Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow – No trackers, no a… @pluralistic.net.web.brid.gy

Pluralistic: AI's pogo-stick grift (02 Aug 2025) Today's links AI's pogo-stick grift: The hard part is operating in an unpredictable, adversarial, unstructured world. Hey look at this: Delights to delectate. Object permanence: Galaksija, TSA shock-wand, Reverse-centaur apocalypse. 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. AI's pogo-stick grift (permalink) Not only is agentic AI bullshit, but it's a specific kind of bullshit that AI hucksters have busted out in the past, and will bust out in the future, so it's worth spending a minute to unpack this bullshit and catalog its traits so that we don't fall for it. As GW Bush says, "Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, we don't get fooled again." Automation can be transformative, relieving us of danger and drudgery by getting a machine to pick up some of the heavy work. Ideally automation seamlessly swaps a human for a machine at some stage in a process (ideally, the boring, dangerous and/or difficult phase). Like, whipping egg-whites for a meringue is hard on your wrist. But swap your whisk for a hand blender, and suddenly that tiresom process becomes fast and easy. If the blender is cordless, you can use it anywhere in your kitchen, including wherever you would have stood over a bowl with a whisk. A mixer, by contrast, requires more labor on your part: you have to decant the contents of your mixing bowl into the mixer, run its motor, and then scrape the whipped whites back into your bowl for the next phase. It's worse automation. But the worst automation would be a mixer that requires a special electrical outlet, a different fridge, and a special egg-carton. You would have to redesign your whole kitchen to use that thing. Sure, it might produce perfect meringues, and sure, if you had a meringue factory it might be a great solution. But for everyday use, it's a solution that creates more problems than it solves. AI pitchmen promise that seamless swapping of a human tethered to some choresome drudgery for software. That's the whole point of self-driving cars: each of us can swap a standard car for one with an autopilot and use the same roads, with the same road-users, to get to all the same places. We don't have to tear up all the roads and lay tracks, or fill the roadside environment with sensors and beacons to help the "self-driving" cars navigate the system. A self-driving car can share the road with human-piloted vehicles, even when those other vehicles are driven by humans who don't see why they should allow a robot to merge into their lane or have the right of way, even if the human is turning left into oncoming robo-traffic. Self-driving cars are not very good at this stuff, as it turns out. When that became apparent, self-driving car hucksters announced that it was only reasonable for their products to require something of the rest of us. As Andrew Ng put it: “I think many AV teams could handle a pogo stick user in pedestrian crosswalk,” Ng told me. “Having said that, bouncing on a pogo stick in the middle of a highway would be really dangerous.” “Rather than building AI to solve the pogo stick problem, we should partner with the government to ask people to be lawful and considerate,” he said. “Safety isn’t just about the quality of the AI technology.” https://www.theverge.com/2018/7/3/17530232/self-driving-ai-winter-full-autonomy-waymo-tesla-uber This is an incredible act of shameless bait-and-switchery. In just a few short sentences, Ng's cars go from being the kind of automation that is purely the concern of the person who uses it – the owner of a self-driving car – to the kind of automation that everyone in the world has to adjust to, lest we become part of the "pogo stick problem." Making a car that can navigate a well-behaved, non-adversarial world is relatively straightforward. But demanding that the entire world behave itself? Well, that's the hard problem of 100,000 years of civilization and ethics. A product that only works in an ideal world isn't a viable product. Self-driving car boosters didn't invent this wheeze, either. The entire concept of "pedestrian" (and later, "jaywalker") was invented by the auto industry to shift blame for the death and destruction the wealthy owners of their products inflicted on everyday people to the victims: https://marker.medium.com/the-invention-of-jaywalking-afd48f994c05 The latest peddlers of pogo-stick demands are the agentic AI people. They have raised (hundreds of) billions of dollars by promising that they will make AIs that can autopilot your browser to accomplish tedious, time-consuming tasks, visiting the same websites you would visit, locating and processing the information needed to perform the task you've set for it. This will supposedly make all kinds of human workers obsolete (which is where the hundreds of billions of dollars come in – the whole AI investor pitch is "We are developing technology that will let bosses fire their workers"). But agentic AI sucks. Asking a chatbot to take a screenshot of a website, then make guesses about which parts of it are links and what those links do, choose one link to fire a click at, and then start again is a recipe for incredible dysfunction. That's even before we get into "hallucinations" (this is AI jargon for "errors"). A more mature agentic AI apologetics admits that while no one knows how to make an AI that can navigate the whole internet, we can make specialist agents that can perform one kind of task, then hand off the output from that task to the next agent, and the next. This also sucks: you're created a whole menagerie of AIs, each of which is prone to its own failure modes, and then combining them, multiplying all those error potentials together, sending erroneous findings careening through a cascade of downstream AIs. This is broken-telephone-as-a-service. Give it your credit card, ask it to order a bag of jucing oranges, and six months later someone's gonna back a 16 wheeler up to your front door with $40,000 worth of frozen OJ and a receipt for a futures contract you're on the hook for. The latest agentic AI pitch "solves" this problem by asserting that the whole internet will simply have to accommodate itself to AI agents. Every website will have to adopt robust, accurate semantics that describe its navigation and offerings, standardized across every domain of human activity. This would be great. The semantic web people have been trying to make it happen since 1999, with no success to speak of, for reasons I identified more than 20 years ago: https://people.well.com/user/doctorow/metacrap.htm The reason websites don't make their results easy to scrape and compare is that they want to cheat you. They want you to buy something more expensive and/or inferior than the best match for your desire. There is no way for an AI agent to know when a website is lying to it, and the websites that lie the most are incentivized to have the best, highest-grade automation hooks for an AI agent to connect to (just as spammers have the best, most pristine anti-spam incidia, from DKIM to SPF to DMARC records). And these cheaters aren't fringe players – they're the biggest companies out there. Amazon knows that Prime members don't shop around, so it presents them with higher prices than non-Prime users. Airlines use AI and surveillance data to estimate your desperation and price their tickets accordingly: https://pluralistic.net/2025/07/30/efficiency-washing/#medallion-clubbed What's more, these companies sue people who try to collect and analyze their prices: https://simpleflying.com/ryanair-wins-case-booking-screen-scraping-reselling-tickets/ The hard part of comparison-shopping for an airline isn't sorting a database of all the prices offered to all customers under all circumstances: it's compiling such a database. We don't need complex AI-based techniques to perform a simple sort – we need AI to solve the problem of knowing what prices every airline is charging at this instant to every flier for every itinerary. When agentic AI grifters insist that the entire internet has to adopt and faithfully use standard APIs so their bots can accurately analyze the internet's contents, they are re-inventing the pogo-stick problem. Yes, if you could get the entire world to arrange its affairs to your benefit, you could surely do some incredible things, and if my grandmother had wheels, she'd be a rollerskate. Even if you could get everyone to adopt a standard set of APIs and use them well, this is a titanic engineering challenge, at least as big as anything the agentic AI people are promising to do. There's an unassailable response to the assertion that you could do amazing things as soon as everyone else upends their life to make things more convenient for you, the sacred principle of "wish in one hand and shit in the other and see which will be full first": https://www.reddit.com/r/etymology/comments/oqiic7/studying_the_origins_of_the_phrase_wish_in_one/ (Image: Cryteria, CC BY 3.0, modified) Hey look at this (permalink) A business model for hyperactive smoke alarms https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1945959030851035223.html Britain’s New Left-Wing Party May Be Devastating for Labour https://jacobin.com/2025/08/britain-new-left-wing-party/ Making America Epstein Again https://prospect.org/power/2025-08-01-making-america-epstein-again/ Thirty-Two Short Stories About Death in Prison https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/08/thirty-two-stories-jeffrey-epstein-prison-death/596029/ LIDER MIT PALESTINE https://lidermitpalestine.bandcamp.com/album/lider-mit-palestine-new-yiddish-songs-of-grief-fury-and-love Object permanence (permalink) #20yrsago Telco that blocked union site also blocked 766+ other sites https://web.archive.org/web/20050807000417/http://www.opennetinitiative.net/bulletins/010/ #20yrsago Chevron being sued in US for hiring Nigerian death squads https://web.archive.org/web/20050812002406/http://www.mercurynews.com/mld/mercurynews/12285441.htm #20yrsago Airport security wand delivers debilitating shocks https://web.archive.org/web/20051226123609/http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=dn7777&feedId=online-news_rss20 #15yrsago Shades of Milk and Honey: Kowal’s debut novel is a drawing-room romance with magic and art https://memex.craphound.com/2010/08/02/shades-of-milk-and-honey-kowals-debut-novel-is-a-drawing-room-romance-with-magic-and-art/ #5yrsago Galaksija https://pluralistic.net/2020/08/02/ventilator-202/#Galaksija #1yrago The reverse-centaur apocalypse is upon us https://pluralistic.net/2024/08/02/despotism-on-demand/#virtual-whips 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. (1032 words yesterday, 18440 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. How to get Pluralistic: Blog (no ads, tracking, or data-collection): Pluralistic.net Newsletter (no ads, tracking, or data-collection): https://pluralistic.net/plura-list Mastodon (no ads, tracking, or data-collection): https://mamot.fr/@pluralistic Medium (no ads, paywalled): https://doctorow.medium.com/ Twitter (mass-scale, unrestricted, third-party surveillance and advertising): https://twitter.com/doctorow Tumblr (mass-scale, unrestricted, third-party surveillance and advertising): https://mostlysignssomeportents.tumblr.com/tagged/pluralistic "When life gives you SARS, you make sarsaparilla" -Joey "Accordion Guy" DeVilla READ CAREFULLY: By reading this, you agree, on behalf of your employer, to release me from all obligations and waivers arising from any and all NON-NEGOTIATED agreements, licenses, terms-of-service, shrinkwrap, clickwrap, browsewrap, confidentiality, non-disclosure, non-compete and acceptable use policies ("BOGUS AGREEMENTS") that I have entered into with your employer, its partners, licensors, agents and assigns, in perpetuity, without prejudice to my ongoing rights and privileges. You further represent that you have the authority to release me from any BOGUS AGREEMENTS on behalf of your employer. ISSN: 3066-764X

02.08.2025 18:29 — 👍 3 🔁 1 💬 0 📌 0

Pluralistic: Mattie Lubchansky's 'Simplicity' (01 Aug 2025) Today's links Mattie Lubchansky's 'Simplicity': A tale of walled cities, omnisexual communes, and Cthulhoid horrors. Hey look at this: Delights to delectate. Object permanence: MP3s on punchcards; German Potter fan-trans; Healthy Boundary Tree. 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. Mattie Lubchansky's 'Simplicity' (permalink) Cartoonist Mattie Lubchansky has a new, horny, weird, amazing science fiction graphic novel called Simplicity and it drops today: https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/739012/simplicity-by-mattie-lubchansky/ Simplicity is set in the not-so-distant future, in which the US has dissolved and its major centers have been refashioned as "Administrative and Security Territories" – a fancy way of saying "walled corporate autocracies." Lucius Pasternak is an anthropology grad student in the NYC AST, a trans-man getting by as best as he can, minimizing how much he sells out, which is not enough to make his bosses treat him with respect, but is more than his friends can stomach. Pasternak's fortunes improve when he gets a big, juicy assignment: to embed with a Catskills community of weirdo sex-hippies who supply the most coveted organic produce in the NYC AST. They've been cloistered in an old summer camp since the 1970s, and when civilization collapsed, it barely touched them. Pasternak's mission is to chronicle the community and its strange ways for a billionaire's vanity-project museum of New York State. The meat of the action is set in Simplicity, the Catskills home of the Spiritual Association of Peers, where Pasternak struggles to gain the support and trust of the community, working their gardens by day and, eventually, attending their orgy/free-for-all nightly rituals, where the community members work out their tension and aggression through a mix of wild sex and punch-ups. But no matter how diligently Pasternak tries to fit in, he still finds himself at the community's margins, unable to win over their trust. Then, just as he starts to make some progress, members of the community start going missing, turning up horribly mutilated. The horror of this is compounded by the erotic, nightmarish visions that have haunted Pasternak since his arrival in Simplicity, of a many-tentacled, many-mawed, many-vulvaed monster. Pasternak's bosses abruptly recall him to the NYC AST, and that's when he learns the true nature of his mission to Simplicity, and the story moves into a thrilling, action-packed final act with an extremely satisfying conclusion. This is such a tight little tale, speedily told in that way of the best graphic novels, which cram so much expressivity and atmosphere into the visual storytelling. It's got shades of Ellis's Transmetropolitan and Matt Bors's Justice Warriors: https://pluralistic.net/2023/05/22/libras-assemble/#the-uz This is post-cyberpunk, ecosexual revolutionary storytelling at its finest. I know Lubchansky mostly from her absolutely amazing podcast, No Gods, No Mayors (co-hosted with Trashfuture's November Kelly and Riley Quinn), where she is incredibly charming, funny, and incisive: https://www.patreon.com/nogodsnomayors If you'd asked me to imagine what kind of science fiction graphic novel she would turn out, I probably wouldn't have guessed this one – but now that I've read it, I'm not surprised at all that it came from her. Hey look at this (permalink) Technically Radical: On the Unrecognized Potential of Tech Workers and Hackers https://wedontagree.net/technically-radical-on-the-unrecognized-potential-of-tech-workers-and-hackers Canada’s Bill C-2 Opens The Floodgates To U.S. Surveillance https://www.techdirt.com/2025/07/30/canadas-bill-c-2-opens-the-floodgates-to-u-s-surveillance/ Epic just won its antitrust lawsuit against Google again https://www.theverge.com/news/716856/epic-v-google-win-in-appeals-court Once Upon a KATAMARI https://www.gematsu.com/games/once-upon-a-katamari Object permanence (permalink) #20yrsago Anti-software-patent site taken down by software patent advocates https://web.archive.org/web/20051025080342/https://www.nosoftwarepatents.com/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?t=656 #20yrsago One 3 min MP3 = 5’9″ high stack of punchcards https://web.archive.org/web/20050804025015/http://www.ypsidixit.com/blog/archives/2005/08/remember_punch.html #20yrsago German Harry Potter fan-translation in 45 hours https://www.theguardian.com/world/2005/aug/01/books.harrypotter #10yrsago Re-recording the 1969 “Story and Song of the Haunted Mansion” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YbJRoi92Ilo #5yrsago Populism is good for your health https://pluralistic.net/2020/08/01/set-healthy-boundaries/#healthy-populism #5yrsago The Tree Who Set Healthy Boundaries https://pluralistic.net/2020/08/01/set-healthy-boundaries/#boundaries #5yrsago A deep dive into Mexico's new copyright law https://pluralistic.net/2020/08/01/set-healthy-boundaries/#la-ley #5yrsago Grace is going home https://pluralistic.net/2020/08/01/set-healthy-boundaries/#grace-freed #1yrago Why is this Canadian university scared of you seeing its Privacy Impact Assessment? https://pluralistic.net/2024/08/01/eruditio-libertas-est/#streisand-v-linkletter 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. (1011 words yesterday, 17402 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. How to get Pluralistic: Blog (no ads, tracking, or data-collection): Pluralistic.net Newsletter (no ads, tracking, or data-collection): https://pluralistic.net/plura-list Mastodon (no ads, tracking, or data-collection): https://mamot.fr/@pluralistic Medium (no ads, paywalled): https://doctorow.medium.com/ Twitter (mass-scale, unrestricted, third-party surveillance and advertising): https://twitter.com/doctorow Tumblr (mass-scale, unrestricted, third-party surveillance and advertising): https://mostlysignssomeportents.tumblr.com/tagged/pluralistic "When life gives you SARS, you make sarsaparilla" -Joey "Accordion Guy" DeVilla READ CAREFULLY: By reading this, you agree, on behalf of your employer, to release me from all obligations and waivers arising from any and all NON-NEGOTIATED agreements, licenses, terms-of-service, shrinkwrap, clickwrap, browsewrap, confidentiality, non-disclosure, non-compete and acceptable use policies ("BOGUS AGREEMENTS") that I have entered into with your employer, its partners, licensors, agents and assigns, in perpetuity, without prejudice to my ongoing rights and privileges. You further represent that you have the authority to release me from any BOGUS AGREEMENTS on behalf of your employer. ISSN: 3066-764X

