“We cannot afford this level of dependence on foreign tech,” lawmakers say in letter obtained by POLITICO.

This website has been established to provide general information related to the proposed settlement of the case referred to as Canadian Packaged Bread Class Actions Settlement.

The court will move its internal work environment to Open Desk, a German-developed open source software

PALO ALTO, CA - A group of Silicon Valley tech CEOs assure North Americans that job losses from artificial intelligence could easily be mitigated by universal basic income, while also adding that they...

Country set to unveil PM Mark Carney’s spending plan as it battles trade war with US and protracted cost of living crisis

Today's links There's one thing EVERY government can do to shrink Big Tech: The path to a post-American internet. Hey look at this: Delights to delectate. Object permanence: D2020; Sony rootkit; Public Enemy vs the internet; NYC plute Hallowe'en. 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. There's one thing EVERY government can do to shrink Big Tech (permalink) As the old punchline goes, "If you wanted to get there, I wouldn't start from here." It's a gag that's particularly applicable to monopolies: once a company has secured a monopoly, it doesn't just have the power to block new companies from competing with it, it also has the power to capture governments and thwart attempts to regulate it or break it up. 40 years ago, a group of right-wing economists decided that this was a feature, not a bug, and convinced the world's governments to stop enforcing competition law, anti-monopoly law, and antitrust law, deliberately encouraging a global takeover by monopolies, duopolies and cartels. Today, virtually every sector of our economy is dominated by five or fewer firms: https://www.openmarketsinstitute.org/learn/monopoly-by-the-numbers These neoliberal economists knew that in order to stop us from getting there ("there" being a world where everyday people have economic and political freedom), they'd have to get us "here" – a world where even the most powerful governments find themselves unable to address concentrated corporate power. They wanted to drag us into a oligarchy, and take away any hope of us escaping to a fairer, more pluralistic world. They succeeded. Today, rich and powerful governments struggle to do anything to rein in Big Tech. Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney contemplated levying a 3% tax on America's tax-dodging tech giants…for all of five seconds. All Trump had to do was meaningfully clear his throat and Carney folded: https://www.politico.com/news/2025/06/30/in-tech-tax-cave-trump-and-carney-may-have-both-gotten-what-they-wanted-00433980 Canada also tried forcing payments to Canadian news agencies from tech giants, and failed in the most predictable way imaginable. Facebook simply blocked all Canadian news on its platforms (this being exactly what it had done in every other country where this was tried). Google paid out some money, and the country's largest newspaper killed its long-running investigative series into Big Tech's sins. Then Google slashed its payments. These payments were always a terrible idea. The only beneficial part of how Big Tech relates to the news is in making it easy for people to find and discuss the news. News you're not allowed to find or talk about isn't "news," it's "a secret." The thing that Big Tech steals from the news isn't links, it's money: 30% of every in-app payment is stolen by the mobile duopoly; 51% of every ad dollar is stolen by the ad-tech duopoly; and social media holds news outlets' subscribers hostage and forces news companies to pay to "boost" their content to reach the people who follow them. In other words, extracting payments for links is a form of redistribution, a clawback of some of Big Tech's stolen loot. It isn't predistribution, which would block Big Tech from stealing the loot in the first place. Canada is a wealthy nation, but only 41m people call it home. The EU is also wealthy, and it is home to 500m people. You'd think that the EU could get further than Canada, but, faced with the might of the tech cartel, it has struggled to get anything done. Take the GDPR, Europe's landmark privacy law. In theory, this law bans the kind of commercial surveillance that Big Tech thrives on. In practice, these companies just flew an Irish flag of convenience, which not only let them avoid paying their taxes – it also let them get away with illegal surveillance, by capturing the Irish privacy regulator, who does nothing to defend Europeans' privacy: https://pluralistic.net/2023/05/15/finnegans-snooze/#dirty-old-town It's hard to overstate just how supine the Irish state is in relation to the American tech giants that pretend to call Dublin their home. The country's latest privacy regulator is an ex-Meta executive! https://www.article19.org/resources/ireland-adopt-new-transparent-process-to-appoint-data-protection-commissioner/ (Perhaps he can hang out with the UK's newly appointed head of competition enforcement, who used to be the head of Amazon UK:) https://pluralistic.net/2025/01/22/autocrats-of-trade/#dingo-babysitter For the EU, Ireland is just part of the problem when it comes to regulating Big Tech. The EU's latest tech regulations are the sweeping, even visionary Digital Services Act and Digital Markets Act. If tech companies obeyed these laws, that would go a long way to addressing their monopoly abuses. So of course, they're not obeying the laws. Apple has threatened to leave the EU altogether rather than comply with a modest order requiring it to allow third party payments and app stores: https://pluralistic.net/2025/09/26/empty-threats/#500-million-affluent-consumers And they've buried the EU in complex litigation that could drag on for a decade: https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/?uri=CELEX:62025TN0354 And Trump has made it clear that he is Big Tech's puppet, and any attempt to get American tech companies to obey EU law will be met with savage