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Pluralistic: "Science Comics Computers: How Digital Hardware Works" (05 Nov 2025) - Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow

2025-11-05T16:40:38.000Z

Today's links

"Science Comics Computers: How Digital Hardware Works": Steampunk dinosaurs scratch-build a pressurized air-based, Turing complete, universal von Neumann machine.
Hey look at this: Delights to delectate.
Object permanence: Google Print vs Great Ormond; Lincolnbot; "Zoo City"; Killed by your tapeworm's cancer; NZ Colossus; How to have cancer.
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.

"Science Comics Computers: How Digital Hardware Works" (permalink)

In Science Comics Computers: How Digital Hardware Works, legendary cypherpunk Perry Metzger teams up with Penelope Spector and illustrator Jerel Dye for a tour-de-force young adult comic book that uses hilarious steampunk dinosaurs to demystify the most foundational building-blocks of computers. It's astounding:

https://www.veniac.com/

"Science Comics" is a long-running series from First Second, the imprint that also published my middle-grades comic In Real Life and my picture book Poesy the Monster-Slayer (they are also publishing my forthcoming middle-grades graphic novel Unauthorized Bread and adult graphic novel Enshittification). But long before I was a First Second author, I was a giant First Second fan, totally captivated by their string of brilliant original comics and English translations of beloved comics from France, Spain and elsewhere. The "Science Comics" series really embodies everything I love about the imprint: the combination of whimsy, gorgeous art, and a respectful attitude towards young readers that meets them at their level without ever talking down to them:

https://us.macmillan.com/series/sciencecomics

But as great as the whole "Science Comics" series is, How Digital Hardware Works is even better. Our guide to the most profound principles in computer science is a T Rex named Professor Isabella Brunel, who dresses in steampunk finery that matches the Victorian, dinosaur-filled milieu in which she operates.

Brunel begins by introducing us to "Veniac," a digital computer that consists of a specially designed room in which a person performs all the steps involved in the operations of a computer. This person – a celebrated mathematician (she has a Fields Medal) velociraptor named Edna – moves slips of paper in and out of drawers, looks up their meaning in a decoder book, tacks them up on a corkboard register, painstakingly completing the operations that comprise the foundations of computing.

Here the authors are showing the reader that computing can be abstracted from computing. The foundation of computing isn't electrical engineering, microlithography, or programming: it's logic.

When I was six or seven, my father brought home a computer science teaching tool from Bell Labs called "CARDiac," the "CARDboard Illustrative Aid to Computation." This was a papercraft digital computer that worked in nearly the same way as the Veniac, with you playing the role of Edna, moving little tokens around, penciling and erasing values in registers, and painstakingly performing the operations to run values through adders and then move them to outputs:

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

CARDiac was profoundly formative for me. No matter how infinitesimal and rapid the components of a modern computer are, I have never lost sight of the fact that they are performing the same operations I performed with a CARDiac on my child-sized desk in my bedroom. This is exactly the mission of CARDiac, whose creators, David Hagelbarger and Saul Fingerman, were worried that the miniaturization of computers (in 1968!) was leading to a time where it would be impossible to truly grasp how they worked. If you want to build your own CARDiac, here's a PDF you can download and get started with:

https://www.instructables.com/CARDIAC-CARDboard-Illustrative-Aid-to-Computation-/

But of course, you don't need to print, assemble and operate a CARDIac to get the fingertip feeling of what's going on inside a computer. Watching a sassy velociraptor perform the operations will work just as well. After Edna lays down this conceptual framework, Brunel moves on to building a mechanical digital computer, one composed of mechanical switches that can be built up into logic gates, which can, in turn, be ganged together to create every part of a universal computer that can compute every valid program.

This mechanical computer – the "Brawniac" – runs on compressed air, provided by a system of pumps that either supply positive pressure (forcing corks upwards to either permit or block airflow) or negative pressure (which sucks the corks back down, toggling the switch's state). This simple switch – you could probably build one in your kitchen out of fish-tank tubing and an aquarium pump – is then methodically developed into every type of logic gate. These gates are then combined to replicate every function of Edna in her special Veniac room, firmly anchoring the mechanical nuts-and-bolts of automatic computing with the conceptual framework.

This goes beyond demystification: the authors here are attaching a handle to this big, nebulous, ubiquitous hyperobject that permeates every part of our lives and days, allowing the reader to grasp and examine it from all angles. While there's plenty of great slapstick, fun art, and terrific characters in this book that will make you laugh aloud, the lasting effect upon turning the last page isn't just entertainment, it's empowerment.

No wonder they were able to tap the legendary hardware hacker Andrew "bunnie" Huang to contribute an outstanding introduction to this book, one that echoes the cri de coeur in in the intro that bunnie generously provided for my young adult novel Little Brother. No one writes about the magic of hacking hardware like bunnie:

https://memex.craphound.com/2016/12/30/the-hardware-hacker-bunnie-huangs-tour-de-force-on-hardware-hacking-reverse-engineering-china-manufacturing-innovation-and-biohacking/

Bunnie isn't the only computing legend associated with this book. Lead author Perry Metzger founded the Cryptography mailing list and is a computing pioneer in his own right.

The authors have put up a website at veniac.com that promises educator guides and a Veniac simulator. These will doubtless serve as excellent companions to the book itself, but even without them, this is an incredible accomplishment.

Hey look at this (permalink)

Zohran Mamdani: “Hope Is Alive” https://jacobin.com/2025/11/zohran-mamdani-election-victory-speech/
Credit Card-Thin Handheld Has 300 Games and A Multiplayer Cable https://www.yankodesign.com/2025/11/05/credit-card-thin-handheld-has-300-games-and-a-multiplayer-cable/
‘The Big Short’ Investor Michael Burry Bets Against AI Hype https://gizmodo.com/the-big-short-investor-michael-burry-bets-against-ai-hype-2000681316
I'm an Amazon employee, and I co-sign this letter anonymously https://www.amazonclimatejustice.org/open-letter#sign-form
Epic and Google agree to settle their lawsuit and change Android’s fate globally https://www.theverge.com/policy/813991/epic-google-proposed-settlement

Object permanence (permalink)

#20yrsago Google print hurts kids! https://memex.craphound.com/2005/11/05/hospital-google-print-hurts-kids/

#15yrsago HOWTO graft the RFID from a payment-card onto your phone https://www.bunniestudios.com/blog/2010/rfid-transplantation/

#15yrsago Lincolnbot Mark I https://web.archive.org/web/20101107224026/http://disneyparks.disney.go.com/blog/2010/11/walt-disney-one-mans-dream-re-opens-with-new-magic-fond-memories-at-disney’s-hollywood-studios/

#15yrsago Crutchfield Dermatology of Minneapolis claims copyright in everything you write, forever, to keep you from posting complaints on the net https://memex.craphound.com/2010/11/05/crutchfield-dermatology-of-minneapolis-claims-copyright-in-everything-you-write-forever-to-keep-you-from-posting-complaints-on-the-net/

#15yrsago Botmasters include fake control interface to ensnare security researchers https://web.archive.org/web/20101106004833/https://blog.tllod.com/2010/11/03/statistics-dont-lie-or-do-they/

#15yrsago Young Asian refugee claimant sneaks onto Air Canada flight from HK disguised as old white guy https://www.cnn.com/2010/WORLD/americas/11/04/canada.disguised.passenger/index.html

#15yrsago Zoo City: hard-boiled South African urban fantasy makes murder out of magic https://memex.craphound.com/2010/11/05/zoo-city-hard-boiled-south-african-urban-fantasy-makes-murder-out-of-magic/

#15yrsago Shortly after Murdoch buys National Geographic, he fires its award-winning journalists https://www.pewresearch.org/journalism/2011/07/20/wall-street-journal-under-rupert-murdoch/

#10yrsago British government will (unsuccessfully) ban end-to-end encryption https://memex.craphound.com/2015/11/05/british-government-will-unsuccessfully-ban-end-to-end-encryption/

#10yrsago Man killed by his tapeworm’s cancer https://www.livescience.com/52695-tapeworm-cancer.html?cmpid=514645

#10yrsago Washington Redskins’ lawyers enumerate other grossly offensive trademarks for the USPTO https://www.techdirt.com/2015/11/04/how-redskins-delightfully-vulgar-court-filing-won-me-over/

#10yrsago New Zealand’s lost colossus: all-mechanical racetrack oddsmaking computer https://hackaday.com/2015/11/04/tote-boards-the-impressive-engineering-of-horse-gambling/

#5yrsago Ant, Uber, and the true nature of money https://pluralistic.net/2020/11/05/gotta-be-a-pony-under-there/#jack-ma

#1yrago How to have cancer https://pluralistic.net/2024/11/05/carcinoma-angels/#squeaky-nail

Upcoming appearances (permalink)

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
Oxford: Enshittification and Extraction: The Internet Sucks Now with Tim Wu (Oxford Internet Institute), Nov 14
https://www.oii.ox.ac.uk/news-events/events/enshittification-and-extraction-the-internet-sucks-now/
London: Enshittification with Sarah Wynn-Williams and Chris Morris, Nov 15
https://www.barbican.org.uk/whats-on/2025/event/cory-doctorow-with-sarah-wynn-williams
London: Downstream IRL with Aaron Bastani (Novara Media), Nov 17
https://dice.fm/partner/tickets/event/oen5rr-downstream-irl-aaron-bastani-in-conversation-with-cory-doctorow-17th-nov-earth-london-tickets
London: Enshittification with Carole Cadwalladr (Frontline Club), Nov 18
https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/in-conversation-enshittification-tickets-1785553983029
Virtual: Enshittification with Vass Bednar (Vancouver Public Library), Nov 21
https://www.crowdcast.io/@bclibraries-present
San Diego: Enshittification at the Mission Hills Branch Library, Dec 1
https://libraryfoundationsd.org/events/doctorow
Seattle: Neuroscience, AI and Society (University of Washington), Dec 4
https://www.eventbrite.com/e/neuroscience-ai-and-society-cory-doctorow-tickets-1735371255139
Madison, CT: Enshittification at RJ Julia, Dec 8
https://rjjulia.com/event/2025-12-08/cory-doctorow-enshittification

Recent appearances (permalink)

Enshittification and How To Fight It (ILSR)
https://www.whoshallrule.com/p/enshittification-and-how-to-fight
Big Tech’s “Enshittification” & Bill McKibben on Solar Hope for the Planet
https://www.writersvoice.net/2025/11/cory-doctorow-on-big-techs-enshittification-bill-mckibben-on-solar-hope-for-the-planet/
Enshittification and the Rot Economy with Ed Zitron (Clarion West)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tz71pIWbFyc
Amanpour & Co (New Yorker Radio Hour)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I8l1uSb0LZg
Enshittification is Not Inevitable (Team Human)
https://www.teamhuman.fm/episodes/339-cory-doctorow-enshittification-is-not-inevitable

Latest books (permalink)

"Canny Valley": A limited edition collection of the collages I create for Pluralistic, self-published, September 2025
"Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It," Farrar, Straus, Giroux, October 7 2025
https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374619329/enshittification/
"Picks and Shovels": a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about the heroic era of the PC, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), February 2025 (https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250865908/picksandshovels).
"The Bezzle": a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about prison-tech and other grifts, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), February 2024 (the-bezzle.org).
"The Lost Cause:" a solarpunk novel of hope in the climate emergency, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), November 2023 (http://lost-cause.org).
"The Internet Con": A nonfiction book about interoperability and Big Tech (Verso) September 2023 (http://seizethemeansofcomputation.org). Signed copies at Book Soup (https://www.booksoup.com/book/9781804291245).
"Red Team Blues": "A grabby, compulsive thriller that will leave you knowing more about how the world works than you did before." Tor Books http://redteamblues.com.
"Chokepoint Capitalism: How to Beat Big Tech, Tame Big Content, and Get Artists Paid, with Rebecca Giblin", on how to unrig the markets for creative labor, Beacon Press/Scribe 2022 https://chokepointcapitalism.com

Upcoming books (permalink)

"Unauthorized Bread": a middle-grades graphic novel adapted from my novella about refugees, toasters and DRM, FirstSecond, 2026
"Enshittification, Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It" (the graphic novel), Firstsecond, 2026
"The Memex Method," Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2026
"The Reverse-Centaur's Guide to AI," a short book about being a better AI critic, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 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.

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Book Review: The Battle of the Beams by Tom Whipple ★★★★★ - Terence Eden’s Blog

2025-11-05T12:34:48.000Z

Well this is a treat! It is rare to find a pop-science book which does such a good job of actually explaining the science, rather than just using it as a background for storytelling. The Battle of Beams doesn't go too deep into the mechanics and physics, but gives a general overview with just enough detail to keep things interesting. It is also well illustrated (not a given in these sorts of books) which helps flesh out some of the trickier concepts.

How did radio-waves change the course of the war? Was RADAR solely the preserve of the British? What tactics were used to conceal developments? Was there an invisible war in the skies? Battle of the Beams takes a technical and social look at how physics became the forefront of attack and defence. It dives into the people who set their brains to work on the problem, and those who were determined to stop them.

The book honest about the problems of referencing contradictory source material. Some of the work published after the war is obviously biased towards the writer's personal successes - which don't always tally with reality. Similarly, there's a good overview of what both sides were doing in technology. We often only hear about ENIGMA and Britain's attempts to crack it - it's rare to read something from the other side. Here we get to experience both sides as they attempt to tame the radio waves, discover how they are being used against them, and the countermeasures both sides took.

The book is pacey and leaps back-and-forth across the channel, giving a real sense of drama to the sometimes baroque nature of physics research. There is a little touch of the "boys-own-adventure" what with daring fighter pilots and exciting raids - but it never strays into the hagiographic.

As ever with histories of the second World War, you're left wondering how it was the Allies succeeded. The book is full of infuriating little anecdotes like:

The report was filed and then forgotten, seen by some officials, understood by fewer, and then left in the archives of Whitehall. Britain continued for at least a year to believe that it, alone, had mastered this new wonder weapon of radar.

Similarly, a daring piece of espionage was fatally undermined when the defector was imprisoned and then:

through an astonishing cock-up the film he had gone to so much trouble to smuggle in had been sent to be processed at the post office, and most of it had been destroyed.

Gah!

Nevertheless, a fascinating look at how technology develops and how systems react to change.

Automerge [link] - remy sharp's b:log

2025-11-04T12:47:22.000Z

Version control for your data: Automerge is a local-first sync engine for multiplayer apps that works offline, prevents conflicts, and runs fast. Interesting project, possibly for mini personal projects that want to share some data (possibly without a database? unsure). But also in some kind of collaborative code editor, ala codecasting from JS Bin old days. Beautifully designed landing page though.

Source: automerge.org

Originally published on Remy Sharp's b:log

Political Experiments - Terence Eden’s Blog

2025-11-03T12:34:41.000Z

Many years ago, in another lifetime, I was presenting our team's work to a rather senior politician. Here's how I remember it:

"We want to provide value for money," I said, "so we propose that running five small pilots of [thing I still can't talk about]. We know there are multiple technologies which could work. But we don't know which one will work best."

"How will running something five times save the taxpayer money?" They asked, quite reasonably.

I replied, somewhat smugly, "Big technology projects often fail because they get very far along before a critical flaw is discovered. If we run some pilot programmes, we hope to discover those problems before we go too far down the wrong path."

"But running five pilots will cost more money?" They replied, with a smugness born of a thousand encounters like this.

I had the uneasy feeling I knew where this was going. "Yes, in the short term, it will cost more."

"Why don't we just run the pilot with the technology which will work best?" They asked earnestly.

I had one of those "Pray Mr Babbage" moments and took a moment to compose myself.

I gently explained that we wouldn't know in advance the results of the experiment and, without going too far into The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, falsifiable hypotheses were probably the best way to discover the truth.

Apparently their PPE degree was worthwhile because they accepted my arguments - albeit only with funding for 3 pilots.

From their point of view, it was perfectly rational to reject experimentation. Each failed experiment is a waste of taxpayers' hard-earned money. How do you look your constituents in the eye and say "80% of our budget was spent on failure"? It is political suicide.

Which leads me on to this brilliant blog post by Mark Sewards MP. In it, the MP describes the process of setting up an "AI" counterpart to answer his constituents' questions.

So far, so zeitgeisty. But rather than just slap a label on an LLM and call it a day, the MP for Leeds South West and Morley actually spent time thinking about what he and his team wanted out of this experiment. They didn't just launch and bugger off; they tested and refined.

The experiment was a success. Not because it reduced his case-load and allowed a tech company to profit from misery. But because it taught him (and others) the limitations of technology. It shows exactly what doesn't work. If a person can't understand where the boundaries are, they'll never learn how to successfully master anything.

As Mark said:

What didn’t it do? It didn’t save any time. I read every single transcript to ensure we didn’t miss any questions from constituents. I can see this technology working alongside a casework team, but it needs a lot of refinement. I took this leap to understand what AI might be capable of and what it isn’t yet. I understand why some dismissed the model out of hand, but I think the potential is real, even if that’s all it is for now – potential.

Experimentation is hard because it leaves us vulnerable. It shows that we don't know everything and that humbles us. We need to loudly celebrate politicians who try something new and are honest about where it goes wrong.

There is so much more to be learned from failure than success.

Pluralistic: There's one thing EVERY government can do to shrink Big Tech (01 Nov 2025) - Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow

2025-11-01T19:56:25.000Z

Today's links

There's one thing EVERY government can do to shrink Big Tech: The path to a post-American internet.
Hey look at this: Delights to delectate.
Object permanence: D2020; Sony rootkit; Public Enemy vs the internet; NYC plute Hallowe'en.
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.

There's one thing EVERY government can do to shrink Big Tech (permalink)

As the old punchline goes, "If you wanted to get there, I wouldn't start from here." It's a gag that's particularly applicable to monopolies: once a company has secured a monopoly, it doesn't just have the power to block new companies from competing with it, it also has the power to capture governments and thwart attempts to regulate it or break it up.

