Pluralistic: All (antitrust) politics are local (02 Sep 2025)

Sep. 2nd, 2025 03:20 pm
[syndicated profile] doctorow_feed

Posted by Cory Doctorow

https://pluralistic.net/2025/09/02/act-locally/

https://pluralistic.net/?p=11513


Today's links


A modest Grecian revival columnated building amidst leafy trees, with gilded letters over the door reading CITY HALL. To one side is a guillotine with a gilded blade. In the foreground are the silhouettes of Victorian onlookers in elaborate hats.

All (antitrust) politics are local (permalink)

The US government has abandoned antitrust. Today, companies facing antitrust jeopardy can just pay key Trumpland figures a million bucks, and they will make a discreet visit to the fifth floor of the DoJ building, have a little shufty around the Antitrust Division and the whole thing will just…go away:

https://prospect.org/power/2025-08-19-doj-insider-blows-whistle-pay-to-play-antitrust-corruption/

Federally speaking, antitrust is now just another hustle. The fish rots from the head down, of course: Trump brings baseless lawsuits against media companies so that they can offer him a (colorably) legal bribe in the form of a "settlement":

https://www.techdirt.com/2025/07/03/institutional-failure-cbs-wimps-out-pays-trump-16-million-bribe-to-settle-baseless-lawsuit/

This opens space for "MAGA influencer lobbyists" whose boozy back-Broom deals with antitrust targets like Hewlett-Packard Enterprises and Juniper Networks swap legal immunity for personal "consulting" payments in the millions of dollars:

https://unherd.com/2025/07/the-antitrust-war-inside-maga/

But here's the thing: even though the fish rots from the head down, the world rises from the bottom up. The global wave of antitrust vigor (which swept up federal enforcers in the US, Canada, the UK, Australia, South Korea, Japan, Germany, France, Spain, the EU and China) did not start with government enforcers.

Rather, these enforcers were driven forward by an unstoppable current of popular fury over corporate power. That fury is ubiquitous, and it's growing. Federal enforcement was the channel that current was forced into, but merely damming up that channel does not cause the current to abate.

Right now, that rage is finding vent in municipal politics, which makes sense if you think about it, because corporate power is most vividly felt at the local level. When a billionaire rains flaming space-junk down on your home, or poisons your water with fracking, or jacks up your electricity and water bills by building a data-center, that's because a local politician has been captured by an oligarch. Very few of us are personally familiar with America's oligarch class, but a hell of a lot of us know where the mayor lives.

Writing in The American Prospect, Ron Knox documents the rising wave of successful local mobilizations against corporate power:

https://prospect.org/economy/2025-09-02-shifting-anti-monopoly-landscape/

In Portland, Maine, the community has risen up against the monopolist Live Nation/Ticketmaster's plan to build a 3,300 seat venue that would have destroyed the local music scene, which pulled off a miracle of mutual aid and survived the covid lockdowns and nursed itself back to health.

The Maine Music Alliance and its allies won their fight by packing town meetings, circulating petitions, and bollocking their municipal representatives – you know, all the stuff that has totally stopped working at the federal level, but which still moves the needle when it comes to local politics.

The Portland/Live Nation victory is a story of a couple thousand everyday people thoroughly trouncing a globe-spanning, rapacious, corporation that grossed seven billion dollars in the last quarter. Moreover, these everyday people beat Live Nation/Ticketmaster at the same moment as the feds were making noises about dropping their antitrust investigation against the company. Where the feds surrender, the people of Portland fight – and win.

It's just the latest installment in a series of similar victories, including well-known ones (Queens, NY blocking a giant corporate giveaway to build a new Amazon HQ), and quieter ones, like Tuscon rejecting an Amazon data-center. Localities are fighting the fire-engine cartel (three companies that control fire-engine production and screw cities on new vehicles and maintenance):

https://pdfserver.amlaw.com/legalradar/pm-59657794_complaint.pdf

For a guy who loves to throw his power around, Trump has a very primitive theory of power. He thinks that illegally shuttering the National Labor Relations Board will put a lid on the generationally unprecedented support for unions among American workers.

But the NLRB doesn't exist to make unions possible: unions made the NLRB possible. We have labor law because illegal unions fought so hard and terrified their bosses so much that the capital class had to sue for peace. Firing the referee doesn't end the game – it just means we don't have to play by the rules.

Trump has illegally torn up the contracts of a million unionized federal workers. It's "by far the largest single action of union busting in American history":

https://prospect.org/labor/2025-09-01-trump-celebrates-labor-day-as-most-anti-union-president/

And the Grinch stole Christmas. So what? The Grinch thought that the ribbons, tags, packages, boxes and bags made the Whos down in Whoville feel all Christmassy. But he had it backwards: the Whos had Christmas in their hearts, which is why they surrounded themselves with the tinsel, the trimmings and the trappings. He attacked the effect, but the cause was left intact.

We have a cause. The historic highs in popular support for unions are part of a massive wave of anti-corporate anger. We see it everywhere. It's in juries, which is why corporate lawfirms are panicking at the thought of their clients falling into ordinary peoples' hands:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/08/22/jury-nullification/#voir-dire

And the reason we're so angry at the oligarchs is that they're so terrible. They've figured out that the only way to keep their billions is to crush democracy and replace it with fascism, which the tech PACs are doing right now, in an open scheme to end elections as means to change society:

https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/monopoly-round-up-is-there-a-silicon

As Matt Stoller writes, "if the voting booth isn’t a meaningful way to fix problems, people will find other mechanisms to seek redress, using uglier tactics."

Which is why every fascist takeover was ultimately defeated by revolution, not elections:

https://cmarmitage.substack.com/p/i-researched-every-attempt-to-stop

But one place where democracy is still alive and well is at the local levels. Local races are weird and silly and bush-league, but they're also legible to people in a community that state and national elections are not. MAGA figured that out during the Biden years, packing library boards and town councils with insane chuds and culture warriors – but once decent people caught wind of it, we were able to trounce those weirdos in the next election.

I love municipal politics. My 2024 solarpunk novel The Lost Cause is all about local politics as a microcosm of – and a base for – global movements to address the climate emergency:

https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250865946/thelostcause/

For the past several months, I've been immersed in a seeming contradiction: global, local politics. That's because I have new all-time fave podcast, "No Gods No Mayors":

https://www.patreon.com/c/NoGodsNoMayors/posts

Every week, the NGNM crew profile a mayor – past, present or future, from all over the world and all through time – and prove, repeatedly, that "mayor" is the highest office to which a true oaf can aspire. NGNM has been an especially important balm for me in these brutal political times, because it scratches my burning need to think about politics, without making me think about the country's terrifying slide into fascism (it helps that Riley Quinn, November Kelly and Mattie Lubchansky, the podcast's hosts, are both infinitely charming and very, very funny).

As a confirmed NGNM stan (I've started sleeping with a mayoral sash under my pillow) I am duty-bound to consider municipal politics to be funny and, generally speaking, trivial. But municipalities are also cradles of democracy, and at now that cities are the front line of the fight against Trumpism – from antitrust to militarization of our streets – I feel like my NGNM-imparted encyclopedic mayoral knowledge has prepared me to join the battle.

(Image: Onbekend, CC BY-SA 4.0, modified)

Hey look at this (permalink)


A shelf of leatherbound history books with a gilt-stamped series title, 'The World's Famous Events.'

Object permanence (permalink)

#20yrsago PSP’s social/technical merits and demerits https://web.archive.org/web/20050911180235/http://www.guardian.co.uk/online/story/0,,1559853,00.html

#20yrsago Video-poker bots collaborate through back-channels https://web.archive.org/web/20050924164125/https://www.wired.com/wired/archive/13.09/pokerbots.html

#15yrsago News stories about stupid young people make old people feel good https://web.archive.org/web/20100903144343/http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20100831/od_nm/us_elderly_news

#15yrsago Gardener fighting village busybodies for the right to grow tomatoes in her front garden https://web.archive.org/web/20100903171803/http://triblocal.com/Northbrook/detail/214078.html

#10yrsago Little Robot: nearly wordless kids’ comic from Zita the Spacegirl creator https://memex.craphound.com/2015/09/01/little-robot-nearly-wordless-kids-comic-from-zita-the-spacegirl-creator/

#5yrsago America's economy is cooked https://pluralistic.net/2020/09/01/cant-pay-wont-pay/#jubilee-now

#5yrsago Set My Heart to Five https://pluralistic.net/2020/09/01/cant-pay-wont-pay/#robot-rights

#5yrsago Podcasting "How to Destroy Surveillance Capitalism" https://pluralistic.net/2020/09/01/cant-pay-wont-pay/#htdsc

Upcoming appearances (permalink)

A photo of me onstage, giving a speech, pounding the podium.


