->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->-> Top Sources: None -->

Today's links

• America cannot undo Trumpism: The only way out is through.
• Hey look at this: Delights to delectate.
• Object permanence: Bruces x Pokemon; Rich countries and WIPO conspire to kill developement agenda; Wired photos go CC; "Mortality Bridge"; Drones over Disney; CBC v podcast apps; Realtor x election eschatology; Right-clicker mentality; "Victories Greater Than Death"; Facebook's fraud files; Zune v Universal; Ben and Jerry's x OWS; Nudging is bunk; History of Chinese sf; How Audi cheated; Trump runs the surveillance state; Stockholm v interop.
• Upcoming appearances: Courtenay, Vancouver, Folkestone, Oxford, Sheffield, Virtual, Oxford, Santa Barbara, 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.

America cannot undo Trumpism (permalink)

True Carneyism has never been tried. When Canadian PM Mark Carney traveled to Davos to declare a "rupture" in the old order (and admit that this old order was never that great to begin with) he told us that there was no going back from Trumpism. The only way out of Trumpism was through:

https://www.weforum.org/stories/forum-institutional/davos-2026-special-address-by-mark-carney-prime-minister-of-canada/

This is easy to say, but hard to do. If the old order is over, then we will never again be able to trust America to serve as the world's cop, banker, ISP, IT department and consumer of first resort.

We can't trust Americans to buy the things we make:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/12/16/k-shaped-recovery/#disenshittification-nations

We can't trust them not to interfere with the interconnections between fiber lines that slither out of the oceans and onto the US landmass:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/11/26/difficult-multipolarism/#eurostack

We can't trust them not to weaponize the US dollar to undermine sovereign nations' legitimate activities:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/01/26/i-dont-want/#your-greenback-dollar

And we absolutely can't trust them not to spy on, steal from, and shut down governments, firms and households around the world by cutting off access to US software and cloud services, and by bricking the world's devices, from tractors to smartphones:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/01/01/39c3/#the-new-coalition

Despite Carney's assertion that this rupture represents a welcome (if too cruel, sudden and painful) departure of the old (never very good) system, no one (not even Carney) is acting like the world has truly changed. Take Carney's answer to the Trump tariffs: retaliatory tariffs. Tariffs have a place in sheltering a nascent domestic industry from better-developed, deeper-pocketed foreign competitors, so a tariff wall between Canada and the US could make sense, if it was paired with the massive domestic investment we'd need to rebuild the manufacturing industry that Brian Mulroney sold out with the Canada-US Free Trade Agreement (and later NAFTA).

But Carney is no Carneyist. When it comes to massive domestic spending, Carney is a bog-standard, austerity-addled Reaganomics guy; a central banker and technocrat whose idea of "industrial policy" is firing tens of thousands of skilled civil servants who thwart his agenda and replacing them with defective (but obedient) chatbots running on US hardware:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/05/13/vibe-governance/#k-hole

Carney's retaliatory tariffs aren't what you'd do if the old order had "ruptured." They're what you'd do if you hoped that your American cousins would come to their senses, evict their mad king from the White House, tear down the Epstein Memorial Ballroom, and roll back the clock to 2016. Like a lot of liberals, Carney just wants to go back to brunch.

But as any true Carneyist knows, brunch is canceled forever. Brunch ruptured. There's no going back to the old America, and there's no going back to the old American order that had dominated the world since the end of WWII. As November Kelly says, "Trump inherited a poker game rigged in his favor, but he flipped the table over anyway because he resented having to pretend to play."

This is something we're all struggling with, including Americans. The Republicans' midterm wipeout has corporate Democrats hoping that after a few years' tinkering, they can elect a Newsomdroid or give Harris a do-over and win back the trust and reliance of the world and the American people. Even for a true Carneyist who never liked the old order very much (like me), this is a comforting prospect. No one knows what the next world will look like, and no matter how screwed up the old world was, I knew how it worked and how to make it work for me (more or less).

But there is no going back. Trump I didn't have a plan, it only had Trump, whose One Big Idea was issuing Executive Orders. Many of these were meaningless bloviating. Some were illegal and were swiftly suspended or never went into effect. Biden overturned nearly all the remaining EOs (that were both substantive and not totally illegal).

But Trump II had Project 2025. The point of Project 2025 and the ambition of the wreckers who wrote it was to push America through a series of one-way transformations that cannot be undone, and that's what's happened, over two short years. That's the bad news. The good news is that it's much easier to destroy than to build, so Project 2025 hasn't led to the creation of permanent, load-bearing fascist institutions that cannot be shuttered without bringing down large parts of the USA.