retaliation: https://www.cnn.com/2025/09/05/tech/google-eu-antitrust-fine-adtech When it comes to getting Big Tech to obey the law, if we wanted to get there, I wouldn't start from here. But the fact that it's hard to get Big Tech to do the bidding of publicly accountable governments doesn't mean that those governments are powerless. There's one institution a government has total control over: itself. The world's governments have all signed up to "anticircumvention" laws that criminalize reverse-engineering and modifying US tech products. This was done at the insistence of the US Trade Rep, who has spent this entire century using the threat of tariffs to bully every country in the world into signing up to laws that ban their own technologists from directly blocking American Big Tech companies' scams. It's because of anticircumvention laws that a Canadian company can't go into business making an alternative Facebook client that blocks ads but restores the news. It's because of anticircumvention laws that a Canadian company can't go into business with a product that lets media companies bypass the Meta/Google ad-tech duopoly. It's because of anticircumvention laws that a European company can't go into business modifying your phone, car, apps, smart devices and operating system to block all commercial surveillance. If companies can't get your data, they can't violate the GDPR. It's because of anticircumvention laws that a European company can't sell you a hardware dongle that breaks into your iPhone and replaces Apple's ripoff app store with a Made-in-the-EU alternative. Anticircumvention law is the reason Canada's only response to Trump's illegal tariffs is more tariffs, which make everything in Canada more expensive. Get rid of anticircumvention law and Canada could get into the business of shifting billions of dollars from American tech monopolists to Canadian startups and the Canadian people: https://pluralistic.net/2025/01/15/beauty-eh/#its-the-only-war-the-yankees-lost-except-for-vietnam-and-also-the-alamo-and-the-bay-of-ham Anticirumvention law is the reason the EU can't get its data out of the Big Tech silos that Trump controls, which lets Trump shut down any European government agency or official that displeases him: https://pluralistic.net/2025/10/15/freedom-of-movement/#data-dieselgate American monopolists like John Deere have installed killswitches in every tractor in the world – killswitches that can't be removed until we get rid of anticircumvention laws, which will let us create open source firmware for tractors. Until we do that, Trump can shut down all the agriculture in any country that makes him angry: https://pluralistic.net/2025/10/20/post-american-internet/#huawei-with-american-characteristics For a decade, we've been warned that allowing China to supply our telecoms infrastructure was geopolitical suicide, because it would mean that China could monitor and terminate our network traffic. That's the threat that Trump's America now poses for the whole world, as Trump makes it clear that America doesn't have allies or trading partners, only rivals and competitors, and he will stop at nothing to beat them. And if you are worried about China, well, perhaps you should be. The world's incredible rush to solarization has left us with millions of solar installations whose inverters are also subject to arbitrary updates by their (Chinese) manufacturers, including updates that could render them inoperable. The only way around this? Get rid of anticircumvention law and replace all the software in these critical systems with open source, transparent, owner-controlled alternatives: https://pluralistic.net/2025/09/23/our-friend-the-electron/#to-every-man-his-castle Getting Big Tech to do your government's bidding is a big lift. The companies are too big to jail, especially with Trump behind them. That's why each of America's Big Tech CEOs paid $1m out of their own pockets to sit behind him on the dais at the inauguration: https://apnews.com/article/trump-inauguration-tech-billionaires-zuckerberg-musk-wealth-0896bfc3f50d941d62cebc3074267ecd Even America can't bring its tech companies to heel. When Google was convicted of being an illegal monopolist, the judge punished the company by sentencing it to…nothing: https://pluralistic.net/2025/09/03/unpunishing-process/#fucking-shit-goddammit-fuck But ultimately, breakups and fines and interoperabilty mandates are all forms of redistribution – a way to strip the companies of the spoils of their decades-long looting spree. That's a laudable goal, but if we want to get there, we must start with predistribution: halting the companies' ongoing extraction efforts, by getting rid of the laws that prevent other technologists from unfucking their products and halting their cash- and data-ripoffs. Do that long and hard enough and we stand a real chance of draining off so much of their power that we can get moving on those redistributive moves. And getting rid of anticircumvention laws only requires that governments control their own behavior – unlike taxing or fining companies, which only works if governments can control the behavior of companies that have proven, time and again, to be more powerful than any country in the world. (Image: Cryteria, CC BY 3.0, modified) Hey look at this (permalink) The Forgotten History of Socialism and the Occult https://jacobin.com/2025/10/socialism-occult-mysticism-marxism-history/ Study: AI Models Trained On Clickbait Slop Result In AI ‘Brain Rot,’ ‘Hostility’ https://www.techdirt.com/2025/10/31/study-ai-models-trained-on-clickbait-slop-result-in-ai-brain-rot-hostility/ The Validation Machines https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2025/10/validation-ai-raffi-krikorian/684764/ The Department of Defense Wants Less Proof its Software Works https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2025/10/department-defense-wants-less-proof-its-software-works Ireland: Adopt new, transparent process to appoint Data Protection Commissioner