Cory Doctorow

By Cory Doctorow (GPG 0xBF3D9110957E5F4C)
doctorow (npub1hs3…585k).

Archived at pluralistic.net

I post long threads. If you don't like these in your timeline but want to read them, I suggest unfollowing me here and subscribing to my RSS, or my newsletter, or any of my various long-form feeds. Links at https://pluralistic.net.

Books: https://craphound.com
Blog: https://pluralistic.net
Podcast: https://craphound.com/podcast/
Kickstarter: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/doctorow/picks-and-shovels-marty-hench-at-the-dawn-of-enshittification

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Last Notes

2026-05-25 10:13:36 CEST

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My latest novel is "Picks and Shovels," a historical technothriller set in the Weird Era of the PC, about Ponzi schemes, techbros, and the dawn of enshittification:
https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250865908/picksandshovels
--
My latest nonfiction book is the internationally bestselling "Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It," from MCD/Farrar, Straus and Giroux:
https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374619329/enshittification/
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2026-05-25 10:13:26 CEST

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Thursday's threads: Shopping isn't politics; and more!
https://mamot.fr/@pluralistic/116613307220142174
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2026-05-25 10:13:11 CEST

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#5yrsago Consent theater https://pluralistic.net/2021/05/20/consent-theater/
#5yrsago Debunking the arguments for vaccine apartheid https://pluralistic.net/2021/05/21/wait-your-turn/#vaccine-apartheid
#5yrsago How the filibuster dies https://pluralistic.net/2021/05/22/not-with-a-bang/#theory-of-change
#1yrago Strange Bedfellows and Long Knives https://pluralistic.net/2025/05/21/et-tu-sloppy-steve/#fractured-fairytales
#1yrago The meritocracy to eugenics pipeline https://pluralistic.net/2025/05/20/big-cornflakes-energy/#caliper-pilled
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2026-05-05 16:08:28 CEST

Dawkins extending more humanity to a language model than he does toward Muslims or trans people is hardly a surprise based on his personal and political views. https://flux.community/matthew-sheffield/2026/05/richard-dawkins-and-the-claude-delusion/

2026-04-13 07:37:11 CEST

I'm worried about AI psychosis. Specifically, I'm worried about the psychosis that makes "capital allocators" spend *$1.4T* on the money-losingest technology in human history, in pursuit of a bizarre fantasy that if we teach the word-guessing program enough words, it will take all the jobs.
--
If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
https://pluralistic.net/2026/04/13/always-great/#our-nhs
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2026-04-08 16:27:22 CEST

Today's threads (a thread)
Inside: Process knowledge; and more!
Archived at: https://pluralistic.net/2026/04/08/process-knowledge-vs-bosses/
#Pluralistic
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2026-04-02 12:32:37 CEST

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It's *great* that Claude Code's source is online. It's *great* that we have the ability to pore over, analyze and criticize this code, which has become so consequential in so many ways. It's *great* the copyright is weak enough that this is possible (for now).
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2026-04-02 12:32:28 CEST

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Copyright positions the creative worker as a small business - an LLC with an MFA - bargaining B2B with another firm. To the extent that copyright helps us, it is largely incidental. Sure, we were able to file for a few thousand bucks per book that Anthropic downloaded from a pirate site to train its models on. But Anthropic doesn't have to use a shadow library to get those books - it can just pay our bosses to get them.
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2026-04-02 12:32:14 CEST

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If we creative workers are going to pour our resources into a new policy to address the threats that our bosses - and the AI companies they are morally and temperamentally indistinguishable from - represent to our livelihoods, then let that new policy be a renewed sectoral bargaining right for *every* worker. It was sectoral bargaining (a collective, solidaristic right) and not copyright (an individual, commercial right) that saw off AI in the Hollywood writers' strike.
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2026-04-02 12:31:51 CEST

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These goals are *entirely compatible with copyright*. The *New York Times* is suing over AI - and they're licensing their writers' words to train an AI model:
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/29/business/media/new-york-times-amazon-ai-licensing.html
The *NYT* wants more copyright. You know what the *NYT* *doesn't* want? More *labor* rights. The *NYT* are vicious union-busters:
https://actionnetwork.org/letters/new-york-times-stop-union-busting
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2026-04-02 12:31:04 CEST