Start with values. Trumpism is a denial of democracy and the rule of law. Tens of millions of Americans have been marinated in a belief system that says that the way to win power is to claim all the elections you lose are rigged and that these "stolen elections" are best addressed by staging a coup. These people are in a cult that embraces its leader's naked corruption. They're in a cult whose doctrine treats political triumph of as divine direction to embark on looting sprees. It's a cult whose members mutilate their faces so that they can't ever leave, and the reward for this permanent disfigurement is endless influence-peddling:

https://thehill.com/homenews/administration/6136101-ambassador-guilfoyle-wire-request/

Even without ritual scarification to mark them out forever, millions of these people will never come back from this cult indoctrination. They will forever be democracy's enemies, treating the idea of laws, rules and honest service as shucks for the rubes. What's more, these people's neighbors, family members and co-workers will never be able to fully trust them.

Unfortunately, those values aren't just diffused through the population: they are concentrated in the organs of state. DOGE and Federalist Society judicial appointments have created a stay-behind cadre of life-tenured fascists who now dominate America's federal judiciary and permanent civil service, including and especially the nation's law enforcement and national security agencies, from the FBI to the FDA, the NSA to the Bureau of Prisons.

Worse: DOGE also chased away hundreds of thousands of skilled, principled public servants. Those people have retired, retrained, emigrated or exited the workforce. They can't simply be re-hired and restored to their old roles. From finance regulation to the national education system, America has lobotomized itself, swapping people who understand how things work and use that understanding to enforce the laws and safeguard the American people for end-times fascists, caliper-wielding eugenicists, and Ayn Rand LARPers.

Much of the work DOGE's victims did is also gone forever. When DOGE's muskrats killed long-running NIH research projects, they pulled the plug on studies, some of which had run for decades. Many of these experiments are unsalvageable. DOGE didn't just throw away the contributions that cancer patients, people with genetic disorders and other volunteer research subjects gave to science: in halting these research projects, DOGE shredded this selfless sacrifice. Why not? When one NIH official begged his DOGE invaders not to kill long-running, valuable cancer research, the DOGE child laughed and said it didn't matter, because AI was going to cure cancer.

Then there's the NIH's research partners: the elite institutions who buckled so quickly in the face of Trump's antisemitism/DEI witch-hunts. These universities now face the same crisis as the DOGE-gutted civil service, with their best and brightest gone, grad students chased back to their home countries, and the trust of their students and faculty permanently squandered.

It's not just grad students who got chased out of America. Immigrants – documented and undocumented alike – have been terrorized for two years and many of them have fled. ICE got what it wanted: they robbed aging, stagnant America of the dynamism, aspiration and youthful vigor of the most ambitious people from every corner of the globe, people who proved their resourcefulness and bravery by making dangerous crossings. Then they navigated the US immigration system's impenetrable bureaucracy, often working without legal representation, in a language they were just learning, and still managing to clear every bureaucratic hurdle. This alone is a breathtaking demonstration of intelligence, resourcefulness and diligence. Those brilliant, hardworking people aren't coming back: some other country will get the benefit of their life's work and care. Their children will become citizens of other nations.

Now think of the hundreds of billions of dollars that have been transferred from ordinary working people who are still here, to America's oligarchs. Trump's tax cuts, corrupt policy subsidies and no-bid pork contracts have supercharged the wealth (and thus the power) of America's most corrupt elite. It will be the work of a generation to tax away their stolen loot, and much of it may never be recovered. These people will spend that time working to transform their wealth into permanent power, buying and installing politicians at every level of office.

Trumpland is a coalition of wreckers of every kind. Think of how MAHA undermined the nation's herd immunity to a host of communicable diseases, many of which can result in permanent disability. Long after MAHA is forgotten even as a punchline, the people whose health they destroyed forever will still be struggling. After a century of painstaking work to corral measles and other killer diseases, MAHA immunocompromised America itself, in just two short years. Any attempt to bring back evidence-based preventative medicine must now overcome the deep mistrust of medical science that an army of supplement-peddling quacks has sunk deep into Americans' psyche.

Speaking of mistrust: Americans must now and forever live with the knowledge that tens of thousands of their neighbors joined ICE, an armed, masked kidnapping squad that occupied US cities, murdering US citizens and noncitizens alike in the streets with impunity. Even if we try and imprison every one of those war criminals, it will take years and will shatter families and communities.

