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Pluralistic: Agents vs ecommerce (28 Oct 2026)

By Cory Doctorow

Today’s links

A blasted, dark, cratered moonscape, dominated by an overturned shopping cart, which is being swarmed with killer robots from pulp magazines.

Agents vs ecommerce (permalink)

The first widely read piece of tech criticism I ever wrote was “Metacrap: Putting the torch to the seven strawmen of the meta-utopia,” a response to the underlying philosophy of the “Semantic Web” that I published in 2001:
https://people.well.com/user/doctorow/metacrap.htm

The piece holds up surprisingly well today (if I do say so myself), and not just for its criticism of the ontological incoherence of “web semantics.” The most relevant concept I develop in that piece is a criticism of any plan that starts with “first, everyone else in the world just needs to set aside their needs and advantages in favor of my priorities, and then my plan will work.”

This is especially relevant today in the context of “agentic AI.” When this idea was first mooted, the big idea was that you could instruct a chatbot to venture out onto the public, unstructured web and it would do your bidding, for example, finding all the flights that fit your criteria and comparing prices for all of them, picking the best one and booking it for you.

This idea quickly foundered. Each step in that process was too complex and specialized for a single chatbot; so the notion quickly gave way to “swarms” of specialized chatbots – one to search the web and identify likely travel websites; one to search those websites; one to evaluate flights against your criteria, one to handle the transaction, and so on.

Through specialization, these bots could be made far more accurate, but at a price: both the literal price of all the extra computation that goes into powering a “swarm” versus a single process, and the reliability price that arises from complexity. That’s because error rates are multiplicative: combine two bots with low failure rates into a single system and that system will have a higher failure rate than any of its components. This compounding error rate only increases as you add more and more bots, so every time you add a new specialized bot to decrease the error rate in its area of specialization, you increase the overall error rate of the system by adding more complexity to it.

Despite this, companies pressed on ahead with “agentic,” without any regard to the realities or consequences. For example, Microsoft has repeatedly announced that it will modify Windows to eliminate all forms of PC-side privacy and confidentiality, sending a continuous stream of screenshots to Microsoft’s cloud servers so that your Microsoft “agent” can access your private data on Microsoft’s cloud:
https://pluralistic.net/2026/01/06/1000x-liability/#graceful-failure-modes

But the real fix for “agentic” is for everyone in the world to rearrange their affairs to the benefit of AI agents. This is the same demand that the Semantic Web people made in the early oughts, and it has the same problems. The Semantic Web people operated on the assumption that there were freestanding, objectively correct ways of describing things and that everyone who put information on the web would eventually come to see that adopting these correct semantics was to everyone’s advantage.

In reality, these semantic differences are the expression of real, serious, unresolvable philosophical, technical, moral and political arguments. The reason that some media outlets won’t describe transwomen as women isn’t because they lack an appreciation of objectively correct semantic classifications – it’s because they’re bigots. That’s the same reason “race realists” insist that there is a biological category called “race,” that exists despite everything computational genomics has proved:
https://pluralistic.net/2020/08/16/combat-wheelchairs/#race-realism

In my book The Reverse Centaur’s Guide to Life After AI, I predicted that a similar dynamic would play out when it came to agentic AI and websites. The reason websites are so inhospitable to bots is that ecommerce sites don’t want to be legible to automated tools:
https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374621568/thereversecentaursguidetolifeafterai/

Ecommerce websites deploy a wide range of sleazy tactics to raise prices, including surveillance pricing:
https://pluralistic.net/2026/10/07/gouged/#aeropain

They use market power to rig whole categories, forcing prices up:
https://pluralistic.net/2026/10/15/enshittipedia/

Multiple law-enforcers, Republic and Democrat, state and federal, have sued companies for “drip pricing” and “junk fees” that make it impossible to know what the actual price is until you’ve spent a long-ass time going through the purchase process:
https://pluralistic.net/2024/06/07/drip-drip-drip/#drip-off

Surveillance pricing, drip pricing, junk fees, price fixing and “most favored nation” deals are the source of all the growth in profitability by the economy’s largest, most important firms. These tactics require opacity and are antithetical to the kinds of automated comparison-shopping that agentic peddlers promise:
https://pluralistic.net/2024/08/14/the-price-is-wright/#enforcement-priorities

These tactics are facially illegal and despite this, they are widely practiced. Cheating is so profitable that it’s cheaper for firms to buy off regulators and pay fines than it is for them to stop criming. The fantasy that these same companies would welcome agentic shopping bots with open arms is just as implausible as the idea that if we feed enough words to the word-guessing program, it will wake up and become a “super intelligence”:
https://pluralistic.net/2026/09/18/surprise/#wow-signal

What’s more, the AI companies know this. Google’s big plan to make AI profitable is to sell merchants the power to combine its surveillance data with its AI tools to price-gouge shoppers:
https://pluralistic.net/2026/01/21/cod-marxism/#wannamaker-slain

And right on time, ecommerce websites are mass-blocking AI agents:
https://gizmodo.com/online-shopping-platforms-turn-against-third-party-ai-agents-2000831298

They’re doing it in part because AI agents allow shoppers to cheat (for example, by renewing a “temporary” hold on a used item to block other buyers indefinitely), but also because they don’t want automation tools on their platforms at all. These tools are a frontal assault on all the most exciting (and sleaziest) ways to make money in the waning hours of end-stage capitalism. Far from welcoming bots, ecommerce sites were always going to block them.

It’s easy to come up with amazing applications for technology if you’re allowed to assume that you can get everyone else in the world to set aside their priorities and their interests in favor of yours. But unless someone has a plan to do that, we shouldn’t take them seriously.

