Mostly tech people I enjoy - BlogFlock

An opinionated HTML Serializer for PHP 8.4 - Terence Eden’s Blog

2025-04-02T11:34:36.000Z

A few days ago, I wrote a shitty pretty-printer for PHP 8.4's new Dom\HTMLDocument class.

I've since re-written it to be faster and more stylistically correct.

It turns this:

<html lang="en-GB"><head><title id="something">Test</title></head><body><h1 class="top upper">Testing</h1><main><p>Some <em>HTML</em> and an <img src="example.png" alt="Alternate Text"></p>Text not in an element<ol><li>List</li><li>Another list</li></ol></main></body></html>

Into this:

<!doctype html>
<html lang=en-GB>
    <head>
        <title id=something>Test</title>
    </head>
    <body>
        <h1 class="top upper">Testing</h1>
        <main>
            <p>
                Some 
                <em>HTML</em>
                 and an 
                <img src=example.png alt="Alternate Text">
            </p>
            Text not in an element
            <ol>
                <li>List</li>
                <li>Another list</li>
            </ol>
        </main>
    </body>
</html>

I say it is "opinionated" because it does the following:

Attributes are unquoted unless necessary.
Every element is logically indented.
Text content of CSS and JS is unaltered. No pretty-printing, minification, or checking for correctness.
Text content of elements may have extra newlines and tabs. Browsers will tend to ignore multiple whitespaces unless the CSS tells them otherwise.
- This fucks up <pre> blocks which contain markup.

It is primarily designed to make the markup easy to read. Because according to the experts:

A computer language is not just a way of getting a computer to perform operations but rather … it is a novel formal medium for expressing ideas about methodology. Thus, programs must be written for people to read, and only incidentally for machines to execute.

I'm fairly sure this all works properly. But feel free to argue in the comments or send me a pull request.

Here's how it works.

When is an element not an element? When it is a void!

Modern HTML has the concept of "Void Elements". Normally, something like <a> must eventually be followed by a closing </a>. But Void Elements don't need closing.

This keeps a list of elements which must not be explicitly closed.

$void_elements = [
    "area",
    "base",
    "br",
    "col",
    "embed",
    "hr",
    "img",
    "input",
    "link",
    "meta",
    "param",
    "source",
    "track",
    "wbr",
];

Tabs Space

Tabs, obviously. Users can set their tab width to their personal preference and it won't get confused with semantically significant whitespace.

$indent_character = "\t";

Setting up the DOM

The new HTMLDocument should be broadly familiar to anyone who has used the previous one.

$html = '<html lang="en-GB"><head><title id="something">Test</title></head><body><h1 class="top upper">Testing</h1><main><p>Some <em>HTML</em> and an <img src="example.png" alt="Alternate Text"></p>Text not in an element<ol><li>List</li><li>Another list</li></ol></main></body></html>>'
$dom = Dom\HTMLDocument::createFromString( $html, LIBXML_NOERROR, "UTF-8" );

This automatically adds <head> and <body> elements. If you don't want that, use the LIBXML_HTML_NOIMPLIED flag:

$dom = Dom\HTMLDocument::createFromString( $html, LIBXML_NOERROR | LIBXML_HTML_NOIMPLIED, "UTF-8" );

To Quote or Not To Quote?

Traditionally, HTML attributes needed quotes:

<img src="example.png" class="avatar no-border" id="user-123">

Modern HTML allows those attributes to be unquoted as long as they don't contain ASCII Whitespace or certain other characters

For example, the above becomes:

<img src=example.png class="avatar no-border" id=user-123>

This function looks for the presence of those characters:

function value_unquoted( $haystack )
{
    //  Must not contain specific characters

    $needles = [ 
        //  https://infra.spec.whatwg.org/#ascii-whitespace
        "\t", "\n", "\f", "\n", " ", 
        //  https://html.spec.whatwg.org/multipage/syntax.html#unquoted 
        "\"", "'", "=", "<", ">", "`" ];
    foreach ( $needles as $needle )
    {
        if ( str_contains( $haystack, $needle ) )
        {
            return false;
        }
    }
    //  Must not be null
    if ( $haystack == null ) { return false; }
    return true;
}

Re-re-re-recursion

I've tried to document this as best I can.

It traverses the DOM tree, printing out correctly indented opening elements and their attributes. If there's text content, that's printed. If an element needs closing, that's printed with the appropriate indentation.

function serializeHTML( $node, $treeIndex = 0, $output = "")
{
    global $indent_character, $preserve_internal_whitespace, $void_elements;

    //  Manually add the doctype to start.
    if ( $output == "" ) {
        $output .= "<!doctype html>\n";
    }

    if( property_exists( $node, "localName" ) ) {
        //  This is an Element.

        //  Get all the Attributes (id, class, src, &c.).
        $attributes = "";
        if ( property_exists($node, "attributes")) {
            foreach( $node->attributes as $attribute ) {
                $value = $attribute->nodeValue;
                //  Only add " if the value contains specific characters.
                $quote = value_unquoted( $value ) ? "" : "\"";

                $attributes .= " {$attribute->nodeName}={$quote}{$value}{$quote}";
            }
        }

        //  Print the opening element and all attributes.
        $output .= "<{$node->localName}{$attributes}>";

    } else if( property_exists( $node, "nodeName" ) &&  $node->nodeName == "#comment" ) {
        //  Comment
        $output .= "<!-- {$node->textContent} -->";
    }

    //  Increase indent.
    $treeIndex++;
    $tabStart = "\n" . str_repeat( $indent_character, $treeIndex ); 
    $tabEnd   = "\n" . str_repeat( $indent_character, $treeIndex - 1);

    //  Does this node have children?
    if( property_exists( $node, "childElementCount" ) && $node->childElementCount > 0 ) {

        //  Loop through the children.
        $i=0;
        while( $childNode = $node->childNodes->item( $i++ ) ) {

            //  Is this a text node?
            if ($childNode->nodeType == 3 ) {
                //  Only print output if there's no HTML inside the content.
                //  Ignore Void Elements.
                if ( 
                      !str_contains( $childNode->textContent, "<" ) && 
                    property_exists( $childNode, "localName" ) && 
                          !in_array( $childNode->localName, $void_elements ) ) 
                {
                    $output .= $tabStart . $childNode->textContent;
                }
            } else {
                $output .= $tabStart;
            }

            //  Recursively indent all children.
            $output = serializeHTML( $childNode, $treeIndex, $output );
        };

        //  Suffix with a "\n" and a suitable number of "\t"s.
        $output .= "{$tabEnd}"; 

    } else if ( property_exists( $node, "childElementCount" ) && property_exists( $node, "innerHTML" ) ) {
        //  If there are no children and the node contains content, print the contents.
        $output .= $node->innerHTML;
    }

    //  Close the element, unless it is a void.
    if( property_exists( $node, "localName" ) && !in_array( $node->localName, $void_elements ) ) {
        $output .= "</{$node->localName}>";
    }

    //  Return a string of fully indented HTML.
    return $output;
}

Print it out

The serialized string hardcodes the <!doctype html> - which is probably fine. The full HTML is shown with:

echo serializeHTML( $dom->documentElement );

Next Steps

Please raise any issues on GitLab or leave a comment.

Pluralistic: Anyone who trusts an AI therapist needs their head examined (01 Apr 2025) - Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow

2025-04-01T12:28:11.000Z

Today's links

Anyone who trusts an AI therapist needs their head examined: Same goes for trusting an AI with your trade secrets.
Hey look at this: Delights to delectate.
Object permanence: 2010, 2015, 2020, 2024
Upcoming appearances: Where to find me.
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.

Anyone who trusts an AI therapist needs their head examined (permalink)

There's a debate to be had about whether AI chatbots make good psychotherapists. This is not an area of my expertise, so I'm not going to weigh in on that debate. But nevertheless, I think that if you use an AI therapist, you need your head examined:

https://www.salon.com/2025/03/30/some-argue-ai-therapy-can-break-down-mental-health-stigma–others-warn-it-could-make-it-worse/

I'm not an expert on psychotherapy, but I am an expert on privacy and corporate misconduct, and holy shit is the idea of a chatbot psychotherapist running on some Big Tech cloud a terrible idea. Because while I'm no expert on therapy, I have benefited from therapy, and I know this for certain: therapy requires confidentiality.

Shrinks are incredibly careful about privacy. For example: when my brother was getting married, my therapist was invited to the wedding. His daughter and my brother's fiancee were close friends, and my brother's fiancee had grown up staying over at their house and wanted her friend and her friend's parents at the wedding. My therapist sat me down and said, "Now listen, I take confidentiality very seriously. If you want me to, I will pretend not to know you at the wedding. No one needs to know that you're seeing me or – any therapist."

I told him I didn't mind people knowing I'd seen him, but just that little fastidious gesture confirmed the trust I'd put in Alan. It meant that I could openly and freely discuss things I'd never told anyone before, and that I never told anyone ever again. Having those genuinely open conversations transformed my life, for the better.

Now consider the chatbot therapist: what are its privacy safeguards? Well, the companies may make some promises about what they will and won't do with the transcripts of your AI sessions, but they are lying. Of course they're lying! AI companies lie about what their technology can do (of course). They lie about what their technologies will do. They lie about money. But most of all, they lie about data.

There is no subject on which AI companies have been more consistently, flagrantly, grotesquely dishonest than training data. When it comes to getting more data, AI companies will lie, cheat and steal in ways that would seem hacky if you wrote them into fiction, like they were pulp-novel dope fiends:

https://arstechnica.com/ai/2025/03/devs-say-ai-crawlers-dominate-traffic-forcing-blocks-on-entire-countries/

When an AI company tells you it won't use your intimate secrets as training data, they are lying. Of course they're lying! This isn't just any data, it's data that isn't replicated elsewhere on the internet. It's rare – it's unique. It's a competitive advantage. AI companies will 100%, without exception, totally use your private therapy data as training data.

What's more: they will leak your therapy sessions. They will leak them because they can't figure out how to prevent models from vomiting up their training data verbatim:

https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2024/01/chatgpt-memorization-lawsuit/677099/

But they'll also leak because tech companies leak like hell. They are crawling with insider threats. If the AI company sticks around long enough, it'll leak your secrets. And if it goes bankrupt? That's even worse! When tech companies go bust, the first thing their creditors do is sell off their warehouses full of private data. The more private and compromising that data is, the harder they'll try to sell it:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2025/03/how-delete-your-23andme-data

Now, maybe you're thinking, "OK, but that's a small price to pay if we can finally get therapy for everyone." After all, the country – the world – is in the midst of a terrible mental health crisis and there's a dire shortage of therapists.

Now, let's stipulate for the moment to the idea that chatbots are substitutes for human therapists – that, at the very least, they're better than nothing. I don't think that's true, but let's say it is. Even so, this is a bad tradeoff.

Here, try this thought-experiment: someone figures out a great business-model for to pay for therapy for poor people. "We turned therapy into a livestreamed reality TV show. If you're too poor to afford a therapist, you can go to one of our partially trained livestreamer therapists, who will broadcast all of your secrets to anyone who watches. There's a permanent archive of these sessions, and the worst people in the world comb through it 24/7 looking for embarrassing stuff to repost and go viral with. What, you don't like that? Oh, I see: you just don't think poor people deserve mental health. I guess the perfect really is the enemy of the good."

This gambit is called "predatory inclusion." Think of Spike Lee shilling cryptocurrency scams as a way to "build Black wealth" or Mary Kay promising to "empower women" by embroiling them in a bank-account-draining, multi-level marketing cult. Having your personal, intimate secrets sold, leaked, published or otherwise exploited is worse for your mental health than not getting therapy in the first place, in the same way that having your money stolen by a Bitcoin grifter or Mary Kay is worse than not being able to access investment opportunities in the first place.

But it's not just people struggling with their mental health who shouldn't be sharing sensitive data with chatbots – it's everyone. All those business applications that AI companies are pushing, the kind where you entrust an AI with your firm's most commercially sensitive data? Are you crazy? These companies will not only leak that data, they'll sell it to your competition. Hell, Microsoft already does this with Office365 analytics:

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

These companies lie all the time about everything, but the thing they lie most about is how they handle sensitive data. It's wild that anyone has to be reminded of this. Letting AI companies handle your sensitive data is like turning arsonists loose in your library with a can of gasoline, a book of matches, and a pinky-promise that this time, they won't set anything on fire.

