Cory Doctorow

Yep. I also read the whole thing, and feels like its a right-libertarian writing this. And feels like high-brow what I see on my local city's Facebook. The other problem is what austerity politics brings. Austerity brings fascism and strongman governments. https://doctorow.medium.com/https-pluralistic-net-2026-04-13-always-gr…

A huge chunk of those trillions come from European and other non-US sources. Capital controls (or triggering the EU anti-coercion legislation), a truly integrated EU capital market and a few failed USD treasury auctions could very rapidly re-direct those flows. If https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/IIPUSNETIQ starts reversing, you'll see a lot of US & EU tech re-pricing (and not in the US's favour). Europe's tech talent is excellent, it's the structural financing disadvantages (and loaded trade agreements, see: https://doctorow.medium.com/https-pluralistic-net-2026-01-01-39c3-the-… that have historically held it back.

Yes, or as Cory Doctorow put it: "So now we have tariffs, and if someone threatens to burn your house down unless you follow orders, and then they burn it down anyway, you really don’t have to keep following their orders." https://doctorow.medium.com/https-pluralistic-net-2025-12-16-k-shaped-…

Cory Doctorow said it best: "Enshittification" https://doctorow.medium.com/https-pluralistic-net-2024-04-04-teach-me-…

I mean … fair point, but Apple and other companies very much did spend immense amounts of money lobbying and scaremongering against right-to-repair legislation, so that’s worth drawing attention to. https://techhq.com/2024/02/apple-right-to-repair-oregon-bill-lobbying-… https://doctorow.medium.com/apple-fucked-us-on-right-to-repair-again-d…

Not for audiobooks sold through Audible, for reasons Cory Doctorow has discussed at length: Today, Audible dominates the audiobook market. In some verticals, their market-share is over 90 percent! And Audible will not let authors or publishers opt out of DRM. If you want to publish an audiobook with Audible, you must let them add their DRM to it. That means that every time one of your readers buys one of your books, they’re locking themselves further into Audible. If you sell a million bucks’ worth of audiobooks on Audible, that’s a million bucks your readers have to forfeit to follow you to a rival platform. <https://doctorow.medium.com/why-none-of-my-books-are-available-on-audi…

For those downvoting this comment, the body of evidence doesn’t look great that this won’t happen at some point in the future. https://www.csoonline.com/article/572811/remote-bricking-of-ukrainian-… https://doctorow.medium.com/about-those-kill-switched-ukrainian-tracto… https://hackaday.com/2023/12/08/the-latest-john-deere-repair-lawsuit-n… And this of course isn’t a John Deere only issue. https://hackaday.com/2023/12/14/polish-train-manufacturer-threatens-ha…

I'm afraid we're already there. https://doctorow.medium.com/oh-great-theres-drm-in-printer-paper-now-d…

I saw that word ("enshittification") in Cory Doctorow's writing: https://doctorow.medium.com/mass-tech-worker-layoffs-and-the-soft-land… ...which also had this amazing summary of what we're seeing now: "The Big Tech firms are locked in a race to see who can eat their seed corn the fastest."

That's great, I also had good experiences with AirBnB early on. This seems to have become a standard practice in VC-backed firms, a process clearly documented here [0] by Cory Doctorow (article covers much more than just the title-mentioned Tiktok). [0] https://doctorow.medium.com/tiktoks-enshittification-bb3f5df91979

This article is not an exclusive (but some on medium are), so here's the canonical non-paywalled version: https://pluralistic.net/2021/10/08/unfollow-everything/#shut-the-zuck-… Cory seems to be up front about the conditions of his various forms of publishing: How to get Pluralistic:[0] 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/web/accounts/303320 Medium (no ads, paywalled): https://doctorow.medium.com/ Twitter (mass-scale, unrestricted, third-party surveillance and advertising): https://twitter.com/doctorow Tumblr (mass-scale, unrestricted, third-party surveillance and advertising): [0] https://pluralistic.net/2021/05/05/clarkes-third-law/

I just read Cory Doctorow's column about quitting tobacco: https://doctorow.medium.com/i-quit-9ae7b6010c99 He notes how big tobacco authored the playbook for all disinformation, that everyone uses right now: "a denialist doesn’t want to convince you that smoking is safe, they just want to convince that it’s impossible to say whether smoking is safe or not." Apple is intentionally making a "not truly shitty, just bad enough" browser to have us all eternally question whether PWAs, web apps and other open web technologies are inferior to apps. It's worth billions to them to do that. And, its awful that they are destroying a sphere where open culture could thrive and blossom while they do that.