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)

#25yrsago Hack your Aibo https://web.archive.org/web/20010516005338/http://aibohack.com/

#20yrsago History of calculator watches https://watchismo.blogspot.com/2006/10/calculating-history-of-led-calculator.html

#15yrsago How Occupy has shifted the national debate https://www.salon.com/2011/10/27/the_victory_ows_has_already_won/

#15yrsago UK public reimbursed Margaret Thatcher was reimbursed for more than £500K in personal expenses https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2011/oct/28/margaret-thatcher-expenses-claim

#15yrsago Depression the Hyperbole and a Half way https://hyperboleandahalf.blogspot.com/2011/10/adventures-in-depression.html

#15yrsago Philippines president Duterte says God threatened to crash his plane if he didn’t stop swearing https://www.khaosodenglish.com/news/international/2016/10/28/duterte-says-god-told-stop-cursing/

#15yrsago Public safety codes are now free online for all https://memex.craphound.com/2016/10/28/public-safety-codes-are-now-free-online-for-all/

#10yrsago Dr Seuss estate has crushed a kickstarter for a Seuss/Trek mashup https://web.archive.org/web/20170425161011/https://www.popehat.com/2016/10/26/popehat-signal-help-defend-a-seuss-trek-parody-under-fair-use/

#10yrsago Undercover with a prepper militia that patrols the border to fight “drug cartels” https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2016/10/undercover-border-militia-immigration-bauer/

#10yrsago The “Blacks for Trump” guy used to be in a murder cult https://web.archive.org/web/20161027133828/https://fusion.net/story/362459/blacks-for-trump-michael-the-black-man-yahweh-cult/

#5yrsago Europe’s trustbusters lose the plot https://pluralistic.net/2021/10/28/clintons-ghost/#filternet

#5yrsago All of science gets a general index https://pluralistic.net/2021/10/28/clintons-ghost/#cornucopia-concordance

#5yrsago The new DRM-breaking exemptions just dropped https://pluralistic.net/2021/10/28/clintons-ghost/#felony-contempt-of-business-model

#1yrago Raymond Biesinger’s “9 Times My Work Has Been Ripped Off” https://pluralistic.net/2025/10/28/productive-seething/#fuck-you-pay-me

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)

  • “The Post-American Internet,” a geopolitical sequel of sorts to Enshittification, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2027

  • “Unauthorized Bread”: a middle-grades graphic novel adapted from my novella about refugees, toasters and DRM, FirstSecond, April 20, 2027

  • “Enshittification, Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It” (the graphic novel), Firstsecond, 2027

  • “The Memex Method,” Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2027

Colophon (permalink)

Today’s top sources:

Currently writing:

  • “Once Is Enemy Action,” a science fiction novel about the origins of modern technofascism. Today’s words: 518 (30331 total).

  • “The Post-American Internet,” a sequel to “Enshittification,” about the better world the rest of us get to have now that Trump has torched America. Fourth draft completed. Submitted to editor.

  • A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING

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

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

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

How to get Pluralistic:

Blog (no ads, tracking, or data-collection):

Pluralistic.net

Newsletter (no ads, tracking, or data-collection):
https://pluralistic.net/plura-list

Mastodon (no ads, tracking, or data-collection):
https://mamot.fr/@pluralistic

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https://bsky.app/profile/doctorow.pluralistic.net

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https://doctorow.medium.com/

Tumblr (mass-scale, unrestricted, third-party surveillance and advertising):
https://mostlysignssomeportents.tumblr.com/tagged/pluralistic

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

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

ISSN: 3066-764X

Full article

#cory doctorow #pluralistic
Pluralistic pluralistic
3d

Pluralistic: History is something you do (27 Oct 2026)

By Cory Doctorow

Today’s links

A closeup of a roulette wheel at rest. The ball has been replaced with the planet Earth. A flying fist is jetting through the air at it and is about to knock it.

History is something you do (permalink)

Prediction is hard. Especially about the future. That Yogi Berra gem proves that you don’t have to be a science fiction writer to get irritated with people insisting that you must know what’s going to happen tomorrow, but (as a sf writer), I can tell you that this is one of our main occupational hazards.

Obviously, this is a self-inflicted injury. Our genre is full of big names who self-mythologized as scientific Nostradamuses. From the “future history” bar-charts in Heinlein’s books (I was once on a panel with Robert Silverberg where he referred to RAH as “Robert A Timeline”) to the McGuffin of Asimov’s Foundation series: a “scientific” discipline that could predict the trajectory of human civilization for millennia into the future.

But me, I find the prospect of predicting the future incredibly dismal – even offensive. A predictable future is set in stone, immune to human agency. A predictable future runs on rails, and we’re the prisoners of history, tied to the tracks.

For me, the most exciting thing about sf is the idea that the future is contingent. Sf is a long, sharp pin that can prick inevitabilism’s bubble: that assertion by tech-bros and policymakers alike that the future is out of our hands and must be accommodated, not shaped. Inevitabilism is a form of vulgar Thatcherism, the assertion that “there is no alternative.”

If The Market won’t deliver an energy transition, and it leaves us to boil in our own skins, drown in the rising seas, and roast in wildfires, then tough shit humanity, there is no alternative. If there’s a tech company eavesdropping on all of our communications technologies and following us as we move through digital and physical space (and turning the juiciest tidbits over the ICE), that’s not the tech company’s fault: there is no alternative. If some broadly useful statistical tools are delivered in the most climate-destroying, economy-wrecking, job-killing, quality-vaporizing way possible, that’s just How It Is. It’s not Sam Altman or Dario Amodei’s fault: there is no alternative.

Science fiction can do more than imagine how “General AI” might change society: sf can imagine a society that doesn’t make the fanciful leap from a word-guessing sentence-extruder to a machine god. Sf can imagine a world that debuts “AI” as a joint supercomputing project between the IPCC and Sandia National Labs whose primary purpose is to improve the fidelity of climate models, and whose spinoffs are modest but interesting open source tools that people run on regular computers with normal energy footprints.

Considered as a predictive literature, sf is a colossal failure. If our books are to be taken as roadmaps to an inevitable future, we have all flunked out of cartography school. More than 99.9% of these maps describe a territory that never emerged. All claims of sf’s predictive value are just survivor bias, feats of Texas marksmanship in which we fire a shotgun into the side of a barn and then draw a target around the place where the holes cluster.

What’s more likely: that sf is 99.9% fake fortune-tellers and 0.1% seers and soothsayers; or that the “predictions that came true” in sf are just the inevitable bullseyes that you’d score if you threw enough darts?

