The legal saga over surveillance footage from within an Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention center in suburban Chicago has reached new levels of Kafkaesque absurdity, with the federal government losing three hard drives it was supposed to put footage on, refusing to provide footage from five critical surveillance cameras, and delivering soundless video of a highly contested visit from Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem. 

We have repeatedly covered an abuse lawsuit about living conditions within the Broadview detention facility. The federal government has claimed that 10 days of footage from within the facility, taken during a critical and highly contested period, was “irretrievably destroyed” and could not be produced as part of the lawsuit, which was brought by people being held at Broadview in what were allegedly horrendous conditions. It later said that due to a system crash, the footage was never recorded in the first place. The latest update in this case, however, deals with surveillance camera footage that was recorded and that a judge has ordered the federal government to turn over. 

For this footage, the federal government first claimed that it could not afford the storage space necessary to take the footage that it did have and produce it for discovery to the plaintiffs’ lawyers in the case. The plaintiffs’ lawyers, representing Broadview’s detainees, then purchased 78 terabytes of empty hard drives and gave them to the federal government, according to court records. This included three 8-terabyte SSDs and three 18-terabyte hard drives.

Court records note that “plaintiffs provided defendants with five large hard drives to facilitate Defendants’ production, yet Defendants inexplicably lost three of them.” Emails submitted as evidence suggest that the U.S. government and the plaintiffs’ attorneys had a call to discuss the lost hard drives. 

One of the emails sent by plaintiffs’ attorneys to the Department of Justice in late January notes that the government had been exceedingly slow in producing footage, taking weeks to produce just a small amount of footage. 

“There should be plenty of hard drive space at Broadview’s disposal,” the email reads. “The team there should currently have in its possession 5 hard drives with 72 terabytes of space, provided by plaintiffs’ counsel at the last 2 site visits. We have received only one hard drive back from Broadview to date. Copying of November/December footage should have taken place over the past week so that it could be delivered to plaintiffs’ counsel today when they visit Broadview this afternoon. At the very least, that footage should be being copied now.”

The two sides then arranged a phone call, a summary of which was emailed by plaintiffs’ attorneys to the Department of Justice: 

“Thanks for the productive call this morning. For the benefit of everyone: 

We discussed the production of video footage. You relayed that, at present, your agency contact knows where 2 of the 5 hard drives are and that you have relayed that copying of footage from November to present for all 10 feeds and footage from September to November for the 5 additional cameras should be underway. You will investigate further where the remaining hard drives are and will also work on a plan to exchange footage on a more regular basis than plaintiffs' counsel's weekly visits.

We discussed providing an accounting of the hard drives to facilitate your conversations with personnel at Broadview: 

• On January 8, plaintiffs' counsel delivered four hard drives to Broadview during an attorney visit. One was a 20 TB hard drive; three were 8 TB SSD drives. 
• On January 16, plaintiffs' counsel received from Broadview one of the 8 TB SSD drives containing 150 GB of footage from 5 cameras for one week in January. 
• Also on January 16, plaintiffs' counsel provided personnel at Broadview (SDDO Taylor, in particular) with two 18 TB hard drives. 
• The sum total of storage capacity Broadview should have is: 5 drives, with a total of 72 TB of space. Using the productions we have received to date, we anticipate that the Government owes us at least 15 TB of footage.”

Days later, the Department of Justice told the plaintiffs’ attorneys that “they are still searching for those hard drives at Broadview.” The plaintiffs’ attorneys responded: “Losing multiple drives provided to facilitate speedy production is not acceptable,” and “the missing hard drives and lack of production of any footage predating January remains a significant, prejudicial issue.”

A filing by the plaintiffs with the court highlights some of the ongoing issues they have had with the government complying with court-ordered discovery requirements, which includes the lost hard drives, missing footage, footage from only five of the 10 cameras that were supposed to be delivered. A separate filing notes that footage produced by the government from a high-profile visit by Noem is missing audio “despite visible professional microphones and cell phones with audio capabilities in the footage.”

