Mostly tech people I enjoy - BlogFlock

PHP - simple way to send HTTP headers before a script ends - Terence Eden’s Blog

2026-05-25T11:34:38.000Z

Suppose you want PHP to keep processing after it has sent back an HTTP response. Normally, this doesn't work:

<?php
   header( "Location: https://example.com/" );
   //   Long operation.
   sleep(10);
   die();

Try it yourself. You'll have to wait 10 seconds before you get back

< HTTP/2 302 
< location: https://example.com/

There are some complex ways to fix this - they usually involve spawning sub-processes or having a cron job run something. But there's a simpler way!

Most servers do some form of output buffering. They wait for the buffer to fill (or be explicitly terminated) before they send any content. My server was set to a buffer of 4,096 bytes. So I forced some dummy output to fill it up, then told PHP to flush the buffer:

<?php
   header( "Location: https://example.com/" );
   echo str_repeat("😆", 4097);
   flush();
   sleep(10);
   die();

Some clients, like Python's Requests, wait until they've explicitly seen the end of the response before processing it.

But, for something like curl, the above is sufficient.

Pluralistic: No honor among (ad-tech) thieves (25 May 2026) - Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow

2026-05-25T08:21:45.000Z

Today's links

No honor among (ad-tech) thieves: Including "and" and "the."
Hey look at this: Delights to delectate.
Object permanence: Budweiser nunchuks; GOP vote-suppressor voted illegally; Airbnb enshittifies; Oculus enshittifies; Nintendo copyfrauds its fans; Meritocracy to eugenics pipeline; Ultima Online crisis management; SNES cartridge urinal; JJ Abrams x Axanar, "Sex Criminals"; Beating school filters for fun; Orphan works; Japanese ATM heist; How the Sacklers rigged the game.
Upcoming appearances: London, Kansas City, LA, Menlo Park, Toronto, NYC, Edinburgh.
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.

No honor among (ad-tech) thieves (permalink)

It shouldn't come as a surprise to learn that a company that uses dishonest tactics to spy on you for profit will also use dishonest tactics to sell the resulting surveillance data.

The only reason this wouldn't be obvious is if you've fallen into the trap of thinking "if you're not paying for the product, you're the product." Companies that cheat when the opportunity arises will cheat everyone: customers, users, regulators, suppliers and employees. You're the product if the company can get away with making you the product:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/11/14/luxury-surveillance/#liar-liar

The digital surveillance swindle is a con from top to bottom: it's not just that they spy on you, it's also that they lie to you about how and why and where they spy on you and what happens to the data they swindle out of you. They're not just cheats, in other words – they're also liars.

Of course they're liars! If their terms of service were honest, they'd say something like, "By being desperate enough to use this product, you 'agree' that we're allowed to come over to your house and punch your grandmother, wear your underwear, make long-distance calls and eat all the food in your fridge."

So they lie like crazy. But they don't just lie to us: they lie to the people they sell our surveillance data to as well. Of course they do! Those people are the ones giving them the money! By tricking the people paying for the product, these surveillance swindlers can get them to pay more!

This is the basis of Tim Hwang's essential 2020 book Subprime Attention Crisis:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/10/05/florida-man/#wannamakers-ghost

Core to Hwang's thesis is that these ads aren't just dangerous, they're also ineffective. The danger of these ads is the erosion of privacy and the mobilization of private data for state repression and fraud, but not particularly for persuasion. The idea that ad-tech companies have realized the ancient dream of building a mind-control ray via the novel technique of "hacking your dopamine loop" is a story that the ad-tech swindlers cooked up to help them sell ads:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/09/30/dont-believe-the-criti-hype/#ordinary-mediocrities

Critics who repeat these outlandish claims are helping these companies sell ads to credulous advertisers, who are getting robbed to the tune of hundreds of billions of dollars. This is the process that Lee Vinsel calls "criti-hype," which is when you "take the sensational claims of boosters and entrepreneurs, flip them, and start talking about 'risks'":

https://peoples-things.ghost.io/youre-doing-it-wrong-notes-on-criticism-and-technology-hype/

Criti-hype is satisfying because the hype itself is so fantastically overblown. These companies claim they're going to save/destroy/conquer the world, transform the very nature of humanity, etc, and so critics who repeat those claims (brackets derogatory) can style themselves as defenders of the world and humanity itself.

This is also a very profitable style of criticism: there's a huge commercial market for people who claim to be defending the world from conquest by evil dopamine-hacking sorcerers and/or superintelligent paperclip-maximizers that can chatbot you into killing yourself and/or voting for Trump (brackets derogatory).

The opposite of criti-hype is materialistic criticism, grounded in independently verifiable claims about how these scams work. To be a good tech critic, you need to start by assuming that a company that lies to its users about what it's doing is perfectly capable of lying to its customers and investors about what it's doing (that is, "even if you're paying for the product, you're still the product").

That's demonstrably, verifiably true of the commercial surveillance industry. Commercial spies lie to their customers like crazy, and always have. Think of the department store magnate John Wannamaker's famous quip that "half my advertising dollars are wasted, I just don't know which half." Man, did someone ever do a sell-job on old Wannamaker: imagine believing that only half of your advertising dollars are wasted. Today, thanks to creepy ad-tech analytics, we know that the true figure is around 99%.

Hwang's book documents lots more ad-tech fraud that's every bit as audacious as the Wannamaker-era con-jobs. For example, there's the fact that when Procter and Gamble zeroed out its $200m/year surveillance advertising program, they saw a zero percent drop in sales because (to a first approximation) all $200m of that annual spend was disappearing down the fraud-hole.

There's been plenty more examples since, rivaling previous eras for audacity and outlandishness. In 2023, Mozilla Labs investigated the ways that modern cars spy on their drivers and concluded that, when it came to privacy, cars were "the worst product category" they had ever evaluated, and recommended that you not buy any of the cars currently offered for sale:

https://www.mozillafoundation.org/en/privacynotincluded/articles/its-official-cars-are-the-worst-product-category-we-have-ever-reviewed-for-privacy/

Mozilla's report investigated two things: which data your car was collecting and selling about you (lots) and what data your car company claimed it had collected about you and was offering for sale (way, way more).

For example, Nissan and Kia claimed that they had data about your sex life, a thing that cannot be reasonably inferred from the sensors in your car (unless you have a highly specific sex life). Six car companies claimed they had your genetic data (again, not a thing that any of the sensors in your car can know about).

What's more, all of these scams have only gotten worse in the intervening three years:

https://cleantechnica.com/2026/05/22/mozilla-foundation-condemns-data-collection-by-cars/

These companies are spying on you, and lying to you about how much they respect your privacy, and lying to their commercial customers about all the fiendish ways they've cooked up for invading your privacy.

Everyone in the ad-tech sector is lying to everyone else in the ad-tech sector, in other words. It's your basic hive of scum and villainy. Back in 2023, Cox Media – part of the sprawling media conglomerate that includes Cox Cable – told advertisers that they had a new product called "Active Listening" that recorded and transcribed all the conversations you have around your smart speakers, smart TVs, smart watches and phones:

https://www.404media.co/heres-the-pitch-deck-for-active-listening-ad-targeting/

It was a lie. There are plenty of ways that these devices spy on you, of course. Your smart TV is a cesspool of surveillance and data-exfiltration, but that data doesn't include your conversations:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/12/03/painful-burning-dribble/#law-of-intended-consequences

Same for your smart speaker, which not only gathers tons of information about you for sale and targeting, but also leaks your voice data all the time, whenever you utter any of its "trigger words," which include over 1,000 phrases that sound like its trigger words:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/07/02/big-river/#triggered

Cox, in other words, was running the same equal-opportunity scam that your auto-maker runs: deceiving you about how little data they were stealing from you, and deceiving their customers about how much data they were gathering on you.

That said, there was something remarkable and unique about Cox's fraud: because they were ripping off other (better-connected) fraudsters, their lies triggered an investigation by Donald Trump's FTC, who never met a scammer they wouldn't defend (from another scammer):

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2026/05/marketer-that-claimed-it-could-tap-devices-for-ad-targeting-will-pay-880k-settlement/

Still, there are limits to this "honor among thieves" business. The settlement Trump's FTC extracted from Cox for lying to other liars is less than $1m – basically, change that Cox can find down the back of its sofa:

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2026/05/marketer-that-claimed-it-could-tap-devices-for-ad-targeting-will-pay-880k-settlement/

Still, the Cox settlement is a great criti-hype object lesson, a reminder that these creepy, lying companies lie to everyone, including their customers, which means that even if you're paying for the product, you're still the product.

Hey look at this (permalink)

Hating AI is good, actually https://www.thehandbasket.co/p/hating-ai-is-good-actually
The Labour Party’s Main Problem Isn’t Losing Voters to Reform https://jacobin.com/2026/05/uk-elections-labour-reform-greens
Flipper One — we need your help https://blog.flipper.net/flipper-one-we-need-your-help/
London mayor Sadiq Khan blocks £50m Met police deal with Palantir https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2026/may/21/london-mayor-sadiq-khan-blocks-met-police-deal-with-palantir
Do AI Risks Require Extraordinary Government Intervention? https://www.normaltech.ai/p/do-ai-risks-require-extraordinary?hide_intro_popup=true

Object permanence (permalink)

#25yrsago Best email disclaimer award https://web.archive.org/web/20010526174903/http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/35/19057.html

#25yrsago Kaycee hoax FAQ https://web.archive.org/web/20010629212706/https://rootnode.org/article.php?sid=26

#25yrsago Crisis management in Ultima Online https://web.archive.org/web/20010605015828/http://www.newyorker.com/FACT/

#25yrsago E3 is all softcore porn now https://web.archive.org/web/20010702122044/https://www.salon.com/tech/feature/2001/05/22/e3_2001/print.html

#25yrsago Canadian payphone infinite long distance glitch https://web.archive.org/web/20010608183145/https://www.wired.com/news/culture/0,1284,43967,00.html

#20yrsago Kids make a sport out of outsmarting school web-filters https://web.archive.org/web/20060821224237/http://news.com.com/Kids+outsmart+Web+filters/2009-1041-6062548.html

#20yrsago Orphan works legislation https://web.archive.org/web/20060531135239/http://www.copybites.com/2006/05/chairman_lamar_.html

#20yrsago U. Florida cops ask fiction writer for fingerprints, DNA https://memex.craphound.com/2006/05/22/u-florida-cops-ask-fiction-writer-for-fingerprints-dna/

#20yrsago HDMI, the Manchurian DRM – a Broadcast Flag dormant until 2010 https://web.archive.org/web/20060523193853/https://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20060521-6880.html

#15yrsago The Filter Bubble: how personalization changes society https://memex.craphound.com/2011/05/22/the-filter-bubble-how-personalization-changes-society/

#15yrsago Last decade’s English libel legal sharks poised to make a new fortune on stupid privacy lawsuits and superinjuctions https://memex.craphound.com/2011/05/22/last-decades-english-libel-legal-sharks-poised-to-make-a-new-fortune-on-stupid-privacy-lawsuits-and-superinjuctions/

#15yrsago RIAA boss takes home $3 mil+ https://lefsetz.com/wordpress/2011/05/21/another-member-of-the-overpaid/

#15yrsago Vindictive game company invites employees to pan reviewer’s novel after bad review https://maroonersrock.com/2011/05/conduit-2-developer-calls-for-internal-retaliation-against-author-of-negative-joystiq-review/

#15yrsago France lobbies G8 for Internet control and censorship https://www.laquadrature.net/en/2011/05/20/frances-g8-focuses-on-control-and-restrictions-to-online-freedoms/

#15yrsago Budweiser nunchuks: American Ninja https://web.archive.org/web/20110701153712/http://www.todayandtomorrow.net/2011/05/19/american-ninja/

#15yrsago GOP legislative aide works on punitive voter ID bill, boasts of illegally voting in another district https://web.archive.org/web/20110522014606/http://host.madison.com/wsj/news/local/govt-and-politics/elections/article_ede5d49e-8272-11e0-a6e0-001cc4c03286.html

#15yrsago Raising a kid without disclosing their sex https://web.archive.org/web/20110523180952/http://www.parentcentral.ca/parent/babiespregnancy/babies/article/995112–parents-keep-child-s-gender-secret

#15yrsago Byron Sonne: Canadian security geek jailed for taunting G20 security theatre https://web.archive.org/web/20110518195236/http://www.torontolife.com/daily/informer/from-print-edition-informer/2011/05/03/how-byron-sonne’s-obsessions-with-the-g20-security-apparatus-cost-him-everything/

#15yrsago HOWTO make a SNES cartridge urinal https://blog.pricecharting.com/2011/05/how-to-build-video-game-urinal.html

#15yrsago German police raid German Pirate Party’s servers two days before election https://web.archive.org/web/20120516010632/https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2011/05/german-police-seize-pirate-party-servers-looking-at-anons-toolkit/

#10yrsago JJ Abrams urges Paramount to drop its lawsuit over fan Star Trek movie https://web.archive.org/web/20160522121940/https://deadline.com/2016/05/star-trek-axanar-lawsuit-ending-jj-abrams-paramount-1201760721/

#10yrsago Pat Buchanan on the Republican Party’s historical opposition to free trade deals https://web.archive.org/web/20160521162845/http://www.theamericanconservative.com/buchanan/free-trade-vs-the-republican-party/

#10yrsago United offered men-only “executive” flights until 1970 https://viewfromthewing.com/united-airlines-men-only-executive-service/

#10yrsago Elderly man kills wife because they couldn’t afford her medicine https://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/20/us/florida-man-says-he-killed-sick-wife-because-he-couldnt-afford-her-medicine-sheriffs-say.html?_r=0

#10yrsago Sex Criminals: Robin Hood bank robbers who can stop time when they orgasm https://memex.craphound.com/2016/05/21/sex-criminals-robin-hood-bank-robbers-who-can-stop-time-when-they-orgasm/

#10yrsago Airbnb stealth-updates terms of service, says it’s not an insurer and requires binding arbitration https://memex.craphound.com/2016/05/20/airbnb-stealth-updates-terms-of-service-says-its-not-an-insurer-and-requires-binding-arbitration/

#10yrsago Oculus breaks promise, uses DRM to kill app that let you switch VR systems https://web.archive.org/web/20160520161939/https://motherboard.vice.com/read/new-oculus-drm-cross-platform

#10yrsago Nintendo claims ownership over fans’ Minecraft/Mario mashups https://web.archive.org/web/20160521193334/http://arstechnica.com/gaming/2016/05/nintendo-issues-copyright-claims-on-mario-themed-minecraft-videos/

#10yrsago Paypal refuses to deliver online purchases to UK addresses containing “Isis” https://b2fxxx.blogspot.com/2016/05/the-tyranny-of-algorithm-yet-again.html

#10yrsago 30 students debate mass surveillance on Capitol Hill https://web.archive.org/web/20160521000031/https://theintercept.com/2016/05/20/high-school-debaters-bring-surveillance-encryption-arguments-to-capitol-hill/

#10yrsago What the NSA’s assault on whistleblowers taught Snowden https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/may/22/how-pentagon-punished-nsa-whistleblowers

#10yrsago Massive, coordinated ATM heist in Japan nets $12.7 million (¥‎1.4 billion) https://web.archive.org/web/20160523102154/http://mainichi.jp/english/articles/20160522/p2g/00m/0dm/044000c

#5yrsago How the Sacklers rigged the game https://pluralistic.net/2021/05/23/a-bankrupt-process/#sacklers

#5yrsago Consent theater https://pluralistic.net/2021/05/20/consent-theater/

#5yrsago Debunking the arguments for vaccine apartheid https://pluralistic.net/2021/05/21/wait-your-turn/#vaccine-apartheid

#5yrsago How the filibuster dies https://pluralistic.net/2021/05/22/not-with-a-bang/#theory-of-change

#1yrago Strange Bedfellows and Long Knives https://pluralistic.net/2025/05/21/et-tu-sloppy-steve/#fractured-fairytales

#1yrago The meritocracy to eugenics pipeline https://pluralistic.net/2025/05/20/big-cornflakes-energy/#caliper-pilled

Upcoming appearances (permalink)

SXSW London, Jun 2
https://www.sxswlondon.com/session/how-big-tech-broke-the-internet-b3c4a901
Kansas City: Facing the Future (Woodneath Library Center), Jun 10
https://www.mymcpl.org/events/119655/facing-future-cory-doctorow
LA: The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI with Brian Merchant (Skylight Books), Jun 19
https://www.skylightbooks.com/event/skylight-cory-doctorow-presents-reverse-centaurs-guide-life-after-ai-w-brian-merchant
Menlo Park: The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI with Angie Coiro (Kepler's), Jun 21
https://www.keplers.org/upcoming-events-internal/cory-doctorow-2026
Toronto: TBA, Jun 23
NYC: The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI with Jonathan Coulton (The Strand), Jun 24
https://www.strandbooks.com/cory-doctorow-the-reverse-centaur-s-guide-to-life-after-ai.html
Philadelphia: TBA, Jun 25
Chicago: The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI with Rick Perlstein (Exile in Bookville), Jun 26
https://exileinbookville.com/events/50628
Edinburgh International Book Festival with Jimmy Wales, Aug 17
https://www.edbookfest.co.uk/events/the-front-list-cory-doctorow-and-jimmy-wales

Recent appearances (permalink)

On Enshittification – and what can be done about it (Re:publica)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KhINQgPMVSI
EFFecting Change: How to Disenshittify the Internet (EFF, with Wendy Liu)
https://archive.org/details/effecting-change-enshittification
The “Enshittification” of Everything (Bioneers)
https://bioneers.org/cory-doctorow-enshittification-of-everything-zstf2605/
Enshittification (99% Invisible)
https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/666-enshittification/
Artificial Intelligence: The Ultimate Disruptor, with Astra Taylor and Yoshua Bengio (CBC Ideas)
https://www.cbc.ca/listen/live-radio/1-23-ideas/clip/16210039-artificial-intelligence-the-ultimate-disruptor

Latest books (permalink)

"Canny Valley": A limited edition collection of the collages I create for Pluralistic, self-published, September 2025 https://pluralistic.net/2025/09/04/illustrious/#chairman-bruce
"Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It," Farrar, Straus, Giroux, October 7 2025
https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374619329/enshittification/
"Picks and Shovels": a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about the heroic era of the PC, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), February 2025 (https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250865908/picksandshovels).
"The Bezzle": a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about prison-tech and other grifts, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), February 2024 (thebezzle.org).
"The Lost Cause:" a solarpunk novel of hope in the climate emergency, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), November 2023 (http://lost-cause.org).
"The Internet Con": A nonfiction book about interoperability and Big Tech (Verso) September 2023 (http://seizethemeansofcomputation.org). Signed copies at Book Soup (https://www.booksoup.com/book/9781804291245).
"Red Team Blues": "A grabby, compulsive thriller that will leave you knowing more about how the world works than you did before." Tor Books http://redteamblues.com.
"Chokepoint Capitalism: How to Beat Big Tech, Tame Big Content, and Get Artists Paid, with Rebecca Giblin", on how to unrig the markets for creative labor, Beacon Press/Scribe 2022 https://chokepointcapitalism.com

Upcoming books (permalink)

"The Reverse-Centaur's Guide to AI," a short book about being a better AI critic, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, June 2026 (https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374621568/thereversecentaursguidetolifeafterai/)
"Enshittification, Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It" (the graphic novel), Firstsecond, 2026
"The Post-American Internet," a geopolitical sequel of sorts to Enshittification, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2027
"Unauthorized Bread": a middle-grades graphic novel adapted from my novella about refugees, toasters and DRM, FirstSecond, April 20, 2027
"The Memex Method," Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2027

Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources:

Currently writing: "The Post-American Internet," a sequel to "Enshittification," about the better world the rest of us get to have now that Trump has torched America. Third draft completed. Submitted to editor.