Prediction is a weak and helpless activity, the obsession of people who don’t think they can change anything. It’s the superstitious dread that gives rise to astrology. Far better to be a Luddite who asserts that there is more than one way to introduce a technology to a society. To be a Luddite is to insist that humans are in charge of humanity, not the iron laws of economics, not the great forces of history, not the uncaring and illusory constellations. At its best, sf is a proudly Luddite literature:
https://locusmag.com/feature/cory-doctorow-science-fiction-is-a-luddite-literature/

The insistence that we can change things is an active posture. It’s an activist posture. At its radical best, sf is activist, because it engages with more than what the machine does, insisting on changing who the machine does it for and who the machine does it to.

Which is why I find demands to offer predictions for the future so irritating. People who think that sf writers can predict the future have the field’s role exactly backwards. My intention isn’t to demoralize you into tying yourself to history’s tracks – I’m here to show you how to grab the wheel and steer off the rails altogether.

The reason this seems so implausible is that the “there is no alternative” people have convinced us that all change is the result of individuals. To change the world, you must fashion yourself into one of history’s mediocre Great Men, a Musk or Zuck. Our oligarchs are the avatars of the Great Forces of History. They have seen the predictable, inevitable future and have been allocated trillions by the capital markets to ensure that we arrive there on time, running straight down those shining rails, no matter how many people are tied to the tracks.

Another motif of Thatcherism (and hence inevitabilism) is that “there is no such thing as society,” which means that all change is the result of individuals, which means that only Great Men can hope to change anything. If there is no such thing as society, then it follows that there’s no such thing as mass movements, there’s no such thing as trade unions, and there’s no such thing as revolutions.

If there’s no such thing as society, then eruptions of students and workers in the streets must be nothing more than mob violence – it can’t possibly be a political eruption. If you’re an inevitabilist than Occupy was nothing more than millions of individual “virtue signallers” and #MeToo and #BlackLivesMatter were the individual follies of innumerable “social justice warriors.”

As an activist, I’m not interested in predicting the future, I’m interested in changing it. When I speak about “the post-American internet” that we could create by exploiting the policy space that has been opened by Trump’s incontinent belligerence, my intention is to get you to help build it, not to get you to prepare yourself for that inevitable outcome:
https://pluralistic.net/2026/01/01/39c3/#the-new-coalition

Obviously, some aspects of our future are locked in. The climate violence our political and business elites inflicted on the world locked in rising seas, extreme weather, habitat-loss driven zoonotic plagues and massive refugee crises. Those are inevitable. What’s entirely up to us is what we do about them.

Do we create full employment for every person who will live for the next 300 years, relocating our coastal cities inland, treating the sick, retrofitting our infrastructure, and accommodating our neighbors who are driven out of their homes? Or do we let the stupidest, worst people among us lead us into the ecofascism of border walls, drone warfare, and exterminationism? That’s our choice.

We’ve had generations of being told to “vote with our wallets” instead of organizing in political, labor and social movements. Voting with your wallet doesn’t work (billionaires’ wallets are thicker than yours, they win those votes), and if you lose enough of those wallet elections, it’s easy to fall into the despair of believing that the future is inevitable:
https://pluralistic.net/2025/09/13/consumption-choices/#marginal-benefits

I think this is why “prediction markets” have caught on so ferociously. While prediction markets are sold as a way for people to “inject information” into markets, they are actually a rigged system that transfers money from everyday “investors” to insiders:
https://pluralistic.net/2026/03/24/degenerated-gambling/#oracle-capture

Prediction markets are the perfect pastime for history’s prisoners. If you fancy yourself a plaything of the gods whose future is already written, then prediction markets are a way for you and your fellow prisoners to bet on what torments will come next. And of course oligarchs love prediction markets, because they’re the ones who can rig the odds, say, by placing a bet on a war and then leading the country to that war.

They are the gods, the only ones who get to make history, so a market for bets on what history will do next is a way to enrich history’s avatars at the expense of history’s victims.

In science fiction, we often meet powerful aliens who tell us “resistance is futile” as they conquer our world and set about exterminating us. But if resistance was truly futile, no one would have to say it.

When they tell us “there is no alternative,” what they mean is “stop trying to think of alternatives.” To imagine radically is to move beyond the helplessness of prediction: a radical imagination dares to insist that history is what we make, not what happens to us.

(Image: Ralf Roletschek, CC BY-SA 3.0, 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)

#15yrsago Canon of St Paul’s resigns over plans to evict Occupy London https://www.theguardian.com/world/2011/oct/27/giles-fraser-st-pauls-profile

#15yrsago Orange County city council unanimous: Occupy tents are a form of speech https://web.archive.org/web/20111029021151/http://www.occupy-oc.org/tears-stream-as-city-council-unanimously-agrees-occupy-tents-are-a-form-of-speech/

#15yrsago Edible Venn diagram: the piagram https://www.reddit.com/r/pics/comments/g8nxo/i_realize_its_a_bit_late_for_pi_day_but_heres_my/

#15yrsago SOPA: US House of Reps copyright bill proposes national censorship, attacks on hosting services, Twitter, YouTube https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2011/10/disastrous-ip-legislation-back-–-and-it’s-worse-ever

#15yrsago Google rejects JWZ’s 2-step plan to end the nym wars https://www.jwz.org/blog/2011/10/google-nymwars-redux/

#15yrsago Toronto mayor confronted by comedy interviewer calls 911, reportedly shouts “You bitches! Don’t you fucking know? I’m Rob fucking Ford, the mayor of this city! https://www.joeydevilla.com/2011/10/27/im-rob-fucking-ford-or-the-mayor-the-ambush-and-the-911-call/

#15yrsago Canadian Tory MP: Don’t worry about violating our stupid new copyright law, because we probably won’t catch you if you do https://web.archive.org/web/20111029155739/https://www.michaelgeist.ca/content/view/6089/125/

#10yrsago UK MPs realise that age filtering won’t work so now they just want to block all porn in the UK https://www.openrightsgroup.org/blog/now-we-want-censorship-the-digital-economy-bill-is-running-out-of-control/

#10yrsago Samsung abuses copyright to censor satirical exploding phone Grand Theft Auto mod https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2016/10/samsung-sets-its-reputation-fire-bogus-dmca-takedown-notices

#10yrsago EU lies and the British tabloids who told them https://web.archive.org/web/20160626051921/https://www.economist.com/blogs/graphicdetail/2016/06/daily-chart-15