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Pluralistic: How my DRM-free principles left me owning the rights to a German audiobook (21 Jul 2025) Today's links How my DRM-free principles left me owning the rights to a German audiobook: This isn't my usual crowdfunder! Hey look at this: Delights to delectate. Object permanence: Internet addiction, Dems fund DHS urban invasions, AI art and anti-cooption, FCC vs prison profiteers 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. How my DRM-free principles left me owning the rights to a German audiobook (permalink) Long story short: thanks to a series of misunderstandings, I had to shell out more than ten thousand euros to prevent a German audiobook of my work from being released with DRM and now I need your help (assuming you speak German) to get the book into readers' ears! https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/doctorow/red-team-blues-auf-deutsche-drm-freie For more than a quarter-century, I've had an iron-clad policy of not releasing my work with "digital rights management," this being a kind of encryption that keeps my readers from reading the books they've bought in the apps of their choice. There's two reasons for this: the first is, it's just grossly unfair. If you buy one of my print books, you can shelve it on any bookcase and read it sitting in any chair, under any company's lightbulb. It's stupid and offensive for a company like Amazon/Audible to declare that you can only read the ebooks and audiobooks you buy using the apps they approve. But the second reason is more insidious and subtle. By retaining control over the apps that you must use to read or listen to your books, companies like Amazon are able to lock you into their platform. That means they can change the deal even after you've made your purchase (for example, Amazon has been caught deleting ebooks from people's Kindle apps and readers and Audible has experimented with inserting ads into your audiobooks after you buy them). This lock-in isn't limited to readers, either. Once Amazon has all my readers locked in, the company acquires control over me, the writer. After all, if my readers can't switch from Amazon to another bookseller, then I can't switch from Amazon to another bookseller, because that would mean asking my readers to start over buying all their books again. Amazon has a long history of squeezing its sellers – including writers and publishers – once it has them locked in. Today, 45-51% of every Amazon Marketplace purchase from an independent seller is skimmed off by Amazon in junk fees. The company makes $58 billion/year charging vendors for search placement (rather than putting the best match for shoppers' searches at the top of the result). And they stole at least $100m from Audible audiobook authors: https://pluralistic.net/2022/09/07/audible-exclusive/#audiblegate In 1998, the US passed a law (Section 1201 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act) that makes tampering with DRM a felony with a 5-year prison sentence and a $500k fine (for a first offense). In the years since, the US Trade Representative bullied every US trading partner into adopting this law. The EU did so in 2001, with Article 6 of the Copyright Directive. This means that it's literally a crime for me, the author of a book, who holds the copyright to the work, to authorize you, a reader who bought the ebook or audiobook on Amazon, to convert the digital file so that it works with apps that compete with Amazon's. So that's why I don't allow my work to be sold with DRM. Everyone I do business with knows this – my publishers, my agents, etc – and over the past quarter century and more than 30 books, all of these people have bent over backwards to accommodate this policy of mine, even when it meant changing the workflow they used for thousands of books just to make an exception for me. I'm incredibly grateful for this. But eventually, someone was bound to slip up, and that's how I ended up owning the German audiobook for my novel Red Team Blues. After Red Team Blues was published in English in 2022 and became a national bestseller, many foreign publishers snapped up the translation rights. Among them was Heyne, my German publisher, who commissioned a fantastic translation by Jürgen Langowski that has sold briskly in Germany, Austria and Switzerland. Heyne also commissioned an audiobook, beautifully read by a beloved German audiobook narrator, Uve Teschner. But somewhere in there, everyone forgot that this audiobook could only be sold without DRM. And since Audible, Apple Books and Audiobooks.com refuse to carry DRM-free books, that meant that they would not be able to sell the books in the places where 90+% of readers look for them. No one is to blame here. It's just an oversight. But it left us all in the awkward position of my publisher having spent more than EUR10,000 on an audiobook that they would never be able to recoup. Both my publisher and my agent offered to eat these costs, but I felt bad about this, given the great lengths both had gone to over the years to help me live my principles through my books. Besides: I have this platform of mine, the newsletters and lists of people who've bought audiobooks from me before and the people who've backed the Kickstarters for my previous English works, and I decided I would buy the audiobook rights from my German publisher and try to make the money back by selling directly to my German fans. Today, I've launched a Kickstarter campaign to sell the DRM-free German audiobook. I'm also selling the DRM-free ebook, and the German paperback, which will be fulfilled by my pals at Berlin's excellent sf/f bookstore Otherland (due to the Trump tariff nonsense, these can only be shipped in the EU, UK, and Switzerland): https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/doctorow/red-team-blues-auf-deutsche-drm-freie There's something for English-speaking readers, too: discounted editions of the English-language ebook and audiobook (read by Wil Wheaton), available in bundles with the German titles, or on their own. Europeans can also order the print edition of the book (again, fulfilled by Otherland in Berlin). Now, I don't actually speak German. I grew up speaking Yiddish, much of which I've forgotten, which means that I can kind of grunt out ungrammatical German-adjacent phrases (the Otherland folks generously translated my Kickstarter page into German). That means that I have extremely limited ability to promote this Kickstarter to German-speaking audiences. I'm really relying on my readers here: if you are a German-speaker and/or have German-speaking friends, please let them know about this! When you do, your pals are going to ask you what the book is about. Red Team Blues tells the story of the last case of Martin Hench, a 67 year old high-tech forensic accountant who's spent 40 years in Silicon Valley, busting the weirdest financial scams that three generations of tech bros cooked up. For this final job, Marty's been called out of retirement to resolve that scammiest of all tech-bro schemes, a cryptocurrency heist. Marty's dear old pal Danny Lazer has built a new – and wildly successful – kind of blockchain, built on the security chips in mobile devices, called Trustlesscoin. Lazer is a cypherpunk legend, but that's not why Trustlesscoin went from zero to more than a billion in capitalization in a few short months: all that money poured in because some of the world's most ruthless criminals came to appreciate how Danny's cryptocurrency could facilitate money-laundering. That would be bad enough, but Danny is exactly the kind of very smart guy who is more than capable of outsmarting himself. That's how he came to build a cryptographic back-door into Trustlesscoin, a secret key that allows the bearer to rewrite the supposedly immutable transactions in the network, which is to say, to steal all the money. That's where Marty Hench comes in: Danny summons Marty to his home in Palo Alto because someone has stolen the physical token that this billion-dollar key lives on, and if someone doesn't get it back soon, it's only a matter of time until a billion dollars goes missing, and then the kind of people who resolve their monetary disputes with bone-saws and red-hot pokers will come looking for Danny. That's where the story starts – but it turns out that recovering Danny's missing keys are the easy part. The hard part comes next, when Marty finds himself in the crosshairs of the violent international crime syndicates that boosted the keys in the first place. People really like this book. It's the kind of book you stay up all night reading (or, as Molly White from Web3 is Going Just Great put it, "don't start reading it at bedtime if you have to be awake for something the next morning"). If you find yourself craving more Marty Hench in the morning, I've published two more bestsellers recounting his earlier adventures: The Bezzle and Picks and Shovels. Check it out for yourself. Here's the first chapter of the German audiobook, read by Uve Teschner: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X8e2or8ze_4 And here's the first chapter of the English audiobook, read by Wil Wheaton: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mb8yJeASgho The campaign only runs for a brisk three weeks (I've got to get it all put away before I head out on tour with Enshittification in October), so act fast: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/doctorow/red-team-blues-auf-deutsche-drm-freie And please, tell your German-speaking friends! Hey look at this (permalink) Everything Else https://newleftreview.org/sidecar/posts/everything-else UBC discourages its privacy impact assessments’ inclusion on hub created by former staffer https://ubyssey.ca/news/ubc-discourages-pia-hub/ Patient Care Technology Disruptions Associated With the CrowdStrike Outage https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamanetworkopen/fullarticle/2836824 Mark Zuckerberg Is Expanding His Secretive Hawaii Compound. Part of It Sits Atop a Burial Ground https://www.wired.com/story/mark-zuckerberg-secretive-hawaii-compound-burial-ground/ The Incredible Shrinking Trump Antitrust Enforcers https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/monopoly-round-up-the-incredible Object permanence (permalink) #10yrsago What we talk about when we talk about “Internet addiction” https://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2015/07/16/is-internet-addiction-a-health-threat-for-teenagers/blame-society-not-the-screen-time #10yrsago Los Angeles is selling off some very odd lots, including a sidewalk corner https://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-redevelopment-property-sale-20150718-story.html #10yrsago Rare look at how big business defends “Investor State Dispute Settlements” https://www.techdirt.com/2015/07/20/eu-proposes-to-reform-corporate-sovereignty-slightly-us-think-tank-goes-into-panic-mode/ #5yrsago Dems vote to fund more DHS invasions of US cities https://pluralistic.net/2020/07/20/no-mask-no-service/#enablers #5yrsago Grifters started the anti-mask movement https://pluralistic.net/2020/07/20/no-mask-no-service/#dorr-brothers #5yrsago Michigan Supreme Court to review teenager's no-homework jail sentence https://pluralistic.net/2020/07/20/no-mask-no-service/#free-grace #1yrago AI art has no anti-cooption immune system https://pluralistic.net/2024/07/20/ransom-note-force-field/#antilibraries #1yrago FCC strikes a blow against prison profiteering https://pluralistic.net/2024/07/19/martha-wright-reed/#capitalists-hate-capitalism Upcoming appearances (permalink) 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 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. (1014 words yesterday, 6133 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. How to get Pluralistic: Blog (no ads, tracking, or data-collection): Pluralistic.net Newsletter (no ads, tracking, or data-collection): https://pluralistic.net/plura-list Mastodon (no ads, tracking, or data-collection): https://mamot.fr/@pluralistic Medium (no ads, paywalled): https://doctorow.medium.com/ Twitter (mass-scale, unrestricted, third-party surveillance and advertising): https://twitter.com/doctorow Tumblr (mass-scale, unrestricted, third-party surveillance and advertising): https://mostlysignssomeportents.tumblr.com/tagged/pluralistic "When life gives you SARS, you make sarsaparilla" -Joey "Accordion Guy" DeVilla READ CAREFULLY: By reading this, you agree, on behalf of your employer, to release me from all obligations and waivers arising from any and all NON-NEGOTIATED agreements, licenses, terms-of-service, shrinkwrap, clickwrap, browsewrap, confidentiality, non-disclosure, non-compete and acceptable use policies ("BOGUS AGREEMENTS") that I have entered into with your employer, its partners, licensors, agents and assigns, in perpetuity, without prejudice to my ongoing rights and privileges. You further represent that you have the authority to release me from any BOGUS AGREEMENTS on behalf of your employer. ISSN: 3066-764X

