Pluralistic
pluralistic.net · Personal blog · on HN since 2020
Cory Doctorow's daily blog of links and essays on tech policy, monopoly power, copyright, and what he calls enshittification.
What HN saysCommenters call Doctorow one of the best contemporary authors, concise and relevant, and cite the site as a model for publishing on your own site.
606HN people shared it
299linked it in comments
855stories submitted
20Kstory points
2 months agolast shared
2020people per year2026
Most-shared posts
- 1TikTok's Enshittification83 people · 36 points · first shared 2023 · 2 comments on HN
- 2A post-American, enshittification-resistant internet20 people · 14 points · first shared 2026 · 2 comments on HN
- 3Pluralistic: Daily Links from Cory Doctorow15 people · 3 points · first shared 2020 · discussion on HN
- 4Autoenshittification13 people · 10 points · first shared 2023 · 1 comments on HN
- 5The Reverse-Centaur's Guide to Criticizing AI10 people · 111 points · first shared 2025 · 14 comments on HN
- 6Bluesky and Enshittification10 people · 81 points · first shared 2024 · 14 comments on HN
- 7My McLuhan Lecture on Enshittification10 people · 40 points · first shared 2024 · 2 comments on HN
- 8The (economic) AI apocalypse is nigh8 people · 212 points · first shared 2025 · 188 comments on HN
- 9If buying isn't owning, piracy isn't stealing8 people · 32 points · first shared 2023 · 5 comments on HN
- 10I [Cory Doctorow] Got Scammed7 people · 151 points · first shared 2024 · 18 comments on HN
- 11Disenshittify or Die7 people · 81 points · first shared 2024 · 12 comments on HN
- 12It's not a crime if we do it with an app6 people · 875 points · first shared 2025 · 609 comments on HN
- 13Workplace surveillance is coming for you6 people · 503 points · first shared 2022 · 184 comments on HN
- 14Cory Doctorow on Kagi Search6 people · 212 points · first shared 2024 · 125 comments on HN
- 15Uber's Still Not Profitable6 people · 175 points · first shared 2022 · 101 comments on HN
What HN people wrote when they linked it
Voultapher · 2025-05-28
Cory Doctorow is one of the best contemporary authors that I know, nearly everything he writes is concise, poignant and relevant and he writes new articles nearly every day. You can find his writing here [1]. One of his most memorable articles for me is about remote attestation and the context in lives in [2], absolutely worth a read.
[1] https://pluralistic.net
[2] https://pluralistic.net/2023/07/24/rent-to-pwn/
dredmorbius · 2022-08-31
I'd strongly recommend the POSSE model (post on your own site, syndicate everywhere), with Cory Doctorow's Pluralistic as an excellent examplar: posted to https://pluralistic.net, syndicated to Twitter, Mastodon, & elsewhere, frequently hitting HN as well (through independent submissions).
https://indieweb.org/POSSE
Insimwytim · 2026-08-09
Billionaires love it when you try to vote with your wallet, because while billionaires only represent 0.00004% of the population, their wallets are 100,000 times larger than average. [1]
[1] https://pluralistic.net/2026/05/21/purity-culture/
jauntywundrkind · 2026-07-17
Cory Doctorow had a great write up two weeks ago, Zuckerberg's increasingly bizarre war on whistleblowers
https://pluralistic.net/2026/06/27/zuckerstreisand-2/#autodisparagemen…
His end thesis is that even though Meta knows of the Streisand effect, even though they full on expect to lose, badly, and look like bullies chuds and losers, with no real defense, they are doing it to keep everyone else who works or worked at Meta on line, to engage in gratuitous overkill as a message. Sounds about right!
He also had a very excellent piece on pro-Monopolists like Thiel, which just feels so close a breed of absolute deranged fucking madness. Excellent read. Realest of real problems. Deranged billionaires and their syndromes, https://pluralistic.net/2026/07/16/lucky-orifices/
Terr_ · 2026-06-08
Follow-up/P.S.: There's a Doctorow piece [0] which I think is relevant here. It's about how individual refusal (e.g. to quit your job at an employer when they require an authenticator-app) is an inferior substitute for "real" politics on both a practical and emotional level.