#10yrsago The Pirate Party are poised to form Iceland’s government in Saturday’s election https://qz.com/817784/icelands-pirate-party-looks-likely-to-take-the-countrys-general-election-on-oct-29

#5yrsago Hospital rings up $2755 upcharge by sending pregnant woman to ER https://pluralistic.net/2021/10/27/crossing-a-line/#zero-fucks-given

#1yrago Shake Shack wants you to shit yourself to death https://pluralistic.net/2025/10/27/shit-shack/#binding-arbitration

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)

  • “The Post-American Internet,” a geopolitical sequel of sorts to Enshittification, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2027

  • “Unauthorized Bread”: a middle-grades graphic novel adapted from my novella about refugees, toasters and DRM, FirstSecond, April 20, 2027

  • “Enshittification, Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It” (the graphic novel), Firstsecond, 2027

  • “The Memex Method,” Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2027

Colophon (permalink)

Today’s top sources:

Currently writing:

  • “Once Is Enemy Action,” a science fiction novel about the origins of modern technofascism. Today’s words: 530 (29813 total).

  • “The Post-American Internet,” a sequel to “Enshittification,” about the better world the rest of us get to have now that Trump has torched America. Fourth draft completed. Submitted to editor.

  • A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING

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

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

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

How to get Pluralistic:

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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

Full article

#cory doctorow #pluralistic
Pluralistic pluralistic
3d

Pluralistic: Sovereign citizens, but for news (26 Oct 2026)

By Cory Doctorow

Today’s links

  • Sovereign citizens, but for news: By reading the LA Times, you agree…
  • Hey look at this: Delights to delectate.
  • Object permanence: Patenting tax dodges; 6-word sf; Newscorp shareholders v Murdoch; Ancient German ophthalmology cult; Trolley problem is stupid; Trump’s influence peddling to Chinese millionaire; Al Franken v binding arbitration; Yoga pants spite parade; Dems’ secret Congressional committee; RIAA v your PC; “Going Under”; “Machine Man”; Aging goths; “Everfair”; Kremlin will destabilize Ukraine; FCC fronts for Big Cable; Straight Outta Vagina; Remixed TED Talk about remixing; Authoritarian debt.
  • Upcoming appearances: Vienna, Kilkenny, Courtenay, Vancouver, Oxford, Sheffield, Virtual, Oxford, Montreal.
  • Recent appearances: Where I’ve been.
  • Latest books: You keep readin’ em, I’ll keep writin’ ‘em.
  • Upcoming books: Like I said, I’ll keep writin’ ‘em.
  • Colophon: All the rest.
The original Art Deco LA Times building. Draped over it is a fringed naval flag. Superimposed over the building is the text of the LAT's outrageous dickover 'consent' dialog.

Sovereign citizens, but for news (permalink)

When it comes to terrible practices by website operators, it takes a lot to shock me. I literally wrote the book on the subject. But last night, I encountered a piece of genuinely appalling fuckery and I can’t get it out of my head, because it’s such a perfect storm of outrageous conduct and institutional decay.

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/2026/10/26/abandon-hope/#all-ye-who-enter-here

It happened when I followed a link to an LA Times article. Having lived in LA three times (and having been an Angeleno for a decade and counting this time around) I generally have warm feelings for the Times. The Times’s Festival of Books is a great event that I speak at most years, and I’m broadly happy to have a daily newspaper covering my city.

That said, the Times has been chipping away at my goodwill for the past decade. First, there’s the personal: after a Festival of Books appearance some years ago, the books editor approached me and asked if I’d contribute regular book reviews to the paper. I said yes, and then immediately my editor got laid off, reportedly so they could avoid giving him benefits that would come with seniority.

I wrote several reviews for a new editor, though the paper never sent me a contract for any of them – or a payment! Many months (and published reviews) later, an editor I’d never had contact with at the paper got in touch to get the paperwork squared away, and the Times sent me a contract with broad, one-sided language that I would never sign onto.

Given that they’d already published my work, there wasn’t much they could do to make me sign the contract, so, after quite a lot of wrangling, I eventually got the offensive clauses removed and got paid (but I never got invited to write another review for them).

To be honest, this is par for the course. The last time the New York Times asked me to write for them, they refused to remove some similar clauses from their contract (something they’d done previously), and the contracts person just ghosted me after a couple of volleys.

A similar thing happened with the Washington Post the last time I wrote for them, except they (like the LAT) published the work and then sent me a one-sided, manifestly unfair contract that I refused to sign. Given they’d already published the op-ed there wasn’t anything they could do about it, so eventually I got a better contract and a payment (and again, that was the last time the Post asked me to write for them).

Basically, there’s an epidemic of bad legal terms sweeping the American media industry, and while the LA Times isn’t the worst offender (at least they didn’t ask me to assign any related patents, trademarks and copyrights to fictional characters, as Conde Nast does!), they’re not what you’d call “writer-friendly” in their contracting terms.

But again, that’s hardly unique. If I disqualified news outlets because they tried to shift liability to, and grab rights from, their writers, I’d be left with damned few media outlets.

But on the editorial side, the Times has a bunch of billionaire-shaped red flags. The paper’s owner is the Trump-allied, severely AI-pilled biotech billionaire Patrick Soon-Shiong, whose editorial interference in the Times is comparable to Bezos’s interference in the Post. Like Bezos, Soon-Shiong killed the paper’s endorsement for Kamala Harris:
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/10/26/us/los-angeles-times-endorsement-soon-shiong.html

And I have my suspicions that Soon-Shiong might have been behind the layoff that killed Brian Merchant’s beat as the country’s first technology critic, from which perch Merchant assayed some acerbic, well-reasoned criticism of tech billionaires and AI:
https://talkingbiznews.com/media-news/ex-la-times-tech-columnist-merchant-joining-ai-now-institute/

Again, that’s not disqualifying. If I boycotted every newspaper owned by a reprehensible billionaire, I’d have to turn my back on e.g. the NYT with its morbidly wealthy, union-busting owners:
https://www.thedailybeast.com/new-york-times-illegally-busted-union-campaign-national-labor-relations-board-alleges/

But unlike the NYT, the LA Times has followed the playbook of Alden Capital papers (like the Chicago Tribune), shipping a skinnier paper with less original reporting at a higher price (which is why I canceled my subscription):
https://archive.is/hOhpu

But even that isn’t disqualifying. Like the Tribune, the LAT still employs dedicated, talented reporters who do excellent work, which is how I came to be following a link to a recent article yesterday…and how I came to find myself confronted by an enshittificatory gambit that shocked even me.

