventeenth of the fossil fuels we dig up every year. Remember, when you dig up a bunch of stuff to make a solar panel, that solar panel produces energy for decades afterwards, and when it finally reaches its end-of-life, we make it into another solar panel. When you dig up coal, you burn it and all that's left behind is a bunch of planet-destroying carbon dioxide and earth-and water-poisoning toxic ash. I can't emphasize this enough. Solar is a superior substitute for fossil fuels in more ways than one. Fossil fuels need to be continuously replenished, meaning that every fossil fuel-powered system in the world requires a continuous, ongoing stream of materials to produce energy. Replenishing this fuel doesn't merely require us to dig up enough old dead shit to burn in the machine, we also have to dig up tons more old dead shit to shlep that old dead shit around. The gas and coal being set on fire all around you right now required another mountain of fossil fuel to power the mining rig, the refinery, and the ship and the truck that brought it to you. Making more solar involves digging stuff up and moving it too – but just once. Once those panels are on your roof (or over your parking lot or irrigation canal, or between the rows in your farm's fields) they convert abundant sunshine into efficient energy, without requiring any more materials: https://pluralistic.net/2024/08/06/with-great-power/#comes-great-responsibility So it's definitely time we rethink our assumptions about the solar transition. Here's one assumption I had to jettison after reading McKibben's book: I used to assume that whenever I heard about Europe or the US or Canada lowering CO2 emissions, that was mostly because these rich countries had exported their carbon to China, by shifting carbon-intensive manufacturing there. Back around the time of the Paris Accords, there was a raging debate about national carbon targets, with poor countries in the global south arguing that because rich northern countries were responsible for nearly all the CO2 in the atmosphere, the rich world should make the sacrifices needed to decarbonize, leaving China, India, and other poor countries to continue to enjoy the benefits of burning coal. China made an especially pointed case, insisting that their CO2 figures were grossly inflated because they made all the stuff that the rich world consumed. The carbon emissions from the appliances, consumer goods and industrial equipment and other exports from China were really the rich world's carbon, which had been offshored to "the world's factory" – China. This may have been true back then, but things have changed dramatically. China is running away from coal as fast as it can, and solarizing everything. China lights up a new solar generation facility with the capacity of a coal plant every eight hours. Trump can subsidize fossil fuels and throw up as many structural impediments to renewables as he can think of, and it won't change the fact that as a planet, we're on track to replace all of the embodied energy in the stuff the whole world uses with solar. So when you read that 54% of the energy in the EU is coming from renewables, that doesn't mean that they're cheating by offshoring their emissions to China. The EU is offshoring its manufacturing to China, but China has found a better way to manufacture Europe's stuff, without having to set old dead stuff on fire 24/7: https://electrek.co/2025/09/30/solar-leads-eu-electricity-generation-as-renewables-hit-54-percent/ Reading Here Comes the Sun is a forceful reminder that there's a big old world out there beyond America's borders. It's true that American policy was once very important to the whole world, but that was largely down to the things that Trump is hell-bent on destroying. American dollar-clearing and the SWIFT system gave the US a massive, global structural advantage, but the weaponization of SWIFT, the deliberate weakening of the US dollar, and the destruction of American monetarism via cryptocurrency scams has put dollar clearing into terminal decline: https://pluralistic.net/2023/10/10/weaponized-interdependence/#the-other-swifties Even US military might is in decline. US military spending remains off the charts, but Trump and Hegseth are purging the forces, targeting Black and brown people (disproportionately represented in the US military because people from minority groups are typically poorer, and the US military recruits a lot of poor people without many other options): https://theintercept.com/2025/10/01/pete-hegseth-war-pentagon-beardos-dei/ American aid agendas used to give it a huge global footprint. When American evangelicals forced the government to ban aid that included birth control or helping gender minorities, countries all around the world saw surges in unwanted pregnancies and homophobic discrimination. Now that the US has cut off all that aid, the US can no longer set priorities for those countries. America's domestic research agenda used to set the standard for the world, because the brightest scholars in the world moved here to go to university and to pursue their research. This meant that the priorities behind US federal scientific and academic grants determined what the world's best and brightest worked on. Of course, that's dead, too. Trump hasn't just killed research funding in America – he's also singlehandedly reversed generations of work to lure the world's most talented scientists and scholars to the USA. Grad students, professors, engineers and researchers are leaving the US rather than risk being kidnapped to a gulag in El Salvador or imprisoned in Alligator Auschwitz. Our loss is everyone else's gain. It's not clear whether people will ever again aspire to come to America to pursue their research. The point is that things are very much up for grabs right now. The planet is solarizing at rates that beggar the imagination (and warm the heart). McKibben quotes many sources who've called China "the Saudi Arabia of solar," but he is skeptical of that characterization. The sun, after all, shines everywhere and once you've got the solar installed, China can't take it away from you. Or can they? Solar – and the whole cleantech sector – is the first truly successful "internet of things" application. From inverters to EVs to household batteries, the new, electric world is digital and networked, and that means that it's all terribly enshittification prone. Today, the US has the ability to remotely, permanently disable every John Deere tractor in the world and set off a global famine: https://pluralistic.net/2022/05/08/about-those-kill-switched-ukrainian-tractors/ Tomorrow, Chinese soft (and not-so-soft) power could be vested in the ability to remotely update, downgrade, disable, or brick whole countries' worth of cleantech: https://pluralistic.net/2025/09/23/our-friend-the-electron/#to-every-man-his-castle There's a way to prevent this, thankfully. The only reason that technologists around the world can't reverse-engineer and unlock these "smart" devices is that the US trade representative bullied every country into passing punitive IP laws that ban this practice: https://pluralistic.net/2025/01/15/beauty-eh/#its-the-only-war-the-yankees-lost-except-for-vietnam-and-also-the-alamo-and-the-bay-of-ham Absent these laws, there could be a roaring trade in jailbreaking smart devices of all kinds – from printers to ventilators, but also all of cleantech – so that owners of these devices could always change how they work, blocking field updates and restoring functionality that had been confiscated by the manufacturer, whether due to greed or geopolitics. The US trade rep got these IP laws passed abroad by threatening America's trading partners with tariffs. Tariffs: another source of power that Trump has vaporized. The threat of tariffs loomed over the whole world, and fear of losing access to American markets meant that policymakers all over the world kept laws on the books that allowed US tech companies to extract rent and extort their populations. But a deterrent only works if you don't use it. Now that everyone's been tariffed by Trump, the threat is dead. Happy Liberation Day, folks. It's these US tech-protecting laws that create the conditions for an eventual mass-enshittification of cleantech. It's these laws that Chinese firms – and the Chinese state – would use to secure their ability to truly be the Saudi Arabia of the sun: not just the source of the technology that converts sunshine to electrons, but also the landlord of those sunbeams, with the power to evict whole countries from their solar arrays, at the click of a mouse. Creating a legal and technical framework for local control over cleantech's software has many advantages. The mere existence of a killswitch (or any remote-update facility that device owners can't override) makes devices vulnerable to shutdown by malicious hackers as well as manufacturers. However, a world of cleantech devices that are under their owners' absolute control also poses some challenges to the solar revolution. If you want to build a virtual power plant by harnessing the batteries of thousands of homeowners, or relieve grid pressure by adjusting the thermostats and fridges of millions of utility subscribers, it's a lot easier if you know that you're communicating with devices that do what you tell them to do and faithfully communicate their operations to you. That's a tradeoff we're going to have to make, though. The incremental reliability of designing technology so its owners can't override remote instructions is swamped by the massive risk that this power will be abused to attack individuals, regions, and whole countries. As the US government turns its back on solar, the sun is setting on the American empire. It's not clear whether there will be elections next year. Trump says he'll use terrorism laws to arrest people who are "anti-Christian" or "anti-capitalist": https://jacobin.com/2025/10/trump-classifies-anti-capitalism-as-a-political-pre-crime/ Will China step in and become the world's unipower as America shits itself to death after drinking raw milk or coughs itself to death after boycotting vaccines? I don't know. I hope we end up with a multipolar world, and that someone picks up the research agendas that Trump has destroyed. Earlier this year, Elon Musk's DOGE killed all the NIH grants that included the word "systemic" (because they're racist against the idea of "systemic racism"). Speaking as a guy whose cancer diagnosis was just upgraded from "localized" to "systemic," I really want some other well-resourced entity to do this work. One way the EU can act as a hedge against Chinese hegemony is by turning itself to manufacturing and selling disenshittifying technology – tools to jailbreak computers, phones, consoles, and embedded systems in cars and solar inverters and medical devices. This is a giant market opportunity for the EU, and it's also key to actually moving to a "Eurostack" of technology that is independent from the American tech companies that Trump uses to project power into every company and government in the world (except China). It doesn't matter if the EU funds an Office365 clone if there's no way to migrate data from Microsoft to that made-in-Europe alternative. No government ministry, no large firm, no civil society group is going to manually move each of their documents, messages, edit histories, directories and permissions over from a US tech product to a Eurostack alternative. To do that work, you'll need automation: scrapers, jailbreaks of virtualized devices that directly access their RAM and instruction flow. What about America? Well, there's still the tattered remains of federalism. The states and localities have power – on paper, at least. Many of these localities (including ones in deepest, reddest Trumpland) have been able to seize control over their energy destiny. If you want to get involved in insulating your town from "the Saudi Arabia of oil" (AKA "Saudi Arabia"), check out the Institute for Local Self-Reliance's work on "Community Power": https://ilsr.org/article/energy-democracy/four-shortcuts-to-boost-your-states-community-power-score/ Do that work, and maybe you'll be able to keep the lights on in the coming American Dark Ages. Practically speaking, it's unlikely that the rest of the world is going to accept 250 million American refugees fleeing the 50 million Trump diehards who've looted the country and torched its future. Hey look at this (permalink) * The Government Has Been Shut Down for Months https://prospect.org/politics/2025-09-30-government-has-been-shut-down-for-months/ I’ve Written About Loads of Scams. This One Almost Got Me. https://www.nytimes.com/2025/09/18/nyregion/zelle-chase-banking-scam.html?unlocked_article_code=1.nE8.mifp.13j7oh96HfpC&smid=url-share Chat Control Is Back on the Menu in the EU. It Still Must Be Stopped https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2025/09/chat-control-back-menu-eu-it-still-must-be-stopped-0 18 Lawyers Caught Using AI Explain Why They Did It https://www.404media.co/18-lawyers-caught-using-ai-explain-why-they-did-it/ The Ann Arbor District Library Plans to Acquire the Ann