Cory Doctorow

By Cory Doctorow (GPG 0xBF3D9110957E5F4C)
@doctorow.

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.

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Last Notes

2026-05-11 10:12:55 UTC

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Upcoming appearances (cont'd):
* #HayOnWye: HowTheLightGetsIn, May 22-25
https://howthelightgetsin.org/festivals/hay/big-ideas-2
* SXSW #London, Jun 2
https://www.sxswlondon.com/session/how-big-tech-broke-the-internet-b3c4a901
* #NYC: The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI with Jonathan Coulton (The Strand), Jun 24
https://www.strandbooks.com/cory-doctorow-the-reverse-centaur-s-guide-to-life-after-ai.html
* #Edinburgh International Book Festival with Jimmy Wales, Aug 17
https://www.edbookfest.co.uk/events/the-front-list-cory-doctorow-and-jimmy-wales
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2026-05-11 10:12:45 UTC

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Upcoming appearances:
* #Barcelona: Internet no tiene que ser un vertedero (Global Digital Rights Forum), May 13
https://encuentroderechosdigitales.com/en/speakers/
* Virtual: How to Disenshittify the Internet with Wendy Liu (EFF), May 14
https://www.eff.org/event/effecting-change-enshittification
* #Berlin: Re:publica, May 18-20
https://re-publica.com/de/news/rp26-sprecher-cory-doctorow
* #Berlin: Enshittification at Otherland Books, May 18
https://www.otherland-berlin.de/de/event-details/cory-doctorow-in-der-friesenstrasse-23-kreuzberg-praesentiert-von-otherland.html
* #Berlin: Enshittification at Otherland Books, May 19
https://www.otherland-berlin.de/de/event-details/cory-doctorow.html
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2026-05-11 10:12:30 UTC

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My ebooks and audiobooks (from FSGxMCD, Tor Books, Head of Zeus, McSweeneys, Beacon, Verso and others) are for sale all over the net, but I sell 'em too, and when you buy 'em from me, I earn twice as much and you get books with no DRM and no license "agreements."
https://craphound.com/shop/
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2026-05-11 10:12:12 UTC

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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
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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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2026-05-11 10:12:02 UTC

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Saturday's threads: Trump's fruitless search for a goreable ox; and more!
https://mamot.fr/@pluralistic/116544826522569554
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2026-05-11 10:11:51 UTC

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#10yrsago Safe Patient Project: searchable spreadsheet tells Californians whether their doc is on probation, and why https://web.archive.org/web/20160507002350/http://consumersunion.org/research/california-doctors-on-probation/
#5yrsago The Memex Method https://pluralistic.net/2021/05/09/the-memex-method/
#5yrsago How copyright filters lead to wage-theft https://pluralistic.net/2021/05/08/copyfraud/#beethoven-just-wrote-music
#1yrago Who broke the internet? https://pluralistic.net/2025/05/08/who-broke-the-internet/#bruce-lehman
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2026-05-11 10:11:33 UTC

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#10yrsago Conservative economics: what’s happened to the UK economy after a year of Tory rule https://web.archive.org/web/20160509113126/https://www.independent.co.uk/news/business/news/what-has-happened-to-the-economy-under-the-tories-in-six-charts-a7017131.html
#10yrsago Save iTunes: how the W3C’s argument for web-wide DRM would have killed iTunes https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2016/04/save-itunes
#10yrsago America’s courts are going dark https://www.justsecurity.org/30920/courts-going-dark/
#10yrsago Panama Papers: New Zealand is the go-to money launderer for crooked Latin Americans https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/panama-papers/303356/nz-at-heart-of-panama-money-go-round
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2026-05-11 10:11:16 UTC

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#15yrsago Ann Arbor library acquires lending, sharing and copying rights to Creative Commons music catalog https://annarborchronicle.com/2011/04/28/ann-arbor-library-signs-digital-music-deal/
#15yrsago Tin robot on Karel Čapek’s grave https://www.gilesorr.com/travels/Prague2011/BestPrague.20110421.6142.GO.CanonSX10.html
#15yrsago Just look at this banana Dalek. https://web.archive.org/web/20110716022131/https://www.daleksoftheday.com/2011/05/banana-dalek.html
#15yrsago NRA and Florida gag pediatricians: no more firearm safety advice for parents https://www.npr.org/2011/05/07/136063523/florida-bill-could-muzzle-doctors-on-gun-safety
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2026-05-07 08:02:42 UTC

Going to the UK polls today? Remember, Labour is the party that just greenlit Palantir being in charge of all the health data in our NHS:
https://www.theregister.com/paas-and-iaas/2026/05/07/minister-gives-palantirs-nhs-platform-a-clean-bill-of-health/5230642
While the Greens are the party that has put Palantir on notice that all of its contracts will be torn up and the company will be ejected from the country after the next general election:
https://greenparty.org.uk/2026/01/22/zack-polanski-tells-defence-surveillance-corporation-palantir-to-pack-its-bags-and-get-the-hell-out-of-the-nhs/