"The Reverse Centaur's Guide to AI," a short book for Farrar, Straus and Giroux about being an effective AI critic. LEGAL REVIEW AND COPYEDIT COMPLETE.
"The Post-American Internet," a short book about internet policy in the age of Trumpism. PLANNING.
A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING

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

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

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

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ISSN: 3066-764X

Which age-gates should be skill-gates and vice-versa? - Terence Eden’s Blog

2026-05-23T11:34:31.000Z

In the UK, it is illegal to buy alcohol if you are under 18.

Similarly, in most countries, you cannot vote until you have reached a specific age.

These are age-gates. You do not need to prove your competence to drink, vote, smoke, or get married; you just need to be old enough.

Some things have skill-gates. If you want an amateur radio licence in the UK, you need to pass an exam. You can be any age⁰.

Similarly, most jurisdictions allow you to get a medical licence once you have passed the requisite tests¹.

There are also activities which are dual-gated. You can only get a driving licence after passing a test, but you can only apply to take the test once you are a certain age.

Where should society swap age-gates and skill-gates?

Perhaps the big one is voting. The UK is preparing to extend the franchise to all 16 and 17 year olds - but why is there an age-gate at all?

Children are affected by politics, they pay tax on the goods they buy, they exist in the world. Why shouldn't they vote?

The usual argument is that they are too immature. But maturity isn't dependent on age. Idiots are allowed to vote. Centenarians with no stake in the consequences of their politics are allowed to vote. People who don't understand what powers a government has are allowed to vote.

Would it really be so bad to introduce a voting licence? Make people take a short quiz to ensure they understand what they're voting for and why they're voting. Perhaps there are concerns about disenfranchising eligible adults (but not mature children) or that the state will rig the test (when they could rig the election) or whatever. But if we're sticking with the fiction that some people aren't mature enough to vote then we must give disenfranchised people a chance to prove their maturity.

You could make the same argument about driving. If a 7 year old is able to demonstrate mastery and control of a vehicle, are they likely to be a better driver than a 90 year old who has never taken a modern test?

Alcohol is different. We realise that the drug is harmful and especially harmful to developing humans. So we age-gate it. But do people really understand the health risks? Should you have to pass a test in order to imbibe? We make the people selling alcohol pass somewhat rigorous skills assessments. Perhaps the burden of proof should be reversed?

Wait, do you really believe all this?

No, not necessarily.

I find it fascinating that different cultures set different limits on people's activities. I wouldn't like to live somewhere that allowed anyone to drive on the public roads. Similarly, I don't particularly want governments restricting who can vote based on an arbitrary assessment.

But where are the limits? Why is the legal driving age so variable? Why are some driving tests easier than others?

Do you want a teenage doctor diagnosing you - even if they are legally certified? Should you be able to use a radio without passing a test if you're a legal adult?

Which age-gates and skill-gates do you think should be flipped?

OK, realistically you have to be old enough to read, write, and communicate. But there's no legal barrier to a precocious 3 year old taking and passing the exams. ↩︎
As seen in the insightful documentary series "Doogie Howser, M.D." ↩︎

Justin Garrison - Uses This

2026-05-23T00:00:00.000Z

Who are you, and what do you do?

I'm Justin Garrison, a maker, developer, and educator working at Sidero Labs. I got the itch for electronics and software in college, but didn't have a lot of access to tools and software at the time so I have little formal training. All of my early interests were working on cars which got me very comfortable with tools early in life.

I enjoy tinkering with hardware and occasionally write software, and usually I write a blog post or make a video about what I learned. I also contribute to a few different large open source projects as a frequent beta tester and occasional bug fixer.

I sometimes draw terrible comics and animations, but I enjoy consuming them more than creating them. I'm also the host of the Fork Around and Find Out podcast.

What do you use to get the job done?

I have been using Linux as my primary operating system since I got my first computer. Using it as my daily driver has taught me a lot about how it works and how to fix it which has been my job at multiple companies. I'm a contributor and user of Talos Linux, Bluefin, and Bazzite distributions.

I do most of my professional work in a terminal including software development in Neovim. Because I spend so much time in a terminal I maintain lists of TUIs and tmux plugins that help me find new, useful tools.

Most of my art is done on an iPad Pro 10" in Procreate or on my desktop with a Wacom Cintiq 16" with Krita. I also do a lot of white boarding with tldraw.com or a physical white board. My video editing is primarily done in DaVinci Resolve on my desktop, but occasionally I use my iPad with a Speed Editor when I'm traveling.

I have a lot of random tools and electronics I use for hardware projects, and almost all of them are no-name, cheap tools. I've never felt the need to buy a Dremel brand rotary cutter or a Weller soldering iron. I like to use Adam Savage's strategy for buying tools -- he buys the cheapest version possible of a new tool and only when it breaks does he evaluate if he should buy the more expensive option.

My podcasting and live streaming are done via Riverside.fm and Streamyard and audio editing is all done in Audacity.

I use a Fully standing desk that I've had for 8 years since I started working from home. I regularly use a WalkingPad for light exercise while I'm answering emails, Slack messages, or sometimes while I'm on meetings.

What would be your dream setup?

My dream setup would include more space and a window. Almost every office I've had has been in a windowless room -- including my current setup. My retrofitted garage is wonderful for projects, but it is very small and 1/2 of it is still used as a garage for storage.

I would love more bench space for larger projects, more storage space to stay organized, and maybe dedicated space for exercise and filming. If my garage were twice as big it would almost be big enough.

My computing and software setup are plenty powerful enough for my needs and I'm always making small improvements depending on what my current interests and needs are. I use my iPad for a lot of writing on the go -- built in cellular radio is great -- and I look forward to something like Apple Vision Pro that doesn't require macOS or AR glasses that can be used with just a keyboard for getting work done or plugged into my Steam Deck for gaming while traveling

Enjoy the interview? You can support independant publishing and help keep the site ad-free by buying me a coffee!

tweet - Derek Sivers blog

2026-05-21T21:18:39.000Z

Fight Club: I liked it the first time years ago, but watching a second time when you already know the end reveal? Elevates it from good to great. So many brilliant details in the screenplay. What else in life is better the second time?

Pluralistic: Shopping isn't politics (21 May 2026) - Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow

2026-05-21T15:03:37.000Z

Today's links

Shopping isn't politics: The personal isn't political.
Hey look at this: Delights to delectate.
Object permanence: Neither arphid nor RFID; Gor novel sex slave cult; Violent economist sex criminals; Vade et caca in pilleum et ipse traheatur super aures tuo; "We Stand on Guard"; Healthy FLOSS; Lawsuits 2.0; CDC v zombie apocalypse; Gandhi's speeches; Apple v games about Palestine; Second Life chuds v Bernie; UK was never a "white" country; Dead, broke; Who Broke the Internet? (III)
Upcoming appearances: Hay-on-Wye, London, Kansas City, LA, Menlo Park, Toronto, NYC, Edinburgh.
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.

Shopping isn't politics (permalink)

I've written before about the futility of "voting with your wallet." Billionaires love it when you try to vote with your wallet, because while billionaires only represent 0.00004% of the population, their wallets are 100,000 times larger than average, which means that when we vote with wallets, a billionaire's vote counts 100,000 times more than yours:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/09/13/consumption-choices/

The idea of voting with your wallet is fundamentally antiprogressive, and not only because wallet-voting favors the wealthy. The ideological basis for voting with your wallet is the belief that politics are slow and unresponsive, while markets dynamically optimize for human wellbeing. By voting with your wallet, you are supposedly injecting information about your preferences and dispreferences into a vast, distributed computer we call "the market," which uses "demand signals" to decide how we live our lives.

This belief is incompatible with the idea of politics – that is, the idea that our lives can be shaped by representative democracy, deliberation, and/or solidarity. It's a nihilistic view that insists that the only nice things we can have are the things that "the market" chooses for us. If "the market" doesn't decide to swap out fossil fuels for cleantech, then that's that – any attempt to draw down our carbon emissions through regulation will only "distort the market." If you're roasting in a drought, drowning in a flood, or being incinerated by a wildfire, your only move is to go shopping and hope that by buying a Tesla, you will emit a "demand signal" that "tips the market equilibrium" to "not killing you and everyone you love."

Shopping isn't politics. Politics are politics, and shopping is shopping.

This isn't to say shopping can't improve your life! I am a materialist, and having nice things is nice. If there's a lovely independent coffee shop in your neighborhood where the baristas are treated well and the coffee is delicious and the vibes are impeccable, then by all means, get your coffee there. If you love the staff and selections at your neighborhood indie bookstore, then you should buy your books there. If you love the discourse on Mastodon or Bluesky and find yourself feeling sick and angry when you use Twitter or Facebook, then ditch the legacy social media and take up residence in the Fediverse and/or Atmosphere.

But don't kid yourself that this is politics. No matter how indie your coffee, books and social media, your consumption choices will not have a material impact on Starbucks, Amazon or Twitter. Going vegan won't make the meat industry treat animals better. Taking the bus won't induce improvements to your town's public transit network.

Having nice things is nice, and the more nice things you have – good food, good health, good books, good coffee, good social media and good transit – the more space and energy you'll have to devote to politics.

But what about boycotts? Surely the Montgomery bus boycott, the anti-Apartheid boycott, the California grape boycott and the BDS movement were politics, right?

They sure were. But they weren't shopping. The Montgomery bus boycott lasted 382 days, during which time organizers worked with bus riders, cab drivers, the UAW and community groups to provide material and legal support and alternatives like car pools, all while communicating about their specific demands. After 382 days, the courts ruled in their favor, their demands were met, and Montgomery's buses desegregated:

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

That wasn't "shopping." The bus boycott didn't consist of a bunch of individual choices to walk to work, repeatedly made by a city full of Black people and their allies. The shopping part was the least important part of the whole matter, and the meaningful part of the shopping was never individual. If the boycott was nothing more than shopping, it would have broken as soon as individual people found themselves unable to convince their bosses to tolerate their late, sweaty arrival at work, day after day. The boycott worked because it was politics.

And because the boycott was politics, it left behind a movement: the boycott brought people into solidarity with each other, and when they comprehensively defeated their political adversary – National City Lines – they went on to form the backbone of the civil rights movement, going from strength to strength.

Of course, shopping is part of a boycott. It's the individual part that each participant in the boycott undertakes. But without the collective, organized part, shopping is no way to effect change.

Is voting politics? Well, sure, but voting is to politics as shopping is to boycotts. For several decades now, most voters have been asked to chose the lesser of two evils (and now they're asked to choose the significantly lesser of two evils). Voting can change things, when there's something good to vote for, or something very bad to vote against, and when lots of people show up at the polls.

But to make voting effective, you have to do politics. You have to get involved in the primary races that select the candidate. You have to go to candidates' meetings and ask tough questions. You have to ring doorbells for your chosen candidate, volunteer to take your neighbors to the polls and volunteer to defend the polls from chuds and ICE fascists. The part of voting that takes place in the booth is the least important part of politics.

It's obvious why we might prefer to substitute voting or shopping for politics: they're activities you do alone. You don't have to find anyone else to do them with you. You don't have to convince anyone else to do them with you. You don't have to argue about them or justify them. They are zipless fucks, a source of satisfaction without connection, compromise or complication.

Of course, that's also why voting and shopping make a poor substitute for politics. All the retail therapy in the world can't lift your spirits the way that solidarity and community will. Doing politics creates solidaristic ties with the people around you, who might help you if you lose your job and can't buy groceries, or break your leg and can't get to the grocery store, or if ICE fascists try to kidnap you while you're out shopping.

Solidarity gets you through times of no money way better than money gets you through times of no solidarity – just ask the psycho billionaires who wanted Doug Rushkoff to invent a system of bomb-collars that would keep their post-apocalyptic mercenaries from whacking them and stealing their bunkers:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/09/13/collapse-porn/#collapse-porn

Last weekend, I walked through a crowd of tens of thousands of coked-up fascists in central London on my way to meet up with 250,000 comrades marching for an end to genocide in Palestine and a new British social compact based on mutual aid, pluralism, and care. Walking through those flag-draped chuds was incredibly demoralizing:

https://www.newstatesman.com/politics/2026/05/cokeheads-and-christians-a-day-at-tommy-robinsons-rally

But when I got off the tube at South Kensington and found there were so many of us we were backed up all the way from the every street entrance to the bottom of the escalators, my morale surged. Hours later, when we all reached Pall Mall together, I was ready to take on the world. That's what politics does for you: it makes you feel like you belong to a polity and that together, you can really change the world.

Politics runs on solidarity, but shopping destroys it. Individual consumption choices don't change the world, but if you've been convinced that the only way to change the world is by voting with your wallet then when the world stays terrible, you can only conclude that your friends and neighbors have ruined by things by voting (shopping) wrong.

In politics, we build bonds of mutual regard and understanding that we use to navigate our differences. But when you vote with your wallet, all that's left is the endless policing of your allies' consumption choices, endless scolding for their failure to leave Twitter, or give up meat, or eschew chatbots. Shopping for change ends up replacing politics with petty snooping and endless sniping and attempts to bully or shame people into consuming different things.

If "the personal is political," then every political disappointment in your life is down to your friends' personal defects. If you let yourself get tricked into organizing your life around "living your politics" – that is, giving up on nice things in the hope that this will make politics change, and then getting mad at people who consume different things from you – then you will end up sucked into the stupidest fights imaginable with the people you need to get along with in order to do politics.

Once again, this isn't to say that you shouldn't choose to have nice things. Buy stuff you like, shop at places you like. And when circumstances allow all of us to start making consumption choices in unison – as when Comrades Trump and Putin stage an orgy of demand-destruction for fossil fuels, catapulting the world into the Gretacene – then by all means, take the win. That is one of the rare instances in which we can do political change with consumption!

https://pluralistic.net/2026/05/04/hope-in-the-dark/#hormuzed-into-the-gretacene

And there definitely are times where a single individual can intervene in the system in a powerful way that really fucks up the worst actors in our society:

https://www.theverge.com/tech/931532/bambu-agpl-pawel-jarczak-open-source-threat-dmca-github

These usually involve using technology to "move fast and break things," which is fine, actually! It's fine to move fast and break things belonging to Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg or some other monster. Indeed, it's practically a moral imperative:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/01/30/zucksauce/#gandersauce

But even in those highly leveraged, highly individualized opportunities to make a dent in the universe, you'll make a bigger dent, and have more fun, if you do it as politics, with a big group of people, in bonds of solidarity.