ICE proved that America is awash in small arms, but it's a different story when it comes to significant warfighting materiel. Trump's Iranian disaster used up the largest part of Pax Americana's arsenal of missiles and anti-missile interceptors. Putin doesn't need to convince Trump to cut off Ukraine's access to America's long-range arsenal. Trump shot his wad, and re-arming America is the work of decades, and it will cost billions, and it will require access to things America no longer knows how to make. Worse: the places where they do know how to make those things are no longer America's allies.

Can they be America's allies again? Well, sure, but only in a limited, Carneyist, "minilateral" way, in which countries form temporary alliances to accomplish specific goals. Biden spoke of "friendshoring" production of key goods and services. Friendshoring implies a reliable form of friendship, the sort that is built on decades of trust and interdependence. Friendshoring only works if the friends you friendshore to can be relied upon to stay your friends. Do we really think that if Venezuela deposes the puppet regime Trump installed after kidnapping the country's leader that it will remain America's "friend?"

That's the problem with weaponized interdependence: it only works for so long as the country America is screwing remains dependent on America, and now every country in the world is moving heaven and earth to break their dependencies on America, its institutions and products:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/10/10/weaponized-interdependence/#the-other-swifties

As Nate Bethea says on this week's Trashfuture podcast, airports outside of the USA are now filled with large, splashy ads urging businesses to move their IT out of America's cloud and off of American apps:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/10/10/weaponized-interdependence/#the-other-swifties

After Microsoft obliged the Trump regime by taking away the online accounts of foreign officials who made Trump angry, will any other country ever voluntarily trust them with their industrial capacity, let alone their government?

https://www.forbes.com/sites/emmawoollacott/2025/07/22/microsoft-cant-keep-eu-data-safe-from-us-authorities/

I'm not saying America is a write-off: I'm saying that it has been sabotaged down to the foundation slab and structural members by a psychotic cadre of skilled arsonists, who were abetted by mad bombers who drove themselves even crazier by racking up life-altering debts in rigged "prediction markets" that serve as a vehicle for bankrupting yourself by wishcasting away your life's savings by betting on every aspect of a Permanent Chud Reich, as corrupt officials make out like bandits by trading on insider information.

When America comes back (if America comes back), it will not be as the organizing platform for the world's finance, military, technology and commerce. In years or perhaps decades, America may find a new stable place in the international community. But in the meantime, it cannot be relied upon to serve as the world's hyperpower. Trump forever disqualified America from enjoying that privileged place – and just to be sure, he destroyed its capacity to even try.

Hey look at this (permalink)

• GROTESQUE TABLES II FIRST EDITION https://www.paperposts.me/oblique-strategies/

• The New York Times Doesn’t Understand AI’s Role in Suppressing Wages https://gizmodo.com/the-new-york-times-doesnt-understand-ais-role-in-suppressing-wages-2000836392

• Into the Blueniverse https://catvalente.substack.com/p/into-the-blueniverse

• Scamwich: Inside a Restaurant Delivery Payment-Skimming Campaign https://www.infohawk.com/news/2026-11-05-scamwich-restaurant-skimming

• Customer or product? https://customerorproduct.org/

Object permanence (permalink)

#25yrsago Open wifi saves traveler from hotel dial-up gouging https://memex.craphound.com/2001/11/09/i-just-wanna-say-that/

#25yrsago Why Cryptosystems Fail https://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/archive/rja14/wcf.html

#25yrsago Bruce Sterling on Pokemon https://web.archive.org/web/20050908070521/https://www.wired.com/news/audio/interviews/sterling_11.mp3

#20yrsago Fred von Lohmann’s talk at USC https://web.archive.org/web/20061110090032/https://centeronpublicdiplomacy.com/podcasts/061107_von_lohmann.mp3

#20yrsago Secret WIPO memo: rich countries to kill Broadcast Treaty, Development Agenda https://www.ip-watch.org/2006/11/07/developed-country-strategy-on-wipo-development-agenda-governance-revealed/?res=1024_ff&print=0

#20yrsago Canadian copyright czar forced to turn away industry bribes https://web.archive.org/web/20101018194506/http://www.michaelgeist.ca/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=1521&Itemid=125

#20yrsago Copyright explained through a wild west metaphor http://www.greglondon.com/bountyhunters/

#20yrsago Why Zune shouldn’t pay blood money to Universal https://cdm.link/universal-microsoft-screw-over-artists-set-absurd-and-dangerous-precedent-with-zune/#more-1719

#15yrsago New Fed warrantless GPS trackers discovered in the wild https://web.archive.org/web/20111110191030/https://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2011/11/gps-tracker-times-two/all/1