“Plaintiffs have gone above and beyond their obligations under federal law to streamline rolling production of such footage, purchasing expensive hard drives and agreeing to transport and pick up those drives from Broadview during weekly attorney visits. Defendants agreed to this arrangement,” they wrote in the filing. “Yet, Defendants have fallen unacceptably short of their production obligations. Defendants have provided no footage from five of the ten camera feeds […] Defendants have also failed to provide footage for a near-two-month span for the remaining five camera feeds. What’s more, Defendants have purportedly lost multiple hard drives provided by Plaintiffs’ counsel […] There is no excuse for Defendants’ discovery failures.” 

The filing notes that the five missing cameras are specifically from detainee isolation cells, “despite those cells being a key part of Plaintiffs’ complaint. The produced feeds show egregious conditions but were insufficient to provide Plaintiffs the discovery necessary to fully investigate their claims.” These cells were designed to hold one person at a time, but were allegedly being used to hold multiple detainees at a time during a critical period that the lawsuit covers; “such cells are also where ICE holds detainees with acute medical or mental health conditions, including those who have suffered medical emergencies while in detention, and where it holds detainees who have been subjected to use of force by ICE officers while inside the facility,” they add.

The filing says that the plaintiffs learned that the government lost the hard drives in late January, when the government claimed that it had returned all of the hard drives to the plaintiffs’ attorneys, and that it had run out of storage space with which to provide them court-ordered footage. 

“On January 28, Defendants’ counsel relayed that Broadview personnel had advised that they were out of storage space on drives provided by Plaintiffs, reporting that all hard drives provided by Plaintiffs had been returned to them. This was the first indication that some or all of 70 terabytes’ worth of hard drives were unaccounted for,” they wrote. “In the days since, the Government has admitted that it cannot find three of the five hard drives that should be in its possession.”

“Plaintiffs are waiting on months of footage. Every day that passes without this evidence compounds the prejudice to Plaintiffs’ ability to prepare for the upcoming hearing. Defendants’ foot dragging and poor organizational practices—and their instinct to rely on Plaintiffs to take the laboring oar for the purchase, delivery, pickup, and return of storage devices to facilitate Defendants’ discovery obligations—cannot be permitted.”

In the first week of January, Kylie Brewer started getting strange messages. 

“Someone has a only fans page set up in your name with this same profile,” one direct message from a stranger on TikTok said. “Do you have 2 accounts or is someone pretending to be you,” another said. And from a friend: “Hey girl I hate to tell you this, but I think there’s some picture of you going around. Maybe AI or deep fake but they don’t look real. Uncanny valley kind of but either way I’m sorry.” 

It was the first week of January, during the frenzy of people using xAI’s chatbot and image generator Grok to create images of women and children partially or fully nude in sexually explicit scenarios. Between the last week of 2025 and the first week of 2026, Grok generated about three million sexualized images, including 23,000 that appear to depict children, according to researchers at the Center for Countering Digital Hate. The UK’s Ofcom and several attorneys general have since launched or demanded investigations into X and Grok. Earlier this month, police raided X’s offices in France as part of the government’s investigation into child sexual abuse material on the platform.

Messages from strangers and acquaintances are often the first way targets of abuse imagery learn that images of them are spreading online. Not only is the material disturbing itself — everyone, it seems, has already seen it. Someone was making sexually explicit images of Brewer, and then, according to her followers who sent her screenshots and links to the account, were uploading them to an OnlyFans and charging a subscription fee for them. 

“It was the most dejected that I've ever felt,” Brewer told me in a phone call. “I was like, let's say I tracked this person down. Someone else could just go into X and use Grok and do the exact same thing with different pictures, right?” 