40 years ago, a group of right-wing economists decided that this was a feature, not a bug, and convinced the world's governments to stop enforcing competition law, anti-monopoly law, and antitrust law, deliberately encouraging a global takeover by monopolies, duopolies and cartels. Today, virtually every sector of our economy is dominated by five or fewer firms:

https://www.openmarketsinstitute.org/learn/monopoly-by-the-numbers

These neoliberal economists knew that in order to stop us from getting there ("there" being a world where everyday people have economic and political freedom), they'd have to get us "here" – a world where even the most powerful governments find themselves unable to address concentrated corporate power. They wanted to drag us into a oligarchy, and take away any hope of us escaping to a fairer, more pluralistic world.

They succeeded. Today, rich and powerful governments struggle to do anything to rein in Big Tech. Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney contemplated levying a 3% tax on America's tax-dodging tech giants…for all of five seconds. All Trump had to do was meaningfully clear his throat and Carney folded:

https://www.politico.com/news/2025/06/30/in-tech-tax-cave-trump-and-carney-may-have-both-gotten-what-they-wanted-00433980

Canada also tried forcing payments to Canadian news agencies from tech giants, and failed in the most predictable way imaginable. Facebook simply blocked all Canadian news on its platforms (this being exactly what it had done in every other country where this was tried). Google paid out some money, and the country's largest newspaper killed its long-running investigative series into Big Tech's sins. Then Google slashed its payments.

These payments were always a terrible idea. The only beneficial part of how Big Tech relates to the news is in making it easy for people to find and discuss the news. News you're not allowed to find or talk about isn't "news," it's "a secret." The thing that Big Tech steals from the news isn't links, it's money: 30% of every in-app payment is stolen by the mobile duopoly; 51% of every ad dollar is stolen by the ad-tech duopoly; and social media holds news outlets' subscribers hostage and forces news companies to pay to "boost" their content to reach the people who follow them.

In other words, extracting payments for links is a form of redistribution, a clawback of some of Big Tech's stolen loot. It isn't predistribution, which would block Big Tech from stealing the loot in the first place.

Canada is a wealthy nation, but only 41m people call it home. The EU is also wealthy, and it is home to 500m people. You'd think that the EU could get further than Canada, but, faced with the might of the tech cartel, it has struggled to get anything done.

Take the GDPR, Europe's landmark privacy law. In theory, this law bans the kind of commercial surveillance that Big Tech thrives on. In practice, these companies just flew an Irish flag of convenience, which not only let them avoid paying their taxes – it also let them get away with illegal surveillance, by capturing the Irish privacy regulator, who does nothing to defend Europeans' privacy:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/05/15/finnegans-snooze/#dirty-old-town

It's hard to overstate just how supine the Irish state is in relation to the American tech giants that pretend to call Dublin their home. The country's latest privacy regulator is an ex-Meta executive!

https://www.article19.org/resources/ireland-adopt-new-transparent-process-to-appoint-data-protection-commissioner/

(Perhaps he can hang out with the UK's newly appointed head of competition enforcement, who used to be the head of Amazon UK:)

https://pluralistic.net/2025/01/22/autocrats-of-trade/#dingo-babysitter

For the EU, Ireland is just part of the problem when it comes to regulating Big Tech. The EU's latest tech regulations are the sweeping, even visionary Digital Services Act and Digital Markets Act. If tech companies obeyed these laws, that would go a long way to addressing their monopoly abuses. So of course, they're not obeying the laws.

Apple has threatened to leave the EU altogether rather than comply with a modest order requiring it to allow third party payments and app stores:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/09/26/empty-threats/#500-million-affluent-consumers

And they've buried the EU in complex litigation that could drag on for a decade:

https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/?uri=CELEX:62025TN0354

And Trump has made it clear that he is Big Tech's puppet, and any attempt to get American tech companies to obey EU law will be met with savage retaliation:

https://www.cnn.com/2025/09/05/tech/google-eu-antitrust-fine-adtech

When it comes to getting Big Tech to obey the law, if we wanted to get there, I wouldn't start from here.

But the fact that it's hard to get Big Tech to do the bidding of publicly accountable governments doesn't mean that those governments are powerless. There's one institution a government has total control over: itself.

The world's governments have all signed up to "anticircumvention" laws that criminalize reverse-engineering and modifying US tech products. This was done at the insistence of the US Trade Rep, who has spent this entire century using the threat of tariffs to bully every country in the world into signing up to laws that ban their own technologists from directly blocking American Big Tech companies' scams.

It's because of anticircumvention laws that a Canadian company can't go into business making an alternative Facebook client that blocks ads but restores the news. It's because of anticircumvention laws that a Canadian company can't go into business with a product that lets media companies bypass the Meta/Google ad-tech duopoly.

It's because of anticircumvention laws that a European company can't go into business modifying your phone, car, apps, smart devices and operating system to block all commercial surveillance. If companies can't get your data, they can't violate the GDPR. It's because of anticircumvention laws that a European company can't sell you a hardware dongle that breaks into your iPhone and replaces Apple's ripoff app store with a Made-in-the-EU alternative.

Anticircumvention law is the reason Canada's only response to Trump's illegal tariffs is more tariffs, which make everything in Canada more expensive. Get rid of anticircumvention law and Canada could get into the business of shifting billions of dollars from American tech monopolists to Canadian startups and the Canadian people:

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

Anticirumvention law is the reason the EU can't get its data out of the Big Tech silos that Trump controls, which lets Trump shut down any European government agency or official that displeases him:

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

American monopolists like John Deere have installed killswitches in every tractor in the world – killswitches that can't be removed until we get rid of anticircumvention laws, which will let us create open source firmware for tractors. Until we do that, Trump can shut down all the agriculture in any country that makes him angry:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/10/20/post-american-internet/#huawei-with-american-characteristics

For a decade, we've been warned that allowing China to supply our telecoms infrastructure was geopolitical suicide, because it would mean that China could monitor and terminate our network traffic. That's the threat that Trump's America now poses for the whole world, as Trump makes it clear that America doesn't have allies or trading partners, only rivals and competitors, and he will stop at nothing to beat them.

And if you are worried about China, well, perhaps you should be. The world's incredible rush to solarization has left us with millions of solar installations whose inverters are also subject to arbitrary updates by their (Chinese) manufacturers, including updates that could render them inoperable. The only way around this? Get rid of anticircumvention law and replace all the software in these critical systems with open source, transparent, owner-controlled alternatives:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/09/23/our-friend-the-electron/#to-every-man-his-castle

Getting Big Tech to do your government's bidding is a big lift. The companies are too big to jail, especially with Trump behind them. That's why each of America's Big Tech CEOs paid $1m out of their own pockets to sit behind him on the dais at the inauguration:

https://apnews.com/article/trump-inauguration-tech-billionaires-zuckerberg-musk-wealth-0896bfc3f50d941d62cebc3074267ecd

Even America can't bring its tech companies to heel. When Google was convicted of being an illegal monopolist, the judge punished the company by sentencing it to…nothing:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/09/03/unpunishing-process/#fucking-shit-goddammit-fuck

But ultimately, breakups and fines and interoperabilty mandates are all forms of redistribution – a way to strip the companies of the spoils of their decades-long looting spree. That's a laudable goal, but if we want to get there, we must start with predistribution: halting the companies' ongoing extraction efforts, by getting rid of the laws that prevent other technologists from unfucking their products and halting their cash- and data-ripoffs.

Do that long and hard enough and we stand a real chance of draining off so much of their power that we can get moving on those redistributive moves. And getting rid of anticircumvention laws only requires that governments control their own behavior – unlike taxing or fining companies, which only works if governments can control the behavior of companies that have proven, time and again, to be more powerful than any country in the world.

(Image: Cryteria, CC BY 3.0, modified)

Hey look at this (permalink)

The Forgotten History of Socialism and the Occult https://jacobin.com/2025/10/socialism-occult-mysticism-marxism-history/
Study: AI Models Trained On Clickbait Slop Result In AI ‘Brain Rot,’ ‘Hostility’ https://www.techdirt.com/2025/10/31/study-ai-models-trained-on-clickbait-slop-result-in-ai-brain-rot-hostility/
The Validation Machines https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2025/10/validation-ai-raffi-krikorian/684764/
The Department of Defense Wants Less Proof its Software Works https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2025/10/department-defense-wants-less-proof-its-software-works
Ireland: Adopt new, transparent process to appoint Data Protection Commissioner https://www.article19.org/resources/ireland-adopt-new-transparent-process-to-appoint-data-protection-commissioner/

Object permanence (permalink)

#20yrsago Sony DRM uses black-hat rootkits https://web.archive.org/web/20051102053346/http://www.sysinternals.com/blog/2005/10/sony-rootkits-and-digital-rights.html

#20yrsago Suncomm encourages people to break its DRM https://web.archive.org/web/20051116115847/http://bigpicture.typepad.com/comments/2005/10/drm_crippled_cd.html

#20yrsago Public Enemy’s Internet strategy https://web.archive.org/web/20051103053915/https://www.wired.com/news/print/0,1294,69403,00.html

#10yrsago Petition: Rename Stephen Harper to “Calgary International Airport” https://www.change.org/p/rename-stephen-harper-to-calgary-international-airport

#10yrsago Hallowe’en with NYC’s super-rich https://www.nytimes.com/slideshow/2015/10/29/fashion/halloween-in-manhattans-most-expensive-zip-codes/s/29UESHALLOWEEN-slide-LRGS.html

#5yrsago D2020 https://pluralistic.net/2020/10/31/walkies/#probabilistic

#5yrsago The Americans https://pluralistic.net/2020/10/31/walkies/#among-us

Upcoming appearances (permalink)

Virtual: Peoples and Things with danah boyd and Lee Vinsel, Nov 3
https://www.youtube.com/live/WjFvGPLpskk
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
Oxford: Enshittification and Extraction: The Internet Sucks Now with Tim Wu (Oxford Internet Institute), Nov 14
https://www.oii.ox.ac.uk/news-events/events/enshittification-and-extraction-the-internet-sucks-now/
London: Enshittification with Sarah Wynn-Williams and Chris Morris, Nov 15
https://www.barbican.org.uk/whats-on/2025/event/cory-doctorow-with-sarah-wynn-williams
London: Downstream IRL with Aaron Bastani (Novara Media), Nov 17
https://dice.fm/partner/tickets/event/oen5rr-downstream-irl-aaron-bastani-in-conversation-with-cory-doctorow-17th-nov-earth-london-tickets
London: Enshittification with Carole Cadwalladr (Frontline Club), Nov 18
https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/in-conversation-enshittification-tickets-1785553983029
Virtual: Enshittification with Vass Bednar (Vancouver Public Library), Nov 21
https://www.crowdcast.io/@bclibraries-present
Seattle: Neuroscience, AI and Society (University of Washington), Dec 4
https://www.eventbrite.com/e/neuroscience-ai-and-society-cory-doctorow-tickets-1735371255139
Madison, CT: Enshittification at RJ Julia, Dec 8
https://rjjulia.com/event/2025-12-08/cory-doctorow-enshittification

Recent appearances (permalink)

Enshittification and the Rot Economy with Ed Zitron (Clarion West)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tz71pIWbFyc
Amanpour & Co (New Yorker Radio Hour)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I8l1uSb0LZg
Enshittification is Not Inevitable (Team Human)
https://www.teamhuman.fm/episodes/339-cory-doctorow-enshittification-is-not-inevitable
The Great Enshittening (The Gray Area)
https://www.reddit.com/r/philosophypodcasts/comments/1obghu7/the_gray_area_the_great_enshittening_10202025/
Enshittification (Smart Cookies)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-BoORwEPlQ0

Latest books (permalink)

"Canny Valley": A limited edition collection of the collages I create for Pluralistic, self-published, September 2025
"Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It," Farrar, Straus, Giroux, October 7 2025
https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374619329/enshittification/
"Picks and Shovels": a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about the heroic era of the PC, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), February 2025 (https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250865908/picksandshovels).
"The Bezzle": a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about prison-tech and other grifts, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), February 2024 (the-bezzle.org).
"The Lost Cause:" a solarpunk novel of hope in the climate emergency, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), November 2023 (http://lost-cause.org).
"The Internet Con": A nonfiction book about interoperability and Big Tech (Verso) September 2023 (http://seizethemeansofcomputation.org). Signed copies at Book Soup (https://www.booksoup.com/book/9781804291245).
"Red Team Blues": "A grabby, compulsive thriller that will leave you knowing more about how the world works than you did before." Tor Books http://redteamblues.com.
"Chokepoint Capitalism: How to Beat Big Tech, Tame Big Content, and Get Artists Paid, with Rebecca Giblin", on how to unrig the markets for creative labor, Beacon Press/Scribe 2022 https://chokepointcapitalism.com

Upcoming books (permalink)

"Unauthorized Bread": a middle-grades graphic novel adapted from my novella about refugees, toasters and DRM, FirstSecond, 2026
"Enshittification, Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It" (the graphic novel), Firstsecond, 2026
"The Memex Method," Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2026
"The Reverse-Centaur's Guide to AI," a short book about being a better AI critic, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 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

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

ISSN: 3066-764X

Book Review: When We Cease to Understand the World - Benjamín Labatut ★★★★★ - Terence Eden’s Blog

2025-11-01T12:34:19.000Z

This is a stunning book.

If some scientists and mathematicians have seen further than others, it is by standing on the mountains of madness. This straddles between being a faithful and fanciful biography of insanity. It is written like a hyperactive friend trying to show you how all the things in the universe connect with each other - while you slowly back away in terror.

Are these ghost stories? Biographies dictated from beyond the grave? Counter-factual histories written to bemuse and confuse? These are the implausibly mystic crystal revelations that strain the boundary between realities.

Science is terrifying. It ought to be. It tells us that the world isn't quite what we thought it was. If you found out the secret to the universe, how would you react? In many ways, it remind me of Asimov's "Breeds There A Man…?".

The prose is sublime and the stories are haunting. Highly recommended!

Pluralistic: The internet was made for privacy (31 Oct 2025) - Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow

2025-10-31T16:29:32.000Z

Today's links

The internet was made for privacy: And unmade by regulators.
Hey look at this: Delights to delectate.
Object permanence: Materialist conspiratorialism; TSA ball-fondlers; Anonymous to dox 1,000 Klansmen; Amazon hates private property; The Great Firewall of Cameron.
Upcoming appearances: Where to find me.
Recent appearances: Where I've been.
Latest books: You keep readin' em, I'll keep writin' 'em.
Upcoming books: Like I said, I'll keep writin' 'em.
Colophon: All the rest.

The internet was made for privacy (permalink)

While "tech exceptionalism" can be a grave sin (as with the "move fast and break things" ethos that wrecked so much of our world, especially its labor markets), there are ways in which tech is truly exceptional, in the sense of bringing forth capabilities and affordances that have never existed before, in all of human history.

One obvious way in which tech is exceptional: its flexibility. Digital computers are "Turing-complete, universal von Neumann machines," which means that they are engines capable of computing every valid program. They are truly general purpose. We have many other general purpose machines, of course, but they are simple things, like wheels. Computers are unique in that they are both complex and universal, and every computer can run every program. Just as we don't know how to make knives that only cut in beneficial ways, we also don't know how to make computers that only run desirable programs.

Every computer can run every program, including ones that the user doesn't want (viruses), or that the manufacturer doesn't want (ad-blockers). No one knows how to make a computer that is almost Turing-complete. There's no such thing as "Turing-complete minus one." We can't make a computer that only runs the programs the manufacturer has authorized – all we can do is criminalize the act modifying your own computer to do what you tell it to, even if the manufacturer objects:

https://memex.craphound.com/2012/01/10/lockdown-the-coming-war-on-general-purpose-computing/

I've devoted a lot of my life to exploring the policy implications of this amazing fact, but that's not the only amazing, exceptional thing about technology. There's at least one other way in which modern digital technology has produced something that is genuinely, civilizationally novel: encryption.

Encryption – scrambling data so that it can only be read by its intended recipient – is an age-old project for both the authorities (who used ciphers to keep their secrets safe since the time of the Caesars) and for those who would overthrow them (revolutionary movements have always used codes to protect themselves from the authorities they sought to dethrone).

But WWII ushered in a new era, in which encryption (and attempts to break it) went digital, as Alan Turing and the codebreakers of Bletchley Park turned themselves to a computer-aided mathematics of scrambling and descrambling. In the decades that followed, a modern form of encryption emerged, one that was powerful beyond the wildest dreams of the Caesars and their revolutionary adversaries.

Modern, computerized encryption can scramble data to the point where it is literally unscramblable by an unauthorized party. In the eyeblink moment between you pressing the camera button on your phone and the resulting image being saved to its mass storage, the bits that make up that image are scrambled so thoroughly that even if every hydrogen atom in the universe were made into a computer, and even if all those computers were put to work guessing at the key, we would run out of time and universe before we ran out of keys.

Even futuristic, experimental technologies like quantum computing that may revolutionize codebreaking are also revolutionizing scrambling itself:

https://signal.org/blog/pqxdh/

The history of encryption is seriously fraught. Until the early 1990s, the NSA classed working encryption as a munition and banned civilian access to a whole branch of mathematics. It wasn't until Cindy Cohn – then a lawyer for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, now its executive director – convinced a court that the First Amendment protected the right to publish computer code, that we were all able to gain access to this essential technology, which today safeguards your messages, files, banking transactions, and the software updates for your car's brakes, your pacemaker, and the informatics on airplanes. Cohn has announced her retirement from EFF in 2026, and while she will be sorely missed, we do have her memoir, Privacy's Defender, to look forward to:

https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262051248/privacys-defender/

The legalization of encryption was a starting gun for the internet itself, as true information security entered the picture and pervaded every part of service design. Every security crisis, every scandal (e.g. Snowden), jolted the effort to encrypt the internet forward, and in this way, much of the internet lurched into a state we can call "encrypted by default."