#15yrsago Occupy Atlanta encamps on lawn of house under foreclosure threat https://web.archive.org/web/20111109225513/https://thinkprogress.org/special/2011/11/08/363692/occupy-atlanta-encamps-in-neighborhood-to-save-police-officers-home-from-foreclosure/

#15yrsago Ben from Ben and Jerry’s serves ice-cream to Occupiers https://www.fastcompany.com/1678825/the-ice-cream-man-of-zuccotti-park-ben-cohen-on-his-work-with-occupy-wall-street

#15yrsago Identity theft marketplace sells mothers’ maiden names, dates of birth, etc https://krebsonsecurity.com/2011/11/how-much-is-your-identity-worth/

#15yrsago Policy-by-nudging unsupported by evidence, and undemocratic https://web.archive.org/web/20111112154542/https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg21228376.500-nudge-policies-are-another-name-for-coercion.html

#15yrsago Wired.com photo policy: all staff-produced photos will now be Creative Commons licensed https://web.archive.org/web/20111111051330/https://www.wired.com/rawfile/2011/11/creative-commons/?pid=1365&pageid=6275

#15yrsago “Piracy-stricken” Viacom CEO tops pay-raise charts https://www.techdirt.com/2011/11/07/viacom-decimated-piracy-its-ceo-got-biggest-raise-any-exec-anywhere/

#15yrsago Boyett’s Mortality Bridge: Rock n’ roll Dante meets Orpheus https://memex.craphound.com/2011/11/08/boyetts-mortality-bridge-rock-n-roll-dante-meets-orpheus/

#10yrsago FAA okays use of semi-autonomous drones for Disneyland and Disney World fireworks displays https://web.archive.org/web/20161110065859/http://thedisneyblog.com/2016/11/07/disney-drones/

#10yrsago Glenn Beck’s “decency” doesn’t extend to answering questions about why he was such an asshole https://wnyc.org/story/beck-changed-man

#10yrsago CBC threatens podcast app makers, argues that RSS readers violate copyright https://www.reddit.com/r/podcasts/comments/5bmzuj/cbc_are_blocking_podcast_apps/

#10yrsago Winter Denial of Service attack knocks out heating in Finnish homes https://web.archive.org/web/20161109214609/https://metropolitan.fi/entry/ddos-attack-halts-heating-in-finland-amidst-winter

#10yrsago Women are flocking to Susan B Anthony’s grave to cover it with “I Voted” stickers https://www.thecut.com/2016/11/susan-b-anthonys-grave-will-be-open-until-the-polls-close.html

#10yrsago Edward Snowden to Trump campaign: “old laptops” could vet 800,000 emails in “minutes-to-hours” https://web.archive.org/web/20161107235120/https://www.yahoo.com/news/edward-snowden-crushes-conspiracy-theory-053349259.html

#10yrsago My neighborhood realtor is determined to turn a buck on electoral eschatology https://memex.craphound.com/2016/11/08/my-neighborhood-realtor-is-determined-to-turn-a-buck-on-electoral-eschatology/

#10yrsago A history of Chinese science fiction, from 475 BC to Cixin Liu https://web.archive.org/web/20161105172922/http://mithilareview.com/wang_11_16/

#10yrsago How Audi cheated emissions tests: if (steering) then (pollute) https://www.jalopnik.com/america-figured-out-a-new-way-audi-cheated-on-emissions-1788630969/

#10yrsago Senate investigates Wells Fargo retaliations against whistleblowers https://web.archive.org/web/20161108210544/http://www.warren.senate.gov/files/documents/2016-11-03_Wells_Fargo_FINRA_Violations_Letter_Final.pdf

#10yrsago A madman has been given the keys to the surveillance state https://memex.craphound.com/2016/11/09/a-madman-has-been-given-the-keys-to-the-surveillance-state/

#5yrsago Stockholm's war on interoperability https://pluralistic.net/2021/11/09/skrota-skolplattformen/#privacy-without-monopoly

#5yrsago Right-Clicker-Mentality https://pluralistic.net/2021/11/08/tina-v-tapas/#spoilsports-r-us

#5yrsago Charlie Jane Anders' Victories Greater Than Death https://pluralistic.net/2021/11/08/tina-v-tapas/#the-chosen-ones

#5yrsago Imagining the end of capitalism https://pluralistic.net/2021/11/08/tina-v-tapas/#its-pronounced-tape-ass

#1yrago Facebook's fraud files https://pluralistic.net/2025/11/08/faecebook/#too-big-to-care

Upcoming appearances (permalink)

• Courtenay: Enshittification (Sid Williams Theatre Society), Nov 10
  https://www.sidwilliamstheatre.com/events/cory-doctorow-talks-enshittification/