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Pluralistic: Ellen Ullman's "Close to the Machine" (16 Jul 2025) Today's links Ellen Ullman's "Close to the Machine": "Technophilia and Its Discontents." Hey look at this: Delights to delectate. Object permanence: Unethical ethicists; McKinsey covid profiteering; Homeschool-to-prison pipeline 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. Ellen Ullman's "Close to the Machine" (permalink) Close To the Machine is Ellen Ullman's classic memoir of writing software in Silicon Valley at the start of the dotcom bubble; it was originally published in 1997 and reprinted in 2022 for the 25 anniversary by Farrar, Straus and Giroux's MCD books: https://www.mcdbooks.com/books/close-to-the-machine-25th-anniversary-edition I somehow never read Ullman's book; having read it now, it's easy to understand how this beautifully rendered snapshot of life at the end of the 20th century became a touchpoint for multiple generations of coders and technologists, and why it's still in print, 27 years later. Ullman's subtitle for the book is "Technophilia and its discontents," and therein lies the secret to its magic. Ullman loves programming computers, loves the way they engage her attention, her consciousness, and her intelligence. Her descriptions of the process of writing code – of tackling a big coding project – are nothing less than revelatory. She captures something that a million technothriller movies consistently fail to even approach: the dramatic interior experience of a programmer who breaks down a complex problem into many interlocking systems, the momentary and elusive sense of having all those systems simultaneously operating in a high-fidelity mental model, the sense of being full, your brain totally engaged in every way. It's a poetics of language that meets and exceeds the high bar set by the few fiction writers who've ever approached a decent rendering of this feeling, like William Gibson. These glittering moments are fleeting, though. No code project survives contact with the computer, a brutal and unforgiving cognitive partner that ferrets out every error in your thinking, every trap you've unknowningly fallen into. Here again, Ullman shines in her renderings of the ferocious mental combat that programmers must do with their computers, grueling matches that are made all the worse by the certain knowledge that the only way to win the bout is to discover and fix your own flaws. These set-pieces make for great branching points into the three other components of Ullman's classic: first, there are the stories of high-tech institutions. We follow Ullman – a contract programmer who is hired to assemble teams to run specific projects – as she works on a gnarly all-in-one tool for matching people with AIDS with a spectrum of public services; and when she is brought into a failing startup as part of an abortive turnaround attempt. All of this is happening just as the web and the internet are devouring all high-tech projects, and Ullman – a techie who is an old hand at networked communications, but is professionally part of a breed of coder who specializes in standalone and modem-based services – finds herself sitting opposite glittering new-breed hackers who have arrived to eat her lunch. Here, too, Ullman absolutely nails the experience of a technologist who has transitioned from surfing the cutting edge to being decapitated by it. This sequence is made all the more poignant by a series of scenes in which Ullman confronts the impossible knot of writing code that benefits marginalized, at-risk users (people dying of AIDS) while satisfying the political and bureaucratic imperatives of multiple charities, government agencies, and advocates. Ullman has finally wrestled all of these stakeholders into a stable configuration, only to have these shiny young people show up and tell her that she – and everything she's done and everything she stands for – is obsolete. It's a gut-punch of a scene. That's the third component of Ullman's memoir – the workplace culture of a programmer who must answer to (and assuage) a variety of nontechnical people who flip from awe to seething resentment of you and your work. Ullman, who lives the simultaneously precarious and lucrative life of a high-paid, much sought-after freelancer, is at the mercy of so many people who have terrible power over her, little empathy for her, and an almost total lack of understanding of what she does (imagine Dilbert, but written by a smart and aware person, not a humorless asshole). The final quadrant of Ullman's book is the memoir itself – the story of her life growing up in the shadow of a driven, striving Jewish immigrant in New York City whose manic entrepreneurship and minimal self-awareness transforms him into both a source of inspiration and an object of pity for Ullman. Ullman's personal life in San Francisco is painted with equal fidelity, from her bisexual, polyamorous romantic life to her camaraderie with other hackers (some of whom end up in her bed). Ullman introduces us to characters that are instantly recognizable today, from the cypherpunk who dreams of setting up an anonymous digital cash system that is financed by an offshore porn empire to a semi-libertarian young man who can't imagine why the law would set limits on when a worker can be treated as an independent contractor. These are timeless avatars for the kinds of people who live "close to the machine," whose brains are easily and productively ensnared by digital computers and their pitiless logic. Despite that, this volume is also a perfect, high-fidelity capture of Silicon Valley at the start of one of its many (many, many) bubbles. I was there, then, working as a contractor (what else?) for a Unix shop and learning on the job as we tried to figure out whether our customers would expect to access our tools through a browser rather than at the console of a quarter-million dollar SGI machine. Though I'm a generation younger than Ullman, I was in the same place, time and milieu as she was when this book was written, and all of it rings utterly true. What's more, Ullman's work here preserves and reveals the extent to which the best and worst aspects of tech culture have been present since the earliest days, and gestures at the causal relationship between those aspects and the intrinsic nature of the work of programming computers. While Ullman doesn't advance an explicit theory relating the attitudes and conundra of her field to the nature of computer programming, this work is implicitly webbed over with gossamer threads joining all these phenomena. That's something I've tried to do in my own fiction, particularly with my Martin Hench novels, which visit different moments in Silicon Valley history (the 1980s, the 2000s, the 2020s) through the eyes of a forensic accountant who unravels tech scams and, in so doing, traces those same threads: https://us.macmillan.com/series/themartinhenchnovels This 25th anniversary edition features a beautiful introduction by Anna Wiener, author of the extraordinary 2020 Silicon Valley memoir Uncanny Valley. Wiener is the perfect choice to introduce this volume, connecting the present moment with the first days of the commercial internet: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncanny_Valley_(memoir) Hey look at this (permalink) * UnitedHealth’s Campaign to Quiet Critics https://www.nytimes.com/2025/07/12/business/unitedhealth-insurance-criticism.html When He Calls Your Name https://www.uncannymagazine.com/article/when-he-calls-your-name/ More Woody Guthrie Songs? Yes, From a Trove of Homemade Recordings. https://www.nytimes.com/2025/07/14/arts/music/woody-guthrie-tapes-woody-at-home.html The Enshittification of American Power https://www.wired.com/story/enshittification-of-american-power/ Musk's Perfect World: How would it work? https://profstevekeen.substack.com/p/musks-perfect-world-how-would-it Object permanence (permalink) #10yrsago Why aren’t ethicists better people? https://web.archive.org/web/20150714200719/http://aeon.co/magazine/philosophy/how-often-do-ethics-professors-call-their-mothers/ #10yrsago Laura Poitras sues the US Government to find out why she was repeatedly detained in airports https://theintercept.com/2015/07/13/laura-poitras-sues-u-s-government-find-repeatedly-stopped-border/ #5yrsago PE's three kids in a trenchcoat fraud https://pluralistic.net/2020/07/15/3-frauds-in-a-trenchcoat/#fraud #5yrsago Biden's $2T climate plan https://pluralistic.net/2020/07/15/3-frauds-in-a-trenchcoat/#gnd-lite #5yrsago McKinsey waxes fat off coronavirus failures https://pluralistic.net/2020/07/15/3-frauds-in-a-trenchcoat/#failing-up #5yrsago Spain has been an NSO customer since 2015 https://pluralistic.net/2020/07/15/3-frauds-in-a-trenchcoat/#homage-to-catalonia #5yrsago Homeschool to prison pipeline https://pluralistic.net/2020/07/15/3-frauds-in-a-trenchcoat/#judge-mary-ellen-brennan #1yrago Foxx Nolte's "Hidden History of Walt Disney World" https://pluralistic.net/2024/07/15/disnefried/#dialectics Upcoming appearances (permalink) Virtual: ORG at 20: in conversation with Maria Farrell, Jul 16 https://www.openrightsgroup.org/events/org-at-20-cory-doctorow-in-conversation-with-maria-farrell/ 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 Recent appearances (permalink) 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 Forward Kentucky https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LpMxBBMBkZs 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, 2037 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. How to get Pluralistic: Blog (no ads, tracking, or data-collection): Pluralistic.net Newsletter (no ads, tracking, or data-collection): https://pluralistic.net/plura-list Mastodon (no ads, tracking, or data-collection): https://mamot.fr/@pluralistic Medium (no ads, paywalled): https://doctorow.medium.com/ Twitter (mass-scale, unrestricted, third-party surveillance and advertising): https://twitter.com/doctorow Tumblr (mass-scale, unrestricted, third-party surveillance and advertising): https://mostlysignssomeportents.tumblr.com/tagged/pluralistic "When life gives you SARS, you make sarsaparilla" -Joey "Accordion Guy" DeVilla READ CAREFULLY: By reading this, you agree, on behalf of your employer, to release me from all obligations and waivers arising from any and all NON-NEGOTIATED agreements, licenses, terms-of-service, shrinkwrap, clickwrap, browsewrap, confidentiality, non-disclosure, non-compete and acceptable use policies ("BOGUS AGREEMENTS") that I have entered into with your employer, its partners, licensors, agents and assigns, in perpetuity, without prejudice to my ongoing rights and privileges. You further represent that you have the authority to release me from any BOGUS AGREEMENTS on behalf of your employer. ISSN: 3066-764X

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Pluralistic: Tessa Hulls's "Feeding Ghosts" (2 Jul 2025) Today's links Tessa Hulls's "Feeding Ghosts": A phantasmagorical memoir of intergenerational trauma and reconciliation. Hey look at this: Delights to delectate. Object permanence: Toronto G20 police riot, why I'm leaving London, BBC's Right to Be Forgotten pages, breaking up Google, Female Furies 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. Tessa Hulls's "Feeding Ghosts" (permalink) Tessa Hulls's debut graphic novel is Feeding Ghosts, a stunning memoir that tells the story of three generations of her Chinese family. It was a decade in the making, and it is utterly, unmissably brilliant: https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374601652/feedingghosts/ Feeding Ghosts is about Hulls's quest to understand – and heal – her relationship with her mother, a half-Chinese, half-Swiss woman who escaped from China as a small child with her own mother, a journalist who had been targeted by Mao's police. Hulls's grandmother, Sun Yi, wrote a bestselling memoir about her experiences in post-revolutionary Shanghai that made her both famous and notorious, in part because of the salacious details of Sun Yi's affair with the Swiss diplomat who fathered Rose, Hulls's mother. In Hong Kong, Sun Yi's mental health declines precipitously. Some combination of mental illness and trauma – both from the horrors of the Sino-Japanese War and her torture at the hands of the Chinese police – sends her into a spiral of paranoid delusions. But Sun Yi has a community of people who feel an obligation to support her in Hong Kong, including one of her rich "boyfriends" – and Rose is sent away to a fancy, British-run girl's school dominated by expats where she acquires a cut-glass accent and learns to mix with upper-class, colonial English gentry. Hulls is born to Rose many years later, after Rose has emigrated to the USA, attended university, married twice – the second time to Hull's father, an Englishman – and moved her mother in with her. For Hulls, growing up in Rose's household as the only Asian kid in a small American town is a series of torments. Her mentally ill grandmother lives in one bedroom, gripped by delusions, compulsively writing, fretting, begging with her few English words for Rose to come back. Rose, meanwhile, is a duty-stricken domestic saint who does all the cooking and cleaning, cares for her children and her husband, and looks after her totally isolated, profoundly disturbed mother. Hulls grows up in the shadow of the intergenerational trauma – genocide, war crimes, colonialist discrimination, untreated mental illness, and everyday American racism – that haunts her family. Rose veers from doting to shouting, terrified that Hulls is sliding into the family's madness, unable to understand or grapple with Hulls's identity as a self-proclaimed "mixed-race" Eurasian person, born in America, unable to speak Chinese or to understand her Chinese identity. All of this biography is interspersed through several time-hopping sections that recount the history of the Chinese revolution and the lives of Sun Yi and Rose, along with scenes from the decade that Hulls spent writing and drawing Feeding Ghosts, during which she and her mother travel to see their family in China, on a literal and figurative journey of reconciliation. It sounds complex and confusing, but it's anything but. Each of the intertwined narratives – revolutionary China, Rose's girlhood, Hulls's girlhood, the trips to contemporary China, Hulls's adulthood and Sun Yi's institutionalizations and long isolation – are high stakes, high-tension scenarios, beautifully told. Hulls hops from one tale to the next in ways that draw out the subtle, imporant parallels between each situation, subtly amplifying the echoes across time and space. In the final third of this long, large book, we get to the meat of Hulls's own story: her tempestuous relationship with her mother, her mother's immersion in a psychoanalytic cult, the sad demise of Sun Yi, and the wild flight of Hulls herself, in which she breaks off her stultifying engagement and teaches herself to be a bicycle mechanic and begins cycling all over the world, living on pennies and consummating her love of wild and empty spaces. At college, she becomes a cook through a weekly women's drunken pie-baking night, and somehow parlays that into a long session as a cook in Antarctica on McMurdo Station. This final third acts as a kind of keystone to the many interwoven tales, as well as to the complex relationship between Hulls, her mother, and her own sense of self. Up until this point, the different threads of Hulls's family's story are subtle echoes of one another, motifs that repeat and vary. But in this final third, the reader – and Hulls – experience a profound psychological realization about how the three stories of these three generation of women, along with China's tumultuous history and the experience of an American immigrant all produced the person whose bold illustrations and sharp prose we've been immersed in for hundreds of pages. It's a wild moment. Hulls's art style runs to dark, stylized inks, with horrors and ghosts puncturing individual panels' frames and wending through the page. It's a phantasmagorical experience. Feeding Ghosts came out in March, and has gone on to win the Pulitzer Prize, only the second graphic novel in history to take the honor (the first was Maus, another memoir of intergenerational trauma, horrific war, and the American immigrant experience). The prize is a big deal, obviously, and it's no coincidence that this kind of ambitious illustrated memoir has won both graphic novel Pulitzers. Hulls joins the annals of world-altering comic-book memoirists, from Lynda Barry to Emil Ferris (My Favorite Thing is Monsters) to Art Spiegelman and Chester Brown. She has pulled of a magnificent feat, one that illuminates history, contemporary racial and gender politics, the immigrant experience, and the impossible problems of parents and children in the aftermath of unspeakable trauma. Hey look at this (permalink) FCC will allow prison phone gougers another two years of ripoffs https://www.prisonpolicy.org/blog/2024/07/18/fcc-vote/ Mitch Kapor finally completes MIT master's degree after 45-year detour https://www.theregister.com/2025/06/30/mitch_kapor_mba/ Ted Chiang on Superintelligence and Its Discontents in J.D. Beresford’s Innovative Work of Early 20th-Century Science Fiction https://lithub.com/ted-chiang-on-superintelligence-and-its-discontents-in-j-d-beresfords-innovative-work-of-early-20th-century-science-fiction/ AI warnings are the hip new way for CEOs to keep their workers afraid of losing their jobs https://edition.cnn.com/2025/06/18/business/ai-warnings-ceos Wikipedia:WikiProject AI Cleanup/AI catchphrases https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiProject_AI_Cleanup/AI_catchphrases Object permanence (permalink) #20yrsago Anti-DRM badges https://web.archive.org/web/20050701004506/http://nootropic.blogspot.com/2005/06/gallery-of-drm-related-antipixel.html #15yrsago ACLU: America is riddled with politically motivated surveillance https://www.aclu.org/files/assets/Spyfiles_2_0.pdf #15yrsago Toronto cops justify extreme G20 measures with display of LARPing props, weapons from unrelated busts https://web.archive.org/web/20100702002151/https://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/national/toronto/weapons-seized-in-g20-arrests-put-on-display/article1622761/ #15yrsago Copyright best practices for communications scholars https://web.archive.org/web/20100628005458/http://centerforsocialmedia.org/fair-use/related-materials/codes/code-best-practices-fair-use-scholarly-research-communication #15yrsago G20 police used imaginary law to jail harass demonstrators and jailed protestors in dangerous and abusive “detention center” https://memex.craphound.com/2010/06/29/g20-police-used-imaginary-law-to-jail-harass-demonstrators-and-jailed-protestors-in-dangerous-and-abusive-detention-center/ #10yrsago Why I’m leaving London https://memex.craphound.com/2015/06/29/why-im-leaving-london/ #10yrsago Neal Stephenson on the story behind Seveneves http://www.bookotron.com/agony/audio/2015/2015-interviews/neal_stephenson-2015.mp3 #10yrsago Brian Wood’s Starve: get to your comic shop now! https://memex.craphound.com/2015/06/29/brian-woods-starve-get-to-your-comic-shop-now/ #10yrsago BBC’s list of pages de-indexed through Europe’s “right to be forgotten” https://www.bbc.co.uk/webarchive/https%3A%2F%2Fwww.bbc.co.uk%2Fblogs%2Finternet%2Fentries%2F1d765aa8-600b-4f32-b110-d02fbf7fd379 #5yrsago NYC housing lottery favors the least-needy https://pluralistic.net/2020/06/29/female-furies/#market-failure #5yrsago Facebook and Trump collaborate on rule-rigging https://pluralistic.net/2020/06/29/female-furies/#fb-hearts-dt #5yrsago How to break up Google https://pluralistic.net/2020/06/29/female-furies/#braygoog #5yrsago Female Furies https://pluralistic.net/2020/06/29/female-furies/#apokolips-now Upcoming appearances (permalink) Manchester: Picks and Shovels at Blackwell's Bookshop, Jul 2 https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/an-evening-with-cory-doctorow-tickets-1308451968059 Manchester: Co-operatives UK Co-op Congress keynote, Jul 4 https://www.uk.coop/events-and-training/events-calendar/co-op-congress-2025-book-your-place Virtual: ORG at 20: in conversation with Maria Farrell, Jul 16 https://www.openrightsgroup.org/events/org-at-20-cory-doctorow-in-conversation-with-maria-farrell/ 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 Recent appearances (permalink) If We Had a Choice, Would We Invent Social Media Again? (The Agenda/TVO) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KJw38uIcmEw Forward Kentucky https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LpMxBBMBkZs Democrats Abroad https://creators.spotify.com/pod/profile/demsabroadca/episodes/Cory-Doctorow-on-Enshittification-e34blmg/a-ac0jn7i 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) Uncanny 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 Colophon (permalink) Today's top sources: Currently writing: A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING This work – excluding any serialized fiction – is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license. That means you can use it any way you like, including commercially, provided that you attribute it to me, Cory Doctorow, and include a link to pluralistic.net. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ Quotations and images are not included in this license; they are included either under a limitation or exception to copyright, or on the basis of a separate license. Please exercise caution. How to get Pluralistic: Blog (no ads, tracking, or data-collection): Pluralistic.net Newsletter (no ads, tracking, or data-collection): https://pluralistic.net/plura-list Mastodon (no ads, tracking, or data-collection): https://mamot.fr/@pluralistic Medium (no ads, paywalled): https://doctorow.medium.com/ Twitter (mass-scale, unrestricted, third-party surveillance and advertising): https://twitter.com/doctorow Tumblr (mass-scale, unrestricted, third-party surveillance and advertising): https://mostlysignssomeportents.tumblr.com/tagged/pluralistic "When life gives you SARS, you make sarsaparilla" -Joey "Accordion Guy" DeVilla READ CAREFULLY: By reading this, you agree, on behalf of your employer, to release me from all obligations and waivers arising from any and all NON-NEGOTIATED agreements, licenses, terms-of-service, shrinkwrap, clickwrap, browsewrap, confidentiality, non-disclosure, non-compete and acceptable use policies ("BOGUS AGREEMENTS") that I have entered into with your employer, its partners, licensors, agents and assigns, in perpetuity, without prejudice to my ongoing rights and privileges. You further represent that you have the authority to release me from any BOGUS AGREEMENTS on behalf of your employer. ISSN: 3066-764X