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If the media bosses get their way, and manage to make it even more illegal - and practically harder - to host, discuss, and publish facts about copyrighted works, then leaks like the Claude Code disclosures will never see the light of day. It's only because of decades of hard-fought battles to push back on this nonsense that we are able to identify and learn about the defects in Claude Code that are revealed by this source-code leak.
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2026-04-02 12:29:49 CEST

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The Claude Code leak is full of fascinating information about a tool that - like Diebold's voting machines - is at the very center of the most important policy debates of our time. Here's just one example: Claude is almost certainly implicated in the US missile that murdered a building full of little girls in Iran last month:
https://www.theguardian.com/news/2026/mar/26/ai-got-the-blame-for-the-iran-school-bombing-the-truth-is-far-more-worrying
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2026-04-02 12:29:36 CEST

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If these companies manage to get copyright law expanded to restrict scraping, analysis, and publication of factual information, they won't use those new powers to increase creators' pay - they'll use them the same way they've used *every* new copyright created in the past 40 years, to make themselves richer at the expense of artists:
https://pluralistic.net/2020/03/03/just-a-stick/#authorsbargain
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2026-04-02 12:29:18 CEST

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Disney takes the position that when it buys a company like Lucasfilm, it secures the right to publish the works Lucasfilm commissioned, but not the obligation to pay the royalties that Lucasfilm owes when those works are sold:
https://pluralistic.net/2022/04/30/disney-still-must-pay/#pay-the-writer
As Theresa Nielsen Hayden quipped during the Napster Wars: "Just because you're on their side, it doesn't mean they're on your side."
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2026-04-02 12:28:53 CEST

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It's clear that the media companies that have sued the AI giants aren't "anti-AI." They don't want to prevent AI from replacing creative workers - they just want to control how that happens.
When Disney and Universal sue Midjourney, it's not to prevent AI models from being trained on their catalogs and used to pauperize the workers whose work is in those catalogs.
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2026-04-02 12:28:39 CEST

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They claim that making a transient copy of a work, analyzing that work, and publishing that analysis is a copyright infringement:
https://pluralistic.net/2023/02/09/ai-monkeys-paw/#bullied-schoolkids
Here's a good rule of thumb: any time your boss demands a new rule, you should be very skeptical about whether that rule will benefit *you*.
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2026-04-02 12:28:20 CEST

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They struck for the right not to have their wages eroded by AI - to have the right to use (or not use) AI, as they saw fit, without risking their livelihoods.
Right now, many media companies are demanding a new copyright that would allow them to control AI training, and many creative workers have joined in this call. The media companies aren't arguing against infringing *uses* of AI models - they're arguing that the mere *creation* of such a model infringes copyright.
30/

2026-04-02 12:28:04 CEST

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Two years later, the Hollywood Writers struck again, this time over AI in the writers' room, securing a *stunning* victory over the major studios:
https://pluralistic.net/2023/10/01/how-the-writers-guild-sunk-ais-ship/
Notably, the writers strike was a *labor* action, not a copyright action. The writers weren't demanding a new copyright that would allow them to control whether their work could be used to train an AI.
29/

2026-04-02 12:27:54 CEST

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When we wrote about the power of sectoral bargaining, it was in reference to the Writers Guild's incredible triumph over the four giant talent agencies, who'd invented a scam that inverted the traditional revenue split between writer and agent, so the agencies were taking in *90%* and the writers were getting just *10%*:
https://pluralistic.net/2020/08/06/no-vitiated-air/#WME-CAA-next
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2026-04-02 12:27:30 CEST

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The first half of *Chokepoint Capitalism* is a series of case studies that dissect the frauds and scams that both media and tech companies use to steal from creative workers. The second half are a series of "shovel-ready" policy proposals for new laws and rules that would actually put money in artists' pockets. Some of these policy prescriptions are copyright-related, but not all of them.
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2026-04-02 12:27:01 CEST

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After two of these copystrikes are accepted and the performer is just one strike away from losing their livelihood, the fraudster contacts the performer and demands blackmail money to rescind the complaints, threatening to file that final strike and put the performer out of business:
https://pluralistic.net/2021/05/08/copyfraud/#beethoven-just-wrote-music
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2026-04-02 12:26:39 CEST

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However, there *is* a large cohort of criminals and fraudsters who have mastered Content ID and they use it to blackmail independent artists. You see, Content ID implements a "three strikes" policy: if you are accused of three acts of copyright infringement, Youtube permanently deletes your videos and bars you from the platform.
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2026-04-02 12:26:19 CEST