Here’s what got me: when I visited the Times, I got a dickover that blocked all the content on the page until I clicked “Continue,” and the text of that dickover is a breathtaking piece of enshittified legal fuckery:

By continuing, you agree to our Terms of Service, which include arbitration and a class action waiver, and our Privacy Policy. You agree that we and our third-party vendors may collect and use your information, including through cookies, pixels and similar technologies, for the purposes set forth in our Privacy Policy such as personalizing your experience and ads.

This is wildly illegal and incredibly immoral. The paper claims that by simply reading an article, you agree that you can never, ever sue them for virtually any reason, and that you have consented to effectively unlimited surveillance and commercial exploitation of your private data.

It’s hard to overstate how dangerous this kind of binding arbitration waiver is, but to give one example: Disney makes people who sign up for free trials of Disney Plus “consent” to one of these waivers. When a woman was killed by a Disney World restaurant that lied about the allergens in its food, the company told a judge that her grieving widower couldn’t sue them because he’d waived that right by signing up for a trial of D+:
https://lawreview.missouri.edu/infinite-arbitration-how-one-click-can-take-you-out-of-court-forever/

The company later backed off for that one specific case, but subsequently doubled down on binding arbitration. By putting an arbitration clause in its terms, the LAT could head off my right to sue them if they stiffed me on those reviews I wrote for them, Brian Merchant’s right to sue them for wrongful termination, and your right to sue them if you get run over by a newspaper delivery van.

Then there’s the privacy clause: the LAT is a California paper, and in California, we have the CCPA, a reasonably good privacy law. Under the CCPA, privacy waivers have to be explicit, informed and can be withdrawn at any time. What’s more, the CCPA has broad prohibitions against “dark patterns” that this dickover almost certainly violates:
https://cppa.ca.gov/announcements/2024/20240904.html

In theory, there’s a way to avoid all of this: you could just use the “Kill Sticky” bookmarklet or an adblock filter to block or dismiss the dickover without ever clicking “continue”:
https://pluralistic.net/2026/07/21/dickovers/#block-element

But this is an industrial strength dickover; it uses advanced tricks to block existing dickover killers, likely a combination of shadow DOM and an “important” scroll-lock in the html.

Like I say, this shocks the conscience. Under this standard, the Times’s reporters could find themselves bound to legal “agreements” with the companies they investigate online that could interfere with their reporting. Just as bad is how these illegal measures mislead the Times’s readership on two of the most important consumer issues facing Californians (and all internet users) today.

As Jargoggles points out, this is the corporate version of the bizarre nonsense that Sovereign Citizens gabble at cops when they get pulled over for driving with a special “sheriff’s license plate,” and at judges to insist that they lack jurisdiction due to the tassels on the courtroom flag:
https://kolektiva.social/@jargoggles/117503729678727400

A newspaper’s job is to inform its readership, not mislead it.

The very idea that everyone who reads a single article on a newspaper’s website “consents” to an 8,865-word privacy policy (that would take 53-67 minutes to read according to Firefox’s “Reader Mode” estimate) is a bad joke:
https://www.latimes.com/privacy-policy

The joke gets even worse when you add in the 7,103-word Terms of Service (estimated read: 41-50 minutes):
https://www.latimes.com/terms-of-service

So what can you do? Well, you can use this uBlock filter that blocks the dickover without setting the LAT’s “consent” cookie to “1”:

latimes.com##+js(trusted-set, window.ctUser, { “loggedIn”: true, “ready”: true, “subStatus”: “1” })

https://infosec.exchange/@deFractal/117505049281552873

If you’re a Californian, you can file a complaint with the California Privacy Protection Agency:
https://cppa.ca.gov/webapplications/complaint

As Don Marti points out, businesses dealing with Californians are legally required to acknowledge and honor the Global Privacy Control signal from your browser:
https://federate.social/@dmarti/117504985464483210

Here’s an ambitious countermove. Buried in that 7,103-word terms of service is this gem: you can opt out of the binding arbitration within 30 days of “agreeing” to it by sending an email to [email protected] with the subject line “MANDATORY ARBITRATION AND CLASS ACTION WAIVER OPT-OUT”. Someone could build a browser mod that automatically sends that email to the company whenever you land on an latimes.com page. You could even include my all-purpose email footer:

By reading this email, 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.

All of this is fun to contemplate, but it’s hardly enough. It should be illegal for a company to knowingly offer unenforceable contracting terms, especially in its non-negotiable, boilerplate contracts. It’s already illegal for California companies to put noncomplete clauses in their contracts. In other words, noncompetes aren’t just unenforceable in California, they’re illegal, and we should extend that prohibition (with sanctions for noncompliant firms and their general counsels) to privacy and arbitration:
https://oag.ca.gov/news/press-releases/attorney-general-bonta-issues-consumer-alert-reminding-california-workers-their

Because the LAT isn’t the only news outlet that’s engaged in this kind of illegal, immoral, conscience-shocking, dickover-delivered enshittification. It’s also SOP at Bloomberg:
https://cdn.bsky.app/img/feed_thumbnail/plain/did:plc:kaagvvv22ki4ccsymevrpfxk/bafkreia4yxewg2chpwgki3ftzq7fnl7s454efx5oev6h6siqlsnenrjpe4

These gambits are infectious, and they’re spreading. Time to bend the curve.