Brewer is a content creator whose work focuses on feminism, history, and education about those topics. She’s no stranger to online harassment. Being an outspoken woman about these and other issues through a leftist lens means she’s faced the brunt of large-scale harassment campaigns primarily from the “manosphere,” including “red pilled” incels and right-wing influencers with podcasts for years. But when people messaged her in early January about finding an OnlyFans page in her name, featuring her likeness, it felt like an escalation. 

One of the AI generated images was based on a photo of her in a swimsuit from her Instagram, she said. Someone used AI to remove her clothing in the original photo. “My eyes look weird, and my hands are covering my face so it kind of looks like my face got distorted, and they very clearly tried to give me larger breasts, where it does not look like anything realistic at all,” Brewer said. Another image showed her in a seductive pose, kneeling or crawling, but wasn’t based on anything she’s ever posted online. Unlike the “nudify” one that relied on Grok, it seemed to be a new image made with a prompt or a combination of images. 

Many of the people messaging her about the fake OnlyFans account were men trying to get access to it. By the time she clicked a link one of them sent of the account, it was already gone. OnlyFans prohibits deepfakes and impersonation accounts. The platform did not respond to a request for comment. But OnlyFans isn’t the only platform where this can happen: Non-consensual deepfake makers use platforms like Patreon to monetize abusive imagery of real people. 

“I think that people assume, because the pictures aren't real, that it's not as damaging,” Brewer told me. “But if anything, this was worse because it just fills you with such a sense of lack of control and fear that they could do this to anyone. Children, women, literally anyone, someone could take a picture of you at the store, going grocery shopping, and ask AI or whatever to do this.” 

A lack of control is something many targets of synthetic abuse imagery say they feel — and it can be especially intense for people who’ve experienced sexual abuse in real life. In 2023, after becoming the target of deepfake abuse imagery, popular Twitch streamer QTCinderella told me seeing sexual deepfakes of herself resurfaced past trauma. “You feel so violated…I was sexually assaulted as a child, and it was the same feeling,” she said at the time. “Like, where you feel guilty, you feel dirty, you feel like, ‘what just happened?’ And it’s bizarre that it makes that resurface. I genuinely didn’t realize it would.”

Other targets of deepfake harassment also feel like this could happen anytime, anywhere, whether you’re at the grocery store or posting photos of your body online. For some, it makes it harder to get jobs or have a social life; the fear that anyone could be your harasser is constant. “It's made me incredibly wary of men, which I know isn't fair, but [my harasser] could literally be anyone,” Joanne Chew, another woman who dealt with severe deepfake harassment for months, told me last year. “And there are a lot of men out there who don't see the issue. They wonder why we aren't flattered for the attention.”

‘I Want to Make You Immortal:’ How One Woman Confronted Her Deepfakes Harasser

“After discovering this content, I’m not going to lie… there are times it made me not want to be around any more either,” she said. “I literally felt buried.”

404 MediaSamantha Cole

Brewer’s income is dependent on being visible online as a content creator. Logging off isn’t an option. And even for people who aren’t dependent on TikTok or Instagram for their income, removing oneself from online life is a painful and isolating tradeoff that they shouldn’t have to make to avoid being harassed. Often, minimizing one’s presence and accomplishments doesn’t even stop the harassment.

Since AI-generated face-swapping algorithms became accessible at the consumer level in late 2017, the technology has only gotten better, more realistic, and its effects on targets harder to combat. It was always used for this purpose: to shame and humiliate women online. Over the years, various laws have attempted to protect victims or hold platforms accountable for non-consensual deepfakes, but most of them have either fallen short or present new risks of censorship and marginalize legal, consensual sexual speech and content online. The TAKE IT DOWN Act, championed by Ted Cruz and Melania Trump, passed into law in April 2025 as the first federal level legislation to address deepfakes; the law imposes a strict 48-hour turnaround requirement on platforms to remove reported content. President Donald Trump said that he would use the law, because “nobody gets treated worse online” than him. And in January, the Disrupt Explicit Forged Images and Non-Consensual Edits (DEFIANCE) Act passed the Senate and is headed to the House. The act would allow targets of deepfake harassment to sue the people making the content. But taking someone to court has always been a major barrier to everyday people experiencing harassment online; It’s expensive and time consuming even if they can pinpoint their abuser. In many cases, including Brewer’s, this is impossible—it could be an army of people set to make her life miserable.

