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

2026-05-30 09:48:23 UTC

Today's threads (a thread)
Inside: Carneyism without Carney; and more!
Archived at: https://pluralistic.net/2026/05/30/rupture/
#Pluralistic
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2026-05-25 07:56:54 UTC

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For example, Nissan and Kia claimed that they had data about your sex life, a thing that cannot be reasonably inferred from the sensors in your car (unless you have a highly specific sex life). *Six* car companies claimed they had your genetic data (again, not a thing that any of the sensors in your car can know about).
What's more, all of these scams have only gotten worse in the intervening three years:
https://cleantechnica.com/2026/05/22/mozilla-foundation-condemns-data-collection-by-cars/
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2026-05-17 16:38:52 UTC

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@nprofile…ysg3 I'm sorry to hear it

2026-05-17 16:24:33 UTC

Travis McGee on Enshittifcation
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2026-05-17 11:49:31 UTC

Urban exuberance
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2026-05-16 19:52:12 UTC

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My next book is *The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI*, out next month. Pre-order it now, including as a DRM-free audiobook or ebook, at my Kickstarter, and help me continue to prove that DRM-free isn't just the *right* way to reach an audience, it's also the *best* way to reach them:
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/doctorow/the-reverse-centaurs-guide-to-life-after-ai
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2026-05-16 19:51:21 UTC

Today's threads (a thread)
Inside: Making sense of Trump's unscheduled sudden midair disassembly of the American empire; and more!
Archived at: https://pluralistic.net/2026/05/16/technopoly/
#Pluralistic
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2026-05-15 05:48:24 UTC

Hey #Ubuntu friends: I keep fatfingering the numlock key and switching off my numeric keypad. I used Tweaks to set "Numeric keypad always enters digits" to true, but hitting numlock still switches off the numeric keypad. I also tried using xmodmap to set numlock to blank, but it rejected every identifier I tried for the key ("77," "0xff7f," "Num_Lock") with "bad keycode value".
Ideas?
Thanks!

2026-05-14 11:44:53 UTC

Today's threads (a thread)
Inside: Kickstarting "The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI"; and more!
Archived at: https://pluralistic.net/2026/05/14/who-it-does-it-for/
#Pluralistic
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2026-05-14 11:08:50 UTC

My next book, *The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI*, will be out in about a month - and (once again) Amazon's monopoly audiobook platform refuses to carry it, and so (once again) I'm pre-selling the audio, ebook and print edition in a Kickstarter campaign that proves that DRM-free isn't just the *right* way to reach an audience, it's also the *best* way to reach them:
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/doctorow/the-reverse-centaurs-guide-to-life-after-ai
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2026-05-13 16:11:36 UTC

Today's threads (a thread)
Inside: Billionaire solipsism, dictator solipsism, AI, and the fascist paradigm; and more!
Archived at: https://pluralistic.net/2026/05/13/vibe-governance/
#Pluralistic
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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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2026-05-11 10:10:33 UTC

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#20yrsago Scientology to open “Super Power” training center in FL https://web.archive.org/web/20060522112457/http://www.sptimes.com/2006/05/06/Tampabay/Scientology_nearly_re.shtml/
#20yrsago Homemade radios http://www.duntemann.com/radiogallery.htm
#20yrsago Vatican astronomer denounces Creationism as “paganism” https://web.archive.org/web/20060517013332/http://news.scotsman.com/international.cfm?id=674042006
#20yrsago Canada’s New Democratic Party embraces copyfighting musicians https://web.archive.org/web/20060520024734/http://www.ndp.ca/page/3713
#15yrsago Teens and privacy online: using Facebook is compatible with valuing privacy https://www.zephoria.org/thoughts/archives/2011/05/09/how-teens-understand-privacy.html
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2026-05-11 10:10:18 UTC

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#25yrsago Denmark plans to legalize music trading https://edition.cnn.com/2001/TECH/internet/05/07/denmark.downloads.idg/index.html
#20yrsago Babysuit https://web.archive.org/web/20060513013815/https://www.gildlilies.com/pop_ups/phillip_toledano_kaleidoscope.htm
#20yrsago Patent office will ask the public to “peer review” inventions https://web.archive.org/web/20060512051743/http://www.dotank.nyls.edu/communitypatent/
#20yrsago Report from France’s DRM protest at Place de la Bastille https://web.archive.org/web/20170902135411/https://tofz.org/?dir=Paris%2Fevents%2FMarch for Digital Freedom%2C against DRM and DADVSI%2C May 7th 2006%2F
#20yrsago Interactive maps show your city’s floodline when the sea rises https://flood.firetree.net/
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2026-05-11 10:09:54 UTC

