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

2026-04-08 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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2026-04-06 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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2026-04-04 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 10:22:41 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
1/
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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

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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/2026/04/01/minilateralism/
--
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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

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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

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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//

2026-03-30 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

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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/

2026-03-30 17:38:01 UTC

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But this is *not* what happens. Resort-goers love the bartenders at the swim-up bar, and they are frustrated to the point of fury with the people selling necklaces, sunglasses and massages on the beach. These sellers "live or die by their ability to persuade people to part with money in exchange for goods and services." It's exhausting to *be* them, and it's exhausting to be approached *by* them.
27/

2026-03-30 17:37:52 UTC

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For Ganz, the beauty of an inclusive resort is that it removes the "cognitive demands" of a market, which are inherently stressful: "Every transaction is a decision, and decisions cost energy."
Ganz proposes that "this is quite difficult for people to understand if they have an economics degree." Why would the resort restaurants improve their food quality if they're not competing for your business? Why would servers hustle to make you happy if they're not competing for tips?
26/

2026-03-30 17:37:17 UTC

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The richest person at the resort eats and drinks the same food, goes on the same excursions, and participates in the same activities as the poorest person at the resort (yes, this is less true of today's inclusive resorts, which are full of "up-charges," representing the triumph of people who are invigorated by bargaining over people who are exhausted by it).
25/

2026-03-30 17:37:02 UTC

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Club Med was founded by an Olympian named Gérard Blitz whose insight was that "what people seek from a holiday is not luxury or material comfort, but happiness." For Blitz, the value of an inclusive resort wasn't the open bar and the buffet, "it’s the relief from participation in the everyday economy."
As Ganz points out, class differences (between guests, at least) are erased at inclusive resorts.
24/

2026-03-30 17:36:51 UTC

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It's the elevation of "stop hitting yourself" into political ideology.
The antidote to this is something John Ganz calls "The Club Med theory." He argues that while mostly we sneer at inclusive holiday resorts as a way to go on vacation without having to engage with another country's culture and people, that the original value of these resorts (still present today) is the way they let you go on vacation without participating in *markets*:
https://backofmind.substack.com/p/the-club-med-theory
23/

2026-03-30 17:36:42 UTC

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Running the world on "caveat emptor" isn't just a transfer from workers to the wealthy, it's a transfer from people who are exhausted by bargaining to people who are invigorated by it. It's a way of transforming just one of the many differences in how humans think into the single most important success criterion, the major determinant of your life's chances. It's a way for the invigorated to utterly dominate the exhausted.
22/

2026-03-30 17:36:29 UTC

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If you can cheat and get away with it, it's not even cheating: "that makes you smart":
https://pluralistic.net/2024/12/04/its-not-a-lie/#its-a-premature-truth
"Caveat emptor" makes sense at a yard-sale or an estate auction - but it's no way to operate a government or conduct your daily life. It's *exhausting*:
https://pluralistic.net/2025/04/29/cheaters-and-liars/#caveat-emptor-brainworms
21/

2026-03-30 17:36:17 UTC

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And if they sell their *privacy* to Sheryl Sandberg in order to stay in touch with the people they love, they have a "revealed preference" for having their data extracted and exploited by Facebook:
https://pluralistic.net/2024/01/24/everything-not-mandatory/#is-prohibited
Trump is the apotheosis of this. The true "art of the deal" is just *cheating*. That's why he stiffed his workers, stiffed his suppliers, stiffed his backers and stiffed his base.
20/

2026-03-30 17:36:04 UTC

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

2026-03-30 17:35:50 UTC

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In Sarah Wynn-Williams's *Careless People*, there's a memorable incident in which Sheryl Sandberg is shocked to the roots of her hair when she is told that she can't go to Mexico and buy a kidney if her child gets sick. Her child isn't even sick! She's just offended that this *hypothetical* situation wouldn't be resolved by bargaining:
https://pluralistic.net/2025/04/23/zuckerstreisand/#zdgaf
18/

2026-03-30 17:35:42 UTC

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The people running this game are so invigorated by haggling that they *can't not* haggle. They make putting a price on everything into a virtue. They want to be able to sell their kidneys. More importantly, they want to *buy your kidneys*.
17/