A screenshot of me at my desk, doing a livecast.

Recent appearances (permalink)


A grid of my books with Will Stahle covers..

Latest books (permalink)


A cardboard book box with the Macmillan logo.

Upcoming books (permalink)

  • "Canny Valley": A limited edition collection of the collages I create for Pluralistic, self-published, September 2025

  • "Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It," Farrar, Straus, Giroux, October 7 2025
    https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374619329/enshittification/

  • "Unauthorized Bread": a middle-grades graphic novel adapted from my novella about refugees, toasters and DRM, FirstSecond, 2026

  • "Enshittification, Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It" (the graphic novel), Firstsecond, 2026

  • "The Memex Method," Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2026

  • "The Reverse-Centaur's Guide to AI," a short book about being a better AI critic, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2026


Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources:

Currently writing:

  • "The Reverse Centaur's Guide to AI," a short book for Farrar, Straus and Giroux about being an effective AI critic. (1022 words yesterday, 11212 words total).

  • A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING

This work – excluding any serialized fiction – is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license. That means you can use it any way you like, including commercially, provided that you attribute it to me, Cory Doctorow, and include a link to pluralistic.net.

https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Quotations and images are not included in this license; they are included either under a limitation or exception to copyright, or on the basis of a separate license. Please exercise caution.

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https://pluralistic.net/2025/09/02/act-locally/

https://pluralistic.net/?p=11513

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3 things

Sep. 2nd, 2025 11:11 am
suncani: Cartoon of supergirl type figure saying "Anxiety Girl, able to leap to confusions in a single bound" (anxiety)
[personal profile] suncani
 1. I go on holiday in less than a week and it's kicking up my anxiety a bit. Which is nutty as its just a beach holiday so very simple and straightforward. But then if it was rational it wouldn't be anxiety.

2. Someone recreated the wallace and gromit breakfast machine! This made me smile when I saw it, and though its probably been very carefully edited I'm amazed at how well bits of it work.

3.I always forget how much regular but light casual chat can make my day a bit brighter. I've started commenting more in various discord servers I'm part of and it's just making me feel better. I'd stopped for a while as I felt like I didn't have much to say/ anxiety got the better of me.
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Daily Happiness

Sep. 1st, 2025 08:23 pm
torachan: scott pilgrim pouting (scott pilgrim - pout)
[personal profile] torachan
1. Today was a pretty low key day. Aside from going out for a couple neighborhood walks, I didn't go anywhere, and didn't do much at home other than play Donkey Kong Bananza and read. It was nice to have a day to really just relax. And I still have one more day off!

2. I finished up another puzzle this morning. I bought this at the same time as the other Disney villains one, since it has mostly different villains. Like the other one, having each person separated in their own area (and with different enough colors in each) made it easy to sort and then work on each of those as if it were its own mini puzzle, so it went pretty fast.



3. I do not know how cats find this comfortable, but they all like sleeping this way from time to time, so I guess they do!

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Pluralistic: Darth Android (01 Sep 2025)

Sep. 1st, 2025 06:06 pm
[syndicated profile] doctorow_feed

Posted by Cory Doctorow

https://pluralistic.net/2025/09/01/fulu/

https://pluralistic.net/?p=11500


Today's links


An Android robot standing atop a cracked mobile phone, wearing Darth Vader armor.

Darth Android (permalink)

William Gibson famously said that "Cyberpunk was a warning, not a suggestion." But for every tech leader fantasizing about lobotomizing their enemies with Black Ice, there are ten who wish they could be Darth Vader, force-choking you while grating out, "I'm altering the deal. Pray I don't alter it any further."

I call this business philosophy the "Darth Vader MBA." The fact that tech products are permanently tethered to their manufacturers – by cloud connections backstopped by IP restrictions that stop you from disabling them – means that your devices can have features removed or altered on a corporate whim, and it's literally a felony for you to restore the functionality you've had removed:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/10/26/hit-with-a-brick/#graceful-failure

That presents an irresistible temptation to tech bosses. It means that you can spy on your users, figure out which features they rely on most heavily, disable those features, and then charge money to restore them:

https://restofworld.org/2021/loans-that-hijack-your-phone-are-coming-to-india/

It means that you can decide to stop paying a supplier the license fee for a critical feature that your customers rely on, take that feature away, and stick your customers with a monthly charge, forever, to go on using the product they already paid for:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/10/28/fade-to-black/#trust-the-process

It means that you can push "security updates" to devices in the field that take away your customers' ability to use third-party apps, so they're forced to use your shitty, expensive apps:

https://www.404media.co/developer-unlocks-newly-enshittified-echelon-exercise-bikes-but-cant-legally-release-his-software/

Or you can take away third-party app support and force your customers to use your shitty app that's crammed full of ads, so they have to look at an ad every time they want to open their garage-doors:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/11/09/lead-me-not-into-temptation/#chamberlain

Or you can break compatibility with generic consumables, like ink, and force your customers to buy the consumables you sell, at (literal) ten billion percent markups:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2020/11/ink-stained-wretches-battle-soul-digital-freedom-taking-place-inside-your-printer

Combine the "agreements" we must click through after we hand over our money, wherein we "consent" to having the terms altered at any time, in any way, forever, and surrender our right to sue:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/08/15/dogs-breakfast/#by-clicking-this-you-agree-on-behalf-of-your-employer-to-release-me-from-all-obligations-and-waivers-arising-from-any-and-all-NON-NEGOTIATED-agreements

With the fact that billions of digital tools can be neutered at a distance with a single mouse-click:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/02/19/twiddler/

With the fact that IP law makes it a literal felony to undo these changes or add legal features to your own property that the manufacturer doesn't want you to have:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/05/24/record-scratch/#autoenshittification

And you've created the conditions for a perfect Darth Vader MBA dystopia.

Tech bosses are fundamentally at war with the idea that our digital devices contain "general purpose computers." The general-purposeness of computers – the fact that they are all Turing-complete, universal von Neumann machines – has created tech bosses' fortunes, but now that these fortunes have been attained, the tech sector would like to abolish that general-purposeness; specifically, they would like to make it impossible to run programs that erode their profits or frustrate their attempts at rent-seeking.

This has been a growing trend in computing since the mid-2000s, when tech bosses realized that the "digital rights management" that the entertainment industry had fallen in love with could provide even bigger dividends for tech companies themselves.

Since the Napster era, media companies have demanded that tech platforms figure out how to limit the use and copying of media files after they were delivered to our computers. They believed that there was some practical way to make a computer that would refuse to take orders from its owner, such that you could (for example) "stream" a movie to a user without that being a "download." The truth, of course is that all streams are downloads, because the only way to cause my screen to display a video file that is on your server is for your server to send that file to my computer.

"Streaming" is a consensus hallucination, and when a company claims to be giving you a "stream" that's not a "download," they really mean that they believe that the program that's rendering the file on your screen doesn't have a "save as" button.

But of course, even if the program doesn't have a "save as" button, someone could easily make a "save as" plugin that adds that functionality to your streaming program. So "streaming" isn't just "a video playback program without a 'save as' button," it's also "a video playback program that no one can add a 'save as' button to."

At the turn of the millennium, tech companies selling this stuff hoodwinked media companies by claiming that they used technical means to prevent someone from adding the "save as" button after the fact. But tech companies knew that there was no technical means to prevent this, because computers are general purpose, and can run every program, which means that every 10-foot fence you build around a program immediately summons up an 11-foot ladder.

When a tech company says "it's impossible to change the programs and devices we ship to our users," they mean, "it's illegal to change the programs and devices we ship to our users." That's thanks to a cluster of laws we colloquially call "IP law"; a label we apply to any law that lets a firm exert control on the conduct of users, critics and competitors:

https://locusmag.com/2020/09/cory-doctorow-ip/

Law, not technology, is the true battlefield in the War on General Purpose Computing, a subject I've been raising the alarm about for decades now:

https://memex.craphound.com/2012/01/10/lockdown-the-coming-war-on-general-purpose-computing/

When I say that this is a legal fight and not a technical one, I mean that, but for the legal restrictions on reverse-engineering and "adversarial interoperability," none of these extractive tactics would be viable. Every time a company enshittified its products, it would create an opportunity for a rival to swoop in, disenshittify the enshittification, and steal your customers out from under you.

