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For those after in-depth hardware and system monitoring support from the Linux desktop, hw-monitor continues to advance as one of the modern options. Released on Monday was hw-monitor 0.6 with per-process GPU reporting metrics when using capable DRM drivers like the AMDGPU, Intel i915 and Xe, and Nouveau drivers...

Today's links Lindsay Owens's "Gouged" : The end of a fair price and what that means for your wallet. Hey look at this : Delights to delectate. Object permanence : Doonesbury on 9/11; Suspicious Looking Device; Elephant-shit paper; The Onion x TSA liquid rules; Borders goodbye letter; Voting machines suck; EFF v DRM; Matt Furie on the hijacking of Pepe; Austerity v last steam-loom; Facebook x "disinformation" criticism. Upcoming appearances : Boston, Brighton, Virtual, South Bend, Hudson, Calgary, Winnipeg, Paris, OVancouver, Victoria, Ottawa, Kilkenny, Montreal. 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. Lindsay Owens's "Gouged" ( permalink ) Lindsay Owens is the executive director of Groundwork Collaborative, who have done some of the most important work on surveillance pricing (using computers to spy on you to rip you off) and algorithmic wage discrimination (using computers to spy on you and steal your wages). Today, she publishes Gouged , a comprehensive, accessible guide to this modern scourge: https://gougedbook.com/ If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog: https://pluralistic.net/2026/09/29/algorithmic-wage-theft/#algorithmic-price-gouging Owens and Groundwork have done as much as anyone to publicize and fight against the use of corporate power, computers and vast troves of commercial surveillance data to pick your pocket, shrink your paycheck and make the worst people on earth far richer. It was Katie Wells, a Groundwork fellow, who co-authored the report describing how the apps nurses use to get shiftwork collude with data-brokers to find out how much money nurses owe on their credit cards, so they can pay the most desperate nurses lower wages: https://pluralistic.net/2024/12/18/loose-flapping-ends/#luigi-has-a-point Owens helped coin the term "the age of recoupment," to describe this current moment in which companies that chased all their competitors out of the market with predatory pricing are now jacking up prices, knowing they're the only game in town: https://pluralistic.net/2024/07/24/gouging-the-all-seeing-eye/#i-spy And Owens helped lead a study that showed that Instacart was using surveillance data to jack up prices by 20% or more based on inferences about your willingness and ability to pay (after the study was published, Instacart promised they'd stop doing it): https://pluralistic.net/2025/12/11/nothing-personal/#instacartography Owens and Groundwork have a keen eye for the structural conditions that allow companies to screw their workers and customers, especially the role that competition plays in keeping companies' greed in check. Take their proposal for "street pricing" in sports stadiums: like everyone, they understand that sports stadium owners know that you can't easily step outside for a snack, so they've raised prices to the sky: https://pluralistic.net/2025/03/28/street-pricing/#sportball-analogies They have a simple solution: just force vendors to charge the same prices as the shopkeepers in the neighborhood – the ones whose customers can take their business elsewhere. This proposal polls high (Groundwork does a lot of polling), both with Democrats and Republicans (despite the latter group's allergy to "price controls"). It's a good example of the kind of policy work Groundwork does: diagnosing a problem and coming up with a solution that's easy to administer and easy to explain, in terms that are popular with people from all walks of life. This is the spirit of Gouged : laying out the baroque, data-driven scams that underpin an ever-increasing part of your life in plain language and tracing those scams back to specific policy choices. Owens does important work here: sector by sector and scam by scam, she lays out how companies collude – often with the assistance of a captured and tame state – to reduce competition in order to raise prices, from groceries to rents to airline tickets. She describes how online sellers exploit their information asymmetry, their ability to both directly observe you and millions of other consumers, and to augment those observations with sensitive information purchased from the wild west of data brokers, to steer you into paying more and getting less. These schemes run the gamut from subscriptions you sign up for with a single click but can't get shut off without canceling your credit card to lengthy check-out processes that end with a long set of junk prices that tack another 10 or 20% onto the cost you thought you were about to pay. All of this raises a deceptively simple-sounding question: what is a fair price? Owens takes us through the history of pricing, and the American