> It's obvious why we might prefer to substitute voting or shopping for politics: they're activities you do alone. You don't have to find anyone else to do them with you. [...] Individual consumption choices don't change the world, but if you've been convinced that the only way to change the world is by voting with your wallet then when the world stays terrible, you can only conclude that your friends and neighbors have ruined by things by voting (shopping) wrong. [... and] every political disappointment in your life is down to your friends' personal defects.
[0] https://pluralistic.net/2026/05/21/purity-culture/
palata · 2026-03-16
That's exactly what "enshittification" [1] describes. I strongly recommend Doctorow's book "Enshittification: Why everything suddenly got worse and what to do about it" [2].
A shorter introduction would be his recent talk at 39C3: https://pluralistic.net/2026/01/01/39c3/.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enshittification
[2]: https://shop.craphound.com/
chias · 2026-02-04
Data centers in space make perfect sense, in exactly the same way as a jetpack made perfect sense. It is an excellent vehicle to ride out some juicy government contracts for as long as you can keep the grift going.
https://pluralistic.net/2024/05/17/fake-it-until-you-dont-make-it/#twe…
simonw · 2026-01-19
Corporations love copyright. I don't see why "supports broad copyright violations" and "go fully corporate" fit together here.
Corey Doctorow wrote about that recently: https://pluralistic.net/2025/12/05/pop-that-bubble/#u-washington
He's not a generative AI fan at all, but he argues that if artists think tightening up copyright law to make it harder to train models is a good idea they're going to find themselves strengthening the very corporate overlords that they've been trying to escape.
cratermoon · 2026-01-18
"If the problem were primarily mechanical—too much typing, too complex syntax, too many steps—we would have solved it by now"
And yet we see management and the AI boosters still talk about productivity in terms of lines of code written,
or proxies for that metric, likes number of features shipped.
We definitely have solved the mechanical problem,
and we did so decades ago when wizards
and IDEs able to auto-generate boilerplate stubs came along.
Still we see the process discussed and boosted in terms of sheer quantity of "stuff",
even as we are drowning in accidental complexity and tech debt.
Adding yet more code generated by a synthetic text extruder is not solving any problem of consequence,
but is in fact making things worse. "AI is the asbestos we're shoveling into the walls of our high-tech society" https://pluralistic.net/2026/01/06/1000x-liability/#graceful-failure-m…
degamad · 2025-12-08
What you are describing the best-case scenario. They happen.
What also happens is, they take operating businesses with reasonable returns, buy up all it's supply chain or it's competitors to reduce costs or enable monopoly pricing, then load the company up with debt, squeezing it into a terrible company. That is the bad scenario which people object to.
An example: https://pluralistic.net/2024/02/28/5000-bats/#charnel-house
_wire_ · 2025-11-26
> But real gold has been fully digitized. It's easy to buy and hold gold without ever taking physical custody of it.
(...point by point gets sillier, until...)
> Right now, the "smart money" knows that the best available "digital gold" is actually the real thing --- bullion.
--
Impressively obtuse and confused reasoning! A case study for Brandolini's Law and Hegelian mental gymnastics.
--
The commenter omitted the final point, so here's Doctorow last week on "Boss preppers":
https://pluralistic.net/2025/11/22/eschatology-watch/#guillotine-watch
"The modern goldbug is a crypto weirdo, and that a weird thing to be a prepper about. It will be a very odd apocalypse that takes down all of modern civilization except for blockchains."
topaz0 · 2025-11-06
If you're interested in the specific thing that other people mean by that word, the original Cory Doctorow essay that coined it is well worth a read: https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/21/potemkin-ai/
Of course he followed it up with a book, so there's that as well if you want a deeper dive, but the essay is fairly comprehensive at least in laying out what he intends by the term.
m463 · 2025-09-08
Cory Doctorow points out a lot of things: https://pluralistic.net/
But I don't think mainstream journalism points out computer nonsense because they're so intertwined with it all.