2026-05-04 10:36:25 UTC

No one is better at keeping hope alive than Rebecca Solnit, the historian and essayist whose *Hope in the Dark* got me through the first Trump administration and whose *A Paradise Built In Hell* inspired my novel *Walkaway*:
https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/301070/a-paradise-built-in-hell-by-rebecca-solnit/
--
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/2026/05/04/hope-in-the-dark/#hormuzed-into-the-gretacene
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2026-05-02 11:50:23 UTC

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You can follow these posts as a daily blog at pluralistic.net: no ads, trackers, or data-collection!
Here's today's edition: https://pluralistic.net/2026/05/02/denazification/denazification.jpg
--
If you prefer a newsletter, subscribe to the plura-list, which is ad-/tracker-free, and is utterly unadorned save a single daily emoji. Today's is "🗄". Suggestions solicited for future emojis!
--
You can also get a fulltext RSS feed, licensed CC BY 4.0:
https://pluralistic.net/feed/
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2026-04-30 14:41:44 UTC

If you want to piss me off, it's easy: just breezily assert that our tech regulation problems are the result of the fast pace of technological change racing ahead of the plodding speed of governmental action:
https://pluralistic.net/2026/04/22/uber-for-nurses/#go-meta
--
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/2026/04/30/something-must-be-done/#there-ive-done-something
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2026-04-27 14:01:22 UTC

To opt out, just don't have a face
#London #FacialRecognition
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2026-04-25 11:34:53 UTC

day's threads (a thread)
Inside: Ada Palmer's "Inventing the Renaissance"; and more!
Archived at: https://pluralistic.net/2026/04/25/machiavellian/
#Pluralistic
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2026-04-24 19:52:52 UTC

Surfin' firefighters
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2026-04-23 12:45:14 UTC

Today's threads (a thread)
Inside: The (other) problem with automatic conversion of free software to proprietary software; and more!
Archived at: https://pluralistic.net/2026/04/23/poison-pill/
#Pluralistic
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2026-04-23 12:35:02 UTC

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Image:
Muhammad Mahdi Karim (modified)
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Blue_Wildebeest,_Ngorongoro.jpg
GNU FDL
https://www.gnu.org/licenses/fdl-1.3.html
eof/

2026-04-23 12:28:02 UTC

An interesting stunt: Malus.sh will take your money and in exchange it will ingest any free/open source code you want, refactor that code using an LLM, and spit out a "clean room" version that is freed from all the obligations imposed by the original project's software license:
https://www.404media.co/this-ai-tool-rips-off-open-source-software-without-violating-copyright/?ref=daily-stories-newsletter
-
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/2026/04/23/poison-pill/#kobayashied
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2026-04-22 15:28:40 UTC

If I could abolish one piece of received wisdom about tech policy, it would be this: "Tech moves at the speed of innovation and regulation moves at the speed of government, so regulation will always lag behind tech."
--
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/2026/04/22/uber-for-nurses/#go-meta
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2026-04-20 17:24:19 UTC

Today's threads (a thread)
Inside: Comrade Trump; and more!
Archived at: https://pluralistic.net/2026/04/20/praxis/
#Pluralistic
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2026-04-20 16:58:17 UTC

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This is a deeply shitty timeline, but Comrade Trump keeps tripping over his red tie. Let's take the wins.
eof/

2026-04-20 16:58:12 UTC

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Thanks to Trump, we might see criminal prosecutions - and a primary challenge for any Dem that gets in the way of a serious, Nuremberg-style reckoning with Trumpismo and its gangsters:
https://pluralistic.net/2026/02/10/miller-in-the-dock/#denazification
Look, all things being equal, I would have preferred that Trump had keeled over from a mid-burger stroke on the campaign trail in 2016. But when life gives you SARS, you make sarsaparilla.
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2026-04-20 16:58:02 UTC

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Fury over Trumpismo is pushing even the most useless Democratic leaders to sign up for billionaire taxes:
https://jacobin.com/2026/04/zohran-tax-rich-hochul-nyc
Thanks to Comrade Trump, the median Democratic voter will no longer be satisfied with Kente cloth photo-ops and little ping-pong paddles stenciled with "down with this sort of thing":
https://www.truthdig.com/articles/ping-pong-paddles-to-a-gun-fight/
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2026-04-18 13:31:58 UTC