I tend to agree. Cory Doctorow has a good essay on how the deck is stacked against people who don't own homes. This doesnt include some of the health effects of loneliness and other issues when people can't live close to their friends/loved ones. https://doctorow.medium.com/the-rents-too-damned-high-1a04a547013a

This reminds me of "Radio Free Europe" and "Radio Liberty", which were basically bankrolled (and likely largely influenced) by the CIA. They wanted to distribute all kinds of programming into USSR that was banned there, same with Solzhenitsyn's books etc. Eventually the USSR fell apart. Now they are treating Europe like they treated USSR. Musk and other big influencers on X have already been calling for the breakup of the EU, after the EU fined X $100M. I bet that was at least some of the reason behind this. The irony is that the Trump admin has been deporting non-citizens for speech, his FCC has been intimidating media like ABC and CBS into firing people or canceling programs and interviews, his DOJ has been telling social networks to fork over the identities of citizens who criticized ICE online, and his CBP will begin demanding that tourists hand over 5 years of their social media history, as well as their biometrics, family's information and whatever else. This is the administration who would lecture Europe about freedom of speech? Didn't they just get through 10 years of telling European countries to be "nationalist" and resist the influence of their own federal government in Brussels -- but I guess we can just ignore their laws and broadcast anything into their countries, tempting them to set up a "great firewall" like China. Well, if freedom of speech means violating other countries' laws, in this case can European governments just start streaming copyrighted…

> if a skilled human has to check everything it does then "AI" becomes worthless Well, perhaps not worthless, but certainly not "a trillion-dollar revolution that will let me fire 90% of my workforce and then execute my Perfect Rich Guy Visionary Ideas without any more pesky back-talk." That said, the "worth" is brings to the shareholders will likely be a downgrade for everybody else, both workers and consumers, because: > The market’s bet on AI is that an AI salesman will visit the CEO of Kaiser and make this pitch: “Look, you fire 9/10s of your radiologists [...] and the remaining radiologists’ job will be to oversee the diagnoses the AI makes at superhuman speed, and somehow remain vigilant as they do so, despite the fact that the AI is usually right, except when it’s catastrophically wrong. > “And if the AI misses a tumor, this will be the human radiologist’s fault, because they are the ‘human in the loop.’ It’s their signature on the diagnosis.” > This is a reverse centaur, and it’s a specific kind of reverse-centaur: it’s what Dan Davies [calls] an “accountability sink.” The radiologist’s job isn’t really to oversee the AI’s work, it’s to take the blame for the AI’s mistakes. -- https://doctorow.medium.com/https-pluralistic-net-2025-12-05-pop-that-…

If I read that right, it's grant writing, patronage and kickstarter. > When authors do get paid, a natural model is patronage. That is the model used by most scientists. Copyright is of no help whatsoever to mathematicians. > “But, Daniel, you are delusional! Not every writer can find a patron.” Am I? I have funded several book projects myself. For example, a lady called Kio Stark got $38,928 from us to write a handbook on alternatives to schooling. > Several authors get funded on kickstarter: > ... > In fact, if you think about it for a minute, whenever you buy a book or a movie, you are being a patron to this project. So all work is the result of patronage. Cory Doctorow makes all his novels available for free from his web site. He happens to be one of the most successful writer of his generation. You can be confident that he is doing well financially. It works for him because people are willing to support him: his paying readers are his patrons. (Note https://wiki.creativecommons.org/wiki/Case_Studies/Cory_Doctorow ) > Cory Doctorow's literary works are released under Creative Commons Atrribution NonCommercial ShareAlike or Attribution NonCommercial NoDerivatives. His latest work, Little Brother, has spent 4 weeks on the NYTimes bestseller list and is released as BY-NC-SA. Consider the question "without copyright, how could he enforce the NonCommercial NoDerivatives clauses? And related:…

This is already deployed. My current employer (at least, my local branch) has some not-mandatory-but-actually-yes-mandatory "training" followed by tests where they do track your eyeball and you are penalised if you look away (they also disallow alt-tabbing, screenshots and many other basic operations). They are losing a lot of people (including me, very soon) and this is one of the main reasons, but I don't think they have any intention to stop, since this shit has probably been decided several levels above the line managers, who are the ones seeing the mess but don't have much decision power about it. I'd like to think that this insanity will be stopped relatively soon, since tech workers are still in high demand, so people mostly don't put up with this shit. For the vast majority of workers, who don't have that luxury, I don't think they will be able to get rid of this kind of software. Related link from two days ago: an article from Cory Doctorow describing workplace surveillance or "Bossware": https://doctorow.medium.com/workplace-surveillance-is-coming-for-you-8…