• Vancouver: BC Policy Solutions Gala, Nov 12
  https://bcpolicy.ca/gala/

• Folkestone Writers Festival, Nov 16
  https://www.creativefolkestone.org.uk/whats-on/cory-doctorow-the-internet-is-broken-now-what/

• Oxford: Ministry of the Future, Nov 23
  https://ministryforthefuture.co.uk/events.html

• Sheffield: Reverse Centaur at Juno Books, Nov 25
  https://www.outsavvy.com/event/40274/cory-doctorow-in-conversation

• Virtual: Enshittification, AI, and the Future of Technology (UBC Master of Educational Technology), Nov 28
  https://met.ubc.ca/2026/09/met-speaker-series-cory-doctorow-enshittification-ai-and-the-future-of-technology/

• Oxford: Bennett Oxford Symposium on Open Code in Science, Dec 9
  https://www.bennett.ox.ac.uk/events/2026-bennett-institute-symposium/

• Santa Barbara: UCSB Reads, Apr 29
  https://www.library.ucsb.edu/events-exhibitions/ucsb-reads-2027-presents-author-cory-doctorow

• Montreal: World Science Fiction Convention, Sep 2-6
  https://montreal2027.ca/en

Recent appearances (permalink)

• Clint Eastwood (No Gods No Mayors)
  https://www.patreon.com/NoGodsNoMayors/posts/clint-eastwood-173008088

• Life After AI (Brain Bar)
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IPPa43-n0vI

• Terms of Service with Clare Duffy (CNN)
  https://www.cnn.com/audio/podcasts/terms-of-service-with-clare-duffy/episodes/458ce968-af5d-11f0-b539-13ed2afe25f8

• AI, Work, and Power (Software Engineering Daily)
  AI, Work, and Power https://softwareengineeringdaily.com/podcasts/cory-doctorow-on-ai-work-and-power/

• AI, Corporate Power, and the Fight for Worker Control (Plutopia)
  https://plutopia.io/cory-doctorow-ai-corporate-power-and-the-fight-for-worker-control/

Latest books (permalink)

• "The Reverse-Centaur's Guide to AI," a short book about being a better AI critic, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, June 2026
  https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374621568/thereversecentaursguidetolifeafterai/

• "Canny Valley": A limited edition collection of the collages I create for Pluralistic, self-published, September 2025 https://pluralistic.net/2025/09/04/illustrious/#chairman-bruce

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

• "Picks and Shovels": a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about the heroic era of the PC, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), February 2025 (https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250865908/picksandshovels).

• "The Bezzle": a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about prison-tech and other grifts, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), February 2024 (thebezzle.org).

• "The Lost Cause:" a solarpunk novel of hope in the climate emergency, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), November 2023 (http://lost-cause.org).

• "The Internet Con": A nonfiction book about interoperability and Big Tech (Verso) September 2023 (http://seizethemeansofcomputation.org). Signed copies at Book Soup (https://www.booksoup.com/book/9781804291245).

• "Red Team Blues": "A grabby, compulsive thriller that will leave you knowing more about how the world works than you did before." Tor Books http://redteamblues.com.

• "Chokepoint Capitalism: How to Beat Big Tech, Tame Big Content, and Get Artists Paid, with Rebecca Giblin", on how to unrig the markets for creative labor, Beacon Press/Scribe 2022 https://chokepointcapitalism.com

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: 574 (7730 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.

ISSN: 3066-764X

->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->-> Top Sources: None -->

Today's links

• JS Tan and Clarissa Redwine's "Against Tech Oligarchy": Inventing a new labor playbook for a unique and powerful industry.
• Hey look at this: Delights to delectate.
• Object permanence: EMI x Gnutella; ETCON photos; Piracy loss claims are "self-serving hyperbole"; Shareholder supremacy let Google conquer and enshittify the world; Cat causes kernel panic; HK erupts; National Guard x 1 weed plant; Enshittification of labor.
• Upcoming appearances: Kilkenny, Courtenay, Vancouver, Folkestone, Oxford, Sheffield, Virtual, Oxford, Santa Barbara, 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.

JS Tan and Clarissa Redwine's "Against Tech Oligarchy" (permalink)

JS Tan and Clarissa Redwine are veterans of a string of hard-fought unionization drives at tech workplaces that started with some astounding successes but ran up against ferocious resistance in the second Trump term; their book about tech labor, Against Tech Oligarchy, is a superb analysis of the challenges and potential for tech labor organizing:

https://againsttecholigarchy.com/

For decades, tech workers enjoyed extraordinary power, despite the fact that virtually no tech workers were in unions. That's because tech workers were both extremely valuable to their employers (each engineer hired by a Silicon Valley firm added about $1m to the company's bottom line) and extremely scarce.