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)

#25yrsago RIAA denies asking for criminal immunity for hacking your computer https://memex.craphound.com/2001/10/26/remember-when-the-riaa-tried/

#20yrsago Big Mac pumpkin https://web.archive.org/web/20061031170037/http://bitsandpieces1.blogspot.com/2006/10/big-mac-pumpkin.html

#20yrsago Going Under: moving kids’ novel https://memex.craphound.com/2006/10/26/going-under-moving-kids-novel/

#20yrsago Accountants patent tax-dodges https://web.archive.org/web/20061029080957/http://www.iht.com/articles/2006/10/19/business/norris20.php

#20yrsago 6-word sf stories https://web.archive.org/web/20061109183215/https://www.wired.com/wired/archive/14.11/sixwords.html

#15yrsago Using machine translation techniques to attack ciphers reveals secrets of ancient German ophthalmology cult https://web.archive.org/web/20111025035607/http://www.isi.edu/natural-language/people/copiale-11.pdf

#15yrsago The Homeland Directive: taut technothriller for the paranoid era https://memex.craphound.com/2011/10/25/the-homeland-directive-taut-technothriller-for-the-paranoid-era/

#15yrsago NewsCorp shareholders revolt against Murdoch family https://www.theguardian.com/media/2013/may/08/rupert-murdoch-news-corporation

#15yrsago One-percenter: why I support Occupy https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2011/10/21/1028500/community/A-Voice-From-the-1/

#15yrsago Debunking the OccupyLondon “empty tents” story https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2011/oct/25/occupy-london-part-time-protest

#15yrsago Machine Man: a discomfiting novel about the antihuman side of transhumanism https://memex.craphound.com/2011/10/26/machine-man-a-discomfiting-novel-about-the-antihuman-side-of-transhumanism/

#15yrsago Goths age gracefully https://www.theguardian.com/education/2011/oct/24/goth-culture-research

#10yrsago Everfair: a diverse, ambitious steampunk novel of Fabian socialists and American Black Zionists in Belgian Congo https://memex.craphound.com/2016/10/26/everfair-a-diverse-ambitious-steampunk-novel-of-fabian-socialists-and-american-black-zionists-in-belgian-congo/

#10yrsago Leaked Kremlin memos reveal plan to destabilize Ukraine https://globalvoices.org/2016/10/25/hackers-publish-kremlin-aides-e-mails-allege-plan-to-destabilize-ukraine/

#10yrsago When the FCC asked about unlocking set-top boxes, the Copyright Office ran to the MPAA https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2016/10/newly-released-documents-show-hollywood-influenced-copyright-offices-comments-set

#10yrsago Pussy Riot’s “Straight Outta Vagina”: sacrelicious Russian feminist pop anthem https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bp-KeVBNz0A

#10yrsago TED talk about remixes and appropriating made by remixing and appropriating TED talks about remixing and appropriating https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qLlbzI5HURM

#10yrsago Warner Bros angry that someone other than the MPAA is running an illegal internal movie server https://torrentfreak.com/warner-bros-claims-agency-ran-its-own-pirate-movie-site-161025/

#10yrsago AT&T developed a “product” for spying on all its customers and made millions selling it to warrantless cops https://web.archive.org/web/20170504105645/https://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2016/10/25/at-t-is-spying-on-americans-for-profit

#10yrsago Lawsuit: mayor’s social media blocklists are public records https://www.techdirt.com/2016/10/24/pinac-director-sues-miami-beach-mayor-over-refusal-to-release-social-media-blocklists/

#10yrsago EFF asks court to let American sue Ethiopia for hacking his computer and rounding up his friends https://www.eff.org/press/releases/american-illegally-wiretapped-home-ethiopian-government-deserves-his-day-court-eff

#10yrsago Donald Trump’s super PAC promised a Chinese millionaire access, influence in exchange for a secret $2 million donation https://web.archive.org/web/20161024192242/https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2016/10/24/exclusive-investigation-donald-trump-faces-foreign-donor-fundrai/

#10yrsago Al Franken and FCC commissioner Clyburn want limits on forced arbitration https://time.com/4541176/al-franken-arbitration-clauses/?iid=sr-link1

#10yrsago Mercedes’ weird “Trolley Problem” announcement continues stupid debate about self-driving cars https://memex.craphound.com/2016/10/25/mercedes-weird-trolley-problem-announcement-continues-dumb-debate-about-self-driving-cars/

#10yrsago When Californians vote on legal weed, they’ll also vote on wiping millions of arrest records https://web.archive.org/web/20161027161505/https://motherboard.vice.com/read/california-to-vote-on-wiping-old-weed-arrests

#10yrsago Dickhead’s anti-yoga-pants letter to the editor sparks yoga-pants-parade https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-37751422

#10yrsago RIP science fiction great Sheri Tepper https://locusmag.com/2016/10/sheri-s-tepper-1929-2016/

#5yrsago The Dems’ most secret Congressional committee https://pluralistic.net/2021/10/25/people-do-stuff/#personnel-are-policy

#5yrsago Maxing out our global credit-card with authoritarian debt https://pluralistic.net/2021/10/26/inequality-and-guard-labor/#just-watch-me

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)

  • “The Post-American Internet,” a geopolitical sequel of sorts to Enshittification, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2027

  • “Unauthorized Bread”: a middle-grades graphic novel adapted from my novella about refugees, toasters and DRM, FirstSecond, April 20, 2027

  • “Enshittification, Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It” (the graphic novel), Firstsecond, 2027

  • “The Memex Method,” Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2027

Colophon (permalink)

Today’s top sources:

Currently writing:

  • “Once Is Enemy Action,” a science fiction novel about the origins of modern technofascism. Today’s words: 547 (29282 total).

  • “The Post-American Internet,” a sequel to “Enshittification,” about the better world the rest of us get to have now that Trump has torched America. Fourth draft completed. Submitted to editor.

  • 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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”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.

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Full article

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Pluralistic pluralistic
6d

Pluralistic: Critique and writing (23 Oct 2026)

By Cory Doctorow

Today’s links

  • Critique and writing: The most important part of a writing workshop is trying to fix other people’s stories.
  • Hey look at this: Delights to delectate.
  • Object permanence: USPS nukes the mail; Enron Explorer; “Scored”; UAE’s international hacker legion; NZ provides hacking tools to torturers; Truecrypt insecure; The Traitorous Eight.
  • Upcoming appearances: Vancouver, Ottawa, Vienna, Kilkenny, Courtenay, Vancouver, Oxford, Sheffield, Virtual, Oxford, Montreal.
  • Recent appearances: Where I’ve been.
  • Latest books: You keep readin’ em, I’ll keep writin’ ‘em.
  • Upcoming books: Like I said, I’ll keep writin’ ‘em.
  • Colophon: All the rest.
A vast field of complicated machinery composed of many-times-overlaid 19th century printing presses. Caught in these gears are several figures who are all writing - a bearded Greek in a loincloth, a severe doge, a grande dame, a lady upon her settee, a recording angel, two drunken clerks at a table, a tormented poet in a wig. Invading the scene is a many-tentacled pulp robot.