(Image: Zde, CC BY-SA 4.0, modified)

Hey look at this (permalink)

Tariffs, Abundance and Why America Can't Build https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/monopoly-round-up-tariffs-abundance
Global Working Conditions Matter for American Workers https://prospect.org/labor/2025-03-30-global-working-conditions-matter-american-workers-su-tai-ilab/
"An off switch? She'll get years for that." https://www.jwz.org/blog/2025/03/an-off-switch-shell-get-years-for-that-2/

Object permanence (permalink)

#15yrsago Noteworthy Modern Occurances: the Digital Economy Bill https://www.openrightsgroup.org/blog/disconnection-notices-served/

#15yrsago Digital Economy Bill: the last hours https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gOyg1GUY18U

#5yrsago Turn on wifi sharing https://pluralistic.net/2020/04/02/eff-livestream-today/#digital-divide

#5yrsago Coronavirus travel posters https://pluralistic.net/2020/04/02/eff-livestream-today/#jennifer-baer

#5yrsago How you are subsidizing the otherwise unprofitable Fox News https://pluralistic.net/2020/04/02/eff-livestream-today/#unfoxmycablebox

#5yrsago Ted Chiang on pandemics as idiot plots https://pluralistic.net/2020/04/02/eff-livestream-today/#disaster-capitalism

#5yrsago Bird's "Black Mirror" mass layoffs https://pluralistic.net/2020/04/02/eff-livestream-today/#2-mins

#5yrsago UK public health official endorses official reagents for covid tests https://pluralistic.net/2020/04/02/eff-livestream-today/#unauthorized-reagents

#5yrsago A promising, plausible plan for "privacy-preserving" surveillance https://pluralistic.net/2020/04/02/eff-livestream-today/#pepp-pt

#5yrsago Private equity titan squats on empty hospital https://pluralistic.net/2020/04/02/eff-livestream-today/#joel-kills

#1yrago Prison-tech company bribed jails to ban in-person visits https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/02/captive-customers/#guillotine-watch

Upcoming appearances (permalink)

Chicago: Picks and Shovels with Peter Sagal, Apr 2
https://exileinbookville.com/events/44853
Chicago: ABA Techshow, Apr 3
https://www.techshow.com/
Bloomington: Picks and Shovels at Morgenstern, Apr 4
https://morgensternbooks.com/event/2025-04-04/author-event-cory-doctorow
Bloomington: Ostrom Center, Apr 4
https://events.iu.edu/ostromworkshop/event/1843316-hls-beyond-the-web-cory-doctorow
Pittsburgh: Picks and Shovels at White Whale Books, May 15
https://whitewhalebookstore.com/events/20250515
Pittsburgh: PyCon, May 16
https://us.pycon.org/2025/schedule/
PDX: Teardown 2025, Jun 20-22
https://www.crowdsupply.com/teardown/portland-2025
PDX: Picks and Shovels at Barnes and Noble, Jun 20
https://stores.barnesandnoble.com/event/9780062183697-0
New Orleans: DeepSouthCon63, Oct 10-12, 2025
http://www.contraflowscifi.org/

Recent appearances (permalink)

Fire the unelected social media dictators (Al Jazeera Upfront)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KXa4DzhkUZ8
Capitalists Hate Capitalism (MMT Podcast)
https://pileusmmt.libsyn.com/195-capitalists-hate-capitalism-with-cory-doctorow
How to Destroy Our Tech Overlords (Homeless Romantic)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=epma2B0wjzU

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). Signed, personalized copies at Dark Delicacies (https://www.darkdel.com/store/p3062/Available_Feb_20th%3A_The_Bezzle_HB.html#/).
"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). Signed, personalized copies at Dark Delicacies (https://www.darkdel.com/store/p3007/Pre-Order_Signed_Copies%3A_The_Lost_Cause_HB.html#/)
"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. Signed copies at Dark Delicacies (US): and Forbidden Planet (UK): https://forbiddenplanet.com/385004-red-team-blues-signed-edition-hardcover/.
"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
"Attack Surface": The third Little Brother novel, a standalone technothriller for adults. The Washington Post called it "a political cyberthriller, vigorous, bold and savvy about the limits of revolution and resistance." Order signed, personalized copies from Dark Delicacies https://www.darkdel.com/store/p1840/Available_Now%3A_Attack_Surface.html
"How to Destroy Surveillance Capitalism": an anti-monopoly pamphlet analyzing the true harms of surveillance capitalism and proposing a solution. https://onezero.medium.com/how-to-destroy-surveillance-capitalism-8135e6744d59?sk=f6cd10e54e20a07d4c6d0f3ac011af6b) (signed copies: https://www.darkdel.com/store/p2024/Available_Now%3A__How_to_Destroy_Surveillance_Capitalism.html)
"Little Brother/Homeland": A reissue omnibus edition with a new introduction by Edward Snowden: https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250774583; personalized/signed copies here: https://www.darkdel.com/store/p1750/July%3A__Little_Brother_%26_Homeland.html
"Poesy the Monster Slayer" a picture book about monsters, bedtime, gender, and kicking ass. Order here: https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781626723627. Get a personalized, signed copy here: https://www.darkdel.com/store/p2682/Corey_Doctorow%3A_Poesy_the_Monster_Slayer_HB.html#/.

Upcoming books (permalink)

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

Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources:

Currently writing:

Enshittification: a nonfiction book about platform decay for Farrar, Straus, Giroux. Status: second pass edit underway (readaloud)
A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING
Picks and Shovels, a Martin Hench noir thriller about the heroic era of the PC. FORTHCOMING TOR BOOKS FEB 2025

Latest podcast: Why I don't like AI art https://craphound.com/news/2025/03/30/why-i-dont-like-ai-art/

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

ISSN: 3066-764X

Goodbye Offpunk, Welcome XKCDpunk! - Ploum.net

2025-04-01T00:00:00.000Z

Goodbye Offpunk, Welcome XKCDpunk!

For the last three years, I’ve been working on Offpunk, a command-line gemini and web browser.

Offpunk.net

While my initial goal was to browse the Geminisphere offline, the mission has slowly morphed into cleaning and unenshitiffying the modern web, offering users a minimalistic way of browsing any website with interesting content.

Rendering the Web with Pictures in Your Terminal (ploum.net)

Focusing on essentials

From the start, it was clear that Offpunk would focus on essentials. If a website needs JavaScript to be read, it is considered as non-essential.

It worked surprisingly well. In fact, in multiple occurrence, I’ve discovered that some websites work better in Offpunk than in Firefox. I can comfortably read their content in the former, not in the latter.

By default, Offpunk blocks domains deemed as nonessentials or too enshitified like twitter, X, facebook, linkedin, tiktok. (those are configurable, of course. Defaults are in offblocklist.py).

Cleaning websites, blocking worst offenders. That’s good. But it is only a start.

It’s time to go further, to really cut out all the crap from the web.

And, honestly, besides XKCD comics, everything is crap on the modern web.

As an online technical discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison with an existing XKCD comic approaches 1.
– XKCD’s law

XKCD’s law (ploum.net)

If we know that we will end our discussion with an XKCD’s comic, why not cut all the fluff? Why don’t we go straight to the conclusion in a true minimalistic fashion?

Introducing XKCDpunk

That’s why I’m proud to announce that, starting with today’s release, Offpunk 2.7 will now be known as XKCDpunk 1.0.

Xkcdpunk.net

XKCDpunk includes a new essential command "xkcd" which, as you guessed, takes an integer as a parameter and display the relevant XKCD comic in your terminal, while caching it to be able to browse it offline.

Screenshot of XKCDpunk showing comic 626

Of course, this is only an early release. I need to clean a lot of code to remove everything not related to accessing xkcd.com. Every non-xkcd related domain will be added to offblocklist.py.

I also need to clean every occurrence of "Offpunk" to change the name. All offpunk.net needs to be migrated to xkcd.net. Roma was not built in one day.

Don’t hesitate to install an "offpunk" package, as it will still be called in most distributions.

offpunk package versions - Repology (repology.org)

And report bugs on the xkcdpunk’s mailinglist.

xkcdpunk-users on lists.sr.ht

Goodbye Offpunk, welcome XKCDpunk!

I’m Ploum, a writer and an engineer. I like to explore how technology impacts society. You can subscribe by email or by rss. I value privacy and never share your adress.

I write science-fiction novels in French. For Bikepunk, my new post-apocalyptic-cyclist book, my publisher is looking for contacts in other countries to distribute it in languages other than French. If you can help, contact me!

Pluralistic: Private-sector Trumpism (31 Mar 2025) - Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow

2025-03-31T13:08:04.000Z

Today's links

Private-sector Trumpism: Monopoly, facial recognition and property rights all add up to a private system of government.
Hey look at this: Delights to delectate.
Object permanence: 2010, 2020, 2024
Upcoming appearances: Where to find me.
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.

Private-sector Trumpism (permalink)

Trumpism is a mixture of grievance, surveillance, and pettiness: "I will never forgive your mockery, I have records of you doing it, and I will punish you and everyone who associates with you for it." Think of how he's going after the (cowardly BigLaw firms:

https://abovethelaw.com/2025/03/skadden-makes-100-million-settlement-with-trump-in-pro-bono-payola/

Trump is the realization of decades of warning about ubiquitous private and public surveillance – that someday, all of this surveillance would be turned to the systematic dismantling of human rights and punishing of dissent.

23 years ago, I was staying in London with some friends, scouting for a flat to live in. After at day in town, I came back and we ordered a curry and had a nice chat. I mentioned how discomfited I'd been by all the CCTV cameras that had sprouted at the front of every private building, to say nothing of all the public cameras installed by local councils and the police. My friend dismissed this as a kind of American, hyper-individualistic privacy purism, explaining that these cameras were there for public safety – to catch flytippers, vandals, muggers, boy racers tearing unsafely through the streets. My fear about having my face captured by all these cameras was little more than superstitious dread. It's not like they were capturing my soul.

Now, I knew that my friend had recently marched in one of the massive demonstrations against Bush and Blair's illegal invasion plans for Iraq. "Look," I said, "you marched in the street to stand up and be counted. But even so, how would you have felt if – as a condition of protesting – you were forced to first record your identity in a government record-book?" My friend had signed petitions, he'd marched in the street, but even so, he had to admit that there would be some kind of chilling effect if your identity had to be captured as a condition of participating in public political events.

Trump has divided the country into two groups of people: "citizens" (who are sometimes only semi-citizens) and immigrants (who have no rights):

https://crookedtimber.org/2025/03/29/trumps-war-on-immigrants-is-the-cancellation-of-free-society/#fn-53926-1

Trump has asserted that he can arrest and deport immigrants (and some semi-citizens) for saying things he doesn't like, or even liking social media posts he disapproves of. He's argued that he can condemn people to life in an offshore slave-labor camp if he doesn't like their tattoos. It is tyranny, built on ubiquitous surveillance, fueled by spite and grievance.

One of Trumpism's most important tenets is that private institutions should have the legal right to discriminate against minorities that he doesn't like. For example, he's trying to end the CFPB's enforcement action against Townstone, a mortgage broker that practiced rampant racial discrimination:

https://prospect.org/justice/2025-03-28-trump-scrambles-pardon-corporate-criminals-townstone-boeing-cfpb/

By contrast, Trump abhors the idea that private institutions should be allowed to discriminate against the people he likes, hence his holy war against "DEI":

https://www.cnbc.com/2025/03/29/trump-administration-warns-european-companies-to-comply-with-anti-dei-order.html

This is the crux of Wilhoit's Law, an important and true definition of "conservativism":

Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition, to wit: There must be in-groups whom the law protectes but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect.

https://crookedtimber.org/2018/03/21/liberals-against-progressives/#comment-729288

Wilhoit's definition is an important way of framing how conservatives view the role of the state. But there's another definition I like, one that's more about how we relate to one-another, which I heard from Steven Brust: "Ask, 'What's more important: human rights or property rights?' Anyone who answers 'property rights are human rights' is a conservative."

Thus the idea that a mortgage broker or an employer or a banker or a landlord should be able to discriminate against you because of the color of your skin, your sexual orientation, your gender, or your beliefs. If "property rights are human rights," then the human right not to rent to a same-sex couple is co-equal with the couple's human right to shelter.

The property rights/human rights distinction isn't just a way to cleave right from left – it's also a way to distinguish the left from liberals. Liberals will tell you that 'it's not censorship if it's done privately' – on the grounds that private property owners have the absolute right to decide which speech they will or won't permit. Charitably, we can say that some of these people are simply drawing a false equivalence between "violating the First Amendment" and "censorship":

https://pluralistic.net/2022/12/04/yes-its-censorship/

But while private censorship is often less consequential than state censorship, that isn't always true, and even when it is, that doesn't mean that private censorship poses no danger to free expression.

Consider a thought experiment in which a restaurant chain called "No Politics At the Dinner Table Cafe" buys up every eatery in town, and then maintains its monopoly by sewing up exclusive deals with local food producers, and then expands into babershops, taxis and workplace cafeterias, enforcing a rule in all these spaces that bans discussions of politics:

https://locusmag.com/2020/01/cory-doctorow-inaction-is-a-form-of-action/

Here we see how monopoly, combined with property rights, creates a system of censorship that is every bit as consequential as a government rule. And if all of those facilities were to add AI-backed cameras and mics that automatically monitored all our conversations for forbidden political speech, then surveillance would complete the package, yielding private censorship that is effectively indistinguishable from government censorship – with the main difference being that the First Amendment permits the former and prohibits the latter.

The fear that private wealth could lead to a system of private rule has been in America since its founding, when Benjamin Franklin tried (unsuccessfully) to put a ban on monopolies into the US Constitution. A century later, Senator John Sherman wrote the Sherman Act, the first antitrust bill, defending it on the Senate floor by saying:

If we would not submit to an emperor we should not submit to an autocrat of trade.

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

40 years ago, neoliberal economists ended America's century-long war on monopolies, declaring monopolies to be "efficient" and convincing Carter, then Reagan, then all their successors (except Biden) to encourage monopolies to form. The US government all but totally suspended enforcement of its antitrust laws, permitting anticompetitive mergers, predatory pricing, and illegal price discrimination. In so doing, they transformed America into a monopolist's playground, where versions of the No Politics At the Dinner Table Cafe have conquered every sector of our economy:

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

This is especially true of our speech forums – the vast online platforms that have become the primary means by which we engage in politics, civics, family life, and more. These platforms are able to decide who may speak, what they may say, and what we may hear:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/12/10/e2e/#the-censors-pen

These platforms are optimized for mass surveillance, and, when coupled with private sector facial recognition databases, it is now possible to realize the nightmare scenario I mooted in London 23 years ago. As you move through both the virtual and physical world, you can be identified, your political speech can be attributed to you, and it can be used as a basis for discrimination against you:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/09/20/steal-your-face/#hoan-ton-that

This is how things work at the US border, of course, where border guards are turning away academics for having anti-Trump views:

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/20/world/europe/us-france-scientist-entry-trump-messages.html

It's not just borders, though. Large, private enterprises own large swathes of our world. They have the unlimited property right to exclude people from their properties. And they can spy on us as much as they want, because it's not just antitrust law that withered over the past four decades, it's also privacy law. The last consumer privacy law Congress bestirred itself to pass was 1988's "Video Privacy Protection Act," which bans video-store clerks from disclosing your VHS rentals. The failure to act on privacy – like the failure to act on monopoly – has created a vacuum that has been filled up with private power. Today, it's normal for your every action – every utterance, every movement, every purchase – to be captured, stored, combined, analyzed, and, of course sold.

With vast property holdings, total property rights, and no privacy law, companies have become the autocrats of trade, able to regulate our speech and association in ways that can no longer be readily distinguished state conduct that is at least theoretically prohibited by the First Amendment.

Take Madison Square Garden, a corporate octopus that owns theaters, venues and sport stadiums and teams around the country. The company is notoriously vindictive, thanks to a spate of incidents in which the company used facial recognition cameras to bar anyone who worked at a law-firm that was suing the company from entering any of its premises:

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/12/22/nyregion/madison-square-garden-facial-recognition.html

This practice was upheld by the courts, on the grounds that the property rights of MSG trumped the human rights of random low-level personnel at giant law firms where one lawyer out of thousands happened to be suing the company:

https://www.nbcnewyork.com/news/local/madison-square-gardens-ban-on-lawyers-suing-them-can-remain-in-place-court-rules/4194985/

Take your kid's Girl Scout troop on an outing to Radio City Music Hall? Sure, just quit your job and go work for another firm.