But even as this privacy-preserving technology was perfected and made ubiquitous, something weird and contradictory happened: mass surveillance also took off online. The ad-tech industry – and its handmaidens, the data-broker industry – rigged the game so that our private activities were only encrypted in such a way as to defend their privacy, but not ours. Our data is encrypted in transit to the servers we interact with, and when it is at rest on those servers' mass storage devices, but it is not encrypted in a way that prevents companies from data-mining it, or decrypting it and selling it on or giving it away or combining it with surveillance data purchased or traded from others.

This isn't an inevitability: it's a choice. The ubiquity of surveillance in the age of encryption is a policy choice. The reason companies don't encrypt our data so that they can't use it against us is because they don't have to. Congress hasn't updated American consumer privacy law since 1988, when they passed a law that prohibits video store clerks from disclosing our VHS rentals:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/02/20/privacy-first-second-third/#malvertising

Why hasn't Congress updated our privacy rights since Die Hard was in theaters? Because American cops and spies love commercial internet surveillance. Tech companies and data brokers are a source of fine-grained, off-the-books, warrantless surveillance data that the American state is totally dependent on. There is no difference between "commercial surveillance" and "government surveillance" – they are a fused symbiote and neither could survive without the other:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/04/13/public-interest-pharma/#axciom

Governments have hated encryption since the Clinton era, and have been attempting to subvert it since computers came in beige boxes and modems screamed in agony every time you tried to look at the internet:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2015/04/clipper-chips-birthday-looking-back-22-years-key-escrow-failures

It's no mystery why we don't have federal bans on facial recognition – if we did, ICE wouldn't be able to nonconsensually, warrantlessly steal your face and store it for 15 years (at least):

https://www.404media.co/you-cant-refuse-to-be-scanned-by-ices-facial-recognition-app-dhs-document-says/

Why did the EU allow Ireland to facilitate mass surveillance for a decade after the GDPR's passage? Because European authorities also hate encryption and say that it is a "totally erroneous perception that it is everyone's civil liberty to communicate on encrypted messaging services":

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2025/09/chat-control-back-menu-eu-it-still-must-be-stopped-0

The internet could be the most privacy-preserving communications medium in history. Instead, it has ushered in an era of nightmarish surveillance. This isn't a technology problem. It's a policy problem. Criminals spy on us online because our governments wanted to spy on us online, so they let corporations spy on us online.

Imagine what the internet would look like today if, in its early regulatory moments, our elected representatives had demanded privacy, rather than trying to ban it. Sure, some corporations would have spied on us anyway, and criminals would have done their best to compromise our privacy, but criminals and rogue firms wouldn't have been able to attract capital to engage in conduct that was likely to give rise to massive fines and criminal prosecutions for violating the privacy laws Congress never bothered to write for us.

Think of it this way: sure, there are e-commerce sites that are just scams, that take your money and never ship you goods. Those sites don't have IPOs, they're not listed on stock exchanges, and they get shut down or blocked. They exist in the shadows, not in the light. Imagine if that was the kind of commercial surveillance industry we'd gotten: marginal, shadowy, illegal, forever on the run. There would still have been some bad privacy invasions, but these would have been crimes, not Harvard Business Review case-studies:

https://www.hbs.edu/faculty/Pages/item.aspx?num=51748

(And before you email me about that one time Paypal closed your account and kept your money or Ebay wouldn't give you a refund, sure, that's right, those things suck, and the companies should face penalties for them, but their business model isn't stealing money from their customers; but Google and Meta and Apple's business model is 100% stealing data from their customers.)

Instead of treating data theft the way we treat monetary theft, we're now increasingly treating monetary theft like data theft. The legislative formalization of cryptocurrency will now allow companies to steal your money with the same blissful lack of consequence as Google faced for stealing your private information:

https://www.citationneeded.news/issue-89/

We're rounding the corner on a decade since the beginning of the fight against Big Tech, and the efforts to cut it down to size. These keep foundering on the political economy of crushing an all-powerful monopolist – namely, that it is all-powerful.

You can't tax Big Tech:

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

You can't break it up:

https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/a-judge-lets-google-get-away-with

Donald Trump has made it clear that he'd rather let Putin annex Brussels than allow the EU to fine tech companies:

https://www.cnn.com/2025/09/05/tech/google-eu-antitrust-fine-adtech

Breakups, taxes and fines are all forms of redistribution, which seek to address the harms of monopoly after the monopoly has been formed. The failure to make privacy protections as inviolable as financial protections is a missed opportunity for predistribution. Bans on data collection, mining, and sale would have prevented these monopolies from forming in the first place. Predistribution is far more effective than redistribution:

https://jacobin.com/2025/10/predistribution-welfare-state-inequality-class

It's amazing to realize that the privacy-invading internet has somehow beaten the encrypted internet. It's crazy that the only entity that will promise to encrypt your data beyond the reach of a data broker, an ad-tech giant, or a government is a ransomware criminal, who will also encrypt your data beyond your reach:

https://www.wired.com/story/state-of-ransomware-2024/

It didn't have to be this way. This wasn't a technology failure. It wasn't a commercial failure. It was a policy failure. Since the 1990s, whenever push came to shove, governments decided that they would rather preserve their ability to spy on us than keep us safe from private spying.

Hey look at this (permalink)

Animal Costumes from the 1862 Fairytale Ball of the Jung-München Artist’s Association https://publicdomainreview.org/collection/maskenfest/
New physical attacks are quickly diluting secure enclave defenses from Nvidia, AMD, and Intel https://arstechnica.com/security/2025/10/new-physical-attacks-are-quickly-diluting-secure-enclave-defenses-from-nvidia-amd-and-intel/
If Musk was broke, he’d just be another asshole with bad ideas https://www.smh.com.au/culture/books/if-musk-was-broke-he-d-just-be-another-asshole-with-bad-ideas-cory-doctorow-20251023-p5n4u6.html
FCC Republicans force prisoners and families to pay more for phone calls https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2025/10/fcc-republicans-force-prisoners-and-families-to-pay-more-for-phone-calls/
norecognition https://github.com/hevnsnt/norecognition

Object permanence (permalink)

#20yrsago Baen Books to launch online sf mag edited by Eric Flint https://web.archive.org/web/20060702073036/http://www.scifi.com/scifiwire/?id=33090

#15yrsago Dirty debt collectors frightened victims with fake “sheriffs,” “courtroom,” “judges” https://web.archive.org/web/20101106001140/https://www.thepittsburghchannel.com/r/25569199/detail.html

#15yrsago TSA demands testicular fondling as an alternative to naked scanners https://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2010/10/for-the-first-time-the-tsa-meets-resistance/65390/

#15yrsago Brain-imaging and neurorealism: what does it mean to “feel something” in your brain? https://www.badscience.net/2010/10/neuro-realism/

#15yrsago Animaniacs vs Newt Gingrich — the lost episode https://www2.cruzio.com/~keeper/UAdearmr.html

#15yrsago Canada’s telcoms regulator gives bloated, throttling incumbent the keys to the kingdom https://web.archive.org/web/20101031090505/http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/technology/globe-on-technology/crtc-ruling-handcuffs-competitive-market-teksavvy/article1778211/

#15yrsago Rent-seeking in the 21st century: where eBay, free software, Foxconn and the MPAA come from https://web.archive.org/web/20101102151059/http://radar.oreilly.com/2010/10/points-of-control-rent-extract.html

#10yrsago Patent trolls: The Eastern District of Texas must die so that we all may live https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2015/10/its-time-federal-circuit-shut-down-eastern-district-texas

#10yrsago Anonymous threatens to dump real names of 1,000 KKK members https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/anonymous-hackers-threaten-release-names-ku-klux-klan-members-n453246

#10yrsago UK govt: no crypto back doors, just repeal the laws of mathematics https://betanews.com/2015/10/28/uk-government-says-app-developers-wont-be-forced-to-implement-backdoors/

#10yrsago David Cameron promises law to force ISPs to censor a secret blacklist https://web.archive.org/web/20151029155602/http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2015-10/28/cameron-porn-filter-law-net-neutrality

#10yrsago EU Parliament votes to drop criminal charges and grant asylum to Snowden https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/oct/29/edward-snowden-eu-parliament-vote-extradition

#10yrsago Thanks to the meth wars, cold medicine’s effective ingredient isn’t https://www.forbes.com/sites/daviddisalvo/2015/10/26/the-popular-over-the-counter-cold-medicine-that-science-says-doesnt-work/

#10yrsago UK police & spies will have warrantless access to your browsing history https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/crime/11964655/Police-to-be-granted-powers-to-view-your-internet-history.html

#10yrsago NM judge believes daily prison rape is a fit punishment for nearly all defendants https://web.archive.org/web/20151030003120/http://www.ijreview.com/2015/10/458319-judge-calls-18-year-old-a-b-but-shes-only-trying-to-help/

#10yrsago Charity with US Characteristics: how our oligarchs buy their way out of criticism https://www.csmonitor.com/Business/Robert-Reich/2015/0408/How-the-Koch-brothers-and-the-super-rich-are-buying-their-way-out-of-criticism

#10yrsago Christ, what an asshole. https://memex.craphound.com/2015/10/30/christ-what-an-asshole-2/

#5yrsago Facebook loses users, makes more money https://pluralistic.net/2020/10/30/rigged-game/#tails-you-lose

#5yrsago Sue your medical bully https://pluralistic.net/2020/10/29/victim-complex/#i-object

#5yrsago Violent cops' deadly victim complex https://pluralistic.net/2020/10/29/victim-complex/#marsys-law

#5yrsago Amazon says only corporations own property https://pluralistic.net/2020/10/29/victim-complex/#digital-feudalism

#1yrago Conspiratorialism as a material phenomenon https://pluralistic.net/2024/10/29/hobbesian-slop/#cui-bono

#1yrago AI's "human in the loop" isn't https://pluralistic.net/2024/10/30/a-neck-in-a-noose/#is-also-a-human-in-the-loop

Upcoming appearances (permalink)

Virtual: Peoples and Things with danah boyd and Lee Vinsel, Nov 3
https://www.youtube.com/live/WjFvGPLpskk
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
Oxford: Enshittification and Extraction: The Internet Sucks Now with Tim Wu (Oxford Internet Institute), Nov 14
https://www.oii.ox.ac.uk/news-events/events/enshittification-and-extraction-the-internet-sucks-now/
London: Enshittification with Sarah Wynn-Williams and Chris Morris, Nov 15
https://www.barbican.org.uk/whats-on/2025/event/cory-doctorow-with-sarah-wynn-williams
London: Downstream IRL with Aaron Bastani (Novara Media), Nov 17
https://dice.fm/partner/tickets/event/oen5rr-downstream-irl-aaron-bastani-in-conversation-with-cory-doctorow-17th-nov-earth-london-tickets
London: Enshittification with Carole Cadwalladr (Frontline Club), Nov 18
https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/in-conversation-enshittification-tickets-1785553983029
Virtual: Enshittification with Vass Bednar (Vancouver Public Library), Nov 21
https://www.crowdcast.io/@bclibraries-present
Seattle: Neuroscience, AI and Society (University of Washington), Dec 4
https://www.eventbrite.com/e/neuroscience-ai-and-society-cory-doctorow-tickets-1735371255139
Madison, CT: Enshittification at RJ Julia, Dec 8
https://rjjulia.com/event/2025-12-08/cory-doctorow-enshittification

Recent appearances (permalink)

Enshittification and the Rot Economy with Ed Zitron (Clarion West)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tz71pIWbFyc
Amanpour & Co (New Yorker Radio Hour)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I8l1uSb0LZg
Enshittification is Not Inevitable (Team Human)
https://www.teamhuman.fm/episodes/339-cory-doctorow-enshittification-is-not-inevitable
The Great Enshittening (The Gray Area)
https://www.reddit.com/r/philosophypodcasts/comments/1obghu7/the_gray_area_the_great_enshittening_10202025/
Enshittification (Smart Cookies)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-BoORwEPlQ0

Latest books (permalink)

"Canny Valley": A limited edition collection of the collages I create for Pluralistic, self-published, September 2025
"Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It," Farrar, Straus, Giroux, October 7 2025
https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374619329/enshittification/
"Picks and Shovels": a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about the heroic era of the PC, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), February 2025 (https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250865908/picksandshovels).
"The Bezzle": a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about prison-tech and other grifts, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), February 2024 (the-bezzle.org).
"The Lost Cause:" a solarpunk novel of hope in the climate emergency, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), November 2023 (http://lost-cause.org).
"The Internet Con": A nonfiction book about interoperability and Big Tech (Verso) September 2023 (http://seizethemeansofcomputation.org). Signed copies at Book Soup (https://www.booksoup.com/book/9781804291245).
"Red Team Blues": "A grabby, compulsive thriller that will leave you knowing more about how the world works than you did before." Tor Books http://redteamblues.com.
"Chokepoint Capitalism: How to Beat Big Tech, Tame Big Content, and Get Artists Paid, with Rebecca Giblin", on how to unrig the markets for creative labor, Beacon Press/Scribe 2022 https://chokepointcapitalism.com

Upcoming books (permalink)

"Unauthorized Bread": a middle-grades graphic novel adapted from my novella about refugees, toasters and DRM, FirstSecond, 2026
"Enshittification, Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It" (the graphic novel), Firstsecond, 2026
"The Memex Method," Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2026
"The Reverse-Centaur's Guide to AI," a short book about being a better AI critic, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 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

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

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https://mamot.fr/@pluralistic

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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

ISSN: 3066-764X

Gig Review: Meat Loaf by Candlelight ★★★★☆ - Terence Eden’s Blog

2025-10-30T12:34:02.000Z

The "…by Candlelight" concerts have a simple premise - come to a cathedral or church to hear top West End talent sing your favourite singer's songs, backed by a live band. This is a cut above your usual tribute act - they aren't trying to do impressions of the act, they're stamping their own energy onto beloved songs.

It works! Mostly. This concert was in a West End theatre so the (electric) candles were only on the stage. It perhaps wasn't as intimate as some of their other concerts. But, still, I was blown away by how powerful their voices were and how loud the band was.

The first half perhaps felt a little too polished - but the second was more raucous. Lots of encouragement to get up and dance, sing along, and snap photos.

All the hits were there - with the deepest cut being "In the Land of the Pig, the Butcher Is King" and the Jim Steinman penned "Total Eclipse of the Heart".

You're never going to be able to see Meat Loaf sing live (unless he returns from the dead as foretold in prophesy) but this is a good substitute. None of the singers could individually match his vocal ferocity - but when they come together it is a thing of joy.

Meat Loaf by Candlelight is touring the UK now.

Pluralistic: When AI prophecy fails (29 Oct 2025) - Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow

2025-10-29T14:00:07.000Z

Today's links

When AI prophecy fails: Hating workers is a hell of a drug.
Hey look at this: Delights to delectate.
Object permanence: SCOTUS lets the FBI kidnap Americans; Inequality perverts justice; Free the McFlurry!
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.

When AI prophecy fails (permalink)

Amazon made $35 billion in profit last year, so they're celebrating by laying off 14,000 workers (a number they say will rise to 30,000). This is the kind of thing that Wall Street loves, and this layoff comes after a string of pronouncements from Amazon CEO Andy Jassy about how AI is going to let them fire tons of workers.

That's the AI story, after all. It's not about making workers more productive or creative. The only way to recoup the $700 billion in capital expenditure to date (to say nothing of AI companies' rather fanciful coming capex commitments) is by displacing workers – a lot of workers. Bain & Co say the sector needs to be grossing $2 trillion by 2030 in order to break even, which is more than the combined grosses of Amazon, Google, Microsoft, Apple Nvidia and Meta:

https://www.bain.com/about/media-center/press-releases/20252/$2-trillion-in-new-revenue-needed-to-fund-ais-scaling-trend—bain–companys-6th-annual-global-technology-report/

Every investor who has put a nickel into that $700b capex is counting on bosses firing a lot of workers and replacing them with AI. Amazon is also counting on people buying a lot of AI from it after firing those workers. The company has sunk $120b into AI this year alone.

There's just one problem: AI can't do our jobs. Oh, sure, an AI salesman can convince your boss to fire you and replace you with an AI that can't do your job, but that's the world's easiest sales-call. Your boss is relentlessly horny for firing you:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/03/18/asbestos-in-the-walls/#government-by-spicy-autocomplete

But there's a lot of AI buyers' remorse. 95% of AI deployments have either produced no return on capital, or have been money-losing:

https://www.technologyreview.com/2019/01/25/1436/we-analyzed-16625-papers-to-figure-out-where-ai-is-headed-next/

AI has "no significant impact on workers’ earnings, recorded hours, or wages":

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=5219933

What's Amazon to do? How do they convince you to buy enough AI to justify that $180b in capital expenditure? Somehow, they have to convince you that an AI can do your workers' jobs. One way to sell that pitch is to fire a ton of Amazon workers and announce that their jobs have been given to a chatbot. This isn't a production strategy, it's a marketing strategy – it's Amazon deliberately taking an efficiency loss by firing workers in a desperate bid to convince you that you can fire your workers:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/08/05/ex-princes-of-labor/#hyper-criti-hype

Amazon does use a lot of AI in its production, of course. AI is the "digital whip" that Amazon uses to allow itself to control drivers who (nominally) work for subcontractors. This lets Amazon force workers into unsafe labor practices that endanger them and the people they share the roads with, while offloading responsibility onto "independent delivery service" operators and the drivers themselves:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/10/23/traveling-salesman-solution/#pee-bottles

Amazon leadership has announced that AI has or will shortly replace its coders as well. But chatbots can't do software engineering – sure, they can write code, but writing code is only a small part of software engineering. An engineer's job is to maintain a very deep and wide context window, one that considers how each piece of code interacts with the software that executes before it and after it, and with the systems that feed into it and accept its output.

