Mostly tech people I enjoy - BlogFlock

[Notes] Pre-modern art and metadata: a sticky situation - Tiny Subversions

2025-09-25T00:00:00.000Z

Thoughts on big platforms and the accidental censorship of a 12th century composer. (full item here)

How big a solar battery do I need to store all my home's electricity? - Terence Eden’s Blog

2025-09-15T11:34:42.000Z

I have a modest set of solar panels on an entirely ordinary house in suburban London.

On average they generate about 3,800kWh per year. We also use about 3,800kWh of electricity each year. Obviously, we can't use all the power produced over summer and we need to buy power in winter. So here's my question:

How big a battery would we need in order to be completely self-sufficient?

Background

Let's take a look at a typical summer's day. The graph is a little complex, so I'll explain it.

The yellow line shows solar production. It starts shortly after sunrise, peaks at midday, and gradually drops until sunset.

The red line shows how much electricity our home is using. As you can see, there's a large peak about 19:00 when we cook dinner.

The blue line shows how much electricity we draw or export from the grid. From midnight until sunrise we import because the sun isn't shining. Once the sun has risen we're able to power our house and export to our neighbours. When we cook, we draw from the grid and our battery - which is why the evening grid peak is lower than the household use dip.

The CSV of the data looks something like this:

Local_time	Household_(W)	Solar_(W)
2025-08-25T08:25:00.000+01:00	-187.76	1166.77
2025-08-25T08:30:00.000+01:00	-227.04	1193.25
2025-08-25T08:35:00.000+01:00	-253.06	1222.84
2025-08-25T08:40:00.000+01:00	-266.87	1245.18
2025-08-25T08:45:00.000+01:00	-450.8	1268.66
2025-08-25T08:50:00.000+01:00	-251.84	1281.79
2025-08-25T08:55:00.000+01:00	-1426.26	1306.93
2025-08-25T09:00:00.000+01:00	-206.78	1341.37
2025-08-25T09:05:00.000+01:00	-215.52	1390.9
2025-08-25T09:10:00.000+01:00	-242.6	1426.19
2025-08-25T09:15:00.000+01:00	-246.84	1473

It's fairly trivial to sum both columns and subtract one from the other. That shows either the excess or deficit in solar power for the household.

On that day, the house used 9.7kWh and generated 19.6kWh. I'd need a 9.9kWh battery to store the excess right? Wrong!

Because my usage doesn't track the sun, I'd actually need a 13kWh battery. That's the peak amount of excess electricity I've generated in that one day.

What I want to do is find out what the maximum size battery I would need in order to store all of summer's electricity for use in winter.

Luckily, I have several years of real data to go off! Let's get started!

Disclaimer

This is based on data generated by my home battery. It has probes to measure solar output and grid flow. It is not 100% clock-accurate compared to my solar-panels' internal reporting nor what my smart-meter reports. I estimate a 1-2% deviation, which is good enough for these purposes.

My energy usage isn't representative of anything other than my usage. Your household is probably different. I already have a 4.8kWh battery which changes how and when I use energy.

This doesn't account for gas heating or hot water. We have some electric heaters and taps which increases our electricity usage.

My maths is probably right - but the code is open source, so feel free to check for yourself.

Remember, this is just a bit of fun. There's no practical way to build domestic batteries with this capacity using the technology of 2025.

Code

We tend to start generating more electricity than we use starting in Spring. So I've picked the end of March 2024 to the end of March 2025.

Let's see how big a battery we'd need to store our summer excess for winter. This finds the cumulative difference between each day's energy production and usage:

import os
import pandas as pd

# Load all the CSVs
filepaths = [f for f in os.listdir(".") if f.endswith('.csv')]
df = pd.concat(map(pd.read_csv, filepaths))

# Make sure they're in order
df = df.sort_values("Timestamp")
df = df.reset_index(drop=True)

# Resolution is every 5 minutes, so divide by 12 to get hourly
df["Cumulative_Difference"] = ( (df["Household_(W)"] + df["Solar_(W)"] ).cumsum() ) / 12

# kWh of battery needed
int(df["Cumulative_Difference"].max() / 1000)

## Draw a pretty graph
df.plot(kind="line", x="Local_time", y="Cumulative_Difference", xlabel="Date", ylabel="MWh", xticks=["2024-04-01", "2024-05-01", "2024-05-01", "2024-06-01", "2024-07-01", "2024-08-01", "2024-09-01", "2024-10-01", "2024-11-01", "2024-12-01", "2025-01-01", "2025-02-01", "2025-03-01", "2025-04-01"], legend=False, grid=True, fontsize=15)
plt.show()

The total is 1,068KWh - basically, a MegaWatt-hour of storage.

Here's a quick graph to show how the storage would be used over the year.

As you can see, even in this scenario there are a few days where we'd need to import energy from the grid.

Is this sensible?

Probably not, no. It doesn't account for increased energy use from having an electric car or moving away from gas heating / cooking. As solar panels increase in efficiency, it might be more sensible to replace the panels on my roof, or add some onto a shed.

The environmental impact of creating and storing such huge batteries could also be factored in.

A battery which is only 100% full for a few days probably isn't an efficient design. Using wind, hydro, and other green sources from the grid might be preferable.

But, remember, this is an exercise in wishful thinking.

Is this possible?

Grid-scale batteries exist and they work brilliantly.

But if I wanted my own MegaWatt-hour of battery storage, it would probably cost me between £100k and half-a-million quid.

That doesn't include maintenance, the land, planning permission, and a hundred other things.

But battery prices are falling fast. In the last decade lithium ion battery prices have fallen 90%. With new sodium ion batteries promising an even bigger drop - down to US$10/kWh.

If - and it is a big if - those numbers came to pass, it would probably cost around £8,000 for a domestic battery. Basically the same cost as adding solar panels in the first place.

Domestic solar works - yes, even in the rainy UK! It is relatively cheap, moves energy production as close as possible to energy consumption, reduces bill-shock, and means we don't have endless planning arguments about whether fields should be turned into solar farms.

It is possible that, not too long in the future, every home could also have a 1 MegaWatt-hour battery. They would be able to capture all the excess solar power generated in a year.

There's a bright and sunny future where every home can be solar-self-sufficient.

Pluralistic: Wallet voting (13 Sep 2025) - Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow

2025-09-13T13:45:00.000Z

Today's links

Wallet voting: On the uses and abuses of consumerism.
Hey look at this: Delights to delectate.
Object permanence: Microsoft copyright crackdown against Russian dissidents; Corbyn wins Labour leadership; Bill Gates' monopolism; TiVo won't record DRM shows; HDCP leaks; Puking sink; Mr Gotcha v covid.
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.

Wallet voting (permalink)

You cannot vote with your wallet. Or rather, you can, but you will lose that vote. Wallet-votes always go to the people with the thickest wallets, and statistically, that is not you.

Margaret Thatcher tried to get us to believe that "there is no such thing as society." She wanted everyday people to abandon the idea of having a shared destiny, to throw away any notion of solidarity as an answer to social problems. Despite the fact that Thatcher's own backers happily formed cartels and cabals, from the Mount Pellerin Society to the Heritage Foundation, Thatcher insisted that everyday people should fight their battles alone.

If you want higher wages, don't join a union – just go demand a higher wage from your boss. If you want lower rents, don't demand rent controls, just petition your landlord for a discount. If none of this stuff works (this stuff rarely works), then you are out of luck. "The market" exists to do "price discovery" and you've just discovered the price of your labor (less than you need to survive) and the cost of your home (more than you can afford). You voted with your wallet, and you lost. As Thatcher was fond of saying, "there is no alternative."

This has been our framework for change for the past 50 years. It's like we've had a collective lobotomy and have forgotten the way that actual change comes about. Change happens when solidaristic groups of everyday people – unions, political movements – directly confront politicians and power-brokers and demand change. Your boss won't equitably share the fruits of your labor unless they fear that all the workers on the jobsite will shut down the shop. Your politicians won't do the bidding of everyday people – who can't shower them in cash – unless they fear that they will have their offices blockaded, their homes picketed, and their seats primaried.

Rather than demanding this kind of change, we're supposed to vote with our wallets, making a fetish out of our personal consumption choices and scolding others as "lazy" or "cheap" if they don't quit Facebook or stop shopping at Walmart. This isn't just ineffective, it's counterproductive. Refusing to form solidaristic bonds with people suffering in the same way as you because they buy things you disapprove of means that you can't attain the solidarity needed to make the real change you're seeking.

Shopping harder is no way to save the planet or your neighbors. Individual actions do not provoke systemic change. For that, we need collective action. Join your local tenants' union, your local DSA chapter, your local Electronic Frontier Alliance group:

https://efa.eff.org/allies

And also! Make consumption choices that improve your life and the lives of people you love. Support your local bookstore, buy online from libro.fm and bookshop.org – not because this will break Amazon's monopoly power (for that we will need unionization, antitrust, and tax enforcement), but because when you shop at those stores, you make a difference to the lives of the people who operate those stores, who pay decent wages and don't maim their warehouse workers.

Go to your local family-owned grocer instead of the union-busting monopolist, because they're nice people, the food is good, and they pitch in to help their community, rather than draining its finances and lobbying for tax exemptions.

Buy from artists and creators you like online, join their crowdfunders and Patreons, get their music on Bandcamp – not because this will shatter the hegemony of the five giant publishers, four giant studios, three giant labels, two giant app companies and one giant ebook and audiobook store – but because it will help people whose art you love pay their rent and buy groceries.

Get off Facebook, Insta and Twitter and join Mastodon and/or Bluesky – not because you can disenshittify the internet by switching to federated social media, but because you, personally can have a less shitty time if you get away from the zuckermuskian rot economy.

Do all this stuff – to the extent you can. Support your local bookstore, but don't forego buying and reading books you love because the store is a two hour drive and you only get there once a month. Support your local grocer, but if they don't have the ingredients you need for the special dinner you're making for your friends or your picky kids, then go to Safeway or Whole Foods or Albertsons. Buy art from artists where you can, but if there's a movie you want to stream and the only way to get it is on Prime or Youtube, pay the $3.99. Get a Mastodon or Bluesky account, but if your friends or customers or audience won't move with you, then reach them where they are.

Above all, don't isolate yourself. As Zephyr Teachout writes in Break 'Em Up, when you miss the picket at the Amazon warehouse because you've been driving around for hours looking for an independent stationery story to buy markers and cardboard for a protest sign, Jeff Bezos wins.

Give your comrades grace. Don't call them scabs because they bought McDonald's for their kids after a long shift. Don't turn your nose up at them because they bought a shirt at Zara. Give yourself grace. The damage you do to the cause by flying home for Thanksgiving, using a plastic straw, or using proprietary software is immeasurably infinitesimal. And if you're connected to your family, well hydrated, and get your tech needs met, you will have more energy and resources to throw into the fight for systemic change.

Make individual choices that make your life better. Take collective action to make society better. Your individual hand-wringing about whether to buy organic produce or get a Frappuccino just makes you less effective. It's not a boycott. A boycott is planned, social and solidaristic. It's something lots of people do together. Boycotts work (which is why génocidaires hate the BDS movement). Scabbing isn't buying something from someone unethical. Scabbing is crossing a picket line or breaking a boycott.

Margaret Thatcher's crude trick – "there is no such thing as society" – fools fewer and fewer of us every day. Doing the right thing isn't a matter of personal orthodoxy – it's a matter of movement tactics. We won't cure enshittification by zealously pursuing an approved list of correct merchants and products – we'll do so by changing the policy landscape so that enshittifiers sink and disenshittifiers rise:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/07/31/unsatisfying-answers/#systemic-problems

If you think buying something different, or shopping somewhere else, will make your comrades' lives better, then sure, by all means, give them a helpful tip! But don't nag them for shopping wrong. The best reason to suggest a consumption choice is to improve the life of someone you care about.

And speaking of which: this is my last blog post before my Kickstarter to pre-sell the audiobook, ebook and hardcover of my next book, Enshittification, winds down. I don't have a Patreon, I don't paywall my work or sell ads. I support my family by selling books, and the Kickstarter is the way to buy the books that does me the most good – I get the most money per book this way, and it does more to help the books get on the bestseller lists:

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/doctorow/enshittification-the-drm-free-audiobook

So I'd love it if you'd consider backing the campaign. But also: don't worry about it if this isn't the easiest way for you to read my work. If you're short on cash, or you can't use Kickstarter, or you prefer the library, get the books some other way. That's fine. Your individual consumption choices can make a difference to me, personally; but the way we will change society is by joining and participating in a movement. I'd much rather live in a better world than live in this one with an extra $20 or $30 from your book purchases in my bank account.

Hey look at this (permalink)

YIMBYs on the Cusp of Major Victory in California https://prospect.org/infrastructure/housing/2025-09-13-yimbys-cusp-major-victory-california/
Why You Should Spend Less Time with Your Kids https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=whaesnYloMQ&t=10s
Political Violence Is Wrong. Charlie Kirk Didn’t Think So https://jacobin.com/2025/09/kirk-posobiec-political-violence-far-right/

Object permanence (permalink)

#20yrsago TiVo won’t save certain shows or allow moving them https://memex.craphound.com/2005/09/13/tivo-wont-save-certain-shows-or-allow-moving-them/

#15yrsago HDCP master-key leaks, possible to make unrestricted Blu-Ray recorders https://www.engadget.com/2010-09-14-hdcp-master-key-supposedly-released-unlocks-hdtv-copy-protect.html

#15yrsago Kim Stanley Robinson on science, justice and science fiction https://gerrycanavan.wordpress.com/2010/09/13/science-justice-science-fiction-an-interview-with-kim-stanley-robinson/

#10yrsago 27-year-olds: don’t forget your D10K party!https://memex.craphound.com/2015/09/13/27-year-olds-dont-forget-your-d10k-party/

#10yrsago Empty Epson “professional” inkjet cartridges are still 20% fullhttps://petapixel.com/2015/09/11/this-is-how-much-ink-the-epson-9900-printer-wastes/

#10yrsago Chest-height puking toilet in a nightclub bathroom https://www.reddit.com/r/funny/comments/3kq88k/in_a_local_club_they_have_this_awesome_toilet_for/

#10yrsago MIT and Boston U open legal clinic for innovative tech projects https://web.archive.org/web/20151005073023/https://civic.mit.edu/blog/natematias/the-story-behind-mit-and-boston-universitys-new-legal-clinic-for-student-innovation

#15yrsago Russian cops use excuse of pirated Microsoft products to raid dissidents, newspapers, and environmentalist groups https://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/12/world/europe/12raids.html

#10yrsago My novel “Walkaway” will hit shelves in 2017 https://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/industry-news/book-deals/article/68042-book-deals-week-of-september-14-2015.html

#10yrsago NYPD cop who beat up tennis star James Blake has a long, violent rapsheet https://web.archive.org/web/20150913062523/https://www.nydailynews.com/news/national/tackled-james-blake-sued-4-times-excessive-force-article-1.2356691

#10yrsago Jeremy Corbyn wins Labour leadership contest and vows 'fightback' https://memex.craphound.com/2015/09/12/uk-labour-party-elects-its-first-left-wing-leader-in-more-than-20-years/