Hey look at this (permalink)

The Workers Who Defy Gravity https://washingtonmonthly.com/2026/05/20/ai-companies-organized-labor-actors-fight-back/
Messages of Solidarity https://movement.wwwrise.org/solidarity
The Enshittification of History https://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2026/05/the-enshittification-of-histor.html
Europe’s big tech bet is only as safe as its democracy https://defenddemocracy.eu/eu-tech-democracy/
Iran demands Big Tech pay fees for undersea Internet cables in Strait of Hormuz https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2026/05/iran-demands-big-tech-pay-fees-for-undersea-internet-cables-in-strait-of-hormuz/

Object permanence (permalink)

#25yrsago Software-based antennas https://web.archive.org/web/20010518225333/http://www.etenna.com/

#25yrsago Aimster loses trademark to AOL https://web.archive.org/web/20010523001415/http://msnbc.com/news/575492.asp?cp1=1

#25yrsago House to ban online anonymity https://web.archive.org/web/20010526220254/https://www.wired.com/news/politics/0,1283,43938,00.html

#20yrsago Lawsuits of Web 2.0 https://web.archive.org/web/20060528001734/http://www.fuckedsuit.com/

#20yrsago Is one month’s piracy worth more than France’s GDP? https://decordove.com/one-month-of-torrents-is-worth-more-than-the-gdp-of-france-riaa-rant.php

#20yrsago Audio from Bruce Sterling’s “Neither Arphid nor RFID” rant https://web.archive.org/web/20060614140414/https://dev1.manme.org.uk/~luke/Sterling_SPACE_160506.mp3

#20yrsago Cops raid “sex slave cult” based on science fiction novels http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/4996410.stm

#15yrsago Legal rebuttal: “vade et caca in pilleum et ipse traheatur super aures tuo” https://newyorkpersonalinjuryattorneyblog.com/2011/05/joseph-rakofsky-i-have-an-answer-for-you.html

#15yrsago List of economists involved in violent sex crimes, for Ben Stein https://blog.xkcd.com/2011/05/18/answering-ben-steins-question/

#15yrsago MAFIAA wants warrantless searches of CD and DVD factories https://web.archive.org/web/20110520232527/https://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2011/05/riaa-warrantless-seizures/

#15yrsago CDC explains how to prepare for a zombie apocalypse https://web.archive.org/web/20110519201602/http://emergency.cdc.gov/socialmedia/zombies_blog.asp

#10yrsago 129 of Gandhi’s speeches on India and self-rule https://archive.org/details/HindSwaraj?and[]=subject%3A"Post+Prayer+Speech"

#10yrsago A backer message as Earth leaves beta and goes 1.0 https://web.archive.org/web/20160521054706/http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v533/n7603/full/533432a.html

#10yrsago EFF files Chelsea Manning appeal on hacking conviction https://www.eff.org/press/releases/eff-asks-court-reverse-chelsea-mannings-conviction-violating-federal-anti-hacking-law

#10yrsago Apple rejects game about Palestine because political messages disqualify games from consideration https://web.archive.org/web/20160520111154/https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2016/05/apple-says-game-about-palestinian-child-isnt-a-game/

#10yrsago Nerdcore rapper Sammus’s amazing OSCON keynote https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ELczJ07XPnw

#10yrsago Everything is a Remix on “The Force Awakens” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PKvsc6a03Es

#10yrsago Angry dudes are downranking woman-oriented TV shows on review sites https://web.archive.org/web/20160519014153/https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/men-are-sabotaging-the-online-reviews-of-tv-shows-aimed-at-women/

#10yrsago Second Life’s Trump army lays siege to Bernie Sanders’s virtual HQ with swastika cannons https://web.archive.org/web/20160428093534/https://motherboard.vice.com/read/second-life-donald-trump-bernie-sanders

#10yrsago Xenophobic UK politician ranting about “political correctness” gets a public spanking from an historian https://web.archive.org/web/20160520224731/http://indy100.independent.co.uk/article/ukip-councillor-attempts-to-blast-bbc-for-historical-inaccuracy-gets-destroyed-by-actual-historian–ZyZAasU2fb

#10yrsago A look at digital habits of 13 year olds shows desire for privacy, face-to-face time https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/parenting4digitalfuture/2016/04/18/the-class-living-and-learning-in-the-digital-age/

#10yrsago Big Vitamin bankrolls naturopaths’ attempts to go legit and get public money https://web.archive.org/web/20160520123659/https://www.statnews.com/2016/05/17/naturopaths-go-mainstream/

#10yrsago We Stand on Guard: in 100 years, America seizes Canada for its water https://memex.craphound.com/2016/05/18/we-stand-on-guard-in-100-years-america-seizes-canada-for-its-water/

#5yrsago Apple's complicity in Chinese state oppressionhttps://pluralistic.net/2021/05/18/unhealthy-balance-sheet/#think-manorialism

#5yrsago Community Health Services sued its way through the pandemic https://pluralistic.net/2021/05/18/unhealthy-balance-sheet/#health-usury

#5yrsago What Would Open Source Look Like If It Were Healthy https://pluralistic.net/2021/05/18/unhealthy-balance-sheet/#user-personas

#5yrsago Dead, broke https://pluralistic.net/2021/05/19/zombie-debt/#damnation

#1yrago Who Broke the Internet? Part III https://pluralistic.net/2025/05/19/khan-thought/#they-were-warned

Upcoming appearances (permalink)

Hay-on-Wye: HowTheLightGetsIn, May 22-25
https://howthelightgetsin.org/festivals/hay/big-ideas-2
SXSW London, Jun 2
https://www.sxswlondon.com/session/how-big-tech-broke-the-internet-b3c4a901
Kansas City: Facing the Future (Woodneath Library Center), Jun 10
https://www.mymcpl.org/events/119655/facing-future-cory-doctorow
LA: The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI with Brian Merchant (Skylight Books), Jun 19
https://www.skylightbooks.com/event/skylight-cory-doctorow-presents-reverse-centaurs-guide-life-after-ai-w-brian-merchant
Menlo Park: The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI with Angie Coiro (Kepler's), Jun 21
https://www.keplers.org/upcoming-events-internal/cory-doctorow-2026
Toronto: TBA, Jun 23
NYC: The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI with Jonathan Coulton (The Strand), Jun 24
https://www.strandbooks.com/cory-doctorow-the-reverse-centaur-s-guide-to-life-after-ai.html
Philadelphia: TBA, Jun 25
Chicago: The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI with Rick Perlstein (Exile in Bookville), Jun 26
https://exileinbookville.com/events/50628
Edinburgh International Book Festival with Jimmy Wales, Aug 17
https://www.edbookfest.co.uk/events/the-front-list-cory-doctorow-and-jimmy-wales

Recent appearances (permalink)

On Enshittification – and what can be done about it (Re:publica)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KhINQgPMVSI
EFFecting Change: How to Disenshittify the Internet (EFF, with Wendy Liu)
https://archive.org/details/effecting-change-enshittification
The “Enshittification” of Everything (Bioneers)
https://bioneers.org/cory-doctorow-enshittification-of-everything-zstf2605/
Enshittification (99% Invisible)
https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/666-enshittification/
Artificial Intelligence: The Ultimate Disruptor, with Astra Taylor and Yoshua Bengio (CBC Ideas)
https://www.cbc.ca/listen/live-radio/1-23-ideas/clip/16210039-artificial-intelligence-the-ultimate-disruptor

Latest books (permalink)

"Canny Valley": A limited edition collection of the collages I create for Pluralistic, self-published, September 2025 https://pluralistic.net/2025/09/04/illustrious/#chairman-bruce
"Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It," Farrar, Straus, Giroux, October 7 2025
https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374619329/enshittification/
"Picks and Shovels": a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about the heroic era of the PC, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), February 2025 (https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250865908/picksandshovels).
"The Bezzle": a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about prison-tech and other grifts, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), February 2024 (thebezzle.org).
"The Lost Cause:" a solarpunk novel of hope in the climate emergency, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), November 2023 (http://lost-cause.org).
"The Internet Con": A nonfiction book about interoperability and Big Tech (Verso) September 2023 (http://seizethemeansofcomputation.org). Signed copies at Book Soup (https://www.booksoup.com/book/9781804291245).
"Red Team Blues": "A grabby, compulsive thriller that will leave you knowing more about how the world works than you did before." Tor Books http://redteamblues.com.
"Chokepoint Capitalism: How to Beat Big Tech, Tame Big Content, and Get Artists Paid, with Rebecca Giblin", on how to unrig the markets for creative labor, Beacon Press/Scribe 2022 https://chokepointcapitalism.com

Upcoming books (permalink)

"The Reverse-Centaur's Guide to AI," a short book about being a better AI critic, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, June 2026 (https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374621568/thereversecentaursguidetolifeafterai/)
"Enshittification, Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It" (the graphic novel), Firstsecond, 2026
"The Post-American Internet," a geopolitical sequel of sorts to Enshittification, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2027
"Unauthorized Bread": a middle-grades graphic novel adapted from my novella about refugees, toasters and DRM, FirstSecond, April 20, 2027
"The Memex Method," Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2027

Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources:

"The Reverse Centaur's Guide to AI," a short book for Farrar, Straus and Giroux about being an effective AI critic. LEGAL REVIEW AND COPYEDIT COMPLETE.
"The Post-American Internet," a short book about internet policy in the age of Trumpism. PLANNING.
A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING

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

ISSN: 3066-764X

Whale Fall - Terence Eden’s Blog

2026-05-21T11:34:15.000Z

Somewhere, in the endless blue ocean, a gigantic mammal shudders as it takes its last breath. Thanks to science, we know that all dogs go to heaven, but all whales descend through the murky depths until their carcasses litter the seabed.

Imagine a giant dying. You can't. They are huge and endless. A towering presence which, so it seems, has always been part of our world. They dominate and are indomitable. It is simply unfathomable that they can ever end. Yet end they must.

As the whale dies, we do not know what passes through its cavernous brain. But we do know what the rest of the ocean thinks.

Lunch.

The death of a whale is a thing to be celebrated. The thump of their still-warm body onto the floor is the starting bell for a feast. Some larger predators sense an easy meal and tear off the choicest morsels. But what of the scavengers? What about the new life not yet established? What happens to the weird little creatures just waiting for an energy boost?

In many ways, it was fortuitous that Twitter pre-signalled its death with the Fail Whale.

The twitching corpse is gently floating down to its watery grave. Some of the older and more established social networks have bitten out chunks of the still-fresh body and have run away with their spoils. But the fascinating thing is watching all the new services benefit from the death of a giant. Mastodon, Discord, BlueSky, Qaplion, Nostr, and a bunch of others hollowing out the rotting husk and using it to power their own growth.

Will those .meow social networks ever become a gigaton behemoth capable of ruling the waves? Maybe not, but size is not the only metric of success. Finding and defending an ecological niche is its own reward. Evolution abhors a monoculture.

Several bloated bodies meander through the brine, each one confident that its ageless wisdom will outlast the others. Had they any self-awareness, the hubris would gnaw at their tattered souls until the crushing realisation of their impending doom drove them mad.

Perhaps it will happen to GitHub next. The endless downtime and forced injection of crappy AI will start a death spiral. Already established forges are waiting to pounce once they smell blood in the water. But what critters will emerge to suck the bones of the old giant and develop in unexpected ways? Some bizarre fungal growth will devour the stinking jelly unlocked from those shattered bones and a new ecosystem will emerge.

Will WordPress's increasingly erratic leadership and tangle of legal disputes cause it fatal damage? Once minnows darted away from its presence; now they cautiously nip at its greying skin. Its mighty bellow still echoes through the clammy waters, but there's a tinge of frailty in its song.

Everything dies eventually.

The internal flora and fauna - be they parasitic or symbiotic - eagerly await their host's downfall. A chance to break free and explore new strange new world. A chance to begin a new relationship and co-evolve in unexpected ways.

The biological pump is primed, the hungry jaws of an uncountable fleet of new ideas is just waiting to pounce, the giants swim on in blissful ignorance.

You can read more about Whale Fall on Wikipedia.

[RSS Club] Let's meet up AFK - Terence Eden’s Blog

2026-05-20T11:34:04.000Z

Shhhh! This post is only available to RSS subscribers like you 😊

My wife and I are preparing for a big Interrail journey through Europe. Whenever we go on holiday, we like to meet up with friendly locals to have a drink and chat. We did this on our last journey and it was great.

So, if you're a member of RSS club and fancy showing some tourists a cool bar, awesome restaurant (with vegan options), local tech conference, or nifty museum - please get in touch.

Our exact dates aren't finalised yet, but from now until the beginning of July, we'll be taking roughly this route:

🇩🇪 Hamburg →
🇩🇰 Copenhagen →
🇸🇪 Gothenburg →
🇳🇴 Oslo →
🇸🇪 Stockholm →
🇫🇮 Helsinki →
🇪🇪 Tallinn →
🇱🇻 Riga →
🇱🇹 Vilnius →
🇵🇱 Warsaw →
🇩🇪 Berlin → Munich →
🇮🇹 Verona → Milan →
🇨🇭 Basel →
🇫🇷 Paris

If you're in one of those cities and fancy a beer & veggie burger, please give us a shout. We won't be able to meet everyone as we do have some existing plans and tight connections but, as they say, it's nice to go where everybody knows your name.

Book Review: Terrible Worlds: Destinations by Adrian Tchaikovsky ★★★★★ - Terence Eden’s Blog

2026-05-19T11:34:17.000Z

What's better than one Adrian Tchaikovsky novella? Three Adrian Tchaikovsky novellæ! Or is it "novellii"? Either way, a delightful triptych of stories on a common theme. On the surface, they're about travelling to a new destination (Space! The Future! For-Copyright-Reasons Not Narnia!)

Except, deep down, they're about loneliness. No matter how far or fast we run, no matter where or when we go, we can't outrun ourselves. When you enter the void, sometimes the void enters you.

There's also the constant theme about the hunter becoming the hunted. All three of the stories reminded me a bit of Piranesi by Susanna Clarke - in that I was never quite sure if the characters were simply delusional and waging war on an enemy of their own making.

It brims with a pathos which I find rare in modern science fiction. That's offset with the perfectly placed British humour within it. Yes, there's a touch of the Weir/Scalzi "Only I, a nerdy guy, can save the universe in a self-knowing way" - but those authors aren't brave enough to mention Reading town centre or have their hero hail from Stevenage. Whereas Tchaikovsky knows what's up with the Furries.

An excellent collection of tales.

Many thanks to NetGalley for the review copy. The book is available to buy now.

Pluralistic: There's no such thing as "age verification" (19 May 2026) - Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow

2026-05-19T07:17:09.000Z

Today's links

There's no such thing as "age verification": The foreseeable and foreseen consequences of "something must be done"/"there, I've done something."
Hey look at this: Delights to delectate.
Object permanence: Apple Stores exist; Responsible spam; Australia loves Hollywood('s copyright); TCP over Syrian donkey; Icelandic Pirate get funded; Algorithmic cruelty; Trump loves data brokers; Douglas Adams, vindicated; Blog history; Sex names; Flickr's Gamma; "Fuzzy Nation"; The Intercept publishes Snowden docs; Software version of CIA sabotage manual; Who owns covid vaccines? Anal clenching v depression; Web is 10; Danish birds x ringtones; Office-supply X-wing; Nintendo 3DS license sucks is unbelievably bad; Public Interest Internet.
Upcoming appearances: Berlin, Hay-on-Wye, London, Kansas City, LA, Menlo Park, Toronto, NYC, Edinburgh.
Recent appearances: Where I've been.
Latest books: You keep readin' em, I'll keep writin' 'em.
Upcoming books: Like I said, I'll keep writin' 'em.
Colophon: All the rest.

There's no such thing as "age verification" (permalink)

"Object permanence" is the ability to understand that even if you can't see something, it still exists. Most toddlers acquire a thorough sense of object permanence by the age of two. But when it comes to technopolitics, object permanence eludes even full-grown lawmakers. These motherfuckers would lose a game of peek-a-boo.

Over and over again, politicians are warned about the ways that their pet policies will a) produce enormous collateral damage, and; b) be easily evaded by the people they're seeking to control, giving rise to a cascade of ever-more extreme measures. And yet, they swallow a spider to catch a fly and then act baffled and hurt when we tell them it's their own damn fault that they now have to swallow a bird to catch the spider:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/01/13/wanting-it-badly/#is-not-enough

The foreseeable and foreseen consequences of bad technopolicy are all around us, but in the eternal now of a politics utterly devoid of object permanence, no one is allowed to remember what happened the last time we did something stupid, especially not when we're on the verge of doing that same stupid thing again, only worse:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/10/07/foreseeable-outcomes/#calea

Technopolitics are defined by Bruce Schneier's "security syllogism," which goes, "Something must be done! There, I've done something." "Something" doesn't have to fix the problem, and "something" doesn't have to anticipate what will happen next. So long as "something" is done, the issue is resolved and the politician can chalk up a win.