But that was just for starters. Now, MSG has started combing social media to identify random individuals who have criticized the company, and has added their faces to the database of people who can't enter their premises. For example, a New Yorker named Frank Miller has been banned for life from all MSG properties because, 20 years ago, he designed a t-shirt making fun of MSG CEO James Dolan:

https://www.theverge.com/news/637228/madison-square-garden-james-dolan-facial-recognition-fan-ban

This is private-sector Trumpism, and it's just getting started.

Take hotels: the entire hotel industry has collapsed into two gigachains: Marriott and Hilton. Both companies are notoriously bad employers and at constant war with their unions (and with nonunion employees hoping to unionize in the face of flagrant, illegal union-busting). If you post criticism online of both hotel chains for hiring scabs, say, and they add you to a facial recognition blocklist, will you be able to get a hotel room?

After more than a decade of Uber and Lyft's illegal predatory pricing, many cities have lost their private taxi fleets and massively disinvested in their public transit. If Uber and Lyft start compiling dossiers of online critics, could you lose the ability to get from anywhere to anywhere, in dozens of cities?

Private equity has rolled up pet groomers, funeral parlors, and dialysis centers. What happens if the PE barons running those massive conglomerates decide to exclude their critics from any business in their portfolio? How would it feel to be shut out of your mother's funeral because you shit-talked the CEO of Foundation Partners Group?

https://kffhealthnews.org/news/article/funeral-homes-private-equity-death-care/

More to the point: once this stuff starts happening, who will dare to criticize corporate criminals online, where their speech can be captured and used against them, by private-sector Trumps armed with facial recognition and the absurd notion that property rights aren't just human rights – they're the ultimate human rights?

The old fears of Benjamin Franklin and John Sherman have come to pass. We live among autocrats of trade, and don't even pretend the Constitution controls what these private sector governments can do to us.

(Image: Cryteria, CC BY 3.0, modified)

Hey look at this (permalink)

Aint Been Doin Nothin if You Aint Been Called a Red https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UCedPmK4E4I h/t r/LateStageCapitalism
Know Your Rights – City of Burbank https://www.burbankca.gov/know_your_rights
The Tech Fantasy That Powers A.I. Is Running on Fumes https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/29/opinion/ai-tech-innovation.html (h/t Nelson Minar)

Object permanence (permalink)

#15yrsago Why I won’t buy an iPad (and think you shouldn’t, either) https://memex.craphound.com/2010/04/01/why-i-wont-buy-an-ipad-and-think-you-shouldnt-either/

#5yrsago Solar as a beneficial fad https://pluralistic.net/2020/04/01/pluralistic:-01-apr-2020/#pv-or-bust

#5yrsago American employment exceptionalism https://pluralistic.net/2020/04/01/pluralistic:-01-apr-2020/#usausausa

#5yrsago Tiktok Kremlinology https://pluralistic.net/2020/04/01/pluralistic:-01-apr-2020/#going-pandemic

#5yrsago Alteon cuts covid-fighters' pay https://pluralistic.net/2020/04/01/pluralistic:-01-apr-2020/#private-equity

#5yrsago Snowden's Box https://pluralistic.net/2020/04/01/pluralistic:-01-apr-2020/#94-1054-Eleu-St

#1yrago Humans are not perfectly vigilant https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/01/human-in-the-loop/#monkey-in-the-middle

Upcoming appearances (permalink)

Chicago: Picks and Shovels with Peter Sagal, Apr 2
https://exileinbookville.com/events/44853
Chicago: ABA Techshow, Apr 3
https://www.techshow.com/
Bloomington: Picks and Shovels at Morgenstern, Apr 4
https://morgensternbooks.com/event/2025-04-04/author-event-cory-doctorow
Bloomington: Ostrom Center, Apr 4
https://events.iu.edu/ostromworkshop/event/1843316-hls-beyond-the-web-cory-doctorow
Pittsburgh: Picks and Shovels at White Whale Books, May 15
https://whitewhalebookstore.com/events/20250515
Pittsburgh: PyCon, May 16
https://us.pycon.org/2025/schedule/
PDX: Teardown 2025, Jun 20-22
https://www.crowdsupply.com/teardown/portland-2025
PDX: Picks and Shovels at Barnes and Noble, Jun 20
https://stores.barnesandnoble.com/event/9780062183697-0
New Orleans: DeepSouthCon63, Oct 10-12, 2025
http://www.contraflowscifi.org/

Recent appearances (permalink)

Fire the unelected social media dictators (Al Jazeera Upfront)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KXa4DzhkUZ8
Capitalists Hate Capitalism (MMT Podcast)
https://pileusmmt.libsyn.com/195-capitalists-hate-capitalism-with-cory-doctorow
How to Destroy Our Tech Overlords (Homeless Romantic)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=epma2B0wjzU

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). Signed, personalized copies at Dark Delicacies (https://www.darkdel.com/store/p3062/Available_Feb_20th%3A_The_Bezzle_HB.html#/).
"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). Signed, personalized copies at Dark Delicacies (https://www.darkdel.com/store/p3007/Pre-Order_Signed_Copies%3A_The_Lost_Cause_HB.html#/)
"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. Signed copies at Dark Delicacies (US): and Forbidden Planet (UK): https://forbiddenplanet.com/385004-red-team-blues-signed-edition-hardcover/.
"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
"Attack Surface": The third Little Brother novel, a standalone technothriller for adults. The Washington Post called it "a political cyberthriller, vigorous, bold and savvy about the limits of revolution and resistance." Order signed, personalized copies from Dark Delicacies https://www.darkdel.com/store/p1840/Available_Now%3A_Attack_Surface.html
"How to Destroy Surveillance Capitalism": an anti-monopoly pamphlet analyzing the true harms of surveillance capitalism and proposing a solution. https://onezero.medium.com/how-to-destroy-surveillance-capitalism-8135e6744d59?sk=f6cd10e54e20a07d4c6d0f3ac011af6b) (signed copies: https://www.darkdel.com/store/p2024/Available_Now%3A__How_to_Destroy_Surveillance_Capitalism.html)
"Little Brother/Homeland": A reissue omnibus edition with a new introduction by Edward Snowden: https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250774583; personalized/signed copies here: https://www.darkdel.com/store/p1750/July%3A__Little_Brother_%26_Homeland.html
"Poesy the Monster Slayer" a picture book about monsters, bedtime, gender, and kicking ass. Order here: https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781626723627. Get a personalized, signed copy here: https://www.darkdel.com/store/p2682/Corey_Doctorow%3A_Poesy_the_Monster_Slayer_HB.html#/.

Upcoming books (permalink)

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

Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources: Slashdot (https://slashdot.org/).

Currently writing:

Enshittification: a nonfiction book about platform decay for Farrar, Straus, Giroux. Status: second pass edit underway (readaloud)
A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING
Picks and Shovels, a Martin Hench noir thriller about the heroic era of the PC. FORTHCOMING TOR BOOKS FEB 2025

Latest podcast: Why I don't like AI art https://craphound.com/news/2025/03/30/why-i-dont-like-ai-art/

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://mamot.fr/@pluralistic

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https://doctorow.medium.com/

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

https://twitter.com/doctorow

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

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

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

ISSN: 3066-764X

Pretty Print HTML using PHP 8.4's new HTML DOM - Terence Eden’s Blog

2025-03-31T11:34:54.000Z

Those whom the gods would send mad, they first teach recursion.

PHP 8.4 introduces a new Dom\HTMLDocument class it is a modern HTML5 replacement for the ageing XHTML based DOMDocument. You can read more about how it works - the short version is that it reads and correctly sanitises HTML and turns it into a nested object. Hurrah!

The one thing it doesn't do is pretty-printing. When you call $dom->saveHTML() it will output something like:

<html lang="en-GB"><head><title>Test</title></head><body><h1>Testing</h1><main><p>Some <em>HTML</em> and an <img src="example.png"></p><ol><li>List</li><li>Another list</li></ol></main></body></html>

Perfect for a computer to read, but slightly tricky for humans.

As was written by the sages:

A computer language is not just a way of getting a computer to perform operations but rather … it is a novel formal medium for expressing ideas about methodology. Thus, programs must be written for people to read, and only incidentally for machines to execute.

HTML is a programming language. Making markup easy to read for humans is a fine and noble goal. The aim is to turn the single line above into something like:

<html lang="en-GB">
    <head>
        <title>Test</title>
    </head>
    <body>
        <h1>Testing</h1>
        <main>
            <p>Some <em>HTML</em> and an <img src="example.png"></p>
            <ol>
                <li>List</li>
                <li>Another list</li>
            </ol>
        </main>
    </body>
</html>

Cor! That's much better!

I've cobbled together a script which is broadly accurate. There are a million-and-one edge cases and about twice as many personal preferences. This aims to be quick, simple, and basically fine. I am indebted to this random Chinese script and to html-pretty-min.

Step By Step

I'm going to walk through how everything works. This is as much for my benefit as for yours! This is beta code. It sorta-kinda-works for me. Think of it as a first pass at an attempt to prove that something can be done. Please don't use it in production!

Setting up the DOM

The new HTMLDocument should be broadly familiar to anyone who has used the previous one.

$html = '<html lang="en-GB"><head><title>Test</title></head><body><h1>Testing</h1><main><p>Some <em>HTML</em> and an <img src="example.png"></p><ol><li>List<li>Another list</body></html>'
$dom = Dom\HTMLDocument::createFromString( $html, LIBXML_NOERROR, "UTF-8" );

This automatically adds <head> and <body> elements. If you don't want that, use the LIBXML_HTML_NOIMPLIED flag:

$dom = Dom\HTMLDocument::createFromString( $html, LIBXML_NOERROR | LIBXML_HTML_NOIMPLIED, "UTF-8" );

Where not to indent

There are certain elements whose contents shouldn't be pretty-printed because it might change the meaning or layout of the text. For example, in a paragraph:

<p>
    Some 
    <em>
        HT
        <strong>M</strong>
        L
    </em>
</p>

I've picked these elements from text-level semantics and a few others which I consider sensible. Feel free to edit this list if you want.

$preserve_internal_whitespace = [
    "a", 
    "em", "strong", "small", 
    "s", "cite", "q", 
    "dfn", "abbr", 
    "ruby", "rt", "rp", 
    "data", "time", 
    "pre", "code", "var", "samp", "kbd", 
    "sub", "sup", 
    "b", "i", "mark", "u",
    "bdi", "bdo", 
    "span",
    "h1", "h2", "h3", "h4", "h5", "h6",
    "p",
    "li",
    "button", "form", "input", "label", "select", "textarea",
];

The function has an option to force indenting every time it encounters an element.

Tabs Space

Tabs, obviously. Users can set their tab width to their personal preference and it won't get confused with semantically significant whitespace.

$indent_character = "\t";

Recursive Function

This function reads through each node in the HTML tree. If the node should be indented, the function inserts a new node with the requisite number of tabs before the existing node. It also adds a suffix node to indent the next line appropriately. It then goes through the node's children and recursively repeats the process.

This modifies the existing Document.

function prettyPrintHTML( $node, $treeIndex = 0, $forceWhitespace = false )
{    
    global $indent_character, $preserve_internal_whitespace;

    //  If this node contains content which shouldn't be separately indented
    //  And if whitespace is not forced
    if ( property_exists( $node, "localName" ) && in_array( $node->localName, $preserve_internal_whitespace ) && !$forceWhitespace ) {
        return;
    }

    //  Does this node have children?
    if( property_exists( $node, "childElementCount" ) && $node->childElementCount > 0 ) {
        //  Move in a step
        $treeIndex++;
        $tabStart = "\n" . str_repeat( $indent_character, $treeIndex ); 
        $tabEnd   = "\n" . str_repeat( $indent_character, $treeIndex - 1);

        //  Remove any existing indenting at the start of the line
        $node->innerHTML = trim($node->innerHTML);

        //  Loop through the children
        $i=0;

        while( $childNode = $node->childNodes->item( $i++ ) ) {
            //  Was the *previous* sibling a text-only node?
            //  If so, don't add a previous newline
            if ( $i > 0 ) {
                $olderSibling = $node->childNodes->item( $i-1 );

                if ( $olderSibling->nodeType == XML_TEXT_NODE  && !$forceWhitespace ) {
                    $i++;
                    continue;
                }
                $node->insertBefore( $node->ownerDocument->createTextNode( $tabStart ), $childNode );
            }
            $i++; 
            //  Recursively indent all children
            prettyPrintHTML( $childNode, $treeIndex, $forceWhitespace );
        };

        //  Suffix with a node which has "\n" and a suitable number of "\t"
        $node->appendChild( $node->ownerDocument->createTextNode( $tabEnd ) ); 
    }
}

Printing it out

First, call the function. This modifies the existing Document.

prettyPrintHTML( $dom->documentElement );

Then call the normal saveHtml() serialiser:

echo $dom->saveHTML();

Note - this does not print a <!doctype html> - you'll need to include that manually if you're intending to use the entire document.

Licence

I consider the above too trivial to licence - but you may treat it as MIT if that makes you happy.

Thoughts? Comments? Next steps?

I've not written any formal tests, nor have I measured its speed, there may be subtle-bugs, and catastrophic errors. I know it doesn't work well if the HTML is already indented. It mysteriously prints double newlines for some unfathomable reason.

I'd love to know if you find this useful. Please get involved on GitLab or drop a comment here.

Gadget Review: Windfall Energy Saving Plug (Beta) ★★★★☆ - Terence Eden’s Blog

2025-03-30T11:34:48.000Z

The good folks at Windfall Energy have sent me one of their interesting new plugs to beta test.

OK, an Internet connected smart plug. What's so interesting about that?

Our Windfall Plug turns on at the optimal times in the middle of the night to charge and power your devices with green energy.

Ah! Now that is interesting.

The proposition is brilliantly simple:

Connect the smart-plug to your WiFi.
Plug your bike / laptop / space heater into the smart-plug.
When electricity is cleanest, the smart-plug automatically switches on.

The first thing to get out of the way is, yes, you could build this yourself. If you're happy re-flashing firmware, mucking about with NodeRED, and integrating carbon intensity APIs with your HomeAssistant running on a Rasbperry Pi - then this isn't for you.