https://www.article19.org/resources/ireland-adopt-new-transparent-process-to-appoint-data-protection-commissioner/ Object permanence (permalink) #20yrsago Sony DRM uses black-hat rootkits https://web.archive.org/web/20051102053346/http://www.sysinternals.com/blog/2005/10/sony-rootkits-and-digital-rights.html #20yrsago Suncomm encourages people to break its DRM https://web.archive.org/web/20051116115847/http://bigpicture.typepad.com/comments/2005/10/drm_crippled_cd.html #20yrsago Public Enemy’s Internet strategy https://web.archive.org/web/20051103053915/https://www.wired.com/news/print/0,1294,69403,00.html #10yrsago Petition: Rename Stephen Harper to “Calgary International Airport” https://www.change.org/p/rename-stephen-harper-to-calgary-international-airport #10yrsago Hallowe’en with NYC’s super-rich https://www.nytimes.com/slideshow/2015/10/29/fashion/halloween-in-manhattans-most-expensive-zip-codes/s/29UESHALLOWEEN-slide-LRGS.html #5yrsago D2020 https://pluralistic.net/2020/10/31/walkies/#probabilistic #5yrsago The Americans https://pluralistic.net/2020/10/31/walkies/#among-us Upcoming appearances (permalink) Virtual: Peoples and Things with danah boyd and Lee Vinsel, Nov 3 https://www.youtube.com/live/WjFvGPLpskk Miami: Enshittification at Books & Books, Nov 5 https://www.eventbrite.com/e/an-evening-with-cory-doctorow-tickets-1504647263469 Miami: Cloudfest, Nov 6 https://www.cloudfest.com/usa/ Burbank: Burbank Book Festival, Nov 8 https://www.burbankbookfestival.com/ Lisbon: A post-American, enshittification-resistant internet, with Rabble (Web Summit), Nov 12 https://websummit.com/sessions/lis25/92f47bc9-ca60-4997-bef3-006735b1f9c5/a-post-american-enshittification-resistant-internet/ Cardiff: Hay Festival After Hours, Nov 13 https://www.hayfestival.com/c-203-hay-festival-after-hours.aspx Oxford: Enshittification and Extraction: The Internet Sucks Now with Tim Wu (Oxford Internet Institute), Nov 14 https://www.oii.ox.ac.uk/news-events/events/enshittification-and-extraction-the-internet-sucks-now/ London: Enshittification with Sarah Wynn-Williams and Chris Morris, Nov 15 https://www.barbican.org.uk/whats-on/2025/event/cory-doctorow-with-sarah-wynn-williams London: Downstream IRL with Aaron Bastani (Novara Media), Nov 17 https://dice.fm/partner/tickets/event/oen5rr-downstream-irl-aaron-bastani-in-conversation-with-cory-doctorow-17th-nov-earth-london-tickets London: Enshittification with Carole Cadwalladr (Frontline Club), Nov 18 https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/in-conversation-enshittification-tickets-1785553983029 Virtual: Enshittification with Vass Bednar (Vancouver Public Library), Nov 21 https://www.crowdcast.io/@bclibraries-present Seattle: Neuroscience, AI and Society (University of Washington), Dec 4 https://www.eventbrite.com/e/neuroscience-ai-and-society-cory-doctorow-tickets-1735371255139 Madison, CT: Enshittification at RJ Julia, Dec 8 https://rjjulia.com/event/2025-12-08/cory-doctorow-enshittification Recent appearances (permalink) Enshittification and the Rot Economy with Ed Zitron (Clarion West) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tz71pIWbFyc Amanpour & Co (New Yorker Radio Hour) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I8l1uSb0LZg Enshittification is Not Inevitable (Team Human) https://www.teamhuman.fm/episodes/339-cory-doctorow-enshittification-is-not-inevitable The Great Enshittening (The Gray Area) https://www.reddit.com/r/philosophypodcasts/comments/1obghu7/the_gray_area_the_great_enshittening_10202025/ Enshittification (Smart Cookies) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-BoORwEPlQ0 Latest 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/ "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) "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. FIRST DRAFT COMPLETE AND SUBMITTED. 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

Today's links When AI prophecy fails: Hating workers is a hell of a drug. Hey look at this: Delights to delectate. Object permanence: SCOTUS lets the FBI kidnap Americans; Inequality perverts justice; Free the McFlurry! 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. When AI prophecy fails (permalink) Amazon made $35 billion in profit last year, so they're celebrating by laying off 14,000 workers (a number they say will rise to 30,000). This is the kind of thing that Wall Street loves, and this layoff comes after a string of pronouncements from Amazon CEO Andy Jassy about how AI is going to let them fire tons of workers. That's the AI story, after all. It's not about making workers more productive or creative. The only way to recoup the $700 billion in capital expenditure to date (to say nothing of AI companies' rather fanciful coming capex commitments) is by displacing workers – a lot of workers. Bain & Co say the sector needs to be grossing $2 trillion by 2030 in order to break even, which is more than the combined grosses of Amazon, Google, Microsoft, Apple Nvidia and Meta: https://www.bain.com/about/media-center/press-releases/20252/$2-trillion-in-new-revenue-needed-to-fund-ais-scaling-trend—bain–companys-6th-annual-global-technology-report/ Every investor who has put a nickel into that $700b capex is counting on bosses firing a lot of workers and replacing them with AI. Amazon is also counting on people buying a lot of AI from it after firing those workers. The company has sunk $120b into AI this year alone. There's just one problem: AI can't do our jobs. Oh, sure, an AI salesman can convince your boss to fire you and replace you with an AI that can't do your job, but that's the world's easiest sales-call. Your boss is relentlessly horny for firing you: https://pluralistic.net/2025/03/18/asbestos-in-the-walls/#government-by-spicy-autocomplete But there's a lot of AI buyers' remorse. 