tradition – begun by Quakers – of replacing haggling with price-tags, and setting those prices at "cost plus a reasonable percentage." She describes an ideological project, a cousin to the neoliberal revolution of Carter and Reagan, to replace this "fair price" with a "market price" that was calculated to be whatever the market would bear. She introduces us to the men who spent a generation dreaming of the technology to change every price for every customer, every time that customer entered the marketplace, and she shows us how, when they got their wish, they shifted billions away from workers and shoppers to owners. Remember: a wage is also a price: it's the price you get for your labor and the precious, irreplaceable hours of your life. The same men who committed to making prices you pay as high as possible were every bit as committed to ensuring that the price you charged for those unrecoverable moments of the only life you will ever live as low as possible. Every scam to make you pay more has a mirror-image scam that ensures you are paid less. This is the logical trajectory of the gig economy – a way to bring that same exploitable information asymmetry to labor markets, where the boss can observe everyone on the payroll and how much (how little) they've accepted from job to job, but workers don't even know who the other workers are, much less what they're getting paid. All of this is laid out with admirable clarity and detail. By the time you get to the last chapter, you'll know exactly how you're getting scammed, who is scamming you, and why they're getting away with it. The final chapter is meant to be the "What do we do about it?" chapter, and regrettably, it's weaker than other parts of the book. Owens urges you to have conversations with your friends about these things, she urges you to take basic measures to defend your privacy, and lists some businesses that have steered clear of the scams she describes in the book, with the implication that you could bring your business to these companies and ones like them. There is nothing wrong with this advice. Every word of it is sound, and your life – and the world – will be better off if you follow it. But this wasn't what I hoped for from someone with such an excellent track record of devising shovel-ready, highly leveraged, popular policy proposals. I would much rather have been presented with a half-dozen well-thought-through, well-explained rules or laws that could really strike at the root of these problems. The pathologies Owens presents in this book can be traced to the Chicago School, a group of radical economists who won favor with Carter, Reagan, Thatcher, and other architects of neoliberalism. The Chicago School's chief strategist was Milton Friedman, who spent decades advocating for the policies that went on to destroy the world as we knew it. Before Friedman was ascendant, his colleagues would ask him how in the world he expected his plans – totally alien to the political consensus of the day – to ever turn into action. Friedman had a stock answer for this question: "In times of crisis, ideas move from the periphery to the center. Our job is to 'keep ideas lying around' so that when the crisis strikes, we will be able to seize the moment." Friedman was a monster, but he was right . There's always a crisis, eventually – the world is big and complicated and subject to all kinds of shocks. Friedman didn't need a crystal ball to predict a crisis – the next crisis was eminently foreseeable. Today, crises are coming thicker and faster than ever, as Friedman's program of autocratic rule and extraction reaches a boiling point. Each of the scams that Owens lays out in her book is a crisis in waiting. When those crises arrive, I would love to go into it knowing which policies could have prevented it, so that I can blame our policymakers for failing to prevent it, and, after they've been defenestrated, I can demand that anyone who seeks to replace them promise to take meaningful steps to end the crisis and prevent it from happening again. Throughout this excellent book, Owens makes an indisputable case that the problems she describes have a systemic root. They're not caused by wickedness or greed – they're caused by a system designed to reward wickedness and greed. There's nothing wrong with giving people some simple measures they can take to protect themselves from such a system, but those protections will only ever be partial and temporary. I would have been far more energized if those personal measures had been a prelude to a chapter designed to equip me with a list of bold, muscular policy demands. Long ago, Owens convinced me that the system is rigged and we all deserve better. This book made that case even clearer. I want to know how we get beyond modest personal protections and make our way to a better world for all. Hey look at this ( permalink ) How to Beat Surveillance Pricing Before It Bleeds You Dry https://www.wired.com/story/how-to-beat-surveillance-pricing-before-it-bleeds-you-dry/ By 30 points, voters oppose sending ICE agents to the polls https://www.gelliottmorris.com/p/2026-09-29-ice-and-troops-at-the-polls Amazon Crime https://billmckibben.substack.com/p/amazon-crime Trial of live facial recognition in London stations leads to a false positive and no arrests https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/sep/29/trial-live-facial-recognition-cameras-london-stations-false-positive Historic England’s Vanishing Archive https://www.sarsen.org/2026/09/historic-englands-photos-didnt-vanish.html Object permanence ( permalink ) #25yrsago Doonesbury on 9/11 https://web.archive.org/web/20020309055239/http://www2.uclick.com/feature/01/10/01/db011001.gif #20yrsago Suspicious Looking Device exists to incite unease https://web.archive.org/web/20061107112421/http://junkfunnel.com/sld/ #20yrsago HOWTO make elephant-shit paper https://web.archive.org/web/20061020105837/https://intensehumour.blogspot.com/2006/09/elephant-dung-paper.html #20yrsago The Onion on TSA liquid restrictions https://web.archive.org/web/20061001102305/https://theonion.com/content/node/53536 #15yrsago Goodbye letter from Borders employee(s) (?) spills secrets of bookselling trade https://memex.craphound.com/2011/09/30/goodbye-letter-from-borders-employees-spills-secrets-of-bookselling-trade/ #10yrsago Electronic voting machines suck, the comprehensive 2016 election edition https://web.archive.org/web/20160930060538/https://www.bloomberg.com/features/2016-voting-technology/ #10yrsago Shadow Regulation: the secret laws that giant corporations cook up in back rooms https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2016/09/shadow-regulation-back-room-threat-digital-rights #10yrsago EFF to court: don’t let US government prosecute professor over his book about securing computers https://www.eff.org/press/releases/eff-asks-court-block-us-prosecuting-security-researcher-detecting-and-publishing #10yrsago Matt Furie on the experience of having his Pepe the Frog character hijacked by white supremacists https://riylcast.tumblr.com/post/151123916140/episode-187-matt-furie-bonus #10yrsago Arkansas lawmaker who pushed law protecting right to video police is arrested for videoing an arrest https://web.archive.org/web/20160930151809/https://theintercept.com/2016/09/30/lawmaker-who-pushed-bill-to-protect-people-filming-police-arrested-for-filming-police/ #10yrsago Austerity kills the last steam-powered loom in the world https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-lancashire-37512136 #5yrsago Facebook thrives on criticism of "disinformation" https://pluralistic.net/2021/09/30/dont-believe-the-criti-hype/#ordinary-mediocrities Upcoming appearances ( permalink ) 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: Rethinking Our Relationship with AI, Sep 30 (Emtech) https://event.technologyreview.com/emtech-future-2026/detailed-agenda 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 Brighton: Digital Sovereignty and the Post-American Internet (Green Party Conference), Oct 3 https://www.openrightsgroup.org/events/digital-sovereignty-and-the-post-american-internet/ Virtual: How to govern technology in a multipolar digital world (Connecting Current), Oct 6 https://connectingcurrent.tech/how-to-govern-technology-a-multipolar-digital-world/ 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 Paris: Slow Tech Summit, Oct 15 https://slowtechsummit.com/ 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 Kilkenny (Kilkenomics), Nov 6-8 https://kilkenomics.com/ Vancouver: Enshittification (Sid Williams Theatre Society), Nov 10 https://www.sidwilliamstheatre.com/events/cory-doctorow-talks-enshittification/ Vancouver: BC Policy Solutions Gala, Nov 12 https://bcpolicy.ca/gala/ Montreal: World Science Fiction Convention, Sep 2-6 https://montreal2027.ca/en Recent appearances ( permalink ) How to Think About AI—Before It’s Too Late (Daniel Solove) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_0xR3uEgGcc Could Tech Bosses Destroy Life As We Know It? (Politics JOE) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PL4VktU0SgY 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 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: 574 (7730 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

A regularly updated list of online shops that sell DRM-free ebooks, digital comics, magazines, and RPGs. Helping hundreds of readers a month discover over 400 DRM-free bookshops.

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Listening Party from Apartment Records.

Application gratuite pour ranger ta collection : étagère privée, exemplaires, liste d’envies et prix, import Steam et GOG, notes presse. Encyclopédie collaborative, destinée à s’étendre à d’autres méd...

Policie stále častěji řeší lidi, kteří se prochází s atrapami střelných zbraní, často špatně rozeznatelných od reálných pistolí. Procházka může skončit zásahem policie, stejně jako v Jílovém u Prahy.

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