There's one thing AI struggles with beyond all else: maintain context. Each linear increase in context that you demand from AI results in an exponential increase in computational expense. AI has no object permanence. It doesn't know where it's been and it doesn't know where it's going. It can't remember how many fingers it's drawn, so it doesn't know when to stop. It can write a routine, but it can't engineer a system.

When tech bosses dream of firing coders and replacing them with AI, they're fantasizing about getting rid of their highest-paid, most self-assured workers and transforming the insecure junior programmers leftover into AI babysitters whose job it is to evaluate and integrate that code at a speed that no one – much less a junior programmer – can meet if they are to do a careful and competent job:

https://www.bloodinthemachine.com/p/how-ai-is-killing-jobs-in-the-tech-f39

The jobs that can be replaced with AI are the jobs that companies already gave up on doing well. If you've already outsourced your customer service to an overseas call-center whose workers are not empowered to solve any of your customers' problems, why not fire those workers and replace them with chatbots? The chatbots also can't solve anyone's problems, and they're even cheaper than overseas call-center workers:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/08/06/unmerchantable-substitute-goods/#customer-disservice

Amazon CEO Andy Jassy wrote that he "is convinced" that firing workers will make the company "AI ready," but it's not clear what he means by that. Does he mean that the mass firings will save money while maintaining quality, or that mass firings will help Amazon recoup the $180,000,000,000 it spent on AI this year?

Bosses really want AI to work, because they really, really want to fire you. As Allison Morrow writes for CNN bosses are firing workers in anticipation of the savings AI will produce…someday:

https://www.cnn.com/2025/10/28/business/what-amazons-mass-layoffs-are-really-about

All this can feel improbable. Would bosses really fire workers on the promise of eventual AI replacements, leaving themselves with big bills for AI and falling revenues as the absence of those workers is felt?

The answer is a resounding yes. The AI industry has done such a good job of convincing bosses that AI can do their workers' jobs that each boss for whom AI fails assumes that they've done something wrong. This is a familiar dynamic in con-jobs.

The people who get sucked into pyramid schemes all think that they are the only ones failing to sell any of the "merchandise" they shell out every month to buy, and that no one else has a garage full of unsold leggings or essential oils. They don't know that, to a first approximation, the MLM industry has no sales, and relies entirely on "entrepreneurs" lying to themselves and one another about the demand for their wares, paying out of their own pocket for goods that no one wants.

The MLM industry doesn't just rely on this deception – they capitalize on it, by selling those self-flagellating "entrepreneurs" all kinds of expensive training courses that promise to help them overcome the personal defects that stop them from doing as well as all those desperate liars boasting about their incredible MLM sales success:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/05/05/free-enterprise-system/#amway-or-the-highway

The AI industry has its own version of those sales coaching courses – there's a whole secondary industry of management consultancies and business schools offering high-ticket "continuing education" courses to bosses who think that the only reason the AI they've purchased isn't saving them money is that they're doing AI wrong.

Amazon really needs AI to work. Last week, Ed Zitron published an extensive analysis of leaked documents showing how much Amazon is making from AI companies who are buying cloud services from it. His conclusion? Take away AI and Amazon's cloud division is in steep decline:

https://www.wheresyoured.at/costs/

What's more, those big-money AI customers – like Anthropic – are losing tens of billions of dollars per year, relying on investors to keep handing them money to incinerate. Amazon needs bosses to believe they can fire workers and replace them with AI, because that way, investors will keep giving Anthropic the money it needs to keep Amazon in the black.

Amazon firing 30,000 workers in the run-up to Christmas is a great milestone in enshittification. America's K-shaped recovery means that nearly all of the consumption is coming from the wealthiest American households, and these households overwhelmingly subscribe to Prime. Prime-subscribing households do not comparison shop. After all, they've already prepaid for a year's shipping in advance. These households start and end nearly every shopping trip in the Amazon app.

If Amazon fires 30,000 workers and tanks its logistics network and e-commerce systems, if it allows itself to drown in spam and scam reviews, if it misses its delivery windows and messes up its returns, that will be our problem, not Amazon's. In a world of commerce where Amazon's predatory pricing, lock-in, and serial acquisitions has left us with few alternatives, Amazon can truly be "too big to care":

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/oct/05/way-past-its-prime-how-did-amazon-get-so-rubbish

From that enviable position, Amazon can afford to enshittify its services in order to sell the big AI lie. Killing 30,000 jobs is a small price to pay if it buys them a few months before a reckoning for its wild AI overspending, keeping the AI grift alive for just a little longer.

(Image: Cryteria, CC BY 3.0, modified)

Hey look at this (permalink)

Eugene Debs and All Of Us https://www.hamiltonnolan.com/p/eugene-debs-and-all-of-us
US Business Cycles 1954-2020 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vXRC3RrngcI
Ed Zitron Gets Paid to Love AI. He Also Gets Paid to Hate AI https://www.wired.com/story/ai-pr-ed-zitron-profile/
Worried About AI Monopoly? Embrace Copyright’s Limits https://www.lawfaremedia.org/article/worried-about-ai-monopoly–embrace-copyright-s-limits

Object permanence (permalink)

#10yrsago Librarian of Congress puts impossible conditions on your right to jailbreak your 3D printer https://michaelweinberg.org/post/132021560865/unlocking-3d-printers-ruling-is-a-mess

#10yrsago The two brilliant, prescient 20th century science fiction novels you should read this election season https://memex.craphound.com/2015/10/28/the-two-brilliant-prescient-20th-century-science-fiction-novels-you-should-read-this-election-season/

#10yrsago Hundreds of city police license plate cams are insecure and can be watched by anyone https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2015/10/license-plate-readers-exposed-how-public-safety-agencies-responded-massive

#10yrsago Appeals court holds the FBI is allowed to kidnap and torture Americans outside US borders https://www.techdirt.com/2015/10/28/court-your-fourth-fifth-amendment-rights-no-longer-exist-if-you-leave-country/

#10yrsago South Carolina sheriff fires the school-cop who beat up a black girl at her desk https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/oct/28/south-carolina-parents-speak-out-school-board

#10yrsago The more unequal your society is, the more your laws will favor the rich https://web.archive.org/web/20151028133814/http://america.aljazeera.com/opinions/2015/10/the-more-unequal-the-country-the-more-the-rich-rule.html

#5yrsago Trump abandons supporters to freeze https://pluralistic.net/2020/10/28/trumpcicles/#omaha

#5yrsago RIAA's war on youtube-dl https://pluralistic.net/2020/10/28/trumpcicles/#yt-dl

#1yrago The US Copyright Office frees the McFlurry https://pluralistic.net/2024/10/28/mcbroken/#my-milkshake-brings-all-the-lawyers-to-the-yard

Upcoming appearances (permalink)

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
Oxford: Enshittification and Extraction: The Internet Sucks Now with Tim Wu (Oxford Internet Institute), Nov 14
https://www.oii.ox.ac.uk/news-events/events/enshittification-and-extraction-the-internet-sucks-now/
London: Enshittification with Sarah Wynn-Williams and Chris Morris, Nov 15
https://www.barbican.org.uk/whats-on/2025/event/cory-doctorow-with-sarah-wynn-williams
London: Downstream IRL with Aaron Bastani (Novara Media), Nov 17
https://dice.fm/partner/tickets/event/oen5rr-downstream-irl-aaron-bastani-in-conversation-with-cory-doctorow-17th-nov-earth-london-tickets
London: Enshittification with Carole Cadwalladr (Frontline Club), Nov 18
https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/in-conversation-enshittification-tickets-1785553983029
Virtual: Enshittification with Vass Bednar (Vancouver Public Library), Nov 21
https://www.crowdcast.io/@bclibraries-present
Seattle: Neuroscience, AI and Society (University of Washington), Dec 4
https://compneuro.washington.edu/news-and-events/neuroscience-ai-and-society/
Madison, CT: Enshittification at RJ Julia, Dec 8
https://rjjulia.com/event/2025-12-08/cory-doctorow-enshittification

Recent appearances (permalink)

Enshittification and the Rot Economy with Ed Zitron (Clarion West)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tz71pIWbFyc
Amanpour & Co (New Yorker Radio Hour)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I8l1uSb0LZg
Enshittification is Not Inevitable (Team Human)
https://www.teamhuman.fm/episodes/339-cory-doctorow-enshittification-is-not-inevitable
The Great Enshittening (The Gray Area)
https://www.reddit.com/r/philosophypodcasts/comments/1obghu7/the_gray_area_the_great_enshittening_10202025/
Enshittification (Smart Cookies)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-BoORwEPlQ0

Latest books (permalink)

"Canny Valley": A limited edition collection of the collages I create for Pluralistic, self-published, September 2025
"Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It," Farrar, Straus, Giroux, October 7 2025
https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374619329/enshittification/
"Picks and Shovels": a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about the heroic era of the PC, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), February 2025 (https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250865908/picksandshovels).
"The Bezzle": a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about prison-tech and other grifts, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), February 2024 (the-bezzle.org).
"The Lost Cause:" a solarpunk novel of hope in the climate emergency, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), November 2023 (http://lost-cause.org).
"The Internet Con": A nonfiction book about interoperability and Big Tech (Verso) September 2023 (http://seizethemeansofcomputation.org). Signed copies at Book Soup (https://www.booksoup.com/book/9781804291245).
"Red Team Blues": "A grabby, compulsive thriller that will leave you knowing more about how the world works than you did before." Tor Books http://redteamblues.com.
"Chokepoint Capitalism: How to Beat Big Tech, Tame Big Content, and Get Artists Paid, with Rebecca Giblin", on how to unrig the markets for creative labor, Beacon Press/Scribe 2022 https://chokepointcapitalism.com

Upcoming books (permalink)

"Unauthorized Bread": a middle-grades graphic novel adapted from my novella about refugees, toasters and DRM, FirstSecond, 2026
"Enshittification, Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It" (the graphic novel), Firstsecond, 2026
"The Memex Method," Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2026
"The Reverse-Centaur's Guide to AI," a short book about being a better AI critic, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 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

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

ISSN: 3066-764X

Pluralistic: Raymond Beisinger's "9 Times My Work Has Been Ripped Off" (28 Oct 2025) - Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow

2025-10-28T15:16:00.000Z

Today's links

Raymond Beisinger's "9 Times My Work Has Been Ripped Off": A self-defense guide for creative workers.
Hey look at this: Delights to delectate.
Object permanence: Gingerbread Phantom Manor; Orwell estate censors 1984; The Abbadon; Ferris wheel fine dining.
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.

Raymond Beisinger's "9 Times My Work Has Been Ripped Off" (permalink)

Raymond Beisinger's new book 9 Times My Work Has Been Ripped Off is a masterclass in how creative workers can transform the endless, low-grade seething about the endless ripoffs of the industry into something productive and even profound:

https://drawnandquarterly.com/books/9-times-my-work-has-been-ripped-off/

Beisinger is an iconic designer and illustrator whose instantly recognizable style and entrepreneurial hustle have allowed him to achieve the coveted and elusive status of full-time, economically secure(ish) artist. But over the years – and even in recent times – Beisigner has found himself in the all-too-common and endlessly frustrating circumstance of being owed money by people who refuse to pay it. The sums involved are typically small by the standards of corporate budgets, but it's what Beisinger calls "needed money" – money that makes a huge difference to the life of the artist to whom it is owed.

Speaking from personal experience, getting stiffed is one of the most embittering things that can happen to a creative worker – or any worker (as the tradespeople who've had their wages stolen by Trump can attest). I remember every time I got shafted by a client and often find my mind returning to those humiliating, frustrating moments.

There was the "friend" who hired me to do some work and then just decided never to pay me the $150 we agreed on. There was the university prof who asked me to speak to his class and promised me reimbursement for the taxi and then stiffed me for 20 quid. There was the international magazine who commissioned a short story from me, accepted it, then tried to cram a bullshit contract down my throat and refused to discuss any modifications to its terrible terms, finally stiffing me for the $500 they owed me.

There was the largest publisher in the world, who commissioned a novella from me for an anthology, promising me tens of thousands of dollars, who accepted the novella, and then "discovered" they hadn't ever finalized the contract for the anthology and canceled it, stiffing me in the process. The fact that I went on to sell that novella several times over, both in book form and as a graphic novel, and for film rights (twice!), making far more money in the process, doesn't make me any less angry about these fuckers who just screwed me without a second thought.

Objectively speaking, there is no reason for me to dwell on these little humiliations. It doesn't do me any good. It doesn't make the dickheads who screwed me feel bad. It is, as the proverb goes, "drinking poison and hoping your enemy dies." But I can't help it.

Neither, it seems, can Beisinger. But unlike me, Beisinger has found an incredibly productive – and inspiring – way to deal with that otherwise pointless seething. In 9 Times My Work Has Been Ripped Off, Beisinger reflects on the nine titular ripoffs, telling the story of how he got ripped off, what he did to get his own back, how he felt about it at the time, and how he feels about it in retrospect.

The book's subtitle ("An informal self-defense guide for independent creatives") sets up this book as a kind of manual for navigating these situations in your own life, and there's plenty of that in here – successes and failures for the rest of us to learn from. These stories are often very satisfying, as the little guy gets the justice he deserves. But the most interesting part of this book is Beisinger's reflections on the meaning of the different ripoffs he confronted, and how they relate to his own work.

Because – as Beisinger will tell you – he rips stuff off, too. All artists do. "Good artists copy; great artists steal." (said Picasso (who was ripping off Faulkner) (or Stravinsky) (or Eliot) (or Trilling). He carefully parses through the muddied ethics of lifting elements for collage, for inspiration, and just because you forgot that you weren't supposed to. Much of Beisinger's early work was collage, and (as a collagist myself), and you can't do that work without developing complicated feelings about creative ownership.

Beisinger also straddles a line between commercial illustrator, producing commissioned pieces to order for magazine and advertising art directors; and fine artist, making "artistic" pieces for his own satisfaction, and selling these as prints. While he's proud of all this work, it's clear that how he relates to his own work depends a great deal on whether it falls into the former category or the latter. Part of that difference is a blanket prohibition on licensing his "artistic" pieces for commercial work.

This just adds to the moral complexity of Beisinger's deliberations: when a extremely well-funded charity misappropriates an "artistic" piece to accompany an exemplary article on women's health advocacy, he wrestles with a whole suite of concerns and mitigations – the "charity"'s reputation as a money-laundry for a wealthy plutocrat, his support for the article, his principle about not licensing his "artistic" work. It's typical of the kind of nuance that Beisinger brings to these chapters.

Also fascinating is Beisinger's chapter about a fan who solicited artistic advice from him, but went on to produce a portfolio of uncredited knock-offs of Beisinger's own signature style. Beisinger describes how he blasted this young artist for abusing his goodwill and unjustly profiting from Beisinger's own work developing his style, and then, in later years, repented of his angry outburst. In a delightful coda, Beisinger recounts how he looked up this artist years later, only to discover that he had matured into a talented, original, successful and ambitious creator. When Beisinger emailed the artist to apologize for his furious letter, the other artist replied that Beisinger's blast had been the kick in the pants he'd needed to finally figure out his own style, and he credits his later success to Beisinger's fury.

At the root of all nine tales of ripoffs is the inadequacy and/or inappropriateness of the legal system as a tool for redress when an independent creator is ripped off. In the case of commercial ripoffs – by agencies large and small, by fly-by-night concert promoters, by gallerists peddling unauthorized reproductions – the sums involved are usually far too small to involve lawyers or the courts. In the case of disputes with other artists – like the copyist who bit Beisinger's style – the law is (rightly) silent, because styles are not copyrightable.

In telling these nine tiles, Beisinger beautifully illustrates the limitations of copyright as the sole regulator of creative activity. Copyright law (and its cousin, contract law) might be suitable for mediating commercial transactions between creative workers and businesses, but it's utterly unsuitable for other kinds of interactions, including interactions between artistic peers, or between artists and creators working in related disciplines. The most important thing that Beisinger is doing in this book is setting out a continuum of relationships and detailing many of the different tools available to creators to resolve disputes arising at different points on that continuum.

Given Beisinger's justly deserved fame as an illustrator, this is also a beautiful book, published in pocket-sized trim by Drawn & Quarterly, one of the world's great indie comics presses. The many, many illustrations in this small volume don't just bring the subject matter to life – they're artistic delights in their own right. It's a reminder of how wonderful the "art" part of all this stuff is, and how that complicates the all too familiar labor issues at the book's core.