95% of AI deployments have either produced no return on capital, or have been money-losing: https://www.technologyreview.com/2019/01/25/1436/we-analyzed-16625-papers-to-figure-out-where-ai-is-headed-next/ AI has "no significant impact on workers’ earnings, recorded hours, or wages": https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=5219933 What's Amazon to do? How do they convince you to buy enough AI to justify that $180b in capital expenditure? Somehow, they have to convince you that an AI can do your workers' jobs. One way to sell that pitch is to fire a ton of Amazon workers and announce that their jobs have been given to a chatbot. This isn't a production strategy, it's a marketing strategy – it's Amazon deliberately taking an efficiency loss by firing workers in a desperate bid to convince you that you can fire your workers: https://pluralistic.net/2025/08/05/ex-princes-of-labor/#hyper-criti-hype Amazon does use a lot of AI in its production, of course. AI is the "digital whip" that Amazon uses to allow itself to control drivers who (nominally) work for subcontractors. This lets Amazon force workers into unsafe labor practices that endanger them and the people they share the roads with, while offloading responsibility onto "independent delivery service" operators and the drivers themselves: https://pluralistic.net/2025/10/23/traveling-salesman-solution/#pee-bottles Amazon leadership has announced that AI has or will shortly replace its coders as well. But chatbots can't do software engineering – sure, they can write code, but writing code is only a small part of software engineering. An engineer's job is to maintain a very deep and wide context window, one that considers how each piece of code interacts with the software that executes before it and after it, and with the systems that feed into it and accept its output. There's one thing AI struggles with beyond all else: maintaining context. Each linear increase in context that you demand from AI results in an exponential increase in computational expense. AI has no object permanence. It doesn't know where it's been and it doesn't know where it's going. It can't remember how many fingers it's drawn, so it doesn't know when to stop. It can write a routine, but it can't engineer a system. When tech bosses dream of firing coders and replacing them with AI, they're fantasizing about getting rid of their highest-paid, most self-assured workers and transforming the insecure junior programmers leftover into AI babysitters whose job it is to evaluate and integrate that code at a speed that no one – much less a junior programmer – can meet if they are to do a careful and competent job: https://www.bloodinthemachine.com/p/how-ai-is-killing-jobs-in-the-tech-f39 The jobs that can be replaced with AI are the jobs that companies already gave up on doing well. If you've already outsourced your customer service to an overseas call-center whose workers are not empowered to solve any of your customers' problems, why not fire those workers and replace them with chatbots? The chatbots also can't solve anyone's problems, and they're even cheaper than overseas call-center workers: https://pluralistic.net/2025/08/06/unmerchantable-substitute-goods/#customer-disservice Amazon CEO Andy Jassy wrote that he "is convinced" that firing workers will make the company "AI ready," but it's not clear what he means by that. Does he mean that the mass firings will save money while maintaining quality, or that mass firings will help Amazon recoup the $180,000,000,000 it spent on AI this year? Bosses really want AI to work, because they really, really want to fire you. As Allison Morrow writes for CNN bosses are firing workers in anticipation of the savings AI will produce…someday: https://www.cnn.com/2025/10/28/business/what-amazons-mass-layoffs-are-really-about All this can feel improbable. Would bosses really fire workers on the promise of eventual AI replacements, leaving themselves with big bills for AI and falling revenues as the absence of those workers is felt? The answer is a resounding yes. The AI industry has done such a good job of convincing bosses that AI can do their workers' jobs that each boss for whom AI fails assumes that they've done something wrong. This is a familiar dynamic in con-jobs. The people who get sucked into pyramid schemes all think that they are the only ones failing to sell any of the "merchandise" they shell out every month to buy, and that no one else has a garage full of unsold leggings or essential oils. They don't know that, to a first approximation, the MLM industry has no sales, and relies entirely on "entrepreneurs" lying to themselves and one another about the demand for their wares, paying out of their own pocket for goods that no one wants. The MLM industry doesn't just rely on this deception – they capitalize on it, by selling those self-flagellating "entrepreneurs" all kinds of expensive training courses that promise to help them overcome the personal defects that stop them from doing as well as all those desperate liars boasting about their incredible MLM sales success: https://pluralistic.net/2025/05/05/free-enterprise-system/#amway-or-the-highway The AI industry has its own version of those sales coaching courses – there's a whole secondary industry of management consultancies and business schools offering high-ticket "continuing education" courses to bosses who think that the only reason the AI they've purchased isn't saving them money is that they're doing AI wrong. Amazon really needs AI to work. Last week, Ed Zitron published an extensive analysis of leaked documents showing how much Amazon is making from AI companies who are buying cloud services from it. His conclusion? Take away AI and Amazon's cloud division is in steep decline: https://www.wheresyoured.at/costs/ What's more, those big-money AI customers – like Anthropic – are losing tens of billions of dollars per year, relying on investors to keep handing them money to incinerate. Amazon needs bosses to believe they can fire workers and replace them with AI, because that way, investors will keep giving Anthropic the money it needs to keep Amazon in the black. Amazon firing 30,000 workers in the run-up to Christmas is a great milestone in enshittification. America's K-shaped recovery means that nearly all of the consumption is coming from the wealthiest