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Hey look at this
* taken. https://sinceyouarrived.world/taken
* Big Finance Might Be Dooming the SPLC — Even Before Its Day in Court https://theintercept.com/2026/05/08/splc-donations-banks-censorship/
* Four Theses on the Conservative Legal Movement https://www.programmablemutter.com/p/four-theses-on-the-conservative-legal
* Hearts and Minds: An Ambivalent Review of “Project Hail Mary” https://www.rifters.com/crawl/?p=11659
* Meta Is Dying. It’s About Time. https://www.nytimes.com/2026/05/08/opinion/meta-facebook-zuckerberg.html
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2026-05-11 10:09:41 UTC

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2024 (apart from the obvious): Some unforced errors.
https://mamot.fr/@pluralistic/116555304668960736
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2026-05-11 10:08:56 UTC

Today's threads (a thread)
Inside: 2024 (apart from the obvious); and more!
Archived at: https://pluralistic.net/2026/05/11/postmortem/
#Pluralistic
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2026-05-10 09:45:16 UTC

How the avionics system tells you "You haven't got a prayer"
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2026-05-09 21:53:23 UTC

Play the anarchist piano!
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2026-05-07 21:06:06 UTC

Google puts the NYC skyline in the background of the Android weather forecast for North York, a suburb of Toronto.
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2026-05-07 09:24:32 UTC

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@nprofile…q5pf @nprofile…nurl Anyone who trusts the Libdems after the Coalition government needs their head examined (but not by an NHS therapist who has entrusted their medical records to Palantir).

2026-05-07 08:20:55 UTC

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I can easily imagine that *I* will find some of those post-bubble tools useful, and that in 20 years I will still be using them, just as today, I am still using some of those early post-dotcom bubble services and tools.
And despite all that, *IT IS NOT WORTH IT*.
The residue that is left behind by *every* bubble is subsidized, but that subsidy doesn't come from the deep-pocketed investors who are gripped by "irrational exuberance."
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2026-05-07 08:20:40 UTC

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Not everything that got built in those heady days was good, but many good things got built.
I can easily imagine that the post-bubble AI scene will produce benefits comparable to Web 2.0 - projects built by and for people who want to do useful and fun things, without being distracted by the mirage of illusory billions promised by the stock swindlers who created the bubble.
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2026-05-07 08:20:28 UTC

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He offered to sell me ten lifetime's supply of branded t-shirts for $20. I turned him down.
That was the birth of Web 2.0. All of a sudden, people who wanted to make *real* things that were *good* could do so, because they could find skilled workers, hardware, and office space at such knock-down prices that they could be funded out of pocket or put on a credit card. People got to pursue the web they wanted, free from asshole bosses and VCs.
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2026-05-07 08:20:16 UTC

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Almost overnight, the legion of humanities undergrads who'd been treated to subsidized training in perl, Python and HTML found themselves looking for work. Servers could be purchased in bulk for pennies on the dollar (with user data still on them!). I bought a "dining room set" of six $1,000+ fancy office chairs for $50 each (still wrapped in plastic!) from a dotcom founder who was selling them on the sidewalk out front of his failed startup's office in the Mission.
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2026-05-07 08:20:05 UTC

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And there will be lots of open source models that have barely been optimized (why make an open source model more efficient when you're raising capital based on the promise of outspending everyone else in order to dominate a world of ubiquitous, pluripotent, winner-take-all centralized AI?):
https://pluralistic.net/2025/10/16/post-ai-ai/#productive-residue
That's a situation not unlike the post-dotcom bubble of the early 2000s.
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2026-05-07 08:19:55 UTC

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The GPUs will still be there, and if we don't "sweat the assets" by running them as hot and hard as they can tolerate, they won't burn out in 2-3 years. There will be lots of applied statisticians, skilled data-labelers, etc, looking for work.
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2026-05-07 08:19:40 UTC