“It feels like any remote sense of privacy and protection that you could have as a woman is completely gone and that no one cares,” Brewer said. “It’s genuinely such a dehumanizing and horrible experience that I wouldn't wish on anyone... I’m hoping also, as there's more visibility that comes with this, maybe there’s more support, because it definitely is a very lonely and terrible place to be — on the internet as a woman right now.”

The Department of Health and Human Services’ new AI nutrition chatbot will gleefully and dangerously give Americans recommendations for the best foods to insert into one’s rectum and will answer questions about the most nutrient-dense human body part to eat.

“Use AI to get real answers about real food,” a new website called realfood.gov proclaims. “From the guidelines to your kitchen. Ask AI to help you plan meals, shop smarter, cook simply, and replace processed food with real food.” The website then has an “Ask” chatbox where you can ask any question. Asking anything simply redirects to Grok, an example of how halfassed Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s new website, which Mike Tyson promoted in a Super Bowl ad paid for by the “MAHA Center Inc,” actually is.

Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff ‘joked’ with employees who had traveled to the United States for a Salesforce all-hands meeting that Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents were in the building keeping tabs on them, 404 Media has learned.

Multiple employees told 404 Media about the joke, and 404 Media obtained internal Slack chats showing employees discussing it. Benioff was giving the opening keynote at the Salesforce CKO event in Las Vegas on Tuesday, which is a major Salesforce meeting ‘kicking off’ its strategy for the year. In his keynote, Benioff thanked international employees for traveling to the United States for the meeting, and asked them to stand. Benioff then said that ICE agents were in the building to keep tabs on them.

The comments instantly became a major topic of conversation on Saleforce’s internal Slack, with shocked employees trying to figure out if they had misheard the CEO. One employee asked “what was the ice joke?” Another employee responded “If you’re visiting from outside the United States, please stand … ICE is keeping track of that.” Another said the joke was “Please stand if you traveled here from abroad! Thank you! Just so the ICE agents know.” And a third wrote that the joke was, “roughly, ‘Please everyone stand who traveled here internationally.’ And then while they are still standing, ‘there are ICE agents in the hall to keep tabs on you.’”

“The room groaned,” one employee wrote on Slack. “We couldn’t believe he said that.”

Salesforce’s contracts with ICE have been controversial within the company, which is part of why employees weren’t happy with Benioff’s joke. 

San Francisco's Gazetteer first reported on Benioff’s remarks.

This is an example of “Silicon Valley CEOs and their inability to divorce ICE and the complete lack of understanding of why that makes them monsters,” a Salesforce employee told 404 Media. “Employees are going absolutely apeshit in internal Slack about how completely awful it was.” Another employee told 404 Media that Benioff “then followed it up with a joke about not understanding the message of Bad Bunny's Super Bowl performance. On its own just seems out of touch, but coupled with the previous joke it does seem worse.”

In a Slack channel called “#airing-of-grievances,” employees posted a meme of a Nazi officer that read “Are we the baddies?” Another wrote “Serious question: would a statement of apology/recognition/whatever by someone (anyone) actually do anything at this point? Or has a rubicon of sorts been crossed?” A third wrote “It’s super uncomfortable to me that this has been glossed over like ZERO mention of hey we hear your comments and your voice matters.”

Whether a journalist or painter, creative people always find themselves in the same predicament. The best ideas come when they least expect; not when it’s forced or one is pressured to find a quick solution. It’s just human nature. One could be in the shower or lying in bed, as the adages go. For musicians – pianists as much as songwriters – it’s no different. An idea of a melody or lyric pops up out of the blue and has to be captured for safekeeping and later review. Rudimentary smartphone apps and voice memos can only go so far in accommodating that need or fully facilitating the experience.