2026-03-30 17:35:18 UTC

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This ideology isn't just an *observation* ("society *is* a market"), it's also a demand ("society *should be* a market"). People who find aggressive haggling have taken over the operations of our civilization, and they are determined to convert *everything* to a marketplace, from waiting on hold for the IRS to looking for a parking place:
https://pluralistic.net/2021/10/07/markets-in-everything/#no-th-enq
16/

2026-03-30 17:34:57 UTC

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I emailed my pal, who emailed their manager to stand down and treat this as a friendly negotiation, whereupon Dr Jekyll became Mr Hyde and we wrapped things up in about ten minutes.
These haggler types do very well in our society, which is organized around the idea of efficient markets, where everyone is *always* bargaining to the last breath in order to "maximize their utility."
15/

2026-03-30 17:34:44 UTC

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They asked me to route the payment through their manager, and this manager assumed I was just another production hiring my buddy, and let loose with his full power at me over this payment, haggling for paperwork that would make Creative Commons releases impossible, as well as other (normal but not appropriate in this case) conditions.
14/

2026-03-30 17:34:24 UTC

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

2026-03-30 17:33:52 UTC

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They're competitive as hell, they love to bargain hard, but they understand that they're playing an iterated game, and if they crush the publishers' representatives they're up against, then they'll ruin *my* good name.
More: when the bargaining's done and we're having a nice chat about everyday things, or getting together for dinner, they're not *on*. They're just normal, not wrestling over every detail. Bargaining is what they *do*, it's not who they *are*.
12/

2026-03-30 17:33:19 UTC

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Many's the time I've gotten on a video call with my agents after they've concluded a successful deal and they're *glowing*. Call it what you will: cognitive diversity, emotional diversity, neurodiversity...my agents and I have it, and it's good for all of us.
And here's the thing that makes these world-class hagglers great: *they can switch it off*.
11/

2026-03-30 17:33:05 UTC

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

2026-03-30 17:32:51 UTC

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Likewise, my publisher employs copyeditors and proofreaders who find the typos that my brain just *doesn't see*, and when they send me back my marked-up manuscripts for review, I ask my mom to give them a pass, because *she* finds the typos *they* miss.
Sitting between me and my publishers are my agents (I have several of these, one for English-language literary deals, another for foreign rights, another for media, and yet another for speaking engagements).
9/

2026-03-27 14:16:55 UTC

How ICE Is Assisting TSA https://theonion.com/how-ice-is-assisting-tsa/
#TheOnion
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2026-03-26 07:58:51 UTC

Love to see that Virgin UK/O2 have blacklisted "http://detectportal.firefox.com/canonical.html" (the URL Ffox uses to invoke a captive portal, such as the ones you have to clear in order to use public hotspots with Virgin as a provider). Also nice to see that they've copyrighted the error page.
https://static.mamot.fr/media_attachments/files/116/294/411/355/725/026/original/63721e0ebc904e04.png

2026-03-26 04:35:11 UTC

Hey, EU-savvy friends. Vueling lost my baggage on a recent trip. I'm trying to file a claim with them, but the only path to do so is via their chatbot, which only produces this error:
> Sorry, this page doesn't exist. You can access all our Virtual Assistants on our Customer Services Centre
How do I open a complaint with the EC about this?

2026-03-25 08:58:45 UTC

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@nprofile…6keg What else would I have used? My fingers?

2026-03-24 11:41:44 UTC

Today's threads (a thread)
Inside: Goodhart's Law vs "prediction markets"; and more!
Archived at: https://pluralistic.net/2026/03/24/degenerated-gambling/
#Pluralistic
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2026-03-24 11:27:28 UTC

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But, as Protos's Cas Piancey and Mark Toon note, Polymarket and Kalshi know what side their bread is buttered on - they have banned bets on Trump's death (Trump's sons are heavily invested in both Polymarket and Kalshi):
https://protos.com/assassination-markets-are-legal-now-but-trump-doesnt-have-to-worry/
Incentives *do* matter. These are the foreseeable and foreseen outcomes of prediction markets.
32/