Arbor Observer https://aadl.org/node/647334 Blippo+ Stands Against the Enshittification of TV https://www.endlessmode.com/video-games/blippo/blippo-stands-against-the-enshittification-of-tv Object permanence (permalink) #15yrsago Stuttgart police use overwhelming force against peaceful protestors concerned about new train station https://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/the-world-from-berlin-germany-shocked-by-disproportionate-police-action-in-stuttgart-a-720735.html #10yrago Apple removes Ifixit’s repair manuals from App Store https://www.ifixit.com/News/7401/ifixit-app-pulled #10yrsago Theoretical “auto-brothel” attack on mechanics’ computers could infect millions of cars https://www.wired.com/2015/10/car-hacking-tool-turns-repair-shops-malware-brothels/ #10yrsago France’s plan to legalize mass surveillance will give it the power to spy on the world https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2015/09/frances-government-aims-give-itself-and-nsa-carte-blanche-spy-world #10yrsago Tube-map labelled with one-bedroom flat rental rates https://www.thrillist.com/lifestyle/london/london-underground-rent-map #10yrsago Nuanced profile of the Oklahoma County where “no one believes in climate change” https://www.cnn.com/2015/08/03/opinions/sutter-climate-skeptics-woodward-oklahoma/index.html?eref=rss_topstories #10yrsago Judge John Hodgman is back in the NYThttps://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/04/magazine/judge-john-hodgman-on-a-christmas-wish.html?_r=0 #10yrsago Fuerdai: Paris Hilton with Chinese characteristics https://web.archive.org/web/20151002094642/https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2015-10-01/children-of-the-yuan-percent-everyone-hates-china-s-rich-kids #10yrago New $50 Kindle Fire won’t recognize sideloaded ebooks on SD cards https://web.archive.org/web/20151002213918/https://teleread.com/chris-meadows/first-look-amazons-50-fire-tablet/ #10yrsago Landmark patent case will determine whether you can ever truly own a device againhttps://www.wired.com/2015/10/can-use-gadgets-may-hinge-printer-ink-case/?mbid=social_twitter #10yrsago Internet of Things That Lie: the future of regulation is demonology https://web.archive.org/web/20151002063110/http://ieet.org/index.php/IEET/more/rinesi20150925 #10yrsago Dieselgate for TVs: Samsung accused of programming TVs to cheat energy efficiency ratings https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2015/oct/01/samsung-tvs-appear-more-energy-efficient-in-tests-than-in-real-life #10yrsago Pope: I don’t support homophobic civic layabout Kim Davis https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-34425450 #10yrsago Arbitration: how America’s corporations got their own private legal system https://web.archive.org/web/20151004171307/http://www.onthecommons.org/magazine/we-now-have-a-justice-system-just-for-corporations #10yrsago Voter suppression act two: closing driver’s license offices in Alabama’s Black Belt https://www.al.com/opinion/2015/09/voter_id_and_drivers_license_o.html #10yrsago Why an obscure left-wing MP won the UK Labour leadership by the biggest margin in history https://mondediplo.com/2015/10/04corbyn #5yrsago Apple kills RSS readers in China https://pluralistic.net/2020/10/02/chickenized-by-arise/#rss-ccp-rip #5yrsago Call center workers pay for the privilege https://pluralistic.net/2020/10/02/chickenized-by-arise/#arise #5yrsago Block Google-Fitbit https://pluralistic.net/2020/10/01/the-years-of-repair/#google-fitbit #5yrsago The Years of Repair https://pluralistic.net/2020/10/01/the-years-of-repair/#leap-manifesto #5yrsago Private equity's profitable murder https://pluralistic.net/2020/10/01/the-years-of-repair/#mass-murder #5yrsago Witch https://pluralistic.net/2020/10/01/the-years-of-repair/#witch #1yrago Everyday homeowners are human shields for Wall Street's Internet of Shit slumlords https://pluralistic.net/2024/10/01/housing-is-a-human-right/# #1yrago Epic Systems, a lethal health record monopolist https://pluralistic.net/2024/10/02/upcoded-to-death/#thanks-obama Upcoming appearances (permalink) Boston: Enshittification with Randall Munroe (Brattle Theater), Oct 7 https://www.eventbrite.com/e/cory-doctorow-at-the-brattle-theatre-tickets-1591235180259?aff=oddtdtcreator DC: Enshittification with Rohit Chopra (Politics and Prose), Oct 8 https://politics-prose.com/cory-doctorow-10825 NYC: Enshittification with Lina Khan (Brooklyn Public Library), Oct 9 https://www.bklynlibrary.org/calendar/cory-doctorow-discusses-central-library-dweck-20251009-0700pm New Orleans: DeepSouthCon63, Oct 10-12 http://www.contraflowscifi.org/ New Orleans: Enshittification at Octavia Books, Oct 12 https://www.octaviabooks.com/event/enshittification-cory-doctorow Chicago: How Platforms Die with Rick Perlstein (University Club), Oct 14 https://www.eventbrite.com/e/how-platforms-die-with-cory-doctorow-tickets-1747916117159 Los Angeles: Enshittification with David Dayen (Diesel), Oct 16 https://dieselbookstore.com/event/2025-10-16/cory-doctorow-enshittification San Francisco: Enshittification at Public Works with Jenny Odell (The Booksmith), Oct 20 https://app.gopassage.com/events/doctorow25 PDX: Enshittification at Powell's, Oct 21 https://www.powells.com/events/cory-doctorow-10-21-25 Seattle: Enshittification and the Rot Economy, with Ed Zitron (Clarion West), Oct 22 https://www.clarionwest.org/event/2025-deep-dives-cory-doctorow/ Vancouver: Enshittification with David Moscrop (Vancouver Writers Festival), Oct 23 https://www.showpass.com/2025-festival-39/ Montreal: Montreal Attention Forum keynote, Oct 24 https://www.attentionconferences.com/conferences/2025-forum Ottawa: Enshittification (Ottawa Writers Festival), Oct 25 https://writersfestival.org/events/fall-2025/enshittification Toronto: Enshittification with Dan Werb (Type Books), Oct 27 https://www.instagram.com/p/DO81_1VDngu/?img_index=1 Barcelona: Conferencia EUROPEA 4D (Virtual), Oct 28 https://4d.cat/es/conferencia/ Miami: Enshittification at Books & Books, Nov 5 https://www.eventbrite.com/e/an-evening-with-cory-doctorow-tickets-1504647263469 Miami: Cloudfest, Nov 6 https://www.cloudfest.com/usa/ Burbank: Burbank Book Festival, Nov 8 https://www.burbankbookfestival.com/ Lisbon: A post-American, enshittification-resistant internet, with Rabble (Web Summit), Nov 12 https://websummit.com/sessions/lis25/92f47bc9-ca60-4997-bef3-006735b1f9c5/a-post-american-enshittification-resistant-internet/ Cardiff: Hay Festival After Hours, Nov 13 https://www.hayfestival.com/c-203-hay-festival-after-hours.aspx Recent appearances (permalink) Enshittification (The.Ink) https://the.ink/p/watch-cory-doctorow-on-why-everything Why Everything Is Getting Worse (Majority Report) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EQW6UxY144Q Enshittification (Cornell) https://ecornell.cornell.edu/keynotes/view/K091225/ Latest books (permalink) "Picks and Shovels": a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about the heroic era of the PC, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), February 2025 (https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250865908/picksandshovels). "The Bezzle": a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about prison-tech and other grifts, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), February 2024 (the-bezzle.org). "The Lost Cause:" a solarpunk novel of hope in the climate emergency, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), November 2023 (http://lost-cause.org). "The Internet Con": A nonfiction book about interoperability and Big Tech (Verso) September 2023 (http://seizethemeansofcomputation.org). Signed copies at Book Soup (https://www.booksoup.com/book/9781804291245). "Red Team Blues": "A grabby, compulsive thriller that will leave you knowing more about how the world works than you did before." Tor Books http://redteamblues.com. "Chokepoint Capitalism: How to Beat Big Tech, Tame Big Content, and Get Artists Paid, with Rebecca Giblin", on how to unrig the markets for creative labor, Beacon Press/Scribe 2022 https://chokepointcapitalism.com Upcoming books (permalink) "Canny Valley": A limited edition collection of the collages I create for Pluralistic, self-published, September 2025 "Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It," Farrar, Straus, Giroux, October 7 2025 https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374619329/enshittification/ "Unauthorized Bread": a middle-grades graphic novel adapted from my novella about refugees, toasters and DRM, FirstSecond, 2026 "Enshittification, Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It" (the graphic novel), Firstsecond, 2026 "The Memex Method," Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2026 "The Reverse-Centaur's Guide to AI," a short book about being a better AI critic, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2026 Colophon (permalink) Today's top sources: Currently writing: "The Reverse Centaur's Guide to AI," a short book for Farrar, Straus and Giroux about being an effective AI critic. FIRST DRAFT COMPLETE AND SUBMITTED. A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING This work – excluding any serialized fiction – is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license. That means you can use it any way you like, including commercially, provided that you attribute it to me, Cory Doctorow, and include a link to pluralistic.net. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ Quotations and images are not included in this license; they are included either under a limitation or exception to copyright, or on the basis of a separate license. Please exercise caution. How to get Pluralistic: Blog (no ads, tracking, or data-collection): Pluralistic.net Newsletter (no ads, tracking, or data-collection): https://pluralistic.net/plura-list Mastodon (no ads, tracking, or data-collection): https://mamot.fr/@pluralistic Medium (no ads, paywalled): https://doctorow.medium.com/ Twitter (mass-scale, unrestricted, third-party surveillance and advertising): https://twitter.com/doctorow Tumblr (mass-scale, unrestricted, third-party surveillance and advertising): https://mostlysignssomeportents.tumblr.com/tagged/pluralistic "When life gives you SARS, you make sarsaparilla" -Joey "Accordion Guy" DeVilla READ CAREFULLY: By reading this, you agree, on behalf of your employer, to release me from all obligations and waivers arising from any and all NON-NEGOTIATED agreements, licenses, terms-of-service, shrinkwrap, clickwrap, browsewrap, confidentiality, non-disclosure, non-compete and acceptable use policies ("BOGUS AGREEMENTS") that I have entered into with your employer, its partners, licensors, agents and assigns, in perpetuity, without prejudice to my ongoing rights and privileges. You further represent that you have the authority to release me from any BOGUS AGREEMENTS on behalf of your employer. ISSN: 3066-764X

Today's links Decarbonization at a distance: A post-American century that runs on sunshine. Hey look at this: Delights to delectate. Object permanence: Human shields for Internet of Shit slumlords; Tubemap with one-bedroom flat prices; Years of Repair; Internet of Lying Things; Dieselgate for TVs; Apple kills Chinese RSS readers. Upcoming appearances: Where to find me. Recent appearances: Where I've been. Latest books: You keep readin' em, I'll keep writin' 'em. Upcoming books: Like I said, I'll keep writin' 'em. Colophon: All the rest. Decarbonization at a distance (permalink) In Bill McKibben's new book Here Comes the Sun, he frequently laments activists' tendency not to celebrate our wins, a habit that sees us always feeling as though we were losing, even when we're racking up massive victories: https://billmckibben.com/books/here-comes-the-sun/ Here Comes the Sun is an extraordinary, beautifully told, exhaustively researched and argued book about the remarkable progress of solar energy over the past five or so years. McKibben is speaking as much to his fellow activists as he is to the people on the sidelines, trying to get them to understand the quiet, profound changes to solar, to "update their priors" about whether a solar transition is possible, and what impediments stand between us and decarbonization. For example, you may have read that the material bill for solar is simply too large to pay – that there isn't enough copper, enough conflict minerals, enough lithium for the panels, wires and batteries we'll need for a solar transition: https://pluralistic.net/2024/08/06/with-great-power/#comes-great-responsibility This is just not true, for several reasons. First, the material bill for solarization is in freefall, with no end in sight. The amount of stuff we need to make panels, transmission lines and batteries keeps declining. Further: the efficiency gains of "clean" technology are astounding – meaning that, for example, it not only takes a lot less material to make a solar panel, the panel we make out of so much less stuff generates a lot more power. More: we keep finding ways to substitute more abundant materials for materials that are harder to find or refine (for example, swapping out lithium in batteries and replacing