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Take away the bubble and we'd call the things AI can do "plug-ins" and some people would use them, and others wouldn't, and some of those uses would be productive, and others would be foolish, but we wouldn't bet the world's economy on them, nor would we squander our last dribbles of potable water to cool their data centers.
After the AI bubble pops, there will be a lot of durable residue. The data centers will still stand.
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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/

2026-05-06 10:49:12 UTC

One of my bedrock beliefs is that capitalists *really* hate capitalism. They may name their beloved institutes after the likes of Adam Smith, but they ignore everything Smith had to say about the necessity of competition to keep markets from turning into monopolies:
https://pluralistic.net/2023/06/09/commissar-merck/#price-giver
--
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/2026/05/06/champerty-loves-company/#circle-of-life
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2026-05-05 14:08:28 UTC

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

2026-05-05 12:36:07 UTC

Political change is downstream of coalition building, and coalitions are fragile, because by definition they are not fully aligned; they share some goals but often violently disagree about others. A coalition forms when groups set aside their differences to pursue the common elements of their agenda.
--
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/2026/05/05/three-is-a-magic-number/#coalitions
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2026-05-04 10:44:37 UTC

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Nuclear plants take at least a decade to bring online, which means that they will always arrive ten years *after* some future Comrade Trump-type kicks off another orgy of demand destruction, and by the time we turn them on, the world will have already bought, improved and recycled two generations of batteries and panels.
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2026-05-04 10:44:30 UTC

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It won't be a nuclear future, and not just because nuclear materials are (like oil) concentrated according to accidents of geography, nor merely because fissiles are geopolitically catastrophic (like oil).
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2026-05-04 10:44:14 UTC

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Lithium is set to join cobalt, a notorious conflict mineral, in the cleantech revolution's rear-view mirror as a transitional material used in early, primitive batteries and no longer required.
A post-carbon future is a post-petrostate future is a post-American future. It will run on solar and wind and batteries, which can be brought online cheaply and quickly, every time demand-destruction surges, using materials that are widely distributed around the world.
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2026-05-04 10:44:02 UTC

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Unlike a fossil fuel economy, a cleantech sector does not require that your country have access to some difficult to find, unevenly distributed reservoir of old dead shit or even rare minerals. Not only is lithium far more common than once believed, it's also being phased out for use in batteries and replaced by sodium, the world's sixth-most abundant element:
https://cen.acs.org/energy/energy-storage-/Sodium-ion-batteries-Should-believe/103/web/2025/11
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2026-05-04 10:43:53 UTC

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Trump shut that plant down, which means that other countries will get to recycle America's superannuated panels into modern, efficient ones and sell them back to America. America may have blocked any climate reparations for the poor world, but thanks to Comrade Trump, America's still going to end up paying them, in the form of windfall profits for countries whose cleantech economy is racing ahead of America's.
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2026-05-04 10:43:40 UTC

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But those materials are all recyclable: we don't recycle them today because we haven't prioritized doing so, not because it it technologically beyond our reach. In 2024, America saw its first all-solar powered solar panel recycling factory, which reclaimed 99% of the materials in a panel that was 20% efficient, and then used those materials to make *two* panels that were each *40%* efficient:
https://interestingengineering.com/energy/solarcycle-to-recycle-10-million-solar-panels-yearly
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2026-05-04 10:43:31 UTC

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The world consumes *seventeen times* more fossil fuels in a year than we will require to electrify the planet *forever*:
https://pluralistic.net/2024/08/06/with-great-power/#comes-great-responsibility
The infrastructure of renewables - panels, batteries, transmission lines - requires materials that are often scarce and whose processing involves extremely harmful and polluting processes.
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2026-05-04 10:43:20 UTC

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Meanwhile, *not* transitioning to renewables *absolutely* requires an endless cycle of incredibly destructive and genocidal extraction. Remember, fossil fuels are *fuels*, while renewables are *infrastructure*. Fuels need to be dug up and destroyed every year for so long as we insist on setting old dead shit on fire to survive. We dig up a *lot* of fossil fuels.
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2026-05-04 10:43:06 UTC

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The renewables transition is now a self-licking ice-cream cone, a flywheel that only spins faster and faster. As Solnit writes, this is true notwithstanding the concerns by some climate advocates about the materials needed for the transition. Sure, there will be *some* extraction involved in mass electrification, and if that's done badly, it will involve stealing and destroying more land from poor and indigenous people. But we don't have to do it badly!
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2026-05-04 10:39:05 UTC