American households, and these households overwhelmingly subscribe to Prime. Prime-subscribing households do not comparison shop. After all, they've already prepaid for a year's shipping in advance. These households start and end nearly every shopping trip in the Amazon app. If Amazon fires 30,000 workers and tanks its logistics network and e-commerce systems, if it allows itself to drown in spam and scam reviews, if it misses its delivery windows and messes up its returns, that will be our problem, not Amazon's. In a world of commerce where Amazon's predatory pricing, lock-in, and serial acquisitions has left us with few alternatives, Amazon can truly be "too big to care": https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/oct/05/way-past-its-prime-how-did-amazon-get-so-rubbish From that enviable position, Amazon can afford to enshittify its services in order to sell the big AI lie. Killing 30,000 jobs is a small price to pay if it buys them a few months before a reckoning for its wild AI overspending, keeping the AI grift alive for just a little longer. (Image: Cryteria, CC BY 3.0, modified) Hey look at this (permalink) Eugene Debs and All Of Us https://www.hamiltonnolan.com/p/eugene-debs-and-all-of-us US Business Cycles 1954-2020 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vXRC3RrngcI Ed Zitron Gets Paid to Love AI. He Also Gets Paid to Hate AI https://www.wired.com/story/ai-pr-ed-zitron-profile/ Worried About AI Monopoly? Embrace Copyright’s Limits https://www.lawfaremedia.org/article/worried-about-ai-monopoly–embrace-copyright-s-limits Object permanence (permalink) #10yrsago Librarian of Congress puts impossible conditions on your right to jailbreak your 3D printer https://michaelweinberg.org/post/132021560865/unlocking-3d-printers-ruling-is-a-mess #10yrsago The two brilliant, prescient 20th century science fiction novels you should read this election season https://memex.craphound.com/2015/10/28/the-two-brilliant-prescient-20th-century-science-fiction-novels-you-should-read-this-election-season/ #10yrsago Hundreds of city police license plate cams are insecure and can be watched by anyone https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2015/10/license-plate-readers-exposed-how-public-safety-agencies-responded-massive #10yrsago Appeals court holds the FBI is allowed to kidnap and torture Americans outside US borders https://www.techdirt.com/2015/10/28/court-your-fourth-fifth-amendment-rights-no-longer-exist-if-you-leave-country/ #10yrsago South Carolina sheriff fires the school-cop who beat up a black girl at her desk https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/oct/28/south-carolina-parents-speak-out-school-board #10yrsago The more unequal your society is, the more your laws will favor the rich https://web.archive.org/web/20151028133814/http://america.aljazeera.com/opinions/2015/10/the-more-unequal-the-country-the-more-the-rich-rule.html #5yrsago Trump abandons supporters to freeze https://pluralistic.net/2020/10/28/trumpcicles/#omaha #5yrsago RIAA's war on youtube-dl https://pluralistic.net/2020/10/28/trumpcicles/#yt-dl #1yrago The US Copyright Office frees the McFlurry https://pluralistic.net/2024/10/28/mcbroken/#my-milkshake-brings-all-the-lawyers-to-the-yard Upcoming appearances (permalink) Miami: Enshittification at Books & Books, Nov 5 https://www.eventbrite.com/e/an-evening-with-cory-doctorow-tickets-1504647263469 Miami: Cloudfest, Nov 6 https://www.cloudfest.com/usa/ Burbank: Burbank Book Festival, Nov 8 https://www.burbankbookfestival.com/ Lisbon: A post-American, enshittification-resistant internet, with Rabble (Web Summit), Nov 12 https://websummit.com/sessions/lis25/92f47bc9-ca60-4997-bef3-006735b1f9c5/a-post-american-enshittification-resistant-internet/ Cardiff: Hay Festival After Hours, Nov 13 https://www.hayfestival.com/c-203-hay-festival-after-hours.aspx Oxford: Enshittification and Extraction: The Internet Sucks Now with Tim Wu (Oxford Internet Institute), Nov 14 https://www.oii.ox.ac.uk/news-events/events/enshittification-and-extraction-the-internet-sucks-now/ London: Enshittification with Sarah Wynn-Williams and Chris Morris, Nov 15 https://www.barbican.org.uk/whats-on/2025/event/cory-doctorow-with-sarah-wynn-williams London: Downstream IRL with Aaron Bastani (Novara Media), Nov 17 https://dice.fm/partner/tickets/event/oen5rr-downstream-irl-aaron-bastani-in-conversation-with-cory-doctorow-17th-nov-earth-london-tickets London: Enshittification with Carole Cadwalladr (Frontline Club), Nov 18 https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/in-conversation-enshittification-tickets-1785553983029 Virtual: Enshittification with Vass Bednar (Vancouver Public Library), Nov 21 https://www.crowdcast.io/@bclibraries-present Seattle: Neuroscience, AI and Society (University of Washington), Dec 4 https://compneuro.washington.edu/news-and-events/neuroscience-ai-and-society/ Madison, CT: Enshittification at RJ Julia, Dec 8 https://rjjulia.com/event/2025-12-08/cory-doctorow-enshittification Recent appearances (permalink) Enshittification and the Rot Economy with Ed Zitron (Clarion West) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tz71pIWbFyc Amanpour & Co (New Yorker Radio Hour) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I8l1uSb0LZg Enshittification is Not Inevitable (Team Human) https://www.teamhuman.fm/episodes/339-cory-doctorow-enshittification-is-not-inevitable The Great Enshittening (The Gray Area) https://www.reddit.com/r/philosophypodcasts/comments/1obghu7/the_gray_area_the_great_enshittening_10202025/ Enshittification (Smart Cookies) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-BoORwEPlQ0 Latest 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/ "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) "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. FIRST DRAFT COMPLETE AND SUBMITTED. 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

Occasioned by the release of Andor, Jonathan Brown reflects on the class politics of the Star Wars media empire and capitalism's cultural logic.