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Angelenos! I'll be at the #LosAngeles Festival of Books SUNDAY (Apr 19) for a panel called "Nature or Nurture: How Humans and AI Are Changing Each Other" with Adam Becker, Joanne McNeil, and Lucas Cantor Santiago:
https://www.latimes.com/events/festival-of-books/schedule?eventId%5B56624ef6-1a3f-40d7-8897-9e46d5e61c95%5D=ea981e7e-4aa8-4a4c-9001-6fd8427e8e9e&performerId%5B56624ef6-1a3f-40d7-8897-9e46d5e61c95%5D
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2026-04-18 13:31:13 UTC

Today's threads (a thread)
Inside: Georgia's voting technology blunder; and more!
Archived at: https://pluralistic.net/2026/04/18/dominion-sucks-actually/
#Pluralistic
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2026-04-18 13:15:17 UTC

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And even if the files make it to the outside contractor safely, that contractor could "change the inputs (ballot images) or outputs (tabulations)."
So this is very bad. Voting machines suck. Raffensperger sucks.
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2026-04-18 13:15:04 UTC

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As Appel writes, "it would be fairly easy for an unsophisticated attacker to alter ballot-image files–just replace the ballots they don’t like with copies of the ones they do like."
Then there's the step where these files are zipped up and transferred to the outside vendor for the audit - a step that Raffensperger has not explained.
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2026-04-18 13:14:50 UTC

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First, the BMDs are super-hackable, so we don't trust them to print the same info in the QR code as they print in the human-readable text (which no one looks at anyway). If we don't trust them to print accurate info in the QR code, then why would we trust them to accurately generate that 200dpi QR code that's generated for the audit?
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2026-04-18 13:14:39 UTC

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As Appel points out, this is the same stupid plan that Raffensperger tried in 2024, where he called the OCR step an "audit" of the QR tabulation. Back then, he grabbed 200dpi "ballot image files" from the Dominion BMDs and ran them through OCR software run by a company called Enhanced Voting. Appel sums up the fundamental incoherence of this approach.
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2026-04-18 13:10:34 UTC

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Pretty much everyone I knew thought that voting machines were garbage technology...right up to the moment that the My Pillow guy, Tucker Carlson, and a whole menagerie of conspiratorial Trumpland mutants started peddling a bizarre story about how Hugo Chavez colluded with the Canadian voting machine company Dominion Voting Systems (who bought Diebold's voting machine business when they finally dumped the division) to rig the 2020 election for Joe Biden.
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2026-04-18 13:10:23 UTC

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The hits just kept on coming:
https://web.archive.org/web/20061007120655/http://openvotingfoundation.org/tiki-index.php?page_ref_id=1
At Defcon, the amazing Matt Green has presided over the Voting Village, where it's an annual tradition for hackers to probe voting machines. This exercise has produced a string of terrifying revelations that precisely described how these machines suck:
https://www.votingvillage.org/cfp
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2026-04-18 13:10:13 UTC

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Rather, he was just a loudmouth asshole CEO who supported the (up to that point) worst president in American history, and who also made garbage products that were not fit for purpose.
In the decades since, voting machines have been the subject of lots of scrutiny by the information security community, because *they suck*. Time after time, the most sphincter-puckering defects in widely used machines have come to light:
https://blog.citp.princeton.edu/2006/05/11/report-claims-very-serious-diebold-voting-machine-flaws/
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2026-04-18 13:09:58 UTC

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Not only was this a very unconvincing excuse, it was downright alarming in light of the promise of Walden O’Dell (Diebold CEO and prominent Bush fundraiser) to help "Ohio deliver its electoral votes to the president":
https://fairvote.org/diebold-partisanship-and-public-interest-elections/
Now, to be clear, I don't think that O'Dell was going to steal the election for Bush (that's the Supreme Court's job).
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2026-04-17 10:51:11 UTC

Today's threads (a thread)
Inside: Tiktokification shall set us free; and more!
Archived at: https://pluralistic.net/2026/04/17/for-youze/
#Pluralistic
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2026-04-17 10:41:31 UTC

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Your friends fulfill a very specific purpose in your life that strangers - even extremely cool strangers - cannot match.
On the other hand: one feed of algorithmically selected, entertaining amateur dramatics is broadly equivalent to any other feed of algorithmically selected amateur dramatics.
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2026-04-17 10:38:18 UTC

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On a typical day, no friend of yours is going to absolutely floor you with a novel thought or finding that sparks hours of furious conversation and argumentation.
And speaking of argumentation: you and your friends probably don't argue that much - I mean, sure, you'll have "friendly disagreements" (again, by definition), but if there's a friend who sparks furious, frustrating, irresistible feuds that drag on and on, chances are that person won't be your friend anymore.
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2026-04-16 11:26:54 UTC

Today's threads (a thread)
Inside: A Pascal's Wager for AI Doomers; and more!
Archived at: https://pluralistic.net/2026/04/16/pascals-wager/
#Pluralistic
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2026-04-16 11:11:04 UTC