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As Solnit writes, Trump's stupid war follows on the heels of another unforgivable, cruel blunder: Putin's quagmire in Ukraine, which catapulted Europe into the Gretacene, with a wholesale, continent-wide shift away from fossil fuels to renewables and the devices they power. Now, the rest of the world is following suit. In South Korea, President Lee Jae Myung is leading the charge to transition the country to renewables, framing fossil fuels as an existential geopolitical risk.
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2026-05-04 10:38:37 UTC

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In starting this stupid, unforgivable war, Trump has *vastly* accelerated the process of demand destruction. Rather than buying American oil, the whole world has undertaken a simultaneous, rapid, irreversible shift to electrical substitutes for fossil fuel applications, from induction tops to balcony solar to ebikes and EVs:
https://thepolycrisis.org/01-demand-destruction-us-oil-is-not-winning-the-iran-war/
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2026-05-04 10:38:19 UTC

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For decades, fossil fuel apologists have insisted that we'll never stop setting old dead shit on fire because "the sun doesn't always shine and the wind doesn't always blow," but thanks to battery deployment in China and California (and more places very soon), the sun shines all night long:
https://ember-energy.org/app/uploads/2026/04/Global-Electricity-Review-2026.pdf?ref=meditationsinanemergency.com
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2026-05-04 10:38:10 UTC

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But to *really* max out on demand destruction, you need *both* rationing *and* a cheap, easily installed substitute, and that's what the Strait of Epstein crisis, along with solar and batteries, offers the world today. Solar is *incredibly* cheap, and getting cheaper every day. Batteries are *also* incredibly cheap, and they're getting cheaper too.
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2026-05-04 10:37:59 UTC

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Beyond high prices, shortages and rationing are *far* more likely to lead to demand destruction. In the 10 years following the 1970s oil crisis, US cars doubled in fuel efficiency, and the gas-guzzler didn't return until car manufacturers exploited the American "light truck" loophole to fill the streets with deadly SUVs:
https://medium.com/vision-zero-cities-journal/the-chicken-tax-and-other-ways-the-u-s-government-subsidizes-your-ford-f-150-444a5164c627
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2026-05-04 10:37:51 UTC

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High prices sometimes create demand destruction: for example, if a transient shortage in eggs pushes prices up, people might discover that they prefer tofu scrambles in the morning, so even when the price of eggs comes back down, they buy two dozen fewer eggs every month, forever.
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2026-05-04 10:37:41 UTC

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Solnit starts by explaining some of the (many, many) things that Trump doesn't understand. Principally, Trump doesn't understand the concept of "demand destruction," which is what happens when shortages prompt people to make durable, one-way changes in their behavior that permanently reduce the demand for fossil fuels.
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2026-05-04 10:37:32 UTC

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In her latest, "Truth, Consequences, Climate, and Demand Destruction," Solnit is nothing short of inspirational - not because she downplays the horror and misery of Trump and his war of choice in Iran, but because she tells us what we stand to salvage from the wreckage:
https://www.meditationsinanemergency.com/truth-consequences-climate-and-demand-destruction/
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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
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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!
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https://pluralistic.net/feed/
15/

2026-05-02 11:50:13 UTC

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Recent appearances:
* Artificial Intelligence: The Ultimate Disruptor, with Astra Taylor and Yoshua Bengio (CBC Ideas)
https://www.cbc.ca/listen/live-radio/1-23-ideas/clip/16210039-artificial-intelligence-the-ultimate-disruptor
* When Do Platforms Stop Innovating and Start Extracting? (InnovEU)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cccDR0YaMt8
* Pete "Mayor" Buttigieg (No Gods No Mayors)
https://www.patreon.com/posts/pete-mayor-with-155614612
* The internet is getting worse (CBC The National)
https://youtu.be/dCVUCdg3Uqc?si=FMcA0EI_Mi13Lw-P
* 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
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2026-05-02 11:49:58 UTC

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2026-05-02 11:49:40 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 19
https://www.otherland-berlin.de/de/event-details/cory-doctorow.html
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2026-05-02 11:49:26 UTC