Today's links The AI that we'll have after AI: Cheap GPUs, unemployed engineers, and open source models. Hey look at this: Delights to delectate. Object permanence: FBI confuses KISS and Dr Who; How the NSA breaks crypto: Bricked Ferrari; Taxing billionaires. 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 AI that we'll have after AI (permalink) When the AI bubble pops, what will remain? Cheap GPUs at firesale prices, skilled applied statisticians looking for work, and open source models that already do impressive things, but will grow far more impressive after being optimized: https://pluralistic.net/2025/09/27/econopocalypse/#subprime-intelligence The AI bubble companies are scams. They've spend most of a trillion dollars in capital expenditures, and by their own (very cooked and dishonest) numbers, they are grossing a total of $45b/year, industry-wide: https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-ai-bubbles-impossible-promises/ At $45b/year (an inflated number, remember!) it's going to take them a long time to recoup the hundreds of billions of dollars they've spent so far. But they don't have a long time: the massive GPUs that power AI's "foundation models" and cost six- or seven-figures each burn out remarkably quickly. The companies that buy these GPUs claim they'll last five years (and depreciate them over that schedule); however, this is accounting fraud, because in reality, these GPUs have a duty-cycle that's more like two to three years: https://blog.citp.princeton.edu/2025/10/15/lifespan-of-ai-chips-the-300-billion-question/ And when the companies run their GPUs really hard, they burn out in just 54 days: https://techblog.comsoc.org/2024/11/25/superclusters-of-nvidia-gpu-ai-chips-combined-with-end-to-end-network-platforms-to-create-next-generation-data-centers/ To recoup their existing and announced investments, AI companies will have to bring in $2 trillion, more than the combined revenue of Amazon, Google, Microsoft, Apple, Nvidia and Meta: https://www.bain.com/about/media-center/press-releases/20252/$2-trillion-in-new-revenue-needed-to-fund-ais-scaling-trend—bain–companys-6th-annual-global-technology-report/ And they have to bring in that $2 trillion before all those GPUs burn out…which is, again, about 2-3 years. Or sometimes just 54 days. AI companies' purchases and R&D expenditures aren't guided by the need to make products that will bring in $2 trillion dollars. AI companies spend money in order to put on a show for investors, to demonstrate that they are very serious about AI. Think of all those GPU-stuffed data-centers as akin to a peacock's tailfeathers: an expensive way to attract mates (or, in this case, investors), by emitting costly signals that demonstrate your power: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Signalling_theory Of course, it's far cheaper to pretend to be spending a lot of money than it is to actually spend it, and they're doing plenty of that, too. Meta has promised to spend $72b next year on data-centers. However, Meta's annual free cash flow is $52.1b. OpenAI says it will spend $60b/year on data-centers, which is five times its annual revenue of $12.7b (and the company is losing $9b/year). As The American Prospect's Brian McMahon writes, "How can OpenAI plan to spend five times what it brought in?" https://prospect.org/power/2025-10-15-nvidia-openai-ai-oracle-chips/ I don't know how many of these giant "foundation models" will still be online after the crash, but I would not be surprised if that number is zero. So the big question is, what comes next? What will the AI bubble leave behind? Some bubbles leave nothing or next-to-nothing behind. Enron left nothing behind but the cooling corpse of a CEO who popped his clogs before he could be sentenced to life in prison. Worldcom left behind a CEO who survived long enough to die behind bars…and a ton of fiber in the ground that people are still getting use out of (I'm sending these keystrokes to the internet on old Worldcom fiber that AT&T bought and lit up). Crypto's not going to leave much behind: a few Rust programmers who've really taken security by design to heart, sure, but mostly it'll be shitty Austrian economics and even shittier JPEGs. So what kind of bubble is AI? That's the $2 trillion question: https://locusmag.com/feature/commentary-cory-doctorow-what-kind-of-bubble-is-ai/ Before I get to that, let me be clear here: bubbles are always bad. As much as I like my 2gb symmetrical fiber, the fact that it exists because a crook stole billions of dollars from everyday people who were only hoping to live a dignified retirement of material sufficiency is terrible. Worldcom CEO Bernie Ebbers deserved what he got, and worse. The AI bubble is on its way to sucking up a trillion dollars and not all of that money is coming from Saudi royals, hedge fund bastards and Elon Musk's credulous creditors. Plenty of it will come out of the savings of working people who've been forced to play the suckers at the table thanks to the replacement of guaranteed pensions with "market-based pensions" that only pay out if you guess right about which stocks to buy: https://pluralistic.net/2020/07/25/derechos-humanos/#are-there-no-poorhouses Those people are going to get wrecked. And so are the rest of us. You don't need to be an AI investor to get wiped out by the AI investment