02.07.2025 08:13 — 👍 0 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0

01.07.2025 05:41 — 👍 5 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 3

Pluralistic: Antitrust defies politics' law of gravity (28 Jun 2025) Today's links Antitrust defies politics' law of gravity: Anything that can't go on forever eventually stops. Hey look at this: Delights to delectate. Object permanence: 2005, 2010, 2020, 2024 Upcoming appearances: Where to find me. Recent appearances: Where I've been. Latest books: You keep readin' em, I'll keep writin' 'em. Upcoming books: Like I said, I'll keep writin' 'em. Colophon: All the rest. Antitrust defies politics' law of gravity (permalink) In 2014, I read a political science paper that nearly convinced me to quit my lifelong career as an activist: "Testing Theories of American Politics: Elites, Interest Groups, and Average Citizens," published in Perspectives on Politics: https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/perspectives-on-politics/article/testing-theories-of-american-politics-elites-interest-groups-and-average-citizens/62327F513959D0A304D4893B382B992B The paper's authors are Martin Gilens, a UCLA professor of Public Policy; and Northwestern's Benjamin Page, a professor of Decision Making. Gilens and Page studied a representative sample of 1,779 policy issues, analyzing the effect that the preferences of different groups of people had on the outcome. They wanted to find out what drove policy: money, or popularity? It's money. It's totally, utterly money. When billionaires want something, it literally doesn't matter how much the rest of us hate it, they're gonna get their way. When billionaires hate something, it doesn't matter how popular it is with the rest of us, we're not gonna get it. As Gilens and Page put it: economic elites and organized groups representing business interests have substantial independent impacts on U.S. government policy, while average citizens and mass-based interest groups have little or no independent influence. I know the cynics out there are hollering "no duh" at their computers right now, but bear with me here. Gilens and Page's research shows that you and I have no voice in policy outcomes. Based on these findings, the only way we can change society is to try and woo oligarchs so they champion our cause. This reduces democracy to a competition to see who can pour the most honey into a plutocrat's ear. Mass mobilizations – millions of people in the streets – only matter to the extent that they bring a tear to a billionaire's eye. This just shattered me. I've been haunted by it ever since. I've tried some tactical gambits based on this data, but honestly, I don't want to improve the world by swaying the ultra-rich. Mostly, I've spent the decade since I read the Gilens/Page paper working on mass mobilizations and mass opinion-influencing. I reasoned (or maybe rationalized) that while oligarchs were running the nation now, that was subject to change, and that was a change that I was sure wouldn't come from America's plutocrats committing mass class-suicide. Then, something incredible happened. All this decade, a tide of antitrust vigor has swept the planet. The EU has passed big, muscular tech competition laws like the Digital Markets Act and the Digital Services Act, and has by God enforced them, and have patched the enforcement weaknesses in the GDPR. EU member-states – France, Germany, Spain – have passed their own big, ambitious national laws that go further than DSA/DMA. Even Ireland – a country that deliberately prostrated itself to US Big Tech – is getting in on the act, with the country's Social Media Czar railing against the "enshittification" of tech: https://www.independent.ie/business/technology/chairman-of-irish-social-media-regulator-says-europe-should-not-be-seduced-by-mario-draghis-claims/a526530600.html Not just the EU, of course. Australia and Canada have taken some big swings at Big Tech, and Canada is pressing ahead with its digital services tax of 3% for onshore earnings of tech companies with more than CAD20m in annual turnover, despite the fact that Trump has promised to end all trade talks with Canada in retaliation: https://financialpost.com/technology/canadas-digital-services-tax-g7 Antitrust fever has swept both of the world's superpowers. Under Trump I, the DOJ and FTC brought key cases against Facebook and Google, and then Biden's antitrust enforcers went to town on all forms of monopoly, carrying on the Trump cases and reviving some of the law's most elegant weapons from a more civilized age, like the Robinson-Patman Act: https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2025/01/ftc-sues-pepsico-rigging-soft-drink-competition Admittedly, Trump's FTC and DOJ have carried on some of Biden's work, even as they've killed some of the Biden era's most important cases, and made a general Trumpian mockery of the idea that antitrust law is a tool for economic justice: https://economicpopulist.substack.com/p/weekly-rewind-62725 Trump killing antitrust law is normal. That's what politics has been like for this whole century, and it's what politics is like in every other domain: billionaires get their way on climate, on labor, on whatever bullshit they get into their fool fucking heads: https://www.usatoday.com/story/entertainment/celebrities/2025/06/27/jeff-bezos-lauren-sanchez-married-wedding-venice/84349820007/ But it's a mistake to think that Trump killed antitrust enforcement in the USA out of a special conservative deference to millionaires and enthusiasm for corrosive and predatory monopolies. In the UK, four consecutive Conservative Prime Ministers presided over the best competition law enforcement in British history – and it was Labour's Keir Starmer who fired the head of the UK Competition and Markets Authority and replaced him with the ex-head of Amazon UK: https://pluralistic.net/2025/01/22/autocrats-of-trade/#dingo-babysitter It is completely normal for both "progressive" and "conservative" parties to wield the entire apparatus of state to the benefit of powerful monopolists. The antitrust enforcement – in the US, the UK, the EU, Australia, Germany, France and Spain – are totally aberrant. And it's not just in these countries where political science's law of gravity reversed itself: there've been giant, brutal antitrust cases in Japan and South Korea, and China has passed aggressive tech antitrust laws that strike directly at the giant Chinese tech companies that Cold War 2.0 creeps insist are just branches of the Chinese Communist Party: https://pluralistic.net/2020/12/07/backstabbed/#big-data-backstabbing This is fucking wild. This is water flowing uphill. This is pigs flying. This is hell freezing over. There is no billionaire constituency for antimonopoly work. Oligarchs aren't funneling dark money to trustbuster orgs. Antimonopoly work strikes at the beating heart of the system that creates and sustains billionaires. This is a political outcome that the people want, and that billionaires hate, and billionaires are losing. How is this happening? Why is this happening? I don't know, exactly. I suspect that some of this is related to Stein's Law: "anything that can't go on forever eventually stops." Monopolists corrupt our political system, maim and impoverish workers, gouge their customers on enshittified, overpriced garbage. They are an existential threat to the survival of the human species. The system is so broken and the mainstream of politics endlessly gaslights us, telling us that corrupt and degraded institutions are either just fine ("America Was Always Great" -H. Clinton) or need to be destroyed, rather than redeemed ("Delete CFPB" -E. Musk). People know that the system only caters to the whims of billionaires and tells the rest of us to eat shit. They hate the fucking system. Over and over again, we've seen outbreaks of furious, joyous, uncompromising leftist activism: Occupy, Bernie 2016, Bernie 2020, George Floyd, the Women's March, No Kings, Climate Strikes, on and on. Over and over, liberal "centrists" have joined with the right to crush these movements. Meanwhile, the right has only moved from strength to strength by offering a libidinal, furious promise of root-and-branch change. The only team that's promising radical change is the right. Parties like UK Labour and the Democrats offer austerity and genocide with slightly more polite aesthetics ("[If I'm elected], fundamentally nothing will change" -J. Biden). I think that centrist suppression of the left has pushed 90 percent of the energy for major change into right wing nihilist movements, but the anti-corporate, anti-monopolist energy has not dissipated. It's formed a kind of invisible political wind that has filled the sails of these antimonopoly projects all over the world. But anything that can't go on forever eventually stops. Zohran Mamdani just won the NYC Democratic mayoral primary election. That wasn't supposed to happen. The worst people on Earth showered the hereditary King of New York with so much money it was coming out of his fucking pores and he still ate shit. Guys who've got so much money they were able to get Columbia University to collude in shipping its students off to gulags for having the temerity to oppose genocide tried to do it to Mamdani and we kicked their teeth in. The world is organized around the whims of billionaires, but it doesn't have to be. Most of us are not esoteric authoritarian freaks pining for a CEO of America who'll track us all using mandatory Fitbits and assign us jobs based on an AI's estimation of our cranial geometry. Those ideas are not popular. Now, it's true that this century has been defined by extremely unpopular ideas winning the day. But anything that can't go on eventually stops. Sure, they smeared Jeremy Corbyn and replaced him with Austeritybot 3000, and Labour is collapsing as a result, and if an election were called today, Nigel Farage would sweep the board, assuming the PM's seat ahead of a Ba'ath Party style majority. But on today's Trashfuture podcast, I learned about the leadership contest for the Green Party, in which genuinely progressive candidate, Zack Polanski, is running: https://backzack.com/ Labour has walked away from voters. The Tories are in chaos. The Libdems permanently discredited themselves in the coalition government. The youthquake that buoyed up Corbyn was driven by a desperate hunger for change. The party grandees that purged Labour of everyone who wanted a better country have created a massive constituency that's up for grabs. I'm desperate for change, too. I've joined the Greens, and I'll be voting for Polanski in the leadership race: https://join.greenparty.org.uk/join-us/ (Image: Frank Vincentz, Petri Krohn, CC BY-SA 3.0, modified) Hey look at this (permalink) What is a democratic socialist? https://coreyrobin.com/2025/06/26/what-is-a-democratic-socialist/ Republicans are flagged more often than Democrats for sharing misinformation on X’s Community Notes https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2502053122 Decon: Dual system offering an emergency decontamination tool for Chemical Crowd Control Agent (CCCA) exposure and app for protestor mobilization https://nedc.mesausa.org/team/california-2025/ Promises The ‘Trump Phone’ Would Be ‘Made In USA’ Lasted 1/100th Of A Scaramucci https://www.techdirt.com/2025/06/27/promises-the-trump-phone-would-be-made-in-usa-lasted-1-100th-of-a-scaramucci/ Digital Services Tax to stay in place despite G7 deal https://financialpost.com/technology/canadas-digital-services-tax-g7 Object permanence (permalink) #20yrsago Secret Congressional policy reports published https://web.archive.org/web/20050629020405/http://www.opencrs.com/ #20yrsago Brazil to US pharma co: slash AIDS drug prices or lose patent https://web.archive.org/web/20190918065156/https://www.ft.com/content/816699fe-e50a-11d9-95f3-00000e2511c8 #20yrsago Hilary Rosen: Killing Napster didn’t bring market control https://web.archive.org/web/20050629010724/http://www.huffingtonpost.com/theblog/archive/hilary-rosen/the-wisdom-of-the-court-_3259.html #15yrsago Canadian cops’ history of agents provocateurs and the G20 https://memex.craphound.com/2010/06/27/canadian-cops-history-of-agents-provocateurs-and-the-g20/ #15yrsago Stiglitz: spending cuts won’t cure recession https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/osborne-s-first-budget-it-s-wrong-wrong-wrong-2011501.html #5yrsago Snowden on tech's Oppenheimers https://pluralistic.net/2020/06/27/belated-oppenheimers/#oppenheimers #5yrsago Santa Cruz bans predictive policing https://pluralistic.net/2020/06/27/belated-oppenheimers/#banana-slugs #1yrago Copyright takedowns are a cautionary tale that few are heeding https://pluralistic.net/2024/06/27/nuke-first/#ask-questions-never Upcoming appearances (permalink) London: How To Academy with Riley Quinn, Jul 1 https://howtoacademy.com/events/cory-doctorow-the-fight-against-the-big-tech-oligarchy/ Manchester: Picks and Shovels at Blackwell's Bookshop, Jul 2 https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/an-evening-with-cory-doctorow-tickets-1308451968059 Manchester: Co-operatives UK Co-op Congress keynote, Jul 4 https://www.uk.coop/events-and-training/events-calendar/co-op-congress-2025-book-your-place Virtual: ORG at 20: in conversation with Maria Farrell, Jul 16 https://www.openrightsgroup.org/events/org-at-20-cory-doctorow-in-conversation-with-maria-farrell/ 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 Recent appearances (permalink) If We Had a Choice, Would We Invent Social Media Again? (The Agenda/TVO) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KJw38uIcmEw Forward Kentucky https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LpMxBBMBkZs Democrats Abroad https://creators.spotify.com/pod/profile/demsabroadca/episodes/Cory-Doctorow-on-Enshittification-e34blmg/a-ac0jn7i 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 "Attack Surface": The third Little Brother novel, a standalone technothriller for adults. The Washington Post called it "a political cyberthriller, vigorous, bold and savvy about the limits of revolution and resistance." "How to Destroy Surveillance Capitalism": an anti-monopoly pamphlet analyzing the true harms of surveillance capitalism and proposing a solution. https://onezero.medium.com/how-to-destroy-surveillance-capitalism-8135e6744d59?sk=f6cd10e54e20a07d4c6d0f3ac011af6b) "Little Brother/Homeland": A reissue omnibus edition with a new introduction by Edward Snowden: https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250774583. "Poesy the Monster Slayer" a picture book about monsters, bedtime, gender, and kicking ass. Order here: https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781626723627. Upcoming books (permalink) Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It, Farrar, Straus, Giroux, October 7 2025 https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374619329/enshittification/ Unauthorized Bread: a middle-grades graphic novel adapted from my novella about refugees, toasters and DRM, FirstSecond, 2026 Enshittification, Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It (the graphic novel), Firstsecond, 2026 The Memex Method, Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2026 Colophon (permalink) Today's top sources: Currently writing: A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING This work – excluding any serialized fiction – is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license. That means you can use it any way you like, including commercially, provided that you attribute it to me, Cory Doctorow, and include a link to pluralistic.net. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ Quotations and images are not included in this license; they are included either under a limitation or exception to copyright, or on the basis of a separate license. Please exercise caution. How to get Pluralistic: Blog (no ads, tracking, or data-collection): Pluralistic.net Newsletter (no ads, tracking, or data-collection): https://pluralistic.net/plura-list Mastodon (no ads, tracking, or data-collection): https://mamot.fr/@pluralistic Medium (no ads, paywalled): https://doctorow.medium.com/ Twitter (mass-scale, unrestricted, third-party surveillance and advertising): https://twitter.com/doctorow Tumblr (mass-scale, unrestricted, third-party surveillance and advertising): https://mostlysignssomeportents.tumblr.com/tagged/pluralistic "When life gives you SARS, you make sarsaparilla" -Joey "Accordion Guy" DeVilla READ CAREFULLY: By reading this, you agree, on behalf of your employer, to release me from all obligations and waivers arising from any and all NON-NEGOTIATED agreements, licenses, terms-of-service, shrinkwrap, clickwrap, browsewrap, confidentiality, non-disclosure, non-compete and acceptable use policies ("BOGUS AGREEMENTS") that I have entered into with your employer, its partners, licensors, agents and assigns, in perpetuity, without prejudice to my ongoing rights and privileges. You further represent that you have the authority to release me from any BOGUS AGREEMENTS on behalf of your employer. ISSN: 3066-764X