2026-03-24 11:27:18 UTC

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Polymarket and Kalshi have at last realized the unhinged fantasy of "assassination markets" - where you stochastically murder someone by putting up huge wagers at favorable odds that your target will be killed. Anyone can collect the wager by putting up a small counterwager and then bumping off the victim.
31/

2026-03-24 11:27:04 UTC

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Polymarket and Kalshi are heavily crypto-coded (the only things you can do with crypto is buy other kinds of crypto, launder money, and make wagers) so these demonic freaks flush nearly as much money into the betting markets as they do into the elections they seek to corrupt:
https://bsky.app/profile/molly.wiki/post/3mhch3ze5nc2z
Prediction markets aren't good at producing information, but they're *amazing* at producing corruption.
30/

2026-03-24 11:26:53 UTC

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Meanwhile, Polymarket and Kalshi *suck* at predicting things. As Molly White points out, the predictions in the recent Illinois 2nd District Congressional race weren't just *incredibly* wrong, they also precisely tracked the sums flooded into the election by cryptocurrency Super PACs, who tried (unsuccessfully) to buy the race.
29/

2026-03-24 11:26:41 UTC

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If military insiders who know Trump is about to kidnap the president of Venezuela and steal its oil start laying bets that this is going to happen, the shifting odds are a signal about a future event.
But even if you buy this perverse argument, it doesn't offset the even more perverse effect - that prediction markets create an incentive to corrupt our best sources of information, the oracles that every prediction market absolutely requires if it is going to hope to function.
28/

2026-03-24 11:26:20 UTC

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Now, "prediction markets" are big business and they have plenty of apologists (incentives matter). These apologists will say that the corruption is a feature, not a bug, because prediction markets will attract insiders who cheat on the bets by using their insider knowledge, and that means that looking at the moving odds of an event can help everyone else figure out what's about to happen.
27/

2026-03-24 11:26:10 UTC

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As Masnick says, this is no routine proof of Goodhart's law, where a metric becomes a target. In this case, participants can "put a gun to the metric's head." And of course, not every journalist is as incorruptible as Fabian - think about Fabian's colleague who offered to split the take if Fabian would lie about the missile strike. So there's plenty of incentive to publish lies - and incentives matter, right?
26/

2026-03-24 11:26:01 UTC

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Fabian's talking about an entirely novel - and far less predictable - threat; namely, that you will piss off someone who guessed wrong about the outcome of some arbitrary event and who thinks that they can salvage their bet by intimidating you.
Writing for *Techdirt*, Mike Masnick talks about the sheer perversity of this: that prediction markets, far from being a means of surfacing hidden information, have become a system for distorting information:
https://www.techdirt.com/2026/03/19/prediction-markets-promised-better-information-instead-theyre-creating-powerful-incentives-to-corrupt-information/
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2026-03-24 11:25:51 UTC

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It's sadly not unusual for journalists to receive death threats for reporting the truth, and Israel is the most dangerous country in the world to be a journalist. The IDF has murdered at least 274 journalists to date:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Killing_of_journalists_in_the_Gaza_war
But those journalists are being murdered for *political* reasons, because someone has an ideological stake in suppressing the truth.
24/

2026-03-24 11:25:39 UTC

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The threats continued until Fabian published his article about the threats, then Haim disappeared.
Speaking to Charlie Warzel, Fabian said that he would never be able to report the same way again, because from now on, he'd be worried that some gambler would threaten to kill him if they didn't like what he wrote:
https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/2026/03/emanuel-fabian-threats-polymarket/686454/?gift=nwn-guseqS6cY1kVeEKZAY9_c8Sv4UbJoz5hAUuU8YE&utm_source=copy-link&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=share
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2026-03-24 11:25:30 UTC

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A journalistic colleague contacted Fabian with the lie that his boss wanted Fabian to change the story, then admitted that he was invested in the wager, and offered to split the money with Fabian.
Then, a gambler calling himself "Haim" sent Fabian a new series of blood-curdling threats, including a promise to spend at least $900,000 (the money Haim said he stood to lose) on a hit-man to kill Fabian. Haim threatened Fabian's "lovely parents" and "brothers and sisters" too.
22/