This is a plug-n-play(!) solution for people who don't want to have to manually update their software because of a DST change.

Beta

This is a beta product. It isn't yet available. Some of the things I'm reviewing will change. You can join the waitlist for more information.

Connecting

The same as every other IoT device. Connect to its local WiFi network from your phone. Tell it which network to connect to and a password. Done.

If you run into trouble, there's a handy help page.

Website

Not much too it at the moment - because it is in beta - but it lets you name the plug and control it.

Turning the plug on and off is a single click. Setting it to "Windfall Mode" turns on the magic. You can also fiddle about with a few settings.

The names and icons would be useful if you had a dozen of these. I like the fact that you can change how long the charging cycle is. 30 minutes might be enough for something low power, but something bigger may need longer.

One thing to note, you can control it by pressing a button on the unit or you can toggle its power from the website. If you manually turn it on or off you will need to manually toggle it back to Windfall mode using the website.

There's also a handy - if slightly busy - graph which shows you the upcoming carbon intensity of the UK grid.

You can also monitor the energy draw of devices connected to it. Handy to see just how much electricity and CO2 emissions a device is burning through.

That's it. For a beta product, there's a decent amount of functionality. There's nothing extraneous like Alexa integration. Ideally this is the sort of thing you configure once, and then leave behind a cupboard for years.

Is it worth it?

I think this is an extremely useful device with a few caveats.

Firstly, how much green energy are you going to use? Modern phones have pretty small batteries. Using this to charge your phone overnight is a false economy. Charging an eBike or similar is probably worthwhile. Anything with a decent-sized battery is a good candidate.

Secondly, will your devices work with it? Most things like air-conditioners or kettles don't turn on from the plug alone. Something like a space-heater is perfect for this sort of use - as soon as the switch is flicked, they start working.

Thirdly, what's the risk of only supplying power for a few hours overnight? I wouldn't recommend putting a chest-freezer on this (unless you like melted and then refrozen ice-cream). But for a device with a battery, it is probably fine.

Fourthly, it needs a stable WiFi connection. If its connection to the mothership stops, it loses Windfall mode. It can still be manually controlled - but it will need adequate signal on a reliable connection to be useful.

Finally, as with any Internet connected device, you introduce a small security risk. This doesn't need local network access, so it can sit quite happily on a guest network without spying on your other devices. But you do give up control to a 3rd party. If they got hacked, someone could turn off your plugs or rapidly power-cycle them. That may not be a significant issue, but one to bear in mind.

If you're happy with that (and I am) then I think this is simple way to take advantage of cheaper, greener electricity overnight. Devices like these use barely any electricity while in standby - so if you're on a dynamic pricing tariff, it won't cost you much to run.

Interested?

You can join the waitlist for more information.

How to prevent Payment Pointer fraud - Terence Eden’s Blog

2025-03-29T12:34:31.000Z

There's a new Web Standard in town! Meet WebMonetization - it aims to be a low effort way to help users passively pay website owners.

The pitch is simple. A website owner places a single new line in their HTML's <head> - something like this:

<link rel="monetization" href="https://wallet.example.com/edent" />

That address is a "Payment Pointer". As a user browses the web, their browser takes note of all the sites they've visited. At the end of the month, the funds in the user's digital wallet are split proportionally between the sites which have enabled WebMonetization. The user's budget is under their control and there are various technical measures to stop websites hijacking funds.

This could be revolutionary⁰.

But there are some interesting fraud angles to consider. Let me give you a couple of examples.

Pointer Hijacking

Suppose I hacked into a popular site like BBC.co.uk and surreptitiously included my link in their HTML. Even if I was successful for just a few minutes, I could syphon off a significant amount of money.

At the moment, the WebMonetization plugin only looks at the page's HTML to find payment pointers. There's no way to say "This site doesn't use WebMonetization" or an out-of-band way to signal which Payment Pointer is correct. Obviously there are lots of ways to profit from hacking a website - but most of them are ostentatious or require the user to interact. This is subtle and silent.

How long would it take you to notice that a single meta element had snuck into some complex markup? When you discover it, what can you do? Money sent to that wallet can be transferred out in an instant. You might be able to get the wallet provider to freeze the funds or suspend the account, but that may not get you any money back.

Possible Solutions

Perhaps the username associated with a Payment Pointer should be that of the website it uses? something like href="https://wallet.example.com/shkspr.mobi"

That's superficially attractive, but comes with issues. I might have several domains - do I want to create a pointer for each of them?

There's also a legitimate use-case for having my pointer on someone else's site. Suppose I write a guest article for someone - their website might contain:

<link rel="monetization" href="https://wallet.example.com/edent" />
<link rel="monetization" href="https://wallet.coin_base.biz/BigSite" />

Which would allow us to split the revenue.

Similarly, a site like GitHub might let me use my Payment Pointer when people are visiting my specific page.

So, perhaps site owners should add a .well-known directive which lists acceptable Pointers? Well, if I have the ability to add arbitrary HTML to a site, I might also be able to upload files. So it isn't particularly robust protection.

Alright, what are other ways typically used to prove the legitimacy of data? DNS maybe? As the popular meme goes:

Someone with the ability to publish on a website is less likely to have access to DNS records. So having (yet another) DNS record could provide some protection. But DNS is tricky to get right, annoying to update, and a pain to repeatedly configure if you're constantly adding and removing legitimate users.

Reputation Hijacking

Suppose the propaganda experts in The People's Republic of Blefuscu decide to launch a fake site for your favourite political cause. It contains all sorts of horrible lies about a political candidate and tarnishes the reputation of something you hold dear. The sneaky tricksters put in a Payment Pointer which is the same as the legitimate site.

"This must be an official site," people say. "Look! It even funnels money to the same wallet as the other official sites!"

There's no way to disclaim money sent to you. Perhaps a political opponent operates an illegal Bonsai Kitten farm - but puts your Payment Pointer on it.

"I don't squash kittens into jars!" You cry as they drag you away. The police are unconvinced "Then why are you profiting from it?"

Possible Solutions

A wallet provider needs to be able to list which sites are your sites.

You log in to your wallet provider and fill in a list of websites you want your Payment Pointer to work on. Add your blog, your recipe site, your homemade video forum etc. When a user browses a website, they see the Payment Pointer and ask it for a list of valid sites. If "BonsaiKitten.biz" isn't on there, no payment is sent.

Much like OAuth, there is an administrative hassle to this. You may need to regularly update the sites you use, and hope that your forgetfulness doesn't cost you in lost income.

Final Thoughts

I'm moderately excited about WebMonetization. If it lives up to its promises, it could unleash a new wave of sustainable creativity across the web. If it is easier to make micropayments or donations to sites you like, without being subject to the invasive tracking of adverts, that would be brilliant.

The problems I've identified above are (I hope) minor. Someone sending you money without your consent may be concerning, but there's not much of an economic incentive to enrich your foes.

Think I'm wrong? Reckon you've found another fraudulent avenue? Want to argue about whether this is a likely problem? Stick a comment in the box.

To be fair, Coil tried this in 2020 and it didn't take off. But the new standard has a lot less cryptocurrency bollocks, so maybe it'll work this time? ↩︎

Pluralistic: Big Tech and "captive audience venues" (28 Mar 2025) - Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow

2025-03-28T18:19:15.000Z

Today's links

Big Tech and "captive audience venues": The digital equivalent of baseball stadiums and airport concourses.
Hey look at this: Delights to delectate.
Object permanence: 2005, 2010, 2015, 2020, 2024
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.

Big Tech and "captive audience venues" (permalink)

Enshittification is what you get when tech companies, run by the common-or-garden mediocre sociopaths who end up at the top of most businesses, are unshackled from any consequence for indulging their worst, greediest impulses:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/01/20/capitalist-unrealism/#praxis

The reason Facebook was once a nice place to hang out and talk with your friends and isn't anymore is that Mark Zuckerberg is no longer disciplined by competitors like Instagram (which he bought) nor by regulators (whom he captured), nor by interoperable tech like ad-blockers and alternative clients (which he uses IP law to destroy) nor by his own workforce (who have become disposable thanks to workforce supply catching up with demand). It used to be that Mark Zuckerberg couldn't really move the enshittification lever in the Facebook C-suite because these disciplining forces gummed it up. He had to worry about losing users, or about users installing alternative technology, or about regulators hitting him hard enough to hurt, or about workplace revolts. Now, he doesn't have to worry about these things, so he's indulging the impulses that he's had since the earliest days in his Harvard dorm, when he was a mere larval incel cooking up an online service to help him rate the fuckability of his female classmates.

When we had defenses, Mark Zuckerberg had to respect them. Now that we're defenseless, he's shameless. He's insatiable. He will devour us to the marrow.

When I'm explaining enshittification to normies, I often make comparisons to other places where you can't escape like airports and sports stadiums: "Facebook can afford to abuse you once they have you locked for the same reason that water costs $7/bottle on the other side of the airport TSA checkpoint." It's an extremely apt comparison, as you can verify for yourself by reading "Shakedown at the Snack Counter: The Case for Street Pricing," a new report from the Groundwork Collective:

https://groundworkcollaborative.org/work/street-pricing/

"Shakedown" makes the point that – as is the case with tech giants – sports stadiums and airports are creatures of vast public subsidy. If this seems counterintuitive, try Mariana Mazzucato's Entrepreneurial State, which lists all the ways in which the tech revolution represents a privatization of publicly funded research, as with the iPhone, whose semiconductors, internet connection, voice assistant technology, touchscreen and other components all count the public as a key investor:

https://www.pbs.org/newshour/economy/the-entrepreneurial-state-appl

And, as with airports and sports stadiums, the proprietors of the iPhone business are able to reap this gigantic public subsidy without taking on any public duties. Regulators that could impose some kind of public service obligations as quid pro quo for using public funds are AWOL, or worse, captured and complicit in the ongoing, publicly financed ripoff:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/08/15/private-law/#thirty-percent-vig

Airport, stadiums and tech platforms are all walled gardens – roach motels that are hard to escape once they've been entered. Thus the scorching prices of stadium and airport food, and the 30% transaction fees imposed by Apple and Google on app revenues (this is 1,000% higher than the average fees charged by the rest of the payment processing industry!), the 51% fees extracted by Google/Meta from advertisers and publishers (compare with the historical average of 15%), and the 45-51% that Amazon takes out of every dollar earned by its platform sellers. Once you're locked in, they can turn the screws, either by gouging buyers directly, or by gouging sellers, who pass those additional costs onto buyers.

Groundwork has a proposal to address this in physical settings: regulation. Specifically, a "street pricing" regulation that keeps the charges for food and drinks within these walled gardens to prices comparable to those on the outside. They note that these regulations enjoy wide, bipartisan support. 76% of Republicans support a regulation that can only be described as "price controls," two words that normally trigger head-explosions in the right.

How is it that such a commanding majority of Republicans can get behind government price controls? Simple: it's obvious that when a company no longer faces market discipline – when they're the only game in town (or on the other side of the TSA checkpoint) – that government discipline has to fill the vacuum, and if it doesn't, you will get mercilessly screwed.

This is where enshittification – a form of monopolistic decay unique to the tech sector – departs from everyday monopoly abuse in other sectors, like aviation and league sports. Tech has an in-built flexibility, the inescapable property of "interoperability" that comes standard with every digital system thanks to the universal nature of computers themselves.

Interoperable technologies let you hack Instagram to restore it to the state of privacy- and attention-respecting glory that made it a success in the first place:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/02/05/battery-vampire/#drained

They let you monitor Facebook's failures to uphold its own promises about not profiting from paid political disinformation:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/08/06/get-you-coming-and-going/#potemkin-research-program

They let you claw back control over how Facebook's feeds are constructed:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/10/08/unfollow-everything/#shut-the-zuck-up

They let Apple customers maintain their privacy, even if they have the temerity to be friends with Android users:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/12/07/blue-bubbles-for-all/#never-underestimate-the-determination-of-a-kid-who-is-time-rich-and-cash-poor

They let shoppers use Amazon to order from local mom-and-pop stores:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/07/10/view-a-sku/

They even let you destroy the net worth – and power – of Elon Musk:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/03/08/turnabout/#is-fair-play

Interoperability creates a unique, easily administered source of discipline over tech bosses that just isn't available as a means of countering the ripoffs we see elsewhere, including in sports stadiums and airports. That means that, far from being harder to fix than other disgusting scams in our society, tech is easier to fix. All that stands in the way is the IP laws that criminalize the kind of reverse-engineering work that allow the users of technology to have the final say over how the devices and services they rely on work:

https://locusmag.com/2020/09/cory-doctorow-ip/

Those IP laws were spread around the world by the US Trade Representative, who insisted that every country that wanted to export its products to the US without punitive tariffs must pass laws protecting the rent-extracting scams of US tech giants. With those tariff promises now in tatters, there's never been a better time for the rest of the world to jettison those Big Tech-protecting laws:

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

(Image: Daniel Brody, CC BY-SA 4.0, modified)

Hey look at this (permalink)

FTC Commissioners File Suit to Contest Trump’s Alleged Firing https://prospect.org/justice/2025-03-27-ftc-commissioners-file-suit-trumps-alleged-firing/
Screamboat Is a Both a Steamboat Willie Horror Movie and Hardcore Disney Fan Film https://gizmodo.com/screamboat-director-interview-steamboat-willie-disney-2000581124
Ploopy upgraded its new Classic 2 open-source trackball with better scrolling https://www.theverge.com/news/637794/ploopyploopy-classic-2-trackball-open-source-upgrade

Object permanence (permalink)

#20yrsago How HDTV killed firefighters, birthed the Broadcast Flag, and screwed America https://web.archive.org/web/20051020180115/http://nationaljournal.com/about/njweekly/stories/2005/0218njsp.htm

#15yrsago ACLU prevails: US Fed Judge invalidates gene patent https://www.aclu.org/cases/association-molecular-pathology-v-myriad-genetics

#15yrsago UK record lobby has vehement feelings on Digital Economy Bill debate, won’t say what they are https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2010/mar/29/digital-economy-bill-bpi-doctorow

#15yrsago Leaked doc: EU wants to destroy and rewrite Canada’s IP laws https://www.michaelgeist.ca/2010/03/ceta-demands/