28.06.2025 13:17 — 👍 0 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0

Pluralistic: Bill Griffith's 'Three Rocks' (27 Jun 2025) Today's links Bill Griffith's 'Three Rocks': The Story of Ernie Bushmiller, the Man Who Created Nancy. Hey look at this: Delights to delectate. Object permanence: 2010, 2015, 2020, 2024 Upcoming appearances: Where to find me. Recent appearances: Where I've been. Latest books: You keep readin' em, I'll keep writin' 'em. Upcoming books: Like I said, I'll keep writin' 'em. Colophon: All the rest. Bill Griffith's 'Three Rocks' (permalink) What better format for a biography of Ernie Bushmiller, creator of the daily Nancy strip, than a graphic novel? And who better to write and draw it than Bill Griffith, creator of Zippy the Pinhead, a long-running and famously surreal daily strip? https://store.abramsbooks.com/products/three-rocks Three Rocks: The Story of Ernie Bushmiller, the Man Who Created Nancy is more than a biography, though. Griffith is carrying on the work of Scott McCloud, whose definitive Understanding Comics used the graphic novel form to explain the significance and method of sequential art, singling out Nancy for special praise: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Understanding_Comics For Griffith – and a legion of comics legends who worship Bushmiller – the story of Bushmiller's life and the story of Nancy and its groundbreaking methodology are inseparable. We watch as Bushmiller starts out as a teenaged dropout copy-boy in the bullpen at a giant news syndicate, running errands for the paper's publisher and, eventually, its cartoonists. Bushmiller burns to get into the funnies, and he's got a good head for gags, but his draftsmanship needs work. He secretly enrolls in a life-drawing class, which does him little good, but he applies himself and applies himself, and eventually is given his big break: taking over Fritzi Ritz, a daily cartoon serial about a sexy flapper. Bushmiller's run on Fritzi Ritz outlasts flappers, and, as he struggles to keep the character relevant amidst changing times, he eventually hits on a "Cousin Oliver" gambit: adding in a sassy niece named Nancy: https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/CousinOliver Cousin Oliverae are rarely successful, but Nancy turned out to be the exception that proved the rule. Nancy took over the strip, and "Aunt Fritzi" receded in importance, taking a backstage to Nancy and her pal Sluggo. As Nancy came into her own, so did Bushmiller. Bushmiller combined an impeccable sense of the gag (he started with his punchline panel – "the snapper" – and worked backwards) with a visual style that he refined to something so pure and refined that it inspired generations of comics creators. Bushmiller was the master of simplifying, and then simplifying more, and then simplifying even more. Visually, his characters and his furniture (especially the iconic "three rocks" of the title) are refined to something so iconic they're practically ideograms. While some accused Bushmiller of re-using a small set of drawings, Griffith makes the convincing case that Bushmiller perfected a small number of icons, and repeated them as motifs. Indeed, these characters are so perfect and finely tuned that when Griffith inserts Nancy, Sluggo and other characters from Bushmillerville into his graphic novel, he doesn't re-draw them – rather, Griffith carefully crops these characters out and collages them into his own panels. Every image of Nancy in this book was drawn by Ernie Bushmiller. This pared-down, severely restricted graphic style provides the perfect toolkit for the Bushmiller gag, which, at its best, is profoundly surrealistic, often playing on the form of the comic itself (for example, when Nancy asks Sluggo to give her a push on a bicycle, Sluggo obliges by stepping out of the comic and tipping the final panel at 45 degrees, sending Nancy rolling "downhill"). These meta-humorous gags give rise to Griffith's key insight: that Nancy isn't a comic about what it's like to be a kid – it's a comic about what it's like to be a cartoon character. This is such a good organizing principle for understanding Nancy's staying power and influence. Other cartoons like Peanuts are nominally about being a kid, but are actually about being a small adult. Nancy, meanwhile, shares a lineage with, say, Animaniacs and Bugs Bunny and Groucho Marx (who, we learn, wore out his welcome with Bushmiller and his wife by relentlessly hitting on the latter at celebrity dinners at the Brown Derby). It's no wonder that Scott McCloud, the prophet-explainer of sequential art, loves Nancy: she practically invented stepping outside the frame and making us think about how these pictures and words worked, and why, and she made us laugh the whole time. Bushmiller had a unique mind. He was a workaholic, turning out a 7-day/week strip for decades, even as he shouldered a variety of side-projects and other strips. Once he started making money, he moved to the Connecticut suburbs where he could have a work-room big enough to accommodate four drafting boards, so he could work on four strips at once. He would sometimes get a year ahead of schedule with his publishers. It was only very late in his life that Bushmiller took on any kind of assistants, and even then, he obsessively supervised them, counting the spikes in every depiction of Nancy's hair to ensure that they fell within the regulation 69-107 spikes. Despite his massive following among artists, hipsters and intellectuals, Bushmiller insisted that the secret to his success was in his devotion to simplicity and the universality it brought. Bushmiller's editorial process seems to have consisted almost entirely of his removing words, images and lines from his panels, paring them down further and further until they became, essentially, narrated pictograms – almost funny Ikea assembly instructions. Griffith – a daily cartoonist workaholic who has been turning out Zippy strips since 1971 – bursts with admiration for Bushmiller, and this biography saves a lot of space for Bushmiller himself, with long sections given over to reproductions of some of Nancy's best outings. Griffith has had more than half a century to think about what makes surreal comic-strips tick, and, like McCloud, he pours these out on the page, but largely confines himself to illustrating his insights with Bushmiller strips and panels. The result is a heady volume: a great biography and a great book of literary criticism and comic arts theory. Nancy is still around, written and drawn by the amazing Olivia Jaimes, whose first collection of new Nancy comics I called "incredibly, fantastically, impossibly great": https://memex.craphound.com/2019/10/17/the-first-book-collecting-the-new-nancy-comic-is-incredibly-fantastically-impossibly-great/ Hey look at this (permalink) Vaccine Recommendations Backed by Science https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/see-vaccine-recommendations-backed-by-science-in-these-handy-charts/ John Hodgman Knows Where the Sewage-Treatment Plant Should Go https://www.curbed.com/article/interview-john-hodgman-joy-of-zoning-livestream-simcity2013.html Zohran did not win because of TikTok and podcasts https://www.usermag.co/p/zohran-did-not-win-because-of-tiktok-and-podcasts-social-media How Uber Became A Cash-Generating Machine https://len-sherman.medium.com/how-uber-became-a-cash-generating-machine-ef78e7a97230 Object permanence (permalink) #15yrsago Adventurer’s Club from Walt Disney World recreated in painstaking detail with Half-Life engine https://insidethemagic.net/2010/06/walt-disney-worlds-adventurers-club-virtually-recreated-for-fans-to-once-again-explore/ #15yrsago Texas GOP comes out against oral sex, the UN, and the Supreme Court https://web.archive.org/web/20100626003418/https://www.nydailynews.com/news/2010/06/22/2010-06-22_texas_gop_platform_criminalize_gay_marriage_and_ban_sodomy_outlaw_strip_clubs_an.html #15yrsago Monkey-Pirate-Robot-Ninja-Zombie: Rock Paper Scissors 9.0 https://web.archive.org/web/20100625003931/http://markarayner.com/blog/archives/1613 #10yrsago Harry Reid tells BLM’s Burning Man squad to suck it up https://web.archive.org/web/20150628195105/http://hoh.rollcall.com/harry-reid-to-burning-man-rescue/ #10yrsago Supreme Court upholds marriage equality! https://www.theguardian.com/law/live/2015/jun/26/supreme-court-rules-same-sex-marriage #10yrsago Wil Wheaton on depression https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K6ACzT6PCDw #10yrsago 2.5 million data points show: America’s ISPs suck, and AT&T sucks worst https://www.measurementlab.net/blog/interconnection_and_measurement_update/ #5yrsago Microcontent guidelines for 2020 https://pluralistic.net/2020/06/26/police-riots/#nielsen-98 #5yrsago "Violent protests" vs "violent police" https://pluralistic.net/2020/06/26/police-riots/#police-riot #5yrsago Sympathy for the mask-shy https://pluralistic.net/2020/06/26/police-riots/#harm-reduction #5yrsago Let's get rid of nursing homes https://pluralistic.net/2020/06/26/police-riots/#nursing-homes #5yrsago Splash Mountain to purge Song of the South https://pluralistic.net/2020/06/26/police-riots/#minstrelsy #5yrsago Copyright keeps police use-of-force training a secret https://pluralistic.net/2020/06/26/police-riots/#post-due #1yrago Cleantech has an enshittification problem https://pluralistic.net/2024/06/26/unplanned-obsolescence/#better-micetraps Upcoming appearances (permalink) London: How To Academy with Riley Quinn, Jul 1 https://howtoacademy.com/events/cory-doctorow-the-fight-against-the-big-tech-oligarchy/ Manchester: Picks and Shovels at Blackwell's Bookshop, Jul 2 https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/an-evening-with-cory-doctorow-tickets-1308451968059 Manchester: Co-operatives UK Co-op Congress keynote, Jul 4 https://www.uk.coop/events-and-training/events-calendar/co-op-congress-2025-book-your-place Virtual: ORG at 20: in conversation with Maria Farrell, Jul 16 https://www.openrightsgroup.org/events/org-at-20-cory-doctorow-in-conversation-with-maria-farrell/ 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 Recent appearances (permalink) If We Had a Choice, Would We Invent Social Media Again? (The Agenda/TVO) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KJw38uIcmEw Forward Kentucky https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LpMxBBMBkZs Democrats Abroad https://creators.spotify.com/pod/profile/demsabroadca/episodes/Cory-Doctorow-on-Enshittification-e34blmg/a-ac0jn7i 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 "Attack Surface": The third Little Brother novel, a standalone technothriller for adults. The Washington Post called it "a political cyberthriller, vigorous, bold and savvy about the limits of revolution and resistance." "How to Destroy Surveillance Capitalism": an anti-monopoly pamphlet analyzing the true harms of surveillance capitalism and proposing a solution. https://onezero.medium.com/how-to-destroy-surveillance-capitalism-8135e6744d59?sk=f6cd10e54e20a07d4c6d0f3ac011af6b) "Little Brother/Homeland": A reissue omnibus edition with a new introduction by Edward Snowden: https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250774583. "Poesy the Monster Slayer" a picture book about monsters, bedtime, gender, and kicking ass. Order here: https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781626723627. Upcoming books (permalink) Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It, Farrar, Straus, Giroux, October 7 2025 https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374619329/enshittification/ Unauthorized Bread: a middle-grades graphic novel adapted from my novella about refugees, toasters and DRM, FirstSecond, 2026 Enshittification, Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It (the graphic novel), Firstsecond, 2026 The Memex Method, Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2026 Colophon (permalink) Today's top sources: Currently writing: A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING This work – excluding any serialized fiction – is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license. That means you can use it any way you like, including commercially, provided that you attribute it to me, Cory Doctorow, and include a link to pluralistic.net. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ Quotations and images are not included in this license; they are included either under a limitation or exception to copyright, or on the basis of a separate license. Please exercise caution. How to get Pluralistic: Blog (no ads, tracking, or data-collection): Pluralistic.net Newsletter (no ads, tracking, or data-collection): https://pluralistic.net/plura-list Mastodon (no ads, tracking, or data-collection): https://mamot.fr/@pluralistic Medium (no ads, paywalled): https://doctorow.medium.com/ Twitter (mass-scale, unrestricted, third-party surveillance and advertising): https://twitter.com/doctorow Tumblr (mass-scale, unrestricted, third-party surveillance and advertising): https://mostlysignssomeportents.tumblr.com/tagged/pluralistic "When life gives you SARS, you make sarsaparilla" -Joey "Accordion Guy" DeVilla READ CAREFULLY: By reading this, you agree, on behalf of your employer, to release me from all obligations and waivers arising from any and all NON-NEGOTIATED agreements, licenses, terms-of-service, shrinkwrap, clickwrap, browsewrap, confidentiality, non-disclosure, non-compete and acceptable use policies ("BOGUS AGREEMENTS") that I have entered into with your employer, its partners, licensors, agents and assigns, in perpetuity, without prejudice to my ongoing rights and privileges. You further represent that you have the authority to release me from any BOGUS AGREEMENTS on behalf of your employer. ISSN: 3066-764X