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(This was extremely funny, because Viacom admitted in court that its marketing departments would "rough up" clips of its programming and upload them to Youtube, making them appear to be pirate copies, in a bid to interest Youtube users in Viacom's shows, and sometimes Viacom's lawyers would get confused and send threatening letters to Youtube demanding that these be removed:)
https://blog.youtube/news-and-events/broadcast-yourself/
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2026-04-02 12:25:58 CEST

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Viacom didn't want a *takedown* system, they wanted a *staydown* system, whereby they could supply Google with a list of the works whose copyrights they controlled and then Youtube would prevent *anyone* from uploading those works.
18/

2026-04-02 12:25:49 CEST

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After Viacom sued Youtube in 2007 over copyright infringement, Google launched its own in-house copyright management system, meant to address Viacom's principal grievance in the suit. Viacom was angry that after they had something removed from Youtube, another user could re-upload it, and they'd have to send another takedown, playing Wack-a-Mole with the whole internet.
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2026-04-02 12:24:50 CEST

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There's a whole industry of shady "reputation management" companies that collect large sums in exchange for scrubbing the internet of information their clients want removed from the public eye. They specialize in sexual abusers, war criminals, torturers, and fraudsters, and their weapon of choice is the takedown notice. Jeffrey Epstein spent tens of thousands of dollars on "reputation management" services to clean up his online profile:
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/03/18/business/media/jeffrey-epstein-online.html
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2026-04-02 12:24:41 CEST

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Diebold sent *thousands* of DMCA 512 takedown notices in an attempt to suppress the leaked memos. Eventually, EFF stepped in to provide pro-bono counsel to the Online Policy Group and ended Diebold's flood:
https://www.eff.org/cases/online-policy-group-v-diebold
Diebold wasn't the last company to figure out how to abuse copyright to censor information of high public interest.
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2026-04-02 12:24:30 CEST

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The company knew its voting machines were defective, that they frequently crashed and lost their vote counts on election night, and that Diebold technicians were colluding with local electoral officials to secretly "estimate" the lost vote totals so that no one would hold either the official or Diebold responsible for these defective machines:
https://www.salon.com/2003/09/23/bev_harris/
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2026-04-02 12:21:59 CEST

Anthropic's developers made an extremely basic configuration error, and as a result, the source-code for Claude Code - the company's flagship coding assistant product - has leaked and is being eagerly analyzed by many parties:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47586778
--
If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
https://pluralistic.net/2026/04/02/limited-monopoly/#petardism
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2026-04-02 07:08:12 CEST

Mama don't allow no bell ringing round here
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2026-03-30 19:36:04 CEST

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For these people, cheating is just bargaining by another means. They embrace bizarre concepts like "revealed preferences," the idea that if you *say* you're dissatisfied with a bargain, but you accept it anyway, you have a "revealed preference" for the deal. In other words, if someone sells their kidney to Sheryl Sandberg in order to make the rent, they have a "revealed preference" for having only one kidney.
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2026-03-30 19:34:24 CEST

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That doesn't just make them bearable as human beings, it also makes them better at their jobs. There's an old pal with whom I've done some creative work, and at one point I needed to pay them for their part in a project.
13/

2026-03-30 19:33:52 CEST

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They're competitive as hell, they love to bargain hard, but they understand that they're playing an iterated game, and if they crush the publishers' representatives they're up against, then they'll ruin *my* good name.
More: when the bargaining's done and we're having a nice chat about everyday things, or getting together for dinner, they're not *on*. They're just normal, not wrestling over every detail. Bargaining is what they *do*, it's not who they *are*.
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2026-03-30 19:33:19 CEST

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Many's the time I've gotten on a video call with my agents after they've concluded a successful deal and they're *glowing*. Call it what you will: cognitive diversity, emotional diversity, neurodiversity...my agents and I have it, and it's good for all of us.
And here's the thing that makes these world-class hagglers great: *they can switch it off*.
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2026-03-30 19:33:05 CEST

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I love these folks, partly because the better they are at their jobs, the easier it is for me to pay my mortgage, but *especially* because they really enjoy doing things I *hate* doing: a) asking for money, and; b) haggling.
For me, haggling is (at best) embarrassing. At worst, it's humiliating. It's *always* exhausting. But for my agents, it's *invigorating*.
10/