The fact that there's no technical way to enforce these restrictions means that the companies that benefit from them have to pitch their arguments to lawmakers, not customers. If you have something that works, you use it in your sales pitch, like Signal, whose actual, working security is a big part of its appeal to users.

If you have something that doesn't work, you use it in your lobbying pitch, like Apple, who justify their 30% ripoff app tax – which they can only charge because it's a felony to reverse-engineer your iPhone so you can use a different app store – by telling lawmakers that locking down their platform is essential to the security and privacy of iPhone owners:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/01/12/youre-holding-it-wrong/#if-dishwashers-were-iphones

Apple and Google have a duopoly over mobile computing. Both companies use legal tactics to lock users into getting their apps from the companies' own app stores, where they take 30 cents out of every dollar you spend, and where it's against the rules to include any payment methods other than Google/Apple's own payment systems.

This is a massive racket. It lets the companies extract hundreds of billions of dollars in rents. This drives up costs for their users and drives down profits for their suppliers. It lets the duopoly structure the entire mobile economy, acting as de facto market regulators. For example, the fact that Apple/Google exempt Uber and Lyft from the 30% app tax means that they – and they alone – can provide competitive ride-hailing services.

But though both companies extract the 30% app tax, they use very different mechanisms to maintain their lock on their users and on app makers. Apple uses digital locks, which lets it invoke IP law to criminalize anyone who reverse-engineers its systems and provides an easy way to install a better app store.

Google, on the other hand, uses a wide variety of contractual tactics to maintain its control, arm-twisting Android device makers and carriers into bundling its app store with every device, often with a locked bootloader that prevents users from adding new app stores after they pay for their devices.

But despite this, Google has always claimed that Android is the "open" alternative to the Apple "ecosystem," principally on the strength that you can "sideload" an app. "Sideload" is a weird euphemism that the mobile duopoly came up with; it means "installing software without our permission," which we used to just call "installing software" (because you don't need a manufacturer's permission to install software on your computer).

Now, Google has pulled a Darth Vader, changing the deal after the fact. They've announced that henceforth, you will only be able to sideload apps that come from developers who pay to be validated by Google and certified as good eggs. This has got people really angry, and justifiably so.

Last week, the repair hero Louis Rossmann posted a scorching video excoriating Google for the change:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QBEKlIV_70E

In the video, Rossmann – who is now running an anti-enshittification group called Fulu – reminds us that our mobile devices aren't phones, they're computers and urges us not to use the term "sideloading," because that's conceding that there's something about the fact that this computer can fit in your pocket that means that you shouldn't be able to, you know, just install software.

Rossmann thinks that this is a cash grab, and he's right – partially. He thinks that this is a way for Google to make money from forcing developers to join its certification program.

But that's just small potatoes. The real cash grab is the hundreds of billions of dollars that Google stands to lose if we switch to third-party app stores and choke off the app tax.

That is an issue that is very much on Google's mind right now, because Google lost a brutal antitrust case brought by Epic Games, makers of Fortnite:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/12/12/im-feeling-lucky/#hugger-mugger

Epic's suit contended that Google had violated antitrust law by creating exclusivity deals with carriers and device makers that locked Android users into Google's app store, which meant that Epic had to surrender 30% of its mobile earnings to Google.

Google lost that case – badly. It turns out that judges don't like it when you deliberately destroy evidence:

https://www.legaldive.com/news/deleted-messages-google-antitrust-case-epic-games-deliberate-spoliation-donato/702306/

They say that when you find yourself in a hole, you should stop digging, but Google can't put down the shovel. After the court ordered Google to open up its app store, the company just ignored the order, which is a thing that judges hate even more than destroying evidence:

https://www.justice.gov/atr/case/epic-games-inc-v-google-llc

So it was that last month, Google found itself with just two weeks to comply with the open app store order, or else:

https://www.theverge.com/news/717440/google-epic-open-play-store-emergency-stay

Google was ordered to make it possible to install new app stores as apps, so you could go into Google Play, search for a different app store, and, with a single click, install it on your phone, and switch to getting your apps from that store, rather than Google's.

That's what's behind Google's new ban on "sideloading": this is a form of malicious compliance with the court orders stemming from its losses to Epic Games. In fact, it's not even malicious compliance – it's malicious noncompliance, a move that so obviously fails to satisfy the court order that I think it's only a matter of time until Google gets hit with fines so large that they'll actually affect Google's operations.

In the meantime, Google's story that this move is motivated by security it obviously bullshit. First of all, the argument that preventing users from installing software of their choosing is the only way to safeguard their privacy and security is bullshit when Apple uses it, and it's bullshit when Google trots it out:

https://www.eff.org/document/letter-bruce-schneier-senate-judiciary-regarding-app-store-security

But even if you stipulate that Google is doing this to keep you safe, the story falls apart. After all, Google isn't certifying apps, they're certifying developers. This implies that the company can somehow predict whether a developer will do something malicious in the future.

This is obviously wrong. Indeed, Google itself is proof that this doesn't work: the fact that a company has a "don't be evil" motto at its outset is no guarantee that it won't turn evil in the future.

There's a long track record of merchants behaving in innocuous and beneficial ways to amass reputation capital, before blitzing the people who trust them with depraved criminality. This is a well-understood problem with reputation scores, dating back to the early days of eBay, when crooked sellers invented the tactic of listing and delivering a series of low-value items in order to amass a high reputation score, only to post a bunch of high-ticket scams, like dozens laptops at $1,000 each, which are never delivered, even as the seller walks away with tens of thousands of dollars.

More recently, we've seen this in supply chain attacks on open source software, where malicious actors spend a long time serving as helpful contributors, pushing out a string of minor, high-quality patches before one day pushing a backdoor or a ransomware package into widely used code:

https://arstechnica.com/security/2025/07/open-source-repositories-are-seeing-a-rash-of-supply-chain-attacks/

So the idea that Google can improve Android's safety by certifying developers, rather than code, is obvious bullshit. No, this is just a pretext, a way to avoid complying with the court order in Epic and milking a few more billions of dollars in app taxes.

Google is no friend of the general purpose computer. They keep coming up with ways to invoke the law to punish people who install code that makes their Android devices serve their owners' interests, at the expense of Google's shareholders. It was just a couple years ago that we had to bully Google out of a plan to lock down browsers so they'd be as enshittified as apps, something Google sold as "feature parity":

https://pluralistic.net/2023/08/02/self-incrimination/

Epic Games didn't just sue Google, either. They also sued Apple – but Apple won, because it didn't destroy evidence and make the judge angry at it. But Apple didn't walk away unscathed – they were also ordered to loosen up control over their App Store, and they also failed to do so, with the effect that last spring, a federal judge threatened to imprison Apple executives:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/05/01/its-not-the-crime/#its-the-coverup

Neither Apple nor Google would exist without the modern miracle that is the general purpose computer. Both companies want to make sure no one else ever reaps the benefit of the Turing complete, universal von Neumann machine. Both companies are capable of coming up with endless narratives about how Turing completeness is incompatible with your privacy and security.

But it's Google and Apple that stand in the way of our security and privacy. Though they may sometimes protects us against external threats, neither Google nor Apple will ever protect us from their own predatory instincts.

(Image: Ashwin Kumar, CC BY-SA 2.0, modified)

Hey look at this (permalink)


A shelf of leatherbound history books with a gilt-stamped series title, 'The World's Famous Events.'

Object permanence (permalink)

#20yrsago Microsoft abandons its customers AND copyright to kiss up to Hollywood https://memex.craphound.com/2005/08/30/microsoft-abandons-its-customers-and-copyright-to-kiss-up-to-hollywood/

#15yrsago Koko Be Good: complex and satisfying graphic novel about finding meaning in life https://memex.craphound.com/2010/08/31/koko-be-good-complex-and-satisfying-graphic-novel-about-finding-meaning-in-life/

#15yrsago Frankenmascot: all the cereal mascots in one https://web.archive.org/web/20100904072945/http://citycyclops.com/8.31.10.php

#5yrsago Bayer-Monsanto is in deep trouble https://pluralistic.net/2020/08/31/ai-rights-now/#gotterdammerung

#5yrsago Hard Wired https://pluralistic.net/2020/08/31/ai-rights-now/#len-vlahos

#5yrsago Big Tech welcomes (some) regulation https://pluralistic.net/2020/08/30/arabian-babblers/#bezos-bell-system

#5yrsago We don't know why you don't want to have public sex https://pluralistic.net/2020/08/30/arabian-babblers/#evopsych

Upcoming appearances (permalink)

A photo of me onstage, giving a speech, pounding the podium.