27.06.2025 14:40 — 👍 0 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0

26.06.2025 17:25 — 👍 0 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0

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Pluralistic: The case for a Canadian wealth tax (23 Jun 2025) Today's links The case for a Canadian wealth tax: Lessons learned from previous attempts, applicable all over the world. Hey look at this: Delights to delectate. Object permanence: 2005, 2010, 2015, 2020 Upcoming appearances: Where to find me. Recent appearances: Where I've been. Latest books: You keep readin' em, I'll keep writin' 'em. Upcoming books: Like I said, I'll keep writin' 'em. Colophon: All the rest. The case for a Canadian wealth tax (permalink) A major problem with letting billionaires decide how your country is run is that they will back whichever psycho promises the lowest taxes and least regulation, no matter how completely batshit and unfit that person is: https://www.hamiltonnolan.com/p/nations-are-people Billionaires have farcical, almost unimaginable resources. These let them take over whole political parties, even "left" parties, with the result that all real electoral options disappear. Voting for the other party gets you a different set of aesthetics, but the same existential threats to the human race and the planet: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/jun/22/starmer-backs-us-strike-on-iran-and-calls-for-tehran-to-return-to-negotiations After generations of increasingly oligarch-friendly policies and billionaire entryism into the Democratic Party, America may well be cooked, a total write-off for generations to come. The path to saving the world and our species arguably lies through strengthening other countries to resist American psychos and protect the planet from the consequences of their brainwormed leadership. Writing for Jacobin, Alex Hemingway sets out a plan for imposing a wealth-tax on Canada's oligarchs, one that incorporates lessons from previous attempts at such a tax: https://jacobin.com/2025/06/wealth-tax-canada-inequality-austerity/ Even on the left, the idea of a wealth-tax is controversial – not because leftists are sympathetic to billionaires, but because they are skeptical that a wealth tax can be carried out. It's a practical, not an ideological objection: https://pileusmmt.libsyn.com/196-the-problem-with-wealth-taxes-with-steven-hail-part-1 After all, under capitalism, wealth always grows faster than the economy at large, meaning that over time, the rich will get steadily richer, and inequality will widen and widen: https://memex.craphound.com/2014/06/24/thomas-pikettys-capital-in-the-21st-century/ Ideally, we would counter the trend of wealth piling up into dynastic fortunes with continuous redistribution and predistribution: taxing capital gains at the same rate (or a higher rate) than income, so that income from labor isn't treated worse than income from ownership; steeply graded progressive taxes, with top rates of 70-99%, high inheritance taxes, and so on. We had a system like that, from the end of WWII (when the rich were poorer than they'd been in centuries, with their influence in tatters) until the Reagan era (when the rich had rebuilt their fortunes and were able to seize the reins of power). In the 45 years since the rise of the new oligarchy, we've lived through accelerating wealth accumulation, and as the rich got richer, they used their wealth to dismantle any barrier to creating new aristocratic dynasties. So here we are, trapped in the new oligarchy. It's too late to rely on income taxes, not if we're going to euthanize enough rentiers to free out politics from their toxic influence and save the human race any of several foreseeable mass-extinction events. Making the ultra-rich poor again is going to require new tactics. In Canada, the 1% owns 29% of the country's wealth. The 87 richest families in Canada control as much wealth as the bottom 12 million Canadians combined. This is better than the US (where the 1% own 35% of the country), but not by much: https://www.policyalternatives.ca/wp-content/uploads/attachments/Born%20to%20Win.pdf Can we make a wealth tax work? Here's Hemingway's program for making it work in Canada: Make it apply to all kinds of wealth equally. No carve-outs for real-estate, which makes it very easy to shift wealth among asset-classes to duck the tax; Aim it at the super-rich alone. Avoid even the upper middle-class, who lack the liquid assets to pay the tax and could get wrecked if they have to liquidate their holdings at the same time as everyone else, which will depress asset prices; Use third-party assessments of asset values. Don't take billionaires' word for how much their assets are worth! Canada's got an advantage here, thanks to the Canada Revenue Agency's requirement for financial institutions to report their account holders' income, including capital gains. Canada's also recently created "beneficial owner" registries that record the true owners of assets; Use lifestyle audits: anyone caught engaging in tax-evasion will face severe penalties, as will the enablers at financial services firms that help them. One frequent objection to high taxes is that it encourages capital flight – rich people hopping to another territory to avoid taxation. That's a reasonable fear, given how pants-wettingly terrified the rich are of paying tax. Hemingway points out that a wealth tax is different from an income tax – income taxes are levied on the outcome of productive activities, while wealth taxes target accumulated wealth. High income taxes can starve a country of the capital it needs for a productive economy, but that's not the case with wealth taxes. Hemingway points to the OECD's Common Reporting Standard, through which more than 100 countries have agreed to share financial information, which will help Canada catch billionaires as they funnel their wealth offshore. Meanwhile, if the rich try to move with their money, we can hit them with an exit tax, like the 40% that Elizabeth Warren has proposed. It's an article of faith that the rich will move offshore at the first hint of a wealth tax, but the research shows that rich people often have reasons to stay that trump their taxophobia. The economic effect of rich people Going Galt is pretty darned small: https://warwick.ac.uk/fac/soc/economics/research/centres/cage/publications/workingpapers/2022/taxation_and_migration_by_the_super_rich/ The modern prophet of oligarchy and its origins is the French economist Thomas Piketty. In a recent Le Monde column, Piketty examines the failure of a French wealth tax proposal that would have shaved a modest 2% off the fortunes of the 1,800 French people with more than €100 million: https://www.lemonde.fr/blog/piketty/2025/06/17/the-senate-beside-the-story/ The proposal passed the National Assembly, only to die in the Senate, an institution with a long history of pro-oligarchic activism (the Senate killed every French income tax passed by the Assembly from 1896-1914). The Assembly's wealth tax addressed the problem of tax exiles, levying the wealth tax for 5 years after an oligarch relocated. For Piketty, this didn't go far enough: he wants a pro-rated tax based on the number of years an oligarch spent in France in their lifetime: if you were educated and cared for at French expense from birth and went on to become a billionaire, then a modest share of your wealth would forever be owed to the country that made it possible. Piketty says that a wealth tax could be paid in shares instead of cash, with the stock going into a trust for workers, who would get board seats as well. He points out that decarbonization is going to require large sacrifices from all of us, but that these will be impossible to demand with a straight face so long as the super-rich are paying taxes that are trivial relative to their assets and income. Hey look at this (permalink) Don't Rank Cuomo, the game https://radiatoryang.itch.io/cuomo (h/t Super Punch) FTC competition comment jointly submitted by EFF and Authors Alliance https://www.eff.org/files/2025/06/05/ftc_competition_comment_jointly_submitted_by_eff_and_authorsalliance.pdf McMansion Hell urges all New Yorkers to Rank Zohran Mamdani #1 for Mayor of NYC https://mcmansionhell.com/post/786540193484341248/mcmansion-hell-urges-all-new-yorkers-to-rank Arbitration Information https://arbitrationinformation.org/docs/problems/ Apple to Australians: You’re Too Stupid to Choose Your Own Apps https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2025/06/apple-australians-youre-too-stupid-choose-your-own-apps Object permanence (permalink) #20yrsago Snapple floods Manhattan with 17.5 tons of frozen kiwi-strawberry slurry https://nielsenhayden.com/makinglight/archives/006460.html#006460 #20yrsago Beloved Toronto singing cowboy/mayoral candidate Ben Kerr, RIP https://www.blogto.com/city/2005/06/ben_kerr_a_toronto_legend_passes_away/ #20yrsago Heinlein’s house https://web.archive.org/web/20050625235954/http://www.heinleinsociety.org/rah/history/bonnydoon1.html #20yrsago Banned Nepali radio station transmits via megaphone https://reliefweb.int/report/nepal/banned-air-nepal-news-radio-hits-streets #20yrsago Queen Liz: Sony remotes are too hard to use https://web.archive.org/web/20050815080728/http://www.macworld.co.uk/news/index.cfm?email&NewsID=11914 #15yrsago ASCAP raising money to fight Free Culture https://memex.craphound.com/2010/06/23/ascap-raising-money-to-fight-free-culture/ #15yrsago Original Pac-Man sketches https://www.control-online.nl/2010/06/22/iwatani-toont-gamesgeschiedenis-in-meest-pure-vorm/ #15yrsago Viacom v Internet: round one to Internet https://memex.craphound.com/2010/06/23/viacom-v-internet-round-one-to-internet/ #15yrsago A Canadian author’s perspective on “radical extremism” and copyright https://memex.craphound.com/2010/06/23/a-canadian-authors-perspective-on-radical-extremism-and-copyright/ #15yrsago Gate guarded McMansion suburb in Walt Disney Worldhttps://insidethemagic.net/2010/06/disney-unveils-golden-oak-luxury-homes-offering-a-chance-to-live-in-the-walt-disney-world-resort/ #15yrsago Canadian Heritage Minister declares war on copyright reformers https://web.archive.org/web/20100626073040/http://www.michaelgeist.ca/content/view/5138/125/ #15yrsago Bruce Sterling’s Shareable.net story about astroturfer gulag https://www.shareable.net/the-exterminators-want-ad/ #15yrsago Corruption: FCC’s closed-door meetings on open Internet https://web.archive.org/web/20100626222659/http://blog.broadband.gov/?entryId=518087 #15yrsago Canadian Heritage Minister smears DMCA opponents as “radical extremists” https://www.michaelgeist.ca/2010/06/moore-and-radical-extremists/ #15yrsago US IP Czar’s report sells out the American public to Big Content https://memex.craphound.com/2010/06/22/us-ip-czars-report-sells-out-the-american-public-to-big-content/ #15yrsago I Love Paree: new sf story podcast https://craphound.com/news/2010/06/22/i-love-paree-part-1/ #10yrsago Australia’s own Immortan Joe turns off the water, I mean, Internet https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2015/06/australia-passes-controversial-anti-piracy-web-censorship-law/ #10yrsago GCHQ psychological operations squad targeted Britons for manipulation https://theintercept.com/2015/06/22/controversial-gchq-unit-domestic-law-enforcement-propaganda/ #10yrsago GCHQ hacking squad worried about getting sued for copyright violation https://theintercept.com/2015/06/22/gchq-reverse-engineering-warrants/ #10yrsago The Girl With the Parrot on Her Head https://memex.craphound.com/2015/06/22/the-girl-with-the-parrot-on-her-head/ #10yrsago FDA & FTC mull homeopathy’s future https://sciencebasedmedicine.org/homeopathic-industry-and-its-acolytes-make-poor-showing-before-fda/ #10yrsago Tie your shoes the Ukrainian way http://shnurovka.com/en/step-by-step-instructions-english/ #10yrsago Outstanding paper on the impact of ebook DRM on readers, writers, publishers and distributors https://www.law.berkeley.edu/files/Bittar_Ana_Carolina.pdf #10yrsago You’ll falafel about this horrifying new pita-sized crypto-key-sniffing hack https://www.wired.com/2015/06/radio-bug-can-steal-laptop-crypto-keys-fits-inside-pita/ #5yrsago Against AI phrenology https://pluralistic.net/2020/06/23/cryptocidal-maniacs/#phrenology #5yrsago Privacy in tracing tokens https://pluralistic.net/2020/06/23/cryptocidal-maniacs/#trace-together #5yrsago Congress wants to read all your DMs https://pluralistic.net/2020/06/23/cryptocidal-maniacs/#crypto-wars #5yrsago Blueleaks https://pluralistic.net/2020/06/23/cryptocidal-maniacs/#ddosecrets #5yrsago Surveillance electoralism https://pluralistic.net/2020/06/23/cryptocidal-maniacs/#aaronsw #5yrsago The real cyberwar is Goliath, slaughtering an army of Davids https://pluralistic.net/2020/06/22/jobs-guarantee/#selection-bias #5yrsago The Case for a Job Guarantee https://pluralistic.net/2020/06/22/jobs-guarantee/#job-guarantee Upcoming appearances (permalink) London: How To Academy with Riley Quinn, Jul 1 https://howtoacademy.com/events/cory-doctorow-the-fight-against-the-big-tech-oligarchy/ Manchester: Picks and Shovels at Blackwell's Bookshop, Jul 2 https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/an-evening-with-cory-doctorow-tickets-1308451968059 Manchester: Co-operatives UK Co-op Congress keynote, Jul 4 https://www.uk.coop/events-and-training/events-calendar/co-op-congress-2025-book-your-place Virtual: ORG at 20: in conversation with Maria Farrell, Jul 16 https://www.openrightsgroup.org/events/org-at-20-cory-doctorow-in-conversation-with-maria-farrell/ 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 Recent appearances (permalink) Democrats Abroad https://creators.spotify.com/pod/profile/demsabroadca/episodes/Cory-Doctorow-on-Enshittification-e34blmg/a-ac0jn7i FediForum Keynote https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7_Gs1t0qe78 Science Fiction is EXPOSING Scams and AI Dystopia (Bad Faith) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SlrKlp_Iiko 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 "Attack Surface": The third Little Brother novel, a standalone technothriller for adults. The Washington Post called it "a political cyberthriller, vigorous, bold and savvy about the limits of revolution and resistance." "How to Destroy Surveillance Capitalism": an anti-monopoly pamphlet analyzing the true harms of surveillance capitalism and proposing a solution. https://onezero.medium.com/how-to-destroy-surveillance-capitalism-8135e6744d59?sk=f6cd10e54e20a07d4c6d0f3ac011af6b) "Little Brother/Homeland": A reissue omnibus edition with a new introduction by Edward Snowden: https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250774583. "Poesy the Monster Slayer" a picture book about monsters, bedtime, gender, and kicking ass. Order here: https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781626723627. Upcoming books (permalink) Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It, Farrar, Straus, Giroux, October 7 2025 https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374619329/enshittification/ Unauthorized Bread: a middle-grades graphic novel adapted from my novella about refugees, toasters and DRM, FirstSecond, 2026 Enshittification, Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It (the graphic novel), Firstsecond, 2026 The Memex Method, Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2026 Colophon (permalink) Today's top sources: Currently writing: A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING This work – excluding any serialized fiction – is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license. That means you can use it any way you like, including commercially, provided that you attribute it to me, Cory Doctorow, and include a link to pluralistic.net. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ Quotations and images are not included in this license; they are included either under a limitation or exception to copyright, or on the basis of a separate license. Please exercise caution. How to get Pluralistic: Blog (no ads, tracking, or data-collection): Pluralistic.net Newsletter (no ads, tracking, or data-collection): https://pluralistic.net/plura-list Mastodon (no ads, tracking, or data-collection): https://mamot.fr/@pluralistic Medium (no ads, paywalled): https://doctorow.medium.com/ Twitter (mass-scale, unrestricted, third-party surveillance and advertising): https://twitter.com/doctorow Tumblr (mass-scale, unrestricted, third-party surveillance and advertising): https://mostlysignssomeportents.tumblr.com/tagged/pluralistic "When life gives you SARS, you make sarsaparilla" -Joey "Accordion Guy" DeVilla READ CAREFULLY: By reading this, you agree, on behalf of your employer, to release me from all obligations and waivers arising from any and all NON-NEGOTIATED agreements, licenses, terms-of-service, shrinkwrap, clickwrap, browsewrap, confidentiality, non-disclosure, non-compete and acceptable use policies ("BOGUS AGREEMENTS") that I have entered into with your employer, its partners, licensors, agents and assigns, in perpetuity, without prejudice to my ongoing rights and privileges. You further represent that you have the authority to release me from any BOGUS AGREEMENTS on behalf of your employer. ISSN: 3066-764X