2026-03-30 19:32:30 CEST

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This happens cognitively, too. Pretty much anyone can track their expenses from a work trip, but the company bookkeeper needs to have a certain "head for figures" that lets them do this all day long, for *everyone's* expenses, so we limit the kinds of bookkeeping we ask normies to do, and reserve the heavy lifting for specialists.
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2026-03-30 19:32:20 CEST

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Cyberneticians and systems designers understand that their job is *partly* to design a set of controls that are as complex as the system they modulate, and *partly* to simplify that system to make it possible to control. Think of how you can make a database search run faster by confining it to one field in records from the past year, or how you can hold down the shift key to constrain a rectangular selection tool so it draws perfect squares.
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2026-03-30 19:32:00 CEST

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This is great. As a couple, we make up for one another's deficits and complement one another's strengths. Obviously, this is also true as a species: we all like doing different stuff in different ways, and that's good, because there is a lot of *stuff* to do, and it's pretty damned heterogenous. A complex, dynamic world demands a complex, dynamic response.
4/

2026-03-17 16:28:50 CET

Today's threads (a thread)
Inside: William Gibson vs Margaret Thatcher; and more!
Archived at: https://pluralistic.net/2026/03/17/technopolitics/
#Pluralistic
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2026-03-14 16:16:52 CET

An amazing thing happened this week: a whopping bipartisan Senate majority (89:10!) passed Elizabeth Warren's housing bill, which severely limits private equity companies' ability to buy single-family homes to turn into rental properties:
https://prospect.org/2026/03/13/elizabeth-warrens-amazingly-progressive-housing-bill/
--
If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
https://pluralistic.net/2026/03/14/ill-have-what-xis-having/#binge-and-purge
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2026-03-13 04:03:27 CET

Today's threads (a thread)
Inside: Three more AI psychoses; and more!
Archived at: https://pluralistic.net/2026/03/12/normal-technology/
#Pluralistic
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2026-03-13 03:33:47 CET

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We don't have to burnish their reputations by elevating them to the status of archdemons who taint everything they touch with unwashable sin. Sam Altman isn't Lex Luthor. He's just a conman:
https://open.substack.com/pub/garymarcus/p/breaking-sam-altmans-greed-and-dishonesty?r=8tdk6&utm_medium=ios
The fact that these bros are just normal assholes means that we don't have to treat everything they do as a sin. Scraping the entirety of human knowledge to make something new out of it isn't "stealing."
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2026-03-13 03:33:18 CET

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AI is just normal. The bubble is what drives the environmental costs. If the only LLMs were a couple big data-centers at Sandia National Labs, no one would be particularly exercised about the water and energy demands they represented. Big scientific endeavors - from NASA launches to the large Hadron Collider - often come with immense material and energy needs. The bubble causes massive, wasteful, duplicative efforts that chase diminishing returns through farcical scale.
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2026-03-13 03:33:11 CET

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It's only the belief that AI is *exceptional* - exceptionally wicked, but exceptional nevertheless - that leads critics to decide that they are a better judge of whether a skilled worker should or should not use certain automation tools, and to make that judgment not based on the quality of the work in question, but on the moral character of the tool itself.
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2026-03-13 03:33:00 CET

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A skilled, centaur-configured programmer learns from experience which automation tools they should trust, and under which circumstances, and guides themselves accordingly.
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2026-03-13 03:32:41 CET

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It is *nuts* to deny the experiences these people are having. They're not vibe-coding mission-critical AWS modules. They're not generating tech debt at scale:
https://pluralistic.net/2026/01/06/1000x-liability/#graceful-failure-modes
They're just adding another automation tool to a highly automated practice, and using it when it makes sense. Perhaps they won't always choose wisely, but that's normal too. There's plenty of ways that pre-AI automation tools for software development led programmers astray.
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2026-03-13 03:32:06 CET

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This is an extremely *normal* tech situation: for a new technology to be promoted and productized by shitty people who have grandiose goals that would be apocalyptic should they ever come to pass - and for some people to find uses of that technology that are nevertheless beneficial to them and their communities.
The belief that AI is an exceptionally bad *technology* (as opposed to an exceptionally bad *economic bubble*) drives AI critics into their own absurd *culs-de-sac*.
53/