Hey look at this (permalink)

Twitter, Free Speech Absolutism, and Adoxastic Enshittification https://contemporaryrhetoric.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/10/Alford_Carter_15_3_1.pdf
This Wreckage Courtesy of the Enshittification Administration: Notes On Late-State Trumpism https://www.meditationsinanemergency.com/this-wreckage-courtesy-of-the-enshittification-administration-notes-on-late-state-trumpism/
Air filters have DRM now https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LCu_n2Nddu0
Washington’s Battery Strategy Is Upside Down https://christopherchico.substack.com/p/washingtons-battery-strategy-is-upside
The New York Times is wrong about the electoral value of moderation https://www.gelliottmorris.com/p/the-new-york-times-makes-several

Object permanence (permalink)

#20yrsago Build a gingerbread Phantom Manor from Disneyland Paris https://www.haunteddimensions.raykeim.com/index506.html

#15yrsago HOWTO explain the Internet to a Dickensian street urchin https://www.fastcompany.com/1697711/flowchart-understanding-web-fans-charles-dickens#self

#10yrsago Librarian of Congress grants limited DRM-breaking rights for cars, games, phones, tablets, and remixers https://memex.craphound.com/2015/10/27/librarian-of-congress-grants-limited-drm-breaking-rights-for-cars-games-phones-tablets-and-remixers/

#10yrsago EU, worn down by telcoms lobbyists, pass brutal net discrimination rules https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2015/10/net-neutrality-eu-votes-in-favour-of-internet-fast-lanes-and-slow-lanes/

#10yrsago Ministry of Irony: Orwell estate tries to censor mentions of the number 1984 https://torrentfreak.com/orwell-estate-sends-copyright-takedown-over-the-number-1984-151027/

#10yrsago Pirates are the best customers: just sell good stuff at a reasonable price in a timely fashion https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XXxzWgl3nHs

#10yrsago Elite “wealth managers”: Renfields to the one percent bloodsuckers https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2015/10/elite-wealth-management/410842/

#10yrsago The Abaddon: graphic novel based loosely on Sartre’s No Exit https://memex.craphound.com/2015/10/27/the-abaddon-graphic-novel-based-loosely-on-sartres-no-exit/

#5yrsago Surveillance startup protected sexual harassers https://pluralistic.net/2020/10/27/peads-r-us/#Verkada

#5yrsago Comcast v Comcast https://pluralistic.net/2020/10/27/peads-r-us/#diseconomies-of-scale

#5yrsago The president's extraordinary powers https://pluralistic.net/2020/10/27/peads-r-us/#peads

#5yrsago Monopolies Suck https://pluralistic.net/2020/10/27/peads-r-us/#sally-hubbard

#5yrsago Ferris wheel fine dining https://pluralistic.net/2020/10/27/peads-r-us/#ferris-dining

Upcoming appearances (permalink)

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
Oxford: Enshittification and Extraction: The Internet Sucks Now with Tim Wu (Oxford Internet Institute), Nov 14
https://www.oii.ox.ac.uk/news-events/events/enshittification-and-extraction-the-internet-sucks-now/
London: Enshittification with Sarah Wynn-Williams and Chris Morris, Nov 15
https://www.barbican.org.uk/whats-on/2025/event/cory-doctorow-with-sarah-wynn-williams
London: Downstream IRL with Aaron Bastani (Novara Media), Nov 17
https://dice.fm/partner/tickets/event/oen5rr-downstream-irl-aaron-bastani-in-conversation-with-cory-doctorow-17th-nov-earth-london-tickets
London: Enshittification with Carole Cadwalladr (Frontline Club), Nov 18
https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/in-conversation-enshittification-tickets-1785553983029
Virtual: Enshittification with Vass Bednar (Vancouver Public Library), Nov 21
https://www.crowdcast.io/@bclibraries-present
Seattle: Neuroscience, AI and Society (University of Washington), Dec 4
https://compneuro.washington.edu/news-and-events/neuroscience-ai-and-society/
Madison, CT: Enshittification at RJ Julia, Dec 8
https://rjjulia.com/event/2025-12-08/cory-doctorow-enshittification

Recent appearances (permalink)

Enshittification and the Rot Economy with Ed Zitron (Clarion West)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tz71pIWbFyc
Amanpour & Co (New Yorker Radio Hour)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I8l1uSb0LZg
Enshittification is Not Inevitable (Team Human)
https://www.teamhuman.fm/episodes/339-cory-doctorow-enshittification-is-not-inevitable
The Great Enshittening (The Gray Area)
https://www.reddit.com/r/philosophypodcasts/comments/1obghu7/the_gray_area_the_great_enshittening_10202025/
Enshittification (Smart Cookies)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-BoORwEPlQ0

Latest books (permalink)

"Canny Valley": A limited edition collection of the collages I create for Pluralistic, self-published, September 2025
"Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It," Farrar, Straus, Giroux, October 7 2025
https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374619329/enshittification/
"Picks and Shovels": a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about the heroic era of the PC, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), February 2025 (https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250865908/picksandshovels).
"The Bezzle": a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about prison-tech and other grifts, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), February 2024 (the-bezzle.org).
"The Lost Cause:" a solarpunk novel of hope in the climate emergency, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), November 2023 (http://lost-cause.org).
"The Internet Con": A nonfiction book about interoperability and Big Tech (Verso) September 2023 (http://seizethemeansofcomputation.org). Signed copies at Book Soup (https://www.booksoup.com/book/9781804291245).
"Red Team Blues": "A grabby, compulsive thriller that will leave you knowing more about how the world works than you did before." Tor Books http://redteamblues.com.
"Chokepoint Capitalism: How to Beat Big Tech, Tame Big Content, and Get Artists Paid, with Rebecca Giblin", on how to unrig the markets for creative labor, Beacon Press/Scribe 2022 https://chokepointcapitalism.com

Upcoming books (permalink)

"Unauthorized Bread": a middle-grades graphic novel adapted from my novella about refugees, toasters and DRM, FirstSecond, 2026
"Enshittification, Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It" (the graphic novel), Firstsecond, 2026
"The Memex Method," Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2026
"The Reverse-Centaur's Guide to AI," a short book about being a better AI critic, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 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

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

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

How to get Pluralistic:

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Pluralistic.net

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https://pluralistic.net/plura-list

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https://doctorow.medium.com/

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https://twitter.com/doctorow

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https://mostlysignssomeportents.tumblr.com/tagged/pluralistic

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

ISSN: 3066-764X

A Self-Hosted Favicon Proxy written in PHP - Terence Eden’s Blog

2025-10-28T12:34:54.000Z

In theory, you should be able to get the base favicon of any domain by calling /favicon.ico - but the reality is somewhat more complex than that. Plenty of sites use a wide variety of semi-standardised images which are usually only discoverable from the site's HTML.

There are several services which allow you to get favicons based on a domain. But they all have their problems.

Google
- Exposes your user's to Google's tracking.
- Relies on redirects.
DuckDuckGo
- Not officially supported by DDG.
Favicon.is
- No privacy policy whatsoever.
Icons.horse
- Paid service.
- Only small size icons.
Favicone
- No privacy policy.
- Only small size icons.

I want to show favicons next to specific links, but I don't want to expose my visitors to unnecessary tracking. How can I proxy these images so they are stored and served locally?

There are a few existing services. Some use Cloudflare workers or other cloud services, there are some local-first ones which are unmaintained. But nothing modern, self-hosted, and as easy to deploy as uploading a single PHP file.

So here's my attempt to make something which will preserve user privacy, be reasonably fast, and have moderately up-to-date icons, while remaining fast and efficient.

Getting the domain

Assuming the request comes in to https://proxy.example.com/?domain=bbc.co.uk

PHP has a handy FILTER_VALIDATE_DOMAIN filter which will determine if the string is a domain.

filter_var( $domain, FILTER_VALIDATE_DOMAIN, FILTER_FLAG_HOSTNAME );

Dealing with IDNs

Some domains contain non-ASCII characters - for example https://莎士比亚.org/ - not all favicon services support International Domain Names.

Using the idn_to_ascii() function, it is possible to get the Punycode domain.

$domain = idn_to_ascii("莎士比亚.org");

Getting the image

Check if the icon has previously been downloaded.
Rotate randomly between a few different Favicon services.
Download the icon.
Save it somewhere.

Getting the structure right

I know from my work on OpenBenches that storing tens of thousands of files in a single directory can be problematic. So I'll store the retrieved favicon in: /tld/domain/subdomain/

That will make it quick to see if an icon exists. I'll save the file with a filename based on the current timestamp. That will allow me to check if an icon is out of date, and will prevent people downloading the icons directly from me.

Preventing abuse

I don't want anyone but visitors to my site to be able to use this service. So I'll add a (weak) check to see if the request came from my domain.

$referer = parse_url( $_SERVER["HTTP_REFERER"], PHP_URL_HOST );
if ( $referer == "shkspr.mobi") {
   …
}

Some browsers may not send referers for privacy reasons. So they won't see the favicons. But they probably wouldn't have seen the images loaded from a 3^rd party service. So I'll serve a default image.

Putting it all together

You can grab the code from my personal git service.

Cool Cartoons: Active Listening - Nicky FloweRSS

2025-10-28T06:49:00.000Z

You're allowed to make a cartoon whenever you want. Animate away, my friend, no one can stop you. Chuck Jones, Hayao Miyazaki, whoever animated the sad blob in those ancient Zoloft commercials, and now you — legendary animators. Welcome... I'm happy to have you on board.

Nicky Flowers - 10/27/25 - I've greenlit a full season of a new cartoon series to debut whenever I have room in my schedule to finish such a project!! Hooray!!! - (send any comments/questions to hello at nickyflowers dot com)

Pluralistic: Shake Shack wants you to shit yourself to death (27 Oct 2025) - Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow

2025-10-27T13:41:21.000Z

Today's links

Shake Shack wants you to shit yourself to death: The bifurcation of justice is always and ever a prelude to fascism.
Hey look at this: Delights to delectate.
Object permanence: CCTV botnets; CEOs and random chance; Foxconn v Trump.
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.

Shake Shack wants you to shit yourself to death (permalink)

Shake Shack has changed the terms of service for its app, adding a "binding arbitration" clause that bans you from suing the company or joining a class action suit against it:

https://shakeshack.com/terms-conditions#/

As Luke Goldstein writes for Jacobin, the ToS update is part of a wave of companies, including fast-food companies, that are taking away their customers' right to seek redress in the courts, forcing them to pursue justice with a private "arbitrator" who works for the company that harmed them:

https://jacobin.com/2025/10/shake-shack-arbitration-law-terms-service/

Now, obviously you don't have to agree to terms of service just to walk into a Shake Shack and order a burger (yet), but Shake Shack, like other fast food companies, is on a full-court press to corral you into using its app to order your food, even if you're picking up that food from the counter and eating it in the restaurant. This is an easy trick to pull off – all Shake Shack needs to do is starve its cash-registers of personnel, creating untenably long lines for people attempting to order from a human.

Forcing diners to use an app has other advantages as well. Remember, an app is just a website skinned in the right kind of IP to make it a felony to add an ad-blocker to it, which means that whenever you use an app instead of a website, you are vulnerable to deep and ongoing commercial surveillance and can be bombarded with ads without you having any recourse:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/01/24/everything-not-mandatory/#is-prohibited

That surveillance can be weaponized against you, through "surveillance pricing," which is when companies raise prices based on their estimation of your desperation, which they can infer from surveillance data. Surveillance pricing lets a company reach into your wallet and devalue your money – if you are charged $10 for a burger that costs the next person $5, that means your dollar is only worth $0.50:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/06/24/price-discrimination/

But beyond surveillance and price-gouging, app-based ordering offers corporations another way to screw you: they can force you into binding arbitration. Under binding arbitration, you "voluntarily" waive your right to have your grievances heard by a judge. Instead, the corporation hires a fake judge, called an "arbitrator," who hears your case and then a rebuttal from the company that signs their paycheck and decides who is guilty. It will not surprise you to learn that arbitrators overwhelmingly find in favor of their employers and even when they rule in favor of a wronged customer, the penalties they impose on their bosses add up to little more than a wrist-slap:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/08/15/dogs-breakfast/#by-clicking-this-you-agree-on-behalf-of-your-employer-to-release-me-from-all-obligations-and-waivers-arising-from-any-and-all-NON-NEGOTIATED-agreements

This binding arbitration bullshit was illegal until the 2010s, when Antonin Scalia authored a string of binding arbitration decisions for the Supreme Court, opening the hellmouth for the mass imposition of arbitration on anyone that a business could stick an "I agree" button in front of:

https://brooklynworks.brooklaw.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1443&amp;context=blr

A fundamental tenet of conservative doctrine is "incentives matter" – that's why they say we can't have universal healthcare (if going to the doctor is free, you will schedule frivolous doctor's visits) or food or housing assistance (unless your boss can threaten you with homelessness and starvation, you won't go to work anymore). However, this is a highly selective bit of dogma, because incentives never seem to matter to rich people or corporations, whom conservatives are on an endless quest to immunize from any consequences for harming their workers or customers, which somehow won't incentivize them to hurt their workers and/or customers:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/06/12/hot-coffee/#mcgeico

At this point, we should probably ask, "Why would anyone sue a Shake Shack?" To answer that, you just need to look at why people sue other fast-food restaurants, like McDonald's and Chipotle. The short answer? Because those restaurants had defective food-handling and sourcing procedures, and this resulted in their customers contracting life-threatening food-borne illnesses:

https://apnews.com/article/mcdonalds-chipotle-taco-bell-norovirus-e-coli-83f1077981d738b91dbf0c76f7db2883

By immunizing itself from legal consequences for the most common sources of liability for fast-food restaurants, Shake Shack is reserving the right to make you shit yourself to death. Combine this immunity with Trump's unscheduled rapid midair disassembly of all federal regulations (AKA "Project 2025") and you get a situation where Shake Shack can just make up its own money-saving hygiene shortcuts, and face no consequences if these result in your shitting yourself to death. This is both literal and figurative enshittification.

Of course, Shake Shack doesn't believe this should cut both ways. You can't slip out of Shake Shack's noose by walking into a restaurant with a t-shirt reading:

By reading these words, 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. This indemnity will survive the termination of your relationship with your employer.

Shake Shack isn't trying to create a simplified, efficient system of justice – they're creating a two-tiered system of justice. They get to go to court if you hurt them. Vandalize a Shack Shack restaurant and they'll drag your ass in front of a judge before you can say "listeria." But if they cause you to shit yourself to death, you are literally and figuratively shit out of luck.

That's really bad. Two-tiered justice is always and ever a prelude to fascism. The way to keep the normies in line while your brownshirts round up their neighbors and seize their property is by maintaining the "normal" justice system for some people, but not for the disfavored group:

https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/anti-jewish-legislation-in-prewar-germany

Gradually, the group entitled to "normal" justice dwindles and more and more of us get sucked into the "state of exception" where you aren't entitled to a lawyer, a trial, or any human rights.

Trump isn't just dismantling the regulatory state: his fascist snatch-squads ignore the Constitution and the courts. His supine Congress ignores the separation of powers (Trump: "I'm the President and the Speaker of the House"). This rapid erosion of the rule of law is about to meet and merge with the long-run, Federalist Society project to give corporations their own shadow justice system, where they hire the judges who decide whether you can get justice.

Hey look at this (permalink)

In Memoriam/gbnewby https://www.pgdp.net/wiki/In_Memoriam/gbnewby
Zohran Mamdani’s 5 Lessons for the Democrats https://pluralistic.net/2025/10/23/traveling-salesman-solution/#pee-bottleshttps://jacobin.com/2025/10/zohran-mamdani-democrats-nyc-strategy/
The Internet Doesn’t Have to Suck https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/google-amazon-slop-internet.html
How Elon Musk Ruined Twitter https://jacobin.com/2025/10/enshittification-doctorow-musk-twitter-internet
Hackers Say They Have Personal Data of Thousands of NSA and Other Government Officials https://www.404media.co/hackers-say-they-have-personal-data-of-thousands-of-nsa-and-other-government-officials/

Object permanence (permalink)

#20yrsago Katamari Damacy: the text adventure https://web.archive.org/web/20081011210518/http://www.livejournal.com/community/katamari_damacy/262676.html

#20yrsago danah boyd’s Friendster papers, all in one place https://web.archive.org/web/20051029083531/https://www.zephoria.org/thoughts/archives/2005/10/24/my_articles_on.html

#20yrsago Bruce Sterling’s design future manifesto: viva spime! https://memex.craphound.com/2005/10/26/bruce-sterlings-design-future-manifesto-viva-spime/

#15yrsago South Korea’s US-led copyright policy leads to 65,000 acts of extrajudicial censorship/disconnection/threats by govt bureaucrats https://www.techdirt.com/2010/10/26/a-look-at-how-many-people-have-been-kicked-offline-in-korea-on-accusations-not-convictions-of-infringement/

#15yrsago British Airways chairman: “stop kowtowing to US aviation security demands” https://www.theguardian.com/world/2010/oct/27/airport-security-rules-uk-us

#15yrsago France: 25,000 families a day at risk of losing Internet access https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2010/10/french-three-strikes-agency-getting-25k-complaints-a-day/

#15yrsago Taste receptors in our lungs sense bitterness and respond with opened airways https://web.archive.org/web/20101028234103/http://www.nature.com/nm/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/nm.2237.html

#10yrsago Botnets running on CCTVs and NASs https://www.imperva.com/blog/archive/cctv-ddos-botnet-back-yard/?redirect=Incapsula

#10yrsago A beautiful data-driven Tube ad from 1928 https://www.citymonitor.ai/analysis/1928-ad-london-underground-combines-data-awesome-1513/?cf-view

#10yrsago DoJ to Apple: your software is licensed, not sold, so we can force you to decrypt https://ia600301.us.archive.org/35/items/gov.uscourts.nyed.376325/gov.uscourts.nyed.376325.15.0.pdf

#10yrsago FCC trying to stop phone companies that rip off prisoners’ families https://web.archive.org/web/20151023015659/http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-10-22/is-this-the-end-of-sky-high-prison-phone-call-rates-

#10yrsago Putting your kettle on the Internet of Things makes your wifi passwords an open secret https://www.techdirt.com/2015/10/23/easily-hacked-tea-kettle-latest-to-highlight-pathetic-internet-things-security/

#10yrsago 70% of CEOs’ effect on company performance can be attributed to random chance https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2015/10/151022192337.htm

#10yrsago Astounding showpiece table full of hidden compartments nested in hidden compartments https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4sWrgIgBT9M

#10yrsago A beautiful data-driven Tube ad from 1928 https://www.citymonitor.ai/analysis/1928-ad-london-underground-combines-data-awesome-1513/

#10yrsago Antioxidants protect cancer cells, help tumors to spread https://arstechnica.com/science/2015/10/myths-about-antioxidant-supplements-need-to-die/

#10yrsago Investing in David v Goliath: hundreds of millions slosh into litigation finance funds https://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/25/magazine/should-you-be-allowed-to-invest-in-a-lawsuit.html?smid=tw-share

#10yrsago Globe and Mail: TPP's copyright chapter will cost Canadians hundreds of millions https://www.theglobeandmail.com/opinion/editorials/copyright-concessions-may-be-downside-of-tpp-deal/article26939204/