23.06.2025 15:08 — 👍 0 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0

Pluralistic: Daniel de Visé's 'The Blues Brothers' (21 Jun 2025) Today's links Daniel de Visé's 'The Blues Brothers': Far more than production gossip – an unmissable portrait of a turning point in American comedy and music. Hey look at this: Delights to delectate. Object permanence: 2005, 2010, 2015, 2020, 2024 Upcoming appearances: Where to find me. Recent appearances: Where I've been. Latest books: You keep readin' em, I'll keep writin' 'em. Upcoming books: Like I said, I'll keep writin' 'em. Colophon: All the rest. Daniel de Visé's 'The Blues Brothers' (permalink) I picked up Daniel de Visé's The Blues Brothers: An Epic Friendship, the Rise of Improv, and the Making of an American Film Classic at LA's Diesel Books; it was on the receiving table I sat next to as I signed books after a book-tour reading, and I snuck peeks at the back cover while I chatted with the long line of attendees: https://danieldevise.com/product/the-blues-brothers-an-epic-friendship-the-rise-of-improv-and-the-making-of-an-american-film-classic By the time the line was cleared, there was no question that I was going to buy this book, even though it wasn't formally for sale for a couple days (the bookstore staff were kind enough to make an exception for me, not least because I promised them that I wouldn't get a chance to read it for quite some time as I flitted from city to city on the rest of the tour). Like many people of my generation, I grew up with The Blues Brothers. I taped the movie off of TV when I was about 14 and literally wore the tape out in the next four years, re-watching and re-re-watching the movies on that tape – Animal House, The Blues Brothers and Spinal Tap – so many times that I can still just about recite those movies verbatim, more than 30 years later. The Blues Brothers is sunk so deep into my psyche that I don't know that I ever questioned why they were so embedded in my outlook. I don't know if I can even tell you when I first saw the movie. Certainly, my friend-group was very into the movie, and my best friend and I went as Jake and Elwood on multiple Hallowe'ens at the Rocky Horror Picture Show at Toronto's Roxy Theatre, until it became such a cliche for us that we felt the need to mix it up and dress up as zombie Jake and Elwood. But beyond the movie, I was taken with the Blues Brothers' music. I didn't know much about blues, boogie woogie and other roots music before the Blues Brothers came into my life. The combination of the Blues Brothers movie and its sound-track sent me on a treasure hunt for music by the band, its musical guests, and the artists whose song they covered. By the time I was 20, I'd amassed a vast collection of used records, tapes and CDs featuring Cab Calloway, Ray Charles, John Lee Hooker, Aretha Franklin, Willy Mabon, The Chips, Floyd Dixon and more. Soon, I was leaping from one artist to others. I found an incredible Pop Staples/Steve Cropper/Albert King collaboration "Jammed Together": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Sarzs8VRSg Within a few hops, I'd found my way to Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee and thence to the immortal James Cotton: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kl4IcMlrJwM I started skipping Rocky Horror to see the house band at Chicago's on Queen Street, and from there found my way to the weekend jams at Grossman's: https://torontobluessociety.com/venue/grossmans-tavern-2/ It's not an overstatement to say that The Blues Brothers altered my life, changing the music I listened to and the way I understood the musical ancestry of everything that went into my ears. Indeed, the effects that The Blues Brothers had on my life are so pervasive that I effectively stopped noticing them. When I put on a Memphis Slim album, it doesn't occur to me that the reason that music is on my hard-drive has something to do with that worn-out VHS cassette in my parents' living room in the 1980s. Standing there at the counter at Diesel Books for an hour, sneaking peeks at the back cover of de Visé's book, set me to considering exactly how this weird and remarkable phenomenon came to be. I knew a little, of course – my friends and I used to trade the information that Aykroyd came from a family of famous Ontario Tories the same way we would have gossiped had his father been a famous serial-killer. And no one could escape some of the more salacious details of Belushi's death, though I absorbed most of what I knew via one of the greatest short stories I've ever read, Bradley Denton's "Calvin Coolidge Home for Dead Comedians," about Belushi and Lenny Bruce leading a revolt in Comedian Hell: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Calvin_Coolidge_Home_for_Dead_Comedians So I bought a copy off the receiving table, straight out of the warehouse box, and I've finally gotten around to reading it, and holy moly is it fascinating! I confess that in the months since I brought the book home and stuck it on the TBR shelf, I'd mostly forgotten why I'd picked it up and had started to view it as a book full of production trivia, and when I picked it up this week, it was with an eye to skimming it quickly before putting it out at the curb in my Little Free Library. Instead, I found myself utterly engrossed in a brilliantly told, brilliantly researched tale that left me with a much deeper understanding of – and appreciation for – the cultural phenomenon that I was (and am) swept up in. De Visé devotes the first third of the book to snappy, revealing biographies of Belushi and Aykroyd, who grew up in very different milieux, and were of very different temperaments, but who both found their way into comedy just as the tradition of Borscht Belt comics and variety shows were giving way to a younger, weirder kind of comedy, a mixture of Monty Python, National Lampoon and improv. These biographical sketches are short, but they don't shy away from nuance – Belushi's parents, for example, are simultaneously painted as loving and also reckless and self-involved. De Visé gives the lion's share of attention to Belushi, but he doesn't stint on detail about Aykroyd, strongly implying that "Danny" is on the spectrum, with a deep collection of "special interests" and a deep discomfort with eye contact that accounts for habit of wearing sunglasses. As the two men find their way into various pioneering comedy projects – Second City, National Lampoon radio shows – they start to inch towards Lorne Michaels, and thus to each other. As de Visé painstakingly traces the ups and downs of their comedy careers, he paints a vivid picture of the wild swings of talented, striving artists at the start of their careers. By the time we get to the SNL chapters, the show itself becomes the star, and its rocky early days strongly echo the struggles of the comedians we've followed to its stage. The actual production story of The Blues Brothers movie doesn't start until more than halfway through the narrative. By that time, we've been set up with the way that filmmaking, comedy, popular culture, and politics have all changed to make The Blues Brothers movie a possibility. De Visé shows us how Belushi had won over a long list of household names in the entertainment industry, and how Aykroyd's meticulous, obsessive nature honed and directed Belushi's wild talent. The actual production of, and reception to, The Blues Brothers movie arrives in the book as a kind of extended climax and denouement, and yes, there are tons of funny bits of production trivia and gossip in this section. From winning over the mayor of Chicago (who reversed a decades-long policy of all-but-total prohibitions on filming permits in the city) to dropping a Ford Pinto thousands of feet, to the garage where, every night, dozens of surplus police cars that had been crashed that day were refurbished and gotten into shape to be crashed again the next day. And while all of this is going on, de Visé gives us a vivid portrayal of Belushi's spiraling addiction, the disease that is killing him right there, in front of everyone who loves him. That story carries over into the film's aftermath, as it is laboriously cut from more than three hours (it was originally intended to be shown with an intermission!) and released to hostile critics and an adoring public. These are the final days of Belushi, something we all know and can see coming. But even as Belushi approaches his final days, we learn how The Blues Brothers movie had created a legacy. It was Aykroyd who got Belushi into the blues, and the schtick they did about wanting to preserve this music from a world that was set to bury it and forget it wasn't just for the movie. Aykroyd and Belushi wanted to bring the music back. They couldn't stand that the likes of Cab Calloway, Aretha Franklin, Ray Charles and James Brown were playing county fairs and half-full night clubs. They wanted the music to escape from history and live again. And they succeeded. In a "where are they now" coda straight out of the closing credits of Animal House, de Visé documents how the artists featured in the movie – and the musical traditions they represented – experienced a massive revival following the film's release, which the musicians themselves credit to the movie. Which is where I came in, I suppose. That's how I got here, in this form, with a hard drive full of R&B, blues, country swing, jazz, boogie woogie and jump blues that vie with Talking Heads for play in my shuffle. This isn't a book about a movie; it's a rich and engrossing tale of an extraordinary creative collaboration that found an unlikely foothold at just the right time and place. It's a sensitive, funny, and revealing account of Belushi, Aykroyd, and the comedians, impresarios and friends in their orbit. Even if you didn't wear out a VHS cassette and memorize the whole damned movie, you will find something surprising and delightful in these pages. Hey look at this (permalink) FTC competition comment jointly submitted by EFF and Authors Alliance https://www.eff.org/files/2025/06/05/ftc_competition_comment_jointly_submitted_by_eff_and_authorsalliance.pdf McMansion Hell urges all New Yorkers to Rank Zohran Mamdani #1 for Mayor of NYC https://mcmansionhell.com/post/786540193484341248/mcmansion-hell-urges-all-new-yorkers-to-rank Arbitration Information https://arbitrationinformation.org/docs/problems/ Apple to Australians: You’re Too Stupid to Choose Your Own Apps https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2025/06/apple-australians-youre-too-stupid-choose-your-own-apps Steps towards an Ecology for the Internet https://arxiv.org/html/2506.06469v1 Object permanence (permalink) #20yrsago Canada’s DMCA introduced https://web.archive.org/web/20051027190726/http://www.michaelgeist.ca/home.php?blog_disp_vars=days&blog_date=20050620&day=20&month=06&year=2005&blog_arch=2&v=99 #20yrsago Dead online game resurrected by dumpster-diving its servers https://games.slashdot.org/story/05/06/21/0133233/classic-mmog-raised-from-the-dead-by-past-players #15yrsago Mickey Mouse, amphetamine shill https://www.erowid.org/library/books_online/mickey_mouse_medicine_man/mickey_mouse_medicine_man.shtml #15yrsago Economic reality versus ideology: spending cuts and recovery https://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/18/opinion/18krugman.html #10yrsago UK High Court’s insane ruling: ripping CDs is illegal again https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2015/06/european-copyright-madness-court-strikes-down-law-allowing-users-rip-their-own-cds #10yrsago Schneier: China and Russia probably did get the Snowden leaks — by hacking the NSA https://www.wired.com/2015/06/course-china-russia-snowden-documents/ #10yrsago The snitch in your pocket: making sense of Stingrays https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/notetoself/episodes/stingray-conspiracy-theory-daniel-rigmaiden-radiolab #5yrsago Juneteenth in the Internet Archive https://pluralistic.net/2020/06/20/everybody-knows/#juneteenth #5yrsago "Longshot" NYPD surveillance transparency law passes https://pluralistic.net/2020/06/20/everybody-knows/#Quis-custodiet-ipsos-custodes #5yrsago Everybody Knows https://pluralistic.net/2020/06/20/everybody-knows/#slicey-boi #1yrago How to design a tech regulation https://pluralistic.net/2024/06/20/scalesplaining/#administratability Upcoming appearances (permalink) London: How To Academy with Riley Quinn, Jul 1 https://howtoacademy.com/events/cory-doctorow-the-fight-against-the-big-tech-oligarchy/ Manchester: Picks and Shovels at Blackwell's Bookshop, Jul 2 https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/an-evening-with-cory-doctorow-tickets-1308451968059 Manchester: Co-operatives UK Co-op Congress keynote, Jul 4 https://www.uk.coop/events-and-training/events-calendar/co-op-congress-2025-book-your-place Virtual: ORG at 20: in conversation with Maria Farrell, Jul 16 https://www.openrightsgroup.org/events/org-at-20-cory-doctorow-in-conversation-with-maria-farrell/ 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 Recent appearances (permalink) Democrats Abroad https://creators.spotify.com/pod/profile/demsabroadca/episodes/Cory-Doctorow-on-Enshittification-e34blmg/a-ac0jn7i FediForum Keynote https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7_Gs1t0qe78 Science Fiction is EXPOSING Scams and AI Dystopia (Bad Faith) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SlrKlp_Iiko 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 "Attack Surface": The third Little Brother novel, a standalone technothriller for adults. The Washington Post called it "a political cyberthriller, vigorous, bold and savvy about the limits of revolution and resistance." "How to Destroy Surveillance Capitalism": an anti-monopoly pamphlet analyzing the true harms of surveillance capitalism and proposing a solution. https://onezero.medium.com/how-to-destroy-surveillance-capitalism-8135e6744d59?sk=f6cd10e54e20a07d4c6d0f3ac011af6b) "Little Brother/Homeland": A reissue omnibus edition with a new introduction by Edward Snowden: https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250774583. "Poesy the Monster Slayer" a picture book about monsters, bedtime, gender, and kicking ass. Order here: https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781626723627. Upcoming books (permalink) Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It, Farrar, Straus, Giroux, October 7 2025 https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374619329/enshittification/ Unauthorized Bread: a middle-grades graphic novel adapted from my novella about refugees, toasters and DRM, FirstSecond, 2026 Enshittification, Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It (the graphic novel), Firstsecond, 2026 The Memex Method, Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2026 Colophon (permalink) Today's top sources: Currently writing: Enshittification: a nonfiction book about platform decay for Farrar, Straus, Giroux. Status: second pass edit underway (readaloud) A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING This work – excluding any serialized fiction – is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license. That means you can use it any way you like, including commercially, provided that you attribute it to me, Cory Doctorow, and include a link to pluralistic.net. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ Quotations and images are not included in this license; they are included either under a limitation or exception to copyright, or on the basis of a separate license. Please exercise caution. How to get Pluralistic: Blog (no ads, tracking, or data-collection): Pluralistic.net Newsletter (no ads, tracking, or data-collection): https://pluralistic.net/plura-list Mastodon (no ads, tracking, or data-collection): https://mamot.fr/@pluralistic Medium (no ads, paywalled): https://doctorow.medium.com/ Twitter (mass-scale, unrestricted, third-party surveillance and advertising): https://twitter.com/doctorow Tumblr (mass-scale, unrestricted, third-party surveillance and advertising): https://mostlysignssomeportents.tumblr.com/tagged/pluralistic "When life gives you SARS, you make sarsaparilla" -Joey "Accordion Guy" DeVilla READ CAREFULLY: By reading this, you agree, on behalf of your employer, to release me from all obligations and waivers arising from any and all NON-NEGOTIATED agreements, licenses, terms-of-service, shrinkwrap, clickwrap, browsewrap, confidentiality, non-disclosure, non-compete and acceptable use policies ("BOGUS AGREEMENTS") that I have entered into with your employer, its partners, licensors, agents and assigns, in perpetuity, without prejudice to my ongoing rights and privileges. You further represent that you have the authority to release me from any BOGUS AGREEMENTS on behalf of your employer. ISSN: 3066-764X