This seems to be an increasingly likely outcome. But In the aftermath, like the dot com crash, the debt, and assets are distributed in the liquidation. So it's not the death of AI, or even of ChatGPT. Doctorow wrote about this, but with less bombast than Zitron. https://doctorow.medium.com/https-pluralistic-net-2025-09-27-econopoca…

A lot of smart people said that Uber could never become profitable because the core economics couldn't work out: > https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-48227381 > https://www.forbes.com/sites/lensherman/2019/08/22/ubers-dubious-path-… > https://americanaffairsjournal.org/2019/05/ubers-path-of-destruction/ Cory Doctorow, who is close to Ed Zitron and writes a lot in the same way about AI's economics, was of the same opinion: https://doctorow.medium.com/no-ubers-still-not-profitable-2b8054e375ea I used to believe this, so I'm not sure what to think of the AI market.

Yes, and I'd include Cory Doctorow in the list of Canadians paying attention and writing about it. Back to 2024: "Holy CRAP the UN Cybercrime Treaty is a nightmare" https://doctorow.medium.com/https-pluralistic-net-2024-07-23-expanded-…

Good post. I'm trying to decide if this is better or worse than people sending their AI Q&A without anybody asking (as Cory Doctorow wrote about here https://doctorow.medium.com/https-pluralistic-net-2026-03-02-nonconsen…

Darn, I meant to link to https://doctorow.medium.com/https-pluralistic-net-2025-09-11-vulgar-th… which is easier to read because of the typeface.

The reason is copyright law keeping the monopoly going See https://doctorow.medium.com/https-pluralistic-net-2026-01-01-39c3-the-… Quote: ``` Anticircumvention law originates in the USA: Section 1201 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 1998 establishes a felony punishable by a five year prison sentence and a $500,000 fine for a first offense for bypassing an “access control” for a copyrighted work. So practically speaking, if you design a device or service with even the flimsiest of systems to prevent modification of its application code or firmware, it’s a felony — a jailable felony — to modify that code or firmware. It’s also a felony to disclose information about how to bypass that access control, which means that pen-testers who even describe how they access a device or system face criminal liability. ```

Cory Doctorow's "The Reverse-Centaur’s Guide to Criticizing AI" [1] agrees with you: "<...> a reverse centaur is machine head on a human body, a person who is serving as a squishy meat appendage for an uncaring machine." [1] https://doctorow.medium.com/https-pluralistic-net-2025-12-05-pop-that-…

The term of art for this is becoming a "Reverse Centaur:" A “centaur” is a human being who is assisted by a machine (a human head on a strong and tireless body). A reverse centaur is a machine that uses a human being as its assistant (a frail and vulnerable person being puppeteered by an uncaring, relentless machine). https://doctorow.medium.com/https-pluralistic-net-2025-09-11-vulgar-th…

Yup, we've become reverse centaurs :) https://doctorow.medium.com/https-pluralistic-net-2025-09-11-vulgar-th…

Tesla: Data sharing with 3rd parties is a fact they themselves advertise: https://theoffroading.com/does-tesla-sell-driving-data/ Are they being paid for it or is one of the companies amazon? I couldn't find that information, but frankly: if the tech is in place and used, why wouldn't they? GM does so with insurance companies: https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/11/technology/carmakers-driver-trackin… Tesla does have the ability to remotely disable your car: https://theoffroading.com/can-tesla-shut-down-your-car-remotely/ Again: the tech is there and as we already experienced with John Deer machinery will be used when called upon https://doctorow.medium.com/about-those-kill-switched-ukrainian-tracto…

See https://doctorow.medium.com/como-is-infosec-307f87004563 > This is the same failure mode of all security-through-obscurity. Secrecy means that bad guys are privy to defects in systems, while the people who those systems are supposed to defend are in the dark, and can have their defenses weaponized against them.

If only it actually played out that way[0][1][2][3] Whatever legal and theoretical role they play in the economy does not match the actual, real role they are playing: PE firms are by and large, economic vampires. They have a well documented history of sucking the life out of a sector at the expense of workers and consumers alike [0]: https://www.wired.com/story/megan-greenwell-bad-company-private-equity… [1]: https://www.theguardian.com/business/2024/oct/10/slash-and-burn-is-pri… [2]: https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2023/10/private-equity-publi… [3]: https://doctorow.medium.com/the-long-bloody-lineage-of-private-equitys…

There is no false dilemma. You're just arguing for the sake of arguing at this point. "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-re… 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." - https://doctorow.medium.com/https-pluralistic-net-2025-09-01-fulu-i-am…