Designed by Korean up-and-comer Woojin Yang, Everglow is a handheld mini-keyboard that fits into any bag. The “musical sketchbook” of sorts allows artists to quickly jot down ideas when they’re not in front of their instruments or computers. The sleekly-designed device comes with a generative AI-based sound system that allows them to iterate and develop a song on the spot, not just transcribe the initial tune.

“It’s all about capturing the emotion and nuance of the moment,” Yang says. There’s also a lot more freedom in not always having to open up a full computer set up, or even a laptop for that matter. What’s more, there aren’t hundreds of additional functions that can distract and ultimately let the spark of inspiration pass.

The pared-back, triangulated instrument – reflecting the fundamental modulated configuration of a traditional piano-forte – has much more variability than it might seem at first. Comprising a full octave, Everglow’s keys are sensitive and adaptive to the touch. When one slides upward while holding a key, the built-in pressure sensor detects the movement, allowing them to control velocity and adjust FX levels. Move left or right, the sensor registers the motion enabling half-step pitch shifts.

“This design enhances both visual form and tactile clarity,” Yang adds. “It offers new expressive options for keyboard players and familiar physical feedback for guitarists, supporting different composition styles based on each instrument.”

Emulating the physical play of a guitar as well, Everglow’s keys are not limited to individual notes. When multiples are touched horizontally, a strumming function is activated allowing it to be played back during chord performances. AI comes into the picture and adds additional harmonies, those it generates or that were previously recorded.

Though compact, Everglow can be used to develop ever-elaborate cumulative compositions. Everything is backed up on the accompanying Companion App. Exported files are compatible with most software. And no idea is left unrecorded.

To learn more about the designer’s device, visit behance.net.

Photos courtesy of Woojin Jang.

Today's links

• Europe takes a big step towards a post-dollar world: Recapturing $24t worth of transactions from Visa/Mastercard.
• Hey look at this: Delights to delectate.
• Object permanence: API for Congress; Steampunk fetish mask; Hillary x AOL login screen; Suffragist Valentines; Musk x Intuit vs the American people.
• Upcoming appearances: Where to find me.
• 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.

Europe takes a big step towards a post-dollar world (permalink)

There's a reason every decentralized system eventually finds its way onto a platform: platforms solve real-world problems that platform users struggle to solve for themselves.

I've written before about the indie/outsider author Crad Kilodney, who wrote, edited, typeset and published chapbooks of his weird and wonderful fiction, and then sold his books from Toronto street-corners with a sign around his neck reading VERY FAMOUS CANADIAN AUTHOR BUY MY BOOKS (or, if he was feeling spicy, simply: MARGARET ATWOOD):

https://pluralistic.net/2024/02/19/crad-kilodney-was-an-outlier/#intermediation

Crad was a hell of a writer and a bit of a force of nature, but there are plenty of writers I want to hear from who are never going to publish their own books, much less stand on a street-corner selling them with a MARGARET ATWOOD sign around their necks. Publishers, editors, distributors and booksellers all do important work, allowing writers to get on with their writing, taking all the other parts of the publishing process off their shoulders.

That's the value of platforms. The danger of platforms is when they grow so powerful that they usurp the relationship between the parties they are supposed to be facilitating, locking them in and then extracting value from them (someone should coin a word to describe this process!):

https://pluralistic.net/2024/11/07/usurpers-helpmeets/#disreintermediation

Everyone needs platforms: writers, social media users, people looking for a romantic partner. What's more, the world needs platforms. Say you want to connect all 200+ countries on Earth with high-speed fiber lines; you can run a cable from each country to every other country (about 21,000 cables, many of them expensively draped across the ocean floor), or you can pick one country (preferably one with both Atlantic and Pacific coasts) and run all your cables there, and then interconnect them.