bubble, either. With 30+% of the S&P 500 tied up in seven AI companies' stock, the coming crash will definitely escape containment and crash the whole damned economy. So the bubble is bad. Really bad. But even so, there will be things we can salvage from it: open source models, skilled programmers, cheap GPUs bought out of bankruptcy for pennies on the dollar. It would be better if we created that stuff without burning the world's economy to the ground and emitting a heptillion tons of CO2, but ignoring the productive residue of the AI crash won't bring the economy back, or suck the carbon out of the atmosphere. The open source models are a big deal. They're already capable of doing really impressive things, like transcription, image generation, and natural language-based data transformation, running on commodity hardware. I run several models on the laptop I'm typing this on – a computer that doesn't even have a GPU. What's more, there are a lot of ways to improve these models within easy reach. The US AI companies that threw these models over the transom after irrevocably licensing them as free software had very little impetus to improve their efficiency by optimizing them. Remember, they're spending money as a way to "prove" that AI has a future. Shipping a model that runs badly – that needs more data-centers and energy to run – is a way to convince investors that it's doing something really advanced (after all, look how much compute and energy it's consuming!). It's a scaled-up version of a scam that Elon Musk used to pull on investors when he was shopping his startup Zip2 around: he put the regular PC his demo ran on inside a gigantic hollow case that he would wheel in on a dolly, announcing that his code ran on a "supercomputer." Yes, investors really are that dumb. Even modest efforts at optimization can yield incredible performance gains. Deepseek, the legendary Chinese open source AI model, consumes a fraction of the resources gobbled up by the likes of OpenAI. Deepseek's launch was so impressive that it knocked $589b off of Nvidia's stock price the day it shipped: https://finance.yahoo.com/news/nvidia-stock-plummets-loses-record-589-billion-as-deepseek-prompts-questions-over-ai-spending-135105824.html There are a ton of these open source Chinese models, and they all perform like crazy. China does a lot of AI optimization because US embargoes prevent Chinese AI companies from accessing the most powerful GPUs, so Chinese coders tighten up their code and outperform US companies even though they're using far less powerful computers. After the crash, everyone will be in a similar position to those Chinese AI optimizers: Chinese companies can't buy advanced GPUs because of the embargo; and everyone else won't be able to buy advanced GPUs because the AI crash will have cratered the economy for a generation. But there is so much room at the bottom. Optimized models do really impressive things on really cheap hardware. How cheap? Well, here's hardware hacker Pete Warden demoing a chatbot that you talk to and that talks back to you – and it's running on Synaptics System-on-a-Chip (SoC) that costs "low single digit dollars": https://petewarden.com/2025/10/16/why-does-a-local-ai-voice-agent-running-on-a-super-cheap-soc-matter/ This is basically a little special-purpose Alexa, except it doesn't connect to the internet at all (and therefore doesn't leak any of your data). In Warden's demo, the gadget is a button-sized voice assistant that is meant to be integrated into a dishwasher, which can interpret the dishwasher's manual for you. If your dishes come out dirty or if the drain gets clogged, you press the button, describe your issue in pretty vague terms, and it instantly speaks aloud all the troubleshooting steps to deal with it. This privacy-preserving, cheap-like-borscht component adds a voice-activated, conversational assistant to a device, sipping power like the clock on your microwave, running on a processor that costs less than a pack of AA batteries. It's seriously fucking cool. There's going to be a lot of this AI, after the AI goes away – just like there was a lot of the web after the dotcom crash, when, overnight, San Francisco had infinity office-space, servers, and techies going begging. (Image: Cryteria, CC BY 3.0, modified) Hey look at this (permalink) How I Became a Populist https://newrepublic.com/article/201171/alvaro-bedoya-ftc-became-populist Introducing the Bantam Tools EggBot https://www.evilmadscientist.com/2025/bantam-tools-eggbot/ Framework flame war erupts over support of politically polarizing Linux projects https://www.theregister.com/2025/10/14/framework_linux_controversy/ AI Won’t Replace Jobs, but Tech Bros Want You to Be Afraid It Will https://gizmodo.com/ai-wont-replace-jobs-tech-bros-want-you-terrified-2000670808 US Passport Power Falls to Historic Low https://www.henleyglobal.com/newsroom/press-releases/henley-global-mobility-report-oct-2025 Object permanence (permalink) #20yrsago Logic and math riddles from Slashdot https://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=165444&threshold=3&mode=flat&commentsort=5&op=Change #20yrsago Yiddish postcard gallery https://web.archive.org/web/20051018030610/http://members.screenz.com/bennypostcards/ #20yrsago JibJab’s legal threats over the use of 9 seconds of their video