it with sodium, one of the most abundant minerals on Earth). Finally: we keep finding new sources of the materials that we can't readily substitute for. It turns out that when there's a lot more demand for a given mineral, people who've previously disregarded potential sources of that material suddenly pipe up with information about where (a lot) more of it can be found. None of that is to say that extracting and refining these materials is without cost or risk. The realpolitik of extraction means that mining and refining companies will preferentially target poor and indigenous communities for their mines and factories. That's totally true and completely unacceptable, and it means that our task is to demand climate justice (letting those communities decide for themselves whether and how they will be a part of this). That's important work, and it's very different from endlessly parroting 15-year old back-of-the-envelope calculations about the material bill for solarization. The material story is a really cool and exciting one. There is so much solar energy out there for the taking. A lot of the time, when we characterize high-tech products as "non-recyclable," what we mean is "it would take too much energy to recycle this device." As more and more solar comes online, we can reclaim literal tons of material from existing, superannuated tech. There's a solar-powered factory that ingests old solar panels, decomposes them into their source materials, and makes new, hyper-efficient solar panels out of them, reclaiming 99% of their materials: https://interestingengineering.com/energy/solarcycle-to-recycle-10-million-solar-panels-yearly Far from being an insurmountable barrier to a cleaner, better future, the material bill for solar is eminently tractable. What's more, the material bill for solar is superior in every way to the material bill for fossil fuels. The amount of stuff we need to dig up in order to solarize the planet is equal to one seventeenth of the fossil fuels we dig up every year. Remember, when you dig up a bunch of stuff to make a solar panel, that solar panel produces energy for decades afterwards, and when it finally reaches its end-of-life, we make it into another solar panel. When you dig up coal, you burn it and all that's left behind is a bunch of planet-destroying carbon dioxide and earth-and water-poisoning toxic ash. I can't emphasize this enough. Solar is a superior substitute for fossil fuels in more ways than one. Fossil fuels need to be continuously replenished, meaning that every fossil fuel-powered system in the world requires a continuous, ongoing stream of materials to produce energy. Replenishing this fuel doesn't merely require us to dig up enough old dead shit to burn in the machine, we also have to dig up tons more old dead shit to shlep that old dead shit around. The gas and coal being set on fire all around you right now required another mountain of fossil fuel to power the mining rig, the refinery, the ship and the truck that brought it to you. Making more solar involves digging stuff up and moving it too – but just once. Once those panels are on your roof (or over your parking lot or irrigation canal, or between the rows in your farm's fields) they convert abundant sunshine into efficient energy, without requiring any more materials: https://pluralistic.net/2024/08/06/with-great-power/#comes-great-responsibility So it's definitely time we rethink our assumptions about the solar transition. Here's one assumption I had to jettison after reading McKibben's book: I used to assume that whenever I heard about Europe or the US or Canada lowering CO2 emissions, that was mostly because these rich countries had exported their carbon to China, by shifting carbon-intensive manufacturing there. Back around the time of the Paris Accords, there was a raging debate about national carbon targets, with poor countries in the global south arguing that because rich northern countries were responsible for nearly all the CO2 in the atmosphere, the rich world should make the sacrifices needed to decarbonize, leaving China, India, and other poor countries to continue to enjoy the benefits of burning coal. China made an especially pointed case, insisting that their CO2 figures were grossly inflated because they made all the stuff that the rich world consumed. The carbon emissions from the appliances, consumer goods and industrial equipment and other exports from China were really the rich world's carbon, which had been offshored to "the world's factory" – China. This may have been true back then, but things have changed dramatically. China is running away from coal as fast as it can, and solarizing everything. China lights up a new solar generation facility with the capacity of a coal plant every eight hours. Trump can subsidize fossil fuels and throw up as many structural impediments to renewables as he can think of, and it won't change the fact that as a planet, we're on track to replace all of the embodied energy in the stuff the whole world uses with solar. So when you read that 54% of the energy in the EU is coming from renewables, that doesn't mean that they're cheating by offshoring their emissions to China. The EU is offshoring its manufacturing to China, but China has found a better way to manufacture Europe's stuff, without having to set old dead stuff on fire 24/7: https://electrek.co/2025/09/30/solar-leads-eu-electricity-generation-as-renewables-hit-54-percent/ Reading Here Comes the Sun is a forceful reminder that there's a big old world out there beyond America's borders. It's true that American policy was once very important to the whole world, but that was largely down to the things that Trump is hell-bent on destroying. American dollar-clearing and the SWIFT system gave the US a massive, global structural advantage, but the weaponization of SWIFT, the deliberate weakening of the US dollar, and the destruction of American monetarism via cryptocurrency scams has put dollar clearing into terminal decline: https://pluralistic.net/2023/10/10/weaponized-interdependence/#the-other-swifties Even US military might is in decline. US military spending remains off the charts, but Trump and Hegseth are purging the forces, targeting Black and brown people (disproportionately represented in the US military because people from minority groups are typically poorer, and the US military recruits a lot of poor people without many other options): https://theintercept.com/2025/10/01/pete-hegseth-war-pentagon-beardos-dei/ American aid agendas used to give it a huge global footprint. When