#5yrsago Bill Gates's monopolistic mask-off moment https://pluralistic.net/2020/09/12/whats-a-murder/#miros-tilde-1

#5yrsago Mr Gotcha v covid https://pluralistic.net/2020/09/13/theory-of-change/#mr-gotcha

#5yrsago How to buy doubt https://pluralistic.net/2020/09/13/theory-of-change/#surkov-koch

#5yrsago How the Attack Surface audiobook can reform Audible https://pluralistic.net/2020/09/13/theory-of-change/#avalanche

Upcoming appearances (permalink)

Ithaca: Enshittification at Autumn Leaves Books, Sept 13
https://www.autumnleavesithaca.com/event-details/enshittification-why-everything-got-worse-and-what-to-do-about-it
Ithaca: Radicalized Q&A (Cornell), Sept 16
https://events.cornell.edu/event/radicalized-qa-with-author-cory-doctorow
Ithaca: Communication Power, Policy, and Practice (Cornell), Sept 18
https://events.cornell.edu/event/policy-provocations-a-conversation-about-communication-power-policy-and-practice
Ithaca: A Reverse-Centaur's Guide to Being a Better AI Critic (Cornell), Sept 18
https://events.cornell.edu/event/2025-nordlander-lecture-in-science-public-policy
NYC: Enshittification and Renewal (Cornell Tech), Sept 19
https://www.eventbrite.com/e/enshittification-and-renewal-a-conversation-with-cory-doctorow-tickets-1563948454929
NYC: Brooklyn Book Fair, Sept 21
https://brooklynbookfestival.org/event/big-techs-big-heist-cory-doctorow-in-conversation-with-adam-becker/
DC: Enshittification with Rohit Chopra (Politics and Prose), Oct 8
https://politics-prose.com/cory-doctorow-10825
NYC: Enshittification with Lina Khan (Brooklyn Public Library), Oct 9
https://www.bklynlibrary.org/calendar/cory-doctorow-discusses-central-library-dweck-20251009-0700pm
New Orleans: DeepSouthCon63, Oct 10-12
http://www.contraflowscifi.org/
Chicago: Enshittification with Anand Giridharadas (Chicago Humanities), Oct 15
https://www.oldtownschool.org/concerts/2025/10-15-2025-kara-swisher-and-cory-doctorow-on-enshittification/
San Francisco: Enshittification at Public Works (The Booksmith), Oct 20
https://app.gopassage.com/events/doctorow25
Seattle: Enshittification and the Rot Economy, with Ed Zitron (Clarion West), Oct 22
https://www.clarionwest.org/event/2025-deep-dives-cory-doctorow/
Madrid: 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

Recent appearances (permalink)

Nerd Harder! (This Week in Tech)
https://twit.tv/shows/this-week-in-tech/episodes/1047
Techtonic with Mark Hurst
https://www.wfmu.org/playlists/shows/155658
Cory Doctorow DESTROYS Enshittification (QAA Podcast)
https://soundcloud.com/qanonanonymous/cory-doctorow-destroys-enshitification-e338

Latest books (permalink)

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

Upcoming books (permalink)

"Canny Valley": A limited edition collection of the collages I create for Pluralistic, self-published, September 2025
"Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It," Farrar, Straus, Giroux, October 7 2025
https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374619329/enshittification/
"Unauthorized Bread": a middle-grades graphic novel adapted from my novella about refugees, toasters and DRM, FirstSecond, 2026
"Enshittification, Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It" (the graphic novel), Firstsecond, 2026
"The Memex Method," Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2026
"The Reverse-Centaur's Guide to AI," a short book about being a better AI critic, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2026

Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources:

Currently writing:

"The Reverse Centaur's Guide to AI," a short book for Farrar, Straus and Giroux about being an effective AI critic. FIRST DRAFT COMPLETE AND SUBMITTED.
A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING

This work – excluding any serialized fiction – is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license. That means you can use it any way you like, including commercially, provided that you attribute it to me, Cory Doctorow, and include a link to pluralistic.net.

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

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

How to get Pluralistic:

Blog (no ads, tracking, or data-collection):

Pluralistic.net

Newsletter (no ads, tracking, or data-collection):

https://pluralistic.net/plura-list

Mastodon (no ads, tracking, or data-collection):

https://mamot.fr/@pluralistic

Medium (no ads, paywalled):

https://doctorow.medium.com/

Twitter (mass-scale, unrestricted, third-party surveillance and advertising):

https://twitter.com/doctorow

Tumblr (mass-scale, unrestricted, third-party surveillance and advertising):

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

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

READ CAREFULLY: By reading this, you agree, on behalf of your employer, to release me from all obligations and waivers arising from any and all NON-NEGOTIATED agreements, licenses, terms-of-service, shrinkwrap, clickwrap, browsewrap, confidentiality, non-disclosure, non-compete and acceptable use policies ("BOGUS AGREEMENTS") that I have entered into with your employer, its partners, licensors, agents and assigns, in perpetuity, without prejudice to my ongoing rights and privileges. You further represent that you have the authority to release me from any BOGUS AGREEMENTS on behalf of your employer.

ISSN: 3066-764X

Hosting a WebSite on a Disposable Vape - BogdanTheGeek's Blog

2025-09-13T12:26:02.000Z

Preface This article is NOT served from a web server running on a disposable vape. If you want to see the real deal, click here. The content is otherwise identical. Background For a couple of years now, I have been collecting disposable vapes from friends and family. Initially, I only salvaged the batteries for “future” projects (It’s not hoarding, I promise), but recently, disposable vapes have gotten more advanced. I wouldn’t want to be the lawyer who one day will have to argue how a device with USB C and a rechargeable battery can be classified as “disposable”.

Book Review: All That We See or Seem by Ken Liu ★★★★★ - Terence Eden’s Blog

2025-09-13T11:34:34.000Z

This book is ridiculously zeitgeisty. It's all brain-rotting AI, social-media meltdowns, mixed with some cracking technobabble.

She thinks about erasing more: all the practice session recordings; her own encrypted cephaloscripts; the dream-guide neuromesh of her personal AI; the interviews, fan messages, reviews—food for her vanity, training data for her egolets.

Fab! But, for all that, it's pretty realistic. Sure, it's set five-minutes into the future, but all the tech is plausible and all the hacks somewhere in the ballpark of reality. It is much better than The Ministry for the Future simply because all the technowizardry passes the smell test.

The plot is, charitably, basic. A woman has been kidnapped and her husband (who is a suspect) enlists a ~~Private Eye~~ hacker to solve the mystery. But you're not reading to discover whodunnit; you're there to revel in the pitch-perfect future-gazing and cower before the (hopefully not too accurate) predictions around how technology will be subverted to protect the powerful while leaving everyone else helpless.

The neologisms are off the chart - "Darcybots" to help you date, a "Fiscjinn" to interrogate your finances, and an "Oneirofex" to… well, I'll let you discover that! You'll need to have a good grasp of what's going on with modern technology in order to get more than half the references. I've no idea if the book will be intelligible half-a-decade from now. Perhaps we'll have our self-hosted AIs translate it for us?

At times, it feels less like a book and more like a series of parables woven into one story. The ending feels a little rushed - but it fits in with the fast-paced nature of the plot. A great slab of sci-fi to chew on.

The book is released in October 2025 - and will probably remain relevant for at least half-a-dozen weeks.

Ask Nicky Anything: Dolphy Moment - Nicky FloweRSS

2025-09-13T06:54:00.000Z

I put my e-mail at the bottom of every post on here and encourage questions, as well as things that are more of a comment than a question. And I got one yesterday that isn't best answered privately, which a lot are! Let's see:

"Help I waz trying to have a mingus moment but I accidentally had a Dolphy moment instead. How do I fix this?" - Bezier

There is, unfortunately, nothing available on this Earth to reverse an Accidental Dolphy Moment. Missing the mark on Mingus and diving deep into Dolphy directly? You must live with the consequences, and any future offspring will feel the effects of this, possibly for multiple generations. Luckily, it's always good and never bad to have a Dolphy Moment! One could take shelter inside of his bass clarinet solo on "Free Jazz: A Collective Improvisation" and live a very comfortable life away from the harsh elements. Please rise and remove your hats as we pay tribute to a true saint of jazz.

Nicky Flowers - 09/12/25 - I can't help you if you have a Beefheart Moment, as I'm still recovering from the one I had in 2014 - (send any comments/questions to hello at nickyflowers dot com)

Pluralistic: Reverse centaurs are the answer to the AI paradox (11 Sep 2025) - Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow

2025-09-11T15:17:58.000Z

Today's links

Reverse centaurs are the answer to the AI paradox: Not what the machine does, but who it does it to.
Hey look at this: Delights to delectate.
Object permanence: Themepunks; Data is a liability; Alexa for landlords; Qanon is the Protocols of the Elders of Zio.
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.

Reverse centaurs are the answer to the AI paradox (permalink)

My latest Locus column is "Reverse Centaurs," and it sets out to unravel a paradox: how is that some AI's users describe their experience as a hellish ordeal, while others delight in the ways that AI is changing their lives for the better?

https://locusmag.com/2025/09/commentary-cory-doctorow-reverse-centaurs/

The answer is contained in the concept of "centaurs" and "reverse centaurs," found in automation theory:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/05/27/rancid-vibe-coding/#class-war

A "centaur" is a human being who is assisted by a machine (a human head on a strong and tireless body). A reverse centaur is a machine that uses a human being as its assistant (a frail and vulnerable person being puppeteered by an uncaring, relentless machine).

Let me give you an example: remember at the start of the summer, when Hearst published a summer reading guide that was full of nonexistent books that had been "hallucinated" by a chatbot?

https://www.npr.org/2025/05/20/nx-s1-5405022/fake-summer-reading-list-ai

404 Media's Jason Koebler got in touch with the guy whose byline appeared on the list, and he was hugely embarrassed and contrite:

https://www.404media.co/chicago-sun-times-prints-ai-generated-summer-reading-list-with-books-that-dont-exist/

But in a followup story, Koebler noticed something that the first round of dunks and memes about this poor guy had missed: this same writer had his name on many of these "best of the summer" lists in this supplement. He was practically the sole author of an entire 64-page insert:

https://www.404media.co/viral-ai-generated-summer-guide-printed-by-chicago-sun-times-was-made-by-magazine-giant-hearst/

And that's where it gets interesting. Koebler got his start in journalism as an intern at the Washington Monthly, where he worked on lists like these:

https://www.404media.co/podcast-ai-slop-summer/

When Koebler was doing this work, he'd be part of a team of three interns, overseen by an experienced journalist, backstopped by an extensive fact-checking department. Those little lists take a surprising amount of work, if you really care about their quality.

The freelance writer who authored this giant summer reading guide with all its lists had been tasked with doing the work of literally dozens of writers, editors and fact-checkers. We don't know whether his boss told him he had to use AI, but there's no way one writer could do all that work without AI.

In other words, that writer's job wasn't to write the article. His job was to be the "human in the loop" for an AI that wrote the articles, but on a schedule and with a workload that precluded his being able to do a good job. It's more true to say that his job was to be the AI's "accountability sink" (in the memorable phrasing of Dan Davies): he was being paid to take the blame for the AI's mistakes.

He was, in other words, a reverse centaur.

Now, I am a freelance writer as well, and not so long ago, I wanted to quote something smart I'd heard on a podcast in an article, but I couldn't remember where I heard it. So I downloaded Whisper, an open source AI transcription model from Openai, to my laptop. I threw the last 30 hours' worth of audio that I'd listened to at it, and worked away on other stuff for an hour or two. When I checked again, I had a folder full of pretty reliable transcripts. I searched the text, found the quote, and opened the audio to the supplied timecode to double-check it. I was a centaur. I got to decide how to use the AI, and I only had to use it in ways that made my work better and more satisfying.

This, I think, is the explanation for the paradox of AI: the AI users who are being immiserated and precaratized by bosses who have been convinced to fire their colleagues and pile their work on the terrorized survivors of the layoffs hate the AI, because it makes their life worse in every way.

Whereas the people who choose when and how to use AI – the centaurs – are only using AI to the extent that it is useful, and throwing it away when it's not. They may make poor choices about the AI, but those choices are theirs, they are not imposed from on high. A bicyclist who chooses to commute on two wheels can have a glorious ride, or they can ride like a maniac and end up eating dirt, but they are having a fundamentally different experience from, say, a gig delivery platform rider who has been given an impossible quota and is having their pay eroded by algorithmic wage discrimination:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/02/29/geometry-hates-uber/#toronto-the-gullible

I was very happy to put this analysis in the pages of Locus, the trade magazine for the science fiction field. The job of a science fiction writer is only incidentally to describe what a technology does – at its best, science fiction interrogates who the technology does it to and who the technology does it for.

This is a political act of resistance. Margaret Thatcher's motto, after all, was "There is no alternative," by which she meant, "Stop trying to think of alternatives." The bully's trick is to present your defeat as a fait accompli: "Resistance is futile."

Tech bosses practice a form of vulgar Thatcherism all the time: Mark Zuckerberg wants you to think there's no way to talk with your friends without letting him listen in; Sundar Pichai wants you to think there's no way to search the web without being spied on; Tim Cook wants you to think there's no way to have a safe and reliable computing experience without giving him a veto over which software you install; Satya Nadella wants you to think there's no way for you to edit a Word file without letting your boss compare your keystrokes-per-minute to your co-workers:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/02/24/gwb-rumsfeld-monsters/#bossware

And AI bosses want you to think that the only way to use these tools is to displace and immiserate labor, because that's the promise they raise investment capital on:

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

AI is a bubble. If it wasn't a bubble – if it was just a bunch of computer scientists and product teams tinkering with possible uses for advancements in back-propagation, generative adversarial networks and machine learning – there wouldn't be any controversy here. A programmer who uses a chatbot to autogen a bunch of cross-browser CSS stylesheets that mostly work, after some tinkering, would maybe mention that fact over beers – but they wouldn't get sucked into a cult obsessed with outlandish scenarios in which the chatbot wakes up and turns us all into paperclips:

https://firstmonday.org/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/13636

AI is a bubble. Bubbles burst. We're in for a near-total collapse of the AI investment mania. Most of these companies will fail. Many planned data-centers will never be opened. Many existing data-centers will be shuttered. When that happens, what will be left?

AI is a bubble, and when bubbles burst, they sometimes leave behind a productive residue. At home, I enjoy 2GB symmetrical fiber optic internet, because AT&T was able to light up some of the dark fiber that Worldcom fraudulently raised billions for. Worldcom's CEO died in prison after scamming the finances of ordinary people, and the world would be a better place if that had never happened, but there was some productive residue left behind, and many of us are reaping the benefit today:

https://locusmag.com/2023/12/commentary-cory-doctorow-what-kind-of-bubble-is-ai/

Contrast that with the cryptocurrency bubble. When that bursts, we'll still have a smattering of programmers who've had a subsidized education in cryptography and secure programming in Rust, but mostly what crypto will leave behind is bad Austrian economics and worse monkey JPEGs. Like Enron, crypto will leave nothing much behind of any value.