That's America, the world's global fiber hub. The problem is, America isn't just a platform for fiber interconnections – it's a Great Power that uses its position at the center of the world's fiber networks to surveil and disrupt the world's communications networks:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Snowden

That's a classic enshittification move on a geopolitical scale. It's not the only one America's made, either.

Consider the US dollar. The dollar is to global commerce what America's fiber head-ends are to the world's data network: a site of essential, (nominally) neutral interchange that is actually a weapon that the US uses to gain advantage over its allies and to punish its enemies:

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

The world's also got about 200 currencies. For parties in one country to trade with those in another country, the buyer needs to possess a currency the seller can readily spend. The problem is that setting up 21,000 pairwise exchange markets from every currency to every other currency is expensive and cumbersome – traders would have to amass reserves of hundreds of rarely used currencies, or they would have to construct long, brittle, expensive, high-risk chains that convert, say, Thai baht into Icelandic kroner to Brazilian reals and finally into Costa Rican colones.

Thanks to a bunch of complicated maneuvers following World War II, the world settled on the US dollar as its currency platform. Most important international transactions use "dollar clearing" (where goods are priced in USD irrespective of their country of origin) and buyers need only find someone who will convert their currency to dollars in order to buy food, oil, and other essentials.

There are two problems with this system. The first is that America has never treated the dollar as a neutral platform; rather, American leaders have found subtle, deniable ways to use "dollar dominance" to further America's geopolitical agenda, at the expense of other dollar users (you know, "enshittification"). The other problem is that America has become steadily less deniable and subtle in these machinations, finding all kinds of "exceptional circumstances" to use the dollar against dollar users:

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

America's unabashed dollar weaponization has been getting worse for years, but under Trump, the weaponized dollar has come to constitute an existential risk to the rest of the world, sending them scrambling for alternatives. As November Kelly says, Trump inherited a poker game that was rigged in his favor, but he still flipped over the table because he resents having to pretend to play at all:

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

Once Trump tried to steal Greenland, it became apparent that the downsides of the dollar far outweigh its upsides. Last month, Christine Lagarde (president of the European Central Bank) made a public announcement on a radio show that Europe "urgently" needed to build its own payment system to avoid the American payment duopoly, Visa/Mastercard:

https://davekeating.substack.com/p/can-europe-free-itself-from-visamastercard

Now, there's plenty of reasons to want to avoid Visa/Mastercard, starting with cost: the companies have raised their prices by more than 40% since the pandemic started (needless to say, updating database entries has not gotten 40% more expensive since 2020). This allows two American companies to impose a tax on the entire global economy, collecting swipe fees and other commissions on $24t worth of the world's transactions every year:

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/europe-banks-launching-product-break-101215642.html

But there's another reason to get shut of Visa/Mastercard: Trump controls them. He can order them to cut off payment processing for any individual or institution that displeases him. He's already done this to punish the International Criminal Court for issuing a genocide arrest warrant for Benjamin Netanyahu, and against a Brazilian judge for finding against the criminal dictator Jair Bolsonaro (Trump also threatened to have the judge in Bolsonaro's case assassinated). What's more, Visa/Mastercard have a record of billions (trillions?) of retail transactions taking place between non-Americans, which Trump's officials can access for surveillance purposes, or just to conduct commercial espionage to benefit American firms as a loyalty bonus for the companies that buy the most $TRUMP coins.

Two days after Lagarde's radio announcement, 13 European countries announced the formation of "EuroPA," an alliance that will facilitate regionwide transactions that bypass American payment processors (as well as Chinese processors like Alipay):

https://news.europawire.eu/european-payment-leaders-sign-mou-to-create-a-sovereign-pan-european-interoperable-payments-network/eu-press-release/2026/02/02/15/34/11/168858/

As European Business Magazine points out, EuroPA is the latest in a succession of attempts to build a European payments network:

https://europeanbusinessmagazine.com/business/europes-24-trillion-breakup-with-visa-and-mastercard-has-begun/

There's Wero, a 2024 launch from the 16-country European Payments Initiative, which currently boasts 47m users and 1,100 banks in Belgium, France and Germany, who've spent €7.5b through the network:

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/europe-banks-launching-product-break-101215642.html

Wero launched as a peer-to-peer payment system that used phone numbers as identifiers, but it expanded into retail at the end of last year, with several large retailers (such as Lidl) signing on to accept Wero payments.