2026-03-24 11:25:11 UTC

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Fabian filed a report that a missile had struck an open area in Jerusalem without hurting anyone. That's when the degenerate gamblers found him.
At first, they sent veiled threats, demanding that Fabian revise his reporting to say the missile had been intercepted and that the impact was just wreckage from the interception. When Fabian did not revise his article, the gamblers tracked down his messaging IDs - Whatsapp, Discord, X - and bombarded him with escalating threats.
21/

2026-03-24 11:24:43 UTC

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That's just what's happened. *Times of Israel* war correspondent Emanuel Fabian didn't know that he was serving as an oracle for a bunch of degenerate gamblers on Polymarket - until he wrote a 150 word blog post that made a bunch of bettors in a $14m wager very, very angry:
https://www.timesofisrael.com/gamblers-trying-to-win-a-bet-on-polymarket-are-vowing-to-kill-me-if-i-dont-rewrite-an-iran-missile-story/
The $14m was riding on a bet about when Iran would successfully strike Israel, with "success" defined as a missile getting through without being intercepted.
20/

2026-03-24 11:24:27 UTC

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So you need to get someone trustworthy and diligent to serve as your oracle. But that person also has to be incorruptible, because otherwise a bettor will offer them a bribe to lie about the outcome of a bet. And if the oracle can't be bribed, they can be coerced.
19/

2026-03-24 11:24:14 UTC

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Which means that the single most important factor in any prediction market is the quality of the oracle. If you let Trump be your oracle, he'll insist (on a daily basis) that his war in Iran is over, and that he had bigger crowds for his inauguration than anyone in history, and that every criminal is Somali, and on and on and on.
18/

2026-03-24 11:24:00 UTC

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"How much new solar capacity came online in Pakistan" this year *sounds* like an empirical question, but unless every bettor agrees to travel to Pakistan together and walk the land, counting solar panels and checking proof of their installation dates, these bettors need to agree on some third party assessor as authoritative and trust whatever they say.
17/

2026-03-24 11:23:49 UTC

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This is where Goodhart's law comes in. The idea that betting markets improve the wisdom of crowds because participants have "skin in the game" only works if the cheapest way to win a bet is to be right. If it's cheaper to win by cheating, well, "incentives matter," and you'll get cheating.
Any prediction market needs an "oracle" - a decisive source of truth about how an event turned out.
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2026-03-24 11:23:32 UTC

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Just create a market where people can bet real money on the outcomes of events and you can recreate Galton's ox-guessing miracle, but for everything - how much new solar capacity will come online in Pakistan next year; the likelihood that the Toronto Transit Commission will finish the Ontario Line this year; whether a biotech firm will ship an AIDS vaccine before 2040.
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2026-03-24 11:23:23 UTC

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And because the market is "deep" (with a lot of participants), the sums you'd have to inject into the system to alter its consensus is incredibly large - more than you could possibly stand to make by manipulating the price itself. Incentives matter.
Put "markets," "the wisdom of crowds" and "incentives matter" together and you get "prediction markets."
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2026-03-24 11:23:11 UTC

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Add up all the different buyers' and sellers' guesses about the future of oil (incorporating diffuse knowledge about damage to infrastructure, capacity to rebuild, and intentions of the actors) and (we're told) we'll get a number that accurately reflects the real situation.
And, unlike Pagerank, this number can't be manipulated by flooding the system with spurious, self-serving inputs. If you want to move this price, you have to buy or sell something, which costs money.
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2026-03-24 11:23:02 UTC

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Economists have long spoken of future events being "priced in" to markets - for example, the price of oil today reflects more than the diminished supply resulting from Trump's military blunders, it also reflects "the market's" belief that oil production capacity will be disrupted for a long time to come.
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2026-03-24 11:22:52 UTC

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Of course, economists observed that "the wisdom of crowds" sounds a lot like the idea of "price discovery" - the idea that markets are a way of processing widely diffused information about desires and capacity in order to derive and emit signals about what should be produced.
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2026-03-24 11:22:37 UTC