#10yrsago Stephen King versus Maine’s lying governor https://www.rawstory.com/2015/03/stephen-king-hammers-maine-governor-for-doubling-down-hes-not-man-enough-to-admit-he-made-a-mistake/

#5yrsago Don't worry about groceries https://pluralistic.net/2020/03/29/grifters-gonna-grift/#germophobia

#5yrsago California's missing medical stockpile https://pluralistic.net/2020/03/29/grifters-gonna-grift/#austerity-kills

#5yrsago Cozy Catastrophes https://pluralistic.net/2020/03/29/grifters-gonna-grift/#wyndhamesque

#5yrsago Andrew Cuomo is not your woke bae https://pluralistic.net/2020/03/29/grifters-gonna-grift/#comparative-virtue

#5yrsago Alex Jones's one-two punch https://pluralistic.net/2020/03/29/grifters-gonna-grift/#filter-for-vulnerable

#1yrago Subprime gadgets https://pluralistic.net/2024/03/29/boobytrap/#device-lock-controller

Upcoming appearances (permalink)

Chicago: Picks and Shovels with Peter Sagal, Apr 2
https://exileinbookville.com/events/44853
Chicago: ABA Techshow, Apr 3
https://www.techshow.com/
Bloomington: Picks and Shovels at Morgenstern, Apr 4
https://morgensternbooks.com/event/2025-04-04/author-event-cory-doctorow
Pittsburgh: Picks and Shovels at White Whale Books, May 15
https://whitewhalebookstore.com/events/20250515
Pittsburgh: PyCon, May 16
https://us.pycon.org/2025/schedule/
PDX: Teardown 2025, Jun 20-22
https://www.crowdsupply.com/teardown/portland-2025
PDX: Picks and Shovels at Barnes and Noble, Jun 20
https://stores.barnesandnoble.com/event/9780062183697-0
New Orleans: DeepSouthCon63, Oct 10-12, 2025
http://www.contraflowscifi.org/

Recent appearances (permalink)

Fire the unelected social media dictators (Al Jazeera Upfront)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KXa4DzhkUZ8
Capitalists Hate Capitalism (MMT Podcast)
https://pileusmmt.libsyn.com/195-capitalists-hate-capitalism-with-cory-doctorow
How to Destroy Our Tech Overlords (Homeless Romantic)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=epma2B0wjzU

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). Signed, personalized copies at Dark Delicacies (https://www.darkdel.com/store/p3062/Available_Feb_20th%3A_The_Bezzle_HB.html#/).
"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). Signed, personalized copies at Dark Delicacies (https://www.darkdel.com/store/p3007/Pre-Order_Signed_Copies%3A_The_Lost_Cause_HB.html#/)
"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. Signed copies at Dark Delicacies (US): and Forbidden Planet (UK): https://forbiddenplanet.com/385004-red-team-blues-signed-edition-hardcover/.
"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
"Attack Surface": The third Little Brother novel, a standalone technothriller for adults. The Washington Post called it "a political cyberthriller, vigorous, bold and savvy about the limits of revolution and resistance." Order signed, personalized copies from Dark Delicacies https://www.darkdel.com/store/p1840/Available_Now%3A_Attack_Surface.html
"How to Destroy Surveillance Capitalism": an anti-monopoly pamphlet analyzing the true harms of surveillance capitalism and proposing a solution. https://onezero.medium.com/how-to-destroy-surveillance-capitalism-8135e6744d59?sk=f6cd10e54e20a07d4c6d0f3ac011af6b) (signed copies: https://www.darkdel.com/store/p2024/Available_Now%3A__How_to_Destroy_Surveillance_Capitalism.html)
"Little Brother/Homeland": A reissue omnibus edition with a new introduction by Edward Snowden: https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250774583; personalized/signed copies here: https://www.darkdel.com/store/p1750/July%3A__Little_Brother_%26_Homeland.html
"Poesy the Monster Slayer" a picture book about monsters, bedtime, gender, and kicking ass. Order here: https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781626723627. Get a personalized, signed copy here: https://www.darkdel.com/store/p2682/Corey_Doctorow%3A_Poesy_the_Monster_Slayer_HB.html#/.

Upcoming books (permalink)

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

Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources: Naked Capitalism (https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/).

Currently writing:

Enshittification: a nonfiction book about platform decay for Farrar, Straus, Giroux. Status: second pass edit underway (readaloud)
A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING
Picks and Shovels, a Martin Hench noir thriller about the heroic era of the PC. FORTHCOMING TOR BOOKS FEB 2025

Latest podcast: With Great Power Came No Responsibility: How Enshittification Conquered the 21st Century and How We Can Overthrow It https://craphound.com/news/2025/02/26/with-great-power-came-no-responsibility-how-enshittification-conquered-the-21st-century-and-how-we-can-overthrow-it/

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

Book Review: The Wicked of the Earth by A. D. Bergin ★★★★★ - Terence Eden’s Blog

2025-03-28T12:34:42.000Z

My friend Andrew has written a cracking novel. The English Civil Wars have left a fragile and changing world. The scarred and weary inhabitants of Newcastle Upon Tyne enlist a Scottish "Pricker" to rid themselves of the witches who shamelessly defy god.

Many are accused, and many hang despite their protestations. The town settles into an uneasy peace. And then, from London, rides a man determined to understand why his sister was accused and whether she yet lives.

Stories about the witch trials usually focus on the immediate horror - this is a superb look at the aftermath. Why do people turn on each other? What secrets will men murder for? How deep does guilt run?

It's a tangled tale, with a large dash of historial research to flesh it out. There's a lot of local slang to work through (another advantage of having an eReader with a comprehensive dictionary!) and some frenetic swordplay. It is bloody and gruesome without being excessive.

The audiobook is 99p on Audible - read by the superb Cliff Chapman - and the eBook is only £2.99 direct from the publisher.

Quote from man sued: "What are you gonna do, sue me?" - Molly White's microblog feed

2025-03-28T03:56:25.000Z

Quote from man sued: "What are you gonna do, sue me?"

Kevin O'Leary has sued crypto personality Ben Armstrong (aka "BitBoy Crypto") for repeatedly claiming O'Leary murdered two people.

(O'Leary and his wife were indeed involved in a boating collision that killed two people in 2019; O'Leary states in the lawsuit that it was his wife driving the boat, and she was acquitted of any charges.)

BitBoy also suggested that O'Leary was trying to have him killed, and claimed he'd swatted him. Shortly after, he posted O'Leary's cell phone number and encouraged his followers to "call a real life murderer"

Amusingly, BitBoy once tried to file a defamation lawsuit of his own against a YouTuber who called him a "shady dirtbag". He dropped the suit almost immediately after the YouTuber raised over $200,000 for his defense, and Armstrong admitted he didn't know lawsuits were public.

It's not clear that BitBoy even knows he's been sued yet; he was arrested two days ago after sending threatening emails to the judge in a different defamation case he's facing from his former business partners after he publicly accused them of various crimes.

BASEBALL'S BACK (and i'm feeling slightly melancholy) - Nicky FloweRSS

2025-03-28T03:16:00.000Z

I adore it when people say that baseball is America’s pastime. It may have been true 65 years ago but I would say that right now gambling on baseball is a much bigger pastime than baseball itself, and gambling on football is assuredly more popular than both of them combined. Gaming, apathy, and abusing waitstaff would blow baseball out of the water in an America’s pastime competition. But I’ve never minded that. I appreciate the ultimate meaninglessness of baseball more and more as each Opening Day arrives.

As I write this, I’m watching a game I don’t care about beyond wanting to see the Cardinals lose (EDIT: Boooooo they won, the Twins disappoint yet again). It’s being displayed on my wonderful CRT television, on the futon that serves as the basis of my entertainment center. I’m only kind of watching it; it’s mostly for background noise and after I’m done writing this, I’m gonna start making a casserole for dinner. It’s the perfect sport for all this. Of course, when my team (the Cubs) comes on later tonight, I’m gonna be glued to the screen. They’re starting Opening Day down 0-2, which is very funny to me and I would very much like them to make it 1-2 and I’ve missed my baseball guys very much. I hope they do well and have fun and beat the shit out of the other guys. I hate whoever the guys are that we’re playing tonight, I can’t remember. But when I need to, I can shift baseball into the background again and it fits there just as well. It’s extremely comforting and it feels funny that that’s the case but I need all the comfort I can get lately.

It’s funny that any of it is happening at a professional level and it’s taken so seriously. I love that guys will get so upset at this silly game that they’ll punch their own hands apart. And I don’t want to detract from the vast amount of talent and athleticism these guys all have! I would argue the silliness enhances the seriousness. It wouldn’t be serious if it wasn’t so silly. It’s a sport full of contradictions like that. I’m glad to have it back.

Nicky Flowers - 03/27/25 - If only they'd quit it with the regional cable brodcast blackouts... and the other problems too. - (send any comments/questions to hello at nickyflowers dot com)

Pluralistic: Reality-Based Communities (27 Mar 2025) - Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow

2025-03-27T15:05:36.000Z

Today's links

Reality-Based Communities: Anything that can't go on forever eventually stops.
Hey look at this: Delights to delectate.
Object permanence: 2010, 2015, 2020, 2024
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.

Reality-Based Communities (permalink)

Remember the Global War on Terror? I know, it's been a minute. But there was a time when we were all meant to take terrorism – real terrorism, the knocking-down-buildings kind, not the being-mean-to-Teslas kind – seriously.

Back in the early oughts, I remember picking up a copy of the Financial Times in an airport lounge and flipping through it, and coming across an "advice to corporate management" column in which the question was, "Should I take out terrorism insurance for my business?" The columnist's answer: "The actual risk to your business of a terrorism-related disruption rounds to zero. However: a) your shareholders don't understand this, an b) your insurance company does. That means that you can buy a very large amount of terrorism insurance for a very small amount of money, making this a cheap price to pay to mollify your easily frightened investors."

I never forgot that little piece of writing. It was a powerful reminder that successful large-scale enterprises must attend to the world as it is, not as ideology dictates that it should be. This was – and is – a deeply heterodox position among the ideological defenders of capitalism, who continue to uphold Milton Friedman's maxim that:

Truly important and significant hypotheses will be found to have "assumptions" that are wildly inaccurate descriptive representations of reality, and, in general, the more significant the theory, the more unrealistic the assumptions (in this sense)

https://pluralistic.net/2025/02/17/caliper-ai/#racism-machine

These ideologues – who often cross over from boardrooms into governments – are with the GW Bush official who dismissed a journalist as a member of the "reality-based community":

When we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality—judiciously, as you will—we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors…and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reality-based_community

But ultimately, someone has to make investments and plans that take accord of the world as it is, the adversaries they face, the real and material emergencies unfolding around them. When the Pentagon announces that henceforth the climate emergency will take a prime place in its threat assessments and budgets, that's not "the military going woke" – it's the military joining the reality-based community:

https://www.defensenews.com/opinion/commentary/2021/10/26/the-pentagon-has-to-include-climate-risk-in-all-of-its-plans-and-budgets/

This explains the radical shear between the Wall Street Journal's editorial page – in which you'll learn that governments can't solve any problems and markets solve all problems (including the problem of governments) – and the news reporting within, in which the critical role of the state in regulating and fueling markets is acknowledged.

The tension between the right's ideologues in boardrooms and governments and the operational people in charge of keeping the machines running has only escalated since the War on Terror days. There's an important sense in which leftists – as materialists – are playing the same game as these operational managers of capitalism. Take Thomas Piketty, the socialist economist whose blockbuster 2013 book Capital in the 21st Century argued that rising inequality threatened capitalism itself:

https://memex.craphound.com/2014/06/24/thomas-pikettys-capital-in-the-21st-century/

By analyzing three centuries' worth of capital flows, Piketty showed that when inequality reached a certain tipping point, the result was societal upheaval that continued until so much capital had been destroyed that inequality was reduced (because everyone had been pauperized). Piketty appealed to capitalism's technocrats to institute redistributive programs. His point was that building hospitals and schools was ultimately cheaper than paying for the guard-labor you'd need to keep people from building guillotines outside the gates of your walled estate.

The rise and rise of surveillance tech, and its successors, such as lethal drones and offshore gulags, can be seen as a tacit acknowledgment of Piketty's thesis. By lowering the cost of guard labor, it might possible to stabilize a society with higher levels of inequality, by identifying and neutralizing the people who are radicalized by the system's unfairness before you get an outbreak of guillotines:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/08/13/better-to-have-loved/#less-lethals

But reality is stubborn. Capitalism's defenders can insist that society will continue to function while wages stagnate and greedflation stokes the cost of living crisis, but ultimately, the military can't afford to have a fighting force that's in hock to payday lender usurers who are tormenting their families with arm-breaker collection calls:

https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2025/03/payday-loan-apps-cost-new-yorkers-500-million-plus-new-study-estimates.html

As Stein's Law – a bedrock of finance – has it, "anything that can't go on forever eventually stops." The ideologues of capitalism can insist that Luigi Mangione is a monster and an aberration, an armed freeloader who wants something for nothing. But privately, their own security forces are telling them otherwise.

Writing for The American Prospect, Daniel Boguslaw reports on a leaked intelligence dossier from the Connecticut regional intelligence center – a "fusion center" created as part of the War on Terror – wherein we learn that the American people sees Mangione as a modern Robin Hood:

https://prospect.org/justice/2025-03-27-intelligence-dossier-compares-luigi-mangione-robin-hood/

Many view Thompson as a symbolic representation of both as reports of insurance companies denying life sustaining medication coverage circulate online. It is not an unfair comparison to equate the current reaction toward Mangione to the reactions to Robin Hood, citizens may see Mangione’s alleged actions as an attack against a system designed to work against them.

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1hM3IZbnzk_cMk7evX2Urnwh5zxhRHpD5/view

The Connecticut fusion center isn't the only part of capitalism's operational wing that's taking notice of this. Today, Ken Klippenstein reports on an FBI threat assessment about the "heightened threat to CEOs":

https://www.kenklippenstein.com/p/fbi-becomes-rent-a-cops-for-ceos

The report comes from the FBI's counter-terrorism wing, which (Klippenstein notes) is in the business of rooting out "pre-crime" – identifying people who haven't committed a crime and neutralizing them. As Klippenstein writes, Trump AG Pam Bondi and FBI Director Kash Patel have both vowed to treat anti-Tesla protests as acts of terror. That's the view from the top, but back on the front lines of the Connecticut fusion center, things are more reality-based:

[The public] may view the ensuing manhunt and subsequent arrest of Mangione as NYPD, and largely policing as a whole, as a tool that is willing to expend massive resources to protect the wealthy, while the average citizen is left to their own means for personal security.