Last week, Wero announced an alliance with EuroPA, making another 130m people eligible to use the service, which now covers 72% of the EU and Norway. They're rolling out international peer-to-peer payments in 2026, and retail/ecommerce payments in 2027.

These successes are all the more notable for the failures they follow, like Monnet (born 2008, died 2012). Even the EPI has been limping along since its founding, only finding a new vigor on the heels of Trump threatening EU member states with military force if he wasn't given Greenland.

As EBM writes, earlier efforts to build a regional payment processor foundered due to infighting among national payment processors within the EU, who jealously guarded their own turf and compulsively ratfucked one another. This left Visa/Mastercard as the best (and often sole) means of conducting cross-border commerce. This produced a "network effect" for Visa/Mastercard: since so many Europeans had an American credit card in their wallets, European merchants had to support them; and since so many EU merchants supported Visa/Mastercard, Europeans had to carry them in their wallets.

Network effects are pernicious, but not insurmountable. The EU is attacking this problem from multiple angles – not just through EuroPA, but also through the creation of the Digital Euro, a Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC). Essentially, this would give any European who signs up an account with the ECB, the federal bank of the Eurozone. Then, using an app or a website, any two Digital Euro customers could transfer funds to one another using the bank's own ledgers, instantaneously and at zero cost.

EBM points out that there's a critical difficulty in getting EuroPA off the ground: because it is designed to be cheap to use, it doesn't offer participating banks the windfall profits that Visa/Mastercard enjoy, which might hold back investment in EuroPA infrastructure.

But banks are used to making small amounts of money from a lot of people, and with the Digital Euro offering a "public option," the private sector EuroPA system will have a competitor that pushes it to continuously improve its systems.

It's true that European payment processing has been slow and halting until now, but that was when European businesses, governments and households could still pretend that the dollar – and the payment processing companies that come along with it – was a neutral platform, and not a geopolitical adversary.

If there's one thing the EU has demonstrated over the past three years, it's that geopolitical threats from massive, heavily armed mad empires can break longstanding deadlocks. Remember: Putin's invasion of Ukraine and the end of Russian gas moved the EU's climate goals in ways that beggar belief: the region went from 15 years behind on its solar rollout to ten years ahead of schedule in just a handful of months:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/02/05/contingency/#this-too-shall-pass

This despite an all-out blitz from the fossil fuel lobby, one of the most powerful bodies in the history of civilization.

Crises precipitate change, and Trump precipitates crises.

Hey look at this (permalink)

• Killing in the name of… nothing https://www.theverge.com/policy/849609/charlie-kirk-shooting-ideology-literacy-politics

• Best gas masks https://www.theverge.com/policy/868571/best-gas-masks

• As Was The Style At The Time: How We Became Cruel https://www.oblomovka.com/wp/2026/02/09/as-was-the-style-at-the-time-how-we-became-cruel/

• Remove Your Ring Camera With a Claw Hammer https://www.hamiltonnolan.com/p/remove-your-ring-camera-with-a-claw

• The truth about covering tech at Bezos’s Washington Post https://geoffreyfowler.substack.com/p/washington-post-layoffs-bezos-tech-reporting

Object permanence (permalink)

#15yrsago Realtime API for Congress https://web.archive.org/web/20110211101723/http://sunlightlabs.com/blog/2011/the-real-time-congress-api/

#15yrsago Steampunk fetish mask with ear-horn https://bob-basset.livejournal.com/156159.html

#10yrsago Facebook’s “Free Basics” and colonialism: an argument in six devastating points https://web.archive.org/web/20160211182436/https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2016/02/facebook-and-the-new-colonialism/462393/