2026-03-13 03:31:45 CET

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Others' choices that seem unwise to you might have perfectly good explanations that aren't visible from your perspective. Ultimately, the world is a better place where workers get to decide which parts of their jobs they want to automate and which parts they want to lean into.
52/

2026-03-13 03:31:23 CET

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Nor is this to say that when workers get to decide when and how to use technology, we will always make wise decisions. Perhaps the hobbyist who opts for an automated soldering machine will lose out on the opportunity to refine their hand-eye coordination in ways that will have many other benefits to their practice.
Or perhaps attempting to improve their hand-eye coordination to that point will wreck so many projects that they grow discouraged and give up altogether.
51/

2026-03-13 03:31:15 CET

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Reverse centaurs are trapped in capital's automation plan - to make everything faster and cheaper. But that's the result of *bosses*. It's not the result of *technology*.
This is not to say that technology is apolitical. Only a fool would imagine that there are no politics embedded in technology. But you'd be a far greater fool if you asserted that the politics of a technology were *simple*, *clear*, and *immutable*.
50/

2026-03-13 03:31:07 CET

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The boss want to achieve *corporate* goals, to "sweat the assets," making maximum use of the soldering machines. The pace at which the line runs is set to be the maximum that the workers can match. The workers on the line are "reverse centaurs" - humans who are pressed into service as peripherals for machines, at a pace that is constantly at the very limit of their endurance.
49/

2026-03-13 03:30:57 CET

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Think of a hobbyist who pines for an automated soldering machine. That hobbyist longs to make board-level repairs and modifications that require precision that humans struggle to match. The hobbyist is a centaur, using a machine to help achieve human goals.
Now think of a factory owner who invests in an assembly line of the same machines: that boss wants to fire a bunch of workers and make the survivors of the purge take up the slack.
48/

2026-03-13 03:30:48 CET

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Automation comes in two flavors: there's automation that produces things *more quickly* (and hence more cheaply), and there's automation that makes *better* things. Generally, capital prefers to use automation to increase the pace at which things are made, while workers prefer to use automation to improve the quality of the things they make.
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2026-03-13 03:30:22 CET

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Their utility is a function of what they *do*, not who made them or how they were sold. The *utility* of AI products is based on whether people find ways to use them that make them happy - not whether the people who made those technologies are good people, or whether the funding for the technology was fraudulent, or whether other people use the technology to harm others.
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2026-03-13 03:30:15 CET

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It's not exceptional for these companies to lie about their products, bankrupt naive investors through stock swindles, and pitch themselves to investors as a way for capital to win the class war.
*None of this means that AI companies are good*, it just means that they are not *exceptional*. And because they aren't exceptional, the same dynamics that govern other technologies apply to AI companies' products.
45/

2026-03-11 22:13:45 CET

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I'm also on Bluesky. Read today's thread there at:
https://bsky.app/profile/doctorow.pluralistic.net/post/3mgsrwpi2fc2v
eof/

2026-03-11 22:12:48 CET

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Upcoming appearances:
* #Barcelona: Enshittification with Simona Levi/Xnet (Llibreria Finestres), Mar 20
https://www.llibreriafinestres.com/evento/cory-doctorow/
* #Berkeley: Bioneers keynote, Mar 27
https://conference.bioneers.org/
* #Montreal: Bronfman Lecture (McGill) Apr 10
https://www.eventbrite.ca/e/artificial-intelligence-the-ultimate-disrupter-tickets-1982706623885
* #London: Resisting Big Tech Empires (LSBU)
https://www.tickettailor.com/events/globaljusticenow/2042691
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2026-03-03 19:30:30 CET

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This is one of the rare instances in which a bad case made *good* law. Thaler's case wasn't even close - it was an absolute loser from the jump. Normally, plaintiffs give up after being shot down by an agency like the Copyright Office or by a lower court. But not Thaler - he stuck with it all the way to the highest court in the land, bringing clarity to an issue that might have otherwise remained blurry and ill-defined for years.
12/

2026-02-28 07:19:52 CET

One thing we know about the mass tech layoffs attributed to "AI" is that they follow a trend of mass tech layoffs that firms were formerly forced to admit were the result of their businesses contracting sharply after the lockdowns ended, when users didn't need nearly so many cloud services. By blaming the continuing layoffs on "AI," companies whose business continues to contract can tell investors that they are on the bleeding edge, not the contracting tail.
1/

2026-02-26 12:03:25 CET

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The fear of harsh retaliation for any country that dares to be a Disenshittification Nation is based on the premise that Trump is motivated by a commitment to *fairness*. He's not: Trump is motivated by a desire to *dominate*. Anything that threatens the dominance of the companies that take his orders is fair game, and he will retaliate in any way he can.
eof/

2026-02-20 13:19:09 CET

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Well, I did write a group-blog for 19 years before that!