A screenshot of me at my desk, doing a livecast.

Recent appearances (permalink)


A grid of my books with Will Stahle covers..

Latest books (permalink)


A cardboard book box with the Macmillan logo.

Upcoming books (permalink)

  • "Canny Valley": A limited edition collection of the collages I create for Pluralistic, self-published, September 2025

  • "Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It," Farrar, Straus, Giroux, October 7 2025
    https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374619329/enshittification/

  • "Unauthorized Bread": a middle-grades graphic novel adapted from my novella about refugees, toasters and DRM, FirstSecond, 2026

  • "Enshittification, Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It" (the graphic novel), Firstsecond, 2026

  • "The Memex Method," Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2026

  • "The Reverse-Centaur's Guide to AI," a short book about being a better AI critic, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2026


Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources:

Currently writing:

  • "The Reverse Centaur's Guide to AI," a short book for Farrar, Straus and Giroux about being an effective AI critic. (1022 words yesterday, 11212 words total).

  • A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING

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READ CAREFULLY: By reading this, you agree, on behalf of your employer, to release me from all obligations and waivers arising from any and all NON-NEGOTIATED agreements, licenses, terms-of-service, shrinkwrap, clickwrap, browsewrap, confidentiality, non-disclosure, non-compete and acceptable use policies ("BOGUS AGREEMENTS") that I have entered into with your employer, its partners, licensors, agents and assigns, in perpetuity, without prejudice to my ongoing rights and privileges. You further represent that you have the authority to release me from any BOGUS AGREEMENTS on behalf of your employer.

ISSN: 3066-764X

https://pluralistic.net/2025/09/01/fulu/

https://pluralistic.net/?p=11500

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Sep. 1st, 2025 05:26 pm
adore: (Default)
[personal profile] adore
Friday was my last working day. I was able to schedule a therapy session for this afternoon (because no work!) and I feel good after it. I usually want to snack on something after therapy because being vulnerable expends energy or something, idk. I had cinnamon biscuits on hand, they were nice. I talked about how I'd felt shitty after finishing Project Fang, and I've slowly come to realise why. It's because my writing is not how it used to be. The quality of prose in my debut novel is not the quality of prose I can achieve now, because the debut novel was written before the bookstore debacle and subsequent cognitive changes in myself. But as I talked to my therapist I also slowly realised that I want to write self-indulgently and prioritise pleasure, rather than artistic achievement. It helps that the readership I'm writing for has mostly similar priorities. So it's okay that I'm not the writer I used to be. I'm still improving and will get back up there eventually.

My workplace added my replacement to the work WhatsApp group and welcomed her. They'd forgotten to remove me from the group. So they removed me after adding her instead of before, lol. They also deleted my work email over the weekend. Both these things felt sudden to me. I emailed them from my regular email asking them if I could have access to my work email to save some things I'd worked on to my portfolio. If they say no, then perhaps that's a sign I'm not meant to return to this line of work lol. They've been nice to me though. They might say yes.

In writing news, I've opened ARC signups for Bloodhunt Academy. Its working title was Project Fang, so that's how I've been referring to it, but now it's got its final title. It's all feeling so real! Especially as I have the final cover. I'll do a cover reveal on Instagram soon but I'm revealing it here first because I love it here. Look! SO pretty isn't it!
( Cover reveal! )

Every time our vampire heroine menstruates, she has to drink the blood of men to replenish herself. Things are complicated by Society Frowning Upon This. Things are further complicated when she falls in love with a human girl who rebels against their dystopian regime. Things are even further complicated when she falls in love with a boy who has been trained all his life to become a vampire hunter.

If this sounds like something you or someone you know would enjoy, but don't want to support Amazon (the book will be KU-exclusive after release because this is apparently my livelihood now), you can bypass Amazon by getting an advance reader copy before its release. Here's the ARC signup form: Link! No worries if this is not your thing! I would be delighted if it's someone else's thing and you point them to it.

Here's the complete blurb, for the curious:
( Read more... )

I'm so nervous about doing the steps in the process of launching this book. I have to start recruiting ARC readers from Instagram and Threads and goddess knows where else. I have a simple website in the works and I need to figure out my author newsletter and... AAAAAH I'm doing just the basics for my pen name launch but it feels like a LOT. I'm glad I'm posting the cover reveal and ARC signup form and everything here first because everything just feels less scary on Dreamwidth, lol.
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Daily Happiness

Aug. 31st, 2025 10:36 pm
torachan: brandon flowers of the killers with the text "some beautiful boy to save you" (some beautiful boy to save you)
[personal profile] torachan
1. In the past year, both Ollie and Jasper have started peeing too high in the box once in a while, so that they end up getting all or most of the pee outside, which obviously is not fun to clean up. It doesn't happen frequently, though, so I've just been dealing with it, but then recently facebook started showing me ads for pee screens you can add to the sides of a litter box to help prevent that, and when I clicked on one of the ads, I saw there were also high sided boxes, which seemed like a better solution than the add-ons. I don't want to get a fully enclosed box because it's a pain for scooping, but also all the cats are adults and they've had open boxes all their lives and I don't want to invest in a new type only for them not to like it.

It took a lot of looking at various types to finally settle on which one I wanted to order, but I finally made a decision and went with this one, which arrived today, just a little while before we went out for the evening. No one used it when we were gone, but Ollie just used it a few minutes ago and seemed fine with it. Hopefully it's tall enough that it will prevent any more leakage.

2. All day I kept thinking how nice it was that I still have two more days of my weekend. It's so nice! And tomorrow should be a pretty chill day. No plans to go anywhere.

3. We had a nice dinner at Disneyland tonight, despite the heat and crowds. So muggy, though. Bleh.

4. Look at that sweet Molly face. This is where she sleeps every night, right next to my pillow. :)

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2025 Disneyland Trip #59 (8/31/25)

Aug. 31st, 2025 10:23 pm
torachan: anime-style me ver. 2.0 (anime me)
[personal profile] torachan
We had been planning for our next trip to be Tuesday morning after Carla's doctor's appointment, but we decided to go this evening instead, figuring that although it was pretty hot today (mid 90s in Anaheim), at least the sun would be going down and it would be cooling off, whereas on Tuesday we would be getting the full heat.

( Read more... )
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Aug. 31st, 2025 11:43 pm
skygiants: clone helmet lit by the vastness of space (clone feelings)
[personal profile] skygiants
Sometimes you hit the end of a book and immediately think 'I'd like to read that over again' because there's some sort of big twist that you know will make you experience the whole thing differently, and sometimes you hit the end of a book and think 'I'd like to read that over again' not because of any Major Plot Reveals, but because the book is woven together in an interesting enough way that you want the chance to fully appreciate how all the pieces fit now that you've seen the full puzzle.

This second case was my experience with The Fortunate Fall, a cyberpunk novel from 1995 that came back into print last year and that I did not quite manage to read in time for the Readercon book club (so I extremely appreciate [personal profile] kate_nepveu's extensive notes on it including the intertextuality with Moby Dick.)

The book is narrated by Maya Andreyeva, a 'camera' -- a cyborg news-reporter modified to provide not just full sensory experience but also associated memories, context, etc. to the viewing public. When the book begins -- well, when the book begins, it has already ended, as Maya tells us; her whole audience has already experienced all the relevant events through her eyes, and now she's telling it to us again, in a narrative that she can control and that's on her own terms, contextualizing only what she wants to contextualize and hiding what she wants to hide. Which is a very fun way to begin a book, by consciously keying you into its distortions and elisions, and for the most part I think the text lives up to it.

Anyway, when not the book but the story begins, Maya has decided to put together a series commemorating the anniversary of a major [future]-historical tragedy, and has just gotten assigned a new screener for the project -- a sort of editorial figure who sits in between the camera and the audience, filtering out bodily functions and bad words and anything else that could be trouble for the network. Because of the amount of time they spend immersed in the heads of their cameras, screeners tend to become rapidly very enthusiastic and romantic about them! Maya's new screener Keishi is a beautiful and mysterious young woman who is, indeed, very enthusiastic and romantic about her! And definitely not keeping any secrets about her skills, her identity, or her reasons for being there working with Maya, no sir.