Any good investor knows that anything that can't go on forever eventually stops. The only question is: will that halt is a controlled braking action, or a collision with reality's brick wall?

(Image: Lee Haywood, CC BY-SA 2.0, modified)

Hey look at this (permalink)

Locus Awards Poll Login https://poll.voting.locusmag.com
How to Delete Your 23andMe Data https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2025/03/how-delete-your-23andme-data
China built hundreds of AI data centers to catch the AI boom. Now many stand unused. https://www.technologyreview.com/2025/03/26/1113802/china-ai-data-centers-unused/

Object permanence (permalink)

#15yrsago Battlefield Earth screenwriter apologises https://nypost.com/2010/03/28/i-penned-the-suckiest-movie-ever-sorry/

#15yrsago UK government’s smoke-filled room legislative process https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2010/mar/28/pre-election-parliamentary-wash-up

#15yrsago UK government wants to secretly read your postal mail https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/henryporter/2010/mar/27/intercepting-mail-stasi-tax-inspectors

#10yrsago What it’s like to teach evolution at the University of Kentucky https://orionmagazine.org/article/defending-darwin/

#10yrsago Prisoner escapes by faking an email ordering his release https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-london-32095189

#10yrsago 8-bit photo gun made from a Game Boy and a thermal printer https://vtol.cc/filter/works/gbg-8

#5yrsago Employers scramble to buy remote-worker spyware https://pluralistic.net/2020/03/28/unreciprocated-solidarity/#one-way-solidarity

#5yrsago United gets $25B stimulus and announces layoffs https://pluralistic.net/2020/03/28/unreciprocated-solidarity/#friendly-skies

#5yrsago Trump officials killed Walmart opioid prosecutions https://pluralistic.net/2020/03/28/unreciprocated-solidarity/#walmart-heroin

#5yrsago Boardgame Remix Kit https://pluralistic.net/2020/03/28/unreciprocated-solidarity/#hide-n-seek

#5yrsago The Pandemic Playbook https://pluralistic.net/2020/03/28/unreciprocated-solidarity/#pebkac

#5yrsago Charter techs get $25 gift cards instead of hazard pay https://pluralistic.net/2020/03/28/unreciprocated-solidarity/#charter-sucks

#1yrago The credit card fee victory is a defeat https://pluralistic.net/2024/03/28/concentrated-benefits/#diffuse-harms

Upcoming appearances (permalink)

Chicago: Picks and Shovels with Peter Sagal, Apr 2
https://exileinbookville.com/events/44853
Chicago: ABA Techshow, Apr 3
https://www.techshow.com/
Bloomington: Picks and Shovels at Morgenstern, Apr 4
https://morgensternbooks.com/event/2025-04-04/author-event-cory-doctorow
Pittsburgh: Picks and Shovels at White Whale Books, May 15
https://whitewhalebookstore.com/events/20250515
Pittsburgh: PyCon, May 16
https://us.pycon.org/2025/schedule/
PDX: Teardown 2025, Jun 20-22
https://www.crowdsupply.com/teardown/portland-2025
PDX: Picks and Shovels at Barnes and Noble, Jun 20
https://stores.barnesandnoble.com/event/9780062183697-0
New Orleans: DeepSouthCon63, Oct 10-12, 2025
http://www.contraflowscifi.org/

Recent appearances (permalink)

Capitalists Hate Capitalism (MMT Podcast)
https://pileusmmt.libsyn.com/195-capitalists-hate-capitalism-with-cory-doctorow
How to Destroy Our Tech Overlords (Homeless Romantic)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=epma2B0wjzU
The internet that could have been was ruined by billionaires (Real News Network)
https://therealnews.com/the-internet-that-could-have-been-was-ruined-by-billionaires

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). Signed, personalized copies at Dark Delicacies (https://www.darkdel.com/store/p3062/Available_Feb_20th%3A_The_Bezzle_HB.html#/).
"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). Signed, personalized copies at Dark Delicacies (https://www.darkdel.com/store/p3007/Pre-Order_Signed_Copies%3A_The_Lost_Cause_HB.html#/)
"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. Signed copies at Dark Delicacies (US): and Forbidden Planet (UK): https://forbiddenplanet.com/385004-red-team-blues-signed-edition-hardcover/.
"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
"Attack Surface": The third Little Brother novel, a standalone technothriller for adults. The Washington Post called it "a political cyberthriller, vigorous, bold and savvy about the limits of revolution and resistance." Order signed, personalized copies from Dark Delicacies https://www.darkdel.com/store/p1840/Available_Now%3A_Attack_Surface.html
"How to Destroy Surveillance Capitalism": an anti-monopoly pamphlet analyzing the true harms of surveillance capitalism and proposing a solution. https://onezero.medium.com/how-to-destroy-surveillance-capitalism-8135e6744d59?sk=f6cd10e54e20a07d4c6d0f3ac011af6b) (signed copies: https://www.darkdel.com/store/p2024/Available_Now%3A__How_to_Destroy_Surveillance_Capitalism.html)
"Little Brother/Homeland": A reissue omnibus edition with a new introduction by Edward Snowden: https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250774583; personalized/signed copies here: https://www.darkdel.com/store/p1750/July%3A__Little_Brother_%26_Homeland.html
"Poesy the Monster Slayer" a picture book about monsters, bedtime, gender, and kicking ass. Order here: https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781626723627. Get a personalized, signed copy here: https://www.darkdel.com/store/p2682/Corey_Doctorow%3A_Poesy_the_Monster_Slayer_HB.html#/.

Upcoming books (permalink)

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

Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources:

Currently writing:

Enshittification: a nonfiction book about platform decay for Farrar, Straus, Giroux. Status: second pass edit underway (readaloud)
A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING
Picks and Shovels, a Martin Hench noir thriller about the heroic era of the PC. FORTHCOMING TOR BOOKS FEB 2025

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

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

How to get Pluralistic:

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

Pluralistic.net

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

https://pluralistic.net/plura-list

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https://mamot.fr/@pluralistic

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

Book Review: The Little Book of Ikigai - The secret Japanese way to live a happy and long life by Ken Mogi ★★☆☆☆ - Terence Eden’s Blog

2025-03-27T12:34:24.000Z

Can a Japanese mindset help you find fulfilment in life? Based on this book - the answer is "no".

The Little Book of Ikigai is full of trite and unconvincing snippets of half-baked wisdom. It is stuffed with a slurry of low-grade Orientalism which I would have expected from a book written a hundred years ago. I honestly can't work out what the purpose of the book is. Part of it is travelogue (isn't Japan fascinating!) and part of it is history (isn't Japanese culture fascinating!). The majority tries hard to convince the reader that Japanese practices are the one-true path to a happy and fulfilling life.

Yet, it almost immediately undermines its own thesis by proclaiming:

Of course, ephemeral joy is not necessarily a trademark of Japan. For example, the French take sensory pleasures seriously. So do the Italians. Or, for that matter, the Russians, the Chinese, or even the English. Every culture has its own inspiration to offer.

So… what's the point?

In discussing how to find satisfaction in life, it offers up what I thought was a cautionary tale about the dangers of obsession:

For many years, Watanabe did not take any holidays, except for a week at New Year and another week in the middle of August. The rest of the time, Watanabe has been standing behind the bars of Est! seven days a week, all year around.

But, apparently, that's something to be emulated. Work/life balance? Nah!

I can't overstate just how much tosh there is in here.

Seen from the inner perspective of ikigai, the border between winner and losers gradually melts. Ultimately there is no difference between winners and losers. It is all about being human.

Imagine there was a Gashapon machine which dispensed little capsules of plasticy kōans. You'd stick in a coin and out would pop:

You don’t have to blow your own trumpet to be heard. You can just whisper, sometimes to yourself.

Think of it like a surface-level TED talk. Designed to make dullards think they're learning some deep secret when all they're getting is the mechanically reclaimed industrial byproducts of truth.

There are hints of the quack Jordan Peterson with sentences reminding us that:

Needless to say, you don’t have to be born in Japan to practise the custom of getting up early.

In amongst all the Wikipedia-list padding, there was one solitary thing I found useful. The idea of the "Focusing Illusion"

Researchers have been investigating a phenomenon called ‘focusing illusion’. People tend to regard certain things in life as necessary for happiness, while in fact they aren’t. The term ‘focusing illusion’ comes from the idea that you can be focused on a particular aspect of life, so much so that you can believe that your whole happiness depends on it. Some have the focusing illusion on, say, marriage as a prerequisite condition for happiness. In that case, they will feel unhappy so long as they remain single. Some will complain that they cannot be happy because they don’t have enough money, while others will be convinced they are unhappy because they don’t have a proper job.

In having a focusing illusion, you create your own reason for feeling unhappy.

Evidently my "focusing illusion" is that if I just read enough books, I'll finally understand what makes people fall for nonsense like this.

Crawl Order and Disorder - Weblog on marginalia.nu

2025-03-27T00:00:00.000Z

A problem the search engine’s crawler has struggled with for some time is that it takes a fairly long time to finish up, usually spending several days wrapping up the final few domains. This has been actualized recently, since the migration to slop crawl data has dropped memory requirements of the crawler by something like 80%, and as such I’ve been able to increase the number of crawling tasks, which has led to a bizarre case where 99.

Pluralistic: The AOC-Sanders anti-oligarch tour is all about organizing (26 Mar 2025) - Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow

2025-03-26T17:59:20.000Z

Today's links

The AOC-Sanders anti-oligarch tour is all about organizing: The courage to govern WITH, not OVER.
Hey look at this: Delights to delectate.
Object permanence: 2015, 2020, 2024
Upcoming appearances: Where to find me.
Recent appearances: Where I've been.
Latest books: You keep readin' em, I'll keep writin' 'em.
Upcoming books: Like I said, I'll keep writin' 'em.
Colophon: All the rest.

The AOC-Sanders anti-oligarch tour is all about organizing (permalink)

It's hard to imagine today, but Barack Obama ran as a populist outsider, buoyed into office by a grassroots organizing campaign that used an incredibly innovative online organizing tool called MyBarackObama.com, which directly connected rank-and-file supporters so they could self-organize, creating an unstoppable force.

But as far as Obama was concerned, MyBarackObama.com was a campaigning tool, not a governing tool. The last thing Obama wanted was a clamorous electorate jostling his elbow while he made the grand bargains that defined his presidency: secret drone killings, immunity for telcos that profited from in illegal NSA spying, impunity for CIA torturers, bailing out bankers, complicity in the foreclosure epidemic, and, of course, unlimited free money for health insurance companies through the ACA.

Obama ran like a populist, but governed like Chuck Schumer. Meanwhile, the GOP of his day was dominated by its own "grassroots" groups, the Tea Party movement that was funded and organized by the Kochs but who quickly slipped the leash and became an ungovernable force that conquered the party. It turns out that the kind of people who get really involved in party activism are, well, passionate (a less charitable term might be cranks – and I say this as a certified, grade-A crank). They really believe in the principles that bring them into party activism, and the only people they hate more than the other party are their own sellout leaders (oh, hi, Senator Fetterman!).

For a leader whose theory of governance involves a lot of back-room favor-trading and Extremely Grown Up compromising, an activated, organized base represents a powerful obstacle. Obama's seeming genius was his ability to awaken a grassroots campaigning force that he could then hit pause on once he attained office, then re-activate on demand (Obama "revived" MyBarackObama.com for his second presidential campaign):

https://www.computerworld.com/article/1532634/barack-obama-s-big-data-won-the-us-election-2.html

But ultimately, I think we have to conclude that Obama's strategy was a losing one. By putting his own organization into an induced coma between elections, Obama lost an important source of discipline and feedback that would have told him when his compromises overstepped the tolerance of the electorate – and the fact that Obama didn't have an organized base meant that his Democratic Party rivals and his Republican opponents could force him into bad compromises, as with the ACA.

Contrast Obama with another "populist outsider" in the Democratic Party: Bernie Sanders. Sanders has never been afraid of his own base or their passion. Members of his staff disproportionately come from community and union organizing backgrounds. Think of the difference between Sanders' "Not me, US" and "Our revolution" slogans and Obama's dotcom URL, "MyBarackObama.com." Sanders' presidential campaigns were always organizing campaigns, and he's kept those going in non-election years.

Since Trump/Musk's shock therapy assault on American democracy, Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez have been made headlines with a series of gigantic rallies across the country. The two Democratic Socialists have turned out vast crowds in Republican strongholds: 11,000 in Greely, CO; 15,000 in Tempe, AZ – and even bigger crowds in traditional Democratic turf: 34,000 in Denver.

Writing for The American Prospect, Micah Sifry describes the larger strategy behind these rallies. According to Faiz Shakur, the Sanders staffer who's organizing the events, the point of these events is to build a massive, grassroots organization that gets shit done:

https://prospect.org/politics/2025-03-26-bernies-fighting-oligarchy-tour-organizing/

The campaign is hiring full-time organizers in "Iowa, Nebraska, Wisconsin, and several Western states," and they're already actively fighting in state-level battles, like a Colorado bill to make it easier to form a union:

https://www.cpr.org/2025/02/03/colorado-labor-peace-action-union-history/

These people-powered movements are mobilizing directly against Musk's dark money operation, like the Wisconsin Supreme Court election where Musk is paying people $100 each to vote against Susan Crawford, a progressive candidate:

https://prospect.org/justice/2025-03-21-wisconsin-court-election-drawing-elon-musks-money/

The campaign is using online RSVPs to build out mailing lists. One interesting fact from Sifry's article: 65% of the signups are from people who are new to Sanders' mailing lists. 107,000 people have RSVPed so far. You can sign up here:

https://berniesanders.com/oligarchy/

Rationalization is easy to slip into and impossible to avoid. Politicians who make themselves beholden to organized supporters who really care about the issues are armoring themselves against the enormous pressure on elected representatives to make compromises. Both Sanders and Ocasio-Cortez have made compromises in their careers that I disagree with. I don't support them because I think they're perfect or immune to self-serving justifications. I support them because they are deliberately putting themselves in a position where it's much harder for them to make excuses and get away with it.