2026-02-20 13:18:48 CET

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No one profits from you running an OSS model on your own computer.

2026-02-19 15:15:11 CET

Six years ago today, after 19 years with Boing Boing, during which time I wrote tens of thousands of blog posts, I started a new, solo blog, with the semi-ironic name "Pluralistic."
--
If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
https://pluralistic.net/2026/02/18/now-we-are-six/#stock-buyback
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2026-02-10 13:48:25 CET

America's descent into authoritarian fascism is made all the more alarming and demoralizing by the Democrats' total failure to rise to the moment:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KADW3ZRZLVI
--
If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
https://pluralistic.net/2026/02/10/miller-in-the-dock/#denazification
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2026-02-07 17:18:42 CET

Solidarity with Comrade Bill
https://static.mamot.fr/media_attachments/files/116/030/246/305/419/767/original/e80e2827ca7e82af.jpg

2026-02-06 09:47:43 CET

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But then my kid applied to university and was told that she should sign up for FERPA, which is the federal student loan and grant process; she got pretty good grades and there was a chance she could get a couple grand knocked off her tuition. Seemed like a good idea to me.
So we filled in the FERPA paperwork, and partway through, it asks if you are a naturalized citizen, and, if you are, it asks you to upload a copy of your certificate of citizenship.
10/

2026-02-05 14:30:10 CET

Halfway through Thomas Piketty's 2013 barnstorming *Capital in the 21st Century*, he tosses off a little insight that skewered me on the spot and never let go: the notion that a societal condition that endures beyond a generation becomes "eternal" in the popular consciousness:
https://memex.craphound.com/2014/06/24/thomas-pikettys-capital-in-the-21st-century/
--
If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
https://pluralistic.net/2026/02/05/contingency/#this-too-shall-pass
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2026-02-02 18:05:08 CET

Today's threads (a thread)
Inside: Stock swindles; and more!
Archived at: https://pluralistic.net/2026/02/02/corprophagia/
#Pluralistic
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2026-02-02 16:30:16 CET

There's lots of US historical antecedents of Trumpism - fascist movements like Jim Crow, McCarthyism, the gleeful genocide of indigenous people. But when you're thinking about the rise of Trumpism, never forget that America isn't just a nation of cruel bigots; it's also a nation of rich swindlers.
--
If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
https://pluralistic.net/2026/02/02/corprophagia/#that-makes-me-smart
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2026-01-15 21:35:06 CET

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But hope? That's the stuff. Hope's the belief that if we change the world for the better, even by just a *little*, that we will ascend a gradient towards a better future, and as we rise up that curve, new terrain will be revealed to us that we couldn't see from our lower vantage-point. It's not necessary - or even possible - to see a course from here to the world you want to live in. You can get there in stepwise fashion, one beneficial change at a time:
https://pluralistic.net/2021/10/03/hope-not-optimism/
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2026-01-13 18:44:16 CET

Today's threads (a thread)
Inside: Sorry, eh; and more!
Archived at: https://pluralistic.net/2026/01/13/not-sorry/
#Pluralistic
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2026-01-12 17:09:29 CET

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Rather than fostering an alliance with Americans against our common enemy - America's oligarchs and their god-king Trump - Canadians have declared war on all of our American cousins.
Take the decision to eschew delicious American bourbon and switch to Wayne Gretzky's undrinkable rye. Somewhere in a state that begins and ends with a vowel, there is a corn farmer who never did anything to hurt Canada who's suffering as a result of this decision.
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2026-01-08 15:48:14 CET

Any suggestions for a better text editor (not vim/emacs) for Ubuntu than the default Gnome editor? It's got three frustrating dealbreakers for me:
1. Can't turn off syntax highlighting, AND the syntax highlighting is so confusing that it leads to me screwing up.
2. No way to get a wordcount for selection block.
3. Autoscroll sucks, placing cursor at the bottom of the screen, with text below cursor always invisible.