Lest anyone accuse me of bargaining in bad faith here, let me start with this admission: I don't think AI is intelligent; nor do I think that the current (admittedly impressive) statistical techniques will lead to 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/2026/04/16/pascals-wager/#doomer-challenge
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2026-04-15 07:51:54 UTC

Today's threads (a thread)
Inside: Rights for robots; and more!
Archived at: https://pluralistic.net/2026/04/15/artificial-lifeforms/
#Pluralistic
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2026-04-14 08:52:23 UTC

Today's threads (a thread)
Inside: In praise of (some) compartmentalization; and more!
Archived at: https://pluralistic.net/2026/04/14/compartments/
#Pluralistic
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2026-04-13 05:37:11 UTC

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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2026-04-11 13:37:12 UTC

How I knew I was officially Old: I stopped being disoriented by the experience of meeting with grown-ass adults who wanted to thank me for the books of mine they'd read in their childhoods, which helped shape their lives.
--
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/2026/04/11/obvious-terrible-ideas/#bayesian-terrorism
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2026-04-10 10:01:00 UTC

Last year, I ran a wildly successful Kickstarter campaign to pre-sell my ebooks, audiobooks and hardcovers of my book *Enshittification*, which went on to be an international bestseller, selling out 10 printings in the first 11 weeks:
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/doctorow/enshittification-the-drm-free-audiobook
--
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/2026/04/10/canny-valley#limited-edition
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2026-04-09 10:53:24 UTC

I've known EFF executive director Cindy Cohn for 27 years. I met her when I needed cyberlaw advice for a startup I'd helped found. We got along so well that I ended up quitting the startup and going to work at EFF. Now, Cindy's memoir, *Privacy's Defender*, is on the shelves:
https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262051248/privacys-defender/
--
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/2026/04/09/bernstein/#win-some-lose-some
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2026-04-08 14:27:22 UTC

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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2026-04-08 13:59:02 UTC

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I've come to believe process knowledge is the *most* undervalued part of our society. So undervalued that business geniuses like Musk think you can fire skilled lifers from key government agencies and simply hire new ones if turns out you cut too deep. So undervalued that Trump thinks that you can simply stand up new factories in response to tariffs, and that "training" will somehow allow people to go to work making things that haven't been produced onshore in a generation.
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2026-04-08 13:58:42 UTC

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As a result, all their cleaning supplies and holiday decorations were stolen from the cabinets in the bathrooms that they were forced to stash them in.
Marisol blames this on a "CEO who had never worked a lower level job in his life wasn’t convinced closets were worth it."
This is doubtless true - but we can generalize this, to "a CEO who didn't appreciate process knowledge."
32/

2026-04-08 13:58:35 UTC

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The CEO and architect were still disbelieving, so Marisol had them sit with her for an hour. They didn't last an hour - they left, taking the blueprints with them.
The punchline: Marisol bemoans the fact that she wasn't given more time with those blueprints, because then she might have spotted that they'd forgotten to include *any closets*, including closets for the janitors.
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2026-04-08 13:58:26 UTC

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Marisol explained that charts were pulled continuously, any time there was a crisis or a patient had a question for a nurse, or when a patient came in due to a cancellation. All told, reception went into the chart room 20-30 times/day. The "goofing off" they thought workers got up to in the chart room was "when we got news that a patient had died and we were crying. And even then, we filed charts as we sobbed because no one in this office has free time."
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2026-04-08 13:58:07 UTC

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They insisted that since charts for the day's patients were pulled in the morning, it would be OK to house them through two sets of locked doors, a five-minute walk away (that way, workers wouldn't be tempted to "goof off" in the room). They wanted to keep the chart room locked, with the key entrusted to the CEO, who would supervise every entry.
29/

2026-04-08 13:57:57 UTC

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She explained not everyone signs in - people there for a check-in or group therapy need to be directed to the other side of the building, while "some people are painfully shy and if I don’t appear warm and inviting they won’t approach."
The CEO and architect asked whether this happened often, and she replied "every day." They didn't believe her. Nor did they believe her when she said that the receptionists needed to have continuous access to the chart room throughout the day.
28/

2026-04-08 13:57:29 UTC

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When Marisol - the receptionist - happened to be consulted on the near-final design plan, "it took all of three seconds for two major issues to jump out."
First: "The receptionist can’t see the waiting room from her desk with this layout. It’s around the corner and blocked by a wall." This meant that she couldn't "keep track of the patients who are waiting."
The architect and CEO wanted to know why she couldn't use the sign-in sheet to manage this.
27/