#10yrsago Americans are pretty mellow about climate change, terrified of everything else https://blogs.chapman.edu/wilkinson/2015/10/13/americas-top-fears-2015/

#10yrsago NSA spying: judge tosses out case because Wikipedia isn’t widely read enough https://www.aclu.org/news/national-security/court-chooses-ignore-overwhelming-evidence-nsas-mass

#10yrsago Stylish furniture made from discarded supermarket trolleys https://etiennereijnders.blogspot.com/

#10yrsago Youtube’s pay TV service makes video-creators a deal they literally can’t refuse https://techcrunch.com/2015/10/23/youtube-red-creators/

#10yrsago Secret surveillance laws make it impossible to have an informed debate about privacy https://ijoc.org/index.php/ijoc/article/view/3329/1495

#10yrsago Sony licensed stock footage, then branded its creator a pirate for using it himself https://petapixel.com/2015/10/25/sony-filed-a-copyright-claim-against-the-stock-video-i-licensed-to-them/

#10yrsago Pharma company offers $1/dose version of Martin Shkreli’s drug https://www.chicagotribune.com/2015/10/23/drug-firm-offers-1-version-of-750-turing-pill/

#10yrsago IMF: Cheap oil will bankrupt the Saudis in five years https://web.archive.org/web/20151026052347/https://money.cnn.com/2015/10/25/investing/oil-prices-saudi-arabia-cash-opec-middle-east/index.html?sr=twcnnbrk102515oilpricessaudiarabiacashopecmiddleeast512pStoryMoneyPhoto

#5yrsago Chile restores democratic rule https://pluralistic.net/2020/10/26/viva-allende/#bread-a-roof-and-work

#5yrsago Phone surveillance, made in Canada https://pluralistic.net/2020/10/26/viva-allende/#imsi

#5yrsago Bob Dylan sings a EULA https://pluralistic.net/2020/10/25/musical-chairs/#subterranean-termsick-blues

#5yrsago Facebook threatens ad-transparency group https://pluralistic.net/2020/10/25/musical-chairs/#son-of-power-ventures

#5yrsago RIAA kills youtube-dl https://pluralistic.net/2020/10/24/1201-v-dl-youtube/#1201

#5yrsago Foxconn out-trumped Trump https://pluralistic.net/2020/10/23/foxconned/#foxconned

#5yrsago Bring back the CCC https://pluralistic.net/2020/10/23/foxconned/#ccc

#5yrsago Cracking the Ghislaine Maxwell redactions https://pluralistic.net/2020/10/23/foxconned/#redactions

#5yrsago Student loans are dischargeable https://pluralistic.net/2020/10/23/foxconned/#education-benefit

#1yrago Scientific American endorses Harris https://pluralistic.net/2024/10/23/eisegesis/#norm-breaking

#1yrago The housing crisis considered as an income crisis https://pluralistic.net/2024/10/24/i-dream-of-gini/#mean-ole-mr-median

#1yrago Ian McDonald's "The Wilding" https://pluralistic.net/2024/10/25/bogman/#erin-go-aaaaaaargh

#1yrago Keeping a suspense file gives you superpowers https://pluralistic.net/2024/10/26/one-weird-trick/#todo

Upcoming appearances (permalink)

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
Oxford: Enshittification and Extraction: The Internet Sucks Now with Tim Wu (Oxford Internet Institute), Nov 14
https://www.oii.ox.ac.uk/news-events/events/enshittification-and-extraction-the-internet-sucks-now/
London: Enshittification with Sarah Wynn-Williams and Chris Morris, Nov 15
https://www.barbican.org.uk/whats-on/2025/event/cory-doctorow-with-sarah-wynn-williams
London: Downstream IRL with Aaron Bastani (Novara Media), Nov 17
https://dice.fm/partner/tickets/event/oen5rr-downstream-irl-aaron-bastani-in-conversation-with-cory-doctorow-17th-nov-earth-london-tickets
London: Enshittification with Carole Cadwalladr (Frontline Club), Nov 18
https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/in-conversation-enshittification-tickets-1785553983029
Virtual: Enshittification with Vass Bednar (Vancouver Public Library), Nov 21
https://www.crowdcast.io/@bclibraries-present
Seattle: Neuroscience, AI and Society (University of Washington), Dec 4
https://compneuro.washington.edu/news-and-events/neuroscience-ai-and-society/
Madison, CT: Enshittification at RJ Julia, Dec 8
https://rjjulia.com/event/2025-12-08/cory-doctorow-enshittification

Recent appearances (permalink)

Enshittification and the Rot Economy with Ed Zitron (Clarion West)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tz71pIWbFyc
Amanpour & Co (New Yorker Radio Hour)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I8l1uSb0LZg
Enshittification is Not Inevitable (Team Human)
https://www.teamhuman.fm/episodes/339-cory-doctorow-enshittification-is-not-inevitable
The Great Enshittening (The Gray Area)
https://www.reddit.com/r/philosophypodcasts/comments/1obghu7/the_gray_area_the_great_enshittening_10202025/
Enshittification (Smart Cookies)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-BoORwEPlQ0

Latest books (permalink)

"Canny Valley": A limited edition collection of the collages I create for Pluralistic, self-published, September 2025
"Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It," Farrar, Straus, Giroux, October 7 2025
https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374619329/enshittification/
"Picks and Shovels": a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about the heroic era of the PC, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), February 2025 (https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250865908/picksandshovels).
"The Bezzle": a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about prison-tech and other grifts, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), February 2024 (the-bezzle.org).
"The Lost Cause:" a solarpunk novel of hope in the climate emergency, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), November 2023 (http://lost-cause.org).
"The Internet Con": A nonfiction book about interoperability and Big Tech (Verso) September 2023 (http://seizethemeansofcomputation.org). Signed copies at Book Soup (https://www.booksoup.com/book/9781804291245).
"Red Team Blues": "A grabby, compulsive thriller that will leave you knowing more about how the world works than you did before." Tor Books http://redteamblues.com.
"Chokepoint Capitalism: How to Beat Big Tech, Tame Big Content, and Get Artists Paid, with Rebecca Giblin", on how to unrig the markets for creative labor, Beacon Press/Scribe 2022 https://chokepointcapitalism.com

Upcoming books (permalink)

"Unauthorized Bread": a middle-grades graphic novel adapted from my novella about refugees, toasters and DRM, FirstSecond, 2026
"Enshittification, Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It" (the graphic novel), Firstsecond, 2026
"The Memex Method," Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2026
"The Reverse-Centaur's Guide to AI," a short book about being a better AI critic, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 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

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

ISSN: 3066-764X

Movie Review: The Story of the Weeping Camel ★★★★★ - Terence Eden’s Blog

2025-10-26T14:34:35.000Z

Our friends Annie and Dave run the podcast "Will You Still Love It Tomorrow". The premise is great - take a film that you love but you haven't seen for ages, and see if it still holds up.

They asked me and Liz to nominate a film to discuss with them. What's something that we loved but last saw 20ish years ago? We suggested The Story of the Weeping Camel. It is my go-to answer when someone asks me for my favourite film - it is sufficiently obscure to elicit further questions and sounds cool enough to make me seem interesting.

So we re-watched it in preparation for discussing it on the podcast. How did it hold up?

It is still my favourite foreign language movie. The story is simple and beautifully told. The cinematography is stunning. It is the perfect mix of heartbreaking and hopeful.

Weeping Camel is presented as a documentary - but it is rather closer to Nanook of the North, mixing documentary and drama. At its heart is the story of motherly love. Deep in the Gobi desert, a camel has a difficult birth and rejects her colt. Can the Mongolian farmers help bring mother and child together?

One of the best aspects of the film is that it is 100% on the side of "show, don't tell". If this were a documentary, there would be pointless narration telling us what was going on. Instead, we're treated as grown-ups. We can plainly see the pain - we don't need it spelled out.

Similarly, the Mongolian language is barely translated. Do you need to know what is being sung as a lullaby to a sleeping (human) baby? No! You understand the context. Similarly, what are the grandparents chatting about while playing cards? It isn't important to the plot, they're just sharing their love for each other.

There's a tension at the core of the movie about the tug between tradition and modernity. The vast and empty vista with all its magnificent beauty holds no appeal to a kid who just wants to watch cartoons on TV. The family's traditions are noble and ancient - but they're all supplemented with modern technology.

Back when Russell T. Davies was pitching Doctor Who in 2005, he said "If the Zogs on planet Zog are having trouble with the Zog-monster [...] who gives a toss?" There's a limit to human empathy. Why should we care about creatures so different to us? The Story of the Weeping Camel shows how wrong Davies was. I don't mean to imply that the Mongolians are an alien species and that their concerns shouldn't bother us - but that with the right skill, it is possible to make humans care about the emotional difficulties of camels in a distant desert.

If you want a gentle, moving, and uplifting movie - I urge you to seek it out. It is a tragedy that the film isn't better known. It is unavailable on any streaming service that I can find. Despite being Oscar nominated, it hasn't be re-released in HD, but you can buy it on DVD.

You can listen to "Will You Still Love It Tomorrow" wherever you get your podcasts.

Alpha launch - .well-known/avatar - feedback wanted - Terence Eden’s Blog

2025-10-25T11:34:10.000Z

I've gotten sufficiently annoyed with a trivial problem that I'm preparing to write an IETF RFC. Yeah. That's how ticked off I am!

Every site that I sign up for asks me to upload an avatar to represent myself. Whenever I change my photo, I have to log in to a hundred sites and change it there⁰.

Perhaps they could all use Gravatar - but that's a centralised service¹ and doesn't work with wildcard email addresses. Libravatar also relies on email addresses and requires implementers to set up new DNS entries.

So I'm proposing .well-known/avatar. Here's how it works (for now). I'd like your feedback before going further².

I sign up to a service and use the email address whatever@shkspr.mobi.

The service looks up my avatar using a well-known path. For example, request https://shkspr.mobi/.well-known/avatar?resource=acct:whatever@shkspr.mobi and you'll get back this JSON:

{
    "subject": "acct:whatever@shkspr.mobi",
    "links": [
        {
              "rel": "http:\/\/webfinger.net\/rel\/avatar",
             "type": "image\/webp",
             "href": "https:\/\/shkspr.mobi\/.well-known\/avatar\/avatar-1024.webp",
            "sizes": "1024x1024"
        },
        {
              "rel": "http:\/\/webfinger.net\/rel\/avatar",
             "type": "image\/jpeg",
             "href": "https:\/\/shkspr.mobi\/.well-known\/avatar\/avatar-512.jpg",
            "sizes": "512x512"
        }
    ]
}

That's a slightly enhanced https://webfinger.net/rel/#avatar which adds a sizes parameter. The service can then pick the appropriate MIME and size.

Alternatively, you can request the same URl but with a header of Accept: image/gif and receive the default sized avatar in that specific format.

Try it by running:

curl -H "Accept: image/avif" https://shkspr.mobi/.well-known/avatar/ --output "test.avif"

You should receive an auto-converted version of my avatar.

Some Thoughts

Please add your thoughts to the comments box. Here's some feedback I've received so far.

Perhaps this is too complicated? What's wrong with just serving up an image when the URl is requested? That would make it easier for static sites.

Simon Josefsson

@jas@fosstodon.org

@Edent Thinking about this, while I like content negotiation as a clever hack, I wonder if maybe it isn’t too clever. The nice thing with WKD is that you can deploy it with any normal static HTTP file without any special magic. Maybe the protocol could be dumbed down to simply rely on WKD-style URLs? I’m not sure how to configure my web server (Apache) for your avatar well known URL with negotiation magic.

2025-10-23, 16:50 0 boosts 1 favorites

What about a size parameter?

Chip

@chip@talking.dev

@Edent It'd be nice if the query could limit the size of the avatar being returned. If only there were `Accept-Max-Size`, but maybe a query param? I wouldn't want my performance taking a dive if Alice has a 35M avatar that my client starts downloading. If my client had requested with `max_size=3072` I'd rather not see the avatar than degrade performance/pull excess data

2025-10-23, 15:02 0 boosts 1 favorites

Will anyone actually use it?

Andreas Gohr

@splitbrain@fedi.splitbrain.org

@Edent good luck with getting the hundreds of services to implement it. I mean it. it would be awesome and you might be well connected enough to make it happen.

2025-10-23, 15:03

Proposal

I think the default should be to return an image.

If an accept of image/… is requested, the server should try to return an image in that format.

If an accept of application/json or similar is requested, the server should return a JSON document listing the available avatars.

I don't think a ?size= GET parameter is necessary; services can resize once they've downloaded, or use the JSON document to get the right size.

A limited amount of alt text could be added using the title attribute in the JSON.

Before I start writing up anything formal - I'd love your constructive criticism on this.

OK, I don't have to. But I want to. I dislike having last year's photo cluttering some half-remembered social network. ↩︎
We live in the redecentralised future now! ↩︎
I wrote about this in 2004 and in 2020. It takes me time, but I get there eventually! ↩︎

Pluralistic: Checking in on the state of Amazon's chickenized reverse-centaurs (23 Oct 2025) - Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow

2025-10-23T19:57:19.000Z

Today's links

Checking in on the state of Amazon's chickenized reverse-centaurs: When your shitty boss is a shitty app and you're not even allowed to call yourself an employee.
Hey look at this: Delights to delectate.
Object permanence: Correcting the Disneyland Railroad's Morse code; Breathalyzer source-code; Teaching Little Brother to math students; Arson attacks on Ferguson's Black churches; Tom Lehrer in the public domain.
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.

Checking in on the state of Amazon's chickenized reverse-centaurs (permalink)

Amazon has invented a new kind of labor travesty: the chickenized reverse centaur. That's a worker who has to foot the bill to outfit a work environment where they nevertheless have no autonomy (chickenization) and whose body is conscripted to act as a peripheral for a digital system (reverse centaur):

https://pluralistic.net/2023/04/12/algorithmic-wage-discrimination/#fishers-of-men

"Chickenization" is a term out of labor economics, inspired by the brutal state of the poultry industry, where three giant processing companies have divided up the market so that every chicken farmer has just one place where they can sell their birds. To sell your birds to one of these plants, you have to give them total control over your operation. They sell you the baby chicks, they tell you what kind of coop to build and what lightbulbs to install and when they should be off or on. They tell you which vet to use and which medicines can be administered to your birds. They tell you what to feed your birds and when to feed them. They design your coop and tell you who is allowed to maintain it. The one thing they don't tell you is how much you'll be paid for your birds – that's something you only discover when it's time to sell them, and the sum you're offered is based on the packer's region-wide intelligence on how you and all your competitors are faring, and is calculated to be the smallest amount to allow you to roll over your loans and go into more debt to grow more birds for them.

At its root, "chickenization" is about de-risking, cloaked in the language of entrepreneurship. Chicken farmers assume all the risk for the poultry packers, but they're told that they're their own bosses. The only way in which a chicken farmer resembles an entrepreneur is that they have to bear all the risk of failure – without having any upside for success. Packers can (and do) secretly decide to experiment at farmers' expense, ordering some of their farmers to vary their feeding, light and veterinary routines to see if they can eke new efficiencies out of the process. If that works, the surplus is reaped by the packer. If that fails, the losses are borne by the farmer, who is never told that they were funding an experiment.

Amazon makes extensive use of chickenization in its many commercial arrangements, tightly defining the working conditions of many "self-employed" workers, like the clickwork "turkers" who power the Mechanical Turk service. But the most chickenized of all the people in Amazon's network of cutouts and arm's-length arrangements are the "entrepreneurs" who are lured into starting a "Delivery Service Platform" (DSP) business.

To start a DSP, you borrow lots of money to buy vans that you outfit to Amazon's exacting specifications, filling them with interior and exterior sensors and cameras, painting them with Amazon livery, and kitting them out with shelving and other infrastructure to Amazon's exacting specification. Then, you hire workers – giving Amazon a veto over who you hire – and you train them – using Amazon's training materials. You sign them up for Amazon's platforms, which monitor and rank those workers, and then you get paid either $0.10 per parcel, or maybe $0.50 per parcel, or sometimes $0.00 per parcel, all at Amazon's sole discretion.

That's a pretty chickenized arrangement. But what about reverse centaurs?

In automation theory, a "centaur" is someone who is assisted by some automation system (they are a fragile human head being assisted by a tireless machine). Therefore, a reverse centaur is a person who has been conscripted to serve as a peripheral for a machine, a human body surmounted and directed by a brute and uncaring head that not only uses them, but uses them up.

The drivers that DSPs hire are reverse centaurs. Using various forms of automation, Amazon drives these workers to work at a dangerous, humiliating and unsustainable pace, setting and enforcing not just quotas, but also scripting where drivers' eyes must be pointed, how they must accelerate and decelerate, what routes they take, and more. These edicts are enforced by the in-van and on-body automation systems that direct and discipline workers, tools that labor activists call "electronic whips":

https://crackedlabs.org/en/data-work/publications/callcenter

The chickenized owners of DSPs must enforce the edicts Amazon brings down on their reverse centaur workers – Amazon can terminate any DSP, at any time, for any reason or no reason, stranding an "independent entrepreneur" with heavily mortgaged rolling stock that can only be used to deliver Amazon packages, long terms leases on garages and parking lots, liability for driver accidents caused by automation systems that punish drivers for e.g. braking suddenly if someone steps into the road, and massive loans.

So when Amazon directs a DSP to fire or discipline a worker, that worker is in trouble. Amazon has hybridized chickenization and reverse centaurism, creating a chickenized reverse centaur, a new kind of labor travesty never seen before.

In "Driven Down," a new report from the DAIR Institute, authors Adrienne Williams, Alex Hanna and Sandra Barcenas draw on interviews with DSP drivers and Williams's own experience driving for Amazon to document the state of the Chickenized Reverse Centaur. It's not good:

https://www.dair-institute.org/projects/driven-down/

"Driven Down" vividly describes – often in drivers' own words – how the life of a chickenized reverse centaur is one of wage theft, privacy invasions, humilation and on-the-job physical risks, for drivers and the communities they drive in.