(Image: Matt A.J., CC BY 2.0, modified)

Hey look at this (permalink)

I won't connect my dishwasher to your stupid cloud https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2025/i-wont-connect-my-dishwasher-your-stupid-cloud
Insult to Injury: Trump's Tax on Paying Taxes https://www.creditslips.org/creditslips/2025/03/insult-to-injury-trumps-tax-on-paying-taxes.html

Object permanence (permalink)

#10yrsago San Francisco Sheriff’s Deputy ring accused of pit-fighting inmates https://www.sfgate.com/crime/article/S-F-jail-inmates-forced-to-fight-Adachi-says-6161221.php

#10yrsago Welfare encourages entrepreneurship https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2015/03/welfare-makes-america-more-entrepreneurial/388598/

#10yrsago Here’s the TSA’s stupid, secret list of behavioral terrorism tells https://theintercept.com/2015/03/27/revealed-tsas-closely-held-behavior-checklist-spot-terrorists/

#5yrsago Reasonable covid food-safety advice https://pluralistic.net/2020/03/27/just-asking-questions/#germophobes

#5yrsago Boris Johnson has coronavirus https://pluralistic.net/2020/03/27/just-asking-questions/#bojo

#5yrsago States prep for postal voting https://pluralistic.net/2020/03/27/just-asking-questions/#save-usps

#5yrsago Plutes cash in on stimulus https://pluralistic.net/2020/03/27/just-asking-questions/#stimulus-scam

#5yrsago The US is now the epicenter of the pandemic https://pluralistic.net/2020/03/27/just-asking-questions/#suicide-cults

#1yrago End of the line for corporate sovereignty https://pluralistic.net/2024/03/27/korporate-kangaroo-kourts/#corporate-sovereignty

Upcoming appearances (permalink)

Chicago: Picks and Shovels with Peter Sagal, Apr 2
https://exileinbookville.com/events/44853
Chicago: ABA Techshow, Apr 3
https://www.techshow.com/
Bloomington: Picks and Shovels at Morgenstern, Apr 4
https://morgensternbooks.com/event/2025-04-04/author-event-cory-doctorow
Pittsburgh: Picks and Shovels at White Whale Books, May 15
https://whitewhalebookstore.com/events/20250515
Pittsburgh: PyCon, May 16
https://us.pycon.org/2025/schedule/
PDX: Teardown 2025, Jun 20-22
https://www.crowdsupply.com/teardown/portland-2025
PDX: Picks and Shovels at Barnes and Noble, Jun 20
https://stores.barnesandnoble.com/event/9780062183697-0
New Orleans: DeepSouthCon63, Oct 10-12, 2025
http://www.contraflowscifi.org/

Recent appearances (permalink)

Capitalists Hate Capitalism (MMT Podcast)
https://pileusmmt.libsyn.com/195-capitalists-hate-capitalism-with-cory-doctorow
How to Destroy Our Tech Overlords (Homeless Romantic)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=epma2B0wjzU
The internet that could have been was ruined by billionaires (Real News Network)
https://therealnews.com/the-internet-that-could-have-been-was-ruined-by-billionaires

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). Signed, personalized copies at Dark Delicacies (https://www.darkdel.com/store/p3062/Available_Feb_20th%3A_The_Bezzle_HB.html#/).
"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). Signed, personalized copies at Dark Delicacies (https://www.darkdel.com/store/p3007/Pre-Order_Signed_Copies%3A_The_Lost_Cause_HB.html#/)
"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. Signed copies at Dark Delicacies (US): and Forbidden Planet (UK): https://forbiddenplanet.com/385004-red-team-blues-signed-edition-hardcover/.
"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
"Attack Surface": The third Little Brother novel, a standalone technothriller for adults. The Washington Post called it "a political cyberthriller, vigorous, bold and savvy about the limits of revolution and resistance." Order signed, personalized copies from Dark Delicacies https://www.darkdel.com/store/p1840/Available_Now%3A_Attack_Surface.html
"How to Destroy Surveillance Capitalism": an anti-monopoly pamphlet analyzing the true harms of surveillance capitalism and proposing a solution. https://onezero.medium.com/how-to-destroy-surveillance-capitalism-8135e6744d59?sk=f6cd10e54e20a07d4c6d0f3ac011af6b) (signed copies: https://www.darkdel.com/store/p2024/Available_Now%3A__How_to_Destroy_Surveillance_Capitalism.html)
"Little Brother/Homeland": A reissue omnibus edition with a new introduction by Edward Snowden: https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250774583; personalized/signed copies here: https://www.darkdel.com/store/p1750/July%3A__Little_Brother_%26_Homeland.html
"Poesy the Monster Slayer" a picture book about monsters, bedtime, gender, and kicking ass. Order here: https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781626723627. Get a personalized, signed copy here: https://www.darkdel.com/store/p2682/Corey_Doctorow%3A_Poesy_the_Monster_Slayer_HB.html#/.

Upcoming books (permalink)

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

Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources:

Currently writing:

Enshittification: a nonfiction book about platform decay for Farrar, Straus, Giroux. Status: second pass edit underway (readaloud)
A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING
Picks and Shovels, a Martin Hench noir thriller about the heroic era of the PC. FORTHCOMING TOR BOOKS FEB 2025

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

Note published on March 26, 2025 at 1:40 PM UTC - Molly White's microblog feed

2025-03-26T13:40:25.000Z

"we are currently clean on OPSEC", you write to the group chat with the journalist

Create a Table of Contents based on HTML Heading Elements - Terence Eden’s Blog

2025-03-26T12:34:31.000Z

Some of my blog posts are long⁰. They have lots of HTML headings like <h2> and <h3>. Say, wouldn't it be super-awesome to have something magically generate a Table of Contents? I've built a utility which runs server-side using PHP. Give it some HTML and it will construct a Table of Contents.

Let's dive in!

Background

HTML has six levels of headings¹ - <h1> is the main heading for content, <h2> is a sub-heading, <h3> is a sub-sub-heading, and so on.

Together, they form a hierarchy.

Heading Example

HTML headings are expected to be used a bit like this (I've nested this example so you can see the hierarchy):

<h1>The Theory of Everything</h1>
   <h2>Experiments</h2>
      <h3>First attempt</h3>
      <h3>Second attempt</h3>
   <h2>Equipment</h2>
      <h3>Broken equipment</h3>
         <h4>Repaired equipment</h4>
      <h3>Working Equipment</h3>
…

What is the purpose of a table of contents?

Wayfinding. On a long document, it is useful to be able to see an overview of the contents and then immediately navigate to the desired location.

The ToC has to provide a hierarchical view of all the headings and then link to them.

Code

I'm running this as part of a WordPress plugin. You may need to adapt it for your own use.

Load the HTML

This uses PHP's DOMdocument. I've manually added a UTF-8 header so that Unicode is preserved. If your HTML already has that, you can remove the addition from the code.

//  Load it into a DOM for manipulation
$dom = new DOMDocument();
//  Suppress warnings about HTML errors
libxml_use_internal_errors( true );
//  Force UTF-8 support
$dom->loadHTML( "<!DOCTYPE html><html><head><meta charset=UTF-8></head><body>" . $content, LIBXML_NOERROR | LIBXML_NOWARNING );
libxml_clear_errors();

Parse the HTML

It is not a good idea to use Regular Expressions to parse HTML - no matter how well-formed you think it is. Instead, use XPath to extract data from the DOM.

//  Parse with XPath
$xpath = new DOMXPath( $dom );

//  Look for all h* elements
$headings = $xpath->query( "//h1 | //h2 | //h3 | //h4 | //h5 | //h6" );

This produces an array with all the heading elements in the order they appear in the document.

Recursive looping

This is a bit knotty. It produces a nested array of the elements, their id attributes, and text. The end result should be something like:

array (
  array (
    'text' => '<h2>Table of Contents</h2>',
    'raw' => true,
  ),
  array (
    'text' => 'The Theory of Everything',
    'id' => 'the-theory-of-everything',
    'children' => 
    array (
      array (
        'text' => 'Experiments',
        'id' => 'experiments',
        'children' => 
        array (
          array (
            'text' => 'First attempt',
            'id' => 'first-attempt',
          ),
          array (
            'text' => 'Second attempt',
            'id' => 'second-attempt',

The code is moderately complex, but I've commented it as best as I can.

//  Start an array to hold all the headings in a hierarchy
$root = [];
//  Add an h2 with the title
$root[] = [
    "text"     => "<h2>Table of Contents</h2>", 
    "raw"      => true, 
    "children" => []
];

// Stack to track current hierarchy level
$stack = [&$root]; 

//  Loop through the headings
foreach ($headings as $heading) {

    //  Get the information
    //  Expecting <h2 id="something">Text</h2>
    $element = $heading->nodeName;  //  e.g. h2, h3, h4, etc
    $text    = trim( $heading->textContent );   
    $id      = $heading->getAttribute( "id" );

    //  h2 becomes 2, h3 becomes 3 etc
    $level = (int) substr($element, 1);

    //  Get data from element
    $node = array( 
        "text"     => $text, 
        "id"       => $id , 
        "children" => [] 
    );

    //  Ensure there are no gaps in the heading hierarchy
    while ( count( $stack ) > $level ) {
        array_pop( $stack );
    }

    //  If a gap exists (e.g., h4 without an immediately preceding h3), create placeholders
    while ( count( $stack ) < $level ) {
        //  What's the last element in the stack?
        $stackSize = count( $stack );
        $lastIndex = count( $stack[ $stackSize - 1] ) - 1;
        if ($lastIndex < 0) {
            //  If there is no previous sibling, create a placeholder parent
            $stack[$stackSize - 1][] = [
                "text"     => "",   //  This could have some placeholder text to warn the user?
                "children" => []
            ];
            $stack[] = &$stack[count($stack) - 1][0]['children'];
        } else {
            $stack[] = &$stack[count($stack) - 1][$lastIndex]['children'];
        }
    }

    //  Add the node to the current level
    $stack[count($stack) - 1][] = $node;
    $stack[] = &$stack[count($stack) - 1][count($stack[count($stack) - 1]) - 1]['children'];
}

Missing content

The trickiest part of the above is dealing with missing elements in the hierarchy. If you're sure you don't ever skip from an <h3> to an <h6>, you can get rid of some of the code dealing with that edge case.

Converting to HTML

OK, there's a hierarchical array, how does it become HTML?

Again, a little bit of recursion:

function arrayToHTMLList( $array, $style = "ul" )
{
    $html = "";

    //  Loop through the array
    foreach( $array as $element ) {
        //  Get the data of this element
        $text     = $element["text"];
        $id       = $element["id"];
        $children = $element["children"];
        $raw      = $element["raw"] ?? false;

        if ( $raw ) {
            //  Add it to the HTML without adding an internal link
            $html .= "<li>{$text}";
        } else {
            //  Add it to the HTML
            $html .= "<li><a href=#{$id}>{$text}</a>";
        }

        //  If the element has children
        if ( sizeof( $children ) > 0 ) {
            //  Recursively add it to the HTML
            $html .=  "<{$style}>" . arrayToHTMLList( $children, $style ) . "</{$style}>";
        } 
    }

    return $html;
}

Semantic Correctness

Finally, what should a table of contents look like in HTML? There is no <toc> element, so what is most appropriate?

ePub Example

Modern eBooks use the ePub standard which is based on HTML. Here's how an ePub creates a ToC.

<nav role="doc-toc" epub:type="toc" id="toc">
<h2>Table of Contents</h2>
<ol>
  <li>
    <a href="s01.xhtml">A simple link</a>
  </li>
  …
</ol>
</nav>

The modern(ish) <nav> element!

The nav element represents a section of a page that links to other pages or to parts within the page: a section with navigation links. HTML Specification

But there's a slight wrinkle. The ePub example above use <ol> an ordered list. The HTML example in the spec uses <ul> an unordered list.

Which is right? Well, that depends on whether you think the contents on your page should be referred to in order or not. There is, however, a secret third way.

I decided to use the <menu> element for my navigation. It is semantically the same as <ul> but just feels a bit closer to what I expect from navigation. Feel free to argue with me in the comments.

Where should the heading go?

I've put the title of the list into the list itself. That's valid HTML and, if my understanding is correct, should announce itself as the title of the navigation element to screen-readers and the like.

Conclusion

I've used slightly more heading in this post than I would usually, but hopefully the Table of Contents at the top demonstrates how this works.

If you want to reuse this code, I consider it too trivial to licence. But, if it makes you happy, you can treat it as MIT.

Thoughts? Comments? Feedback? Drop a note in the box.

Too long really, but who can be bothered to edit? ↩︎
Although Paul McCartney disagrees. ↩︎

Pluralistic: Why I don't like AI art (25 Mar 2025) - Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow

2025-03-25T22:23:08.000Z

Why I don't like AI art (permalink)

A law professor friend tells me that LLMs have completely transformed the way she relates to grad students and post-docs – for the worse. And no, it's not that they're cheating on their homework or using LLMs to write briefs full of hallucinated cases.

The thing that LLMs have changed in my friend's law school is letters of reference. Historically, students would only ask a prof for a letter of reference if they knew the prof really rated them. Writing a good reference is a ton of work, and that's rather the point: the mere fact that a law prof was willing to write one for you represents a signal about how highly they value you. It's a form of proof of work.

But then came the chatbots and with them, the knowledge that a reference letter could be generated by feeding three bullet points to a chatbot and having it generate five paragraphs of florid nonsense based on those three short sentences. Suddenly, profs were expected to write letters for many, many students – not just the top performers.

Of course, this was also happening at other universities, meaning that when my friend's school opened up for postdocs, they were inundated with letters of reference from profs elsewhere. Naturally, they handled this flood by feeding each letter back into an LLM and asking it to boil it down to three bullet points. No one thinks that these are identical to the three bullet points that were used to generate the letters, but it's close enough, right?

Obviously, this is terrible. At this point, letters of reference might as well consist solely of three bullet-points on letterhead. After all, the entire communicative intent in a chatbot-generated letter is just those three bullets. Everything else is padding, and all it does is dilute the communicative intent of the work. No matter how grammatically correct or even stylistically interesting the AI generated sentences are, they have less communicative freight than the three original bullet points. After all, the AI doesn't know anything about the grad student, so anything it adds to those three bullet points are, by definition, irrelevant to the question of whether they're well suited for a postdoc.