2026-04-08 13:57:17 UTC

- reply

This reply prompted another response, from "Marisol," a "haunted house actress and accidental IT person" who told the story of her time working at a medical office that specialized in mental health and addiction recovery:
https://www.tumblr.com/marisolinspades/790960414106304512/all-of-this-disaster-befalls-any-company-that
The company was in the midst of standing up its own purpose-built facility, and the CEO was working intensively with the architect to design this new building.
26/

2026-04-08 13:57:08 UTC

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If they failed at this, Blinkpatch would be washing dishes until 2AM, rather than clocking out at midnight.
Blinkpatch's takeaway was that dishwashing was the bottleneck the whole restaurant ran through - and how that meant that Claudio, who was "unambitious" by conventional standards, had the best understanding of the restaurant's overall operations of anyone on site. He was the keeper of the process knowledge
25/

2026-04-08 13:51:59 UTC

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So what is process knowledge? It's all the knowledge that workers collectively carry around in their heads - hard-won lessons that span firms and divisions, that can never be adequately captured through documentation. Think of a worker at a chip fab who finds themself with a load of microprocessors that have failed QA because they become unreliable when they're run above a certain clockspeed.
8/

2026-04-08 13:51:32 UTC

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I picked up *Breakneck* after reading others whom I admire who singled out the book's treatment of process knowledge for praise and further discussion. The political scientist Henry Farrell called process knowledge the key to economic development:
https://www.programmablemutter.com/p/process-knowledge-is-crucial-to-economic
While Dan Davies - a superb writer about organizations and their management - used England's Brompton Bicycles to make the abstract concept of process knowledge very concrete indeed:
https://backofmind.substack.com/p/the-brompton-ness-of-it-all
7/

2026-04-08 13:51:17 UTC

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But even though "IP" is treated as a firm's most important asset, it's actually far less important than another intangible: *process knowledge*.
I first came across the concept of "process knowledge" in Dan Wang's *Breakneck*, a very good book about the rise and rise of Chinese manufacturing, industrialization and global dominance:
https://danwang.co/breakneck/
6/

2026-04-07 08:09:35 UTC

If you live in Switzerland you can get a 25Gbit fiber link to your home. That's 25Gbit *symmetrical* - upload *and* download. On a dedicated connection that's yours and yours alone. From multiple providers. It's the *ne plus ultra*, *magnifico*, *wunderschön*:
https://www.init7.net/de/internet/fiber7/
--
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/2026/04/07/swisscom/#stacked
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2026-04-06 09:23:54 UTC

Today's threads (a thread)
Inside: Your boss wants to use surveillance data to cut your wages; and more!
Archived at: https://pluralistic.net/2026/04/06/empiricism-washing/
#Pluralistic
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2026-04-06 09:12:00 UTC

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In Colorado, a new House bill called the "Prohibit Surveillance Data to Set Prices and Wages Act" would prohibit the use of personal information in wage-setting:
https://leg.colorado.gov/bills/hb25-1264
This bill hasn't passed yet, but it's already doing useful work. Companies universally deny using surveillance data to set wages, insisting that they merely pay for consulting services that give them advice on how they *could* do surveillance wages - but don't actually take that advice.
18/

2026-04-04 07:55:23 UTC

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Moving to the post-American internet *is* hard - but it will only get harder. Sure, Europe could wait for the next crisis to let go of the Big Tech vine and grab the Eurostack one, but that next crisis will be far, far worse. The EU can't afford to wait for Trump to brick one or more of its member states to (finally, at long last) take this threat seriously:
https://pluralistic.net/2026/01/01/39c3/#the-new-coalition
eof/

2026-04-04 07:55:17 UTC

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For Trump, the "art of the deal" can be summed up in one word: *reneging*.
Within the EU, there's fury at the Commission's announcement of "dialogue." As *Politico*'s Milena Wälde reports, lawmakers like Alexandra Geese (Greens) say that this is a move that eliminates the "sovereign path for Europe" by letting tech giants "grade their own homework." She calls it a "fatal decision for our companies and our democracy."
16/

2026-04-04 07:55:05 UTC

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The quislings and appeasers in the Commission who've been spooked by Trump's belligerence (or tempted by offers of cushy jobs in Big Tech after they leave public service) are selling out the EU's future. Caving to Trump won't make him more favorably disposed to Europe or Europeans. Trump treats every capitulation as a sign of weakness that signals that he can safely ignore his end of the bargain and demand twice as much.
15/

2026-04-04 07:50:49 UTC

Crises precipitate change. That's no reason to induce a crisis, but you'd be a fool to let a crisis go to waste. Donald Trump is the greatest crisis of our young century, and the EU looks set to squander the opportunity, to its own terrible detriment.
--
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/2026/04/04/digital-subjugation/#greenlands-next
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2026-04-02 10:32:47 UTC