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This turns out to be a repeatable phenomenon: if you get a lot of people - non-experts, experts, people paying close attention, people who barely think about it - to guess about something, the average is surprisingly accurate. Importantly, it's often more accurate than the best guess of experts.
This idea of the wisdom of crowds inspired a lot of 2000s-era internet projects. Some of them (Yahoo Answers) were pretty bad. Others (Wikipedia) were astounding.
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2026-03-24 11:22:20 UTC

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Surowiecki's book revolved around a famous anecdote from 1906, when 800 people at the Plymouth county fair were invited to guess at the weight of a slaughtered and dressed ox. Statistician (and eugenicist creep) Francis Galton noted that the average guess of 1207 lbs was within 1% of the actual weight, 1198 lbs.
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2026-03-24 11:22:08 UTC

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"The wisdom of crowds" was in the air in those days. James Surowiecki had a massive bestseller with that title in 2004, expounding on the idea that people were, in aggregate, good at figuring stuff out:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wisdom_of_Crowds
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2026-03-24 11:21:50 UTC

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The metric - inbound links - became a target - *get* inbound links - and stopped being a useful metric.
There is something quite wonderful and life affirming about the idea of Pagerank: the idea that people are, on average, pretty good at figuring out what's good. Rather than taking Yahoo's approach of having experts rank and categorize every website on earth, Google trusted "the wisdom of crowds" and it worked (until they created an incentive to subvert it).
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2026-03-24 11:21:40 UTC

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With this insight, Google repurposed the academic practice of "citation analysis" to predict which pages on the internet were most authoritative, calling it Pagerank.
Google Search, powered by Pagerank, was vastly superior to any search engine in history. But as soon as Google became the most popular search engine, people started making links to *bad* websites - sites filled with spam and malware and junk - in order to game the results.
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2026-03-24 11:21:28 UTC

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So incentives matter...when you're fucking over working people. But incentives don't matter, when you're gilding the Epstein class's lilies.
But incentives really *do* matter. That's the premise of Goodhart's law: "When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure." This comes up all the time. Google got its start by observing that people who made websites linked to other websites that they found important or worthy or informative.
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2026-03-24 11:20:04 UTC

The most selectively believed-in verse in the conservative catechism is the idea that "incentives matter."
--
If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
https://pluralistic.net/2026/03/24/degenerated-gambling/#oracle-capture
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https://static.mamot.fr/media_attachments/files/116/277/981/666/458/025/original/599a04b109d7beb9.jpg

2026-03-23 10:29:52 UTC

646 words (55270 total) on “The Post-American Internet,” a sequel to "Enshittification," about the better world the rest of us get to have now that Trump has torched America #DailyWords FIRST DRAFT COMPLETE

2026-03-10 16:04:59 UTC

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Image:
Jakub Hałun (modified)
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Times_Square,_New_York_City,_20231006_1916_2338.jpg
CC BY 4.0
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/deed.en
--
Myotus (modified)
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Vandal_dome_style_security_camera_in_parking_garage.jpg
CC BY-SA 4.0
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/deed.en
--
Lewis Clarke (modified)
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Tiverton_,_CCTV_Camera_-_geograph.org.uk_-_7103690.jpg
CC BY-SA 2.0
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/deed.en
eof/

2026-03-10 16:04:53 UTC

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Our policymakers are supposed to work for *us*. They failed us. Don't let anyone tell you that the greed and depravity of ad-tech are the sole causes of Trump's use of ad-tech to decide who to kidnap and send to a Salvadoran slave-labor camp. Policymakers should have known. They *did* know. They had every chance to stop this. They did not.
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2026-03-10 16:04:47 UTC

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Sure, the ad-tech industry built this fascist dragnet - but a series of governments around the world *let them do it*. There was nothing inevitable about mass commercial surveillance. It doesn't even work very well! Mass commercial surveillance is the public-private partnership from hell, where cops and spies shielded ad-tech companies from regulation in exchange for those ad-tech companies selling cops and spies unlimited access to their databases.
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2026-03-10 16:04:38 UTC