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2026-05-02 11:49:13 UTC

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2026-05-02 11:49:03 UTC

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Thursday's threads: How not to ban surveillance pricing; and more!
https://mamot.fr/@pluralistic/116494235875803571
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2026-05-02 11:48:45 UTC

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#1yrago Mike Lee and Jim Jordan want to kill the law that bans companies from cheating you https://pluralistic.net/2025/04/29/cheaters-and-liars/#caveat-emptor-brainworms
#1yrago Republicans want to force students to pay off scam college loans https://pluralistic.net/2025/04/30/trump-u/#i-think-you-know-what-the-trustees-can-do-with-their-suggestions
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2026-05-02 11:48:26 UTC

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#15yrsago RIP, Joanna Russ https://nielsenhayden.com/makinglight/archives/012974.html#547586
#5yrsago Experian doxes the world (again) https://pluralistic.net/2021/04/30/dox-the-world/#experian
#5yrsago Disney's writer wage-theft is far worse than reported https://pluralistic.net/2021/04/29/writers-must-be-paid/#pay-the-writer
#5yrsago Korea set to break the Samsung dynasty https://pluralistic.net/2021/04/29/writers-must-be-paid/#dynasties
#5yrsago What the hell is "carried interest" https://pluralistic.net/2021/04/29/writers-must-be-paid/#carried-interest
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2026-05-02 11:48:09 UTC

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#15yrsago Scratch-built “freedom press” https://makezine.com/article/craft/freedom_press/
#15yrsago HOWTO quilt a 3D Mad Tea Party set https://www.instructables.com/Quilted-Mad-Tea-Party-Set/
#15yrsago Online activism works: Canada delayed US-style copyright bill in fear of activist campaign https://web.archive.org/web/20110501103056/https://www.michaelgeist.ca/content/view/5763/125/
#15yrsago Ad agency to radicals: “We own radical media(TM)” https://web.archive.org/web/20110503045909/http://radicalmediaconference.wordpress.com/2011/04/27/we-make-radical-media-you-make-adverts/
#15yrsago Troubletwisters: Garth Nix and Sean Williams’ action-packed new kids’ fantasy https://memex.craphound.com/2011/04/30/troubletwisters-garth-nix-and-sean-williams-action-packed-new-kids-fantasy/
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2026-05-02 11:47:46 UTC

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#20yrago Wallaby milk: proof against antibiotic resistant bacteria https://web.archive.org/web/20060429102138/http://news.scotsman.com/scitech.cfm?id=593632006
#20yrsago Documentary on radical free school https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rgpuSo-GSfw
#15yrsago Facebook celebrates royal wedding by nuking 50 protest groups https://anticutsspace.wordpress.com/2011/04/29/political-facebook-groups-deleted-on-royal-wedding-day/
#15yrsago Jay Rosen: What I Think I Know About Journalism https://pressthink.org/2011/04/what-i-think-i-know-about-journalism/
#15yrsago Companies should release the source code for discontinued products https://makezine.com/article/maker-news/if-youre-going-to-kill-it-open-source-it/
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2026-05-02 11:47:27 UTC

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#25yrsago Implementing TCP over pigeon https://blug.linux.no/rfc1149/
#20yrsago Barenaked Ladies frontman on copyright reform https://web.archive.org/web/20060505032617/http://www.canada.com/nationalpost/news/issuesideas/story.html?id=3367a219-f395-4161-a9b9-95256c613824
#20yrsago Stephen Colbert kills at White House press corps dinner https://web.archive.org/web/20060501114431/http://www.editorandpublisher.com/eandp/news/article_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1002425363
#20yrsago Cinema owners try to lure us back to the movies https://web.archive.org/web/20060620140301/https://www.siliconvalley.com/mld/mercurynews/news/local/states/california/peninsula/14457900.htm?source=rss&channel=mercurynews_peninsula
#20yrsago Smithsonian’s sellout to Showtime slammed by Congress https://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/04/28/AR2006042802213_2.html
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2026-05-02 11:47:00 UTC