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Expanding copyright will gain little for creative workers, except for a new reason to be angry about how our audiences experience our work. Expanding *labor* rights will gain much, for *every* worker, including our audiences. It's an idea that our bosses - *and* AI hucksters - hate with every fiber of their beings.
eof/

2026-04-02 10:23:35 UTC

- reply

In practice, that means that anyone can send a notice to any intermediary and have anything removed from the internet. The intermediary who receives this notice *can* choose to ignore it, but if the notice turns out to be genuine, they can end up on the hook for $150,000 per infringement. The intermediary can also *choose* to allow their user to "counternotify" (dispute the accusation) and *can* choose to reinstate the material, but they don't have to.
6/

2026-04-02 10:23:19 UTC

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A cumbersome system in which users would upload proof that they have such a license wouldn't just be onerous - it would still permit copyright infringement, because there's no way for an intermediary to know whether the distribution license the user provided was genuine.
As a compromise, DMCA 512 absolves intermediaries from liability, *if* they "expeditiously remove" material upon notice that it infringes someone's copyright.
5/

2026-04-02 10:23:07 UTC

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DMCA 512 is meant to offset this strict liability. After all, there's no way for a platform to know whether one of its users is infringing copyright - even if a user uploads a popular song or video, the provider can't know whether they've licensed the work for distribution (or even if they are the creator of that work).
4/

2026-04-02 10:22:52 UTC

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Copyright is a "strict liability" statute, meaning that you can be punished for violating copyright even if you weren't aware that you had done so. What's more, "intermediaries" - like web hosts, social media platforms, search engines, and even caching servers - can be held liable for the copyright violations their users engage in. The liability is tremendous: the DMCA provides for $150,000 per infringement.
3/

2026-04-02 10:22:41 UTC

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In response, Anthropic is flooding the internet with "takedown notices." These are a special kind of copyright-based censorship demand established by section 512 of the 1998 Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA 512), allowing for the removal of material without any kind of evidence, let alone a judicial order:
https://www.removepaywall.com/search?url=https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/anthropic-races-to-contain-leak-of-code-behind-claude-ai-agent-4bc5acc7
2/

2026-04-02 10:21:59 UTC

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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2026-04-01 19:24:03 UTC

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@nprofile…srdy I do indeed.

2026-04-01 11:17:34 UTC

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I'm also on Bluesky. Read today's thread there at:
https://bsky.app/profile/doctorow.pluralistic.net/post/3migklhhujk2x
eof/

2026-04-01 11:17:26 UTC

- reply

You can follow these posts as a daily blog at pluralistic.net: no ads, trackers, or data-collection!
Here's today's edition: https://pluralistic.net/2026/04/01/minilateralism/
--
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14/

2026-04-01 11:17:14 UTC

- reply

Recent appearances:
* Do you feel screwed over by big tech? (Ontario Today)
https://www.cbc.ca/listen/live-radio/1-45-ontario-today/clip/16203024-do-feel-screwed-big-tech
* Launch for Cindy's Cohn's "Privacy's Defender" (City Lights)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WuVCm2PUalU
* Chicken Mating Harnesses (This Week in Tech)
https://twit.tv/shows/this-week-in-tech/episodes/1074
* The Virtual Jewel Box (U Utah)
https://tanner.utah.edu/podcast/enshittification-cory-doctorow-matthew-potolsky/
* Tanner Humanities Lecture (U Utah)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i6Yf1nSyekI
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2026-04-01 11:17:00 UTC

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Upcoming appearances (cont'd):
* #London: Resisting Big Tech Empires (LSBU), Apr 25
https://www.tickettailor.com/events/globaljusticenow/2042691
* #NYC: Enshittification at Commonweal Ventures, Apr 29
https://luma.com/ssgfvqz8
* #Berlin: Re:publica, May 18-20
https://re-publica.com/de/news/rp26-sprecher-cory-doctorow
* #Berlin: Enshittification at Otherland Books, May 19
https://www.otherland-berlin.de/de/event-details/cory-doctorow.html
* #HayOnWye: HowTheLightGetsIn, May 22-25
https://howthelightgetsin.org/festivals/hay/big-ideas-2
* SXSW #London, Jun 2
https://www.sxswlondon.com/session/how-big-tech-broke-the-internet-b3c4a901
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2026-04-01 11:16:47 UTC

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Upcoming appearances:
* #Toronto: Humber Polytechnic President's Lecture Series, Apr 8
https://liberalarts.humber.ca/current-students/resources/conferences-and-lectures/presidents-lecture-series.html
* #Montreal: Bronfman Lecture (McGill), Apr 10
https://www.eventbrite.ca/e/artificial-intelligence-the-ultimate-disrupter-tickets-1982706623885
* #Montreal: Drawn and Quarterly, Apr 10
https://mtl.drawnandquarterly.com/events/4863920260410
* #Toronto: DemocracyXchange, Apr 16
https://www.democracyxchange.org/news/cory-doctorow-to-open-dxc26-on-april-16
* #SanFrancisco: 2026 Berkeley Spring Forum on M&A and the Boardroom, Apr 23
https://www.theberkeleyforum.com/#agenda
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2026-04-01 11:05:25 UTC