This won tech workers very favorable working conditions, high compensation, and a great deal of control over their employers' products (because if a worker refused to work on a project, it was hard to find someone else to do the work). What's more, there has always been a sizable cohort of tech workers whose own lives were profoundly improved by access to digital networks and wanted more than anything to distribute those benefits to everyone else. I call these workers "Tron-pilled," because they fought for the user:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/04/11/obvious-terrible-ideas/#bayesian-terrorism

During the era of tech worker scarcity, few tech workers saw themselves as workers at all – rather, the tech worker's self-conception was as an entrepreneur in waiting, a temporarily embarrassed founder. Tech bosses played on this perception, promoting the idea of tech workers and managers as peers and/or family members. Tech CEOs affected hoodies and jeans and hosted company-wide meetings where they allowed engineers to pepper them with impertinent questions about the company's technical and commercial direction.

But scarcity-based power only lasts until supply catches up with demand. As the number of workers outstripped the number of jobs, bosses showed their true colors. That's what happened at Kickstarter, when one of the bosses forced out his co-founders and declared himself CEO and proceeded to override the decisions of the company's Trust and Safety team. This sparked one of tech's first unionization drives, and it was a bitter fight, with management pulling out every dirty tactic in the union-busting playbook:

https://kickstarterunited.org/oral-history/

The labor militancy at Kickstarter United wasn't an isolated incident. Workers at much bigger companies like Google and Microsoft had a long tradition of pushing back against management through internal channels, open letters, and, starting in 2018, mass walkouts:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2018_Google_walkouts

But post-Trump, bosses at these companies were much less willing to countenance dissent, and waves of vicious retaliation and reprisals radicalized many workers at these companies, driving them to more traditional, organized forms of labor activism. At the same time, workers at smaller, "mission-driven" shops like Bandcamp were inspired by the success of Kickstarter United and they started their own drives. All this attracted the interest of the "internationals" – big, established unions like the Communications Workers of America – who trained union organizers at all kinds of tech shops and started laying the groundwork for traditional union drives.

Most of Against Tech Oligarchy tells the story of these drives in a gripping you-are-there style (it helps that both of the authors are veterans of several of these campaigns). The stakes got much higher during the pandemic, of course, as tech came to play a more central role in the lives of hundreds of millions of locked-down workers, and as the tech companies themselves went on uncontrolled hiring sprees, putting workers on the payroll without any duties or responsibilities, often just to ensure that a rival company couldn't hire them.

The pandemic also prompted many tech bosses to express far more worker-hostile sentiments than they'd ever let slip in public before. Fully remote workforces both frustrated tech bosses and also significantly reduced the opportunities for in-person labor organizing. All of this built to a series of rising crescendos, such as Musk's Twitter takeover and mass layoffs, and Israel's tech-fueled genocide in Gaza. Confrontations between tech workers and bosses grew more bitter and direct, even as solidarity between white-collar tech workers and their blue-collar peers (notably Amazon warehouse workers) increased.

If all Against Tech Oligarchy did was lay out the cut-and-thrust of these labor struggles during these momentous years, it would be worth the price of admission. But it's in the final chapters that the book really distinguishes itself, because it's here that the authors embark on a pitiless postmortem of their own failed campaigns and the failures of their peers, and ask themselves what it will take to unionize tech workers.

They start with the observation that most American union organizing is built around maintaining "labor peace" (by swiftly moving to recognition and a contract) but that tech bosses are ready to wage "labor war" (through illegal union-busting and retaliation). A labor peace strategy avoids costly and dangerous risks to established unions, such as decertification of locals and expensive and bruising court battles. But for tech bosses, labor war pays off, because their workforce is transient, fragmented, and skeptical of the very idea that they are workers. They have little to no experience with unions and can barely imagine how a union might improve their working lives.

The traditional labor playbook calls for workers to quietly build their power, taking no overt action while conducting a series of personal, one-to-one conversations that contribute to an eventual quorum of workers that's large enough to win a unionization vote. This strategy is like building a bonfire, where the pieces of fuel are piled one atop the other, but not lit until the pile is done.

But in a tech shop where workers turn over frequently and work in isolated teams, often from home, this strategy fails. Workers who have been won to the union side leave or grow demoralized in their isolation. Reaching new workers is difficult, and since the whole union drive occurs in secret, new workers don't know to reach out to organizers in their shops.