2026-01-07 16:27:07 CET

Today's threads (a thread)
Inside: Writing vs AI; and more!
Archived at: https://pluralistic.net/2026/01/07/delicious-pizza/
#Pluralistic
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2026-01-06 15:57:27 CET

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I'm coming to Colorado! Catch me in #Denver on Jan 22 at The Tattered Cover:
https://www.eventbrite.com/e/cory-doctorow-live-at-tattered-cover-colfax-tickets-1976644174937
And in #ColoradoSprings from Jan 23-25, where I'm the Guest of Honor at COSine:
https://www.firstfridayfandom.org/cosine/
Then I'll be in #Ottawa on Jan 28 at Perfect Books:
https://www.instagram.com/p/DS2nGiHiNUh/
And in #Toronto with Tim Wu on Jan 30:
https://nowtoronto.com/event/cory-doctorow-and-tim-wu-enshittification-and-extraction/
2/

2026-01-06 15:14:41 CET

Code is a liability (not an asset). Tech bosses don't understand this. They think AI is great because it produces 10,000 times more code but that means it's producing 10,000 more liabilities. AI is the asbestos we're shoveling into the walls of our high-tech society:
https://pluralistic.net/2025/09/27/econopocalypse/#subprime-intelligence
--
If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
https://pluralistic.net/2026/01/06/1000x-liability/#graceful-failure-modes
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2025-12-17 14:35:06 CET

People are strange.
I just agreed to speak at a big festival. They invited me by contacting my publicist. I told him I'd do it.
They then sent him (not me) an email with an attached PDF, and asked him to forward it to me, and to instruct me to check page two of the PDF for a link to a Microsoft Form to complete my RSVP.
Surely there is a better way.

2025-12-13 21:40:06 CET

Look, I'm not trying to say that new technologies *never* raise gnarly new legal questions, but what I *am* saying is that a lot of the time, the "new legal challenges" raised by technology are somewhere between 95-100% bullshit, ginned up by none-too-bright tech bros and their investors, and then swallowed by regulators and lawmakers who are either so credulous they'd lose a game of peek-a-boo, or (likely) in on the scam.
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2025-11-12 07:06:40 CET

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Colin explores the historical antecedants for this malicious, sludgy compliance, including (hilariously) the notorious Simple Sabotage Field Manual, a US military guide designed for citizens in Nazi-occupied territories, detailing ways that they can *seem* to do their jobs while actually slowing everything down and ensuring nothing gets done:
https://www.cia.gov/static/5c875f3ec660e092cf893f60b4a288df/SimpleSabotage.pdf
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2025-09-16 19:48:36 CEST

The food here is terrible and the portions are so small.
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2025-09-11 17:41:37 CEST

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The most enshittification-proof way to get the Enshittification audiobook, ebook and hardcover is to pre-order them on my Kickstarter! Help me do an end-run around the Amazon/Audible audiobook monopoly and disenshittify your audiobook experience in the process:
http://disenshittification.org
eof/
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2025-09-08 20:06:16 CEST

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I have no doubt that this is true, but I think it's incomplete. What bunnie is describing isn't merely the expertise imparted by attaining a PhD in electrical engineering - it's the *process knowledge* built up by generations of chip experts who debugged generations of systems that preceded the current tin-vaporizing Rube Goldberg machines.
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2025-09-08 19:58:20 CEST

This was the plan: America would stop making things and instead make *recipes*, "IP" to send to other countries to turn into *stuff*, in lands without the environmental and labor rules that forced businesses accept reduced profits because they weren't allowed to maim their workers and poison the world.
-
If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
https://pluralistic.net/2025/09/08/process-knowledge/#dance-monkey-dance
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2025-09-03 23:00:44 CEST

Well, *fuck*.
--
If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
https://pluralistic.net/2025/09/03/unpunishing-process/#fucking-shit-goddammit-fuck
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2025-08-25 17:20:38 CEST

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Saturday's threads: Friction cannot be reduced, it can only be redistributed; and more!
https://mamot.fr/@pluralistic/115078491981129915
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2025-08-23 16:40:52 CEST

Now THAT'S how you garnish a zombie.
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2025-08-20 16:24:05 CEST

Today's threads (a thread)
Inside: Become unoptimizable; and more!
Archived at: https://pluralistic.net/2025/08/20/billionaireism/
#Pluralistic
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2025-08-18 17:17:33 CEST

When Elon Musk disagrees with someone, he calls them an "NPC" (non-player character). In video-games, an NPC is a machine-puppeted sprite that engages in predictable movements (think of the ghosts in Pac-Man) and perhaps utters some scripted (or AI-generated) dialog:
https://futurism.com/elon-musk-interviewer-npc
--
If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
https://pluralistic.net/2025/08/18/seeing-like-a-billionaire/#npcs
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2025-08-11 20:03:20 CEST

"Here's a thing I asked a chatbot to write" is the new "let me tell you about this weird dream I had last night."
I'd really rather you wouldn't.