This gives rise to some genuinely bizarre consensus hallucinations, in which we pretend that the reality decreed by policy matches up with actual reality. Take "streaming." There is no such thing as "streaming." A "stream" is just "a download that is transmitted to an application that doesn't have a 'Save As…' button":

https://pluralistic.net/2025/09/01/fulu/#i-am-altering-the-deal

Once you decree that there is such a thing as a stream, you must bend heaven and earth to ensure that no "Save As…" buttons are added to the "streaming" program. You have to pass laws that make it illegal to inspect code. To modify code. To report on defects in code. To index information about defects in code. To index information about mods. To link to indices that compile defects and mods. You have to swallow the fly, the spider, the bird, the cat, the dog, and the whole damned horse:

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

Then there's that perennial fave, "bans on working cryptography." To ban working cryptography, you have to outlaw free/open source software. You have to inspect every device that comes into your country. You have to erect a Great Firewall that blocks every site that might carry working cryptography. You make it impossible to reliably update the software in pacemakers, anti-lock brakes and nuclear power plants, and you make it easy for identity thieves, foreign powers and corporate spies to raid your government, your corporations, and your households – and it still won't work!

https://memex.craphound.com/2018/09/04/oh-for-fucks-sake-not-this-fucking-bullshit-again-cryptography-edition/

The latest consensus hallucination to take over our political classes is "age verification," a thing that manifestly does not exist. You can't "verify the age" of an internet user – you can only attempt to attribute every byte that traverses the entire internet to affirmatively identified persons:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/08/14/bellovin/#wont-someone-think-of-the-cryptographers

This comes at enormous cost. It is a gift to every future dictator, every identity thief, and every would-be sexual exploiter of children, who will have access to the hacked, leaked, and badly secured troves of data that this doomed effort produces.

Yes, doomed. Because even when it comes to kids, "age verification" is just a way of convincing young people to familiarize themselves with VPNs. This was entirely obvious from the very instant that "age verification" was mooted, and yet our policymakers pretended they couldn't hear the chorus of people who pointed it out to them. When cornered on the issue, they were affronted: "Can't you see that something must be done? How dare you attempt to stop me from doing something?"

And now, every single one of these chucklefucks is proposing bans on VPNs, from Utah:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2026/04/utahs-new-law-regulating-vpns-goes-effect-next-week

To the UK:

https://www.theregister.com/security/2026/05/18/mozilla-warns-uk-breaking-vpns-will-not-magically-fix-britains-age-check-mess/5241770

They were warned that this would happen. We told them not to swallow that fly. Now we're telling them not to swallow whole bucketloads of spiders. I fully expect that next year, they'll be telling us that once they swallow this herd of horses, it will all be OK.

(Image: Fir0002/Flagstaffotos, https://www.gnu.org/licenses/fdl-1.3.html, modified)

Hey look at this (permalink)

November Reign https://theneedlenews.com/2026/05/november-reign/
The Filipino virtual assistants behind LinkedIn's "thought leadership" content mill https://restofworld.org/2026/virtual-assistant-linkedin-engagement/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=feeds
rip.so https://rip.so/
On the Media: American Emergency https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/otm/american-emergency-movement-kill-fema
DMA: The FSFE intervenes against Apple before European Court of Justice for the second time https://fsfe.org/news/2026/news-20260519-01.en.html
The Ox That's Breaking Your Fantasy Map https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MIqpvpNS5pI

Object permanence (permalink)

#25yrsago The Hubble Constant is 42 https://web.archive.org/web/20010607103335/http://www.best.com/~sirlou/42.html

#25yrsago The history of weblogs http://www.rebeccablood.net/essays/weblog_history.html

#25yrsago Head-shaver’s FAQ https://web.archive.org/web/20010616023912/http://www.geocities.com/shaverg/

#25yrsago "Sex" in your surname https://web.archive.org/web/20010830005021/http://bissex.net/paul/profanity.gif

#25yrsago Apple announces retail stores https://web.archive.org/web/20010521193320/http://www.apple.com/retail/

#25yrsago ISOC standard for "responsible" spam https://web.archive.org/web/20030923030913/ftp://ftp.rfc-editor.org/in-notes/rfc3098.txt

#25yrsago Anal clenching v depression https://web.archive.org/web/20011201070537/http://members.aol.com/nishigaki3/index.htm?mtbrand=AOL_US

#25yrsago The Web is 10 https://www.w3.org/Talks/C5_17_May_91.html

#25yrsago Danish birds imitate ringtones https://web.archive.org/web/20010603204210/http://www.ananova.com/news/story/sm_288774.html?menu

#20yrsago Wired News publishes damning docs from EFF vs AT&T https://web.archive.org/web/20060602044459/http://www.wired.com/news/technology/1,70908-0.html

#20yrsago Canadian privacy commissioners against DRM https://web.archive.org/web/20060530122338/https://www.intellectualprivacy.ca/

#20yrsago How the RIAA’s suit against XM came from Napster, MP3.com and Grokster https://web.archive.org/web/20060524092537/https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/archives/004679.php

#20yrsago Gmail downgraded, no longer cracks PDFs https://web.archive.org/web/20060603055956/https://akira.arts.kuleuven.ac.be/andreas/blog/archives/2006/05/gmail-cripples-drmed-pdf-files-view-as-html-functionality.html

#20yrsago Australia puts out for Hollywood with new copyright law https://web.archive.org/web/20060520192521/https://blogs.smh.com.au/mashup/archives//004567.html

#20yrsago FeedRinse: filters for your RSS and a happier Internet https://web.archive.org/web/20060915062158/http://www.nyu.edu/classes/siva/archives/003114.html

#20yrsago Flickr goes Gamma https://web.archive.org/web/20081219225627/http://blog.flickr.net/en/2006/05/16/alpha-beta-gamma/

#15yrsago UK copyright reforms sound sane, useful https://web.archive.org/web/20160724041821/https://www.theguardian.com/media/2011/may/17/copyright-law-overhaul-for-uk

#15yrsago Life with Ubuntu and a ThinkPad https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2011/may/17/computing-opensource

#15yrsago Scalzi’s Fuzzy Nation: a masterful, likable reboot of one of the great sf classics https://memex.craphound.com/2011/05/16/scalzis-fuzzy-nation-a-masterful-likable-reboot-of-one-of-the-great-sf-classics/

#15yrsago Piracy sends “Go the Fuck to Sleep” to #1 on Amazon https://web.archive.org/web/20110516023258/http://www.baycitizen.org/books/story/go-f-sleep-case-viral-pdf/

#15yrsago Serendipity, the net and cities: are we living in bubbles? Do we have to? https://ethanzuckerman.com/2011/05/12/chi-keynote-desperately-seeking-serendipity/

#15yrsago Texas close to banning TSA searches, TSA invents desperate new constitutional interpretations https://tenthamendmentcenter.com/2011/05/14/in-public-statement-tsa-lies-about-the-constitution/

#15yrsago Syrian dissidents use donkeys to smuggle videos to Jordan https://web.archive.org/web/20110518132126/http://www.dbune.com/news/world/6097-donkeys-take-over-from-dsl-as-syria-shuts-down-internet.html

#15yrsago Walter Jon Williams uses pirate ebooks to rescue his backlist https://www.walterjonwilliams.net/2011/05/crowdsource-please/

#15yrsago Chicago water boss: if we took the sewage out of the Chicago River, people might swim and drown! https://web.archive.org/web/20110516121105/https://www.chicagotribune.com/news/local/breaking/chibrknews-official-cleaning-chicago-river-a-waste-of-money-20110513,0,7553787.story

#15yrsago HOWTO Make an office-supply X-Wing Fighter https://www.instructables.com/X-Wing-Fighter-from-Office-Supplies/

#15yrsago Yale opens up image library, starts with 250,000 free images https://web.archive.org/web/20110514111440/https://opac.yale.edu/news/article.aspx?id=8544

#15yrsago Nintendo 3DS license: We’ll brick your device if we don’t like your software choices, you have no privacy, we own your photos https://web.archive.org/web/20110518014329/https://www.pcworld.com/businesscenter/article/227957/nintendo_3ds_targeted_in_antidrm_campaign.html

#10yrsago Copyright trolls Rightscorp are teetering on the verge of bankruptcy https://web.archive.org/web/20160518103417/https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2016/05/anti-piracy-firm-rightscorps-q1-financials-read-like-an-obituary/

#10yrsago Trump campaign cancels interview after overhearing reporter speaking in Spanish https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/adriancarrasquillo/trump-campaign-canceled-a-reporters-interview-after-they-hea#.ul9L3rXy8

#10yrsago Phoenix airport threatens to kick out TSA, hire private (unaccountable) contractors https://www.csmonitor.com/USA/USA-Update/2016/0514/Is-Phoenix-airport-opting-out-of-the-TSA

#10yrsago US Gov’t survey: Half of Americans reluctant to shop online due to privacy & security fears https://www.ntia.gov/federal-register-notice/2016/request-comments-benefits-challenges-and-potential-roles-government-fostering-advancement-internet

#10yrsago Iceland’s Pirate Party to receive millions in election funding https://web.archive.org/web/20160514102817/http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/icelands-pirate-party-secures-more-election-funding-than-all-its-rivals-as-it-continues-to-top-polls-a7027606.html

#10yrsago Nebula Award swept by record number of women writers https://gizmodo.com/women-swept-the-2015-the-nebula-awards-1776706665

#10yrsago Algorithmic cruelty: when Gmail adds your harasser to your speed-dial https://web.archive.org/web/20160515184025/https://blog.lizdenys.com/2016/05/14/inboxs-accidentally-abusive-algorithm/

#10yrsago Transport for London blames Tube delays on “wrong type of sun” https://web.archive.org/web/20160516133847/https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/london-underground-blame-too-much-sunshine-for-tube-delays-a7031986.html

#10yrsago The Intercept begins publishing Snowden docs https://web.archive.org/web/20160516172510/https://theintercept.com/snowden-sidtoday/

#10yrsago A software developer’s version of the CIA’s bureaucratic sabotage manual https://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2016/05/updating-a-classic.html

#5yrsago Who owns the covid vaccines? https://pluralistic.net/2021/05/16/entrepreneurial-state/#patient-zero-money

#5yrsago Big Pharma's vicious battle against universal covid vaccination https://pluralistic.net/2021/05/15/how-to-rob-a-bank/#roll-the-dice

#5yrsago The S&L crisis perfected finance crime https://pluralistic.net/2021/05/15/how-to-rob-a-bank/#crimogenics

#5yrsago Newsom's California fiber dream https://pluralistic.net/2021/05/15/how-to-rob-a-bank/#fiber-now

#5yrsago The Public Interest Internet https://pluralistic.net/2021/05/17/disgracenote/#enclosure

#5yrsago Paygo, false consciousness and the IRS https://pluralistic.net/2021/05/17/disgracenote/#false-consciousness

#1yrago Trump's CFPB kills data broker rule https://pluralistic.net/2025/05/15/asshole-to-appetite/#ssn-for-sale

Upcoming appearances (permalink)

Berlin: Re:publica, May 18-20
https://re-publica.com/de/news/rp26-sprecher-cory-doctorow
Berlin: Enshittification at Otherland Books, May 18
https://www.otherland-berlin.de/de/event-details/cory-doctorow-in-der-friesenstrasse-23-kreuzberg-praesentiert-von-otherland.html
Berlin: Enshittification at Otherland Books, May 19
https://www.otherland-berlin.de/de/event-details/cory-doctorow.html
Hay-on-Wye: HowTheLightGetsIn, May 22-25
https://howthelightgetsin.org/festivals/hay/big-ideas-2
SXSW London, Jun 2
https://www.sxswlondon.com/session/how-big-tech-broke-the-internet-b3c4a901
Kansas City: Facing the Future (Woodneath Library Center), Jun 10
https://www.mymcpl.org/events/119655/facing-future-cory-doctorow
LA: The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI with Brian Merchant (Skylight Books), Jun 19
https://www.skylightbooks.com/event/skylight-cory-doctorow-presents-reverse-centaurs-guide-life-after-ai-w-brian-merchant
Menlo Park: The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI with Angie Coiro (Kepler's), Jun 21
https://www.keplers.org/upcoming-events-internal/cory-doctorow-2026
Toronto: TBA, Jun 23
NYC: The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI with Jonathan Coulton (The Strand), Jun 24
https://www.strandbooks.com/cory-doctorow-the-reverse-centaur-s-guide-to-life-after-ai.html
Philadelphia: TBA, Jun 25
Chicago: The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI with Rick Perlstein (Exile in Bookville), Jun 26
https://exileinbookville.com/events/50628
Edinburgh International Book Festival with Jimmy Wales, Aug 17
https://www.edbookfest.co.uk/events/the-front-list-cory-doctorow-and-jimmy-wales

Recent appearances (permalink)

On Enshittification – and what can be done about it (Re:publica)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KhINQgPMVSI
EFFecting Change: How to Disenshittify the Internet (EFF, with Wendy Liu)
https://archive.org/details/effecting-change-enshittification
The “Enshittification” of Everything (Bioneers)
https://bioneers.org/cory-doctorow-enshittification-of-everything-zstf2605/
Enshittification (99% Invisible)
https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/666-enshittification/
Artificial Intelligence: The Ultimate Disruptor, with Astra Taylor and Yoshua Bengio (CBC Ideas)
https://www.cbc.ca/listen/live-radio/1-23-ideas/clip/16210039-artificial-intelligence-the-ultimate-disruptor

Latest books (permalink)

"Canny Valley": A limited edition collection of the collages I create for Pluralistic, self-published, September 2025 https://pluralistic.net/2025/09/04/illustrious/#chairman-bruce
"Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It," Farrar, Straus, Giroux, October 7 2025
https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374619329/enshittification/
"Picks and Shovels": a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about the heroic era of the PC, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), February 2025 (https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250865908/picksandshovels).
"The Bezzle": a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about prison-tech and other grifts, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), February 2024 (thebezzle.org).
"The Lost Cause:" a solarpunk novel of hope in the climate emergency, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), November 2023 (http://lost-cause.org).
"The Internet Con": A nonfiction book about interoperability and Big Tech (Verso) September 2023 (http://seizethemeansofcomputation.org). Signed copies at Book Soup (https://www.booksoup.com/book/9781804291245).
"Red Team Blues": "A grabby, compulsive thriller that will leave you knowing more about how the world works than you did before." Tor Books http://redteamblues.com.
"Chokepoint Capitalism: How to Beat Big Tech, Tame Big Content, and Get Artists Paid, with Rebecca Giblin", on how to unrig the markets for creative labor, Beacon Press/Scribe 2022 https://chokepointcapitalism.com

Upcoming books (permalink)

"The Reverse-Centaur's Guide to AI," a short book about being a better AI critic, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, June 2026 (https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374621568/thereversecentaursguidetolifeafterai/)
"Enshittification, Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It" (the graphic novel), Firstsecond, 2026
"The Post-American Internet," a geopolitical sequel of sorts to Enshittification, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2027
"Unauthorized Bread": a middle-grades graphic novel adapted from my novella about refugees, toasters and DRM, FirstSecond, April 20, 2027
"The Memex Method," Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2027

Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources:

"The Reverse Centaur's Guide to AI," a short book for Farrar, Straus and Giroux about being an effective AI critic. LEGAL REVIEW AND COPYEDIT COMPLETE.
"The Post-American Internet," a short book about internet policy in the age of Trumpism. PLANNING.
A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING

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ISSN: 3066-764X

GDS weighs in on the NHS's decision to retreat from Open Source - Terence Eden’s Blog

2026-05-17T11:34:30.000Z

Within the UK's Civil Service you occasionally hear the expression "being invited to a meeting without biscuits". It implies a rather frosty discussion without any of the polite niceties of a normal meeting⁰. In general though, even when people have severe disagreements, it is rare for tempers to fray. It is even rarer for those internal disagreements to spill over into public.

Which is what makes GDS's latest guidance so surprising. At the start of the month, NHS England made the bizarre and irresponsible decision to close all their Open Source repositories due to unfounded fears of AI hacking¹. Lots of people within the NHS were outraged. As were many outside - with this petition against the move gathering over 2,000 signatures.

Within other parts of government there was also alarm. Although I no longer work for Government Digital Service, I was contacted by several concerned people there who remembered all my work on Open Source. The brilliant team in Whitechapel have now published their guidance "AI, open code and vulnerability risk in the public sector".

It is brutal.

They utterly repudiate the NHS's stance and forensically eviscerate it. I'll let you read the whole thing, but here are a few choice excerpts:

Recent public reporting about organisations restricting access to public repositories due to AI-enabled code analysis illustrates how quickly leaders may reach for blanket closure in response to uncertainty.

Basically, non-technical managers need to stop over-reacting.

Private repositories can create a false sense of security.

I think that's the crux of the argument. Closing code doesn't solve the underlying problems.

Making code private is not an appropriate mitigation for lack of ownership, patching capability, or operational assurance, so systems that cannot be safely maintained should be remediated or retired.

If you are so concerned about the poor security of your systems, you should shut them down completely to mitigate the threat.

Closure can become a one-way door.

As I said to the BMJ, "nothing lasts longer than a temporary fix".

Where code has been developed in the open, making a repository private later may not remove access for a capable adversary as popular repositories are often mirrored or forked

Indeed. A friend of mine has already archived all of the NHS's repositories. You can see the ones they've tried to hide.

But the killer blow, I think, is this:

Moving code from public to private as a substitute for investment in secure-by-design delivery, ownership and remediation is a warning sign because it reduces sharing and scrutiny, can slow coordinated improvement across government and suppliers, and does not remove the underlying weaknesses in a running service.

Exactly! Coding in the open has been shown time and again to produce high quality and secure work. The looming threat of AI vulnerability scanners doesn't change that - security is a shared responsibility. Technical teams need to be well enough resourced to create secure systems; hiding code is as reliable as papering over structural cracks.

GDS was created was to be a strong centre with vast technology expertise. This was to counter the frankly shoddy approach to tech in other departments. Back then, a Service Assessment was a way for a department to prove that they were actually capable of designing, launching, and managing a complex IT project.