For Tan and Redwine, this fact militates for a strategy that revives some of the pre-labor activism of tech workers, noisy public/private fights whenever product decisions and management conduct violate some mix of worker rights and workers' values. They see this as a way to build momentum within a shop, bringing workers off the sidelines and giving organizers chances to bring those workers into a sustained, structured labor drive.

Tan and Redwine see tech worker organizing as the frontrunners of an age of new labor militancy and labor war, of the sort that pre-dated the labor peace that arose after the passage of the National Labor Relations Act. That labor peace was the result of bosses learning that hardball tactics would be met with equally hardcore responses.

This is especially important for tech workers, whose strikes cannot inflict the same pain on their bosses as earlier industrial workers' strikes did. Digital systems are designed to operate themselves after they are built, so when the workers involved in those systems withdraw their labor, the systems continue to run, often for a very long time, before needing maintenance (this is also the lesson of Musk's mass layoffs at Twitter).

Tech bosses have metabolized this lesson, and they are increasingly willing to wage all-out war at the first sign of labor unrest, with waves of retaliatory firings. These bosses have figured out devilish tactics for constructive dismissal, like the CEO of Mapbox, who retaliated against union supporters by targeting them with "return to office" mandates that forced them to report in person to offices that were in distant states. This prompted many of these workers to quit, which spared Mapbox from even paying them a severance package.

Against this backdrop, strikes need to be seen not as a way to bring the business operations to a halt, but rather as a way to galvanize workers and bring them into the union drive. As New York Times Tech Guild organizer John Cruickshank put it, Action builds capacity for action.

This is the ethos of the Microsoft workers who have campaigned tirelessly to halt the company's participation in the genocide in Gaza. They barricaded themselves in executives' offices, livestreaming the confrontation; they disrupted Microsoft's livecast 50th anniversary celebration; and they paddled a flotilla of protest kayaks outside of top Microsoft executives' waterfront homes. All of this paid off, with Microsoft halting sales of its tools to a particularly notorious unit of the Israeli military who had been using the company's products to conduct surveillance in Gaza and the West Bank.

Tan and Redwine see these novel tactics as a rewilding of the labor movement, a return to the militant roots that led to the labor peace, but only after all-out labor war. They cite the 1934 Minneapolis truck drivers' strike, where workers invented the "flying picket" by swarming scab trucks far from the factory gates, defeating the trucks' police protection, which led to a general strike and a total victory for labor.

This is important historical context. The genteel business of getting everyone's cards signed and having the NLRB certify your union was the compromise bosses agreed to after they learned that the alternative was far worse for them. Today, it's not just bosses who've forgotten that lesson – many workers have, too. Against Tech Oligarchy aims to rekindle those old boilers and get the unstoppable labor train running again.

Hey look at this (permalink)

• Text Watermarking https://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/202x/2026/08/24/Text-Watermarking

• Every Past and Tomorrow: The Physical Landscape of AI https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/stephenvoss/every-past-and-tomorrow-a-survey-of-virginia-data-centers

• Reflecting on Digital Rights Wins and Losses in Sacramento https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2026/11/reflecting-digital-rights-wins-and-losses-sacramento

• Join EFF to Celebrate the Life of Aaron Swartz https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2026/11/join-eff-celebrate-life-aaron-swartz

• Goodbye from Salon https://www.salon.com/2026/11/05/goodbye-from-salon/

Object permanence (permalink)

#25yrsago EMI will distribute music on Gnutella

#25yrsago Photos from O'Reilly P2P Con https://web.archive.org/web/20011124163254/http://www.openp2p.com/pub/a/p2p/2001/11/05/monday_photos.html

#20yrsago Aussie Institute of Criminology calls piracy losses “self-serving hyperbole” https://web.archive.org/web/20061208043648/http://australianit.news.com.au/articles/0,7204,20713160^15306^^nbv^,00.html

#20yrsago UK airport cop: gun-shaped shirt decoration is illegal https://memex.craphound.com/2006/11/07/uk-airport-cop-gun-shaped-shirt-decoration-is-illegal/

#15yrsago Bug report: “Simultaneous cat and external keyboard input causing kernel panic” https://web.archive.org/web/20120112020023/https://lkml.org/lkml/2011/11/3/110

#10yrsago Hong Kong erupts after Beijing refuses to allow dissident lawmakers to re-take oath https://globalvoices.org/2016/11/06/street-protests-as-beijing-preempts-hong-kong-courts-with-new-interpretation-of-basic-law/

