According to a new study from a team of researchers in Europe, vibe coding is killing open-source software (OSS) and it’s happening faster than anyone predicted. 

Thanks to vibe coding, a colloquialism for the practice of quickly writing code with the assistance of an LLM, anyone with a small amount of technical knowledge can churn out computer code and deploy software, even if they don't fully review or understand all the code they churn out. But there’s a hidden cost. Vibe coding relies on vast amounts of open-source software, a trove of libraries, databases, and user knowledge that’s been built up over decades. 

Open-source projects rely on community support to survive. They’re collaborative projects where the people who use them give back, either in time, money, or knowledge, to help maintain the projects. Humans have to come in and fix bugs and maintain libraries.

Vibe coders, according to these researchers, don’t give back.

The study Vibe Coding Kills Open Source, takes an economic view of the problem and asks the question: is vibe coding economically sustainable? Can OSS survive when so many of its users are takers and not givers? According to the study, no. 

“Our main result is that under traditional OSS business models, where maintainers primarily monetize direct user engagement…higher adoption of vibe coding reduces OSS provision and lowers welfare,” the study said. “In the long-run equilibrium, mediated usage erodes the revenue base that sustains OSS, raises the quality threshold for sharing, and reduces the mass of shared packages…the decline can be rapid because the same magnification mechanism that amplifies positive shocks to software demand also amplifies negative shocks to monetizable engagement. In other words, feedback loops that once accelerated growth now accelerate contraction.”

This is already happening. Last month, Tailwinds—an open source CSS framework that helps people build websites—laid off three of its four engineers. Tailwinds is extremely popular, more popular than it’s ever been, but revenue has plunged.

Tailwinds head Adam Wathan explained why in a post on GitHub. “Traffic to our docs is down about 40% from early 2023 despite Tailwind being more popular than ever,” he said. “The docs are the only way people find out about our commercial products, and without customers we can't afford to maintain the framework. I really want to figure out a way to offer LLM-optimized docs that don't make that situation even worse (again we literally had to lay off 75% of the team yesterday), but I can't prioritize it right now unfortunately, and I'm nervous to offer them without solving that problem first.”

Miklós Koren, a professor of economics at Central European University in Vienna and one of the authors of the vibe coding study, told 404 Media that he and his colleagues had just finished the first draft of the study the day before Wathan posted his frustration. “Our results suggest that Tailwind's case will be the rule, not the exception,” he said.

According to Koren, vibe-coders simply don’t give back to the OSS communities they’re taking from. “The convenience of delegating your work to the AI agent is too strong. There are some superstar projects like Openclaw that generate a lot of community interest but I suspect the majority of vibe coders do not keep OSS developers in their minds,” he said. “I am guilty of this myself. Initially I limited my vibe coding to languages I can read if not write, like TypeScript. But for my personal projects I also vibe code in Go, and I don't even know what its package manager is called, let alone be familiar with its libraries.”

The study said that vibe coding is reducing the cost of software development, but that there are other costs people aren’t considering. “The interaction with human users is collapsing faster than development costs are falling,” Koren told 404 Media. “The key insight is that vibe coding is very easy to adopt. Even for a small increase in capability, a lot of people would switch. And recent coding models are very capable. AI companies have also begun targeting business users and other knowledge workers, which further eats into the potential ‘deep-pocket’ user base of OSS.”

This won’t end well. “Vibe coding is not sustainable without open source,” Koren said. “You cannot just freeze the current state of OSS and live off of that. Projects need to be maintained, bugs fixed, security vulnerabilities patched. If OSS collapses, vibe coding will go down with it. I think we have to speak up and act now to stop that from happening.”

He said that major AI firms like Anthropic and OpenAI can’t continue to free ride on OSS or the whole system will collapse. “We propose a revenue sharing model based on actual usage data,” he said. “The details would have to be worked out, but the technology is there to make such a business model feasible for OSS.”

AI is the ultimate rent seeker, a middle-man that inserts itself between a creator and a user and it often consumes the very thing that’s giving it life. The OSS/vibe-coding dynamic is playing out in other places. In October, Wikipedia said it had seen an explosion in traffic but that most of it was from AI scraping the site. Users who experience Wikipedia through an AI intermediary don’t update the site and don’t donate during its frequent fund-raising drives.

The same thing is happening with OSS. Vibe coding agents don’t read the advertisements in documentation about paid products, they don’t contribute to the knowledge base of the software, and they don’t donate to the people who maintain the software. 

“Popular libraries will keep finding sponsors,” Koren said. “Smaller, niche projects are more likely to suffer. But many currently successful projects, like Linux, git, TeX, or grep, started out with one person trying to scratch their own itch. If the maintainers of small projects give up, who will produce the next Linux?”