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Meanwhile, there's a global cultural market that's sweeping away American media: from K-pop (and K-zombies) to Heated Rivalry to Brazil funk:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Funk_carioca
Now, thanks to Trump, there are just a couple of years until America's wilting cultural exports will face high tariffs from markets where international media is surging.
This is how the American century ends: not with a bang, but with a Trump.
eof

2026-04-01 11:05:15 UTC

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He stole Tiktok and gave it to his buddy Larry Ellison, whose failson's acquisition and merger of two of the five remaining studios Trump *also* waved through:
https://pluralistic.net/2026/02/28/golden-mean/#reality-based-community
Game studios are ensloppifying their flagship products, alienating their most ardent customers, and are laying off thousands of programmers and artists following incestuous mergers that leave them hopelessly bloated:
https://www.blog.udonis.co/mobile-marketing/mobile-games/activision-blizzard-layoffs
15/

2026-04-01 11:05:04 UTC

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This was such a given that in Neal Stephenson's 1992 cyberpunk classic *Snow Crash*, Stephenson imagined a future where the US had all but collapsed, save for the three things it did better than anyone else in the world: "music, movies and microcode":
https://www.gdcvault.com/play/1015147/Music-Movies-Microcode-High-Speed
Today, America's media and software industries are dying, and Trump is holding a pillow over their faces.
14/

2026-04-01 11:04:44 UTC

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Even more interesting: Brazil struck a "minilateral" digital duty-free deal with *66 non-US countries*, including Canada and the EU:
https://www.csmonitor.com/Editorials/the-monitors-view/2026/0331/EU-and-Canada-lean-into-a-new-world-role?icid=rss
Now, the US is a powerhouse exporter of digital goods, and has been since the start.
13/

2026-04-01 11:04:28 UTC

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Brazil blocked the 10-year renewal of the duty-free status of digital exports, *worldwide*. In its place, the US got a two-year renewal - meaning that US companies' ability to export their digital products after 2028 will depend on whatever Trump does in the next two years, a period during which we *know* Trump is going to be a raging asshole (assuming he doesn't have a stroke first).
12/

2026-04-01 11:04:20 UTC

- reply

And this week, duty-free status for digital assets hit the skids when a meeting of the World Trade Organization saw America's demands for a 10-year renewal of a global deal fail because Brazil wouldn't agree to it. Brazil has good reasons to mistrust the digital trade agenda, after Trump and Microsoft colluded to shut down a high court judge's online life in retaliation for passing sentence on the Trump-allied former dictator, Jair Bolsonaro:
https://home.treasury.gov/news/press-releases/sb0211
11/

2026-04-01 11:04:09 UTC

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Today, the digital trade agenda is in tatters. Data localization is the top priority, with projects like the Eurostack and the European Digital Infrastructure Consortium breaking all land-speed records to build on-shore apps and data-centers that will keep data out of the hands of American companies and the American government:
https://digital-strategy.ec.europa.eu/en/policies/edic
10/

2026-04-01 11:03:59 UTC

- reply

Countries that succumbed to the digital trade agenda had to agree not to pursue "data localization" (rules that ban companies from moving or storing data about the people of your country outside of its borders), and they had to agree to duty-free status for digital exports like apps, music, games, ebooks and videos.
9//

2026-04-01 11:03:43 UTC

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Every now and then, I think about how *furious* the USTR must be, watching Trump blunder through all the subtle traps they wove around the planet.
Take the "digital trade agenda," a set of policies that the US has made its top priority for a decade.
8/

2026-04-01 11:03:25 UTC

- reply

(I really hope Trump's plan to rename it the "Strait of Trump" catches on, so that his name in invoked with every tanker that traverses the strait, weakening the dollar and America's power - a very fitting legacy.)
For the past quarter-century, I've fought the US Trade Representative in various international fora, as the USTR piled all kinds of conditions America's trading partners that made it impossible to pursue any kind of technological sovereignty:
https://pluralistic.net/2026/01/01/39c3/#the-new-coalition
7/

2026-04-01 11:03:06 UTC

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Now, thanks to Trump's "America First," America's advantages are collapsing. The dollar is in retreat, with Ethiopia revaluing its debt in Chinese renminbi:
https://fidelpost.com/ethiopia-and-china-move-toward-final-stage-of-debt-restructuring-agreement/
Even worse: Trump's disastrous war of choice in Iran is heading for a humiliating defeat for the dollar, with Iran announcing that any peace deal will require a $2m/ship toll to pass through the Strait of Hormuz, a toll they're already collecting, *payable only in renminbi*:
https://www.nbcnews.com/world/iran/irans-tehran-toll-booth-forces-tankers-pay-millions-leave-strait-hormu-rcna265258
6/