Most departments have become significantly better at the development and running of these sorts of projects, so the raison d'etre of GDS has somewhat waned. Departments feel more confident in running off on their own. Usually I'd celebrate that - it's important that GDS doesn't become a bottleneck and that the talent is distributed throughout the whole Civil Service.

But NHS England has always been a bit of a weird one. One of the reasons NHSX was created² was to ensure that the health service had strong expertise in technology and its deployment. As the Head of Open Technology there, I helped craft the policies which embedded Open Source and Open Standards within it³.

I don't know what discussions have taken place within NHS England - although I looking forward to receiving a response to my FOI request. It looks to me like a small group within NHS England have received a report showing some potential vulnerabilities discovered by Mythos. Rather than following their own internal guidance, they've over-reacted and slapped a blanket ban on coding in the open.

I fervently hope that this new guidance will encourage DHSC to bring NHS England into line with best practice. If not, perhaps GDS ought to reassert itself as the technical authority with power to veto a department's incomprehensible decisions?

Of course, all the budget cuts mean that biscuits cannot be purchased for any meetings. Which may explain some of the morale issues within the Civil Service. Thanks Austerity. Thausterity. ↩︎
As of today, they've shut down nearly 200 repositories. More may be coming. ↩︎
I was there right before the start of NHSX and helped set it up. ↩︎
Which, I suppose, is why I'm bitter and angry that all our hard work is being undone. ↩︎

The 30 year game [blog] - remy sharp's b:log

2026-05-17T00:00:00.000Z

Today I'm releasing my Game Boy game called Marbles² (or Marbles Squared). It's a port of a game that I originally wrote back in 2002, but is a game that started in my life in (or around) 1996.

The development this iteration of the game, the one in 2026, took me about a week and I haven't written a single line of code. Here's how things have changed.

TL;DR

I get it, this is a stupidly long blog post. There's no real value buried inside of it, it's pretty much entirely a story of how technology has progressed over 30 years (not really a spoiler) and my journey to evolve a game that I found in 1996.

The latest edition of this game was coded entirely by Claude Code with one strict rule: keep inside of the 32K boundary limit. There was a huge saving that Claude never suggested (1bpp font tiles instead of 2bpp) which bought me 3K - which was enough to add a full tutorial in the game along with additional small features.

I also tried to vibe code another game using the same process only to fail - the key take away for me was that my experience and knowledge was still the guiding light. With the other game, it failed because my knowledge was shallow, so the output was shallow. Sort of obvious on paper, but a useful exercise for me.

Oh, and if you scroll to the end, there's a link to the game download page.

1996

At some point during my days during Sixth Form (college to some, basically aged 16-18), a close friend had (some) machine (that neither of us can remember) and they let me play a game on it.

Remy & Julie from their Sixth form days in the 90s

I remember really enjoying the game. It was technically a very simple puzzle game: a bunch of balls that you would tap the matching colour groups of balls and they would collapse down into the corner. The goal being to clear the screen.

I never caught the name of the game but my dad had a Psion and remembered that in the instruction manual (long gone are those times) it mentioned you could write your own software.

I'd been making little Visual Basic programs for friends for a few years by then, so I decided that since I had access to the internet (of sorts) through bulletin boards I would try and build my version of game so I could play it all the time!

When I finally managed to download and printed out the documentation (I remember it just kept printing and printing and printing), the very first is what hit the hardest.

SDK. This was foreshadowing. I had no idea what an SDK was. Nor any of the other mass of acronyms. And software development being gate-kept by the usual nerds meant there wasn't going to be any help with the "basic stuff".

(In truth is might have been any kind of acronym, I just remember being bewildered).

Google doesn't exist yet so I tried thumbing through the documentation and spent probably weeks just going back and forth just looking for any clue that would help me get a footing so I'd have something to start with.

In the end, I got absolutely nowhere. I park the idea and put it down to lack of knowledge, and lack of experience. This was not for someone like me. This was for people who had the inside knowledge. Plus, at that age, I had plenty of other (better) distractions.

2002

In 1999 I started my work placement for a year as part of my Computer Information Systems Design sandwich course degree (a mouthful!). In the end, I'd never return to finish my degree and stayed on for a decade.

Certainly a lot less dreamy that the 90s

But back to '99 and the start of the new century. The company was a web agency with the boss and two students (myself being one). Along with client work, the agency also had it's own side projects, one of which was Eurocool - a website dedicated to software for the Palm Pilot (they even made BBC news).

So I eventually bought myself one and through Eurocool I started notice that some of the games and some of the utilities came with source code and the source code was not huge and by this point I had learnt a lot more programming.

By that time I had tinkered with some C, worked with Java. I was writing JavaScript (JScript and VBScript). I was writing Perl and I could start to understand the functions of the source code and I went about making my first utility for the Palm pilot for me.

I started with a couple of smaller bits of software for the Palm Pilot, before I realised I could (and should) make a game

As it turns out that I'm not a very good graphic designer, so when it came to drawing circles for the Palm Pilot it was…very, very bad. The best I could do was draw squares and colour them in. So this is where the name Marbles Squared comes from ("it's a feature, not a bug!").

It took me until the mid 2020 so realise that the original game from the 90s was actually SameGame that I had unwittingly cloned (though only the game play mechanic, the Wiki page details the scoring system which I was never aware of).

One of the key mechanics of my version of the game was that the the random function would have a seed, and that seed would make the grids being played repeatable and shareable.

My game even turned up in American Scientific (though the original article has been long disappeared sadly). After a few years, the game had been downloaded over 1/4 million times.

More importantly though, the coding part took me (probably) 3 months to go from scratch to the first version of a workable game, mostly coding late into the night because I had a full-time job (running in start-up days of getting home at 8pm and later). I'd continue to iterate on it for a further 6 months and the last release was in 2003. If you want to try the game on a (pretty faithful) web port of the Palm Pilot, I'm hosting the Palm version on the Marbles website.

2008

By the mid-late 2000s, I had move away from London and I joined the web scene down in Brighton. Coincidentally the iPhone had launched in 2007.

I remember using this as an excuse for not going out and meeting Brighton webbies

Eventually I caved and got myself an iPhone and Steve Jobs original vision was for developers to use the web and the power of the browser (sidebar: that wasn't really his vision, he just didn't want 3rd party apps).

So that's what I did. I took my knowledge of Marbles Squared and the only code that was directly ported was the random function so that I could continue supporting the seed mechanic.

I also add a timer bar across the bottom of the screen (to let me play with CSS transitions), but functional it did nothing, so watching friends play the game and panicking about the timer running out was a real delight!

Developing the core of the mobile version was a matter weeks (if that) because I was breathing JavaScript daily, and that I was so familiar with how the game would play.

As with all these projects, it really wasn't the core gameplay that took the time, it was the UX around the game. The damn button in particular with the "new" border-image (vendor prefixed to kingdom come!) probably proved to be the trickiest parts.

A it probably took me a few weeks to finish the mobile version.

2020

In 2020, the ZX Spectrum Next Kickstarter project was delivered (after quite a few long years of waiting) and with the pandemic lockdown in full swing, it was time to tinker.

This was the vibe of tinkering on tech during lockdown!

The Next came with an upgraded (and much more capable) NextBASIC (plus the crystal boost to 28Mhz made a big difference). So I set about making myself a game.

I wrote a clone of Oh Mummy that I used to play on the my friends' Commodore C64 but after that was done I turn my hand to recreating my Marbles game.

The challenge here was that even though the Next was faster than an original ZX Spectrum, NextBASIC still wasn't fast enough to do the grid traversing to workout available moves - or certainly not in a way that felt responsive.

So this meant turning my hand to Z80 assembly. I'd tinkered with the language but never had a real project to solve with it. This was perfect for dipping my toe into. Plus, there was 40+ years of experience on the web to learn from.

The bulk of the game would still be in NextBASIC but it would call out to a library that I wrote in assembly for hard tasks.

That project probably took me over 3 months because it was a brand new language. It was also much harder to debug. The development cycle is a lot longer compared to something like JavaScript.

But as I reach the end of that piece of work, I realised that I wanted to add a high score table.

The Spectrum Next (most times) included a Wi-Fi module, but it didn't have any native HTP protocol support so was another side quest.

I built an HTTP client in assembly for the spectrum and one of my more prouder moments that my .http is now part of the Spectrum Next distro, part of the default library of tools.

This would let players see a global leaderboard on the spectrum and share their own high scores directly from the retro hardware.

The http part was probably another three or more months, but absolutely worth it.

2026

In the intervening years AI has exploded as we're all well aware.

In the last few months I have taken to using LLMs to create small personal projects that serve a single purpose, a tool to calculate the distance between a and b, but also to add how long it would take me to walk or run and so on. Or maybe it would be a small song game that I would share with my friends.

About a month ago, I decided that I would take my experience of vibe coding and see if I could build the Game Boy game that I've been wanting the Game Boy version of Marles Squared (ironically I discovered, literally today, that Samegame was available on the Game Boy in 1997 - though it's very different from the game I wanted to enjoy).

30 years later, Remy's able to play the game he wanted from 1996

I was able to describe in detail exactly what I wanted and I was able to iterate over and over and over to get all the details kind of fine-tuned. It certainly wasn't just a one shot build me a Game Boy game.

As with all the previous iterations, the real work was in the UI.

I did however, set myself the constraint that the game had to fit into a 32K rom (this means it works on a cart that doesn't have an MBC - memory bank controller - chip - which is what allowed games to grow up to 8MB large).

The LLM (Claude Code in my case) was also vital to really quickly turning around tooling that helped me in the development process. Tools to slice my graphics into tiles or to visualise tile data inline to code, or to convert fonts (for variable width fonts which I didn't use in the end due to byte size limits).

I was also able to take an existing rust implementation of a Game Boy emulator and layered on an MCP server so that that Claude Code could test, screenshot and probe the memory of the game to see if it was doing what I needed to do.

But the whole process was me just talking back and forth to Claude code in particular to get this game built and the vast majority of it took about a week.

After a couple of rounds of testing, I did notice that the couple of people who tried the game didn't quite know what the goal was. A "how to play" section was needed in the game, but given the constraints of 32K, lumping in a load of text copy wasn't going to work.

One of the biggest wins I had in optimising the codebase was not from Claude. I could see all the text tiles (the tiles that make up the font) were two colours. Whereas a Game Boy tile stores 4 bits of colour in a "pixel", I could see I was wasting a lot of space. GBDK even includes a native function set_bkg_1bpp_data that will make use of 1bpp tile data. From this single change (I had to update my tools to generate 1bpp) I was able to unlock over 3K. This space was then used for the tutorial and a number of other small changes (including increasing the pool of "easy game seeds").

So in the 30 years that's passed I've gone from taking weeks and weeks looking at documentation and getting nowhere to taking a week to build a fully working piece of software that suits all of my requirements.

But the reality isn't as straightforward to say you can just magic up anything you want. My advantage I have is that I've got decades worth of experience in software development. I also have an intimate understanding as to how this game is supposed to work.

As an experiment I tried to vibe code another game. Our family was playing 100 Jumps and I thought it'd be a good candidate for a Game Boy game.

The source code is online, and on the surface it seemed pretty straightforward to me to re-use the techniques that I was using to develop Marble Squared.

Except what happened is I kept iterating on something that was awful. The physics were wrong. The movement was wrong. The graphics were bad. No matter how many times I tried to iterate and even reset, it just didn't come out feeling like a decent experience.

I've come to realise that the reason for this, is because of where my experience lies, and in particular my intimate understanding of how my own game works. This knowledge allowed me to carefully plan out the development, to know where all the pitfalls were ahead of time, which I simply didn't have for 100 Jumps.

I think we're starting to see in the tech industry that the pitch that AI is here to replace our jobs isn't entirely true. In fact, a lot of us have known for decades that the real skill isn't in producing code, but actually understanding functionality and translating it to the real world.

If you made it this far, thank you for reading. If you simply skipped from the top to find the download link, I appreciate you too 😄

You can download the game over on itch, and if you fancy your chances, you can submit your high score via the Marbles website.

Originally published on Remy Sharp's b:log

Pluralistic: Making sense of Trump's unscheduled sudden midair disassembly of the American empire (16 May 2026) - Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow

2026-05-16T08:35:41.000Z

Today's links

Making sense of Trump's unscheduled sudden midair disassembly of the American empire: Don't mistake "powerful" for "durable."
Hey look at this: Delights to delectate.
Object permanence: Copyrighted law; Viral videos v cops; Crooked banker v tiny bat; "Infested"; Can the means of computation be seized?
Upcoming appearances: Berlin, Hay-on-Wye, London, LA, Menlo Park, NYC, Edinburgh.
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.

Making sense of Trump's unscheduled sudden midair disassembly of the American empire (permalink)

For generations, the American empire was the most powerful force on earth, and so we tended to assume that it was the most durable force on earth – surely anything so powerful must also be eternal?

But power and durability aren't the same thing, as Le Guin reminded us with her oft-quoted maxim that "We live in capitalism, its power seems inescapable — but then, so did the divine right of kings":

https://www.ursulakleguin.com/nbf-medal

Monarchs may be powerful, but that power is derived from a manifestly incorrect belief in special blood, a belief that requires monarchs to inbreed. At best, this produces heads of state who can't stop bleeding and also can't tell you if their blood is blue or red; at worst, it yields heads of state who can't speak intelligibly, much less produce another generation of royals:

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

Oligarchy also produces a sequence of progressively weirder and more terrible rulers who rely on a mix of lies, flattery, coercion and personal cult nonsense to hold their coalition together in the face of mounting evidence for the system's bankruptcy. Thus Reagan begat GW Bush, who begat Trump, whose potential successors are a kennel of the least-charismatic chud podcasters ever to curse an RSS feed.

Trump's second term has resulted in a rapid, unscheduled, mid-air disassembly of the American empire. As Baldur Bjarnason writes, under Trump, America "first turned on their trading partners, then their allies in Europe, and then they delivered one of this century’s biggest economic and energy crises to their allies in Asia":

https://www.baldurbjarnason.com/2026/the-old-world-of-tech-is-dying/

The line comes from an excellent post entitled "The old world of tech is dying and the new cannot be born," about the impact of Trump's de-Americanization of the world on the US tech industry, and thus the world's relationship to tech more broadly. As Bjarnason writes, Trump's tech giants dominate the world because America dominates the world. It's not because the world likes American tech. As Bjarnason writes:

They are, more often than not, about as popular and respected as tobacco or pharmaceutical companies – some of them and their products are polling in terms of public sentiment in ranges similar to child molesters or authoritarian immigration enforcement entities – and their CEOs are some of the more despised public figures in recent history.

These very, very unpopular tech companies dominate because American trade policy insists that they must. They are allowed to violate local laws because stopping them from doing so would result in trade sanctions. It's true that US tech companies face fines abroad from time to time, but these are "the price list for inflicting societal suffering. Pick the one that suits your business model." US trading partners haven't really attempted to extinguish the unlawful conduct of US tech companies.

All of that is up for grabs now, thanks to Trump's uncontrollable compulsion to repeatedly hormuz himself (and America) in the foot. But – as Bjarnason writes – this didn't start with Trump. As ever, Trump is as much an effect as a cause, and the most important cause of Trump is the conversion of America into a financial economy, which started under Reagan, but was only finalized by Obama, who let the Wall Street looters who destroyed the world economy walk away unscathed, even as they stole the homes of millions of Americans:

https://web.archive.org/web/20170130083243/https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/jan/16/how-barack-obama-paved-way-donald-trump-racism

Financial economies "suck the air out of the rest of the economy and make it less competitive." Keeping billionaires in megayachts comes at the expense of "research, education, infrastructure, and healthcare." Countries that financialize lag behind countries where the economy is based on making things, not extracting or financing things.

Generations of both imperial looting and domestic investment made America the richest country on earth. That wealth cushioned America's transition to oligarchy: for a while, the country could both "finance and billionaire parasites sucking its blood" and continue to invest in itself. But while you can double the wealth of a billionaire at the expense of a town or two, doubling the wealth of a centibillionaire requires the destruction of whole regions.

As America looted itself into irrelevance, China – a very different kind of autocracy – invested in domestic capacity and domestic consumption. China's hardly a well-run place: like any autocracy, it functions according to the whims of extremely fallible officials, which produces real-estate bubbles and other crises of production (to say nothing of the demographic crisis of the One Child policy) and necessitates steadily increasing oppression, from online surveillance to concentration camps in Xinjiang.

Bjarnason writes about how this Chinese/US world presents a "double bind" for the EU. Siding with the US is increasingly untenable: the EU exists in large part to promote its domestic industries, but the US is no longer content to leave these alone. As Bjarnason says, US economic policy is now, "whatever our oligarchs want to steal this month, they get."

US tech has extended so many tendrils into so many sectors that it's not possible to defend any industrial sector without impinging on the "technopoly," where "the only ideas and thoughts that have social and cultural legitimacy are those that support, are supported by, and are mediated through technology."