All bubbles are bad, but some are more productive than others. When the AI bubble bursts, there will be stellar bargains on GPUs (it would be ironic if scientists snapped them up at pennies on the dollar and used them for climate modeling). We'll have a lot of technical people who are much better at applied statistics than they were a decade ago. And there will be the open source models, like Whisper, the tool I used to transcribe all those podcasts.

These open source models run on commodity hardware, and while the climate costs of creating those models is terrible, they're here now, and operating them isn't especially energy-intensive. When I used Whisper to transcribe 30 hours' worth of podcasts, my laptop's fan didn't even switch on.

What's more, open source hackers are doing amazing things with these tools – far more than the giant corporations that released them ever anticipated. These "toy" models were released as a way to entice programmers into specializing in cloud systems operated by the big tech companies, but it turns out that these standalone models can do amazing things, and aren't just a demo for a big, doomed foundation model:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/08/18/openwashing/#you-keep-using-that-word-i-do-not-think-it-means-what-you-think-it-means

It doesn't matter what happens to Openai; Whisper is here to stay. It's already being rolled into other standard tools – the latest version of ffmpeg integrates Whisper and can autogen captions:

https://www.theregister.com/2025/08/28/ffmpeg_8_huffman/

The things these open source standalone models can do will only expand, and they will become a given for our computing applications. Your computer or phone will be able to transcribe audio and do cool image-editing stuff like erasing strangers from the background of a photo as a standard feature.

That's the good news. The bad news is all the damage the bubble is doing now and all the further damage that will come from its collapse. Today, we're getting the climate impact, obviously, and the immiseration of all those workers who are being reverse-centaured by an AI that can't do their job, but whose manufacturer's salesforce convinced their boss to fire them and replace them with an AI anyway.

After the bubble bursts, there will be the mass incineration of everyday people's retirement savings and the knock-on effects as the whole market craters. And long after that, there will be the terrible impact on our society's ability to do things, as defunct foundation models grind to a halt, after the people they replaced are long gone and can't step in to pick up the work they fumble. We are busily filling the walls of society with digital asbestos and we'll be digging it out for generations to come.

Every day the bubble persists, the harms of today and tomorrow increase. We need to burst that bubble as soon as possible. That's how I came to spend the summer writing a book for Farrar, Straus and Giroux with the working title The Reverse-Centaur's Guide to AI, whose goal is to improve the quality of AI criticism so that it inflicts maximum damage on AI swindlers and their terrible investment bubble.

It'll be out in 2026, but for now, you can have a look at my Locus column:

https://locusmag.com/2025/09/commentary-cory-doctorow-reverse-centaurs/

(Image: School Photos PCC, CC BY 2.0, modified)

Hey look at this (permalink)

Flush door handles are the car industry’s latest safety problem https://arstechnica.com/cars/2025/09/flush-door-handles-are-the-car-industrys-latest-safety-problem/
The Great Space Race(ism): How Science Fiction Predicted the Future–and How Afrofuturism Could Negate It https://escholarship.org/uc/item/3gv8r1r5

Object permanence (permalink)

#20yrago Themepunks (AKA Makers) serialized for next ten weeks on Salon https://web.archive.org/web/20050914060107/http://www.salon.com/tech/feature/2005/09/12/themepunks_1/index_np.html

#10yrsago Data is a liability, not an asset https://web.archive.org/web/20150911201818/https://richie.fi/blog/data-is-a-liability.html

#10yrsago Missing from the computer science curriculum https://prog21.dadgum.com/210.html

#5yrsago Alexa for landlords https://pluralistic.net/2020/09/11/protocols-of-qanon/#landlord-alexa

#5yrsago Security Engineering, 3d edition https://pluralistic.net/2020/09/11/protocols-of-qanon/#security-engineering-v3

#5yrsago America's pandemic spiral https://pluralistic.net/2020/09/11/protocols-of-qanon/#doom-loops

#5yrsago EFF vs filternet https://pluralistic.net/2020/09/11/protocols-of-qanon/#no-filternet

#5yrsago Qanon is basically the Protocols of the Elders of Zion https://pluralistic.net/2020/09/11/protocols-of-qanon/#godwins-qanon

#5yrsago Life as a precriminal https://pluralistic.net/2020/09/11/protocols-of-qanon/#chris-nocco

Upcoming appearances (permalink)

Ithaca: Enshittification at Buffalo Street Books, Sept 11
https://buffalostreetbooks.com/event/2025-09-11/cory-doctorow-tcpl-librarian-judd-karlman
Ithaca: AD White keynote (Cornell), Sep 12
https://deanoffaculty.cornell.edu/events/keynote-cory-doctorow-professor-at-large/
Ithaca: Enshittification at Autumn Leaves Books, Sept 13
https://www.autumnleavesithaca.com/event-details/enshittification-why-everything-got-worse-and-what-to-do-about-it
Ithaca: Radicalized Q&A (Cornell), Sept 16
https://events.cornell.edu/event/radicalized-qa-with-author-cory-doctorow
Ithaca: The Counterfeiters (Dinner/Movie Night) (Cornell), Sept 17
https://adwhiteprofessors.cornell.edu/visits/cory-doctorow/
Ithaca: Communication Power, Policy, and Practice (Cornell), Sept 18
https://events.cornell.edu/event/policy-provocations-a-conversation-about-communication-power-policy-and-practice
Ithaca: A Reverse-Centaur's Guide to Being a Better AI Critic (Cornell), Sept 18
https://events.cornell.edu/event/2025-nordlander-lecture-in-science-public-policy
NYC: Enshittification and Renewal (Cornell Tech), Sept 19
https://www.eventbrite.com/e/enshittification-and-renewal-a-conversation-with-cory-doctorow-tickets-1563948454929
NYC: Brooklyn Book Fair, Sept 21
https://brooklynbookfestival.org/event/big-techs-big-heist-cory-doctorow-in-conversation-with-adam-becker/
DC: Enshittification with Rohit Chopra (Politics and Prose), Oct 8
https://politics-prose.com/cory-doctorow-10825
NYC: Enshittification with Lina Khan (Brooklyn Public Library), Oct 9
https://www.bklynlibrary.org/calendar/cory-doctorow-discusses-central-library-dweck-20251009-0700pm
New Orleans: DeepSouthCon63, Oct 10-12
http://www.contraflowscifi.org/
Chicago: Enshittification with Anand Giridharadas (Chicago Humanities), Oct 15
https://www.oldtownschool.org/concerts/2025/10-15-2025-kara-swisher-and-cory-doctorow-on-enshittification/
San Francisco: Enshittification at Public Works (The Booksmith), Oct 20
https://app.gopassage.com/events/doctorow25
Seattle: Enshittification and the Rot Economy, with Ed Zitron (Clarion West), Oct 22
https://www.clarionwest.org/event/2025-deep-dives-cory-doctorow/
Madrid: 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

Recent appearances (permalink)

Nerd Harder! (This Week in Tech)
https://twit.tv/shows/this-week-in-tech/episodes/1047
Techtonic with Mark Hurst
https://www.wfmu.org/playlists/shows/155658
Cory Doctorow DESTROYS Enshittification (QAA Podcast)
https://soundcloud.com/qanonanonymous/cory-doctorow-destroys-enshitification-e338

Latest books (permalink)

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

Upcoming books (permalink)

"Canny Valley": A limited edition collection of the collages I create for Pluralistic, self-published, September 2025
"Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It," Farrar, Straus, Giroux, October 7 2025
https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374619329/enshittification/
"Unauthorized Bread": a middle-grades graphic novel adapted from my novella about refugees, toasters and DRM, FirstSecond, 2026
"Enshittification, Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It" (the graphic novel), Firstsecond, 2026
"The Memex Method," Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2026
"The Reverse-Centaur's Guide to AI," a short book about being a better AI critic, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2026

Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources:

Currently writing:

"The Reverse Centaur's Guide to AI," a short book for Farrar, Straus and Giroux about being an effective AI critic. FIRST DRAFT COMPLETE AND SUBMITTED.
A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING

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/

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

Reasonably accurate, privacy conscious, cookieless, visitor tracking for WordPress - Terence Eden’s Blog

2025-09-11T11:34:39.000Z

I am vain. I like to know which of my blog posts have "done numbers". I get a little thrill knowing that an old post I wrote has been read by someone in a land I've never visited. I'm curious and want to know if a newsletter has linked to me.

At the same time, I don't want to know too much about people. I don't want to stalk them around the web. I refuse to care how long they spend with me. I can't be bothered setting up a foolproof system that captures 100% accurate information.

After trying several analytics plugins for WordPress, I've decided to have a go at writing my own⁰.

Before embarking on this, please do read "You Don't Need Analytics on Your Blog" and the slightly more provocative "You do not need “analytics” for your blog because you are neither a military surveillance unit nor a commodity trading company". Both give excellent examples of why this is at best foolish and at worse injurious. Proceed with caution in your heart.

Background

As a consequence of the way the web works, every time you click on a link the website's owner gets the following pieces of information.

The time you clicked,
The page you visited,
The name of the web browser you use,
The URl of the page which you clicked to get here,
The IP address your computer has.

There are a few other things sent along but they're not interesting to me.

Using that information, I can construct a reasonably accurate view of how many times a post has been viewed and how many people viewed it.

Defining a page view

If a web page is loaded, that counts as a view. I'm not going to track whether the user stayed for more than 30 seconds or closed their browser in disgust after reading the headline. If the page is loaded, that's a view.

But what if one person repeatedly hits refresh on the same post? To deal with that, I'll need a concept of a visitor.

Defining a visitor

The "normal" way of doing things is to stick a cookie in the user's browser and track them that way. I can't be bothered with that. And, besides, it doesn't account for a person reading on their laptop and then moving to their phone.

So I'm going to use a proxy by creating a cryptographic hash of the visitor's IP address and the browser's User Agent string.

Of course, a household might have one IP address and multiple people with the same phone. But, equally, one person might rove over several WiFi networks in the course of one browsing session, getting a different IP each time.

The aim is to be reasonably accurate.

Hashing the contents means I don't need to store the user's IP address. Once hashed, the information becomes a string like db050e7b853e5856 which is functionally impossible to de-hash back to an IP address & UA string¹.

This also means that I can redefine the concept of a page view. If the same visitor refreshed the page multiple times, it will only count as a single visit.

I'll reset the counter at midnight in my local timezone. If someone visits just before midnight and then just after, it'll count as two visits. Oh well.

Where did they come from?

Generally speaking, there are two ways that visitors share their referrer. One is the "referer" header (yes, it is misspelled). It contains a URl of the referring site or application. For example, if someone clicked from a search result it might say https://yahoo.com.

The other way is using "Urchin Tracking Module" query strings. At the end of the URl they visit, they might append something like ?utm_source=alices-newsletter.

Some sites, like Reddit, might use multiple subdomains - old.reddit.com or out.reddit.com - so some deduplication may be necessary.

Where in the world are they?

A user's IP address is somewhat accurate method of detecting their location. Yes, users could be proxying through a VPN or using a SIM card from a foreign country. But this isn't an exercise in precise tracking. Rough and ready is fine.

There are a variety of GeoIP Databases which are updated semi-regularly. I'm only interested in the country of origin, I don't care about finer resolution than that.

Again, the aim isn't precise targetting. I'd just like to know that people in Sudan ever read my blog posts.

What else could we use?

It might be nice to know if someone is using a small-screen or large device. But my CSS is responsive, so I don't care.

Similarly, their Internet connection speed might be available. But, again, I try to optimise things so that isn't necessary to know.

Do I need to know if someone speaks Hungarian? No. There's nothing useful I can do with that information.

Could I extract their operating system, device, and browser from their User-Agent? I guess. Would I use the information that X% of my readers use Firefox on Linux? Doubtful!

Collect the information

There are two main methods of collecting these data.

First is a "no JavaScript" solution. This tells the browser to request an image which has a query string to send along the details of the page requested.

<noscript>
    <img src="/tracking.php?ID=<?php echo $postID ?>" alt="" width=1 height=1 class=hidden>
</noscript>

The downside is that there's no way to capture referer information. If each page were dynamically generated, I could grab it from PHP's $_SERVER superglobal. But my website is heavily cached, so that isn't possible.

It is possible to use JavaScript to dynamically send the information for collection:

let formData = new FormData();
formData.append("HTTP_REFERER", document.referrer);
formData.append("ID",  <?php echo $postID ?>);

fetch("/tracking.php", {
    method: "POST",
    body: formData,
});

This approach has three distinct advantages.

It works whether the user has JS enabled or not.
Repeated requests for the same page will usually reload the image from cache, so won't double-count.
It doesn't count hits from bots. They typically don't execute JavaScript or don't request images.

Bot Detection

Not all traffic originates from humans. There are lots of bots which crawl the web. Some are useful - like search engines building up a map. Others are harmful - like AI agents aggressively scraping content to plagiarise.

There are lots of identifiable bots out there - and more which obfuscate themselves. There are some, like Lighthouse which cloak themselves.

I'm not trying to eliminate everything which could be a bot. I am trying for reasonably accurate. So I eliminate any User-Agent which contains:

There are some big lists of bots you can use - but they don't seem to trigger my analytics because they aren't requesting the images or executing the JS.

What bits of the site to measure?

I only care about how many visitors my posts and pages get. I don't need to know if someone visited a tag page, or scrolled back to page 100 of posts from 2019. Those sorts of deep pages are usually only accessed by bots anyway.

I also don't want to count visits from me, myself, and I.

So the tracking is only inserted on single pages which are viewed by non-admins:

if ( is_singular() && !current_user_can( "edit_posts" ) ) {
    …
}

Oddities

Sometimes, the URl requested will look something like: https://shkspr-mobi.translate.goog - that just means Google has translated it.

Sometimes, the referer will look something like: android-app://com.google.android.gm/ - that just means they clicked from an Android app.

Sometimes, the URl requested will include a fragment or a query string - they can be ignored.

Sometimes, the utm_ will contain all sorts of weird stuff. It isn't always possible to pull out exactly where it has come from.

Sometimes, the referer and utm_ will disagree. Ah well, never mind.

Sometimes, RSS views are counted and sometimes not. Perhaps I should fix that?

Sometimes, users block trackers or use a text-only browser. That's fine, they can keep their secrets.

Saving the data

I started this by just shoving what I collected into a CSV.

//  Write the CSV.
$line = [date("c"), $ID, $UA, $referer, $domain, $country, $user];
//  Date-based filename.
$filename = "log-" . date("Y-m-d") . ".csv";
//  Append mode.
$handle = fopen( $filename, "a" );
fputcsv( $handle, $line );
fclose( $handle );

Nothing fancy. Something easily grepable with the ability to query it in more detail if I need. At the number of hits that my site gets, it is less than 1MB per day.

I've since moved it into a single MySQL table. That might not be sustainable with hundreds of thousands of rows. But that's tomorrow's problem.

Accuracy

I've been running this for a couple of days - simultaneously with my other, more professional, stats plugin. It is within 5% accuracy. It appears to slightly exaggerate the number of visitors and undercount my page-views. That's good enough for my purposes and probably good for my ego!

Putting it all together

You can take a look at all the code on my GitLab repo.

What does it look like?

If you've made it this far, you can have a little pictorial treat! Aren't you lucky?

What's next?

For now, a simple table structure is fine. I've shoved it in a basic database. Sure, I don't have any indexes or fancy stuff like that. But modern computers are pretty fast.