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Hey look at this
* “The Mistake Will Not Recur [Until Two Sentences From Now]” https://www.loweringthebar.net/2026/04/the-mistake-will-not-recur.html
* Why are the Artemis II photos on Flickr? https://www.anildash.com/2026/04/30/artemis-photos-flickr/
* Your Dinner Got Worse On Purpose https://www.worseonpurpose.com/p/your-dinner-got-worse-on-purpose
* Hadopi (2009–2026) https://www.laquadrature.net/en/2026/04/30/hadopi-2009-2026-2/
* You’re Not Wrong, Babies Are Getting Worse: Enshittification Comes For A Once-Beloved Classic https://theonion.com/youre-not-wrong-babies-are-getting-worse-enshittification-comes-for-a-once-beloved-classic/
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2026-05-02 11:33:27 UTC

Comrade Trump continues his streak of destroying the American empire's grip on the world, hastening the renewables transition, de-dollarizing global trade, and killing the world's suicidal habit of entrusting its digital life to America's defective, enshittified tech exports:
https://pluralistic.net/2026/04/20/praxis/#acceleration
--
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/2026/05/02/denazification/no-more-mx-nice-lib
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2026-04-30 14:43:36 UTC

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Surveillance pricing is also used to determine how much you get paid; when that happens, we call it "algorithmic wage discrimination." Gig platforms like Uber use surveillance data about their drivers to predict which workers are most desperate, and those drivers are offered *less* money per mile and per hour, because a desperate worker will take whatever is on offer. Gig work apps for health-care do the same thing to nurses:
https://pluralistic.net/2024/12/18/loose-flapping-ends/#luigi-has-a-point
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2026-04-30 14:43:28 UTC

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Plexure advertises its ability to use surveillance data to find out when a customer has just gotten a paycheck so that vendors can increase the price of their usual breakfast sandwich order. This isn't aimed at wealthy people - it's explicitly designed to target people who are living paycheck to paycheck.
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2026-04-30 14:43:17 UTC

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It's pitched as the Robin Hood of pricing policies, gouging the rich to finance discounts for the poor. But in practice, that's not at *all* how surveillance pricing works. Instead, surveillance pricing is most often used to levy a "desperation premium" on people who have fewer choices and less leverage.
For example, there's a McDonald's investments portfolio company called Plexure that supplies surveillance pricing tools to fast food restaurants.
7/

2026-04-30 14:43:09 UTC

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They will insist that this is an "efficient" way to price goods, and claim that surveillance pricing isn't just a way to *raise* prices on people who are willing to pay more, it's a way to *lower* prices for people who are willing to pay less.
What you're supposed to infer from this is that people who can afford more will end up paying more, while people who can afford less will pay less.
6/

2026-04-30 14:42:56 UTC

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If you pay $2 for an apple at the grocery store and the same store only charges me $1 for that apple, then that grocer is telling you that your dollars are worth half as much as mine:
https://pluralistic.net/2025/06/24/price-discrimination/
There's a kind of economics brainworm that makes some economists *looooove* surveillance pricing.
5/

2026-04-30 14:42:44 UTC

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So what *is* surveillance pricing, why is it so dangerous, and what's wrong with Maryland's Protection Against Predatory Pricing Act?
Surveillance pricing is when a company spies on you ("surveillance") and uses the resulting dossier to raise its prices to the maximum it calculates you will be willing to pay ("pricing"). With surveillance pricing, a retailer reaches into your bank account and devalues your dollars.
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2026-04-30 14:42:29 UTC

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Take the new Maryland bill that (supposedly) outlaws surveillance pricing: this bill is, frankly, a terribly drafted piece of shit. Worse: it's a terribly drafted piece of shit bill that fails to resolve a serious and urgent problem. *Even worse*: the lawmakers who drafted this piece of shit bill and Maryland Governor Wes Moore were all loudly and repeatedly warned about the problems of this bill, and they did *nothing* and now the people of Maryland are *fucked*.
4/

2026-04-30 14:42:22 UTC

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While there have been some instances in which this *was* true, it is *far* more often the case that there are blindingly obvious answers to tech problems, which our lawmakers and regulators *ignore*, amidst a rising chorus of warnings about the dire consequences of failing to act.
2/

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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2026-04-28 06:10:54 UTC

Today's threads (a thread)
Inside: Vicky Osterweil's "The Extended Universe"; and more!
Archived at: https://pluralistic.net/2026/04/28/mouseketeers/
#Pluralistic
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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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2026-04-27 08:48:51 UTC