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Ad-tech insiders dismissed privacy activists as unrealistic extremists who wanted to end advertising itself and accused ad-tech execs of *wanting* to create a repressive state system of surveillance. In reality, critics were just pointing out the entirely foreseeable repressive state surveillance that ad-tech would end up enabling.
I'm quite pleased to see Nyurenberg calling for a reckoning among his colleagues, but I think there's plenty of blame to spread around.
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2026-03-10 16:04:28 UTC

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Nyurenberg closes by upbraiding his ad-tech peers for refusing to engage with their critics during the decades in which it would have been possible to do something to prevent this outcome.
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2026-03-10 16:04:13 UTC

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Nyurenberg says his friends in ad-tech are really upset that these (eminently foreseeable) outcomes have come to pass, but (he says), ad-tech bosses claim they have no choice but to collaborate with the Trump regime. After all, we've seen what Trump does to companies that don't agree to help him commit crimes:
https://apnews.com/article/anthropic-trump-pentagon-hegseth-ai-104c6c39306f1adeea3b637d2c1c601b
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2026-03-10 16:04:02 UTC

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The losers of that auction are supposed to delete all your private data that they get to see through this process, but obviously they *do not*.
And Max Schrems has hollered from the mountaintops for years about the inevitability of authoritarian governments helping themselves to ad-tech data in order to suppress dissent and terrorize their political opposition:
https://www.bipc.com/european-high-court-finds-eu-us-privacy-shield-invalid
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2026-03-10 16:03:54 UTC

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Ryan is referring to the fact that you don't even have to buy an ad to amass vast databases of surveillance data about internet users. When you land on a webpage, every one of the little boxes where an ad will eventually show up gets its own high-speed auction in which your private data is dangled before anyone with an ad-tech account, who gets to bid on the right to shove an ad into your eyeballs.
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2026-03-10 16:03:47 UTC

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Nyurenberg points to EU privacy activists like Johnny Ryan and Max Schrems, who have chased American surveillance advertising companies out of the Irish courts and into other EU territories and even Europe's federal court, pointing out that these two (and many others!) have long warned the world about the way that this data would be weaponized. Johnny Ryan famously called ad-tech's "realtime bidding" system, "the largest data breach ever recorded":
https://committees.parliament.uk/writtenevidence/453/html/
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2026-03-10 16:03:35 UTC

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The "surveillance capitalism" critics who repeated tech's self-serving mumbo-jumbo about "hacking our dopamine loops" helped ad-tech cast itself in the role of mind-controlling evil sorcerers, which greatly benefited these self-styled Cyber-Rasputins to pitch their ads to credulous advertisers:
https://pluralistic.net/HowToDestroySurveillanceCapitalism
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2026-03-10 16:03:12 UTC

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There's another point that Nyurenberg doesn't make, but which is every bit as important: many of ad-tech's fiercest critics have abetted ad-tech's rise by engaging in "criti-hype" (repeating hype claims as criticism):
https://peoples-things.ghost.io/youre-doing-it-wrong-notes-on-criticism-and-technology-hype/
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2026-03-10 16:03:01 UTC

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Nyurenberg opens with a very important point - not only is ad-tech dangerous, it's also *just not very good at selling stuff*. The claims for the efficacy of surveillance advertising are grossly overblown, and used to bilk advertisers out of high premiums for a defective product:
https://truthset.com/the-state-of-data-accuracy-form/
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2026-03-10 16:02:51 UTC

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Despite this eminently foreseeable outcome of the ad-tech industry, many perfectly nice people who made extremely nice salaries working in ad-tech are rather alarmed by this turn of events:
https://quoteinvestigator.com/2017/11/30/salary/
On Adxchanger.com, ad-tech exec David Nyurenberg writes, "The Privacy ‘Zealots’ Were Right: Ad Tech’s Infrastructure Was Always A Risk":
https://www.adexchanger.com/data-driven-thinking/the-privacy-zealots-were-right-ad-techs-infrastructure-was-always-a-risk/
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2026-03-10 16:02:44 UTC

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Trump didn't offer any rationale for this, despite the fact that the hearing included a rep from the AARP who described how data brokers let advertisers target seniors with signs of dementia (a core Trump voter bloc). I don't know for sure, but I have a sneaking suspicion that the Stephen Miller wing of the Trump coalition wanted data brokers intact so that they could use them to round up and imprison/torture/murder/enslave non-white people and Trump's political enemies.
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2026-03-10 16:02:25 UTC