Eventually I'll need to create some new tables which will consolidate the data. Perhaps a table for individual posts, using date and country? Or maybe referer? I'll have to see.

I also need a way to get historic data into it. I've blog stats going back to 2009 which I am anxious not to lose.

And, yeah, I'll need a better front-end than manually running SQL queries.

Above all, I want to keep it simple enough that my puny mortal brain can understand it after several years of not touching anything. I want to build something which can run without constant maintenance.

Remember, this is only an exercise in self-learning, self-hosting, and self-respect.

I enjoy learning. If you're about to say "Why not just install…" then you've missed the point. I like understanding how things work, I get joy from discovering some new function, my brain feels happy when it is working on a problem. I don't want to just click install, hit next a few times, and fiddle with a few options. I've written more about my philosophy here. ↩︎
Or is it? There are 4 billion IPv4 addresses - although slightly fewer in actual use. Creating a rainbow table with 4 billion rows is possible. But there are an almost infinite variety of User Agent strings. It is probably possible to create a rainbow table of, for example, the 10 most popular UAs, concatenate them with every possible IP address, and then see which hashes to 65fef01fef257963. But even then, what would that get an attacker? Knowing that the most popular model of iPhone is on a mobile network's IP range isn't exactly private information. ↩︎

Mingus Moments - Nicky FloweRSS

2025-09-11T05:53:00.000Z

IT IS EASIER THAN EVER TO EXPERIENCE ... A MINGUS MOMENT

_{(only through Mingus are these Moments possible)}

"What's a Mingus Moment?"

Try this out — you'll know a Mingus Moment when you feel it.

Thank god he did, but... how does he do it?

Nicky Flowers - 09/10/25 - Many Mingus Moments May Mean Millions Meet Meaven (Mingus Heaven) - (send any comments/questions to hello at nickyflowers dot com)

Note published on September 11, 2025 at 4:07 AM UTC - Molly White's microblog feed

2025-09-11T04:07:05.000Z

it's like when you miss a cool number on the odometer

1,111,092 more to go, i guess!

Pluralistic: Hate the player AND the game (10 Sep 2025) - Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow

2025-09-10T16:51:59.000Z

Today's links

Hate the player AND the game: But above all, hate the crooked ump.
Hey look at this: Delights to delectate.
Object permanence: Library Tor nodes vs the DHS; Egg-board psyops; Fury Road amputation cosplay; NYPD's dirtiest cop.
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.

Hate the player AND the game (permalink)

The epigram for my forthcoming book, Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What To Do About It is a quote from Ed Zitron: "I hate them for what they've done to the computer" (Ed even recorded a little cameo of this for the audiobook):

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/doctorow/enshittification-the-drm-free-audiobook/

Ed's a smart and passionate guy, and this was definitely the quote to sum up the rage I felt as I wrote the book. Ed's got a whole theory of who "they" are and "what they did to the computer," which he calls "the Rot Economy":

https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-rot-economy/

The Rot Economy describes the ideology of bosses, starting with monsters like GE's Jack Welch, who financialized companies, optimizing them for making short term cash gains for investors, at the expense of their workers, their customers, their products and services, and, ultimately, their long-term health.

For Ed, these bosses (especially tech bosses) are the sociopaths who destroyed "the computer" (a stand-in for tech more generally). I don't disagree at all. The there is a direct, undeniable line from the ideas and conduct of tech bosses and the tech hellscape we live in today. A good read on this subject is Anil Dash's scorching post from yesterday, "How Tim Cook sold out Steve Jobs":

https://www.anildash.com/2025/09/09/how-tim-cook-sold-out-steve-jobs/

I find the Rot Economy hypothesis entirely compelling, but also, incomplete. Ed's explaining why we should hate the players and why we should hate the game, but the enshittification thesis goes even further and explains why we need to hate the umpires – the policymakers, enforcers, economists and legal theorists who created the enshittogenic environment in which the Rot Economy took hold.

Some early reviews of Enshittification have expressed dissatisfaction with book's "solutions" section, complaining that all the solutions are policy oriented, and there's nothing suggested for us to do in our capacity as individual consumers:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/07/31/unsatisfying-answers/#systemic-problems

Those criticisms are correct: there is nothing we can do as individual consumers. Agonizing about your consumption choices will not fight enshittification any more than conscientiously sorting your recycling will end the climate emergency. Enshittification isn't caused by "lazy consumers" who choose "convenience" or are "too cheap to pay for online services":

https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/12/give-me-convenience/#or-give-me-death

The wellspring of enshittification isn't poor consumption choices, it's poor policy choices. The reason monsters are able to destroy our online lives isn't their personal moral failings, it's the system that rewards predatory, deceptive and unfair commercial practices and elevates their foremost practitioners to positions of power within firms:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/07/28/microincentives-and-enshittification/

And here's the kicker: we know where those policy choices came from! The people who made these policy choices did so in living memory. They were warned at the time about the foreseeable consequences of their choices. They made those choices anyway. They faced zero consequences for doing so, even after every one of the prophesied horrors came to pass. Not only were they spared consequences for their actions, but they prospered as a result – they are revered as statesmen, lawyers, scholars and titans of economics.

As Trashfuture showrunner Riley Quinn often says, the curse of being a leftist is that you have object permanence – you actually remember the stuff that happened and how it happened. You don't live in an eternal now that has no causal relationship to the past.

It's not enough to hate the player, nor the game – we've got to remember the crooked umps who rigged the match. We have to say their names, because that's how we root out their terrible ideas and ensure that our policy interventions make real change. If Elon Musk OD'ed on ketamine tomorrow, there'd be ten Big Balls who'd tear each others' throats out in the ensuing succession fight, and the next guy would be just as stupid, racist, and authoritarian. Musk, Cook, Zuck, Pichai, Nadella, Larry Ellison – they're just filling the monster-shaped holes that policy-makers installed in our society.

Start with Robert Bork, the jurist who championed the "consumer welfare" theory of antitrust, which promotes monopolies as efficient and counsels policymakers not to punish companies that take over markets, because the only way to really dominate a market is to be so good that everyone chooses your products and services. Wouldn't it just be perverse to use public funds to shut down the public's favorite companies? Bork was a virulent racist, a Nixonite criminal, and he was dead wrong about the law and the economics of monopoly:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/02/20/we-should-not-endure-a-king/

Bork's legacy of pro-monopoly advocacy is, unsurprisingly, monopolies. Monopolies that make everything more expensive and worse: from athletic shoes to microchips, glass bottles to pharmaceuticals, pro wrestling to eyeglasses:

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

These monopolies did not arise because of the iron laws of economics. They are not the product of the great forces of history. They are the direct and undeniable consequence of Robert Bork convincing the world's governments to embrace his bullshit, pro-monopoly policies.

Satan took Bork to hell in 2012, but you know who's still with us? Bruce Lehman. Bruce Lehman was Bill Clinton's copyright czar, the man who, in his own words, "did an end-run around Congress" by getting an UN treaty passed that obliged its signatories to ban reverse engineering:

https://www.cbc.ca/listen/cbc-podcasts/1353-the-naked-emperor/episode/16145640-ctrl-ctrl-ctrl

Lehman's used the treaty to get Congress to pass the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) and section 1201 of the DMCA made it a felony to break DRM. Bruce Lehman is why farmers can't fix their own tractors, hospitals can't fix their own ventilators, and your mechanic can't fix your car. It's why, when the manufacturer of your artificial eyes bricks a computer that is permanently wired to your nervous system, no one else can revive it:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/12/12/unsafe-at-any-speed/

Bruce Lehman is why you can use the apps of your choosing on your phone or games console. He's why we can't preserve beloved old video games. He's why Apple and Google get to steal 30 cents out of every dollar you send to a performer, software author, or creator through an app:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/05/01/its-not-the-crime/#its-the-coverup

Yeah, Tim Cook is a venal billionaire who owes his wealth to the Chinese sweatshops of iPhone City, where they had to install suicide nets to catch the workers who'd rather end it all than work another day for Tim Apple, but Tim Cook's power over those workers is owed to Bruce Lehman and Robert Bork.

Then there's the ISP sector, whose Net Neutrality violations and underinvestment mean that people who live in the country where the internet was invented have some of the slowest, most expensive internet in the world. Big ISP bosses are some of the worst people on Earth. Take Thomas Rutledge, who CEO of Charter/Spectrum when covid broke out. At the time, Rutledge was America's highest-paid CEO. He dictated that his back-office staff could not work from home (imagine a telco boss who doesn't believe in telework!), and those back-offices all turned into super-spreader sites. Rutledge's field workers – the people who came to our homes and upgraded our internet so we could work from home – did not get PPE or danger pay. Instead, they got vouchers exclusively redeemable at restaurants that had shut down during the pandemic:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/04/22/filternet/#thomas-rutledge-murderer

Fuck Thomas Rutledge and many his name be a curse forever. But the reason Thomas Rutledge – and all the other terrible telco bosses – were able to reap millions by supplying us with dogshit internet while literally murdering their employees was that Trump's FCC chairman, an ex-Verizon lawyer named Ajit Pai, let them get away with it:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/02/12/ajit-pai/#pai

Ajit Pai engaged in some of the most flagrant cheating ever seen in American regulation (prior to Jan 20, 2025, at least). When he decided to kill Net Neutrality, he accepted obviously fraudulent comments into the official record, including one million identical comments from @pornhub.com email addresses, as well as millions of comments whose return addresses were taken from darknet data-dumps, including the email addresses of dead people and of sitting US senators who supported Net Neutrality:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/11/10/digital-redlining/#stop-confusing-the-issue-with-relevant-facts

Pai – and his co-conspirators – are the umps who rigged the game. Hate Thomas Rutledge to be sure, but to prevent people like Rutledge from gaining power over your digital life in future, you must remember Ajit Pai with the special form of white-hot rage that keeps people like him from ever making policy decisions again.

Then there's Canada's hall of shame, which is full of monsters. Two of my least favorite are James Moore and Tony Clement, who, as ministers under Stephen Harper, rammed through a Canadian version of the DMCA, 2012's Bill C-11, despite their own consultation, which found that Canadians overwhelmingly rejected the idea:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/11/15/radical-extremists/#sex-pest

Clement (now a disgraced sex-pest) and Moore (still accepted into polite society as a corporate lawyer) are the reason that Canada's Right to Repair and interop laws are dead on arrival. THey're also why Canada can't retaliate against Trump's tariffs by jailbreaking US products, making everything cheaper for Canadians and birthing new, global Canadian tech businesses:

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

In Europe, there's Axel Voss, the man behind 2019's "filternet" proposal, which requires tech platforms to spend hundreds of millions of euros for copyright filters that use AI to process everything posted to the public internet in Europe and block anything the AI thinks is "copyrighted":

https://memex.craphound.com/2019/03/26/article-13-will-wreck-the-internet-because-swedish-meps-accidentally-pushed-the-wrong-voting-button/

For years, Voss maintained that none of this was true, that there would be no filters, and dismissed his critics as hysterical fools:

https://memex.craphound.com/2019/04/03/after-months-of-insisting-that-article13-doesnt-require-filters-top-eu-commissioner-says-article-13-requires-filters/

But then, after his law passed, he admitted he "didn't know what he was voting for":

https://memex.craphound.com/2018/09/14/father-of-the-catastrophic-copyright-directive-reveals-he-didnt-know-what-he-was-voting-for/

Fuck the media lobbyists who spent hundreds of millions of euros to push this catastrophic law through:

https://memex.craphound.com/2018/12/13/clash-of-the-corporate-titans-whos-spending-what-in-europes-copyright-directive-battle/

But especially and forever, fuck Axel Voss, the policymaker who helped turn those corporate bribes into policy.

Ed Zitron is right to hate the people who implement the Rot Economy for what they did to the computer. But those people are only doing what policymakers let them do. Corporate monsters thrive in an enshittogenic environment.

But political monsters are the ones create that enshittogenic environment. They're the ones who are terraforming our planet to sideline human life and replace it with the immortal colony organisms we call "limited liability corporations."

Hey look at this (permalink)

Dwayne Johnson Will Play the Chicken Man in ‘Lizard Music’ https://gizmodo.com/dwayne-johnson-to-next-play-the-chicken-man-in-lizard-music-2000655464
Qualifying Conditions https://www.jwz.org/blog/2025/09/qualifying-conditions/
Cindy Cohn Is Leaving the EFF, but Not the Fight for Digital Rights https://www.wired.com/story/eff-cindy-cohn-stepping-down/
Five technological achievements! (That we won’t see any time soon.) https://crookedtimber.org/2025/09/09/five-technological-achievements-that-we-wont-see-any-time-soon/
A notional design studio. https://ethanmarcotte.com/wrote/a-notional-design-studio/

Object permanence (permalink)

#20yrsago Anti-trusted-computing video https://www.lafkon.net/tc/

#10yrsago Library offers Tor nodes; DHS tells them to stop https://www.propublica.org/article/library-support-anonymous-internet-browsing-effort-stops-after-dhs-email

#10yrsago Ashley Madison’s passwords were badly encrypted, 15 million+ passwords headed for the Web https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2015/09/ashley-madison-password-crack-could-spell-trouble-across-the-internet/

#10yrsago Heathrow security insists that ice is a liquid https://gizmodo.com/what-happens-if-you-take-frozen-liquids-through-airport-1729772148

#10yrago DoJ says it will consider jailing executives who order corporate crimes https://www.nytimes.com/2015/09/10/us/politics/new-justice-dept-rules-aimed-at-prosecuting-corporate-executives.html

#10yrsago Government-run egg board waged high-price, secret PSYOPS war on vegan egg-replacement https://www.theguardian.com/business/2015/sep/06/usda-american-egg-board-paid-bloggers-hampton-creek

#10yrago Using sandwiches to teach the Socratic method https://web.archive.org/web/20140810204054/https://medium.com/@kmikeym/is-this-a-sandwich-50b1317eb3f5

#10yrago Fury Road cosplay: amputated arm edition https://web.archive.org/web/20150911194228/http://www.tor.com/2015/09/09/afternoon-roundup-furiosa-real-prosthetic-arm-cosplay/

#5yrsago Kids' smart-watches unsafe at any speed https://pluralistic.net/2020/09/10/booksellers-vs-big-tech/#digital-parenting

#5yrsago Georgia voter suppression, quantified https://pluralistic.net/2020/09/10/booksellers-vs-big-tech/#georgia-suppression

#5yrsago The rise and rise of one of NYPD's dirtiest cops https://pluralistic.net/2020/09/10/booksellers-vs-big-tech/#50a

#5yrago Inaudible https://pluralistic.net/2020/09/10/booksellers-vs-big-tech/#audible-exclusive

Upcoming appearances (permalink)