In 2015, after reading a book about how the telegraph created a sort of proto-internet that helped make various robber barons rich and powerful, I wrote an article about Elon Musk that, a decade later, feels both very embarrassing and somewhat prophetic. Musk and SpaceX had just announced a plan to launch a constellation of low-earth orbit, internet-providing satellites.

I saw this at the time as a step toward a kind of everything company. SpaceX was working on reusable rockets that would drastically lower the cost of flying things to space, and I imagined at the time that, if successful, being able to fly things to space for a far lower cost than his competitors would give Musk incredible power and wealth. This was in part because of SpaceX’s potential ability to become a telecom company in addition to a space launch company.

“If he can successfully develop the reusable launch vehicles, that gives him a tremendous dominance over the mode of getting to space. Once you can do it relatively cheaply and in high volume, instead of launching five or six times a year, you’re launching [and] putting stuff into orbit once a week. That’s the hard part,” Marco Caceres, a space industry analyst, told me at the time. “All the other stuff is really dessert, in a way. It’s the satellites, the services that’ll make you the real money.” SpaceX said at the time that Starlink would have 4,000 satellites. Today, it has more than 9,000 satellites, and the majority of all satellites in space have been launched by SpaceX and are owned by SpaceX. 

I imagined a world in which SpaceX essentially became a telecom company in addition to being a space company, and the type of power that would give Musk. A decade later, at least this part is more or less coming to pass. SpaceX is a company that has been extremely boosted by tax breaks, subsidies, and government contracts. It also has become critical, quasi-governmental infrastructure not just for the United States but for companies around the world. And Starlink itself now essentially has a monopoly on fast internet access in rural areas, on boats, in conflict areas, and, increasingly, on airplanes. Starlink is very much a real thing—an international flight I was on recently had free Starlink internet and it felt like half of the plane spent most of the flight on video calls.

My article from 2015 is full of Musk boosterism that makes me embarrassed now, and Musk promises things every five minutes that are either wildly overhyped by the media, never happen, or happen on much longer timescales than expected. But the article was directionally accurate: SpaceX figured out how to launch rockets routinely and inexpensively, and it is now wildly powerful because of this. Starlink exists because it is easy for SpaceX to put satellites in space, and Musk’s unfettered access to low-Earth orbit has allowed him to literally dominate a space (sorry) that should be shared by all of humanity. 

SpaceX has always been a political project, one in which Musk seeks to colonize space, expand his bloodline, and/or become god emperor of the universe. It is perhaps his most political project. And yet, of his companies, it has flown under the radar as an explicitly political project because Musk has been so goddamned annoying, destructive, and fascistic on X and within the federal government. SpaceX, meanwhile, has always been the most competently run of his companies, and is one that under Gwynne Shotwell’s leadership had, til now, largely not been fucked with by Musk in the ways that Tesla, Twitter, and xAI have been.

That’s not to say Musk hasn’t meddled at all: He ordered the shutdown of Starlink in Ukraine in the early days of Russia’s war there, and literally this week the company announced he would crack down on Russia’s use of Starlink for drones. That this company and this man have this power at all highlights my point: Starlink, and SpaceX, have become geopolitically important in ways that most people have not thought about, that we have not grappled with, and that the Trump administration is almost definitely not going to do anything about.

And so it feels both important and quite alarming that SpaceX is acquiring xAI in what appears to be a highly complex financial scheme that I cannot even begin to pretend to understand. Musk’s announcement of this deal, which appears to have been the result of a protracted “negotiation” between himself, is batshit crazy, first of all: “SpaceX has acquired xAI to form the most ambitious, vertically-integrated innovation engine on (and off) Earth, with AI, rockets, space-based internet, direct-to-mobile device communications and the world’s foremost real-time information and free speech platform. This marks not just the next chapter, but the next book in SpaceX and xAI's mission: scaling to make a sentient sun to understand the Universe and extend the light of consciousness to the stars!”

Musk goes on to say that SpaceX and xAI will launch “a million satellites that operate as orbital data centers,” and signs off “thank you for everything you have done and will do for the light cone of consciousness.” 

There are many reasons that “AI data centers in space” may be a pipe dream and may not happen, but what he is proposing is a magnitude of space junk that no other company could plausibly promise to launch. Data centers or not, SpaceX is now dominating low-Earth orbit in a way no other company or country has. While Musk has been gutting the federal government, interfering in elections, allowing people to generate CSAM, engaging in white supremacy, planning trips to Epstein’s island, implanting chips into people’s brains, siphoning off taxpayer money to build ridiculous tunnels, giving his sperm to whoever will take it, turning his cars into experimental robot taxis, and pretending to build humanoid robots, SpaceX has somewhat (?) quietly colonized and dominated low earth orbit. 