2025-08-09 15:43:02 CEST

For the past year, I've been increasingly fascinated by a political mystery: how has antitrust enforcement become a global phenomenon after spending 40-years in a billionaire-induced coma?
https://pluralistic.net/2025/06/28/mamdani/#trustbusting
--
If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
https://pluralistic.net/2025/08/09/elite-disunity/#awoken-giants
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2025-08-04 15:57:04 CEST

It's easy to understand why some programmers love their AI assistants and others loathe them: the former group get to decide how and when they use AI tools, while the latter has AI forced upon them by bosses who hope to fire their colleagues and increase their workload.
--
If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
https://pluralistic.net/2025/08/04/bad-vibe-coding/#maximally-codelike-bugs
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2025-07-24 19:39:10 CEST

The corollary of "you treasure what you measure," is "you don't give a shit about what you stop measuring," which is why Trump's FCC has decided to stop measuring the speed of the broadband it subsidizes with billions in public funds:
https://www.theregister.com/2025/07/22/biden_broadband_benchmarks_are_bs/
--
If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
https://pluralistic.net/2025/07/24/geometry-hates-cars/#dogshit-unit-economics
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2025-07-24 02:50:35 CEST

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You're correct: CDA 230 doesn't apply to stuff the platform itself creates, so I'm not sure why you'd raise it here.
As to "promotion": what liability would arise from promoting something "hateful and false." Neither hate nor falsity are illegal (indeed, both are protected by the First Amendment). Removing 230 protections for "hateful and false" speech wouldn't actually make platforms civilly liable for it, because there is no liability for it.

2025-07-01 08:07:10 CEST

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The reality, of course, is that people *hate* AI. Telling people that your product is "AI enabled" makes less likely to use it:
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/19368623.2024.2368040#d1e1096
People - who have had an infinitude of AI crammed into down their throats - are already sick of AI. Policymakers and financiers - credulous dolts who fall for tech marketing hype every! fucking! time - are convinced that AI Is The Future.
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2025-06-28 15:24:52 CEST

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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.
5/

2025-06-24 15:40:57 CEST

Today's threads (a thread)
Inside: Surveillance pricing lets corporations decide what your dollar is worth; and more!
Archived at: https://pluralistic.net/2025/06/24/price-discrimination/
#Pluralistic
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2025-06-24 15:02:53 CEST

Economists praise "price discrimination" as "efficient." That's when a company charges customers different sums based on inferences about their willingness to pay. But when a firm sells you something for $2 that someone else can buy for $1, they're valuing the dollars in your pocket at half the rate of the other guy's.
--
If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free blog:
https://pluralistic.net/2025/06/24/price-discrimination/#algorithmic-pricing
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2025-06-19 01:15:44 CEST

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I am trying not to be dramatic here, but this is a deal-breaker for me - literally. I changed dentists because I wouldn't sign binding arbitration. I changed solar installers because I wouldn't sign binding arbitration.
I could never, in good conscience, recommend that someone use a service that required binding arbitration as a condition of use - which means that as of July 1, I would no longer be able to recommend that people get an account on mastodon.social.

2025-04-15 23:30:19 CEST

Today's threads (a thread)
Inside: Tesla accused of hacking odometers to weasel out of warranty repairs; and more!
Archived at: https://pluralistic.net/2025/04/15/musklemons/
#Pluralistic
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2025-04-15 21:51:27 CEST

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Instead, they'd just *pretend* to have run the diagnostics and claim no problems were found (so if your car had a potentially dangerous fault, they would falsely claim that it was safe to drive).
Most modern cars have some kind of internet connection, but Tesla goes much further. By design, its cars receive "over-the-air" updates, including updates that are adverse to drivers' interests.
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