https://blog.wfmu.org/freeform/2005/10/do_as_i_say_not.html #20yrsago Wal-Mart photofinishing narcs out student who made anti-Bush poster https://web.archive.org/web/20051011233852/https://www.alternet.org/walmart/26503/#thumbtack #20yrsago Buddhist monks deploy saffron flak vests and armored monkmobiles https://eyeteeth.blogspot.com/2005/10/monkmobiles-and-bulletproof-robes.html #15yrsago Mitt Romney got a bestseller by demanding bulk-purchases of his books in exchange for lectures https://www.politico.com/blogs/ben-smith/2010/10/how-romney-made-a-best-seller-029968?showall #15yrsago Every terrible thing Canada’s Stephen Harper government has done in the past four years https://24percentmajority.blogspot.com/2015/10/2011-2015-harper-government-wrap-up.html #10yrsago 1980: the Director of the FBI mixes up KISS & The Who, confusing the hell out of FBI agents https://www.muckrock.com/news/archives/2015/oct/15/fbi-files-kiss/ #10yrsago Sit down already: standing desks aren’t healthier than seated ones https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/to-your-health/wp/2015/10/14/sitting-for-long-periods-doesnt-make-death-more-imminent-study-suggests/ #10yrsago It’s not enough that Apple and Google are bringing usable crypto to the world https://www.csmonitor.com/World/Passcode/Passcode-Voices/2015/1014/Opinion-Why-we-all-have-a-stake-in-encryption-policy #10yrsago The NSA sure breaks a lot of “unbreakable” crypto. This is probably how they do it. https://blog.citp.princeton.edu/2015/10/14/how-is-nsa-breaking-so-much-crypto/ #5yrsago Bricked Ferrari https://pluralistic.net/2020/10/15/expect-the-unexpected/#drm #5yrsago The Passenger Pigeon Manifesto https://pluralistic.net/2020/10/15/expect-the-unexpected/#openglam #5yrsago Dystopia as clickbait https://pluralistic.net/2020/10/15/expect-the-unexpected/#dystopia-is-over #1yrago Of course we can tax billionaires https://pluralistic.net/2024/10/15/piketty-pilled/#tax-justice Upcoming appearances (permalink) Chicago: How Platforms Die with Rick Perlstein (University Club), Oct 14 https://www.eventbrite.com/e/how-platforms-die-with-cory-doctorow-tickets-1747916117159 Los Angeles: Enshittification with David Dayen (Diesel), Oct 16 https://dieselbookstore.com/event/2025-10-16/cory-doctorow-enshittification San Francisco: Enshittification at Public Works with Jenny Odell (The Booksmith), Oct 20 https://app.gopassage.com/events/doctorow25 PDX: Enshittification at Powell's, Oct 21 https://www.powells.com/events/cory-doctorow-10-21-25 Seattle: Enshittification and the Rot Economy, with Ed Zitron (Clarion West), Oct 22 https://www.clarionwest.org/event/2025-deep-dives-cory-doctorow/ Vancouver: Enshittification with David Moscrop (Vancouver Writers Festival), Oct 23 https://www.showpass.com/2025-festival-39/ Montreal: Montreal Attention Forum keynote, Oct 24 https://www.attentionconferences.com/conferences/2025-forum Montreal: Enshittification at Librarie Drawn and Quarterly, Oct 24 https://mtl.drawnandquarterly.com/events/3757420251024 Ottawa: Enshittification (Ottawa Writers Festival), Oct 25 https://writersfestival.org/events/fall-2025/enshittification Toronto: Enshittification with Dan Werb (Type Books), Oct 27 https://www.instagram.com/p/DO81_1VDngu/?img_index=1 Barcelona: Conferencia EUROPEA 4D (Virtual), Oct 28 https://4d.cat/es/conferencia/ Miami: Enshittification at Books & Books, Nov 5 https://www.eventbrite.com/e/an-evening-with-cory-doctorow-tickets-1504647263469 Miami: Cloudfest, Nov 6 https://www.cloudfest.com/usa/ Burbank: Burbank Book Festival, Nov 8 https://www.burbankbookfestival.com/ Lisbon: A post-American, enshittification-resistant internet, with Rabble (Web Summit), Nov 12 https://websummit.com/sessions/lis25/92f47bc9-ca60-4997-bef3-006735b1f9c5/a-post-american-enshittification-resistant-internet/ Cardiff: Hay Festival After Hours, Nov 13 https://www.hayfestival.com/c-203-hay-festival-after-hours.aspx Oxford: Enshittification and Extraction: The Internet Sucks Now with Tim Wu at Rawley House (Oxford Internet Institute), Nov 14 https://www.oii.ox.ac.uk/news-events/events/enshittification-and-extraction-the-internet-sucks-now/ London: Enshittification with Sarah Wynn-Williams and Chris Morris, Nov 15 https://www.barbican.org.uk/whats-on/2025/event/cory-doctorow-with-sarah-wynn-williams Seattle: Neuroscience, AI and Society (University of Washington), Dec 4 https://compneuro.washington.edu/news-and-events/neuroscience-ai-and-society/ Recent appearances (permalink) Enshittification (The Gist) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EgBiv_KchI0 Canadian tariffs with Avi Lewis https://plagal.wordpress.com/2025/10/15/cory-doctorow-talks-to-avi-lewis-about-his-proposal-to-fightback-against-trumps-tariff-attack/ Enshittification (This Is Hell) https://thisishell.com/interviews/1864-cory-doctorow Enshittification (Computer Says Maybe) https://csm.transistor.fm/episodes/gotcha-enshittification-w-cory-doctorow Enshittification with Lina Khan (Brooklyn Public Library) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NCX5Yst64Hw Latest 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/ "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) "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. FIRST DRAFT COMPLETE AND SUBMITTED. 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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