This means that continuing to work within the American system means a steady transfer of economic and political control of every aspect of your life to the US, a decaying empire ruled over by a mad king. Nevertheless, there is a strong, vestigial reflex to protect American tech in the EU, which leaves European power-brokers scrambling to come up with reasons that the EU should confine its tech regulation to empty symbolic gestures, while avoiding meaningful action at all costs:

https://cerre.eu/wp-content/uploads/2026/02/CERRE_Horizontal-Interoperability-of-Social-Networking-Services.pdf

But the American tech sector relies on the other sources of American power – the ones that Trump is so bent on destroying. Trump's de-dollarization of the world economy is pushing the world away from using American tech for payment processing and networking. The American empire created the form of the US tech sector. As Bjarnason writes, "without the weight of the US political empire behind it – if Airbnb or Uber had been local startups – much fewer countries in the world would have loosened their regulations and consumer protections to accommodate them to the point where they prospered as they did."

Trump isn't the first US leader to make a strategic blunder (the US has lost every war it's fought since WWII, after all). But Trump's blunders are different in that they "deliberately signal the end [the US] empire." Hormuz and tariffs have driven people away from the US dollar, and everyone knows who to blame for the senseless deaths in the Gulf and the global privation caused by oil rationing.

That's bad news for a software industry that "shifted its entire value proposition from 'we make tools that help you make or save money' to using political clout and the dollar hegemony to capture, control, and loot entire sectors of the various economies of the world. That strategy only works when you’re in charge."

DOGE wiped out the health systems of the global south, and now Trump's trade negotiators are demanding that these countries promise to keep their hands off of US tech in exchange for reinstating a small trickle of the aid they lost. These countries are rejecting those demands:

https://www.reuters.com/business/healthcare-pharmaceuticals/zambia-says-us-health-deal-must-be-uncoupled-minerals-access-2026-05-04/

It's all up for grabs, in other words. The post-American internet is being born in a post-American world, and the shape of both is impossible to determine from this side of the veil. Bjarnason quotes Gramsci: "the old is dying and the new cannot be born."

I hold out high hopes for a world of international digital public goods: free and open software that replaces America's extractive, defective black boxes with transparent, auditable, trustworthy alternatives that are under the control of the people who use them:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/04/16/pascals-wager/#doomer-challenge

But – as Bjarnason says – even the intellectual property framework that the free/open source movement relies on to make its licenses enforceable is an artifact of the collapsing American empire. If the global copyright system collapses with America, there won't be any impediments to reverse-engineering and improving the tech around us – but there also won't be any way to enforce the free software licenses that keep that software open:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/04/02/limited-monopoly/#petardism

The whole essay is very good and – like so many great essays – it raises more questions than it answers. It's also full of standout one-liners like this one:

How do LLMs affect productivity and quality? (Much like leaded petrol. There’s some potential benefit for individual users with literally decades of expertise, provided nobody else uses LLMs. The results are catastrophic when everybody is using them.)

Consider moving it to the top of your weekend reading.

Hey look at this (permalink)

Your Power Tools Got Worse On Purpose https://www.worseonpurpose.com/p/your-power-tools-got-worse-on-purpose
The privilege of bad writers https://coreyrobin.com/2026/05/15/the-privilege-of-bad-writers/
AI as the new avatar of American capitalism https://www.bloodinthemachine.com/p/ai-as-the-new-avatar-of-american
Cucked Internet Theory https://www.tikviewer.com/video/7639554103340698912
Bill to block publishers from killing online games advances in California https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2026/05/bill-to-keep-online-games-playable-clears-key-hurdle-in-california/

Object permanence (permalink)

#25yrsago Is the law copyrighted?
https://web.archive.org/web/20010519134232/http://www.uniontrib.com/news/uniontrib/sun/news/news_1n13own.html

#15yrsago Canadian copyright collective wants a music tax on memory cards https://web.archive.org/web/20110517205114/https://www.michaelgeist.ca/content/view/5798/125/

#10yrsago FBI Director: viral videos make cops afraid to do their jobs https://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/12/us/comey-ferguson-effect-police-videos-fbi.html?_r=2

#10yrsago Banker implicated in one of history’s biggest frauds says boss beat him with a tiny baseball bat https://web.archive.org/web/20160516173952/http://www.ibtimes.co.uk/barclays-banker-accused-rigging-libor-rate-hit-assistant-baseball-bat-1559792

#10yrsago Infested: an itchy, fascinating natural history of the bed bug https://memex.craphound.com/2016/05/14/infested-an-itchy-fascinating-natural-history-of-the-bed-bug/

#5yrsago A weapon of mass financial destruction https://pluralistic.net/2021/05/14/billionaire-class-solidarity/#club-deals

#1yrago Are the means of computation even seizable? https://pluralistic.net/2025/05/14/pregnable/#checkm8

Upcoming appearances (permalink)

Berlin: Re:publica, May 18-20
https://re-publica.com/de/news/rp26-sprecher-cory-doctorow
Berlin: Enshittification at Otherland Books, May 18
https://www.otherland-berlin.de/de/event-details/cory-doctorow-in-der-friesenstrasse-23-kreuzberg-praesentiert-von-otherland.html
Berlin: Enshittification at Otherland Books, May 19
https://www.otherland-berlin.de/de/event-details/cory-doctorow.html
Hay-on-Wye: HowTheLightGetsIn, May 22-25
https://howthelightgetsin.org/festivals/hay/big-ideas-2
SXSW London, Jun 2
https://www.sxswlondon.com/session/how-big-tech-broke-the-internet-b3c4a901
LA: The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI with Brian Merchant (Skylight Books), Jun 19
https://www.skylightbooks.com/event/skylight-cory-doctorow-presents-reverse-centaurs-guide-life-after-ai-w-brian-merchant
Menlo Park: The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI with Angie Coiro (Kepler's), Jun 21
https://www.keplers.org/upcoming-events-internal/cory-doctorow-2026
NYC: The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI with Jonathan Coulton (The Strand), Jun 24
https://www.strandbooks.com/cory-doctorow-the-reverse-centaur-s-guide-to-life-after-ai.html
Edinburgh International Book Festival with Jimmy Wales, Aug 17
https://www.edbookfest.co.uk/events/the-front-list-cory-doctorow-and-jimmy-wales

Recent appearances (permalink)

EFFecting Change: How to Disenshittify the Internet (EFF, with Wendy Liu)
https://archive.org/details/effecting-change-enshittification
The “Enshittification” of Everything (Bioneers)
https://bioneers.org/cory-doctorow-enshittification-of-everything-zstf2605/
Enshittification (99% Invisible)
https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/666-enshittification/
Artificial Intelligence: The Ultimate Disruptor, with Astra Taylor and Yoshua Bengio (CBC Ideas)
https://www.cbc.ca/listen/live-radio/1-23-ideas/clip/16210039-artificial-intelligence-the-ultimate-disruptor
When Do Platforms Stop Innovating and Start Extracting? (InnovEU)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cccDR0YaMt8

Latest books (permalink)

"Canny Valley": A limited edition collection of the collages I create for Pluralistic, self-published, September 2025 https://pluralistic.net/2025/09/04/illustrious/#chairman-bruce
"Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It," Farrar, Straus, Giroux, October 7 2025
https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374619329/enshittification/
"Picks and Shovels": a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about the heroic era of the PC, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), February 2025 (https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250865908/picksandshovels).
"The Bezzle": a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about prison-tech and other grifts, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), February 2024 (thebezzle.org).
"The Lost Cause:" a solarpunk novel of hope in the climate emergency, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), November 2023 (http://lost-cause.org).
"The Internet Con": A nonfiction book about interoperability and Big Tech (Verso) September 2023 (http://seizethemeansofcomputation.org). Signed copies at Book Soup (https://www.booksoup.com/book/9781804291245).
"Red Team Blues": "A grabby, compulsive thriller that will leave you knowing more about how the world works than you did before." Tor Books http://redteamblues.com.
"Chokepoint Capitalism: How to Beat Big Tech, Tame Big Content, and Get Artists Paid, with Rebecca Giblin", on how to unrig the markets for creative labor, Beacon Press/Scribe 2022 https://chokepointcapitalism.com

Upcoming books (permalink)

"The Reverse-Centaur's Guide to AI," a short book about being a better AI critic, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, June 2026 (https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374621568/thereversecentaursguidetolifeafterai/)
"Enshittification, Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It" (the graphic novel), Firstsecond, 2026
"The Post-American Internet," a geopolitical sequel of sorts to Enshittification, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2027
"Unauthorized Bread": a middle-grades graphic novel adapted from my novella about refugees, toasters and DRM, FirstSecond, April 20, 2027
"The Memex Method," Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2027

Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources:

"The Reverse Centaur's Guide to AI," a short book for Farrar, Straus and Giroux about being an effective AI critic. LEGAL REVIEW AND COPYEDIT COMPLETE.
"The Post-American Internet," a short book about internet policy in the age of Trumpism. PLANNING.
A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING

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

ISSN: 3066-764X

Cool Pictures: The Vibes Are Getting fUnky - Nicky FloweRSS

2026-05-16T05:08:00.000Z

05/10 - 05/11, San Leandro + West Oakland // Fujifilm X-S20 // XF16-50mm // I really should be writing down my settings for later...

I meant to take more pictures, but trying to fix my printer took over my week. That Brother was like a brother to me, or so I thought; brothers should never go out of warranty. I also have been trying to fix myself but, if you can believe it, it's less straightforward than a faulty printer.

Nicky Flowers - Therapy should be free! - 05/15/26 - (send any comments/questions to hello at nickyflowers dot com)

Pluralistic: No one wants a permanent gerontocracy (15 May 2026) - Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow

2026-05-15T12:38:04.000Z

Today's links

No one wants a permanent gerontocracy: The one policy everyone agrees on.
Hey look at this: Delights to delectate.
Object permanence: Wolfengitmo; Facebook condemns Google privacy invasion; Michael Moore on bin Laden; TSA v babies; Tendril perversion; "Buy now"; Uber Ch(eats); Who Broke the Internet (II)?
Upcoming appearances: Berlin, Hay-on-Wye, London, NYC, Edinburgh.
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.

No one wants a permanent gerontocracy (permalink)

Perhaps the most demoralizing part of Trumpismo is the fear that the people around you are so cruel and senseless that they approve of the violence, the racism, the pig-ignorant lies and rampant theft:

https://www.techdirt.com/2025/07/08/who-goes-maga/

One of the things keeping me going in these dark days is the pollster G Elliot Morris, whose "Strength in Numbers" newsletter is a reliable, robust and nuanced source of information about the way other people – including Trump's base – feel about him from moment to moment. Reading items like "A reminder: Very few people support Donald Trump's presidency" make it easier to get through the day:

https://www.gelliottmorris.com/p/a-reminder-very-few-people-support

It's a very good piece, breaking down the collapse in support for Trumpismo and confidence in Trump's mental health, even among the people who have historically stood by him, even though – incredibly! – about a third of Americans still support him and believe in his fitness to rule.

But the most interesting part of this post is the eye-popping poll result on a question that is only incidentally about Trump: the extremely broad, bipartisan support for both age limits and term limits for the House, the Senate, the Presidency and the Supreme Court.

How broad and bipartisan are these results?

80% of Americans want age limits in the House and Senate (D78%, R83%; I79%);
Most Americans want age limits for the presidency (R73%, I61%) (the most popular age limit is 79);
Most Americans (65%) want an 18-year term limit for Supreme Court justices;
Most Americans (79%) want age limits for Supreme Court justices.

As Morris writes, this represents "a level of cross-partisan agreement that’s almost unheard of on a high-salience issue."

There are different ways to parse this out. The past decade has shown that, in the absence of a hard rule to the contrary, incumbents will stay in office long after it's obvious they should step down. That was true of Biden, who continued to campaign for a presidential term long after it was obvious that he was no longer physically and mentally capable of doing the job.

It was true of Ruth Bader-Ginsburg, whose commitment to the symbolic value of having her successor appointed by the first woman president allowed Trump to appoint the monstrous Amy Coney Barrett to a lifetime on the Supreme Court, which could well last another 30 years. It was true of Antonin Scalia, who would have handed a Supreme Court pick to the Obama administration if it wasn't for Mitch McConnell's willingness to steal a seat for Neal Gorsuch.

It's true of Kay Granger, a sitting congresswoman whose staff hid the fact that her dementia had progressed to the point that she had to be moved to an assisted living facility – while still holding office:

https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2025/03/14/kay-granger-dementia-dc-media-00210317

It was true of Gerry Connolly, who insisted that he – not AOC – should be the head of the Oversight Committee, despite the fact that he was dying of cancer:

https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/rep-gerry-connolly-announces-return-of-cancer-steps-down-as-top-oversight-democrat

It was true of Dianne Feinstein, who continued to serve in the Senate despite having advanced dementia:

https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2023/04/sen-dianne-feinsteins-saga-is-a-very-public-example-of-a-national-crisis/

These politicians are wed to a system of seniority and patronage that insists that everyone who "pays their dues" should get a turn. It's a system that relies on politicians banking favors from their peers and then paying them back by anointing successors, thus requiring politicians to serve until they are ready to choose that successor.

We have created a system in which no one dares to hand over power, because to do so is to unilaterally disarm, while the other side keeps their permanent gerontocrats in positions of authority. Not only does this system starve the pipeline of young politicians who can progress to fill those new roles, it also exposes each party to significant risk. If your majority rests on a handful of seats and your caucus includes a dozen people who are actuarially certain to die soon, then the whole system could be upended by a couple of highly likely blood-clots:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/07/01/designated-survivors/

It's not that every politician over the age of 70 (or 80, or 85) is incapable of doing the job: it's that a system that runs on a mix of incumbency advantage, seniority, patronage and hubris is a bad system and the only fix for it is to put hard limits on terms – both based on how many years you hold office, and how many years you walk the earth.

The system where everyone who pays their dues gets a turn was never going to work, and that should have been especially obvious to the system's longest-tenured participants, who've had decades to notice how long-lived their colleagues are, and to compare those lifespans to the number of committee chairs, senate seats and other treasures there are to be had in the halls of power.

There are lots of good ideas – like abolishing the Electoral College or limiting political spending – that are popular with a majority of Americans, but these ideas are often very unpopular with conservatives:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/10/18/the-people-no/#tell-ya-what-i-want-what-i-really-really-want

But this is a realm in which – as Morris says – there is "almost unheard-of…cross-partisan agreement." It's the one idea that all Americans – including older Americans (at least the ones who aren't in the House, Senate or Oval Office; or on the Supreme Court) agree on: rule by permanent gerontocracy is bad, and should end.

In not so many months, both parties are going to have to pick their next presidential candidates (in the case of Republicans, it may be sooner, depending on Trump's cheeseburger intake). Those primary contests are going to implicitly raise the issue of whether we should be ruled according to the principle of "everyone who pays their dues gets a turn." But a shrewd politician could win a lot of favor among voters (and fury among their colleagues) by campaigning on age- and term-limits for high office.

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

Hey look at this (permalink)

Internet of Shit: AI Poop Analysis App Offered to Sell Me Database of Its Users' Poops https://www.404media.co/ai-poop-analysis-app-offered-to-sell-me-access-to-its-users-poops/
How companies weaponize the terms of service against you https://www.theverge.com/podcast/930342/brendan-ballou-companies-courts-forced-arbitration-lawsuits-scalia
UK begins antitrust inquiry into Microsoft's business software ecosystem https://www.theregister.com/oses/2026/05/14/uk-begins-antitrust-inquiry-into-microsofts-business-software-ecosystem/5240452
Meta’s New Reality: Record High Profits. Record Low Morale https://www.wired.com/story/meta-layoffs-bad-vibes-mark-zuckerberg-ai/
Verity MCP https://www.iccl.ie/digital-data/verity-mcp/

Object permanence (permalink)

#25yrsago The life of a celeb PA https://www.theguardian.com/education/2001/may/14/highereducation.comment

#20yrsago DOJ moves in dark of night to quash EFF wiretapping lawsuit https://web.archive.org/web/20060524092447/https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/archives/004659.php

#20yrsago WolfenGitmo: Guantanamo Bay mod for Castle Wolfenstein https://web.archive.org/web/20060520203517/https://a.parsons.edu/~evan/school/?q=node/29

#20yrsago Where does booing come from? https://web.archive.org/web/20181215223044/https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2006/05/where-do-hecklers-come-from.html

#15yrsago Steven Levy on Facebook’s ironic privacy charge against Google https://web.archive.org/web/20110514121727/https://www.wired.com/epicenter/2011/05/facebook-privacy-problems/

#15yrsago Michael Moore’s “Some Final Thoughts on the Death of Osama bin Laden” https://web.archive.org/web/20110513181408/https://www.michaelmoore.com/words/mike-friends-blog/some-final-thoughts-on-death-of-osama-bin-laden

#15yrsago DHS’s “Secure Communities” program will deport battered woman for calling 9-1-1 on her abuser https://web.archive.org/web/20110514142235/https://blogs.ocweekly.com/navelgazing/2011/05/isaura_garcia_battered_secure.php

#15yrsago TSA: we’ll search your baby and it will make the country safer https://www.loweringthebar.net/2011/05/tsa-says-baby-frisking-justified.html

#10yrsago Telcoms companies try to rescue TV by imposing Internet usage caps on cord-cutters https://www.techdirt.com/2016/05/13/isps-are-now-forcing-cord-cutters-to-subscribe-to-tv-if-they-want-to-avoid-usage-caps/

#10yrsago The weird, humiliating nicknames George W Bush gave to everyone https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_nicknames_used_by_George_W._Bush

#10yrsago “Tendril perversion”: when one loop of a coil goes the other way https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tendril_perversion