DSP drivers interact with multiple automation systems – at least nine apps that monitor, score and discipline them. These apps are supposed to run on employer-supplied phones, but these phones are frequently broken, and drivers face severe punishment if these apps aren't all running during their shifts. As a result, drivers routinely install these apps on their own phones, and must give them broad, far-reaching permissions, such that drivers' own phones are surveilling them for Amazon 24/7, whether or not they're on the clock. It's not just DSP owners who are chickenized – it's also drivers, footing the bill for their own electronic whips.

First and foremost, these apps tell the drivers where to go and how to get there. Drivers are dispatched to hundreds of stops per day, on a computer-generated route that is not vetted or sanity-checked by a human before it is non-negotiably handed to a driver. Famously, plotting an efficient route among many points is one of the most insoluble computing problems, the so-called "traveling salesman" problem:

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

But it turns out that there is an optimal solution to the traveling salesman problem: get a computer to make a bizarre and dangerous approximation of the optimal route, and then blame and fine workers when it doesn't work. This doesn't optimize the route, but it does shift all the costs of a suboptimal route to workers.

Crucially, Amazon trusts its computer-generated routes, based on map data, over the word of drivers. For example, drivers are often directed to make "group stops" – where the driver parks the van and then delivers to multiple addresses at once (for example, at an apartment complex or office block). Amazon's mapping service assumes that addresses that are in the same complex or development are close together, even when they are very distant. If a driver dares to move and re-park their van to deliver parcels to distant addresses, the app punishes them for making an unauthorized positional adjustment. If a driver attempts to deliver all the parcels without moving the van, they are penalized for taking too long. Even if drivers report the mapping error, it persists, resulting in strings of infractions, day after day.

When drivers fail to make quota, the DSP's per-parcel payout is reduced. DSPs whose drivers perfectly obey the (irrational, impossible) orders of Amazon's apps get $0.50 per parcel delivered. If drivers fall short of the apps' expectations, the per parcel-rate can fall to $0.10, or, in some cases, zero.

This provides a powerful incentive to DSPs to pressure drivers to engage in unsafe practices if the alternative would displease the app. Drivers are penalized for sudden braking and swerving, for example, but are also penalized for missing quota, which puts drivers in the impossible position of having to drive as quickly as possible but also not to swerve or brake if a sudden traffic hazard pops up. In one absurd tale, a driver describes how they were shifted to an electric van that did regenerative braking when they released the accelerator. The app expected drivers to slow down by releasing the accelerator, not by touching the brakes, but this meant that the van's brake lights never switched on. When a driver slowed at a yellow light, they were badly rear-ended by a following UPS truck, whose driver had assumed the Amazon DSP driver was going to rush the light (because the van's brake lights didn't light up).

Meeting quota means that drivers are also not able to stop for bathroom breaks or to take car of other personal hygiene matters. This is bad enough when it means peeing in a bottle, but it's even worse when the only way to take care of period-related matters is to go into the back of the van – where cameras record everything you do – and manage things there.

Drivers are told many inconsistent things about those cameras. Some drivers have been told that the footage is only reviewed after an accident or complaint, but when drivers do get into accidents or have complaints lodged against them, they are often fired or disciplined without anyone reviewing the footage. Meanwhile, drivers are sometimes punished for things the cameras have recorded even when there was no complaint or accident.

The existence of all that empirical evidence of things happening in and outside an Amazon DSP van makes little to no difference to drivers' employment fairness. When a malfunctioning seatbelt sensor insists that a driver has removed their seatbelt while driving, 80+ times in a single shift, the driver struggled to get their docked wages or lost jobs back. When a driver swerved to avoid an oncoming big rig whose driver had fallen asleep and drifted across the media, the driver was penalized – the driver this happened to had his score in "Mentor" (one of the many apps) docked from 850 to 650. Amazon won't tell drivers what their Mentor scores mean, but many drivers – and DSP owners – believe than anything less than a perfect score will result in punishment or termination.

Attaining and maintaining a perfect score is an impossible task, because Amazon will not disclose what drivers are expected to do – it will only penalize them when they fail to do it. Take the photos that Amazon drivers are expected to snap of parcels after they are delivered. The criteria for these photos is incredibly strict – and also not disclosed. Drivers are penalized for having their hands or shoes or reflections in the image, for capturing customers or their pets, for capturing the house-number. They aren't allowed to photograph shoes that are left on the doormat. Drivers share tips with one another about how to take a picture without losing points, but it's a moving target.

Among drivers, there's a (likely correct) belief that Amazon will not tell them how the apps are generating their scores out of fear that if drivers knew the scoring rubric, they'd start to game it. This is a widespread practice within the world of content moderation and spamfighting, where security practitioners who would normally reject the idea of "security through obscurity" out of hand suddenly embrace secrecy-dependent security measures:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/08/07/como-is-infosec/

All this isn't just dangerous and dehumanizing, it's also impoverishing. Drivers who get downranked by these imperious and unaccountable and unexplained algorithms have their hours cut or get fired altogether. The apps set a quota that can't possibly be reached if drivers take their mandated (and unpaid) 30 minute lunch and two 15-minute breaks (drivers who miss quota twice are automatically terminated). This time is given over to unpaid labor. As the report explains:

Drivers are not paid for their 30 minute lunch. A full-time employee working an 8 to 10 hour shift would be working either 4 or 5 days out of each week. At $20 an hour, that is two hours a week for four-day employees, resulting in $40 of unpaid labor a week, $160 a month, almost $2,000 a year.

Drivers are also assigned "homework" – videos they are required watch and simulator exercises they are required to complete as remediation for their real or imagined infractions. This, too, is unpaid, mandatory work. Drivers are required to attend "stand up" meetings at the start of their shifts, and this is also often unpaid work.

Amazon makes a big show of "listening to drivers," but they're never heard. A driver who reported being held at gunpoint by literal Nazis who objected to having their parcels delivered by a Jew had his complaints ignored, and those violent, armed Nazi customers continued to get their parcels delivered.

Even modest requests go unanswered. Drivers for one DSP begged for porta-toilets in the parking lot, rather than having to waste time (and miss quota) legging it to a distant bathroom. They were ignored, and all 50 drivers continue to share a single toilet.

But – thanks to chickenization – none of this is Amazon's problem. It's all the problem of a chickenized DSP "entrepreneur" who serves as a useful accountability sink for Amazon and who can be bankrupted at a moment's notice should they fail to do Amazon's precise bidding.

There's one bright spot here, though: the National Labor Relations Board has brought a case in California seeking to have Amazon held to be a "joint employer" of those reverse centaurs behind the wheels of those vans:

https://www.freightcaviar.com/amazon-faces-mounting-union-pressure-as-nlrb-case-and-teamsters-wins-converge/

This is the very last residue of the NLRB's authority, the rest having been drained away by Trump as part of Project 2025. If they prevail, it will open the door to drivers suing Amazon for unfair labor practices under both federal and state law – and in California and New York, that labor law just got a lot tougher for Amazon:

https://www.laborrelationsupdate.com/2025/10/california-dramatically-expands-state-labor-boards-powers-to-cover-employees-under-nlrbs-exclusive-jurisdiction-following-new-yorks-lead/

The chickenized reverse centaur is a new circle of labor hell, a genuinely innovative way of making workers' lives worse in order to extract more billions for one of the most profitable companies in history.

(Image: Cryteria, CC BY 3.0, modified)

Hey look at this (permalink)

Ethiopia in Talks With China to Convert Dollar Loans to Yuan https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-10-20/ethiopia-in-talks-with-china-to-convert-dollar-loans-into-yuan
This Is How Much Anthropic and Cursor Spend On Amazon Web Services https://www.wheresyoured.at/costs/
No Tricks, Just Treats EFF’s Halloween Signal Stickers Are Here! https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2025/10/no-tricks-just-treats-effs-halloween-signal-stickers-are-here
How Trump is Building a Violent, Shadowy Federal Police Force https://www.propublica.org/article/trump-dhs-ice-secret-police-civil-rights-unaccountable
Does the Left Have Trouble with Making Things in America? https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/monopoly-round-up-the-left-can-protest

Object permanence (permalink)

#20yrsago Ham operator corrects Morse code on the Disneyland Railroad https://web.archive.org/web/20050905155040/http://www.hiddenmickeys.org/Disneyland/Secrets/Square/Morse.html

#20yrsago Accused DUIs demand access to breathalyzer software source-code https://blog.citp.princeton.edu/2005/10/21/breathalyzers-and-open-source/
#20yrsago How Disneyland’s Mark Twain riverboat sank https://web.archive.org/web/20051025011944/http://deseretnews.com/dn/view/0,1249,635154764,00.html

#15yrsago Old film rejection slip: “All scenes of an unpleasant nature should be eliminated” https://oldhollywood.tumblr.com/post/1374666427/the-rejection-slip-the-motion-picture-studio

#15yrsago T-shirt turns into a zombie https://web.archive.org/web/20101123131037/http://deezteez.com/funny-t-shirts/460/turn-into-a-zombie-t-shirt.html?SSAID=112726

#15yrsago Terrified feds try to bar Bunnie Huang from testifying at Xbox jailbreaking trial https://web.archive.org/web/20101023061952/https://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2010/10/xbox-modder-tria/

#15yrsago Derren Brown’s Confessions of a Conjuror: funny memoir is also a meditation on attention, theatrics and psychology https://memex.craphound.com/2010/10/21/derren-browns-confessions-of-a-conjuror-funny-memoir-is-also-a-meditation-on-attention-theatrics-and-psychology/

#10yrsago Wikileaks hosting files from CIA director John Brennan’s AOL account https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2015/10/wikileaks-publishes-e-mail-from-cia-directors-hacked-aol-account/

#10yrsago Hungarian camerawoman who tripped refugee announces she will sue that refugee https://www.techdirt.com/2015/10/21/hungarian-camera-woman-filmed-tripping-refugees-plans-to-sue-facebook-refugee-she-tripped/

#10yrsago Entropy explained, beautifully, in comic-book form https://www.bostonglobe.com/ideas/2015/10/03/sousanis/XOMd3JBYnEdzQCWHM6twTJ/story.html

#10yrsago How a mathematician teaches “Little Brother” to a first-year seminar https://derekbruff.org/2015/10/21/in-class-collaborative-debate-mapping-or-how-a-mathematician-teaches-a-novel/

#10yrsago UK “anti-radicalisation” law can take kids from thoughtcriming parents in secret trials https://www.techdirt.com/2015/10/21/uk-goes-full-orwell-government-to-take-children-away-parents-if-they-might-become-radicalized/

#10yrsago How enforcing a crappy patent bankrupted the Eskimo Pie company https://web.archive.org/web/20190309071221/https://slate.com/technology/2015/10/what-the-history-of-eskimo-pies-says-about-software-patents-today.html

#10yrsago TPP means no more domain privacy https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2015/10/us-bypasses-icann-debates-domain-privacy-closed-room-deals-oecd-and-tpp

#10yrsago McDonald’s China debuts a cement-gray bun https://www.telegraph.co.uk/food-and-drink/news/weird-mcdonalds-food-around-the-world/

#10yrsago Terrorists torch five black Ferguson-area churches, nation yawns https://web.archive.org/web/20151020194546/http://usuncut.com/black-lives-matter/black-churches-burning-ferguson-area/

#10yrsago HOWTO make a trashcan Stormtrooper helmet https://scudamor.wordpress.com/2010/10/22/make-your-own-stormtrooper-helmet/

#10yrsago Fable Comics: anthology of great comics artists telling fables from around the world https://memex.craphound.com/2015/10/22/fable-comics-anthology-of-great-comics-artists-telling-fables-from-around-the-world/

#10yrsago J Edgar Hoover fought to write ex-FBI agents out of Hitchcock’s scripts https://www.muckrock.com/news/archives/2015/oct/22/alfred-hitchcocks-fbi-file/

#10yrsago Canada’s new Liberal majority: better than the Tories, still terrible for the Internet https://memex.craphound.com/2015/10/22/canadas-new-liberal-majority-better-than-the-tories-still-terrible-for-the-internet/

#10yrsago Forced laborers sue Mississippi debtors’ prison https://theintercept.com/2015/10/22/lawsuit-challenges-mississippi-debtors-prison/

#10yrsago Son of Dieselgate: second line of VWs may have used “defeat devices” https://www.reuters.com/article/2015/10/22/us-volkswagen-emissions-engines-idUSKCN0SG0US20151022/

#10yrsago Obama administration petitions judge for no mercy in student debt bankruptcy https://readersupportednews.org/news-section2/318-66/33068-obama-administration-urges-no-bankruptcy-relief-for-student-debt

#10yrsago Complexity of financial crimes makes crooks unconvictable https://web.archive.org/web/20151022014805/https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-10-21/has-it-become-impossible-to-prosecute-white-collar-crime-

#10yrsago Half of Vanuatu’s government is going to jail https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-34600561

#10yrsago DHS admits it uses Stingrays for VIPs, vows to sometimes get warrants, stop lying to judges https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2015/10/dhs-now-needs-warrant-for-stingray-use-but-not-when-protecting-president/

#5yrsago Free the law of Wisconsin https://pluralistic.net/2020/10/22/the-robots-are-listening/#rogue-archivist

#5yrsago US border cruelty, powered by Google cloud https://pluralistic.net/2020/10/22/the-robots-are-listening/#poulson

#5yrsago Companies target robots in disclosures https://pluralistic.net/2020/10/22/the-robots-are-listening/#goodharts-bank

#5yrsago ENDSARS https://pluralistic.net/2020/10/22/the-robots-are-listening/#endsars

#5yrsago IDing anonymized cops with facial recognition https://pluralistic.net/2020/10/22/the-robots-are-listening/#sousveillance

#5yrsago Falsehoods programmers believe about time https://pluralistic.net/2020/10/21/each-drop-of-strych-a-nine/#a-sort-of-runic-rhyme

#5yrsago Trustbusting is stimulus https://pluralistic.net/2020/10/21/each-drop-of-strych-a-nine/#break-em-up

#5yrsago Tom Lehrer in the public domain https://pluralistic.net/2020/10/21/each-drop-of-strych-a-nine/#poisoning-pigeons

#1yrago Retiring the US debt would retire the US dollar https://pluralistic.net/2024/10/21/we-can-have-nice-things/#public-funds-not-taxpayer-dollars

Upcoming appearances (permalink)

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
Montreal: Enshittification at Librarie Drawn and Quarterly, Oct 24
https://mtl.drawnandquarterly.com/events/3757420251024
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
Oxford: Enshittification and Extraction: The Internet Sucks Now with Tim Wu (Oxford Internet Institute), Nov 14
https://www.oii.ox.ac.uk/news-events/events/enshittification-and-extraction-the-internet-sucks-now/
London: Enshittification with Sarah Wynn-Williams and Chris Morris, Nov 15
https://www.barbican.org.uk/whats-on/2025/event/cory-doctorow-with-sarah-wynn-williams
London: Downstream IRL with Aaron Bastani (Novara Media), Nov 17
https://dice.fm/partner/tickets/event/oen5rr-downstream-irl-aaron-bastani-in-conversation-with-cory-doctorow-17th-nov-earth-london-tickets
London: Enshittification with Carole Cadwalladr (Frontline Club), Nov 18
https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/in-conversation-enshittification-tickets-1785553983029
Seattle: Neuroscience, AI and Society (University of Washington), Dec 4
https://compneuro.washington.edu/news-and-events/neuroscience-ai-and-society/
Madison, CT: Enshittification at RJ Julia, Dec 8
https://rjjulia.com/event/2025-12-08/cory-doctorow-enshittification

Recent appearances (permalink)

Enshittification is Not Inevitable (Team Human)
https://www.teamhuman.fm/episodes/339-cory-doctorow-enshittification-is-not-inevitable
The Great Enshittening (The Gray Area)
https://www.reddit.com/r/philosophypodcasts/comments/1obghu7/the_gray_area_the_great_enshittening_10202025/
Enshittification (Smart Cookies)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-BoORwEPlQ0
Enshittification (The Gist)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EgBiv_KchI0
Canadian tariffs with Avi Lewis
https://plagal.wordpress.com/2025/10/15/cory-doctorow-talks-to-avi-lewis-about-his-proposal-to-fightback-against-trumps-tariff-attack/

Latest books (permalink)

"Canny Valley": A limited edition collection of the collages I create for Pluralistic, self-published, September 2025
"Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It," Farrar, Straus, Giroux, October 7 2025
https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374619329/enshittification/
"Picks and Shovels": a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about the heroic era of the PC, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), February 2025 (https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250865908/picksandshovels).
"The Bezzle": a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about prison-tech and other grifts, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), February 2024 (the-bezzle.org).
"The Lost Cause:" a solarpunk novel of hope in the climate emergency, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), November 2023 (http://lost-cause.org).
"The Internet Con": A nonfiction book about interoperability and Big Tech (Verso) September 2023 (http://seizethemeansofcomputation.org). Signed copies at Book Soup (https://www.booksoup.com/book/9781804291245).
"Red Team Blues": "A grabby, compulsive thriller that will leave you knowing more about how the world works than you did before." Tor Books http://redteamblues.com.
"Chokepoint Capitalism: How to Beat Big Tech, Tame Big Content, and Get Artists Paid, with Rebecca Giblin", on how to unrig the markets for creative labor, Beacon Press/Scribe 2022 https://chokepointcapitalism.com

Upcoming books (permalink)

"Unauthorized Bread": a middle-grades graphic novel adapted from my novella about refugees, toasters and DRM, FirstSecond, 2026
"Enshittification, Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It" (the graphic novel), Firstsecond, 2026
"The Memex Method," Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2026
"The Reverse-Centaur's Guide to AI," a short book about being a better AI critic, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 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

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

ISSN: 3066-764X

Book Review: A Quest for God and Spices by Dean Cycon ★★☆☆☆ - Terence Eden’s Blog

2025-10-23T11:34:44.000Z

Brother Mauro, an older monk, and Nicolo, a young, striving merchant are called by the Pope to traverse the treacherous political, religious, and mercantile terrain of medieval Europe and the Byzantine Empire to seek out the powerful Presbyter John, a mysterious king in the Far East who has promised to put his wealth and vast armies to the service of the pope's crusade.