Ithaca: Enshittification at Buffalo Street Books, Sept 11
https://buffalostreetbooks.com/event/2025-09-11/cory-doctorow-tcpl-librarian-judd-karlman
Ithaca: AD White keynote (Cornell), Sep 12
https://deanoffaculty.cornell.edu/events/keynote-cory-doctorow-professor-at-large/
Ithaca: Enshittification at Autumn Leaves Books, Sept 13
https://www.autumnleavesithaca.com/event-details/enshittification-why-everything-got-worse-and-what-to-do-about-it
Ithaca: Radicalized Q&A (Cornell), Sept 16
https://events.cornell.edu/event/radicalized-qa-with-author-cory-doctorow
Ithaca: The Counterfeiters (Dinner/Movie Night) (Cornell), Sept 17
https://adwhiteprofessors.cornell.edu/visits/cory-doctorow/
Ithaca: Communication Power, Policy, and Practice (Cornell), Sept 18
https://events.cornell.edu/event/policy-provocations-a-conversation-about-communication-power-policy-and-practice
Ithaca: A Reverse-Centaur's Guide to Being a Better AI Critic (Cornell), Sept 18
https://events.cornell.edu/event/2025-nordlander-lecture-in-science-public-policy
NYC: Enshittification and Renewal (Cornell Tech), Sept 19
https://www.eventbrite.com/e/enshittification-and-renewal-a-conversation-with-cory-doctorow-tickets-1563948454929
NYC: Brooklyn Book Fair, Sept 21
https://brooklynbookfestival.org/event/big-techs-big-heist-cory-doctorow-in-conversation-with-adam-becker/
DC: Enshittification with Rohit Chopra (Politics and Prose), Oct 8
https://politics-prose.com/cory-doctorow-10825
NYC: Enshittification with Lina Khan (Brooklyn Public Library), Oct 9
https://www.bklynlibrary.org/calendar/cory-doctorow-discusses-central-library-dweck-20251009-0700pm
New Orleans: DeepSouthCon63, Oct 10-12
http://www.contraflowscifi.org/
Chicago: Enshittification with Anand Giridharadas (Chicago Humanities), Oct 15
https://www.oldtownschool.org/concerts/2025/10-15-2025-kara-swisher-and-cory-doctorow-on-enshittification/
San Francisco: Enshittification at Public Works (The Booksmith), Oct 20
https://app.gopassage.com/events/doctorow25
Madrid: 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

Recent appearances (permalink)

Nerd Harder! (This Week in Tech)
https://twit.tv/shows/this-week-in-tech/episodes/1047
Techtonic with Mark Hurst
https://www.wfmu.org/playlists/shows/155658
Cory Doctorow DESTROYS Enshittification (QAA Podcast)
https://soundcloud.com/qanonanonymous/cory-doctorow-destroys-enshitification-e338

Latest books (permalink)

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

Upcoming books (permalink)

"Canny Valley": A limited edition collection of the collages I create for Pluralistic, self-published, September 2025
"Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It," Farrar, Straus, Giroux, October 7 2025
https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374619329/enshittification/
"Unauthorized Bread": a middle-grades graphic novel adapted from my novella about refugees, toasters and DRM, FirstSecond, 2026
"Enshittification, Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It" (the graphic novel), Firstsecond, 2026
"The Memex Method," Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2026
"The Reverse-Centaur's Guide to AI," a short book about being a better AI critic, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2026

Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources:

Currently writing:

"The Reverse Centaur's Guide to AI," a short book for Farrar, Straus and Giroux about being an effective AI critic. FIRST DRAFT COMPLETE AND SUBMITTED.
A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING

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ISSN: 3066-764X

Pluralistic: Trump steals $400b from American workers (09 Sep 2025) - Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow

2025-09-09T17:40:21.000Z

Today's links

Trump steals $400b from American workers: You get a noncompete, and you get a noncompete, and you get a noncompete!
Hey look at this: Delights to delectate.
Object permanence: Spying baby-monitors; FBI tests spy-gear at Burning Man; Little Brother optioned by Paramount; Best-paid CEOs have worst-paid workers.
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.

Trump steals $400b from American workers (permalink)

Trump's stolen a lot of workers' wages over the years, but this week, he has become history's greatest thief of wages, having directed his FTC to stop enforcing its ban on noncompetes "agreements," a move that will cost American workers $400 billion over the next ten years:

https://prospect.org/labor/2025-09-09-trump-lets-bosses-grab-400-billion-worker-pay-noncompete-agreements/

The argument for noncompetes is this: modern industry is IP-intensive, and IP-intensive businesses need noncompetes, otherwise workers will take proprietary information with them when they walk out the door and bring it to a competitor. Who would invest in an IP-intensive firm under those circumstances?

I'll tell you who would: Hollywood and Silicon Valley. These are two most IP-intensive industries in human history, both of which were incubated in California, a state whose constitution prohibits noncompetes and has done so through the entire history of those two industries.

Indeed, we wouldn't have a Silicon Valley if California had noncompetes. Silicon Valley was founded by Robert Shockley, who won the Nobel Price for his role in inventing the silicon transistor (hence Silicon Valley). Shockley was a paranoid, virulent racist who couldn't produce a working chip because he was consumed by eugenic fervor and spent all his time on the road offering shares of his Nobel prize money to Black women who would agree to have their tubes tied.

Lucky for (literally) everyone (except Robert Shockley), California doesn't have noncompetes, so eight of his top engineers ("The Traitorous Eight") were able to quit Shockley Semiconductor and start the first successful chip business: Fairchild Semiconductor. And then two of Fairchild's top engineers quit to found Intel:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/10/24/the-traitorous-eight-and-the-battle-of-germanium-valley/

It's not just Silicon Valley that's rooted in wresting IP away from asshole control-freaks: that's Hollywood's story, too. Ever wonder how it was that movies were invented at Edison Labs in New Jersey, but the film industry was incubated in California, literally as far away from Edison as you could possibly get without ending up in Mexico?

In short: California got the motion picture industry because Edison was an asshole who used his patents to control what kinds of movies could be made and to suck rents out of filmmakers to license those patents. So the most ambitious filmmakers in America fled to California, where Edison couldn't easily enforce his patents, and founded Hollywood:

https://www.nytimes.com/2005/08/21/weekinreview/lala-land-the-origins.html?unlocked_article_code=1.kk8.5T1M.VSaEsN5Vn9tM&smid=url-share

And Hollywood stayed in Calfornia, a place where noncompetes couldn't be enforced, where "IP" could hop from one studio to another, smuggled out between the ears of writers, actors, directors, SFX wizards, prop makers, scenepainters, makeup artists, costumers, and the most creative professionals in Hollywood: accountants.

Empirically speaking, the function of noncompetes is to trap good workers and good ideas in companies controlled by asshole bosses who can't get anything done. Any disinvestment that can be attributed to the absence of noncompetes is completely swamped by the dividends generated by good workers and good ideas escaping from control-freak asshole bosses and founding productive firms. As ever, money talks and bullshit walks.

Today, one in 18 US workers is trapped by a noncompete, and those aren't the knowledge workers of Silicon Valley workers or Hollywood. So who is captured by this form of contractual indenture? The median US worker under noncompete is a fast-food worker stuck with the tipped minimum wage, or a pet groomer making the regular minimum wage. The function of the noncompete in America isn't to secure investment for knowledge-intensive industries – it's to stop the cashier at Wendy's from getting an extra $0.25/hour working the fry-trap at the McDonald's across the street.

Noncompetes are an integral part of the conservative project, which is the substitution of individual power for democratic choice. As Dan Savage puts it, the GOP agenda is "Husbands you can't leave [ed: ending no-fault divorce], pregnancies you can't prevent or terminate [ed: banning contraception and abortion], politicians you can't vote out of office [ed: gerrymandering and voter suppression."

Add to that: jobs you can't quit.

It's not just noncompetes that locks workers to shitty bosses. When Biden's FTC investigated the issue, they revealed a widespread practice called "training repayment agreement provision," (TRAPs) that puts workers on the hook for thousands of dollars if they quit or get fired:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/08/04/its-a-trap/#a-little-on-the-nose

A TRAPped worker – often a pet-groomer at a private equity-owned giant like Petsmart – is charged $5,500 or more for three weeks of "training" that actually amount to one or two weeks of sweeping up pet-hair. But if they leave or get fired in the next three years, they have to pay back that whole amount:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/08/04/its-a-trap/#a-little-on-the-nose

A closely related concept is "bondage fees," which have been imposed on whole classes of workers, like doormen in NYC apartment buildings:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/04/21/bondage-fees/#doorman-building

These fees trap workers in dead-end jobs by forcing anyone who hires them away to pay massive fees to their former employers. It's just another way to lock workers to businesses.

The irony here is that conservatives claim to worship "voluntarism" and "free choice," and insist that the virtue of markets is that they "aggregate price signals" so that companies can respond to these signals by efficiently matching demand to supply.

But though conservatives say they worship free choice as an engine of economic efficiency, they understand that their ideas are so unpopular that they can only succeed if people are coerced into adopting them, hence voter suppression, gerrymandering, noncompetes, and other heads-I-win/tails-you-lose propositions.

Noncompetes aren't about preventing the loss of IP – they're about preventing the loss of process knowledge, the know-how to turn ideas into products and services. Bosses love IP, because it can be alienated, hoarded and sold, while process knowledge is ineluctably vested in the bodies, minds and relations of workers. No IP law can keep employees from taking process knowledge with them on their way out the door, so bosses want to ban them from leaving:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/09/08/process-knowledge/#dance-monkey-dance

Biden's FTC banned noncompetes nationwide, for nearly every category of employment, deeming them an "unfair method of competition":

https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2023/03/ftc-extends-public-comment-period-its-proposed-rule-ban-noncompete-clauses-until-april-19

FTC economists estimated that killing noncompetes would result in $400b in wage gains for the American workforce over the next decade, as good workers migrated to good bosses.

Of course this was challenged by the business lobby, which sued to get the rule overturned. Trump's FTC has not only declined to defend the rule in court, they've also decided to stop trying to enforce it.

Trump is now the king of wage-theft, and MAGA is a relentless engine of enshittification. After all, the thesis of enshittification is that companies make their products and practices worse for suppliers, users and business customers only when they calculate that they can do so without facing punishment – from regulators, competitors, or workers.

Trump's regulators are all either comatose or so captured they wear gimpsuits and leashes in public. They're not keeping companies in line. And his antitrust shops have turned into pay-for-play operations, where a $1m payment to a MAGA influencer gets your case dropped:

https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/an-attempted-coup-at-the-antitrust

Trump neutered the National Labor Relations Board and now he's revived indentured servitude nationwide, formalizing the idea of government-backed jobs you can't quit.

If you can't quit your job or vote our your politicians, why wouldn't your boss or your elected representative just relentless fuck you over? Not merely for sadism's sake (though sadism undoubtedly plays a part here), but simply to make things better for themselves by making things worse for you? It's exactly the same logic of platform lock-in: once you can't leave, they don't have to keep you happy.

Formalizing the legality of noncompetes will only lead to their monotonic spread. When Antonin Scalia greenlit binding arbitration waivers in consumer contracts, only a tiny number of companies used them, forcing customers to sign away their right to sue them no matter how badly, negligently or criminally they behaved. Today, binding arbitration has expanded into every kind of contract, even to the point where groovy, open source, decentralized, federated social media platforms are forcing it on their users:

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

Same for noncompetes: as private equity rolls up whole sectors – funeral homes, pet groomers, hospices – they will stuff noncompetes into the contracts of every employer in each industry, so no matter where a worker applies for a job, they'll have to sign a noncompete. Why wouldn't they? If workers can't leave, they'll accept worse working conditions and lower pay. The best workers will be stuck with the worst employers.

And despite owing their existence to bans on noncompetes Silicon Valley and Hollywood will happily cram noncompetes down their workers' throats. If you doubt it, just read up on the "no poach" scandal, where the biggest tech and movie companies entered into a criminal conspiracy not to hire away each others' employees:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Tech_Employee_Antitrust_Litigation

The conservative future, folks: jobs you can't quit, politicians you can't vote out of office, husbands you can't divorce, and pregnancies you can't prevent or terminate.

Hey look at this (permalink)

Nate Silver's big list of grievances https://www.garbageday.email/p/nate-silver-s-big-list-of-grievances
Electronic Dance Music vs. Copyright: Law as Weaponized Culture https://drive.proton.me/urls/TVH0PW4TZ8#EM5VMl1BUlny
Google admits the open web is in ‘rapid decline’ https://www.theverge.com/news/773928/google-open-web-rapid-decline
Britain Owes Palestine https://www.britainowespalestine.org/
A Dramatic Reading of The Recent New York Times Dispatch from the Hamptons. https://bsky.app/profile/zohrankmamdani.bsky.social/post/3lyech7chqs2q

Object permanence (permalink)

#20yrsago Crooks take anti-forensic countermeasures https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg18725163-800-television-shows-scramble-forensic-evidence/

#20yrsago Recording industry demands digital radio broadcast flag https://web.archive.org/web/20051018100306/https://www.godwinslaw.org/weblog/archive/2005/09/09/riaas-big-push-to-copy-protect-digital-radio

#20yrsago Unicef/Save the Children sell out to recording industry https://web.archive.org/web/20050914034709/http://www.promusicae.org/pdf/campana_jovenes_musica_e_internet.pdf

#15yrsago TSA forces pregnant traveller into full-body scanner https://web.archive.org/web/20100910235117/https://consumerist.com/2010/09/pregnant-traveler-tsa-screeners-bullied-me-into-full-body-scan.html

#10yrsago Help crowdfund a relentless tsunami of FOIA requests into America’s private prisons https://www.muckrock.com/project/the-private-prison-project-8/

#10yrsago Your baby monitor is an Internet-connected spycam vulnerable to voyeurs and crooks https://web.archive.org/web/20210505050810/https://www.rapid7.com/blog/post/2015/09/02/iotsec-disclosure-10-new-vulns-for-several-video-baby-monitors/

#10yrsago Inept copyright bot sends 2600 a legal threat over ink blotches https://www.2600.com/content/2600-accused-using-unauthorized-ink-splotches

#10yrsago FBI used Burning Man to field-test new surveillance equipment https://www.muckrock.com/news/archives/2015/sep/01/burning-man-fbi-file/

#10yrsago Fury Road, hieroglyph edition https://imgur.com/gallery/you-will-ride-eternal-papyrus-chrome-you-will-ride-eternal-papyrus-chrome-BxdOcTr#/t/chrome

#10yrsago Little Brother optioned by Paramount https://www.tracking-board.com/tb-exclusive-paramount-pictures-picks-up-ny-times-bestselling-ya-novel-little-brother/

#10yrsago Record street-marches in Moldova against corrupt oligarchs https://www.euractiv.com/section/europe-s-east/news/moldova-banking-scandal-fuels-biggest-protest-ever/

#5yrsago Germany's amazing new competition proposalhttps://pluralistic.net/2020/09/09/free-sample/#wunderschoen

#5yrsago DRM versus human rights https://pluralistic.net/2020/09/09/free-sample/#que-viva

#1yrago America's best-paid CEOs have the worst-paid employees https://pluralistic.net/2024/09/09/low-wage-100/#executive-excess

Upcoming appearances (permalink)

