Pluralistic: You can't fight enshittification (31 Jul 2025)
Today's links You can't fight enshittification: (But we can.) Hey look at this: Delights to delectate. Object permanence: Apple and trusted computing; TSA mocks travelers; Self-bricking med-tech. Upcoming appearances: Where to find me. Recent appearances: Where I've been. Latest books: You keep readin' em, I'll keep writin' 'em. Upcoming books: Like I said, I'll keep writin' 'em. Colophon: All the rest. You can't fight enshittification (permalink) I need to tell you something unsatisfying: your personal consumption choices will not make a meaningful difference to the amount of enshittification you experience in your life. Oh sure, you can tinker in the margins, and you should! Get a repairable laptop, like the Framework, which is the greatest computer I've ever owned, and run Linux on it (I use Ubuntu, which is easy to install). You'll spend two weeks looking around the UI for the thing you need to click on and then you'll stop noticing it altogether, forever: https://pluralistic.net/2022/11/13/graceful-failure/#frame Access the internet via RSS, and avoid all the algorithmic twiddling and surveillance that subjects you and yours to the depredations of the worst people on earth and their feral algorithms: https://www.citationneeded.news/curate-with-rss/ Give preference to high-security, private, open messaging tools like Signal. Open an account on a federated social media service, like Mastodon, and make it a first-class home for your online social life: https://pluralistic.net/2024/12/14/fire-exits/#graceful-failure-modes Do all this! Do more! You'll make your life somewhat better, and in some cases, much better. But you're not going to fight enshittification this way. Enshittification is not the result of people making bad choices: it's the result of bad policies that produce bad systems. Enshittification makes for a neat descriptive account, talking about how platforms go bad: Here is how platforms die: first, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/21/potemkin-ai/#hey-guys But the most important part of enshittification is its causal hypothesis: the answer it proposes to why this degradation is happening everywhere, right now: https://pluralistic.net/2025/02/26/ursula-franklin/#franklinite Here's why you're getting enshittified: we deliberately decided to stop enforcing competition laws. As a result, companies formed monopolies and cartels. This means that they don't have to worry about losing your business or labor to a competitor, because they don't compete. It also means that they can handily capture their regulators, because they can easily agree on a set of policy priorities and use the billions they've amassed by not competing to capture their regulators. They can hold a whip hand over their formerly powerful tech workers, mass-firing them and terrorizing them out of any Tron-inspired conceits about "fighting for the user." Finally, they can use IP law to shut down anyone who makes technology that disenshittifies their offerings. You can take care to avoid enshittification, you can even make a fetish out of it, but without addressing these systemic failings, your individual actions will only get you so far. Sure, use privacy-enhancing tools like Signal to communicate with other people, but if the only way to get your kid to their little league game is to join the carpool group on Facebook, you're going to hemorrhage data about everything you do to Meta. Likewise, you can use privacy-preserving adblockers in your browser, but the instant you've got to do business with a monopoly that requires you to use their app, you will be totally helpless before them, because anti-circumvention law felonizes modifying an app so it preserves your privacy. An app is just a webpage skinned with the right kind of IP law to make it a jailable offense to install an ad-blocker: https://pluralistic.net/2024/05/07/treacherous-computing/#rewilding-the-internet When all your friends are going to a festival, are you really going to opt out because the event requires you to use the Ticketmaster app (because Ticketmaster has a monopoly over event ticketing)? If so, you're not gonna have a lot of friends, which is a pretty shitty way to live. If you turn your personal campaign to live an enshittification-free life into a set of rigid practices that isolate you from your community, you will be miserable – and you will undermine your ability to address the systemic roots of enshittification. That's because systemic problems have systemic solutions. They are addressed through mass movements, impact litigation, political action, street uprisings, mutual aid, and other forms of solidarity and community. The monsters who benefit from the status quo don't want you to know this. They want to brainwash you with Margaret Thatcher's mantra, "There is no such thing as society." They want you to think that you are a pathetic, atomized individual. They want you to die in a heatwave while gasping out your profound regret for not recycling more diligently and taking more care with your "carbon footprint." They want you to drive around for hours looking for an independent cardboard seller to make your protest sign with, convinced that it's more important to avoid shopping on Amazon than it is to actually show up at the protest outside the Amazon warehouse. They want you to curse yourself for failing to cycle and take the bus in your city where there are no bike lanes and the buses run every 45 minutes and stop at 8PM. If you wanted a livable city, you should have made better consumption choices! Perhaps you could dig your own subway, ever think of that, hmmm? You, me and