I don't understand why all books nowadays have to be an epic trilogy. There's a perfectly decent story in here - but it is padded out to the point of flabbiness. The dialogue veers between trite and didactic. At times it feels like the author has rummaged around Wikipedia for contemporaneous famous people and thrown them in to the story without any particular reason.

Similarly, lots of the scene setting feels like a needless history lesson, inserted just to bring up the word-count.

He was joined by a thin, muscular young man who played an oud, the Arabic stringed instrument that French crusaders had recently brought to Europe under the name l’oud and were now calling the “lute.”

I loved the idea of a super-smeller going on a journey to find the source of the expensive spices which were entering Europe. A quest of a befuddled monk to reunite the various strands of Christendom also makes for a rich tale. But mashed together - and interspersed with treacherous kings, scheming Popes, and duplicitous pirates - it loses all coherence.

Thanks to NetGalley for the review copy.

What Happened to Apple's Legendary Attention to Detail? [link] - remy sharp's b:log

2025-10-23T11:33:22.000Z

I accidentally upgraded to Tahoe (I didn't know it existed and thought I was moving to Sequoia and the UI design is all over the place, and it's constantly reminding me how bad it is. This excellent article takes what was an attention to detail that we took for granted (because tech is supposed to "just work"), and calls out just a handful of the failings that Apple's OS now ships with (including on iOS, that I thankfully don't have to suffer). My fear, based on experience with bad Apple UI - (like the notifications that couldn't be quickly dismissed forcing us to click EXACTLY in the right place, and with the "suitable" amount of delay) - is that it simply won't be fixed or even improved. /via venerable Bruce Lawson

Source: blog.johnozbay.com

Originally published on Remy Sharp's b:log

Bullshitting My Way Into The Future - Nicky FloweRSS

2025-10-22T22:37:00.000Z

My best, proudest American quality (probably the only one I possess and could actually be proud of) is my ability to bullshit. I'm not the best at lying but I am a champion bullshitter. Regional champion, at least — I won a modest cash prize for it in college. There was a whole tournament the bullshitter fraternities & clubs around the country organized, it was actually a lot more fun than you'd think. Met some good people. I would've gone to the 2014 Nationals in Spokane but I figured it'd be better to drop out of school and enter the job market. I was ready to bullshit in an office, possibly the finest venue for the amateur bullshitter hoping to go pro.

I went from call center to call center, working my way up to lateral, underpaid positions across the country. I was good. I built rapport and sold all kinds of stupid nonsense. I did not hit my KPIs, but I lived for the rapport. "Don't talk to me 'till I've built up some rapport!", I'd say every morning. Every cold call was a new opportunity for bullshit and I relished in it. I remember early on in my bullshit career calling a man with the last name "Blood". His e-mail address had something to do with Texas independence, I can't remember it exactly and also I shouldn't dox the poor man. Before he answered, I put on a slight drawl (I figured I've watched plenty of King of the Hill to have a decent one) and when he picked up, I became his best friend immediately. He bought nothing and at the end of the call, he told me he was pleased to learn there were lone patriots out in "Taxachusetts", which almost threw me out of character because I had no idea people were still saying that, even back then. I told him I buy all of my "supplies" under the table. He said "God bless ya, Hank" (I couldn't come up with a better name quick enough) and hung up.

I was eventually let go for being so good at the job everybody got jealous and honestly incredibly bitchy, so I moved to Chicago where there was less competition. I had many jobs during my 4-ish years there, and all of them were bad. The big city itself taught me much more than any individual place. Oh, uhh, except for one place I honestly try to forget about — I lived with a group of people who set off my bullshit detectors early and ended up being a bunch of literal Nazis. Well, the rent was cheap, and I got a discount for a few months after one of them made an attempt on my life. The same landlord who cut me that deal then kicked me out for "stiffing" him. C'est la vie.

The very same landlord once challenged me to a game of backgammon, double-or-nothing the rent for that month. He hustled me and I had to pay extra. I hustled him back the next month after studying the game with a guy in park as my tutor for weeks. He did not let me get away with paying nothing, even though that was always the deal. He may have been the greatest bullshitter in my life if I had mercifully never met my mother. The bullshit she spewed could fill a book and even though nobody would ever publish it, she'd still tell people it was a New York Times best-seller. If I told my bullshit landlord about it, he'd have pretended to have read it already and try to one-up me with some made-up story.

There are too many bullshitters in my life to name them all and there's another one born every day. America is filled with them. I'm proud to be my own kind of bullshitter though, away from the standard variety we mostly encounter, as I try to use my skills for good. I'll bullshit my way through pleasant conversations among strangers, or to unearned discounts at large stores. I bullshit out some songwriting and it weirdly works so I leave it in. I bullshit with my friends and those 'shit sessions bring us closer together. C'est la vie.

Nicky Flowers - 10/22/25 - Don't get it twisted! I love honesty and sincerity too. There's a time and place for all things. Well, most things; we could do without measles. - (send any comments/questions to hello at nickyflowers dot com)

Pluralistic: Carl Hiaasen's 'Fever Beach' (21 Oct 2025) - Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow

2025-10-21T16:18:47.000Z

Today's links

Carl Hiaasen's 'Fever Beach': If you didn't laugh, you'd have to cry.
Hey look at this: Delights to delectate.
Object permanence: Scary Godmother; Nightvale novel; The war on Worker's Comp; Cadillac's murdermobiles.
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.

Carl Hiaasen's 'Fever Beach' (permalink)

Every Carl Hiaasen novel is a cause for celebration, but Fever Beach, his latest, makes it abundantly clear that this moment, this moment of Florida Man violent white nationalist grifting, is the moment that Hiaasen has been training for his whole life:

https://carlhiaasen.com/books/fever-beach/

Hiaasen is a crime novelist who got his start as a newspaper writer, writing columns about Florida's, ah, unique politics – and sublime, emperilled wilderness – for the Miami Herald. That beat, combined with enormous humor and literary talent, produced a writer who perfectly hybridizes Dave Barry's lovable absurdism with the hard-boiled pastoralism of the Travis McGee novels (Hiaasen wrote the introductions for a 1990s reissue of all of John D McDonald's McGee books).

Hiaasen's method is diabolical and hilarious: each volume introduces a bewildering cast of odd, crooked, charming, and/or loathsome Floridians drawn from his long experience chronicling the state and its misadventures. Every one of these people is engaged in some form of skulduggery, even the heroes, who are every bit as lawless and wild as their adversaries, though Hiaasen's protagonists are always smarter and more competent than his villains. The plots and schemes play out like an intricate clock that has been much-elaborated by a mad clockmaker with an affinity for eccentric gears, all set against the background of Florida, a glorious and beautiful place being fed into a woodchipper powered by unchecked greed and depravity.

After 20-some volumes in this vein (including Bad Monkey, lately adapted for Apple TV), something far weirder than anything Hiaasen ever dreamed up came to pass: Donald Trump, the most Florida Man ever, was elected president. If you asked an LLM to write a Hiaasen novel, you might get Trump: a hacky, unimaginative version of the wealthy, callous, scheming grifters of the Hiaasenverse. Back in 2020, Hiaasen wrote Trump into Squeeze Me, a tremendous and madcap addition to his canon:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/10/05/florida-man/#disappearing-act

Fever Beach is the first Hiaasen novel since Squeeze Me, and boy, does Hiaasen ever have MAGA's number.

The book revolves around a classic Hiaasen bumbler, Dale Figgo, an incompetent white nationalist who was kicked out of the Proud Boys after the Jan 6 insurrection, when he mistook a statue of a revered Confederate general for Ulysses S Grant (it was the beard) and released a video of himself smearing shit all over it. Cast out from the brotherhood of violent racists, Figgo founds his own white nationalist militia: the Strokers for Liberty, which differentiates itself from the Proud Boys by encouraging (rather than forbidding) frequent masturbation. Figgo takes his inspiration from his day-job, where he packs and ships disembodied torso sex-dolls for an adult e-commerce site, and he entices new Strokers by offering them free limbless fuck-dolls (stolen from work) as a signing bonus.

Figgo lives in a house bought for him by his long-suffering – and seriously boxing gym-addicted – mother, who despairs of his virulent racism. Her one source of comfort is Figgo's tenant, Viva Morales, a smart granting officer in the family office of the Minks (an ultra-wealthy Florida oligarch couple) who does not tolerate any of Figgo's bullshit and also pays her rent like clockwork.

Viva is the other fulcrum of the tale: her employers, the elderly couple behind the Mink Foundation, are secret white nationalist bankrollers who use their charity to funnel money to militia groups, including Strokers For Liberty. The conduit between the Minks and the Strokers is Congressman Clure Boyette, a MAGA Republican failson of an ultra-powerful Florida lobbyist, who (unbeknownst to his father) has raised $2m for the Strokers to finance a "Stop the Steal pollwatching" operation designed to terrorize voters who favor his opponent.

As a front for this dark money op, Boyette has founded the "Wee Hammers," a charity that pulls prepubescent children out of school and puts them to work with heavy power tools to construct houses in a child-labor-centric MAGA version of Habitat for Humanity. This goes about as well as you might expect.

Into this maelstrom, Viva Morales draws Twilly Spree, a recurring character first introduced in 2000's Sick Puppy as a successor to Skink, one of Hiaasen's best heroes. Twilly is a millionaire ecoterrorist who uses his family's obscene wealth – secured through investments in planet-raping extraction – to fund his arson, bombings, and general fuckery directed against Florida's most flagrant despoilers (it helps that Twilly has been psychologically gifted with the literal inability to feel fear). Twilly and Viva become a couple, and Twilly does what Twilly does – wreaking hilarious, violent and spectacular chaos upon the book's many characters.

There are so many characters – I've barely scratched the surface here. There's Galaxy, a dominatrix who loses patience with her long-term client, the MAGA Congressman Clure Boyette, after he stiffs her on a payment because he was too busy tweeting about an alleged plan by woke billiard manufacturers to replace the nation's black 8-balls with Pride-themed rainbow versions.. There's Clure Boyette's soon-to-be-ex-wife, who must not, on any account, be shown the photos Galaxy took of Clure in a fur dog-collar and leash defecating on the floor of a luxury hotel suite. There's Jonas Onus, the number two man in the Strokers For Liberty, who terrorizes all and sundry by bringing them into contact with Himmler, his 120lb pitbull mix. There's Noel Kristianson, whom Dale Figgo runs over and nearly kills during an altercation over Figgo's practice of stuffing incoherent antisemitic rants into ziplock bags weighted with beach-sand and tossing them onto the driveways of unsuspecting Floridians. There's a constellation of minor characters and spear-carriers, including Key West drag queen martial artists and assorted discount-store Nazis, long-suffering charter bus drivers and a hit man who cannot abide racial prejudice.

The resulting story has more twists and turns than an invasive Burmese python, that apex predator of the gate-guarded McMansion development. It's screamingly funny, devilishly inventive, and deeply, profoundly satisfying. With Fever Beach, Hiaasen makes a compelling case for Florida as the perfect microcosm of the terrifying state of America, and an even more compelling case for his position as its supreme storyteller.

You do not need to have read any of Hiaasen's other novels to love this one. But I'm pretty sure that if you start with this one, you're going to want to dig into the dozens of other Hiaasen books, and you will not be disappointed if you do.

Hey look at this (permalink)

The pivot https://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2025/10/the-pivot-1.html
Video Game Union Workers Rally Against $55 Billion Saudi-Backed Private Acquisition of EA https://www.eurogamer.net/ea-union-workers-rally-against-55bn-saudi-backed-private-acquisition-with-formal-petition-to-regulators
China Has Overtaken America https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/china-has-overtaken-america
How I Reversed Amazon's Kindle Web Obfuscation Because Their App Sucked https://blog.pixelmelt.dev/kindle-web-drm/
OpenAI Needs $400 Billion In The Next 12 Months https://www.wheresyoured.at/openai400bn/
China Forces Scott Bessent to Embrace Anti-Monopoly Tactics https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/welcome-to-the-anti-monopoly-movement

Object permanence (permalink)

#20yrsago WSJ tech writer damns DRM https://web.archive.org/web/20051027023456/http://ptech.wsj.com/archive/ptech-20051020.html

#20yrsago Fundraiser: donate $500 to shut up loudmouth message-board poster https://www.metafilter.com/dios-rothkofundraiser.mefi

#20yrsago Chinese activist to Jerry Yang: You are helping to maintain an evil system https://web.archive.org/web/20051027021122/https://cyberlaw.stanford.edu/blogs/gelman/archives/003388.shtml/

#15yrsago Canadian gov’t scientists protest gag order, go straight to public with own website https://web.archive.org/web/20101020142208/https://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/politics/ottawa-notebook/federal-scientists-go-public-in-face-of-restrictive-media-rules/article1761624/

#15yrsago Scary Godmother: delightful, spooky graphic storybook for kids https://memex.craphound.com/2010/10/20/scary-godmother-delightful-spooky-graphic-storybook-for-kids/

#10yrsago The Welcome to Night Vale novel dances a tightrope between weird humor and real pathos https://memex.craphound.com/2015/10/20/the-welcome-to-night-vale-novel-dances-a-tightrope-between-weird-humor-and-real-pathos/

#10yrsago How a lobbyist/doctor couple are destroying Worker’s Comp across America https://www.propublica.org/article/inside-corporate-americas-plan-to-ditch-workers-comp

#10yrsago How the market for zero-day vulnerabilities works https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2015/10/the-rise-of-the-zero-day-market/

#10yrsago Reality check: we know nothing whatsoever about simulating human brains https://mathbabe.org/2015/10/20/guest-post-dirty-rant-about-the-human-brain-project/

#10yrsago On saying “no”: creativity, self-care, privilege, and knowing your limits https://tumblr.austinkleon.com/post/120472862666

#5yrsago Solar's "miracle material" https://pluralistic.net/2020/10/20/the-cadillac-of-murdermobiles/#perovskite

#5yrsago Cadillac perfects the murdermobile https://pluralistic.net/2020/10/20/the-cadillac-of-murdermobiles/#caddy

#5yrsago Feds gouge states, subsidize corporations https://pluralistic.net/2020/10/20/the-cadillac-of-murdermobiles/#austerity

Upcoming appearances (permalink)

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
Montreal: Enshittification at Librarie Drawn and Quarterly, Oct 24
https://mtl.drawnandquarterly.com/events/3757420251024
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
Oxford: Enshittification and Extraction: The Internet Sucks Now with Tim Wu (Oxford Internet Institute), Nov 14
https://www.oii.ox.ac.uk/news-events/events/enshittification-and-extraction-the-internet-sucks-now/
London: Enshittification with Sarah Wynn-Williams and Chris Morris, Nov 15
https://www.barbican.org.uk/whats-on/2025/event/cory-doctorow-with-sarah-wynn-williams
London: Downstream IRL with Aaron Bastani (Novara Media), Nov 17
https://dice.fm/partner/tickets/event/oen5rr-downstream-irl-aaron-bastani-in-conversation-with-cory-doctorow-17th-nov-earth-london-tickets
Seattle: Neuroscience, AI and Society (University of Washington), Dec 4
https://compneuro.washington.edu/news-and-events/neuroscience-ai-and-society/
Madison, CT: Enshittification at RJ Julia, Dec 8
https://rjjulia.com/event/2025-12-08/cory-doctorow-enshittification

Recent appearances (permalink)

The Great Enshittening (The Gray Area)
https://www.reddit.com/r/philosophypodcasts/comments/1obghu7/the_gray_area_the_great_enshittening_10202025/
Enshittification (Smart Cookies)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-BoORwEPlQ0
Enshittification (The Gist)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EgBiv_KchI0
Canadian tariffs with Avi Lewis
https://plagal.wordpress.com/2025/10/15/cory-doctorow-talks-to-avi-lewis-about-his-proposal-to-fightback-against-trumps-tariff-attack/
Enshittification (This Is Hell)
https://thisishell.com/interviews/1864-cory-doctorow

Latest books (permalink)

"Canny Valley": A limited edition collection of the collages I create for Pluralistic, self-published, September 2025
"Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It," Farrar, Straus, Giroux, October 7 2025
https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374619329/enshittification/
"Picks and Shovels": a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about the heroic era of the PC, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), February 2025 (https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250865908/picksandshovels).
"The Bezzle": a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about prison-tech and other grifts, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), February 2024 (the-bezzle.org).
"The Lost Cause:" a solarpunk novel of hope in the climate emergency, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), November 2023 (http://lost-cause.org).
"The Internet Con": A nonfiction book about interoperability and Big Tech (Verso) September 2023 (http://seizethemeansofcomputation.org). Signed copies at Book Soup (https://www.booksoup.com/book/9781804291245).
"Red Team Blues": "A grabby, compulsive thriller that will leave you knowing more about how the world works than you did before." Tor Books http://redteamblues.com.
"Chokepoint Capitalism: How to Beat Big Tech, Tame Big Content, and Get Artists Paid, with Rebecca Giblin", on how to unrig the markets for creative labor, Beacon Press/Scribe 2022 https://chokepointcapitalism.com

Upcoming books (permalink)

"Unauthorized Bread": a middle-grades graphic novel adapted from my novella about refugees, toasters and DRM, FirstSecond, 2026
"Enshittification, Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It" (the graphic novel), Firstsecond, 2026
"The Memex Method," Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2026
"The Reverse-Centaur's Guide to AI," a short book about being a better AI critic, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 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

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