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Just last year, I testified before Biden's CFPB at hearings on a rule to kill the data-broker industry, where we heard from the Pentagon about ad-tech targeting of American military personnel with gambling problems with location-based ads that reached them in their barracks:
https://pluralistic.net/2025/02/20/privacy-first-second-third/#malvertising
Biden's CFPB passed the data broker-killing rule, but Trump and DOGE nuked it before it went into effect.
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2026-03-10 16:02:15 UTC

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Our lawmakers were warned. They did nothing. They exposed us to this risk, which was both foreseeable *and* foreseen.
Nor did the ICE/ad-tech alliance drop out of the sky. The fascist mobilization of ad-tech data for a racist pogrom is the latest installment in a series of extremely visible, worsening weaponizations of commercial surveillance.
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2026-03-10 16:02:03 UTC

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It took a minute, but today, the DHS is paying data-brokers and ad-tech giants like Google for commercial surveillance data that it is using to feed the systems that automatically decide who will be kidnapped, rendered and tortured by ICE:
https://www.theregister.com/2026/01/27/ice_data_advertising_tech_firms/
I want to be clear here: I'm not claiming *any* prescience - quite the reverse in fact. My point is that *it just wasn't very hard to see what would happen if we let the surveillance advertising industry run wild.*
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2026-03-10 16:01:49 UTC

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But the premise of "Scroogled" lives on. 20 years ago, I wrote a story in which the bloated, paranoid, lawless DHS raided ad-tech databases of behavioral data in order to target people for secret arrests, extraordinary rendition, and torture.
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2026-03-10 16:01:36 UTC

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The harms of mass commercial surveillance were never hard to foresee. 20 years ago, *Radar* magazine commissioned a story from me about "the day Google turned evil," and I turned in "Scroogled," which was widely shared and reprinted:
https://web.archive.org/web/20070920193501/https://radaronline.com/from-the-magazine/2007/09/google_fiction_evil_dangerous_surveillance_control_1.php/
*Radar* is long gone, though it's back in the news now, thanks to the revelation that it was financed via Jeffrey Epstein as part of his plan to both control and loot magazines and newspapers:
https://www.reddit.com/r/Epstein/comments/142bufo/radar_magazine_lines_up_financing_published_2004/
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2026-03-10 16:01:28 UTC

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Cops and spies love commercial surveillance, because the private sector's massive surveillance dossiers are an off-the-books trove of warrantless surveillance data that the government can't legally collect. What's more, even if the spying was legal, buying private sector surveillance data is *much* cheaper than creating a public sector surveillance apparatus to collect the same info:
https://pluralistic.net/2023/08/16/the-second-best-time-is-now/#the-point-of-a-system-is-what-it-does
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2026-03-10 16:01:16 UTC

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It was "Will lawmakers clobber us for spying on the whole internet?" And the answer to that second question was a resounding *no*.
Why did policymakers fail us? It's not much of a mystery, I'm afraid. Policymakers failed us because cops and spies *hate* privacy laws and lobby like hell against them.
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2026-03-10 16:01:04 UTC

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And yes, the EU *did* pass a comprehensive consumer privacy law, but then abdicated any duty to *enforce* the GDPR, because US Big Tech companies pretend to be Irish, and Ireland is a crime-haven that lets the tax-evaders who maintain the fiction of a Dublin HQ break any EU law they find inconvenient:
https://pluralistic.net/2025/12/01/erin-go-blagged/#big-tech-omerta
The most important question for Google wasn't "Will advertisers pay more for surveillance targeting?"
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2026-03-10 16:00:53 UTC

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They draw their paychecks from the public purse in exchange for safeguarding *our* interests, and they have manifestly failed at this.
Why did Google decide to start spying on us? For the same reason your dog licks its balls: because they *could*. The last consumer privacy law to make it out of the US Congress was a 1988 bill that banned video-store clerks from disclosing your VHS rentals:
https://pluralistic.net/2025/10/31/losing-the-crypto-wars/#surveillance-monopolism
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