Ithaca: Enshittification at Buffalo Street Books, Sept 11
https://buffalostreetbooks.com/event/2025-09-11/cory-doctorow-tcpl-librarian-judd-karlman
Ithaca: AD White keynote (Cornell), Sep 12
https://deanoffaculty.cornell.edu/events/keynote-cory-doctorow-professor-at-large/
Ithaca: Enshittification at Autumn Leaves Books, Sept 13
https://www.autumnleavesithaca.com/event-details/enshittification-why-everything-got-worse-and-what-to-do-about-it
Ithaca: Radicalized Q&A (Cornell), Sept 16
https://events.cornell.edu/event/radicalized-qa-with-author-cory-doctorow
Ithaca: The Counterfeiters (Dinner/Movie Night) (Cornell), Sept 17
https://adwhiteprofessors.cornell.edu/visits/cory-doctorow/
Ithaca: Communication Power, Policy, and Practice (Cornell), Sept 18
https://events.cornell.edu/event/policy-provocations-a-conversation-about-communication-power-policy-and-practice
Ithaca: A Reverse-Centaur's Guide to Being a Better AI Critic (Cornell), Sept 18
https://events.cornell.edu/event/2025-nordlander-lecture-in-science-public-policy
NYC: Enshittification and Renewal (Cornell Tech), Sept 19
https://www.eventbrite.com/e/enshittification-and-renewal-a-conversation-with-cory-doctorow-tickets-1563948454929
NYC: Brooklyn Book Fair, Sept 21
https://brooklynbookfestival.org/event/big-techs-big-heist-cory-doctorow-in-conversation-with-adam-becker/
DC: Enshittification with Rohit Chopra (Politics and Prose), Oct 8
https://politics-prose.com/cory-doctorow-10825
NYC: Enshittification with Lina Khan (Brooklyn Public Library), Oct 9
https://www.bklynlibrary.org/calendar/cory-doctorow-discusses-central-library-dweck-20251009-0700pm
New Orleans: DeepSouthCon63, Oct 10-12
http://www.contraflowscifi.org/
Chicago: Enshittification with Anand Giridharadas (Chicago Humanities), Oct 15
https://www.oldtownschool.org/concerts/2025/10-15-2025-kara-swisher-and-cory-doctorow-on-enshittification/
San Francisco: Enshittification at Public Works (The Booksmith), Oct 20
https://app.gopassage.com/events/doctorow25
Madrid: 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

Recent appearances (permalink)

Nerd Harder! (This Week in Tech)
https://twit.tv/shows/this-week-in-tech/episodes/1047
Techtonic with Mark Hurst
https://www.wfmu.org/playlists/shows/155658
Cory Doctorow DESTROYS Enshittification (QAA Podcast)
https://soundcloud.com/qanonanonymous/cory-doctorow-destroys-enshitification-e338

Latest books (permalink)

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

Upcoming books (permalink)

"Canny Valley": A limited edition collection of the collages I create for Pluralistic, self-published, September 2025
"Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It," Farrar, Straus, Giroux, October 7 2025
https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374619329/enshittification/
"Unauthorized Bread": a middle-grades graphic novel adapted from my novella about refugees, toasters and DRM, FirstSecond, 2026
"Enshittification, Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It" (the graphic novel), Firstsecond, 2026
"The Memex Method," Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2026
"The Reverse-Centaur's Guide to AI," a short book about being a better AI critic, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2026

Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources:

Currently writing:

"The Reverse Centaur's Guide to AI," a short book for Farrar, Straus and Giroux about being an effective AI critic. FIRST DRAFT COMPLETE AND SUBMITTED.
A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING

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

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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

Event Review: Doin' the Lambeth Walk (Oi!) ★★★⯪☆ - Terence Eden’s Blog

2025-09-09T11:34:19.000Z

Historical entities have been sighted in the old village of Lambeth. Are they ghosts? Visions? Or intruders through a crack in time? Join your guides and explore the backwaters and byways that slowly spread over the mysterious marshes of Lambeth.

Most walking tours have a guide drag you around the well-known tourist hot-spots while they read out a bit from Wikipedia. Minimum Labyrinth’s tour is different. We were told to find the meeting spot by looking for a mysterious message chalked somewhere on Westminster Bridge.

As the bells from Big Ben faded - ghosts appeared!

We were whisked away onto a tour which was part history lesson, part ghost story, and part science-fiction extravaganza. As we wandered through the streets, various "baddies" appeared out of nowhere. Ghosts came to chat with us and then promptly vanished. Music played causing onlookers to pause their hurried strolling. It was somewhere between immersive theatre and immersed theatre.

The walk was well paced. The three acts each consisted of 50 minutes of strolling then 30 minutes in a pub. Perfect for a loo-break and refreshments. The cast didn't stay in character during the pub - which was a relief for them, and meant we could chat about what we thought of the event.

It took us through some parts of London I was vaguely familiar with - and some which were completely new. It is brilliant having someone explain exactly why that piece of art is where it is, or who commissioned that church, and point out that exquisite detail you might have missed.

Without wishing to spoil anyone's fun, the sci-fi element was the weakest part of the adventure. It paid "loving homage" to an abandoned and somewhat forgotten TV series. I felt that the story would have been much stronger without tying it in to a larger universe. No one under 50 recognised the characters so I think that aspect fell a little flat.

I also felt that there wasn't quite enough to do during the walk. There were some neat snippets of information but there were long stretches of walking down streets without much going on. Given the slightly spooky and sci-fi nature of the story, I would have expected the audience to have been given little tasks or asked to keep a lookout for ghosts.

That said, the tour took us round some stunning and unexpected spots. The ghostly goings-on were suitably mysterious and the cast kept us all safe and entertained. We had fun exploring little alleyways and art displays which were completely unknown to us.

The team at Minimum Labyrinth do a variety of weird tours and events. Worth checking out if you want something entertaining and unusual.

Pluralistic: Fingerspitzengefühl (08 Sep 2025) - Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow

2025-09-08T15:51:58.000Z

Today's links

Fingerspitzengefühl: IP vs process knowledge.
Hey look at this: Delights to delectate.
Object permanence: Buddhist hell theme-park; ORG launches; Yahoo spies for Beijing; Secret plan for border laptop-searches; BBC Creative Archive launches; Penn and Teller BBS; Immortan Trump; IP.
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.

Fingerspitzengefühl (permalink)

This was the plan: America would stop making things and instead make recipes, the "IP" that could be sent to other countries to turn into actual stuff, in distant lands without the pesky environmental and labor rules that forced businesses accept reduced profits because they weren't allowed to maim their workers and poison the land, air and water.

This was quite a switch! At the founding of the American republic, the US refused to extend patent protection to foreign inventors. The inventions of foreigners would be fair game for Americans, who could follow their recipes without paying a cent, and so improve the productivity of the new nation without paying rent to old empires over the sea.

It was only once America found itself exporting as much as it imported that it saw fit to recognize the prerogatives of foreign inventors, as part of reciprocal agreements that required foreigners to seek permission and pay royalties to American patent-holders.

But by the end of the 20th Century, America's ruling class was no longer interested in exporting things; they wanted to export ideas, and receive things in return. You can see why: America has a limited supply of things, but there's an infinite supply of ideas (in theory, anyway).

There was one problem: why wouldn't the poor-but-striving nations abroad copy the American Method for successful industrialization? If ignoring Europeans' patents allowed America to become the richest and most powerful nation in the world, why wouldn't, say, China just copy all that American "IP"? If seizing foreigners' inventions without permission was good enough for Thomas Jefferson, why not Jiang Zemin?

America solved this problem with the promise of "free trade." The World Trade Organization divided the world into two blocs: countries that could trade with one another without paying tariffs, and the rabble without who had to navigate a complex O(^2) problem of different tariff schedules between every pair of nations.

To join the WTO club, countries had to sign up to a side-treaty called the Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS). Under the TRIPS, the Jeffersonian plan for industrialization (taking foreigners' ideas without permission) was declared a one-off, a scheme only the US got to try and no other country could benefit from. For China to join the WTO and gain tariff-free access to the world's markets, it would have to agree to respect foreign patents, copyrights, trademarks and other "IP."

We know the story of what followed over the next quarter-century: China became the world's factory, and became so structurally important that even if it violated its obligations under the TRIPS, "stealing the IP" of rich nations, no one could afford to close their borders to Chinese imports, because every country except China had forgotten how to make things.

But this isn't the whole story – it's not even the most important part of it. In his new book Breakneck, Dan Wang (a Chinese-born Canadian who has lived extensively in Silicon Valley and in China) devotes a key chapter to "process knowledge":

https://danwang.co/breakneck/

What's "process knowledge"? It's all the intangible knowledge that workers acquire as they produce goods, combined with the knowledge that their managers acquire from overseeing that labor. The Germans call it "Fingerspitzengefühl" ("fingertip-feeling"), like the sense of having a ball balanced on your fingertips, and knowing exactly which way it will tip as you tilt your hand this way or that.

Wang's book is big and complicated, and I haven't yet finished it. There's plenty I disagree with Wang about – I think he overstates the role of proceduralism in slowing down American progress and understates the role monopoly and oligarchy play in corrupting the rule of law. But the chapter on process knowledge is revelatory. Don't take my word for it: read Henry Farrell, who says that "[process knowledge] is the message of Dan Wang's new book":

https://www.programmablemutter.com/p/process-knowledge-is-crucial-to-economic

And Dan Davies, who uses the example of the UK's iconic Brompton bikes to explain the importance of process knowledge:

https://backofmind.substack.com/p/the-brompton-ness-of-it-all

Process knowledge is everything from "Here's how to decant feedstock into this gadget so it doesn't jam," to "here's how to adjust the flow of this precursor on humid days to account for the changes in viscosity" to "if you can't get the normal tech to show up and calibrate the part, here's the phone number of the guy who retired last year and will do it for time-and-a-half."

It can also be decidedly high-tech. A couple years ago, the legendary hardware hacker Andrew "bunnie" Huang explained to me his skepticism about the CHIPS Act's goal of onshoring the most advanced (4-5nm) chips.

Bunnie laid out the process by which these chips are etched: first you need to make the correct wavelength of light for the nanolithography machine.

Stage one of that is spraying droplets of molten tin into an evacuated chamber, where each droplet is tracked by a computer vision system that targets them to be hit with a highly specialized laser that smashes each droplet into a precise coin shape. Then, a second kind of extremely esoteric laser evaporates each of these little tin coins to make a specific kind of tin vapor that can be used to generate the right wavelength of light.

This light is then played over two wafers on reciprocating armatures; each wafer needs to be precisely (as in nanograms and nanometers) the same dimensions and weight, otherwise the moving platters they slide back and forth on will get out of balance and the wafers will be spoiled as they are mis-etched.

This process is so esoteric, and has so many figurative and literal moving parts, that it needs to be closely overseen and continuously adjusted by someone with a PhD in electrical engineering. That overseer needs to wear a clean-room suit, and they have to work an eight-hour shift without a bathroom, food or water break (because getting out of the suit means going through an airlock means shutting down the system means long delays and wastage).

That PhD EENG is making $50k/year. Bunnie's topline explanation for the likely failure of the CHIPS Act is that this is a process that could only be successfully executed in a country "with an amazing educational system and a terrible passport." For bunnie, the extensive educational subsidies that produced Taiwan's legion of skilled electrical engineers and the global system that denied them the opportunity to emigrate to higher-wage zones were the root of the country's global dominance in advanced chip manufacture.

I have no doubt that this is true, but I think it's incomplete. What bunnie is describing isn't merely the expertise imparted by attaining a PhD in electrical engineering – it's the process knowledge built up by generations of chip experts who debugged generations of systems that preceded the current tin-vaporizing Rube Goldberg machines.

Even if you described how these machines worked to a doctoral EENG who had never worked in this specific field, they couldn't oversee these machines. Sure, they'd have the technical background to be seriously impressed by how cool all this shit is, and you might be able to train them don a bunny suit and hold onto their bladders for 8 hours and make the machine go, but simply handing them the "IP" for this process will not get you a chip foundry.

It's undeniable that there's been plenty of Chinese commercial espionage, some of it with state backing. But in reading Wang, it's clear that the country's leaders have cooled on the importance of "IP" – indeed, these days, they call it "imaginary property," and call the IP economy the "imaginary economy" (contrast with the "real economy" of making stuff).

Wang evocatively describes how China built up its process knowledge over the WTO years, starting with simple assembly of complex components made abroad, then progressing to making those components, then progressing to coming up with novel ways to reconfiguring them ("a drone is a cellphone with propellers"). He explains how the vicious cycle of losing process knowledge accelerated the decline of manufacturing in the west: every time a factory goes to China, US manufacturers that had been in its supply chain lose process knowledge. You can no longer call up that former supplier and brainstorm solutions to tricky production snags, which means that other factories in the supply chain suffer, and they, too get offshored to China.

America's vicious cycle was China's virtuous cycle. The process knowledge that drained out of America accumulated in China. Years of experience solving problems in earlier versions of new equipment and processes gives workers a conceptual framework to debug the current version – they know about the raw mechanisms subsumed in abstraction layers and sealed packages and can visualize what's going on inside those black boxes.

Likewise in colonial America: taking foreigners' patents was just table-stakes. Real improvement came from the creation of informal communities built around manufacturing centers, and from the pollinators who spread innovations around among practitioners. Long before John Deere turned IP troll and locked farmers out of servicing their own tractors, they paid and army of roving engineers who would visit farmers to learn about the ways they'd improved their tractors, and integrate these improvements into new designs:

https://securityledger.com/2019/03/opinion-my-grandfathers-john-deere-would-support-our-right-to-repair/

But here's the thing: while "IP" can be bought and sold by the capital classes, process knowledge is inseparably vested in the minds and muscle-memory of their workers. People who own the instructions are constitutionally prone to assuming that making the recipe is the important part, while following the recipe is donkey-work you can assign to any freestanding oaf who can take instruction.

Think of John Philip Sousa, decrying the musicians who recorded and sold his compositions on early phonograms:

These talking machines are going to ruin the artistic development of music in this country. When I was a boy…in front of every house in the summer evenings, you would find young people together singing the songs of the day or old songs. Today you hear these infernal machines going night and day. We will not have a vocal cord left. The vocal cord will be eliminated by a process of evolution, as was the tail of man when he came from the ape.

For Sousa, musicians were just the trained monkeys who followed the instructions that talented composers set down on paper and handed off to other trained monkeys to print and distribute for sale.

The exaltation of "IP" over process knowledge is part of the ancient practice of bosses denigrating their workers' contribution to the bottom line. It's key to the myth that workers can be replaced by AI: an AI can consume all the "IP" produced by workers, but it doesn't have their process knowledge. It can't, because process knowledge is embodied and enmeshed, it is relational and physical. It doesn't appear in training data.

In other words, elevating "IP" over process knowledge is a form of class war. And now that the world's store of process knowledge has been sent to the global south, the class war has gone racial. Think of how Howard Dean – now a paid shill for the pharma lobby – peddled the racist lie that there was no point in dropping patent protections for the covid vaccines, because brown people in poor countries were too stupid to make advanced vaccines:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/04/08/howard-dino/#the-scream

The truth is that the world's largest vaccine factories are to be found in the global south, particularly India, and these factories sit at the center of a vast web of process knowledge, embedded in relationships and built up with hard-won problem-solving.

Bosses would love it if process knowledge didn't matter, because then workers could finally be tamed by industry. We could just move the "IP" around to the highest bidders with the cheapest workforces. But Wang's book makes a forceful argument that it's easier to build up a powerful, resilient society based on process knowledge than it is to do so with IP. What good is a bunch of really cool recipes if no one can follow them?