#10yrsago “Massive scale” shut-down of polling places in districts known for suppressing Black voters https://www.commondreams.org/news/2016/11/04/voting-rights-protections-gutted-polling-places-shuttered-massive-scale

#10yrsago Donald Trump’s campaign takes away his right to tweet without supervision https://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/07/us/politics/donald-trump-presidential-race.html?_r=1

#10yrsago National Guard helicopter, 7 cop cars sent to warrantlessly seize a single marijuana plant from an 81-year-old grandmother https://www.loweringthebar.net/2016/11/national-guard-one-plant.html

#5yrsago Bait and Switch https://pluralistic.net/2021/11/07/bait-and-switch/

#1yrago The enshittification of labor https://pluralistic.net/2025/11/07/postwar-social-contract/#a-defense-of-social-contracts

#1yrago The 40-year economic mistake that let Google conquer (and enshittify) the world https://pluralistic.net/2025/11/06/vertical-blinds/#invest-dont-acquire

Upcoming appearances (permalink)

• Kilkenny (Kilkenomics), Nov 6-8
  https://kilkenomics.com/

• Courtenay: Enshittification (Sid Williams Theatre Society), Nov 10
  https://www.sidwilliamstheatre.com/events/cory-doctorow-talks-enshittification/

• Vancouver: BC Policy Solutions Gala, Nov 12
  https://bcpolicy.ca/gala/

• Folkestone Writers Festival, Nov 16
  https://www.creativefolkestone.org.uk/whats-on/cory-doctorow-the-internet-is-broken-now-what/

• Oxford: Ministry of the Future, Nov 23
  https://ministryforthefuture.co.uk/events.html

• Sheffield: Reverse Centaur at Juno Books, Nov 25
  https://www.outsavvy.com/event/40274/cory-doctorow-in-conversation

• Virtual: Enshittification, AI, and the Future of Technology (UBC Master of Educational Technology), Nov 28
  https://met.ubc.ca/2026/09/met-speaker-series-cory-doctorow-enshittification-ai-and-the-future-of-technology/

• Oxford: Bennett Oxford Symposium on Open Code in Science, Dec 9
  https://www.bennett.ox.ac.uk/events/2026-bennett-institute-symposium/

• Santa Barbara: UCSB Reads, Apr 29
  https://www.library.ucsb.edu/events-exhibitions/ucsb-reads-2027-presents-author-cory-doctorow

• Montreal: World Science Fiction Convention, Sep 2-6
  https://montreal2027.ca/en

Recent appearances (permalink)

• Clint Eastwood (No Gods No Mayors)
  https://www.patreon.com/NoGodsNoMayors/posts/clint-eastwood-173008088

• Life After AI (Brain Bar)
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IPPa43-n0vI

• Terms of Service with Clare Duffy (CNN)
  https://www.cnn.com/audio/podcasts/terms-of-service-with-clare-duffy/episodes/458ce968-af5d-11f0-b539-13ed2afe25f8

• AI, Work, and Power (Software Engineering Daily)
  AI, Work, and Power https://softwareengineeringdaily.com/podcasts/cory-doctorow-on-ai-work-and-power/

• AI, Corporate Power, and the Fight for Worker Control (Plutopia)
  https://plutopia.io/cory-doctorow-ai-corporate-power-and-the-fight-for-worker-control/

Latest books (permalink)

• "The Reverse-Centaur's Guide to AI," a short book about being a better AI critic, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, June 2026
  https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374621568/thereversecentaursguidetolifeafterai/

• "Canny Valley": A limited edition collection of the collages I create for Pluralistic, self-published, September 2025 https://pluralistic.net/2025/09/04/illustrious/#chairman-bruce

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

• "Picks and Shovels": a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about the heroic era of the PC, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), February 2025 (https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250865908/picksandshovels).

• "The Bezzle": a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about prison-tech and other grifts, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), February 2024 (thebezzle.org).

• "The Lost Cause:" a solarpunk novel of hope in the climate emergency, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), November 2023 (http://lost-cause.org).

• "The Internet Con": A nonfiction book about interoperability and Big Tech (Verso) September 2023 (http://seizethemeansofcomputation.org). Signed copies at Book Soup (https://www.booksoup.com/book/9781804291245).

• "Red Team Blues": "A grabby, compulsive thriller that will leave you knowing more about how the world works than you did before." Tor Books http://redteamblues.com.

• "Chokepoint Capitalism: How to Beat Big Tech, Tame Big Content, and Get Artists Paid, with Rebecca Giblin", on how to unrig the markets for creative labor, Beacon Press/Scribe 2022 https://chokepointcapitalism.com

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: 532 (33976 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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