Critique and writing (permalink)

Through my own writing life, nothing has done more to improve my writing than diligent participation in peer-based workshops; that’s where a group of writers, all at about the same stage in their artistic development, gather to read one another’s work and offer feedback specifically aimed at improving each other’s stories.

This is a deceptively simple exercise, and the reasons it works so well are quite counter-intuitive. The most obvious benefit is the way that a workshop encourages you to write at all. When you’re at the start of your writing career, you are almost totally reliant upon your own internal self-discipline to keep producing.

Acquiring that self-discipline is infinitely valuable, but it’s also incredibly hard. Being part of a group of writers who expect you to regularly turn in new work adds a very useful bit of external motivation that augments your still nascent self-discipline. Knowing you have to turn in a story for the group by Friday can get you in gear when you feel discouraged or blocked.

Before you’re getting published regularly (or at all), your critiquing circle might be the only source of validation you get for your work, so the knowledge that you’re in for that validation if you get that story in on time is a great motivator. But this is where the counter-intuitive part comes in: as great as it feels to be the center of your peers’ attention and to get close feedback on the work you sweated over, that’s not the real value you get from a writing workshop, at least not at the start of your career.

Your peers’ critiques can help you fix weaknesses in your story, and even teach you a little about how to avoid those weaknesses in future work. You might get feedback that turns an unpublishable story into a published one. But the point of a writing workshop isn’t merely to make your stories better – it’s to make you better at writing stories.

That’s where critiquing other writers’ stories comes in. The process of reading and re-reading someone else’s imperfect work and devoting real mental energy to figuring out what’s not working in it and how to fix it is how you develop the creative instincts that allow you to automatically and unconsciously avoid pitfalls and make breakthroughs in your own work.

Even if none of the feedback you offer is ever incorporated into the story you’re critiquing, the act of preparing and delivering that critique is the most reliable fast-track to becoming a better writer yourself. There’s something very valuable in the combination of thinking critically, being exposed to other workshop members’ ideas about the story under discussion, and working with source material that you can look at with more objectivity because it didn’t come out of your own head.

I bring all this up because I’ve now heard from a few beginning writers who tell me that they’re finding LLMs to be good editorial feedback generators. They value the editorial suggestions they get from a chatbot after they finish their work, and use it to help them with a new draft. Without commenting on whether I think LLM feedback is editorially useful (I certainly wouldn’t ever ask a chatbot for that kind of feedback), I want to point out that when it comes to improving your writing, getting editorial notes on your work is distinctly inferior to offering criticism of other writers’ work.

The reality is that when you’re starting out as a writer, the vast majority of work you produce will be artistically unsalvageable. The much-vaunted “million words of crap” you write on the way to becoming a publishable writer are about learning to marry technique to artistic vision and to sharpen both. Getting editorial feedback that helps you shore up the weakest spots in a story that is ultimately never published and constitutes a learning exercise has value, but it has far less value than applying the things you’ve learned from making and fixing those mistakes to your next story.

With vanishingly few exceptions, a commercially and artistically successful writer isn’t someone who writes one great story or novel: a writing career is defined by a body of work, which means that you have to do more than rewrite. You have to write the next thing, and the next thing, and the next.

Having an editor-on-demand of highly variable (and often dubious) quality might help you improve your writing, but it’s no substitute for participating in a peer workshop. The idea that an LLM might be able to stand in for a workshop is grounded in the fallacy that the point of a workshop is to have people tell you how to fix your story, rather than analyzing other people’s writing in order to develop your own critical skills.

Look: it’s a cliche to say “every writer is different,” but I really believe that every writer is different, and that’s down to the legibility of the writing process to other writers. If you’re a painter or sculptor or other visual artist, you’ve likely spent many hours in a studio with many other practitioners while all of you work from the same life model or still life. If you’re a musician, you’ve almost certainly played music with other musicians. If you’re a dancer, you’ve definitely danced with other dancers.

But writers get precious little exposure to other writers’ process. At best we might look at each other’s drafts. A musician can listen to every note another musician produces while riffing or composing a new work or interpreting a work. Writers don’t get to watch words emerge from each other’s fingertips. Being observed that closely while you write would be ghastly and paralyzingly invasive.

I’ve taught a lot of writers over the years and I’ve had many discussions with my peers about their writing process, and I’m here to tell you that pretty much every writer finds every other writer’s process baffling. We each of us invent an idiosyncratic process for ourselves that will never fully work for anyone else.

So if you value editorial feedback from a chatbot (ideally, a local one running on your computer and not one of the “foundation models” that are torching the planet and elevating the worst people on earth to positions of political, technical and commercial prominence), that’s fine, you do you.

But even if that’s the case, I still want you to know that whatever you’re getting out of the chatbot is fundamentally different, and (I believe) much less useful than participating in a peer workshop.

That’s what I wanted to say today, but I predict that an appreciable number of readers are about to email me to ask how these “peer workshops” work. There’s a ton of variability in how these are conducted, but the basic shape of them is that in advance of each session, one or more writers submits a finished work to the other writers, who then read through the manuscript at least twice, making notes that include both minor copyedits and broader, thematic notes. They may write a brief editorial response as well, ranging from a paragraph to a couple of pages.

Then the workshop convenes. Each writer briefly expresses their views about the story under consideration, focusing on those thematic and structural notes on what worked and didn’t work in the story, with suggestions for improving the latter. You don’t need to point out every typo – they’re noted on the manuscript. Critiquers don’t need to repeat one another. If another workshop member says the thing you were planning to say, you can just say “Ditto what so-and-so said about whatever.” If you have nothing to add when your turn comes about, it’s fine to pass.