In true noir mode, Maya's initially normal-seeming historical research into a tragedy that's as long-ago and terrible and world-shaping for her as the Holocaust is for us ends up leading her increasingly out of the bounds of conventional society down a dangerous rabbithole, at the end of which lies forbidden knowledge about the world, forbidden knowledge about her own past, and forbidden knowledge about a really sad whale. And, following along with her, we as readers gradually start to piece together not only the particular dystopian shape of the world -- the parts that Maya already knows and the parts that Maya doesn't -- but also the shape of the story, the themes that it cares about and that have actually been driving the plot this entire time: embodiment, censorship, the atrocities we commit to end atrocities, and the power and beauty and absolute hard limits of queer love, just to name a few.

I don't know that everything about the book has fully aged well. I understand the well-meaning failure mode in cyberpunk that leads an author to posit a Monolithic Utopian Isolationist Africa when the rest of the world has gone to dystopian shit, but I think it is a failure mode. I also admit that I thought the entire grayspace digital-world sequence was a little bit boring. But for the most part the book is not at all boring, it's interesting in the way that only a book that actually trusts its readers to be doing an equal amount of work as they go is interesting. I did not in fact actually then read the book over again, upon hitting the end, because it was extremely overdue at the library [and I had five more equally overdue books on the pile] but I expect I will do so sometime in the nearer rather than the further future. Maybe I'll have the chance to hit another book club.
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Weird Al @ The Forum 8/30/25

Aug. 31st, 2025 03:10 pm
torachan: (Default)
[personal profile] torachan
Carla wanted to see the opening act and we decided to get dinner at the venue, so we got down there fairly early. We had seats on the floor, since I thought that would be easier/more comfortable for Carla. As it turned out, the entrance to the floor area was fairly near where we parked, and we entered on the side where our seats were, so it was pretty convenient.

I'm not sure if they had more options for food upstairs (I've never eaten at the Forum), but the area where we were just had ready to eat food in warmers that you bought from an Amazon Go space that was sectioned off from the rest of the room. We got a pizza, which was pretty tasty for just being out on the warmer, and took it to eat at our seats.

The opening act was Puddles Pity Party, who I was not familiar with, but Carla knew and liked. He was a good fit for Weird Al, since he's also a comedic singer. His original songs were fine, but the highlight of his set (and possibly the whole night) was when he sang the Gilligan's Island theme song while a fanvid of Kevin Costner's Waterworld played onscreen. That was then followed by a Kevin Costner fanvid (with clips from everything he's ever been in) set to My Heart Will Go On. It was pretty great tbh.

The break between the opening act and main act wasn't too long, which was nice. When the main show started, they had Al coming out from backstage on screen, and when he was going through the hallways in the back, it showed not just Puddles, but also Jack Black, who was in attendance (sadly he never came on stage, that would have been cool).

I don't know a whole lot of Weird Al songs, but I do know many of the songs they're parodies of, and in general it was just a really fun show. He had a lot of clips between songs with fake interviews with celebrities and stuff. I was surprised that I knew almost all the songs in his polka medley as it was one with songs from the past few years.

At one point he played a clip from Weird: the Al Yankovic Story, which I had been aware of when it was first announced that Daniel Radcliffe would be playing him, but then had pretty much forgotten about, but the clip was so funny we decided we should watch the movie soon.

We didn't end up staying for any of the encores. I looked at previous nights' set lists to see what they would probably be and Carla was fine with leaving, so we got a little headstart before the parking lot got too jammed.

Definitely a fun act to see, even for someone who's not already a big fan.

( Set list )
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What I have been reading, July/August edition

Aug. 31st, 2025 07:04 pm
scripsi: (Default)
[personal profile] scripsi
 

Books I read late July and August.

 

New books

At School With The Stanhopes by Gwendoline Courtney. If you follow my journal, you will sooner or later hear me talk about Stepmother by the same author. It’s one of my constant comfort reads, and has been since I was 10. But not until I was an adult did I realize that Courtney wrote a number of books in the 1940s and 50s, all geared towards teenage girls. Most of them have been out of print for decades, and being in Sweden has made it a bit of a hassle to buy them used. But now girls Gone by seems to republishing them, and I read II earlier this year. At School With The Stanhopes is about 16 year old Rosalind, whose guardian dies, forcing her to move in with her much older brother, whom she hardly knows. Neither of them are pleased with it, but I lifes becomes much less gloomy when her favorite teacher opens a school just down the lane. Especially as Miss Stanhope has a bevy of friendly younger sisters. It’s mostly a school story, but also about Rosalind and her brother building a relationship, and I enjoyed it enormously. I do wish I had been able to read this book in my early teens, though, because I can tell I would have loved it even more had I read it back then. 

Furstinnan (The Princess) by Eva Mattson. A biography of the 16th century Swedish queen Catherine Jagiellon. Sweden is pretty bad at noting women in history, and this is the first biography of a very interesting woman. Katarina Jagellonica, to use her Swedish name, was a Polish princess who rather surprisingly married Johan Vasa, the younger brother of the Swedish king at a time when the Vasa dynasty was seen as an upstart royal family. She was highly educated and educated, and it’s clear after reading this book that she had a lasting impact in how late 16th century Sweden was shaped. 

The Art of French Pastry by Jacqut Pfeiffer. I read a lot of cookbooks, but mostly just bits here and there, so never mention them in these posts. But this book was really interesting as it isn’t just recipes, but a thorough explanation of why a recipe looks the way it does, and also how it’s supposed to behave throughout. 

The Adventure of the Demonic Ox by Lois McMaster Bujold. The latest installment in the Penric and Desdemona series. It’s a series of fantasy novellas about a young man who accidently gets infested by a demon, something which makes him a sorcerer. As he doesn’t know how one is supposed to behave during those circumstances, he names the demon Desdemona, and they embark on a much more equal relationship. Bujold is one of my favourite authors, and the Penric and Desdemona novellas are bite-sized pieces of delight that together form a bigger whole. With that said this was probably one of the more lightweight installments in the series. 

 

Re-reads 

Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe and The Wonder Boy of Whistle Stop by Fannie Flagg. The first book has been a comfort read of mine since the early 90s, and I like the movie too. A couple of years ago it got a sequel. If Fried Green Tomatoes paints the past in very nostalgic shades, The Wonder Boy  feels like a fanfic, if one can say that an author can write that to their own work. Everyone is happy at the end of it, and if the bad guy in the first novel was a genuinely awful person, the villains in the latter are reduced to a man with murderous intent towards a cat, and an awful mother-in-law. But sometimes one is in the mood for a book where everything will be just fine. And then some. 

The Secret Garden by Frances Hodgson Burnett. I have always thought of this as a gothic novel for children. I mean, an orphaned heroine moving into an isolated mansion where she hears strange cries in the night, and there is a garden no one has been in for 10 years, and no one knows how to get into. I still remember how thrilled I was when I first read it as a kid. And I still love the description of the secret garden.
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Weekly Reading

Aug. 30th, 2025 04:22 pm
torachan: karkat from homestuck looking bored (karkat bored)
[personal profile] torachan
Currently Reading
What Happened to Lucy Vale?
29%.

Suddenly a Murder
57%.

The War on Alcohol: Prohibition and the Rise of the American State
No progress.

Recently Finished
Our Hideous Progeny
I really loved this. It was hard to listen to in many places because the men in this are so awful, but it was worth it. Great ending.

This Place Kills Me
YA graphic novel. The MC is a pariah at her new school due to rumors that she's a lesbian, and when a popular girl dies and she stumbles across the body, even the teachers are quick to blame her until it's ruled suicide. But the MC doesn't think it was suicide and decides to investigate. I liked this a lot, but I've liked everything I've read by Mariko Tamaki, so that's no surprise.

Sakura, Saku vol. 7

40 Made ni Shitai 10 no Koto vol. 1-2
A lonely salaryman makes a list of ten things he wants to do before his upcoming 40th birthday when staying late at work one night, and is spotted by one of his subordinates, who then says he'll help him complete the list, including going on a date with him for his birthday. This was cute. The setting is realistic present day Japan and both guys are gay and in the closet at work. (So, neither a "everyone is gay" setting nor a "first time with a guy" setting.)

N vol. 1-2
A bunch of creepy things start happening, all linked to a new cult calling themselves N. So far these first two volumes have been a lot of separate stories that are slowly coming together into one, but I'm curious to see where it goes.
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Yuletide 2025 Schedule & New Year's Resolutions

Aug. 30th, 2025 03:24 pm
yuletidemods: A hippo lounges with laptop in hand, peering at the screen through a pair of pince-nez and smiling. A text bubble with a heart emerges from the screen. The hippo dangles a computer mouse from one toe. By Oro. (Default)
[personal profile] yuletidemods posting in [community profile] yuletide_admin
It’s time to start thinking about Yuletide! Here is our schedule for this year. Please note that the time of some deadlines has changed from last year. This may mean the date in UTC has also changed, or that the date relative to your own time zone may have changed.