#10yrsago Clicking “Buy now” doesn’t “buy” anything, but people think it does https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2778072

#5yrsago Uber (Ch)eats https://pluralistic.net/2021/05/13/uber-cheats/#50-companies

#5yrsago The Democratic establishment https://pluralistic.net/2021/05/13/uber-cheats/#party-bosses

#1yrago Who Broke the Internet? Part II https://pluralistic.net/2025/05/13/ctrl-ctrl-ctrl/#free-dmitry

Upcoming appearances (permalink)

Berlin: Re:publica, May 18-20
https://re-publica.com/de/news/rp26-sprecher-cory-doctorow
Berlin: Enshittification at Otherland Books, May 18
https://www.otherland-berlin.de/de/event-details/cory-doctorow-in-der-friesenstrasse-23-kreuzberg-praesentiert-von-otherland.html
Berlin: Enshittification at Otherland Books, May 19
https://www.otherland-berlin.de/de/event-details/cory-doctorow.html
Hay-on-Wye: HowTheLightGetsIn, May 22-25
https://howthelightgetsin.org/festivals/hay/big-ideas-2
SXSW London, Jun 2
https://www.sxswlondon.com/session/how-big-tech-broke-the-internet-b3c4a901
NYC: The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI with Jonathan Coulton (The Strand), Jun 24
https://www.strandbooks.com/cory-doctorow-the-reverse-centaur-s-guide-to-life-after-ai.html
Edinburgh International Book Festival with Jimmy Wales, Aug 17
https://www.edbookfest.co.uk/events/the-front-list-cory-doctorow-and-jimmy-wales

Recent appearances (permalink)

EFFecting Change: How to Disenshittify the Internet (EFF, with Wendy Liu)
https://archive.org/details/effecting-change-enshittification
The “Enshittification” of Everything (Bioneers)
https://bioneers.org/cory-doctorow-enshittification-of-everything-zstf2605/
Enshittification (99% Invisible)
https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/666-enshittification/
Artificial Intelligence: The Ultimate Disruptor, with Astra Taylor and Yoshua Bengio (CBC Ideas)
https://www.cbc.ca/listen/live-radio/1-23-ideas/clip/16210039-artificial-intelligence-the-ultimate-disruptor
When Do Platforms Stop Innovating and Start Extracting? (InnovEU)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cccDR0YaMt8

Latest books (permalink)

"Canny Valley": A limited edition collection of the collages I create for Pluralistic, self-published, September 2025 https://pluralistic.net/2025/09/04/illustrious/#chairman-bruce
"Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It," Farrar, Straus, Giroux, October 7 2025
https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374619329/enshittification/
"Picks and Shovels": a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about the heroic era of the PC, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), February 2025 (https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250865908/picksandshovels).
"The Bezzle": a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about prison-tech and other grifts, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), February 2024 (thebezzle.org).
"The Lost Cause:" a solarpunk novel of hope in the climate emergency, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), November 2023 (http://lost-cause.org).
"The Internet Con": A nonfiction book about interoperability and Big Tech (Verso) September 2023 (http://seizethemeansofcomputation.org). Signed copies at Book Soup (https://www.booksoup.com/book/9781804291245).
"Red Team Blues": "A grabby, compulsive thriller that will leave you knowing more about how the world works than you did before." Tor Books http://redteamblues.com.
"Chokepoint Capitalism: How to Beat Big Tech, Tame Big Content, and Get Artists Paid, with Rebecca Giblin", on how to unrig the markets for creative labor, Beacon Press/Scribe 2022 https://chokepointcapitalism.com

Upcoming books (permalink)

"The Reverse-Centaur's Guide to AI," a short book about being a better AI critic, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, June 2026 (https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374621568/thereversecentaursguidetolifeafterai/)
"Enshittification, Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It" (the graphic novel), Firstsecond, 2026
"The Post-American Internet," a geopolitical sequel of sorts to Enshittification, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2027
"Unauthorized Bread": a middle-grades graphic novel adapted from my novella about refugees, toasters and DRM, FirstSecond, April 20, 2027
"The Memex Method," Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2027

Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources:

"The Reverse Centaur's Guide to AI," a short book for Farrar, Straus and Giroux about being an effective AI critic. LEGAL REVIEW AND COPYEDIT COMPLETE.
"The Post-American Internet," a short book about internet policy in the age of Trumpism. PLANNING.
A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING

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

ISSN: 3066-764X

UK Government Kicks Out Palantir - Terence Eden’s Blog

2026-05-15T05:34:03.000Z

The UK Government, for all its faults, is pretty good at publishing contracts it has awarded. That's why I get depressed when I see rage-bait nonsense about how companies have been award "Top Secret" deals.

Right now you can go to https://www.contractsfinder.service.gov.uk and search for whichever bête noire has you riled up. You might want to argue that the company is corrupt, incompetent, or overpriced - but you can't argue that its contract is secret. There's no conspiracy. There's no secrecy. There's not even "beware of the leopard" shenanigans. It's all out in the open⁰.

The Government says who it paying money to.

But, of course, there are some things the Government can't say. It's rare for them to publicly disagree with a supplier, or call out how crappy they were. They need to maintain cordial relations with people¹. They don't want to scare off new suppliers who can't risk being publicly humiliated. When contracts are cancelled or ended, it is usually done quietly.

So you need to learn to read between the lines.

Let's take this excellent blog post from the Ministry of Housing Communities and Local Government²

"From emergency to sustainability: creating Share Homes for Ukraine data".

It's exactly the sort of blog post that some Civil Servants excel at writing. It clearly sets out how an ambitious and technically challenging project was delivered, why it is important, and who it benefits.

The blog post describes how the team…

exited our contract with our supplier.

And that:

Moving to this in-house model is already saving MHCLG millions of pounds a year in running costs.

They show user feedback for their new system saying:

It’s easier to navigate than the previous system

Of course, what they don't say is who supplied the previous system which was so costly and hard to use.

It was, of course, Palantir.

The original contract (CPD4124104) wasn't secret - although it was mired in some controversy as an urgent exemption to normal procurement rules³.

In 2023, the National Audit Office reported on the scheme - including Palanitr's software. They said:

The initial arrangement was put in place to help get the scheme up and running quickly. Consequently, the system did not undergo the usual research and testing that would be involved for the roll-out of a new digital system. There were initial issues such as the way it presented duplicated application data received from Home Office systems, and confusion from local authorities as to how to engage with the main data system.

How bad was Palantir's software? I've sent in a Freedom of Information request to find out. But we can tell that it was bad enough to convince MHCLG to rewrite it themselves.

A lean Civil Service may not have the in-house capability to rapidly create a new service. But, as their blog post shows, when given suitable resources Civil Servants can often outperform the private sector. More importantly, the new software is under the Ministry's direct control. This open source code is a triumph for sovereign technology.

MHCLG have shown the door to Palantir. They've built something better, easier to use, and cheaper.

I don't want to oversell this as the first victory in the war against this abominable company - but I hope where MHCLG leads, others will follow.

Yes, there occasionally delays and some things are redacted either for privacy, security, or confidentiality. But, in the main, if the Government has spent money on it, it'll be published somewhere. ↩︎
Yes, I know it would cathartic to have a YouTube Shocked Face "Government SLAMS woeful supplier!!" but the long-term consequences make it unlikely. ↩︎
MHCLG is literally the worst acronym in a sea of unpronounceable alphabetti spaghetti. At least MOJ can be pronounced "Modge"! ↩︎
My boring centrist dad position is that sometimes it makes sense to buy off-the-shelf in an emergency. If you find yourself abandoned after a night out, you order a taxi - you don't take up driving lessons. ↩︎

When the Cranes Fly South [book] - remy sharp's b:log

2026-05-15T00:00:00.000Z

Took me a minute to get into, but then…I cried. The good kind.

It took me until around 20% of the book to get on with it properly. I was struggling to even want to pick up the book. It's well written, but the subject, end of life, was so unappealing that I found myself wanting to avoid reading the book.

At some point around 1/5 of the way in, this feeling settled and I was swept along by the narrative that the main character, Bo, gives us.

I think reading this there's going to be different aspects that hit different people hardest. I'm not a dog person, so the thread about Sixten, his dog, though sad (the dog doesn't die!) it didn't gut punch me.

I did however relate hard to the inner monologue not linking up to what's actually said. Something I suspect most people can relate to - which I suspect is the reason this book is well recommended.

The book is told almost exclusively from the thoughts of Bo, the elderly 89 year old man (which took me quite a few pages to actually work out). From his thoughts we travel back and forth in his memory which worked really well. I didn't feel lost at all, maybe because Bo's memories felt like they flowed naturally back and forth.

The story really does feel like it's being faithful to the human flaws many of us share.

It also, for me, did an excellent job of building up my relationship with Bo and gently brought me to tears right at the end in a way that made me message my kids to tell them I love them.

Originally published on Remy Sharp's b:log

Moving away from Tailwind, and learning to structure my CSS - Julia Evans

2026-05-15T00:00:00.000Z

Hello! 8 years ago, I wrote excitedly about discovering Tailwind.

At that time I really had no idea how to structure my CSS code and given the choice between a pile of complete chaos and Tailwind, I was really happy to choose Tailwind. It helped me make a lot of sites!

I spent the last week or so migrating a couple of sites away from Tailwind and towards more semantic HTML + vanilla CSS, and it was SO fun and SO interesting, so here are some things I learned!

it turns out Tailwind taught me a lot

When I started thinking about structuring CSS, I was intimidated at first: I’m not very good at structuring my CSS! But then I started reading blog posts talking about how to structure CSS (like A whole cascade of layers or How I write CSS in 2024) and I realized a couple of things:

Every CSS code base has a bunch of different things going on (layouts! fonts! colours! common components!)
It’s extremely useful to have systems or guidelines to manage each of those things, otherwise things descend into chaos
Tailwind has systems for some of these, and I already know those systems! Maybe I can imitate the systems I like!

For example, Tailwind has:

a reset stylesheet
a colour palette
a font scale

the systems I’m going to talk about

I’m going to talk about a few aspects of my CSS codebase and my thoughts so far what kind of rules I want to impose on the codebase for each one. Some of them are copied from Tailwind and some aren’t.

reset
components
colours
font sizes
utility classes
the base
spacing
responsive design
the build system

1. reset

I just copied Tailwind’s “preflight styles” by going into tailwind.css and copying the first 200 lines or so.

I noticed that I’ve developed a relationship with Tailwind’s CSS reset over time, for example Tailwind sets box-sizing: border-box on every element (which means that an element’s width includes its padding):

* { box-sizing: border-box; }

I think it would be a real adjustment for me to switch to writing CSS without these, and I’m sure there are lots of other things in the Tailwind reset (like html {line-height: 1.5;}) that I’m subconsciously used to and don’t even realize are there.

2. components

This next part is the bulk of the CSS!

The idea here is to organize CSS by “components”, in a way that’s spiritually related to Vue or React components. (though there might not actually be any Javascript at all in the site)

Basically the idea is that:

Each “component” has a unique class
The CSS for one component never overrides the CSS for any other component
Each component has its own CSS file

So editing the CSS for one component won’t mysteriously break something in another component. And probably like 80% of the CSS that I would actually want to change is in various component files, so if I’m editing a 100-line component, I just have to think about those 100 lines. It’s way easier for me to think about.

For example, this HTML might be the .zine “component”.

<figure class="zine horizontal">
    <img src="whatever.jpg">
</figure>

And the CSS looks something like this, using nested selectors:

.zine {
  ...
  &.horizontal {
    ...
  }
  &.vertical {
    ...
  }
  &:hover {
    ...
  }
}

I haven’t done anything programmatic (like web components or @scope) that ensures that components won’t interfere with each other, but just having a convention and trying my best already feels like a big improvement.

Next: conventions to maintain some consistency across the site and keep these components in line with each other!

3. colours

colours.css has a bunch of variables like this which I can use as necessary. Colour is really hard and I didn’t want to revisit my use of colour in this refactor, so I left this alone.

The only guideline I’m trying to enforce here is that all colours used in the site are listed in this file.

:root {
  --pink: #fea0c2;
  --pink-light: #F9B9B9;
  --red: #f91a55;
  --orange: rgb(222, 117, 31);
  ...
}

4. font sizes

One thing I appreciated about Tailwind was that if I wanted to set a font size, I could just think “hm, I want the text to be big”, write text-lg, and be done with it! And maybe if it’s not big enough I’d use xl or 2xl instead. No trying to remember whether I’m using em or px or rem.

So I defined a bunch of variables, taken from Tailwind, like this:

  --size-xs: 0.75rem;
  --line-height-xs: 1rem;

  --size-sm: 0.875rem;
  --line-height-sm: 1.25rem;

Then if I want to set a font size, I can do it like this. It’s a little more verbose than Tailwind but I’m happy with it for now.

h3 {
  font-size: var(--size-lg);
  line-weight: var(--line-weight-lg);
}

5. utilities

There are some things like buttons that appear in many different components. I’m calling these “utilities”.

I copied some utility classes from Tailwind (like .sr-only for things that should only appear for screenreader users).

This section is pretty small and I try to be careful about making changes here.

6. the base

“base” styles are styles that apply across the whole site that I chose myself. I have to keep this section really small because I’m not confident enough to enforce a lot of styles across the whole site. These are the only two I feel okay about right now, and I might change the <section> one:

/* put a 950px column in the middle of each <section> */
section {
  --inner-width: 950px;
  padding: 3rem max(1rem, (100% - var(--inner-width))/2);
}

a {
  color: var(--orange);
}

I think for the base styles it’s going to be easiest for me to work kind of bottom up – first start with almost nothing in the base styles, and then move some styles from the components into base styles as I identify common things I want.

7. spacing

I haven’t completely worked out an approach to managing padding and margins yet. I’m definitely trying to be more principled than how I was doing it in Tailwind though, where I would just haphazardly put padding and margins everywhere until it looked the way I wanted.

Right now I’m working towards making the outer layout components in charge of spacing as much as possible. For example if I have a <section> with a bunch of children that I want to have space between them, I might use this to space the children evenly:

section > *+* {
  margin-top: 1rem;
}

Some inspiration blog posts:

8. responsive design: use more grid!

The way I was doing responsive design in Tailwind was to use a lot of media queries. Tailwind has this md:text-xl syntax that means “apply the text-xl style at sizes md or larger”.

I’m trying something pretty different now, which is to make more flexible CSS grid layouts that don’t need as many breakpoints. This is hard but it’s really interesting to learn about what’s possible with grid, and it’s a good example of something that I don’t think is possible with Tailwind.

For example, I’ve been learning about how to use auto-fit to automatically use 2 columns on a big screen and 1 column on a small screen like this:

  display: grid;
  grid-template-columns: repeat(auto-fit, minmax(min(100%, 400px), max-content));
  justify-content: center;

I also used grid-template-areas a lot which is an amazing feature that I don’t think you can use with Tailwind.

Some inspiration:

A responsive grid layout with no media queries from CSS Tricks

9. the build system: esbuild

In development, I don’t need a build system: CSS now has both built in import statements, like this:

@import "reset.css";
@import "typography.css";
@import "colors.css";

and built in nested selectors, like this:

.page {
  h2 { ...}
}

If I want, I can use esbuild to bundle the CSS file for production. That looks something like this.

esbuild style.css --bundle --loader:.svg=dataurl  --loader:.woff2=file --outfile=/tmp/out.css

Even though I usually avoid using CSS and JS build systems, I don’t mind using esbuild (which I wrote about in 2021 here) because it’s based on web standards and because it’s a static Go binary.

why migrate away from Tailwind?

A few people asked why I was migrating away from Tailwind. A few factors that contributed are:

Tailwind has become much more reliant on a build system since 2018, I think it’s impossible (?) to use newer versions of Tailwind without using a build system. So I’ve been using Tailwind v2 for years. (there’s also litewind apparently)
It’s always been true that you’re supposed to use Tailwind with a build system, but I’ve never really done that, so I have 2.8MB tailwind.min.css files in a lot of my projects and it feels a little silly.
I’m a lot better at CSS than I was when I started using Tailwind
Ultimately Tailwind is limiting: if you want to do Weird Stuff in your CSS, it’s not always possible with Tailwind. Those limits can be extremely useful (a lot of this post is about me reimplementing some of Tailwind’s limits!) but at this point I’d like to be able to pick and choose.
I ended up with sites that mixed both vanilla CSS and Tailwind in the same project and that was not fun to maintain
I got curious about what writing more semantic HTML would feel like.

CSS features I’m curious about

While doing this I learned about a lot of CSS features that I didn’t use but am curious about learning about one day:

@layer (from A Whole Cascade of Layers)
@scope)
container queries
subgrid

that’s all for now!

I still feel happy that I started using Tailwind, even if I’m moving away from it now. I learned a lot from using it and I can still use some parts from it in my sites even after deleting tailwind.min.css.

Thanks to Melody Starling who originally designed and wrote the CSS for wizardzines.com, everything cool and fun about the site is thanks to Melody.