Those are pretty much universal characteristics of a peer workshop. Here are some variations that I am dogmatically committed to, but which other workshoppers might disagree with:

  • Every writer should submit regularly to the workshop. There is a serious risk that attending a workshop can become a substitute for actually writing. It is no kindness to your workshopmates to let them stay in the circle if it leads them to stop writing.

  • The subject of each session must not speak during the critiques, except to answer direct questions that are not related to the writing itself (e.g., “I couldn’t figure out what word this was supposed to be – can you clarify?”). The subject can speak after all the other writers have spoken.

  • Each person in the critiquing circle speaks once, in turn, without being interrupted. No cross-talk allowed. It is useful to set a time-limit for critiques.

  • No partial manuscripts. It’s not really possible to critique a story unless you have the complete tale. Novels can be workshopped as three chapters and an outline.

  • Stories should be distributed in advance and read in advance. Don’t have writers read their work aloud for critique, as this can lead to critiquing the delivery rather than the material.

  • Critique the story, not the writer. It’s fine to be offended by something in the story, but not OK to accuse your workshopmates of being bad people for having offended you.

  • Discourage resubmission of revised stories. Workshopping produces sharply diminishing returns. If you really want feedback on a rewrite, approach people individually and ask if they’ll read the new draft.

Any group of three or more writers can start a workshop. You’ll need to locate writers who are at about the same stage in their artistic and professional lives as you, and find a physical place (or a videoconference service) where you can meet. Library meeting rooms are a favorite, and so is rotating between workshop members’ homes. Set a regular schedule – weekly, fortnightly, monthly, possibly quarterly – and stick to it.

If you write genre fiction and you are interested in attending a peer workshop that also has an instructor to guide the sessions, lecture, set exercises, etc, I can recommend the three workshops I’ve taught:

  • Clarion (UC San Diego, six weeks):

https://clarion.ucsd.edu/ (I’m also a 1992 Clarion grad)

  • Clarion West (Seattle, six weeks):

https://www.clarionwest.org/

  • Viable Paradise (Martha’s Vineyard, one week):

https://viableparadise.com/

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)

#25yrsago UK anti-terror laws could bankrupt ISPs https://web.archive.org/web/20011118143634/http://www.vnunet.com/News/1126338

#25yrsago What’s an “iPod?” https://web.archive.org/web/20011024015856/http://www.apple.com/ipod/

#25yrsago Bible, Koran or Mein Kampf? https://web.archive.org/web/20011109123124/http://www.salon.com/people/feature/2001/10/24/book_quiz/index.html

#25yrsago Tongan court jester scam costs king millions https://web.archive.org/web/20011224034152/http://pidp.eastwestcenter.org/pireport/2001/October/10-23-01.htm

#25yrsago USPS irradiating the mail to fight anthrax attacks https://web.archive.org/web/20011109100316/http://www.newscientist.com/news/news.jsp?id=ns99991468

#20yrsago Enron Explorer mines Enron’s emails https://web.archive.org/web/20061106204850/http://enron.trampolinesystems.com/

#20yrsago Investigative journal: “Fair use is not applicable” https://archive.blogs.harvard.edu/shlep/2006/10/23/whaddayaknow-about-fair-use-and-copyright/

#20yrsago Warners stiffs African amputee film extras on prosthetics promise https://web.archive.org/web/20061105004400/http://www.nypost.com/seven/10232006/gossip/pagesix/pagesix.htm

#20yrsago Former FCC Chairman shills against Net Neutrality https://web.archive.org/web/20061028043416/http://www.lessig.org/blog/archives/003577.shtml

#15yrsago Plotting advice for fiction writers http://nielsenhayden.com/makinglight/archives/013243.html

#15yrsago DARPA wants vampire satellites to harvest parts from dead sats prior to decommissioning https://web.archive.org/web/20111022223128/http://www.darpa.mil/NewsEvents/Releases/2011/10/20.aspx

#15yrsago Understanding the hyperrich through the lens of tomorrow’s history http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2011/10/a-cultural-experiment.html

#15yrsago Scored: pulse-pounding/thought-provoking YA novel about surveillance https://memex.craphound.com/2011/10/24/scored-pulse-pounding-thought-provoking-ya-novel-about-surveillance/

#10yrsago UAE surveillance contractor is recruiting an army of foreign hackers to break into its citizens’ devices https://web.archive.org/web/20161024141138/https://theintercept.com/2016/10/24/darkmatter-united-arab-emirates-spies-for-hire/

#10yrsago Publicly-funded NZ company sold mass surveillance tech to torturers and GCHQ https://web.archive.org/web/20161023101410/https://theintercept.com/2016/10/23/endace-mass-surveillance-gchq-governments/

#10yrsago RIP, Tom Hayden: Yippie, radical, politician, author https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-37749127

#10yrsago Audit reveals significant vulnerabilities in Truecrypt and its successors https://www.helpnetsecurity.com/2016/10/18/veracrypt-security-audit/

#5yrsago Cyber-mercenaries helped Saudis hack an NYT reporter https://pluralistic.net/2021/10/24/breaking-the-news/#kingdom

#5yrsago The Traitorous Eight and the Battle of Germanium Valley https://pluralistic.net/2021/10/24/the-traitorous-eight-and-the-battle-of-germanium-valley/

#1yrago Checking in on the state of Amazon’s chickenized reverse-centaurs https://pluralistic.net/2025/10/23/traveling-salesman-solution/#pee-bottles

Upcoming appearances (permalink)

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Recent appearances (permalink)

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Latest books (permalink)

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Upcoming books (permalink)

  • “The Post-American Internet,” a geopolitical sequel of sorts to Enshittification, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2027

  • “Unauthorized Bread”: a middle-grades graphic novel adapted from my novella about refugees, toasters and DRM, FirstSecond, April 20, 2027

  • “Enshittification, Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It” (the graphic novel), Firstsecond, 2027

  • “The Memex Method,” Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2027

Colophon (permalink)

Today’s top sources:

Currently writing:

  • “Once Is Enemy Action,” a science fiction novel about the origins of modern technofascism. Today’s words: 550 (28730 total).

  • “The Post-American Internet,” a sequel to “Enshittification,” about the better world the rest of us get to have now that Trump has torched America. Fourth draft completed. Submitted to editor.

  • A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING

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