2025 Schedule

Monday 15 to Friday 26 September: Nominations (end 9pm UTC 26 September)
Tuesday 14 to Friday 24 October: Sign-ups (end 9pm UTC 24 October)
Sunday 26 October: Assignments out (may be earlier)
Wednesday 10 December: Default deadline (9pm UTC)
Wednesday 17 December: Assignment deadline (9pm UTC)
Wednesday 24 December: Main collection works reveals (9pm UTC)
Thursday 25 December: Madness collection works reveals (9pm UTC)
Thursday 1 January: Author reveals, end of event (9pm UTC)

Please check back closer to the time if you want to be sure about deadlines! Deadlines in other timezones may be closer than they appear. If your region has a seasonal time shift during the above dates, your relationship to the deadline will also change. We recommend using timeanddate.com to check when each deadline is for you before it occurs.

New Year's Resolutions

We just sent an email to everyone who took part in Yuletide 2024 and who needs to complete a New Year's Resolution story before signing up again.

We use the email that's associated with your AO3 account. This is a good time to check what that email is! If you have any doubts about whether you received it, you're welcome to check your status with us by emailing yuletideadmin@gmail.com. Please include your AO3 name.

Who needs to complete a New Year's Resolution

If you took part in Yuletide and defaulted after the default deadline, or you submitted an incomplete story at the posting deadline, or you defaulted in Yuletide twice in a row, we generally ask you to complete a New Year’s Resolution story before you sign up again.

See the rules for defaulting on AO3

If you defaulted in a previous year, we will not have sent you a new reminder. We issued a general amnesty for ordinary defaults before the 2023 round, but if you were told you needed to complete a NYR due to turning in a placeholder story or a similar problem, you are probably still on our NYR list. Please check with us if you aren’t sure!

How to fulfil the requirement

Stories written for the purpose of re-qualifying for Yuletide must be posted to the New Year's Resolutions 2025 collection before you sign up to Yuletide 2025. They must be over 1,000 words, written for a specific person's past Yuletide prompt, and given to that person. You can write for any Yuletide 2024 prompt, or you can choose an older Yuletide prompt as long as the fandom in which you write is small enough to still qualify for Yuletide (that is, there are fewer than 1,000 fics on AO3 that are in English, complete, and over 1,000 words long).

Purpose of New Year's Resolutions

The NYR system exists for several reasons:
  • It's an incentive to encourage people either to default early, or, to push on through and post something

  • It works as a warm-up, or as practice, or as a way of proving to yourself you can finish a story to a prompt

  • It's a contribution to the project of getting more stories written in tiny fandoms

  • It's a way of ensuring that past prompts don't get entirely forgotten.


If you had to default in a past year, we are aware that this may have been for a carefully-considered reason or in a difficult time. Needing to complete a NYR does not mean we think you're terrible. Even members of the mod team have needed to write NYRs in the past. We hope you use it as an opportunity to write something you enjoy.

People are also welcome to write NYR stories just for fun! The collection will stay open for late fills until Yuletide 2025 sign-ups close (approx Oct 24).

2024 prompts



Prompts for Yuletide 2010-2024 can be found through the relevant individual collections and the NYR collections (see the Yuletide parent collection).

Contact Mods | Participant DW | Participant LJ | Pinch Hits | Discord


Please either comment logged-in or sign a name. Unsigned anonymous comments will be left screened.
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Pluralistic: A weekend's worth of links (30 Aug 2025)

Aug. 30th, 2025 03:13 pm
[syndicated profile] doctorow_feed

Posted by Cory Doctorow

https://pluralistic.net/2025/08/30/merely-clever/

https://pluralistic.net/?p=11490


Today's links


A photo of an early 20th century 'auto polo' match in which drivers of open-air cars wielding polo mallets attempt to move a ball down a playing field. One driver is in the act of being flung clear of his car; upside-down in midair, with his mallet flying over him.

A weekend's worth of links (permalink)

Did you know that it's possible to cut a hole in any cube such that an identical cube can pass through it? Really! It's called "Rupert's Property." Further, all Platonic solids are Rupert! But there's a newly discovered shape, which cannot pass through itself. What is this eldritch polygon called? A Noperthedron!

https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.18475

"Noperthedron" is the best coinage I've heard in months, which makes it a natural to open this week's linkdump, a collection of the links that piled up this week without making it into my newsletter. This is my 33d Saturday linkdump – here's the previous 32 editions:

https://pluralistic.net/tag/linkdump/

Speaking of eldritch geometry? Perhaps you've heard that Donald Trump plans to add a 90,000 sqft ballroom to the (55,000 sqft) White House. As Kate "McMansion Hell" Wagner writes for The Nation, this is a totally bullshit story floated by Trump and a notorious reactionary starchitect, and to call it a "plan" is to do unforgiveable violence to the noble art of planning:

https://www.thenation.com/article/culture/white-house-ballroom-mccrery-postmodernism/

Wagner is both my favorite architecture critic and the only architecture critic I read. That's because she's every bit as talented a writer as she is a perspicacious architecture critic. What's more, she's a versatile writer. She doesn't just write these sober-but-scathing, erudite pieces for The Nation; she has, for many years, invented the genre of snarky Zillow annotations, which are convulsively funny and trenchant:

https://mcmansionhell.com/

At the Electronic Frontier Foundation, we often find ourselves at the center of big political legal fights; for example, we were the first group to sue Musk and DOGE:

https://www.eff.org/press/releases/eff-sues-opm-doge-and-musk-endangering-privacy-millions

Knowing that I'm part of this stuff helps me get through tough times – but I'm also so glad that we get to step in and defend brilliant writers like Wagner, as we did a few years ago, when Zillow tried to use legal bullying tactics to make her stop being mean to their shitty houses:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2017/06/mcmansion-hell-responds-zillows-unfounded-legal-claims

If this kind of stuff excites you as much as it excites me and you're in the Bay Area, get thee to the EFF Awards (or tune into the livestream) and watch us honor this year's winners: Just Futures Law, Erie Meyer, and the Software Freedom Law Center, India:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2025/08/join-your-fellow-digital-rights-supporters-eff-awards-september-10

So much of the activity that EFF defends involves writing. The web was written into existence, after all, both by the coders who hacked it together and the writers who filled it up. I've always wanted to be a writer, since I was six years old, and I'm so lucky to have grown up through an era is which the significance of the written word has continuously expanded.

I was equally lucky to have writing teachers who permanently, profoundly shaped my relationship with the written word. I've had many of those, but none were so foundational as Harriet Wolff, the longest-serving English teacher at Toronto's first alternative school, SEED School, whence I graduated after a mere seven years of instruction.

Harriet was a big part of why I spent seven years getting a four year diploma. She was such a brilliant English teacher, and presided over such an excellent writing workshop, that I felt like I still had so much to learn from high school, even after I'd amassed enough credits to graduate, so I just stuck around.

Harriet died this summer:

https://obituaries.thestar.com/obituary/harriet-wolff-1093038534

We hadn't spoken much over the past decade, though she did come to my wedding and was every bit as charming and wonderful as I'd remembered her. Despite not having spoken to her in many years, hardly a day went by without my thinking of her and the many lessons she imparted to me.

Harriet took a very broad view of what could be good writing. Though she wasn't much of a science fiction fan, she always took my sf stories seriously – as seriously as she took the more "literary" fiction and poetry submitted by my peers. She kept a filing cabinet full of mimeographs and photocopies, each excellent examples of various forms of writing. Over the years, she handed me everything from Joan Didion essays to especially sharp op-eds from Time Magazine, along with tons of fiction.

Harriet taught me how to criticize fiction, as a means of improving my understand of what I was doing with my writing, and as a way of exposing other writers to new ways of squeezing their own big, numinous, irreducible feelings out of their fingertips and out onto the page. She was the first person I called when I sold my first story, at 17, and I still remember standing on the lawn of my parents' house, cordless phone in one hand and acceptance letter in the other, and basking in her approval.

Harriet was a tough critiquer. Like many of the writers in her workshop, I had what you might call "glibness privilege" – a facility with words that I could use to paper over poor characterization or plotting. Whenever I'd do this, she'd fix me with her stare and say, "Cory, this is merely clever." I have used that phrase countless times – both in respect of my own work and to the work of my students.