everyone we know have all been subjected to a 40-year blitz of anti-solidaristic propaganda, aimed at convincing us that we are only allowed to fight the system as individuals. Don't like your health care? Shop around! Don't like your boss? Quit your job! Under no circumstances should you advocate for either a union or socialized health-care. You're an individual, there is no such thing as society. "There's no such thing as society" is what you say if you benefit from society (which absolutely exists) and don't want it to change. To make changes, you have to exist in society. Yes, the Democratic Party is a weak and pathetic failed gerontocracy, but the Democratic Socialists, the Sunrise Movement, and other political groups that are independent of the Dems but still drag them into doing something good, sometimes, all deserve your support. Yes, the union movement squandered the Biden years, refusing to spend its record-setting cash reserves on organizing, despite the millions of workers begging to join unions. But workplace democracy remains the only way that we ever have – or ever will – defeat capital, so join a union, form a union, support a union: https://pluralistic.net/2025/01/29/which-side-are-you-on-2/#strike-three-yer-out Yes, plastic recycling is a scam cooked up by the petrochemical industry and all the plastic you stick in your blue bin either goes to an incinerator or a landfill, but if you don't support (and join up with) real environmental activists, you're going to roast alive: https://heated.world/cp/169762317 Yes, Israel is committing a genocide and Brown, Columbia, and other elite universities are capitulating to Trump, whose evangelical base believes that war in Israel will hasten the Second Coming, when all Jews will be cast into eternal damnation. But that doesn't relieve you of your responsibility to act to defend our Palestinian brothers and sisters from the death rained down on them with the weapons our governments send to Israel. That goes double for us Jews, in whose name the slaughter is being committed: https://www.thecanary.co/trending/2025/07/31/miriam-margolyes-hitler-comments/ My book on Enshittification is coming out in a couple of months, and the early reviews are already coming in, and they are gratifyingly glowing. But there's a trend in these reviews, a caveat that reviewer after reviewer has raised: my book is "short on individual solutions." You're goddamned right it is. Because this isn't an individual problem, it's a systemic one. Sure, live the best life you can, making the best choices you can. But don't kid yourself that this is fighting enshittification. The reason corporations spy on you isn't because you're too cheap to pay for media, so they must resort to surveillance advertising. Whether or not you pay a tech company, they will absolutely spy on you: https://pluralistic.net/2022/11/14/luxury-surveillance/#liar-liar The reason they can spy on you is that the US hasn't had a new consumer privacy law since 1988, when the Video Privacy Protection Act banned video store clerks from disclosing which VHS cassettes you took home. This is the last technological threat to our privacy that Congress has addressed. The reason you are spied upon is because there are no systemic consequences for this surveillance: https://pluralistic.net/2023/12/06/privacy-first/#but-not-just-privacy The reason gig work companies misclassify their workers as contractors in order to abuse them, steal their wages, and deny them workplace protections is because they can – not because workers are insufficiently choosy about their employment arrangements. To fight systemic problems you need to be part of a systemic solution. For 23 and a half years, I've worked for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the most enshittification-fighting organization in the world: https://eff.org EFF is a member-supported nonprofit. We rely on donors like you, and we squeeze our budget hard. For as long as I've been with EFF, I've heard smears about how we're secretly shills for Big Tech and dependent on them for our funding (hilariously I once heard that EFF's reps to a meeting were transported to it in a stretch limo paid for by Intel – except I was the rep at that meeting, and I took the bus). Here's all of our financial disclosures, see for yourself: https://www.eff.org/about/annual-reports-and-financials Donating to EFF is one way to fund the systemic rejection of enshittification. But if you want to join the fight – if you want to be part of a community that fights back – then you need to know about the Electronic Frontier Alliance (EFA): https://efa.eff.org/allies EFA is a network of independent community groups that EFF helps coordinate and advise. When one group is in trouble, we connect it with other groups that have overcome the same troubles. When one group scores a victory, held other groups replicate its successes in their towns. Our organizers also help people in communities that don't have EFA affiliates start groups and join the network. I get it: this is harder work than changing your consumption habits. But it's infinitely more rewarding. You're more than a consumer. You can aspire to more dignity than is afforded to an ambulatory wallet: https://pluralistic.net/2022/05/16/through-the-meat-grinder/#hells-kitchen No one is coming to save us except us. There is such a thing as society, and you're a part of it, and so am I, and so are the rest of us: https://www.hamiltonnolan.com/p/they-are-going-to-take-everything You can't fight enshittification. But together, we can. Hey look at this (permalink) Peter Beinart – "Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza: A