I think that bosses are, psychoanalytically speaking, haunted by the idea that their workers own the process knowledge that is at the heart of their profits. That's why bosses are so obsessed with noncompete "agreements." If you can't own your workers' expertise, then you must own your workers. Any time a debate breaks out over noncompetes, a boss will say something like, "My intellectual property walks out the door of my shop every day at 5PM." They're wrong: the intellectual property is safely stored on the company's hard drives – it's the process knowledge that walks out the door.

You can see this in the prepper dreaming of the ruling class. Preppers are consumed by "disaster fantasies" in which the world ends in a way that they – and they alone – can put to rights. In Dancing at Armageddon: Survivalism and Chaos in Modern Times, the ethnographer Richard Mitchell describes a water chemist who is obsessed with terrorists poisoning the water supply:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/03/22/preppers-are-larpers/#preppers-unprepared

This chemist has stockpiled everything he would need to restore order after a mass water-supply poisoning. But when Mitchell presses him to explain why he thinks it's likely that his town's water supply would be poisoned by terrorists, the prepper is at a loss. Eventually, he basically confesses that it would just be really cool if the world ended in such a way that only he could save it.

Which is a problem for a boss. The chemist has a lot of process knowledge, he knows how to do stuff. But the boss knows how to raise money from investors, how to ignore the company's essential qualitative traits (such as the relationships between workers) and reduce the firm to a set of optimizable spreadsheet cells that are legible to the financial markets. What kind of crisis recovery demands those skills?

As I posit in my novella "The Masque of the Red Death," the perfect boss fantasy is one in which the boss hunkers down in a luxury bunker while the rabble rebuild civilization from the ashes:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/03/14/masque-of-the-red-death/#masque

And once that task is complete, the boss emerges from his hidey-hole with an army of mercenaries in bomb-collars, a vast cache of AR-15s, gemstone-quality emeralds, and thumbdrives full of bitcoin, and does what he does best – takes over the show and tells everyone else what to do, from the comfort his high-walled fortress, with its mountain of canned goods and its harem.

The absurdity of this – as I try to show with my story – is that the process knowledge of wheedling, bullying and coercing other people to work for you is actually not very useful. The IP you can buy and sell an inert curiosity until it finds its way to people who can put it into process.

Hey look at this (permalink)

Statement on discourse about ActivityPub and AT Protocol https://github.com/swicg/general/blob/master/statements%2F2025-09-05-activitypub-and-atproto-discourse.md
A message from Emily James, director of the upcoming documentary Enshittification: The Film. https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/doctorow/enshittification-the-drm-free-audiobook/posts/4478169
The story of how RSS beat Microsoft https://buttondown.com/blog/rss-vs-ice
Ideas Have Consequences The Impact of Law and Economics on American Justice https://academic.oup.com/qje/advance-article/doi/10.1093/qje/qjaf042/8241352

Object permanence (permalink)

#20yrsago BBC Creative Archive pilot launches http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/entertainment/4225914.stm

#20yrsago Gold Rush-era sailing ship ruin excavated in San Fran https://web.archive.org/web/20050910151416/https://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/n/a/2005/09/06/state/n154446D61.DTL

#20yrsago iTunes phone gratuitously crippled by DRM https://web.archive.org/web/20051001030643/http://playlistmag.com/weblogs/todayatplaylist/2005/09/hiddengoodies/index.php

#20yrsago My photos from the Buddhist hells of the Singaporean Tiger Balm themepark https://memex.craphound.com/2005/09/07/corys-photos-from-the-buddhist-hells-of-the-singaporean-tiger-balm-themepark/

#20yrsago Online Rights Group UK launches https://web.archive.org/web/20051120005155/http://www.openrightsgroup.org/

#20yrsago Yahoo rats out Chinese reporter to Beijing, writer gets 10 years in jail http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/4221538.stm

#15yrsago Secret copyright treaty: USA caves on border laptop/phone/MP3 player searches for copyright infringement https://www.michaelgeist.ca/2010/09/acta-enforcement-practice-chapter/

#15yrsago Login screens from Penn and Teller BBS, 1987 https://www.flickr.com/photos/davidkha/4969386169/

#10yrsago Antihoarding: When “decluttering” becomes a compulsion https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2015/09/ocd-obsessive-compulsive-decluttering-hoarding/401591/

#10yrsago NZ bans award-winning YA novel after complaints from conservative Christian group https://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/sep/07/new-zealand-bans-into-the-river-teenage-novel-outcry-christian-group

#10yrsago Immortan Trump https://imgur.com/gallery/relevant-donald-trump-cos-play-OQe2rU5

#5yrsago Antitrust trouble for cloud services https://pluralistic.net/2020/09/08/attack-surface-kickstarter/#reasonable-agreements

#5yrsago FTC about to hammer Intuit https://pluralistic.net/2020/09/08/attack-surface-kickstarter/#tax-fraud

#5yrsago IP https://pluralistic.net/2020/09/08/attack-surface-kickstarter/#control

#5yrsago My first-ever Kickstarter https://pluralistic.net/2020/09/08/attack-surface-kickstarter/#asks

#5yrsago David Graeber on Spectre TV https://pluralistic.net/2020/09/07/facebook-v-humanity/#spectre

#5yrsago Facebook's foreseeable election consequences https://pluralistic.net/2020/09/07/facebook-v-humanity/#zuck-off

Upcoming appearances (permalink)

Ithaca: Enshittification at Buffalo Street Books, Sept 11
https://buffalostreetbooks.com/event/2025-09-11/cory-doctorow-tcpl-librarian-judd-karlman
Ithaca: AD White keynote (Cornell), Sep 12
https://deanoffaculty.cornell.edu/events/keynote-cory-doctorow-professor-at-large/
Ithaca: Enshittification at Autumn Leaves Books, Sept 13
https://www.autumnleavesithaca.com/event-details/enshittification-why-everything-got-worse-and-what-to-do-about-it
Ithaca: Radicalized Q&A (Cornell), Sept 16
https://events.cornell.edu/event/radicalized-qa-with-author-cory-doctorow
Ithaca: The Counterfeiters (Dinner/Movie Night) (Cornell), Sept 17
https://adwhiteprofessors.cornell.edu/visits/cory-doctorow/
Ithaca: Communication Power, Policy, and Practice (Cornell), Sept 18
https://events.cornell.edu/event/policy-provocations-a-conversation-about-communication-power-policy-and-practice
Ithaca: A Reverse-Centaur's Guide to Being a Better AI Critic (Cornell), Sept 18
https://events.cornell.edu/event/2025-nordlander-lecture-in-science-public-policy
NYC: Enshittification and Renewal (Cornell Tech), Sept 19
https://www.eventbrite.com/e/enshittification-and-renewal-a-conversation-with-cory-doctorow-tickets-1563948454929
DC: Enshittification with Rohit Chopra (Politics and Prose), Oct 8
https://politics-prose.com/cory-doctorow-10825
NYC: Enshittification with Lina Khan (Brooklyn Public Library), Oct 9
https://www.bklynlibrary.org/calendar/cory-doctorow-discusses-central-library-dweck-20251009-0700pm
New Orleans: DeepSouthCon63, Oct 10-12
http://www.contraflowscifi.org/
Chicago: Enshittification with Anand Giridharadas (Chicago Humanities), Oct 15
https://www.oldtownschool.org/concerts/2025/10-15-2025-kara-swisher-and-cory-doctorow-on-enshittification/
San Francisco: Enshittification at Public Works (The Booksmith), Oct 20
https://app.gopassage.com/events/doctorow25
Madrid: 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

Recent appearances (permalink)

Nerd Harder! (This Week in Tech)
https://twit.tv/shows/this-week-in-tech/episodes/1047
Techtonic with Mark Hurst
https://www.wfmu.org/playlists/shows/155658
Cory Doctorow DESTROYS Enshittification (QAA Podcast)
https://soundcloud.com/qanonanonymous/cory-doctorow-destroys-enshitification-e338

Latest books (permalink)

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

Upcoming books (permalink)

"Canny Valley": A limited edition collection of the collages I create for Pluralistic, self-published, September 2025
"Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It," Farrar, Straus, Giroux, October 7 2025
https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374619329/enshittification/
"Unauthorized Bread": a middle-grades graphic novel adapted from my novella about refugees, toasters and DRM, FirstSecond, 2026
"Enshittification, Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It" (the graphic novel), Firstsecond, 2026
"The Memex Method," Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2026
"The Reverse-Centaur's Guide to AI," a short book about being a better AI critic, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2026

Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources:

Currently writing:

"The Reverse Centaur's Guide to AI," a short book for Farrar, Straus and Giroux about being an effective AI critic. FIRST DRAFT COMPLETE AND SUBMITTED.
A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING

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

Some thoughts on personal git hosting - Terence Eden’s Blog

2025-09-07T11:34:46.000Z

As part of my ongoing (and somewhat futile) efforts to ReDeCentralise, I'm looking at moving my personal projects away from GitHub. I already have accounts with GitLab and CodeBerg - but both of those sites are run by someone else. While they're lovely now, there's nothing stopping them becoming as slow or AI-infested as GitHub.

So I want to host my own Git instance for my personal projects. I'm experimenting with https://git.edent.tel/

It isn't quite self-hosted; I'm paying PikaPod €2/month to deal with the hassle of hosting and updating the software. I get to point my domain name at it which means I can always change the underlying service if I want. For example, it uses Gitea and I might want to switch to Foregjo later.

So far, it works. But there are a few significant drawbacks.

Network Effects

A large service like GitHub has network effects which are incredible. It feels like 90%+ of all developers have an account there. That means if someone wants to leave a comment or send a PR there is no barrier to entry. That's huge! There are a bunch of popular FOSS projects which make me sign up for yet another service when all I want to do is send a simple bug report which I find deeply annoying.

Luckily, Gitea has built in support for various OAuth providers. So I've set up single-sign-on with Gits Hub and Lab.

I asked people how easy it was to use - most people were able to use it, although a few people wanted a local-only account.

But is is still a bit of a faff. Even a little bit of hassle turns people away.

Forking isn't Federated

Suppose you want to make a Pull Request or just take a copy of the code. At the moment, you have to create a fork on my server. There's no way to easily fork something to your GitHub or personal server.

You can git clone the repo to your local machine, and you can manually move it elsewhere, but there's no way to send a PR from your repo to mine.

There's also no way for users to find other forks. Perhaps the upcoming ForgeFed proposals will fix things - but it doesn't exist yet.

As pointed out in "Let's Make Sure Github Doesn't Become the only Option" - most of the tooling of git hosting platforms isn't adequate for modern needs.

Discoverability

The easiest way to find code at the moment is to search GitHub. Moving my stuff to a different site means it will only be discovered by a general search engine.

I want people to find and use my code. If that's hard, they won't. I can point existing users to the repo - but it still cuts down on discovery.

Admin Hassles

Although PikaPods takes care of all the hosting administration, there's still the faff of setting up all of Gitea's options.

If I get hit by an automated spam attack, it'll be up to me to clean it up.

I'm not sure if I have the time, patience, or expertise to correctly and safely configure everything. Time spent administrating is time not spent coding.

Sponsorship

I get a little bit of money when people sponsor me on GitHub. There's no "sponsor" option on Gitea and, even if there was, the network effects of GitHub are substantial. Getting people to enter their credit card info into a random site isn't as convenient as clicking a button in GitHub.

Now What?

My most popular Github repo has around 140 contributors. I genuinely don't think I could attract that many people to OAuth onto my personal git hosting service.

Gitea seems to have a mixed reputation. But it's the only one offered by PikaPods.

There are interesting discussions about how to replace GitHub but they're only in the early stages.

Although €2/mo isn't a huge amount, I've gotten used to having free services on GitHub / GitLab / CodeBerg.

So this, I think, is my plan:

Leave my popular / sponsored repos on GitHub
Move my smaller repos to https://git.edent.tel/
Create new repos in there as well

I'm also going to look for a hosted Forgejo instance which lets me use my own subdomain - hopefully at a cheaper or comparable price. If you have any recommendations - please let me know!

Bill Ackman suggests Eric Adams place Polymarket bet and then drop out of mayoral race - Molly White's microblog feed

2025-09-06T18:45:16.000Z

Bill Ackman suggests Eric Adams place Polymarket bet and then drop out of mayoral race

Billionaire hedge fund manager Bill Ackman suggests Eric Adams drop out of the New York mayoral race, but first "place a large bet on Andrew Cuomo and then announce your withdrawal from the race" to "fund [his] future".

He writes: "There is no insider trading on Polymarket." Americans are currently prohibited from trading on Polymarket (though Polymarket makes only perfunctory attempts to block it, which are widely circumvented.)

By "no insider trading on Polymarket" he likely is referring to the fact that the SEC can't bring insider trading charges because Polymarket contracts are not securities. That doesn't mean trading on insider information would be legal (or ethical), though.

Pluralistic: Stock buybacks are stock swindles (06 Sep 2025) - Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow

2025-09-06T15:51:17.000Z

Today's links

Stock buybacks are stock swindles: Raising the value of a stock without raising the value of the company.
Hey look at this: Delights to delectate.
Object permanence: Marshmellow longtermism; Physicists are not epidemiologists; CO asphyxiation accounts for half of Hurricane Laura deaths.
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.

Stock buybacks are stock swindles (permalink)

Trump's doing a lot of oligarch shit, and while some of it very visible and obvious, other moves, like throwing the door open to "stock buybacks" are technical and obscure, but it's worth paying attention to this, because this form of stock swindle stands to make billionaires a lot richer (and thus more powerful).

American companies are headed for the stock buying-backest year on record, having already pissed away $1.1 trillion in 2025:

https://www.baystreet.ca/stockstowatch/21522/Stock-Buybacks-Surpass-1-Trillion

So what's a stock buyback, then? On the surface, it's pretty straightforward: during a stock buyback, the company uses its cash reserves to buy its own stock. When they do this, the supply of shares goes down, so the price per share goes up.

Say a company has issued 1,000 shares, and they're selling at $1,000 per share. That company has a "market cap" of $1,000,000 (1,000 x 1,000). Now the company takes $500,000 out of its bank account and buys half of those shares. Now you have a million-dollar company with only 500 shares, so each of those shares is now worth $2,000 (1,000,000/500 = 2,000).

Why is this so bad?

Let's start with what capitalism's advocates claim about the power of markets. Markets, they say, are a kind of alchemist's crucible, a vessel that transforms self-interest to a public good. Capitalism's theory is that if we let people pursue their own profit, they will chase efficiency, because anything that lowers costs will leave more profit for capitalists to reap. But as those capitalists discover better, more productive ways to get goods and services to market, they face competition, who force them to accept lower profits, which makes everything cheaper and more abundant for us. That means that even the greediest capitalists have to find new ways to increase efficiency in order to recapture their profits. Lather, rinse, repeat, and capitalism can make more material abundance available that we can dream of.