Though Harriet was unsparing in her critiques, they never stung, because she always treated the writers in her workshop as her peers in a lifelong journey to improve our craft. She'd come out for cigarettes with us, and she came to every house party I invited her to, bringing a good, inexpensive bottle of wine and finding a sofa to sit on and discuss writing and literature. She invited me to Christmas dinner one year when I was alone for the holidays and introduced me to Yorkshire pudding, still one of my favorite dishes (though none has ever matched the pleasure of eating that first one from her oven).

Harriet apparently told her family that she didn't want a memorial, though from emails with her former students, I know that there might end up being something planned in Toronto. After all, memorials are for the living as much as for the dead. It's unlikely I'll be home for that one, but of course, the best way to memorialize Harriet is in writing.

For Harriet, writing was a big, big church, and every kind of writing was worth serious attention. I always thought of the web as a very Wolffian innovation, because it exposed so many kinds of audiences to so many kinds of writers. There's Kate Wagner's acerbic Zillow annotations, of course, but also so much more.

One of the web writers I've followed since the start is Kevin Kelly, who went from The Whole Earth Review to serving as Wired's first executive editor. Over the years, Kevin has blazed new trails for those of us who write in public, publishing many seminal pieces online. But Kevin was and is a print guy, who has blazed new trails in self-publishing, producing books that are both brilliant and beautifully wrought artifacts, like his giant, three-volume set of photos of "Vanishing Asia":

https://vanishing.asia/the-making-of-vanishing-asia/

This week, Kelly published one of his famous soup-to-nuts guides to a subject: "Everything I Know about Self-Publishing":

https://kk.org/thetechnium/everything-i-know-about-self-publishing/

It's a long, thoughtful, and extremely practical guide that is full of advice on everything from printing to promo. I've self-published several volumes, and I learned a lot.

One very important writer who's trying something new this summer – to wonderful effect – is Hilary J Allen, a business law professor at American University. During the first cryptocurrency bubble, Allen wrote some of the sharpest critiques of fintech, dubbing it "Shadow Banking 2.0":

https://pluralistic.net/2022/03/02/shadow-banking-2-point-oh/#leverage

Allen also coined the term "driverless finance," a devastatingly apt description of the crypto bro's desire for a financial system with no governance, which she expounded upon in a critical book:

https://driverlessfinancebook.com/

This summer, Allen has serialized "FinTech Dystopia," which she called "A summer beach read about Silicon Valley ruining things." Chapter 9 dropped this week, "Let’s Get Skeptical":

https://fintechdystopia.com/chapters/chapter9.html

It's a tremendous read, and while it mostly concerns itself with summarizing her arguments against the claims of fintech boosters, there's an absolutely jaw-dropped section on Neom, the doomed Saudi megaproject to build a massive "linear city" in the desert:

More than 21,000 workers (primarily from India, Bangladesh, and Nepal) are reported to have died working on NEOM and related projects in Saudi Arabia since 2017, with more than 20,000 indigenous people reported to have been forcibly displaced to make room for the development.

Allen offers these statistics as part of her critique of the "Abundance agenda," which focuses on overregulation as the main impediment to a better world. Like Allen, I'm not afraid to criticize bad regulation, but also like Allen, I'm keenly aware of the terrible harms that arise out of a totally unregulated system.

The same goes for technology, of course. There's plenty of ways to use technology that is harmful, wasteful and/or cruel, but that isn't a brief against technology itself. There are many ways that technology has been used (and can be used) to make things better. One of the pioneers of technology for good is Jim Fruchterman, founder of the venerable tech nonprofit Benetech, for which he was awarded a Macarthur "Genius" award. Fruchterman has just published his first book, with MIT Press, in which he sums up a lifetime's experience in finding ways to improve the world with technology. Appropriately enough, it's called Technology For Good:

https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262050975/technology-for-good/

After all, technology is so marvelously flexible that there's always a countertechnology for every abusive tech. Every 10-foot digital wall implies an 11-foot digital ladder. Last month, I wrote about Echelon, a company that makes digitally connected exercise bikes, who had pushed a mandatory update to their customers' bikes that took away functionality they got for free and sold it back to them in inferior form:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/07/26/manifolds/#bark-chicken-bark

Repair hero Louis Rossman – who is running a new, direct action right to repair group named Fulu – offered a $20,000 bounty to anyone who could crack the firmware on an Echelon bike and create a disenshittified software stack that restored the original functionality:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2zayHD4kfcA

In short order, app engineer Ricky Witherspoon, had cracked it, and had a way to continue to use SyncSpin, his popular app for Echelon bikes, which had been shut out by Echelon's enshittification. However, as Witherspoon told 404 Media's Jason Koebler, he won't release his code, not even for a $20,000 bounty, because doing so would make him liable to a $500,000 fine, and a five-year prison sentence, under Section 1201 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act:

https://www.404media.co/developer-unlocks-newly-enshittified-echelon-exercise-bikes-but-cant-legally-release-his-software/

Fulu paid Witherspoon anyway (they're good eggs). Witherspoon told Koebler:

For now it’s just about spreading awareness that this is possible, and that there’s another example of egregious behavior from a company like this […] if one day releasing this was made legal, I would absolutely open source this. I can legally talk about how I did this to a certain degree, and if someone else wants to do this, they can open source it if they want to.

Free/open source software is a powerful tonic against enshittification, and it has the alchemical property of transforming the products of bad companies into good utilities that everyone benefits from.

One example of this is Whisper, an open source audio transcription model released by Openai. Since Whisper's release, free software hackers have made steady – even remarkable – improvements to it. I discovered Whisper earlier this summer, when I couldn't locate a quote I'd heard on a recent podcast that I wanted to reference in a column. I installed Whisper on my laptop and fed it the last 30+ hours' worth of podcasts I'd listened to. An hour later, it had fully transcribed all of them, with timecode, and had put so little load on my laptop that the fan didn't even turn on. I was able to search all that text, locate the quote, and use the timecode to find the clip and check the transcription.

Whisper has turned extremely accurate transcription into a utility, something that can just be added to any program or operating system for free. I think this is going to be quietly revolutionary, bringing full-text search and captioning to audio and video as something we can just take for granted. That's already happening! FFMpeg is the gold-standard free software tool for converting, encoding and re-encoding video, and now the latest version integrates Whisper, allowing FFMpeg to subtitle your videos on the fly:

https://www.theregister.com/2025/08/28/ffmpeg_8_huffman/

Whisper is an example of the "residue" that will be left behind when the AI bubble pops. All bubbles pop, after all, but not all bubbles leave behind a useful residue. When crypto dies, its residue will be a few programmers who've developed secure coding habits in Rust, but besides that, all that will be left behind is terrible Austrian economics and worse monkey JPEGs:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/12/19/bubblenomics/#pop

But the free/open source code generated by stupid and/or evil projects often lives on long after those projects are forgotten. And lots (most) of free/open code is written for good purposes.

Take Madeline, a platform for tracking loans made by co-operatives, produced by the Seed Commons, which is now used by financial co-ops around the world, as they make "non-extractive investments in worker and community-owned businesses on the ground":

https://seedcommons.org/posts/digital-infrastructure-for-a-non-extractive-economy-the-story-of-madeline

Madeline (and Seed Commons) are one of those bright lights that are easy to miss in these brutal and terrifying times. And if that's not enough, there's always booze. If you're thinking of drowning your sorrows, you could do worse than to pour your brown liquor out of a decanter shaped like a giant Atari CX-10 joystick:

https://atari.com/products/atari-joystick-decanter-set

That's the kind of brand necrophilia that could really enhance a night's drinking.


A shelf of leatherbound history books with a gilt-stamped series title, 'The World's Famous Events.'