I mean, "we have a surveillance state" first points to "advertising" which is their revenue stream.
nobody9999 · 2025-05-12
>People may hate google, but by god do they ever love the internet google created.
Actually, we don't. Google is a prime culprit in the 'enshittification' of the Internet. As Cory Doctorow can explain[0] to you.
[0] https://pluralistic.net/2025/05/08/who-broke-the-internet/#bruce-lehma…
margalabargala · 2025-03-29
All scams are not created equal.
Here's an article by Cory Doctorow, a great example of an intelligent, tech-savvy person, detailing how he got scammed.
https://pluralistic.net/2024/02/05/cyber-dunning-kruger/#swiss-cheese-…
orr94 · 2025-03-27
"AIs want the future to be like the past, and AIs make the future like the past. If the training data is full of human bias, then the predictions will also be full of human bias, and then the outcomes will be full of human bias, and when those outcomes are copraphagically fed back into the training data, you get new, highly concentrated human/machine bias.”
https://pluralistic.net/2025/03/18/asbestos-in-the-walls/#government-b…
halosghost · 2025-03-22
I am afraid your “human in the loop” isn't [0].
You acknowledge the problem of AI slop up-front, but seem to have chosen to plow forward anyway. Please do consider your actions and their effects carefully [1]. You are in a position of potential influence; try not to squander it.
All the best,
-HG
[0]: https://pluralistic.net/2024/10/30/a-neck-in-a-noose/
[1]: https://web.cs.ucdavis.edu/~rogaway/papers/radical.pdf
fsflover · 2025-03-06
> There is nothing stopping open-source software from pushing malicious updates.
Two things stop it: (much simplified) oversight by the community and a possibility to fix the code.
> You are criticising Apple for something they haven’t done and had no plans to do.
The do participate in the enshittification (https://pluralistic.net/2025/02/26/ursula-franklin/ and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43243075), so my only expectation is that they won't do what's best for the users. In addition, they removed many features requested by the users like the headphone jack.
In general, the less you trust in a company, the better. Free software allows to decrease the trust in the vendor by watching the code and forking whenever you have to.
baggachipz · 2025-01-02
I'll refer to Cory Doctorow's excellently-written takedown[1] of this idea. Bluesky has plans to make it technically shit-proof, but haven't executed those plans "yet". Until that's the case, they're just as susceptible as any other content platform. After all, they haven't even revealed how they will make a profit yet. And they will have to do that. Profit motive always wins, exponentially so when something is venture-backed. To quote Public Enemy: "can't truss it"
[1]https://pluralistic.net/2024/12/14/fire-exits/#graceful-failure-modes
Hackbraten · 2024-11-27
Required reading for everyone considering a human-in-the-loop system:
https://pluralistic.net/2024/10/30/a-neck-in-a-noose/#is-also-a-human-…
I wish OP the best of luck with their product. I still think that the points Doctorow has made are important to know and consider beforehand.
chx · 2024-08-17
Let me generalize this thread because it was archetypical.
#1: Much used, leading service went down the enshittification route. If we did this extremely convoluted geeky hack everything would be back to normal (it wouldn't).
#2: Let's use another service.
#3 and on: yes, here are other services which no one aside from statistical error uses.
Sigh.
Remember when people suggested to use Lemmy instead of Reddit?
You might ask, what's the point of this comment. Well, it's to get people to read https://pluralistic.net/ more and for the geeks to start unionizing before it's too late (it already is).
rapjr9 · 2024-08-16
This can work both ways, ordinary people can add EULA's to their web presence. See Cory Doctorow's version:
https://pluralistic.net/
READ CAREFULLY By reading this website, 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.
This would negate Disney's claim if anyone at Disney ever happened to read the page it seems. I claim the above agreement applies to this post.
crabmusket · 2024-06-24
It feels like browsers over the decades have moved away from catering to power users.