Reckoning" | The Daily Show https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X5kXCdzt_us Venezuelan Men Sent to CECOT on What They Endured and Reuniting With Their Families https://www.propublica.org/article/venezuelan-men-cecot-interviews-trump The future of MAGA after Trump https://www.garbageday.email/p/the-future-of-maga-after-trump-7a59b37c5e8aa178 Sundman figures it out! https://johnsundman.substack.com/ Scoop: U.S. intelligence intervened with DOJ to push HPE-Juniper merger https://www.axios.com/2025/07/30/merger-hpe-juniper-networks-national-security Object permanence (permalink) #20yrsago Apple to add Trusted Computing to the new kernel? https://memex.craphound.com/2005/07/31/apple-to-add-trusted-computing-to-the-new-kernel/ #10yrsago TSA Behavioral Detection Program’s awful newsletter mocks travellers’ worries https://theintercept.com/2015/07/31/tsas-behavior-detection-program-newsletter-ridiculous-offensive/ #10yrsago German prosecutors give spies a walk, but investigate journalists for “treason” https://netzpolitik.org/2015/federal-office-for-the-protection-of-the-constitution-brings-a-charge-the-federal-public-prosecutor-investigates-against-us-concerning-our-sources/ #10yrsago Google diversity boss promised “UK’s first women’s history museum,” built a Jack the Ripper “museum” https://www.standard.co.uk/culture/exhibitions/museum-which-promised-to-celebrate-east-end-women-now-devoted-to-jack-the-ripper-10423690.html #5yrsago Challenge questions suck https://pluralistic.net/2020/07/31/hall-of-famer/#favorite-food #5yrsago Apple's internal Right to Repair fight https://pluralistic.net/2020/07/31/hall-of-famer/#e-waste-apple #5yrsago Self-bricking medical device https://pluralistic.net/2020/07/31/hall-of-famer/#bricked-exogen #5yrsago Mexico's copyright vs self-determination and national sovereignty https://pluralistic.net/2020/07/31/hall-of-famer/#necensuraninadados #5yrsago I'm being inducted into the Canadian SF/F hall of fame https://pluralistic.net/2020/07/31/hall-of-famer/#hall-of-famer #1yrago The largest campaign finance violation in US history https://pluralistic.net/2024/07/31/greater-fools/#coinbased Upcoming appearances (permalink) San Diego: ACM Collective Intelligence keynote, Aug 5 https://ci.acm.org/2025/speakers/cory-doctorow/ Ithaca: AD White keynote (Cornell), Sep 12 https://deanoffaculty.cornell.edu/events/keynote-cory-doctorow-professor-at-large/ DC: Enshittification at Politics and Prose, Oct 8 https://politics-prose.com/cory-doctorow-10825 New Orleans: DeepSouthCon63, Oct 10-12, 2025 http://www.contraflowscifi.org/ San Francisco: Enshittification at Public Works (The Booksmith), Oct 20 https://app.gopassage.com/events/doctorow25 Miami: Enshittification at Books & Books, Nov 5 https://www.eventbrite.com/e/an-evening-with-cory-doctorow-tickets-1504647263469 Recent appearances (permalink) ORG at 20: In conversation with Maria Farrell https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M9H2An_D6io Why aren't we controlling our own tech? (Co-Op Congress) https://www.youtube.com/live/GLrDwHgeCy4?si=NUWxPphk0FS_3g9J&t=4409 If We Had a Choice, Would We Invent Social Media Again? (The Agenda/TVO) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KJw38uIcmEw Latest books (permalink) Picks and Shovels: a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about the heroic era of the PC, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), February 2025 (https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250865908/picksandshovels). The Bezzle: a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about prison-tech and other grifts, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), February 2024 (the-bezzle.org). "The Lost Cause:" a solarpunk novel of hope in the climate emergency, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), November 2023 (http://lost-cause.org). "The Internet Con": A nonfiction book about interoperability and Big Tech (Verso) September 2023 (http://seizethemeansofcomputation.org). Signed copies at Book Soup (https://www.booksoup.com/book/9781804291245). "Red Team Blues": "A grabby, compulsive thriller that will leave you knowing more about how the world works than you did before." Tor Books http://redteamblues.com. "Chokepoint Capitalism: How to Beat Big Tech, Tame Big Content, and Get Artists Paid, with Rebecca Giblin", on how to unrig the markets for creative labor, Beacon Press/Scribe 2022 https://chokepointcapitalism.com Upcoming books (permalink) Canny Valley: A limited edition collection of the collages I create for Pluralistic, self-published, September 2025 Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It, Farrar, Straus, Giroux, October 7 2025 https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374619329/enshittification/ Unauthorized Bread: a middle-grades graphic novel adapted from my novella about refugees, toasters and DRM, FirstSecond, 2026 Enshittification, Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It (the graphic novel), Firstsecond, 2026 The Memex Method, Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2026 The Reverse-Centaur's Guide to AI, a short book about being a better AI critic, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2026 Colophon (permalink) Today's top sources: Currently writing: "The Reverse Centaur's Guide to AI," a short book for Farrar, Straus and Giroux about being an effective AI critic. (1018 words yesterday, 16391 words total). 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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You further represent that you have the authority to release me from any BOGUS AGREEMENTS on behalf of your employer. ISSN: 3066-764X