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Pluralistic: The Immortal Choir Holds Every Voice (18 Jun 2025) Today's links The Immortal Choir Holds Every Voice: Anarchists, cryptids and haints (oh my). Hey look at this: Delights to delectate. Object permanence: 2010, 2015, 2020, 2024 Upcoming appearances: Where to find me. Recent appearances: Where I've been. Latest books: You keep readin' em, I'll keep writin' 'em. Upcoming books: Like I said, I'll keep writin' 'em. Colophon: All the rest. The Immortal Choir Holds Every Voice (permalink) Margaret Killjoy writes fantasy stories of relentless tension, boundless wonder, thrilling adventure…and completely radical, unflinching anarchist politics. Her 2024 YA novel "The Sapling Cage" is a queer coming-of-age epic that motors with all the narrative energy of a genderbent Conan epic: https://pluralistic.net/2024/09/24/daughters-of-the-empty-throne/#witchy Today, Strangers In a Tangled Wilderness Press publishes The Immortal Choir Holds Every Voice, a collection of three linked short stories set in Killjoy's celebrated Danielle Cain series, which Alan Moore called "ideal reading for a post-truth world": https://www.tangledwilderness.org/shop/p/the-immortal-choir-holds-every-voice Danielle Cain is a freight-train-hopping, anarcho-queer hero whose adventures are shared by solidaristic crews of spellcasting, cryptid-battling crustypunk freaks and street-fighters. In Immortal Choir, the action opens with Danielle and a motley band around a campfire in a dark Idaho woods, surrounded by the night-screams of some distant demonic presence. It's Samhain, and the veil between the realm of the living and the dead is as thin as it gets. Bad things are stalking the night. To save themselves, they must court their own dead, welcoming them to their circle. They pile a camp-plate high with food for the dead to eat, build the fire up, and begin the tell the stories of their dead comrades, summoning them as a defense against the monstrous forces that stalk the All Saints night. This is the setup for the three linked short stories that make up this short book. This is a great setup: a group of endangered comrades, huddled together against the darkness without, telling tales to buoy up their bravery. It's the framing device that makes The Decameron an enduring classic after 800 years and counting. In Killjoy's hands, it sings. The first story is "The Troll King's Court," a ghost story about a Norwegian troll cult that came to America in a failed Manhattan-Adjacent Project to create a mystical superweapon with which to win WWII. It's ultimately a story about how the competent people who have their shit together in our lives are just as broken as the rest of us, and about the many ways that release, fulfillment and actualization can take place. It's spooky as fuck. The middle story is "The Fairies of the Spring," which summons up the old, mean roots of the Fair Folk, the cruelty behind their beauty and merry laughter. Pratchett did one of these (Lords and Ladies), and so have many others – but no one's done it where the resistance comes from a motley band of queer punk club-owners in a rural town, who team up with local shitkickers to hunt the elves and banish them to their realm. The final tale is "The Battle of Miami," a story about a streetfighting anti-globalist battle. It's a tale of Black Bloc tactics and true queer love, that lights up with joy. Killjoy's really onto something with this series. She's tapping into the deep roots of fantasy – maybe the socialist parables woven into William Morris's stories. She's also connecting with the roots of urban fantasy (I was delighted to see a reference to Terri Windling's superb, absolutely amazing Borderland series). These three tales stand alone, so there's no need to read the previous volumes before diving into this one. But you should read the other two, because they're great: The Lamb Will Slaughter the Lion (2017): https://reactormag.com/excerpts-margaret-killjoy-the-lamb-will-slaughter-the-lion/ The Barrow Will Send What It May: (2018): https://reactormag.com/excerpts-the-barrow-will-send-what-it-may-margaret-killjoy/ Hey look at this (permalink) Chubby Cable https://chubbycable.com/collections/chubby-cable Why I Became a Crypto Shill https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eDsSg-Xm1ms Russian edition of "Attack Surface" https://mamot.fr/@pluralistic/114636648703596013 Object permanence (permalink) #15yrsago Canadian copyright astroturf site gives marching orders to its users https://www.michaelgeist.ca/2010/06/astroturf-campaign-mandatory-letter/ #10yrsago Corbis will cheerfully charge you up the wazoo for public domain images https://www.pcmag.com/opinions/stock-photos-will-drive-photoshop-use-into-the-ground #10yrsago Privacy activists mass-quit U.S. government committee on facial recognition privacy https://theintercept.com/2015/06/16/privacy-advocates-resign-protest-u-s-facial-recognition-code-conduct-2/ #10yrsago FCC fines AT&T $100M for throttling “unlimited” customers https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2015/06/17/att-just-got-hit-with-a-100-million-fine-after-slowing-down-its-unlimited-data/?utm_content=buffere69ad&utm_medium=social&utm_source=twitter.com&utm_campaign=buffer #10yrsago Seattle’s tent cities https://grist.org/cities/tent-cities-seattles-unique-approach-to-homelessness/ #5yrsago This is the EU's interoperability moment https://pluralistic.net/2020/06/18/digital-services-act/#interop #5yrsago Sterilizer company vs Right to Repair https://pluralistic.net/2020/06/18/digital-services-act/#steris #1yrago It's been twenty years since my Microsoft DRM talk https://pluralistic.net/2024/06/18/greetings-fellow-pirates/#arrrrrrrrrr Upcoming appearances (permalink) PDX: Teardown 2025, Jun 20-22 https://www.crowdsupply.com/teardown/portland-2025 PDX: Picks and Shovels with bunnie Huang at Barnes and Noble, Jun 20 https://stores.barnesandnoble.com/event/9780062183697-0 Tualatin Public Library, Jun 22: https://www.tualatinoregon.gov/library/author-talk-cory-doctorow London: How To Academy with Riley Quinn, Jul 1 https://howtoacademy.com/events/cory-doctorow-the-fight-against-the-big-tech-oligarchy/ Manchester: Picks and Shovels at Blackwell's Bookshop, Jul 2 https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/an-evening-with-cory-doctorow-tickets-1308451968059 Manchester: Co-operatives UK Co-op Congress keynote, Jul 4 https://www.uk.coop/events-and-training/events-calendar/co-op-congress-2025-book-your-place Virtual: ORG at 20: in conversation with Maria Farrell, Jul 16 https://www.openrightsgroup.org/events/org-at-20-cory-doctorow-in-conversation-with-maria-farrell/ DC: Enshittification at Politics and Prose, Oct 10 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 Recent appearances (permalink) FediForum Keynote https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7_Gs1t0qe78 Science Fiction is EXPOSING Scams and AI Dystopia (Bad Faith) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SlrKlp_Iiko The Rideshare Guy https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iKeoCxJWVVE Latest books (permalink) Picks and Shovels: a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about the heroic era of the PC, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), February 2025 (https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250865908/picksandshovels). The Bezzle: a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about prison-tech and other grifts, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), February 2024 (the-bezzle.org). Signed, personalized copies at Dark Delicacies (https://www.darkdel.com/store/p3062/Available_Feb_20th%3A_The_Bezzle_HB.html#/). "The Lost Cause:" a solarpunk novel of hope in the climate emergency, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), November 2023 (http://lost-cause.org). Signed, personalized copies at Dark Delicacies (https://www.darkdel.com/store/p3007/Pre-Order_Signed_Copies%3A_The_Lost_Cause_HB.html#/) "The Internet Con": A nonfiction book about interoperability and Big Tech (Verso) September 2023 (http://seizethemeansofcomputation.org). Signed copies at Book Soup (https://www.booksoup.com/book/9781804291245). "Red Team Blues": "A grabby, compulsive thriller that will leave you knowing more about how the world works than you did before." Tor Books http://redteamblues.com. Signed copies at Dark Delicacies (US): and Forbidden Planet (UK): https://forbiddenplanet.com/385004-red-team-blues-signed-edition-hardcover/. "Chokepoint Capitalism: How to Beat Big Tech, Tame Big Content, and Get Artists Paid, with Rebecca Giblin", on how to unrig the markets for creative labor, Beacon Press/Scribe 2022 https://chokepointcapitalism.com "Attack Surface": The third Little Brother novel, a standalone technothriller for adults. The Washington Post called it "a political cyberthriller, vigorous, bold and savvy about the limits of revolution and resistance." Order signed, personalized copies from Dark Delicacies https://www.darkdel.com/store/p1840/Available_Now%3A_Attack_Surface.html "How to Destroy Surveillance Capitalism": an anti-monopoly pamphlet analyzing the true harms of surveillance capitalism and proposing a solution. https://onezero.medium.com/how-to-destroy-surveillance-capitalism-8135e6744d59?sk=f6cd10e54e20a07d4c6d0f3ac011af6b) (signed copies: https://www.darkdel.com/store/p2024/Available_Now%3A__How_to_Destroy_Surveillance_Capitalism.html) "Little Brother/Homeland": A reissue omnibus edition with a new introduction by Edward Snowden: https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250774583; personalized/signed copies here: https://www.darkdel.com/store/p1750/July%3A__Little_Brother_%26_Homeland.html "Poesy the Monster Slayer" a picture book about monsters, bedtime, gender, and kicking ass. Order here: https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781626723627. Get a personalized, signed copy here: https://www.darkdel.com/store/p2682/Corey_Doctorow%3A_Poesy_the_Monster_Slayer_HB.html#/. Upcoming books (permalink) Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It, Farrar, Straus, Giroux, October 7 2025 https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374619329/enshittification/ Unauthorized Bread: a middle-grades graphic novel adapted from my novella about refugees, toasters and DRM, FirstSecond, 2026 Enshittification, Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It (the graphic novel), Firstsecond, 2026 The Memex Method, Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2026 Colophon (permalink) Today's top sources: Currently writing: Enshittification: a nonfiction book about platform decay for Farrar, Straus, Giroux. Status: second pass edit underway (readaloud) A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING This work – excluding any serialized fiction – is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license. That means you can use it any way you like, including commercially, provided that you attribute it to me, Cory Doctorow, and include a link to pluralistic.net. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ Quotations and images are not included in this license; they are included either under a limitation or exception to copyright, or on the basis of a separate license. Please exercise caution. How to get Pluralistic: Blog (no ads, tracking, or data-collection): Pluralistic.net Newsletter (no ads, tracking, or data-collection): https://pluralistic.net/plura-list Mastodon (no ads, tracking, or data-collection): https://mamot.fr/@pluralistic Medium (no ads, paywalled): https://doctorow.medium.com/ Twitter (mass-scale, unrestricted, third-party surveillance and advertising): https://twitter.com/doctorow Tumblr (mass-scale, unrestricted, third-party surveillance and advertising): https://mostlysignssomeportents.tumblr.com/tagged/pluralistic "When life gives you SARS, you make sarsaparilla" -Joey "Accordion Guy" DeVilla READ CAREFULLY: By reading this, you agree, on behalf of your employer, to release me from all obligations and waivers arising from any and all NON-NEGOTIATED agreements, licenses, terms-of-service, shrinkwrap, clickwrap, browsewrap, confidentiality, non-disclosure, non-compete and acceptable use policies ("BOGUS AGREEMENTS") that I have entered into with your employer, its partners, licensors, agents and assigns, in perpetuity, without prejudice to my ongoing rights and privileges. You further represent that you have the authority to release me from any BOGUS AGREEMENTS on behalf of your employer. ISSN: 3066-764X

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