Is something like Arc moving back? Without having used it (I plan to at some point), I've heard that at least its tab management seems catered towards "professional browser users".
I like the way Cory Doctorow puts it in this piece:
> A web browser that's a "user agent" is a comforting thought. An agent's job is to serve you and your interests. When you tell it to fetch a web-page, your agent should figure out how to get that page, make sense of the code that's embedded in it, and render the page in a way that represents its best guess of how you'd like the page seen.
https://pluralistic.net/2024/05/07/treacherous-computing/#rewilding-th…
1attice · 2024-05-03
Because you can't boil a frog by starting at 100°C.
You introduce the surveillance as a way of mitigating extreme, rare occurrences, like terrorism.
You gradually make it common to use when solving major crimes, like murders.
Only then do you start tracking down traffic infractions.
Doctorow calls this the 'Shitty Technology Adoption Curve' https://pluralistic.net/2022/08/21/great-taylors-ghost/
Karellen · 2024-03-19
It's a reverse centaur:
> AI researchers talk about "centaurs" – machine-human collaborative teams that outperform either computers or people. The greatest chess players in the world are collaborations between chess-masters and chess software.
> But not all centaurs are created equal. A "reverse centaur" is what happens when a human is made to assist a machine, rather than the other way around.
https://pluralistic.net/2021/03/19/the-shakedown/#weird-flex
selcuka · 2023-11-25
That's my point. They have to continuously invest in content to keep you as a subscriber. They can't simply enshittify [1] their service and expect customers to stay, unlike, say, a social media platform.
[1] https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/21/potemkin-ai/
hiidrew · 2023-09-14
Other Reddit enshittification is their pushiness to use the mobile app. Great UX case study here, this guy makes them very entertaining - https://builtformars.com/case-studies/reddit
Also related, Cory Doctorow's essay on this where he labeled it 'enshittification' - https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/21/potemkin-ai/#hey-guys
virtuous_sloth · 2023-09-12
The fiscal-progressive nature of the New Deal earlier in the century was so successful it created the middle class in the post-war era (90% marginal tax rates!) and it was being followed up by a socially-progressive era of the civil rights movement in the 60s and the powers that be had to make a concerted effort to derail both.
The takeover of the political dialog by economism using the Freshwater/Chicago school of economics started in earnest around this time and was so remarkably successful that Democratic presidents were spouting the neo-liberal conservatism[0] hogwash by the time of Clinton.
I am a member of the Cory Doctorow school[1] of political thought.
[0] https://crookedtimber.org/2018/03/21/liberals-against-progressives/#co…
[1] https://pluralistic.net/tag/political-science/
kmeisthax · 2023-09-05
You're right that the US is very proud of their trigger and muzzle discipline. Or at least half of it. The other half points loaded guns with the safeties off directly at their own crotches to own the libs[0].
Going a layer deeper, Americans really, really love to abuse the shit out of customer service workers. To put it extremely charitably, we're used to being fucked by corpos so we pre-emptively fuck them back in the dumbest way possible. Less charitably, our country has a bunch of bullies that want to shout at anything they can bully. I don't think they'd actually pull the trigger, but, y'know, law of large numbers, times small but non-zero probability of homicide by virtue a gun being present on the scene equals probably at least one murdered cable tech.
[0] https://pluralistic.net/2020/05/28/holographic-nano-layer-catalyser/#m…
laughingman2 · 2023-08-17
Ways of Being: Animals, Plants, Machines: The Search for a Planetary Intelligence
by James Bridle. James pulls an brilliant move of using various examples in technology as a tool to help us rethink our place in nature & reconnect with the (beyond human) world.
He weaves a fascinating tale with myriads of threads such as Cybernetics, Neural Nets, Internet, Random Numbers, Analog computers, Slime molds, Sortition vs Voting, Mycelium, Mysticism in animals, Turing machines, Personhood of non-humans etc.
A nice summary to whet your appetite, https://pluralistic.net/2022/06/07/more-than-human/#umwelt