Also I read so many incredible blog posts about CSS while working on this (from CSS Tricks, Smashing Magazine, and more), I’ve tried to link some of them throughout this post and I really appreciate how much folks in the CSS community share their practices.

tweet - Derek Sivers blog

2026-05-14T22:07:52.000Z

Prepare your “no” and keep it handy: sive.rs/n0

Pluralistic: Kickstarting "The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI" (14 May 2026) - Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow

2026-05-14T11:04:43.000Z

Today's links

Kickstarting "The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI": How to be a better AI critic.
Hey look at this: Delights to delectate.
Object permanence: RIP Douglas Adams; R2-trashcan; EFF v W3C; RIP shonky Disneyland; Stolen oligarch forks; Anal fisting site breached; "Reading With Pictures"; "Napier's Bones"; Trump v his base's welfare.
Upcoming appearances: Berlin, Hay-on-Wye, London, NYC, Edinburgh.
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.

Kickstarting "The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI" (permalink)

My next book, The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI, will be out in about a month – and (once again) Amazon's monopoly audiobook platform refuses to carry it, and so (once again) I'm pre-selling the audio, ebook and print edition in a Kickstarter campaign that proves that DRM-free isn't just the right way to reach an audience, it's also the best way to reach them:

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/doctorow/the-reverse-centaurs-guide-to-life-after-ai

Reverse Centaur is a book about the realpolitik and the political economy of AI, written by a tech critic (me!) who is sick to the back teeth of hearing about AI. Central to the book's thesis:

The AI bubble is exceptionally bad and dangerous:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/05/07/dump-the-pumpers/#alpo-eaters-anonymous

The AI bubble is part of a lineage of pump-and-dump swindles created by monopolists who are desperate to convince investors that they can continue to grow even after they've saturated their markets:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/03/06/privacy-last/#exceptionally-american

In service to that stock swindle, AI companies have cooked up all kinds of ways to "juke the stats" to paint a false picture of AI adoption:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/05/02/kpis-off/#principal-agentic-ai-problem

AI is a normal technology, and in the absence of the bubble, we'd call this collection of technically interesting, sometimes useful tools "plug-ins":

https://pluralistic.net/2026/02/19/now-we-are-six/#stock-buyback

A chatbot can't do your job, but an AI salesman can absolutely convince your boss to fire you and replace you with a chatbot that can't do your job:

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

Despite the fact that the AI can't do your job, there are many ways that AI can be used to erode your wages and working conditions:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/04/06/empiricism-washing/#veena-dubal

The workers who say that their jobs are worse and the things they produce are much worse as a result of AI are correct; but the workers who say their work is much better thanks to AI are also correct. This only seems like a riddle until you understand that the most important fact about any technology (including AI) isn't what it does, but who it does it for and who it does it to:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/09/11/vulgar-thatcherism/#there-is-an-alternative

When a boss fires a worker and gives their jobs to an AI, it usually means that they don't care if that job is done well, which is why customer service jobs are being handed over to AI:

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

Bosses also love firing coders and replacing them with AI – first, because bosses are really angry about the decades when tech workers were in short supply and bosses had to pretend to like them, and second, because if you're selling AI as a way to replace workers, what better way to convince a potential customer than to fire the workers your own company depends upon? (All that said, the coders who are excited about their new AI coding tools have a point – when a worker is in charge of their work and thus when and how they use a tool, we should defer to their own experience):

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

Artists are also a favorite target of AI bosses, which is weird, because the wages of creative workers add up to a total that rounds to zero when compared with the unimaginably large sums AI companies will have to take in if they are to pay back the trillions they've spent to date (let alone the trillions more they're proposing to spend in the near term). All of this raises a foundational question: can AI "art" ever be good? (Spoiler: probably not):

https://pluralistic.net/2025/03/25/communicative-intent/#diluted

Media companies say they have the answer to the AI art question: they'll create (or assert) a copyright that lets them control AI training. This is an incredibly transparent ruse: media companies are artists' class enemies, and if we get a new right to control AI training, our bosses will demand that we sign it away to them as part of their non-negotiable, one-sided standard contracts:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/11/18/rights-without-power/#careful-what-you-wish-for

For creative workers, the answer to these new would-be tech bosses isn't asserting a new right that will be expropriated by the old media bosses who've been ripping us off forever. Our salvation lies in leaning into the US Copyright Office's interpretation that holds that AI-generated works can't be copyrighted, because copyright is only for human creations. That means that the only way our bosses can get a copyright over the things they want to sell is to pay us to make them:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/03/03/its-a-trap-2/#inheres-at-the-moment-of-fixation

Many of the seemingly urgent AI questions that people won't shut up about are distractions, because they assume that AI will lastingly infiltrate every part of our society. In reality, the AI companies are losing unimaginable amounts and have no path to profitability:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/06/30/accounting-gaffs/#artificial-income

The only jobs that AI can do better than humans are jobs that shouldn't exist, like figuring out how to maximize undetectable wage-theft:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/12/18/loose-flapping-ends/#luigi-has-a-point

AI is also really good at figuring out how to do individualized price-gouging, another thing that shouldn't exist:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/01/21/cod-marxism/#wannamaker-slain

Despite AI's manifest unsuitability to do jobs that should exist, bosses keep firing people and replacing them with chatbots that do their jobs very badly. This allows bosses to indulge their solipsistic fantasy of a world without people, in which customers, workers and suppliers are statistical artifacts and bosses are unitary geniuses who simply imagine a product or service and then it is delivered, without any ego-shattering confrontations with people who know how to do things:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/01/05/fisher-price-steering-wheel/#billionaire-solipsism

This is catastrophic, and not just for the parties involved today. The AI bubble will pop, and when it does, the chatbots that do these jobs (badly) will be switched off. Meanwhile, the workers those chatbots replaced will have retrained, retired, or become "discouraged." No one will be around to do those (necessary) jobs. AI is the asbestos we are shoveling into the walls of our civilization and our descendants will be digging it out for generations:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/09/27/econopocalypse/#subprime-intelligence

The real existential AI threat isn't that we'll accidentally teach the word-guessing program so many words that it awakens and becomes a vengeful god. The real risk is that when the bubble bursts we'll indulge the ruling class's reflex to austerity, and that this will continue the decades of mass economic traumatization that makes people into easy marks for fascists:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/04/12/always-great/#our-nhs

But when the AI bubble pops, that won't be the end of AI – it will be the end of the bubble. When the AI bubble pops, we'll have mountains of GPUs at fire-sale prices, skilled workers liberated from the imperative to help their bosses promote their stock swindle, and open source models that will yield tremendous dividends to anyone who sets out to optimize them:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/10/16/post-ai-ai/#productive-residue

As you can see from the links above, I developed The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI in the same way that I developed Enshittification: in public, through a series of essays, which I periodically synthesized into major, widely shared speeches:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/12/05/pop-that-bubble/#u-washington

Making my working notes public is a hugely effective way of producing and refining critical work, and it's been my method for 25 years now:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/05/09/the-memex-method/

It's a method that's let me produce a string of international bestsellers, published by some of the largest publishers in the world. Nevertheless, Amazon refuses to carry my audiobooks:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/07/25/can-you-hear-me-now/#acx-ripoff

That's because I have an iron-clad requirement that my work be sold in open formats, without the "digital rights management" that blocks you from moving the books you bought on Amazon to someone else's apps. Digital rights management (DRM) enjoys bizarre legal protections so that it's a felony for me to give you the tools you need to move the books I wrote out of an Amazon app and into a competitor's app:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/01/14/sole-and-despotic/#world-turned-upside-down

What's more, these outrageous legal rights extend around the world, because the US Trade Representative spent decades bullying America's trading partners into passing laws that criminalize the act of fixing the defects in America's tech exports, which is why farmers can't fix their John Deere tractors, hospitals can't fix their Medtronic ventilators, and no one can sell you an app that stops Apple and Google from spying on your phone:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/01/01/39c3/#the-new-coalition

Amazon's Audible controls 90% (!) of the audiobook market, and they will not sell any book unless they can permanently lock it to their platform. That means that every time a writer sells you an audiobook on Audible, they create a "switching cost" that stops you from leaving Audible for a competitor. Not only is this fundamentally unjust, it's also terrible for creators: if our audiences can't leave Amazon, then we can't leave Amazon either, which means Amazon can (and does!) steal millions of dollars from writers without losing our business:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/09/07/audible-exclusive/#audiblegate

Which is where these Kickstarter campaigns come in. Whenever I sell a new book to a publisher, I arrange to make my own independent audiobook for it, which I sell everywhere except the platforms that have mandatory DRM: Audible, Apple and Audiobooks.com. There are some very good DRM-free audiobook stores, notably Libro.fm and Downpour.com (Google Play also sells audiobooks without DRM). But most people have never heard of these, so it wasn't until I started pre-selling my audiobooks on Kickstarter that I was able to make my stubborn refusal to sell out to Audible into a paying proposition. My agent tells me that if I'd sold out to Audible, I'd have paid off my mortgage and I'd be able to give my kid a full ride through a fancy US college. I don't make that kind of money from these Kickstarters, but they do very well nevertheless, and they're a critical part of my family's finances.

The Kickstarter is live for the next three weeks:

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/doctorow/the-reverse-centaurs-guide-to-life-after-ai

You can pre-order print copies of Reverse Centaur, as well as DRM-free ebooks and audiobooks (narrated by me!) for Reverse Centaur and Enshittification. Normally, I offer custom-signed copies of the print books, but Enshittification was so successful that I haven't stopped touring it and I'm in a new city every couple of days, so there's no way I can reliably get into a warehouse to sign the latest batch of orders. Instead, I'll be posting the contact details for every bookstore that's hosting me on my tours (US in June, UK in September) and you can order signed copies from them, which I'll personalize after my events there so they can ship them to you.

I've also decided to raise money for the Electronic Frontier Foundation (eff.org), the nonprofit I've worked at for nearly 25 years. EFF is the oldest, best and most effective tech rights organization in the world, and its mission has only gotten more important over the years. EFF's outreach folks are offering a special membership package for backers of the Kickstarter, which includes an EFF hat and stickers, as well as an Enshittification pin and two Enshittification stickers:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/04/24/poop-emoji-plus-plus/#devin-washburn

The audiobook is fully recorded and finalized and you can listen to the first hour of it here:

https://archive.org/details/reverse-centaur-audio-sample

It came out great (as always!), thanks to the terrific direction of Gabrielle De Cuir of Skyboat Media and editing from Wryneck Studios' John Taylor Williams. Gabrielle's directed all my audiobooks since 2017, and John's been mastering my podcasts since 2006 (!!), so we constitute a very well-oiled machine.

Working out my ideas in public allows me to produce my Pluralistic newsletter, and with it, a large volume of free, high-quality work that's licensed under a generous Creative Commons license that lets anyone reproduce, translate, redistribute and even sell my articles. If you've enjoyed that work, I hope you'll consider backing the campaign! Selling books is how I pay the bills and keep the lights on, and as ever, this is the only way you can get a major publisher's ebooks and audiobooks with no DRM and no "terms of service." These are truly ebooks and audiobooks that you own. You can sell them, give them away, or lend them out – so long as you don't violate copyright law, we're all cool:

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/doctorow/the-reverse-centaurs-guide-to-life-after-ai

Hey look at this (permalink)

Pee To Melt ICE Free Urinal Stickers https://peetomeltice.com/
We Are Crashing Into the Future (Or It Is Crashing Into Us) https://www.meditationsinanemergency.com/we-are-crashing-into-the-future/

Object permanence (permalink)

#25yrsago RIP, Douglas Adams http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/1326657.stm

#20yrsago Douglas Coupland models his life & books on net rumors about him https://web.archive.org/web/20060515220320/https://www.wired.com/wired/archive/14.05/posts.html?pg=6

#15yrsago Vindictive lumber baron’s far-flung heirs inherit, 91 years after his death https://abcnews.com/Business/lumber-barons-descendants-receive-inheritance-92-years-death/story?id=13569633

#15yrsago R2D2 trashcan https://web.archive.org/web/20171208014511/https://i.imgur.com/x3w0I.jpg

#15yrsago Napier’s Bones: math and mysticism make for great international adventure https://memex.craphound.com/2011/05/12/napiers-bones-math-and-mysticism-make-for-great-international-adventure/

#15yrsago China’s shonky Disneyland-a-like park closed https://web.archive.org/web/20110515073221/https://thedisneyblog.com/2011/05/13/fake-disney-theme-park-in-china-forced-to-close/

#10yrsago Open letter to from EFF to members of the W3C Advisory Committee https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2016/05/open-letter-members-w3c-advisory-committee

#10yrsago Gallery show of forks stolen from rich people, sealed to preserve crumbs & saliva https://web.archive.org/web/20160505183026/https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2016/apr/27/crumbs-and-all-prince-harry-hillary-clinton-and-julia-gillard-have-cutlery-swiped-for-exhibition

#10yrsago German publishers owe writers €100M in misappropriated royalties https://uebermedien.de/4444/schoener-verlegen-mit-dem-geld-anderer-leute/

#10yrsago Chinese state-backed corporations beat US lawsuits with sovereign immunity https://www.reuters.com/article/us-china-usa-companies-lawsuits-idUSKCN0Y2131/

#10yrsago Anal fisting site breached: 100K passwords, usernames, email addresses and IPs extracted https://web.archive.org/web/20160511121337/https://motherboard.vice.com/read/rosebuttboard-ip-board

#10yrsago Reading With Pictures: awesome, classroom-ready comics for math, social studies, science and language arts https://memex.craphound.com/2016/05/12/reading-with-pictures-awesome-classroom-ready-comics-for-math-social-studies-science-and-language-arts/

#5yrsago Crooked Timber's Ministry for the Future Seminar https://pluralistic.net/2021/05/12/seminar-for-the-future/#imaginations

#1yrago Trump can't do ANYTHING for his base https://pluralistic.net/2025/05/12/greased-slide/#greased-pole

Upcoming appearances (permalink)

Berlin: Re:publica, May 18-20
https://re-publica.com/de/news/rp26-sprecher-cory-doctorow
Berlin: Enshittification at Otherland Books, May 18
https://www.otherland-berlin.de/de/event-details/cory-doctorow-in-der-friesenstrasse-23-kreuzberg-praesentiert-von-otherland.html
Berlin: Enshittification at Otherland Books, May 19
https://www.otherland-berlin.de/de/event-details/cory-doctorow.html
Hay-on-Wye: HowTheLightGetsIn, May 22-25
https://howthelightgetsin.org/festivals/hay/big-ideas-2
SXSW London, Jun 2
https://www.sxswlondon.com/session/how-big-tech-broke-the-internet-b3c4a901
NYC: The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI with Jonathan Coulton (The Strand), Jun 24
https://www.strandbooks.com/cory-doctorow-the-reverse-centaur-s-guide-to-life-after-ai.html
Edinburgh International Book Festival with Jimmy Wales, Aug 17
https://www.edbookfest.co.uk/events/the-front-list-cory-doctorow-and-jimmy-wales

Recent appearances (permalink)

The “Enshittification” of Everything (Bioneers)
https://bioneers.org/cory-doctorow-enshittification-of-everything-zstf2605/
Enshittification (99% Invisible)
https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/666-enshittification/
Artificial Intelligence: The Ultimate Disruptor, with Astra Taylor and Yoshua Bengio (CBC Ideas)
https://www.cbc.ca/listen/live-radio/1-23-ideas/clip/16210039-artificial-intelligence-the-ultimate-disruptor
When Do Platforms Stop Innovating and Start Extracting? (InnovEU)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cccDR0YaMt8
Pete "Mayor" Buttigieg (No Gods No Mayors)
https://www.patreon.com/posts/pete-mayor-with-155614612

Latest books (permalink)

"Canny Valley": A limited edition collection of the collages I create for Pluralistic, self-published, September 2025 https://pluralistic.net/2025/09/04/illustrious/#chairman-bruce
"Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It," Farrar, Straus, Giroux, October 7 2025
https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374619329/enshittification/
"Picks and Shovels": a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about the heroic era of the PC, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), February 2025 (https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250865908/picksandshovels).
"The Bezzle": a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about prison-tech and other grifts, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), February 2024 (thebezzle.org).
"The Lost Cause:" a solarpunk novel of hope in the climate emergency, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), November 2023 (http://lost-cause.org).
"The Internet Con": A nonfiction book about interoperability and Big Tech (Verso) September 2023 (http://seizethemeansofcomputation.org). Signed copies at Book Soup (https://www.booksoup.com/book/9781804291245).
"Red Team Blues": "A grabby, compulsive thriller that will leave you knowing more about how the world works than you did before." Tor Books http://redteamblues.com.
"Chokepoint Capitalism: How to Beat Big Tech, Tame Big Content, and Get Artists Paid, with Rebecca Giblin", on how to unrig the markets for creative labor, Beacon Press/Scribe 2022 https://chokepointcapitalism.com

Upcoming books (permalink)

"The Reverse-Centaur's Guide to AI," a short book about being a better AI critic, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, June 2026 (https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374621568/thereversecentaursguidetolifeafterai/)
"Enshittification, Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It" (the graphic novel), Firstsecond, 2026
"The Post-American Internet," a geopolitical sequel of sorts to Enshittification, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2027
"Unauthorized Bread": a middle-grades graphic novel adapted from my novella about refugees, toasters and DRM, FirstSecond, April 20, 2027
"The Memex Method," Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2027

Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources:

"The Reverse Centaur's Guide to AI," a short book for Farrar, Straus and Giroux about being an effective AI critic. LEGAL REVIEW AND COPYEDIT COMPLETE.
"The Post-American Internet," a short book about internet policy in the age of Trumpism. PLANNING.
A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING

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

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