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But here's where there's a critical difference between enshittifying AI and enshittifying a profitable tech business like app stores or search engines. AI is the money-losingest project the human race has ever attempted. At $1.4 trillion and counting, the AI companies and their "frontier models" are so deep in the red that I can't see any way that any of these firms will survive:
https://pluralistic.net/2026/04/16/pascals-wager/#doomer-challenge
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2026-04-27 08:48:44 UTC

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And AI companies can enshittify their products in all the traditional ways: after a customer integrates AI in their lives and businesses in ways that are hard to escape, the AI company can raise prices, insert ads, and route queries to cheaper models that cost less to run and produce worse outputs.
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2026-04-27 08:48:34 UTC

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Beyond this, AI is very useful for plain old enshittification. Surveillance pricing - changing prices or wages based on the other person's desperation and ability to pay - is something AI is *very* good at:
https://pluralistic.net/2026/01/21/cod-marxism/#wannamaker-slain
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2026-04-27 08:48:25 UTC

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If you ask a chatbot to recommend a product and it steers you toward an inferior option that generates a higher commission for the company, who can say whether that was the chatbot cheating, or if it was it a "hallucination?" Likewise, if you ask a chatbot to solve your problem and it does so in an inefficient way that burns a zillion tokens (which you have to pay for), is that the chatbot malfunctioning, or is that price-gouging?
https://pluralistic.net/2025/08/16/jackpot/#salience-bias
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2026-04-27 08:48:15 UTC

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One of the questions I get most frequently is "what about AI and enshittification?" This is a complicated question! Obviously, AI is *very* enshittification-prone: as "black boxes" that do not produce reliable, deterministic outputs, AI products have a lot of intrinsic cover for their enshittifying behavior.
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2026-04-27 08:48:05 UTC

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This can also be applied to politics. Restrictions on immigration and out-migration are both preludes to state enshittification, since a population that can't leave for another state will, on average, put up with more abuse from their political classes without leaving. Tying your work visa to your employer is *very* enshittification-friendly:
https://prospect.org/2026/04/22/north-carolina-farm-stole-h-2a-visa-workers-passports-lawsuit-trump-immigration/
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2026-04-27 08:47:53 UTC

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(Applying this to the effort to kill the concept of "marital rape" is left as an exercise for the reader.)
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2026-04-27 08:47:36 UTC

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Or if shitty men lobby to end anti-discrimination laws (making it much harder for a single woman to survive on her paycheck) and to end no-fault divorce (to make it much harder for a woman to leave the husband she marries to survive in a world where it's legal to discriminate against her in the workplace), in anticipation of being able to be a shitty husband without losing their wives, they are enshittifying marriage.
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2026-04-27 08:47:16 UTC

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If they can bind workers to noncompete "agreements" that make it illegal for the cashier at Wendy's to get $0.25/h more at the McDonald's, that's even *more* enshittifying:
https://pluralistic.net/2025/11/10/zero-sum-zero-hours/#that-sounds-like-a-you-problem
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2026-04-27 08:47:04 UTC

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So if the business lobby bribes Republican state legislators to pass "right to work" laws that make it nearly impossible for workers to unionize, and then the businesses involved worsen their workers' pay and conditions, we can call that enshittification.
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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
https://static.mamot.fr/media_attachments/files/116/461/425/676/270/654/original/754e03601aab5918.jpg

2026-04-24 12:58:39 UTC

Today's threads (a thread)
Inside: A free, open visual identity for enshittification; and more!
Archived at: https://pluralistic.net/2026/04/24/poop-emoji-plus-plus/
#Pluralistic
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2026-04-24 12:51:59 UTC

To my surprise, my life's work has turned out to be a long series of attempts to get people to engage with the abstract, distant issues of tech policy before it's too late. This is hard, because people naturally devote their attention to things that are concrete and immediate (for very good reasons!).
--
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/2026/04/24/poop-emoji-plus-plus/#devin-washburn
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2026-04-23 12:49:31 UTC

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@nprofile…s0kv You need to keep reading this thread!

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 12:34:51 UTC

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Reimplementation is *good, actually*. And honestly, if corporations are foolish enough to reimplement their code using an LLM, and in so doing, create a vast *new* commons of public domain software, well, that's not exactly the freesoftwarepocalypse, is it?
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