This isn't just what capitalists say – it's also the thesis of Chapter One of The Communist Manifesto:

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/31/books/review/a-spectre-haunting-china-mieville.html?unlocked_article_code=1.j08.a1xP.KLkhosG_PxkP&smid=url-share

Marx and Engels were seriously impressed by the productive power of capitalism, but they had a prescient suspicion that capitalists hate capitalism, and would do whatever they could to interrupt this process. After all, if you can prevent competitors from entering the market, you can innovate just once, find a new way to make something that's cheaper and better, and never share those profits with your customers or workers, because you won't have to outbid your competitors. The alchemical reaction is halted at the point where capitalists are rewarded for their efficiency, and they are never forced to repeat that performance.

Monopoly isn't the only way that capitalists can thwart this transformation of greed into abundance. The finance sector is awash in illegal scams that let capitalists get rich without increasing efficiency or making anyone except for themselves better off.

Take "wash-trading": this is when a seller buys their own products, sometimes using an alias, other times using a shill. The idea is to trick people into thinking that something is valuable and liquid (that is, that you can easily find buyers for it), when it is really worthless and undesirable. Remember all those multi-million-dollar NFT sales? Almost every one was a wash trade, a way to pump and dump.

The problem here isn't just that the buyer is getting defrauded. It's also that the seller is being "allocated capital" (getting money) that gives them power – power to decide what else should be bought and sold in our society.

Remember the alchemy theory of markets: if you're a productive capital allocator (if you make things that lots of people desire), you are given more capital to allocate further. This is the market's "invisible hand": elevating the people with proven track records to positions of power over their neighbors and their society, on the basis that they have shown themselves capable of enriching us all, because (the theory goes), capitalism rewards people whose greed translates into a common benefit. As Adam Smith wrote:

It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker, that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest. We address ourselves, not to their humanity but to their self-love, and never talk to them of our own necessities but of their advantages.

Wash trading creates misallocations of capital. It makes stupid people rich, and lets them allocate capital to projects that make us all worse off. The whole theory of markets – the reason we're all supposed to leave money that we could all use to make ourselves better off in the hands of the wealthy – is that wealth is the payoff for efficiency, and we are all better off when the most efficient allocators make investment decisions.

Modern theorists of capitalism tell us that this isn't alchemy, it's computing. The market is a giant "information-processing" system that incorporates trillions of "price signals" (how much we are willing to spend and how much we are willing to accept, for goods, services and labor). The market processes all these signals to direct allocation and production, ensuring that shortages are met with increases in supply, and that overproduction is tamped down by falling prices, and that inefficiencies provoke investment in process improvements.

Which brings me back to stock buybacks. Stock buybacks are a way to make a company's shares more valuable, even as the company itself becomes less valuable.

Think of it this way: imagine you've got a company with 1,000 shares, worth $1,000 each, and this company has $500,000 in the bank. The company is valued at $1,000,000 (1,000 x $1,000), and half of that valuation is based on its cash reserves ($500,000 in the bank), which means the other half must be reflected in the company's physical plant and "intangibles" (knowledge, contracts, efficient team structures, copyrights, patents, etc).

The company announces a stock buyback: they will withdraw the $500,000 from its bank account and buy half the shares. The company is now $500,000 poorer, which means that its shares should go down in value. After all, that $500,000 is capital that could have been mobilized to make the company more profitable: it could have been spent to hire new people, do R&D, or buy machines that lower the price of making the company's products. That $500,000 represented the company's future growth potential, and the company has just pissed away that potential.

This is a company whose future growth has gotten much more expensive, because it will have to borrow in order to fund any expansion. Its shares should be worth less than before. By zeroing out its cash reserves, the company has actually reduced its value by more than the value of those reserves, because it is now stuck in place, forced to fund expansion with debt rather than capital. It is at risk from "shocks" like higher rents or higher energy prices. It's a brittle, hollow vessel for the intangibles that made up the other $500,000 in valuation before the buyback. It will be worse at turning those intangibles into profits in the future.

But the buyback hasn't reduced the price of the company's shares: it has doubled that price. The company has made its shares more valuable while making itself less valuable. If you think that markets are a computer that calculates efficient allocation based on prices, this should freak you the fuck out, because as we all know, the iron law of computing is "garbage in, garbage out." The company is feeding an objectively – and grossly – false price signal into the computer's input hopper.

That's why stock buybacks were illegal until 1982, when Ronald Reagan's SEC changed its Rule 10-b to legitimize this form of stock manipulation and turn stock swindlers into billionaires:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/09/09/low-wage-100/#executive-excess

At root, stock buybacks are just wash-trading, the company buying its own shares to move their price, without doing anything to justify that price movement. Before Reagan legalized stock buybacks, companies returned capital to their investors through dividends. Why would companies prefer buybacks to dividends? Because corporate executives hold tons of shares in their employer's company, and it's much better for them to push those share prices higher even as they gut the company's ability to function.

So why should you care about this? After all, statistically you own either very little or no stock. The richest 10% of US households own more than 93% of all stocks held by Americans:

https://inequality.org/article/stock-ownership-concentration/

Your 401(k) account might see a small boost from this stock swindle, but again, statistically, that 401(k) is unmeasurably infinitesimal compared to the holdings of America's oligarchs.

Stock buybacks are a way of making the stock owning class much richer, by swindling everyday investors – who don't understand that companies who drain their cash reserves are less valuable – into buying shares in the companies they loot.

And that's why you should care: in the first 8 months of 2025, Trump has allowed America's oligarchs to get $1.1 trillion richer. That's money that you don't have – you won't get the lower prices and higher wages and superior goods that $1.1t would have paid for if companies had spent it on process improvements. It's money they have, which they can spend on things that make you worse off – buying everything from Twitter to the presidency.

There's a lot to be furious about right now, like the masked fascist goons kidnapping our neighbors off the street, and the upside-down health system that is reviving the vaccine-controlled deadly pandemics of yesteryear. But the reason those fascist goons and antivaxers are able to decide how we all live our lives is that a very small number of very rich people converted their stolen wealth to illegitimate power, which they wield over us.

Anyone who lived through the 2008 crisis knows that finance is a deadly weapon. Let the finance sector run your economy and they will steal everything and leave you jobless, homeless and hungry. Trump is a casino guy, and he knows that the only guy making money in a casino is the owner, who gets to set the odds at the machines and tables. By opening the floodgates to trillions in stock buybacks, Trump is turning us all into the suckers at the table, and turning his oligarch investors into little autocrats, with the power to degrade our lives and steal our future.

Hey look at this (permalink)

Five for 50 – Anil Dash https://www.anildash.com/2025/09/05/five-for-fifty/
How To Touch Grass https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/powerandmagic/how-to-touch-grass
Why This Economy Feels Weird and Scary https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/why-this-economy-feels-weird-and
A Navajo weaving of an integrated circuit: the 555 timer https://www.righto.com/2025/09/marilou-schultz-navajo-555-weaving.html

Object permanence (permalink)

#20yrsago Interview with mom who won’t pay off the RIAA shakedown https://web.archive.org/web/20051204021157/https://p2pnet.net/story/6134

#5yrsago Political ads have very small effect-sizes https://pluralistic.net/2020/09/04/elusive-mind-control/#persuadables

#5yrsago CO asphyxiation accounts for half of Hurricane Laura deaths https://pluralistic.net/2020/09/04/elusive-mind-control/#co

#5yrsago Trump is a salesman https://pluralistic.net/2020/09/04/elusive-mind-control/#cialdinism

#5yrsago Physicists overestimate their epidemiology game https://pluralistic.net/2020/09/04/elusive-mind-control/#hubris

#1yrago Marshmallow Longtermism https://pluralistic.net/2024/09/04/deferred-gratification/#selective-foresight

Upcoming appearances (permalink)

Ithaca: Enshittification at Buffalo Street Books, Sept 11
https://buffalostreetbooks.com/event/2025-09-11/cory-doctorow-tcpl-librarian-judd-karlman
Ithaca: AD White keynote (Cornell), Sep 12
https://deanoffaculty.cornell.edu/events/keynote-cory-doctorow-professor-at-large/
Ithaca: Enshittification at Autumn Leaves Books, Sept 13
https://www.autumnleavesithaca.com/event-details/enshittification-why-everything-got-worse-and-what-to-do-about-it
Ithaca: Radicalized Q&A (Cornell), Sept 16
https://events.cornell.edu/event/radicalized-qa-with-author-cory-doctorow
DC: Enshittification at Politics and Prose, Oct 8
https://politics-prose.com/cory-doctorow-10825
NYC: Enshittification with Lina Khan (Brooklyn Public Library), Oct 9
https://www.bklynlibrary.org/calendar/cory-doctorow-discusses-central-library-dweck-20251009-0700pm
New Orleans: DeepSouthCon63, Oct 10-12
http://www.contraflowscifi.org/
Chicago: Enshittification with Anand Giridharadas (Chicago Humanities), Oct 15
https://www.oldtownschool.org/concerts/2025/10-15-2025-kara-swisher-and-cory-doctorow-on-enshittification/
San Francisco: Enshittification at Public Works (The Booksmith), Oct 20
https://app.gopassage.com/events/doctorow25
Madrid: 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

Recent appearances (permalink)

Nerd Harder! (This Week in Tech)
https://twit.tv/shows/this-week-in-tech/episodes/1047
Techtonic with Mark Hurst
https://www.wfmu.org/playlists/shows/155658
Cory Doctorow DESTROYS Enshittification (QAA Podcast)
https://soundcloud.com/qanonanonymous/cory-doctorow-destroys-enshitification-e338

Latest books (permalink)

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

Upcoming books (permalink)

"Canny Valley": A limited edition collection of the collages I create for Pluralistic, self-published, September 2025
"Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It," Farrar, Straus, Giroux, October 7 2025
https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374619329/enshittification/
"Unauthorized Bread": a middle-grades graphic novel adapted from my novella about refugees, toasters and DRM, FirstSecond, 2026
"Enshittification, Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It" (the graphic novel), Firstsecond, 2026
"The Memex Method," Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2026
"The Reverse-Centaur's Guide to AI," a short book about being a better AI critic, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2026

Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources:

Currently writing:

"The Reverse Centaur's Guide to AI," a short book for Farrar, Straus and Giroux about being an effective AI critic. FIRST DRAFT COMPLETE AND SUBMITTED.
A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING

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

Teenagers from Outer Space, But Made Better - Nicky FloweRSS

2025-09-06T06:47:00.000Z

1959's best Z grade sci-fi film about a boy simply too kind & shy to kill all life on Earth, the girl who loves him, and the grandpa who sleeps on the couch. The alien ship he's rebelled release some lobsters into a cave, and some other things happen as well.

I've put the nicest copy of the original film I could find through my video synthesizer and a tape delay and, therefore, made the film's perfect sound and visuals even more perfect. If you see only one film this year, this would be an odd choice... but mighty appreciated.

Nicky Flowers - 09/05/25 - I'm gonna make more fun video junk like this. You can fuckin count on it,,, - (send any comments/questions to hello at nickyflowers dot com)

The CoPilot productivity paradox - Weblog on marginalia.nu

2025-09-06T00:00:00.000Z

I’ve been using the CoPilot plugin for IntelliJ on and off for the last few years, and while initially pretty enthusiastic, I’ve come to first disable it and then delete it altogether along with JetBrains’ local AI-completions, and generally felt this has been an improvement in productivity and a reduction of frustration. CoPilot is pretty good at taking things that are already pretty fast, such as monotonous code transformations like mapping an object to a SQL statement, and then making that even faster.

Note published on September 5, 2025 at 7:25 PM UTC - Molly White's microblog feed

2025-09-05T19:25:35.000Z

This long read in The Verge does a remarkable job of describing how Wikipedia's editing community works, the project's strengths and weaknesses, and the threats it faces.

In a time of misinformation, in a time of suppression, having this place where people can come and bring knowledge and share knowledge, that is a statement.

Mostly tech people I enjoy - BlogFlock

[Notes] Pre-modern art and metadata: a sticky situation - Tiny Subversions

How big a solar battery do I need to store *all* my home's electricity? - Terence Eden’s Blog

Pluralistic: Wallet voting (13 Sep 2025) - Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow

Today's links

Wallet voting (permalink)

Hey look at this (permalink)

Object permanence (permalink)

Upcoming appearances (permalink)

Recent appearances (permalink)

Latest books (permalink)

Upcoming books (permalink)

Colophon (permalink)

How to get Pluralistic:

Hosting a WebSite on a Disposable Vape - BogdanTheGeek's Blog

Book Review: All That We See or Seem by Ken Liu ★★★★★ - Terence Eden’s Blog

Ask Nicky Anything: Dolphy Moment - Nicky FloweRSS

"Help I waz trying to have a mingus moment but I accidentally had a Dolphy moment instead. How do I fix this?" - Bezier

Pluralistic: Reverse centaurs are the answer to the AI paradox (11 Sep 2025) - Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow

Today's links

Reverse centaurs are the answer to the AI paradox (permalink)

Hey look at this (permalink)

Object permanence (permalink)

Upcoming appearances (permalink)

Recent appearances (permalink)

Latest books (permalink)

Upcoming books (permalink)

Colophon (permalink)

How to get Pluralistic:

Reasonably accurate, privacy conscious, cookieless, visitor tracking for WordPress - Terence Eden’s Blog

Mingus Moments - Nicky FloweRSS

IT IS EASIER THAN EVER TO EXPERIENCE ... A MINGUS MOMENT

Note published on September 11, 2025 at 4:07 AM UTC - Molly White's microblog feed

Pluralistic: Hate the player AND the game (10 Sep 2025) - Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow

Today's links

Hate the player AND the game (permalink)

Hey look at this (permalink)

Object permanence (permalink)

Upcoming appearances (permalink)

Recent appearances (permalink)

Latest books (permalink)

Upcoming books (permalink)

Colophon (permalink)

How to get Pluralistic:

Pluralistic: Trump steals $400b from American workers (09 Sep 2025) - Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow

Today's links

Trump steals $400b from American workers (permalink)

Hey look at this (permalink)

Object permanence (permalink)

Upcoming appearances (permalink)

Recent appearances (permalink)

Latest books (permalink)

Upcoming books (permalink)

Colophon (permalink)

How to get Pluralistic:

Event Review: Doin' the Lambeth Walk (Oi!) ★★★⯪☆ - Terence Eden’s Blog

Pluralistic: Fingerspitzengefühl (08 Sep 2025) - Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow

Today's links

Fingerspitzengefühl (permalink)

Hey look at this (permalink)

Object permanence (permalink)

Upcoming appearances (permalink)

Recent appearances (permalink)

Latest books (permalink)

Upcoming books (permalink)

Colophon (permalink)

How to get Pluralistic:

Some thoughts on personal git hosting - Terence Eden’s Blog

Bill Ackman suggests Eric Adams place Polymarket bet and then drop out of mayoral race - Molly White's microblog feed

Pluralistic: Stock buybacks are stock swindles (06 Sep 2025) - Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow

Today's links

Stock buybacks are stock swindles (permalink)

Hey look at this (permalink)

Object permanence (permalink)

Upcoming appearances (permalink)

Recent appearances (permalink)

Latest books (permalink)

Upcoming books (permalink)

Colophon (permalink)

How to get Pluralistic:

How big a solar battery do I need to store all my home's electricity? - Terence Eden’s Blog