Which brings me to art. As a working artist in his third decade of professional life, I've concluded that the point of art is to take a big, numinous, irreducible feeling that fills the artist's mind, and attempt to infuse that feeling into some artistic vessel – a book, a painting, a song, a dance, a sculpture, etc – in the hopes that this work will cause a loose facsimile of that numinous, irreducible feeling to manifest in someone else's mind.

Art, in other words, is an act of communication – and there you have the problem with AI art. As a writer, when I write a novel, I make tens – if not hundreds – of thousands of tiny decisions that are in service to this business of causing my big, irreducible, numinous feeling to materialize in your mind. Most of those decisions aren't even conscious, but they are definitely decisions, and I don't make them solely on the basis of probabilistic autocomplete. One of my novels may be good and it may be bad, but one thing is definitely is is rich in communicative intent. Every one of those microdecisions is an expression of artistic intent.

Now, I'm not much of a visual artist. I can't draw, though I really enjoy creating collages, which you can see here:

https://www.flickr.com/photos/doctorow/albums/72177720316719208

I can tell you that every time I move a layer, change the color balance, or use the lasso tool to nip a few pixels out of a 19th century editorial cartoon that I'm matting into a modern backdrop, I'm making a communicative decision. The goal isn't "perfection" or "photorealism." I'm not trying to spin around really quick in order to get a look at the stuff behind me in Plato's cave. I am making communicative choices.

What's more: working with that lasso tool on a 10,000 pixel-wide Library of Congress scan of a painting from the cover of Puck magazine or a 15,000 pixel wide scan of Hieronymus Bosch's Garden of Earthly Delights means that I'm touching the smallest individual contours of each brushstroke. This is quite a meditative experience – but it's also quite a communicative one. Tracing the smallest irregularities in a brushstroke definitely materializes a theory of mind for me, in which I can feel the artist reaching out across time to convey something to me via the tiny microdecisions I'm going over with my cursor.

Herein lies the problem with AI art. Just like with a law school letter of reference generated from three bullet points, the prompt given to an AI to produce creative writing or an image is the sum total of the communicative intent infused into the work. The prompter has a big, numinous, irreducible feeling and they want to infuse it into a work in order to materialize versions of that feeling in your mind and mine. When they deliver a single line's worth of description into the prompt box, then – by definition – that's the only part that carries any communicative freight. The AI has taken one sentence's worth of actual communication intended to convey the big, numinous, irreducible feeling and diluted it amongst a thousand brushtrokes or 10,000 words. I think this is what we mean when we say AI art is soul-less and sterile. Like the five paragraphs of nonsense generated from three bullet points from a law prof, the AI is padding out the part that makes this art – the microdecisions intended to convey the big, numinous, irreducible feeling – with a bunch of stuff that has no communicative intent and therefore can't be art.

If my thesis is right, then the more you work with the AI, the more art-like its output becomes. If the AI generates 50 variations from your prompt and you choose one, that's one more microdecision infused into the work. If you re-prompt and re-re-prompt the AI to generate refinements, then each of those prompts is a new payload of microdecisions that the AI can spread out across all the words of pixels, increasing the amount of communicative intent in each one.

Finally: not all art is verbose. Marcel Duchamp's "Fountain" – a urinal signed "R. Mutt" – has very few communicative choices. Duchamp chose the urinal, chose the paint, painted the signature, came up with a title (probably some other choices went into it, too). It's a significant work of art. I know because when I look at it I feel a big, numinous irreducible feeling that Duchamp infused in the work so that I could experience a facsimile of Duchamp's artistic impulse.

There are individual sentences, brushstrokes, single dance-steps that initiate the upload of the creator's numinous, irreducible feeling directly into my brain. It's possible that a single very good prompt could produce text or an image that had artistic meaning. But it's not likely, in just the same way that scribbling three words on a sheet of paper or painting a single brushstroke will produce a meaningful work of art. Most art is somewhat verbose (but not all of it).

So there you have it: the reason I don't like AI art. It's not that AI artists lack for the big, numinous irreducible feelings. I firmly believe we all have those. The problem is that an AI prompt has very little communicative intent and nearly all (but not every) good piece of art has more communicative intent than fits into an AI prompt.

(Image: Cryteria, CC BY 3.0, modified)

Hey look at this (permalink)

Spammers are more consistent at making SPF, DKIM, and DMARC correct than are legitimate senders https://toad.social/@grumpybozo/114213600922816869
The Turd Reich https://mcusercontent.com/bd36014b9888db9081d204e78/files/27983e2f-9aa0-bf57-321f-53c4dbdeb252/the_turd_reich_A0_.pdf (h/t Crystaltips)
Merchant of Menace: Trump and the Jews https://prospect.org/politics/2025-03-25-merchant-of-menace-trump-and-the-jews/

Object permanence (permalink)

#15yrsago Secret copyright treaty will sideline the UN and replace it with private club of rich countries https://www.michaelgeist.ca/2010/03/acta-superstructure/

#15yrsago Discarded photocopier hard drives stuffed full of corporate secrets https://web.archive.org/web/20100322192937/http://www.thestar.com/news/gta/article/781567–high-tech-copy-machines-a-gold-mine-for-data-thieves

#10yrsago If Indiana legalizes homophobic discrimination, Gen Con’s leaving Indianapolis https://files.gencon.com/Gen_Con_Statement_Regarding_SB101.pdf

#10yrsago Sandwars: the mafias whose illegal sand mines make whole islands vanish https://www.wired.com/2015/03/illegal-sand-mining/<?a>

#10yrsago Woman medicated in a psychiatric ward until she said Obama didn’t follow her on Twitter https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/woman-held-in-psychiatric-ward-after-correctly-saying-obama-follows-her-on-twitter-10132662.html

#10yrsago As crypto wars begin, FBI silently removes sensible advice to encrypt your devices https://www.techdirt.com/2015/03/26/fbi-quietly-removes-recommendation-to-encrypt-your-phone-as-fbi-director-warns-how-encryption-will-lead-to-tears/

#10yrsago Australia outlaws warrant canaries https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2015/03/australian-government-minister-dodge-new-data-retention-law-like-this/

#10yrsago TPP leak: states give companies the right to repeal nations’ laws https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2015/02/its-time-act-now-congress-poised-introduce-bill-fast-track-tpp-next-week

#5yrsago Social distancing and other diseases https://pluralistic.net/2020/03/26/badger-masks/#flu-too

#5yrsago Record wind-power growth https://pluralistic.net/2020/03/26/badger-masks/#blows-blows

#5yrsago Sanders on GOP stimulus cruelty https://pluralistic.net/2020/03/26/badger-masks/#unlimited-cruelty

#5yrsago Canada nationalizes covid patents https://pluralistic.net/2020/03/26/badger-masks/#c13

#5yrsago LoC plugs Little Brother https://pluralistic.net/2020/03/26/badger-masks/#lb-loc

#5yrsago The ideology of economics https://pluralistic.net/2020/03/26/badger-masks/#piketty

#1yrago Meatspace twiddling https://pluralistic.net/2024/03/26/glitchbread/#electronic-shelf-tags

Upcoming appearances (permalink)

Chicago: Picks and Shovels with Peter Sagal, Apr 2
https://exileinbookville.com/events/44853
Chicago: ABA Techshow, Apr 3
https://www.techshow.com/
Bloomington: Picks and Shovels at Morgenstern, Apr 4
https://morgensternbooks.com/event/2025-04-04/author-event-cory-doctorow
Pittsburgh: Picks and Shovels at White Whale Books, May 15
https://whitewhalebookstore.com/events/20250515
Pittsburgh: PyCon, May 16
https://us.pycon.org/2025/schedule/
PDX: Teardown 2025, Jun 20-22
https://www.crowdsupply.com/teardown/portland-2025
PDX: Picks and Shovels at Barnes and Noble, Jun 20
https://stores.barnesandnoble.com/event/9780062183697-0
New Orleans: DeepSouthCon63, Oct 10-12, 2025
http://www.contraflowscifi.org/

Recent appearances (permalink)

Capitalists Hate Capitalism (MMT Podcast)
https://pileusmmt.libsyn.com/195-capitalists-hate-capitalism-with-cory-doctorow
How to Destroy Our Tech Overlords (Homeless Romantic)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=epma2B0wjzU
The internet that could have been was ruined by billionaires (Real News Network)
https://therealnews.com/the-internet-that-could-have-been-was-ruined-by-billionaires

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). Signed, personalized copies at Dark Delicacies (https://www.darkdel.com/store/p3062/Available_Feb_20th%3A_The_Bezzle_HB.html#/).
"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). Signed, personalized copies at Dark Delicacies (https://www.darkdel.com/store/p3007/Pre-Order_Signed_Copies%3A_The_Lost_Cause_HB.html#/)
"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. Signed copies at Dark Delicacies (US): and Forbidden Planet (UK): https://forbiddenplanet.com/385004-red-team-blues-signed-edition-hardcover/.
"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
"Attack Surface": The third Little Brother novel, a standalone technothriller for adults. The Washington Post called it "a political cyberthriller, vigorous, bold and savvy about the limits of revolution and resistance." Order signed, personalized copies from Dark Delicacies https://www.darkdel.com/store/p1840/Available_Now%3A_Attack_Surface.html
"How to Destroy Surveillance Capitalism": an anti-monopoly pamphlet analyzing the true harms of surveillance capitalism and proposing a solution. https://onezero.medium.com/how-to-destroy-surveillance-capitalism-8135e6744d59?sk=f6cd10e54e20a07d4c6d0f3ac011af6b) (signed copies: https://www.darkdel.com/store/p2024/Available_Now%3A__How_to_Destroy_Surveillance_Capitalism.html)
"Little Brother/Homeland": A reissue omnibus edition with a new introduction by Edward Snowden: https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250774583; personalized/signed copies here: https://www.darkdel.com/store/p1750/July%3A__Little_Brother_%26_Homeland.html
"Poesy the Monster Slayer" a picture book about monsters, bedtime, gender, and kicking ass. Order here: https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781626723627. Get a personalized, signed copy here: https://www.darkdel.com/store/p2682/Corey_Doctorow%3A_Poesy_the_Monster_Slayer_HB.html#/.

Upcoming books (permalink)

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

Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources:

Currently writing:

Enshittification: a nonfiction book about platform decay for Farrar, Straus, Giroux. Status: second pass edit underway (readaloud)
A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING
Picks and Shovels, a Martin Hench noir thriller about the heroic era of the PC. FORTHCOMING TOR BOOKS FEB 2025

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

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

You deserve a new book design. - Ethan Marcotte’s website

2025-03-25T04:00:00.000Z

I recently rereleased You Deserve a Tech Union as a self-published title, featuring a brand new design. For those who didn’t catch the announcement, here’s how the book looks now:

I’m just so happy with how it came out. I hope you like it, too.

As I mentioned in the announcement, redesigning the book was part of the agreement I made when I reacquired the rights to my books: basically, if I wanted to keep selling any of my books, they’d need to look like my books. Easy enough, right?

Well, there’s a terrible trick here. You see, Jason Santa Maria created the design for my former publisher’s titles, and I just loved the visual language he came up with. I’ll never forget opening my box of Responsive Web Design, picking up one of the copies, and thinking just how right everything felt as I leafed through its pages. Frankly, there was no chance I’d improve on Jason’s work; but just as importantly, I didn’t want to erase it.

This new version of You Deserve a Tech Union attempts to split that difference. If I’ve done my job right, this design should feel like a noticeable refresh, while still connecting with where the book began. The color is the primary carryover, and the interior layouts haven’t changed too much.¹ The biggest departures were on the cover and — most importantly — the type. Here’s a short excerpt from the book’s colophon:

The text is set in Tiempos Text and Untitled Sans, both by Klim Type Foundry. The headlines and book cover use Cambon Condensed by General Type Studio, as well as Klim Type Foundry’s Söhne.

Longtime readers will be unsurprised to see some of those names — heck, maybe some of you are rolling your eyes a bit. But, hey, look: if someone told me that I could only use Klim typefaces for the rest of my days, I’d die happy. Tiempos Text, Söhne, and Untitled Sans are all old favorites of mine, and they’re often starting points for me when I’m doing type exploration. And together, I think they made the book’s new interior shine.

Here’s how the text of You Deserve a Tech Union used to look, and how it looks now:

A page from the book’s first chapter, showing the book’s original design.

Here’s the redesigned version of the same page, with Söhne, Tiempos Text, and Untitled Sans in full effect.

Want a closer look? Well, here you go.

Ron Bilodeau and I spent a couple rounds finessing the text, but we were making small adjustments around the edges. The new type just felt solid from the very first pass.

But! We still needed a display face. Enter General Type’s Cambon, whose flared terminals I always feel I could get lost in. For the book’s more prominent numbers, like those in the lead-in for every chapter, Cambon’s condensed family felt like a natural fit — especially after seeing how well it sidled up to the Söhne-set chapter titles.

Cambon Condensed worked a treat on the table of contents, too. I really do love how it sits alongside Tiempos and Untitled Sans.

Here’s a side-by-side of the two tables of contents², just to home in on what has (and hasn’t) changed.

And of course, Cambon and Söhne felt like such a good pairing on You Deserve a Tech Union’s new cover. This is the one area of the book where the departure’s more radical than what came before — but if you squint, I think you can see where it all started.

I still deeply love the original design, and always will: after all, it’s my first memory of the finished book. But I feel like this new design’s something that still stands on its own, while still feeling like it’s of a part with what came before.

If you’re interested, you can read more about this new refreshed version, or buy your copy of You Deserve a Tech Union anywhere books are sold.

Thanks, as always, for reading.

Footnotes

There were some slight adjustments, shifting a gutter or two. Nothing too major, no lives were lost, &c &c. ↩︎
English is an absolutely perfect language and cannot be improved upon in any way. ↩︎

This has been “You deserve a new book design.” a post from Ethan’s journal.

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Marginalia Search receives second nlnet grant - Weblog on marginalia.nu

2025-03-25T00:00:00.000Z

I’m happy and grateful to announce that the Marginalia Search project has been accepted for a second nlnet grant. All the details are not yet finalized, but tentatively the grant will go toward addressing most of the items in the project roadmap for 2025. I’ve already been working full time on the project since summer 2023, and this grant secures additional development time, and extends the runway to a comfortable degree.