American evangelicals forced the government to ban aid that included birth control or helping gender minorities, countries all around the world saw surges in unwanted pregnancies and homophobic discrimination. Now that the US has cut off all that aid, the US can no longer set priorities for those countries. America's domestic research agenda used to set the standard for the world, because the brightest scholars in the world moved here to go to university and to pursue their research. This meant that the priorities behind US federal scientific and academic grants determined what the world's best and brightest worked on. Of course, that's dead, too. Trump hasn't just killed research funding in America – he's also singlehandedly reversed generations of work to lure the world's most talented scientists and scholars to the USA. Grad students, professors, engineers and researchers are leaving the US rather than risk being kidnapped to a gulag in El Salvador or imprisoned in Alligator Auschwitz. Our loss is everyone else's gain. It's not clear whether people will ever again aspire to come to America to pursue their research. The point is that things are very much up for grabs right now. The planet is solarizing at rates that beggar the imagination (and warm the heart). McKibben quotes many sources who've called China "the Saudi Arabia of solar," but he is skeptical of that characterization. The sun, after all, shines everywhere and once you've got the solar installed, China can't take it away from you. Or can they? Solar – and the whole cleantech sector – is the first truly successful "internet of things" application. From inverters to EVs to household batteries, the new, electric world is digital and networked, and that means that it's all terribly enshittification prone. Today, the US has the ability to remotely, permanently disable every John Deere tractor in the world and set off a global famine: https://pluralistic.net/2022/05/08/about-those-kill-switched-ukrainian-tractors/ Tomorrow, Chinese soft (and not-so-soft) power could be vested in the ability to remotely update, downgrade, disable, or brick whole countries' worth of cleantech: https://pluralistic.net/2025/09/23/our-friend-the-electron/#to-every-man-his-castle There's a way to prevent this, thankfully. The only reason that technologists around the world can't reverse-engineer and unlock these "smart" devices is that the US trade representative bullied every country into passing punitive IP laws that ban this practice: https://pluralistic.net/2025/01/15/beauty-eh/#its-the-only-war-the-yankees-lost-except-for-vietnam-and-also-the-alamo-and-the-bay-of-ham Absent these laws, there could be a roaring trade in jailbreaking smart devices of all kinds – from printers to ventilators, but also all of cleantech – so that owners of these devices could always change how they work, blocking field updates and restoring functionality that had been confiscated by the manufacturer, whether due to greed or geopolitics. The US trade rep got these IP laws passed abroad by threatening America's trading partners with tariffs. Tariffs: another source of power that Trump has vaporized. The threat of tariffs loomed over the whole world, and fear of losing access to American markets meant that policymakers all over the world kept laws on the books that allowed US tech companies to extract rent and extort their populations. But a deterrent only works if you don't use it. Now that everyone's been tariffed by Trump, the threat is dead. Happy Liberation Day, folks. It's these US tech-protecting laws that create the conditions for an eventual mass-enshittification of cleantech. It's these laws that Chinese firms – and the Chinese state – would use to secure their ability to truly be the Saudi Arabia of the sun: not just the source of the technology that converts sunshine to electrons, but also the landlord of those sunbeams, with the power to evict whole countries from their solar arrays, at the click of a mouse. Creating a legal and technical framework for local control over cleantech's software has many advantages. The mere existence of a killswitch (or any remote-update facility that device owners can't override) makes devices vulnerable to shutdown by malicious hackers as well as manufacturers. However, a world of cleantech devices that are under their owners' absolute control also poses some challenges to the solar revolution. If you want to build a virtual power plant by harnessing the batteries of thousands of homeowners, or relieve grid pressure by adjusting the thermostats and fridges of millions of utility subscribers, it's a lot easier if you know that you're communicating with devices that do what you tell them to do and faithfully communicate their operations to you. That's a tradeoff we're going to have to make, though. The incremental reliability of designing technology so its owners can't override remote instructions is swamped by the massive risk that this power will be abused to attack individuals, regions, and whole countries. As the US government turns its back on solar, the sun is setting on the American empire. It's not clear whether there will be elections next year. Trump says he'll use terrorism laws to arrest people who are "anti-Christian" or "anti-capitalist": https://jacobin.com/2025/10/trump-classifies-anti-capitalism-as-a-political-pre-crime/ Will China step in and become the world's unipower as America shits itself to death after drinking raw milk or coughs itself to death after boycotting vaccines? I don't know. I hope we end up with a multipolar world, and that someone picks up the research agendas that Trump has destroyed. Earlier this year, Elon Musk's DOGE killed all the NIH grants that included the word "systemic" (because they're racist against the idea of "systemic racism"). Speaking as a guy whose cancer diagnosis was just upgraded from "localized" to "systemic," I really want some other well-resourced entity to do this work. One way the EU can act as a hedge against Chinese hegemony is by turning itself towards manufacturing and selling disenshittifying technology – tools to jailbreak computers, phones, consoles, and embedded systems in cars and solar inverters and medical devices. This is a giant market opportunity for the EU, and it's also key to actually moving to a "Eurostack" of technology that is independent from the American tech companies that Trump uses to project power into every company and government in the world (except China). It doesn't matter if the EU funds an Office365 clone if there's no way to migrate data from