2026-04-01 11:02:30 UTC

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This led to Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney - the world's most Davos man - standing up at this year's World Economic Forum to denounce the whole post-war settlement as a bullshit arrangement, announcing that we were in a period of "rupture" and promising a new world of "variable geometry" in which "middle powers" would exist in overlapping webs of alliances, without the USA:
https://pluralistic.net/2026/01/27/i-want-to-do-it/#now-make-me-do-it
5/

2026-04-01 11:02:18 UTC

- reply

When Trump kicked off his campaign of incontinent belligerence - putting tariffs on the exports of countries populated only by penguins, trying to steal Greenland - it became impossible for the world's leaders to carry on this pretense.
4/

2026-04-01 11:02:05 UTC

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By pretending to have a neutral currency, it got to exercise "dollar dominance" through which the nations of the world sent America the things they dug out of the ground or built in their factories, in exchange for America making small adjustments to a spreadsheet at the Federal Reserve. And by pretending its tech exports were neutral platforms, America got to raid the world's private data and bank accounts, spying and looting to its heart's content.
3/

2026-04-01 11:01:53 UTC

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Before Trump, the deal was that everyone would pretend that we had a "rules-based international order" in which every country got a fair deal, even as America cheated like hell and sucked the world dry. It's really impossible to overstate how advantageous this was to America. By pretending to be a neutral interchange spot for transoceanic fiber cables, it got to spy on the world's internet traffic:
https://pluralistic.net/2025/11/26/difficult-multipolarism/#eurostack
2/

2026-04-01 11:00:43 UTC

As November Kelly has pointed out, the weirdest thing about Trumpismo is how the man seethes and rails against a game that is thoroughly rigged in America's favor, because he resents having to pretend to play the game *at all*:
https://pluralistic.net/2026/01/26/i-dont-want/#your-greenback-dollar
--
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/2026/04/01/minilateralism/#own-goal
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2026-03-30 18:48:58 UTC

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Hey look at this
* Electronic Frontier Foundation to swap leaders as AI, ICE fights escalate https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2026/03/trump-made-opposing-government-spying-cool-again-effs-departing-chief-says/
* NYC Schools Release AI Policy That Tells Teachers AI Cannot Do Teacher’s Job https://blog.adafruit.com/2026/03/25/nyc-schools-release-ai-policy-that-tells-teachers-ai-cannot-do-teachers-job/
* How to Keep ICE Agents Out of Your Phone at the Airport https://theintercept.com/2026/03/25/ice-airports-phone-security-privacy-safety/
* End of “Chat Control”: EU Parliament Stops Mass Surveillance in Voting Thriller https://www.patrick-breyer.de/en/end-of-chat-control-eu-parliament-stops-mass-surveillance-in-voting-thriller-paving-the-way-for-genuine-child-protection/
* The Handoff Problem https://blog.dshr.org/2026/03/the-handoff-problem.html
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2026-03-30 18:48:37 UTC

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Market participation is exhausting: No one wants to be the sucker at the table.
https://mamot.fr/@pluralistic/116319311545279432
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2026-03-30 18:47:41 UTC

Today's threads (a thread)
Inside: Market participation is exhausting; and more!
Archived at: https://pluralistic.net/2026/03/30/players-of-games/
#Pluralistic
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2026-03-30 17:38:47 UTC

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The more I thought about it, the more I liked it - and the more I thought that there was something missing from it: the idea that there are some people who *hate* a life without bargaining. These people are invigorated by bargaining and exhausted by "total physical and mental inertia." They *need* to be hustling.
31/

2026-03-30 17:38:38 UTC

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Ganz isn't the first person to observe this. As he points out, in 1963, Galbraith wrote:
> Total physical and mental inertia are highly agreeable, much more so than we allow ourselves to imagine. A beach not only permits such inertia but enforces it, thus neatly eliminating all problems of guilt.
I read Ganz's short post last week and it stuck with me.
30/

2026-03-30 17:38:27 UTC

- reply

The equilibrium of that market is to be woken from your nap or interrupted from your book every five minutes by someone who's hustling to make the rent. The economy doesn't "price in the externality" of your plummeting satisfaction with your holiday.
29/

2026-03-30 17:38:12 UTC

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Ganz says that the best strategy to get someone to part with their money isn't necessarily to provide good service. As he learned in his stockbroker days, you can also "pester them mercilessly until they pay you to go away." In an unregulated market, you don't get a single vendor who comes around and offers you sunglasses once a day.
28/