#10yrsago UK surveillance bill condemned by a Parliamentary committee, for the third time https://web.archive.org/web/20250523013320/https://www.wired.com/story/technology-ip-bill-surveillance-committee/

#10yrsago Haunted by a lack of young voter support, Hillary advertises on the AOL login screen https://web.archive.org/web/20160211080839/http://www.weeklystandard.com/hillary-reaches-base-with-aol-login-page-ad/article/2001023

#10yrsago Celebrate V-Day like an early feminist with these Suffragist Valentines https://web.archive.org/web/20160216100606/https://www.lwv.org/blog/votes-women-vintage-womens-suffrage-valentines

#10yrsago Elements of telegraphic style, 1928 https://writeanessayfor.me/telegraph-office-com

#10yrsago Disgraced ex-sheriff of LA admits he lied to FBI, will face no more than 6 months in prison https://web.archive.org/web/20160211041117/https://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-ln-ex-l-a-county-sheriff-baca-jail-scandal-20160210-story.html

#5yrsago Apple puts North Dakota on blast https://pluralistic.net/2021/02/11/rhodium-at-2900-per-oz/#manorial-apple

#5yrsago Catalytic converter theft https://pluralistic.net/2021/02/11/rhodium-at-2900-per-oz/#ccscrap

#5yrsago Adam Curtis on criti-hype https://pluralistic.net/2021/02/11/rhodium-at-2900-per-oz/#hypernormal

#5yrsago Dependency Confusion https://pluralistic.net/2021/02/11/rhodium-at-2900-per-oz/#extra-index-url

#1yrago Musk steals a billion dollars from low-income Americans and sends it to Intuit https://pluralistic.net/2025/02/11/doubling-up-on-paperwork/#rip-freefile

Upcoming appearances (permalink)

• Salt Lake City: Enshittification at the Utah Museum of Fine Arts (Tanner Humanities Center), Feb 18
  https://tanner.utah.edu/center-events/cory-doctorow/

• Montreal (remote): Fedimtl, Feb 24
  https://fedimtl.ca/

• Victoria: 28th Annual Victoria International Privacy & Security Summit, Mar 3-5
  https://www.rebootcommunications.com/event/vipss2026/

• Berkeley: Bioneers keynote, Mar 27
  https://conference.bioneers.org/

• Berlin: Re:publica, May 18-20
  https://re-publica.com/de/news/rp26-sprecher-cory-doctorow

• Berlin: Enshittification at Otherland Books, May 19
  https://www.otherland-berlin.de/de/event-details/cory-doctorow.html

• Hay-on-Wye: HowTheLightGetsIn, May 22-25
  https://howthelightgetsin.org/festivals/hay/big-ideas-2

Recent appearances (permalink)

• Panopticon :3 (Trashfuture)
  https://www.patreon.com/posts/panopticon-3-150395435

• America's Enshittification is Canada's Opportunity (Do Not Pass Go)
  https://www.donotpassgo.ca/p/americas-enshittification-is-canadas

• Everything Wrong With the Internet and How to Fix It, with Tim Wu (Ezra Klein)
  https://www.nytimes.com/2026/02/06/opinion/ezra-klein-podcast-doctorow-wu.html

• How the Internet Got Worse (Masters in Business)
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=auXlkuVhxMo

• Enshittification (Jon Favreau/Offline):
  https://crooked.com/podcast/the-enshittification-of-the-internet-with-cory-doctorow/

Latest books (permalink)

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

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

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

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

• "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, 2027

• "The Memex Method," Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2027

Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources:

Currently writing: "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 (1027 words today, 26735 total)

• "The Reverse Centaur's Guide to AI," a short book for Farrar, Straus and Giroux about being an effective AI critic. LEGAL REVIEW AND COPYEDIT COMPLETE.

• "The Post-American Internet," a short book about internet policy in the age of Trumpism. PLANNING.

• 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

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):

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