Object permanence (permalink)

#20yrago 5.25″ floppies make great CD sleeves https://web.archive.org/web/20050924144644/http://www.readymademag.com/feature_18_monkey.php

#20yrsago Hollywood can break down any door in Delhi https://web.archive.org/web/20050903065949/https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/archives/003943.php

#20yrsago Side-band attack tips virtual Blackjack dealer’s hand https://web.archive.org/web/20051119111417/https://haacked.com/archive/2005/08/29/9748.aspx

#20yrsago Judge to RIAA: Keep your “conference center” out of my court https://web.archive.org/web/20051001031307/http://www.godwinslaw.org/weblog/archive/2005/08/29/runaround-suits

#15yrsago Which ebook sellers will allow publishers and writers to opt out of DRM? https://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/columns-and-blogs/cory-doctorow/article/44012-doctorow-s-first-law.html

#15yrsago 10 Rules for Radicals: Lessons from rogue archivist Carl Malamud https://public.resource.org/rules/

#15yrsago Homeowners’ associations: hives of petty authoritarianism https://web.archive.org/web/20100606170504/http://theweek.com/article/index/104150/top-7-insane-homeowners-association-rules

#15yrsago Lynd Ward’s wordless, Depression-era woodcut novels https://memex.craphound.com/2010/08/29/lynd-wards-wordless-depression-era-woodcut-novels/#5yrsago

#10yrago Suit: Wells Fargo sent contractors to break into our house, loot family treasures rescued from Nazis https://theintercept.com/2015/08/28/wells-fargo-contractors-stole-family-heirlooms/

#10yrsago Texas doctor’s consent form for women seeking abortions https://memex.craphound.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/09/3kscWU5-2-scaled.jpg

#10yrsago Spear phishers with suspected ties to Russian government spoof fake EFF domain, attack White House https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2015/08/new-spear-phishing-campaign-pretends-be-eff

#10yrsago Rowlf the dog gives a dramatic reading of “Grim Grinning Ghosts.” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CPMTEJ_IAAU

#5yrsago California's preventable fires https://pluralistic.net/2020/08/29/chickenized-home-to-roost/#cal-burning

Upcoming appearances (permalink)

A photo of me onstage, giving a speech, pounding the podium.


A screenshot of me at my desk, doing a livecast.

Recent appearances (permalink)


A grid of my books with Will Stahle covers..

Latest books (permalink)


A cardboard book box with the Macmillan logo.

Upcoming books (permalink)

  • "Canny Valley": A limited edition collection of the collages I create for Pluralistic, self-published, September 2025

  • "Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It," Farrar, Straus, Giroux, October 7 2025
    https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374619329/enshittification/

  • "Unauthorized Bread": a middle-grades graphic novel adapted from my novella about refugees, toasters and DRM, FirstSecond, 2026

  • "Enshittification, Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It" (the graphic novel), Firstsecond, 2026

  • "The Memex Method," Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2026

  • "The Reverse-Centaur's Guide to AI," a short book about being a better AI critic, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2026


Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources:

Currently writing:

  • "The Reverse Centaur's Guide to AI," a short book for Farrar, Straus and Giroux about being an effective AI critic. (747 words yesterday, 46239 words total). FIRST DRAFT COMPLETE

  • A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING

This work – excluding any serialized fiction – is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license. That means you can use it any way you like, including commercially, provided that you attribute it to me, Cory Doctorow, and include a link to pluralistic.net.

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Quotations and images are not included in this license; they are included either under a limitation or exception to copyright, or on the basis of a separate license. Please exercise caution.

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"When life gives you SARS, you make sarsaparilla" -Joey "Accordion Guy" DeVilla

READ CAREFULLY: By reading this, you agree, on behalf of your employer, to release me from all obligations and waivers arising from any and all NON-NEGOTIATED agreements, licenses, terms-of-service, shrinkwrap, clickwrap, browsewrap, confidentiality, non-disclosure, non-compete and acceptable use policies ("BOGUS AGREEMENTS") that I have entered into with your employer, its partners, licensors, agents and assigns, in perpetuity, without prejudice to my ongoing rights and privileges. You further represent that you have the authority to release me from any BOGUS AGREEMENTS on behalf of your employer.

ISSN: 3066-764X

https://pluralistic.net/2025/08/30/merely-clever/

https://pluralistic.net/?p=11490

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Covid vaccine access at pharmacies

Aug. 30th, 2025 10:34 am
redbird: closeup of me drinking tea, in a friend's kitchen (Default)
[personal profile] redbird posting in [community profile] thisfinecrew
Because RFK Jr. is out to get us, CVS (and possibly other pharmacies) isn’t shipping the updated covid vaccine in 16 states. https://www.idse.net/CDC-News/Article/08-25/CVS-stops-COVID-shots/78068

In Massachusetts, New Mexico, and Nevada, state law says pharmacists can’t give vaccines that aren’t CDC-approved. In another 13 states, they can, but it requires a prescription.

These are state laws, so call your state respresentatives.

Here’s a script, and the Massachusetts phone numbers:
( Read more... )

This is in addition to calling your doctor’s office (if you have one) to ask for the vaccine.
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Daily Happiness

Aug. 29th, 2025 08:22 pm
torachan: arale from dr slump dressed in a penguin suit and smiling (arale penguin)
[personal profile] torachan
1. Four day weekend! I'm very excited about that.

2. I had a chance to get over to the Torrance store to say goodbye to the manager who's leaving. Asked her how things were going with her possible transfer to Hawaii and she said she's had web interviews with a few people and it's basically confirmed, just have to finalize where she'll be, so I'm glad they were able to find a position for her.

3. Tuxie was so cute this morning! He loves those planters, but usually doesn't get right up under the tree like that.

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2025 Disneyland Trip #58 (8/28/25)

Aug. 29th, 2025 08:08 pm
torachan: (Default)
[personal profile] torachan
Last night we went down there later in the evening, arriving around 8:30. It was an Oogie Boogie Bash night, so DCA was already closed to non-event guests and it was also almost time for the parade to start, so Disneyland was crowded when we first got in, but once we got past that clog on Main Street it wasn't bad at all.

( Read more... )
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Books, 4 of them this time

Aug. 29th, 2025 06:16 pm
olivermoss: (Default)
[personal profile] olivermoss
I read books 1-4 of C S Poe's Memento Mori series. A while ago when I was still trying to find books by browsing Amazon (this is a terrible way to find books these days, but the reccing ecosystems I was in were worse) I kept staring at these covers and considering. They seemed relevant to my interests, but also I got burned on a lot of random buys. Also, it seemed like the more a book looked like it was maybe catering to me that it would be borderline unreadable, or actually unreadable.

I liked them and they are very well written. However, they are tricky reccs. It's about a pair of detectives dealing with series killers in NYC and has an actually good sense of NYC crime history. A lot of this is rooted in good research. However, the darkness, the various content warnings and a few other things are going to turn off a lot of readers.

So I was going to make really tortured metaphors about how, even putting all that aside, the books have a very specific vibe that I don't think most people would like. However, what tipped the scale and made me finally take a chance was a fan artist I follow doing an unofficial alt cover for it. Also, the books seem popular on the MM books subreddit and in some of the fan spaces I'm in right now.

It's going to be a 5 book series and book 4 just came out. There is a lot of interconnected stuff between the books so I am glad I read them in order. I'll need to do a canon review before the final one comes out. Definitely a series where you might want to look up warnings and tropes beforehand.
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some songs that only get more relevant as time passes:

Aug. 29th, 2025 09:36 am
lirazel: the worlds "care and freedom" in various shades of blue ([misc] care and freedom)
[personal profile] lirazel
I am starting to collect songs that I think of as "Songs That Are Actually More Relevant Now Than They Were When They Were Released Many Years Ago." These are the ones on the list so far:








`










And then there's this one, which would need to have its references updated and would be more like "The Revolution Will Not Be Online" but whose central premise is still so relevant:

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Sinners art & other stuff

Aug. 29th, 2025 09:41 pm
mific: (art supplies)
[personal profile] mific
There's a bunch of challenge stuff I should be working on but I had to finish a big Sinners artwork that grabbed me and wouldn't let go.
It's finally done and on AO3 & tumblr: just for a few hours... we was free

Also I podficced a story for Summer Podfic Swap Behind the Shadows (What We Do In the Shadows movie fandom). Perfect for my accent! :D

Upcheering tumblr posts:
- Firefox and Windows
- play that funky music
- modern art

A short story rec - Eleven Numbers by Lee Child. It's free on Amazon Prime right now, if you can access that. It's bloody good, and a masterclass in short story writing. No CW I can think of.

And signalboosting this post by [personal profile] machinistm - two fanvids based on Bohemian Like You - a new Murderbot one (Kuwadora), and a classic SGA one (astolat) - they're especially good viewed in series. TW: lots of fast cuts in both.

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Daily Happiness

Aug. 28th, 2025 11:57 pm
torachan: (Default)
[personal profile] torachan
1. Just one more day until my four day weekend!

2. We had a nice dinner at Disneyland tonight. Waited until later to go down there, so it wasn't hot anymore (though it was still pretty muggy) and the traffic wasn't bad.

3. I feel like I'm already making good progress with tasks for this new project at work and the IT team was very happy with my report today. Also it seems there's interpersonal trouble again at one of the stores and I'm super glad it's not my problem anymore.

4. Silly Jasper.

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