Microsoft to that made-in-Europe alternative. No government ministry, no large firm, no civil society group is going to manually move each of their documents, messages, edit histories, directories and permissions over from a US tech product to a Eurostack alternative. To do that work, you'll need automation: scrapers, jailbreaks of virtualized devices that directly access their RAM and instruction flow. What about America? Well, there's still the tattered remains of federalism. The states and localities have power – on paper, at least. Many of these localities (including ones in deepest, reddest Trumpland) have been able to seize control over their energy destiny. If you want to get involved in insulating your town from "the Saudi Arabia of oil" (AKA "Saudi Arabia"), check out the Institute for Local Self-Reliance's work on "Community Power": https://ilsr.org/article/energy-democracy/four-shortcuts-to-boost-your-states-community-power-score/ Do that work, and maybe you'll be able to keep the lights on in the coming American Dark Ages. Practically speaking, it's unlikely that the rest of the world is going to accept 250 million American refugees fleeing the 50 million Trump diehards who've looted the country and torched its future. Hey look at this (permalink) * The Government Has Been Shut Down for Months https://prospect.org/politics/2025-09-30-government-has-been-shut-down-for-months/ I’ve Written About Loads of Scams. This One Almost Got Me. https://www.nytimes.com/2025/09/18/nyregion/zelle-chase-banking-scam.html?unlocked_article_code=1.nE8.mifp.13j7oh96HfpC&smid=url-share Chat Control Is Back on the Menu in the EU. It Still Must Be Stopped https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2025/09/chat-control-back-menu-eu-it-still-must-be-stopped-0 18 Lawyers Caught Using AI Explain Why They Did It https://www.404media.co/18-lawyers-caught-using-ai-explain-why-they-did-it/ The Ann Arbor District Library Plans to Acquire the Ann Arbor Observer https://aadl.org/node/647334 Blippo+ Stands Against the Enshittification of TV https://www.endlessmode.com/video-games/blippo/blippo-stands-against-the-enshittification-of-tv Object permanence (permalink) #15yrsago Stuttgart police use overwhelming force against peaceful protestors concerned about new train station https://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/the-world-from-berlin-germany-shocked-by-disproportionate-police-action-in-stuttgart-a-720735.html #10yrago Apple removes Ifixit’s repair manuals from App Store https://www.ifixit.com/News/7401/ifixit-app-pulled #10yrsago Theoretical “auto-brothel” attack on mechanics’ computers could infect millions of cars https://www.wired.com/2015/10/car-hacking-tool-turns-repair-shops-malware-brothels/ #10yrsago France’s plan to legalize mass surveillance will give it the power to spy on the world https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2015/09/frances-government-aims-give-itself-and-nsa-carte-blanche-spy-world #10yrsago Tube-map labelled with one-bedroom flat rental rates https://www.thrillist.com/lifestyle/london/london-underground-rent-map #10yrsago Nuanced profile of the Oklahoma County where “no one believes in climate change” https://www.cnn.com/2015/08/03/opinions/sutter-climate-skeptics-woodward-oklahoma/index.html?eref=rss_topstories #10yrsago Judge John Hodgman is back in the NYThttps://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/04/magazine/judge-john-hodgman-on-a-christmas-wish.html?_r=0 #10yrsago Fuerdai: Paris Hilton with Chinese characteristics https://web.archive.org/web/20151002094642/https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2015-10-01/children-of-the-yuan-percent-everyone-hates-china-s-rich-kids #10yrago New $50 Kindle Fire won’t recognize sideloaded ebooks on SD cards https://web.archive.org/web/20151002213918/https://teleread.com/chris-meadows/first-look-amazons-50-fire-tablet/ #10yrsago Landmark patent case will determine whether you can ever truly own a device againhttps://www.wired.com/2015/10/can-use-gadgets-may-hinge-printer-ink-case/?mbid=social_twitter #10yrsago Internet of Things That Lie: the future of regulation is demonology https://web.archive.org/web/20151002063110/http://ieet.org/index.php/IEET/more/rinesi20150925 #10yrsago Dieselgate for TVs: Samsung accused of programming TVs to cheat energy efficiency ratings https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2015/oct/01/samsung-tvs-appear-more-energy-efficient-in-tests-than-in-real-life #10yrsago Pope: I don’t support homophobic civic layabout Kim Davis https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-34425450 #10yrsago Arbitration: how America’s corporations got their own private legal system https://web.archive.org/web/20151004171307/http://www.onthecommons.org/magazine/we-now-have-a-justice-system-just-for-corporations #10yrsago Voter suppression act two: closing driver’s license offices in Alabama’s Black Belt https://www.al.com/opinion/2015/09/voter_id_and_drivers_license_o.html #10yrsago Why an obscure left-wing MP won the UK Labour leadership by the biggest margin in history https://mondediplo.com/2015/10/04corbyn #5yrsago Apple kills RSS readers in China https://pluralistic.net/2020/10/02/chickenized-by-arise/#rss-ccp-rip #5yrsago Call center workers pay for the privilege https://pluralistic.net/2020/10/02/chickenized-by-arise/#arise #5yrsago Block Google-Fitbit https://pluralistic.net/2020/10/01/the-years-of-repair/#google-fitbit #5yrsago The Years of Repair https://pluralistic.net/2020/10/01/the-years-of-repair/#leap-manifesto #5yrsago Private equity's profitable murder https://pluralistic.net/2020/10/01/the-years-of-repair/#mass-murder #5yrsago Witch https://pluralistic.net/2020/10/01/the-years-of-repair/#witch #1yrago Everyday homeowners are human shields for Wall Street's Internet of Shit slumlords https://pluralistic.net/2024/10/01/housing-is-a-human-right/# #1yrago Epic Systems, a lethal health record monopolist https://pluralistic.net/2024/10/02/upcoded-to-death/#thanks-obama Upcoming appearances (permalink) Boston: Enshittification with Randall Munroe (Brattle Theater), Oct 7 https://www.eventbrite.com/e/cory-doctorow-at-the-brattle-theatre-tickets-1591235180259?aff=oddtdtcreator DC: Enshittification with Rohit Chopra (Politics and Prose), Oct 8 https://politics-prose.com/cory-doctorow-10825 NYC: Enshittification with Lina Khan (Brooklyn Public Library), Oct 9 https://www.bklynlibrary.org/calendar/cory-doctorow-discusses-central-library-dweck-20251009-0700pm New Orleans: DeepSouthCon63, Oct 10-12 http://www.contraflowscifi.org/ New Orleans: Enshittification at Octavia Books, Oct 12 https://www.octaviabooks.com/event/enshittification-cory-doctorow Chicago: How Platforms Die with Rick Perlstein (University Club), Oct 14 https://www.eventbrite.com/e/how-platforms-die-with-cory-doctorow-tickets-1747916117159 Los Angeles: Enshittification with David Dayen (Diesel), Oct 16 https://dieselbookstore.com/event/2025-10-16/cory-doctorow-enshittification San Francisco: Enshittification at Public Works with Jenny Odell (The Booksmith), Oct 20 https://app.gopassage.com/events/doctorow25 PDX: Enshittification at Powell's, Oct 21 https://www.powells.com/events/cory-doctorow-10-21-25 Seattle: Enshittification and the Rot Economy, with Ed Zitron (Clarion West), Oct 22 https://www.clarionwest.org/event/2025-deep-dives-cory-doctorow/ Vancouver: Enshittification with David Moscrop (Vancouver Writers Festival), Oct 23 https://www.showpass.com/2025-festival-39/ Montreal: Montreal Attention Forum keynote, Oct 24 https://www.attentionconferences.com/conferences/2025-forum Ottawa: Enshittification (Ottawa Writers Festival), Oct 25 https://writersfestival.org/events/fall-2025/enshittification Toronto: Enshittification with Dan Werb (Type Books), Oct 27 https://www.instagram.com/p/DO81_1VDngu/?img_index=1 Barcelona: Conferencia EUROPEA 4D (Virtual), Oct 28 https://4d.cat/es/conferencia/ Miami: Enshittification at Books & Books, Nov 5 https://www.eventbrite.com/e/an-evening-with-cory-doctorow-tickets-1504647263469 Miami: Cloudfest, Nov 6 https://www.cloudfest.com/usa/ Burbank: Burbank Book Festival, Nov 8 https://www.burbankbookfestival.com/ Lisbon: A post-American, enshittification-resistant internet, with Rabble (Web Summit), Nov 12 https://websummit.com/sessions/lis25/92f47bc9-ca60-4997-bef3-006735b1f9c5/a-post-american-enshittification-resistant-internet/ Cardiff: Hay Festival After Hours, Nov 13 https://www.hayfestival.com/c-203-hay-festival-after-hours.aspx Recent appearances (permalink) Enshittification (The.Ink) https://the.ink/p/watch-cory-doctorow-on-why-everything Why Everything Is Getting Worse (Majority Report) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EQW6UxY144Q Enshittification (Cornell) https://ecornell.cornell.edu/keynotes/view/K091225/ Latest books (permalink) "Picks and Shovels": a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about the heroic era of the PC, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), February 2025 (https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250865908/picksandshovels). "The Bezzle": a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about prison-tech and other grifts, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), February 2024 (the-bezzle.org). "The Lost Cause:" a solarpunk novel of hope in the climate emergency, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), November 2023 (http://lost-cause.org). "The Internet Con": A nonfiction book about interoperability and Big Tech (Verso) September 2023 (http://seizethemeansofcomputation.org). Signed copies at Book Soup (https://www.booksoup.com/book/9781804291245). "Red Team Blues": "A grabby, compulsive thriller that will leave you knowing more about how the world works than you did before." Tor Books http://redteamblues.com. "Chokepoint Capitalism: How to Beat Big Tech, Tame Big Content, and Get Artists Paid, with Rebecca Giblin", on how to unrig the markets for creative labor, Beacon Press/Scribe 2022 https://chokepointcapitalism.com Upcoming books (permalink) "Canny Valley": A limited edition collection of the collages I create for Pluralistic, self-published, September 2025 "Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It," Farrar, Straus, Giroux, October 7 2025 https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374619329/enshittification/ "Unauthorized Bread": a middle-grades graphic novel adapted from my novella about refugees, toasters and DRM, FirstSecond, 2026 "Enshittification, Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It" (the graphic novel), Firstsecond, 2026 "The Memex Method," Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2026 "The Reverse-Centaur's Guide to AI," a short book about being a better AI critic, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2026 Colophon (permalink) Today's top sources: Currently writing: "The Reverse Centaur's Guide to AI," a short book for Farrar, Straus and Giroux about being an effective AI critic. FIRST DRAFT COMPLETE AND SUBMITTED. A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING This work – excluding any serialized fiction – is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license. That means you can use it any way you like, including commercially, provided that you attribute it to me, Cory Doctorow, and include a link to pluralistic.net. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ Quotations and images are not included in this license; they are included either under a limitation or exception to copyright, or on the basis of a separate license. Please exercise caution. How to get Pluralistic: Blog (no ads, tracking, or data-collection): Pluralistic.net Newsletter (no ads, tracking, or data-collection): https://pluralistic.net/plura-list Mastodon (no ads, tracking, or data-collection): https://mamot.fr/@pluralistic Medium (no ads, paywalled): https://doctorow.medium.com/ Twitter (mass-scale, unrestricted, third-party surveillance and advertising): https://twitter.com/doctorow Tumblr (mass-scale, unrestricted, third-party surveillance and advertising): https://mostlysignssomeportents.tumblr.com/tagged/pluralistic "When life gives you SARS, you make sarsaparilla" -Joey "Accordion Guy" DeVilla READ CAREFULLY: By reading this, you agree, on behalf of your employer, to release me from all obligations and waivers arising from any and all NON-NEGOTIATED agreements, licenses, terms-of-service, shrinkwrap, clickwrap, browsewrap, confidentiality, non-disclosure, non-compete and acceptable use policies ("BOGUS AGREEMENTS") that I have entered into with your employer, its partners, licensors, agents and assigns, in perpetuity, without prejudice to my ongoing rights and privileges. You further represent that you have the authority to release me from any BOGUS AGREEMENTS on behalf of your employer. ISSN: 3066-764X

This Wall Decor item is sold by StudioSoss. Ships from United Kingdom. Listed on Aug 2, 2026

Did you know there are 12 miles of traffic-free cycleways and footpaths in Cramlington? Following an audit into sustainable travel in the town by Sustrans,  a 'tubemap', similar to the London Undergro...