Musk has taken this space for his own use, concerns about light pollution, satellite collisions, and telecom monopolies be damned. This has always been concerning, but explicitly intertwining the aspirations and fate of SpaceX with Musk’s CSAM generating social media website, his AI bullshit machines, and his right wing political project is horrifying and monopolistic. What happens next, I have no idea.

A new tool searches your LinkedIn connections for people who are mentioned in the Epstein files, just in case you don’t, understandably, want anything to do with them on the already deranged social network.

404 Media tested the tool, called EpsteIn—as in, a mash up of Epstein and LinkedIn—and it appears to work. 

“I found myself wondering whether anyone had mapped Epstein's network in the style of LinkedIn—how many people are 1st/2nd/3rd degree connections of Jeffrey Epstein?” Christopher Finke, the creator of the tool, told 404 Media in an email. “Smarter programmers than me have already built tools to visualize that, but I couldn't find anything that would show the overlap between my network and his.”

“Thankfully the overlap is zero, but I did find that a previous co-worker who I purposefully chose not to keep in touch with appears in the files, and not in an incidental way. Trusting my gut on him paid off, I suppose,” he added.

Finke said the tool is based on the work of Patrick Duggan, who made an API to easily search the files.

“Search the publicly released Epstein court documents for mentions of your LinkedIn connections,” the GitHub repository for the tool reads. 

The tool can output a report that shows each result’s name, company, and their position; the total number of mentions across all the searched documents; excerpts from each matching document, and links to the original material on the Department of Justice’s website.

In my case, the tool found 22 connections with mentions in the Epstein files. But, many of these are likely false positives. Some of them were very common names. The tool also found 5 hits for “Adam S.” Obviously, there could be a lot of people with that name and initial. The repository acknowledges this: “Common names may produce false positives—review the context excerpts to verify relevance.” 

Last week the DOJ published 3.5 million pages of files related to the investigations of Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell. The massive dump also contained videos, images, and audio recordings. 404 Media found it included multiple unredacted photos of fully nude women or girls, with the DOJ only taking them down days after their upload. We also covered Musk’s inclusion in the files.

The dump contains a wealth of other tech elites, WIRED reported. Peter Thiel, Larry Page, Sergey Brin, and many others all make an appearance. 

But a mention does not necessarily mean those people were up to anything nefarious (although many, many were, obviously). Jeff Moss, the founder of the DEF CON hacking conference, is mentioned in the files because Vincenzo Iozzo, a well-known hacker, offered to introduce Epstein to the DEF CON founder.

On Reddit, Moss wrote, “Vincenzo approached me for free badges and I said no, and pointed him to the Epstein Wikipedia page and tried to warn him to stay away from any involvement. I didn’t realize how deep it went. As far as I know Epstein never attended. All this other behind the scenes stuff is wild, but not surprising.”

Moss’s LinkedIn post is also where 404 Media first saw the EpsteIN tool.

Update: this piece has been updated to include information from the tool's creator.

Today's links

• All laws are local: And no law knows how evitable it is.
• Hey look at this: Delights to delectate.
• Object permanence: Whisky PC; Anitfeatures; Silicon Roundabout; Steampunk Etch-A-Sketch; MLMs as mirror-world organizers.
• 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.

All laws are local (permalink)

About halfway through Thomas Piketty's 2013 barnstorming Capital in the 21st Century, Piketty tosses off a little insight that skewered me on the spot and never let me go: the notion that any societal condition that endures beyond a generation becomes "eternal" in the popular consciousness:

https://memex.craphound.com/2014/06/24/thomas-pikettys-capital-in-the-21st-century/

Piketty was referring to "primogeniture," the ancient practice of automatically passing the family fortune onto the eldest son (or, if no son was available, the eldest nephew). Primogeniture did important work by keeping dynastic fortunes intact, rather than dividing them up among all children of some baron or lord or other guillotineable monster.

Primogeniture persisted until the age of colonization, when Europe's "great powers" stole the rest of the world. In that moment, the size of Europe's great fortunes expanded by orders of magnitude. This vast increase in the wealth of Europe's most murderous, remorseless looters made primogeniture obsolete. There was so much blood-soaked money available to the nobility that every son could found a "great house."

After a couple generations' worth of this, the colonies were exhausted. There were no more lands to conquer, which meant that every son could no longer expect to found his own fortune. But for these chinless masters of the universe, a world where every son of every rich man wouldn't get his own dynasty was incomprehensible. To do otherwise was literally unimaginable. It was unnatural.

For Piketty, this explained World War I: the world's chinless inbred monsters embarking upon an orgy of bloodletting to relieve one another of the lands – and peoples – they'd claimed as their property in order to carry on the "eternal" tradition of every son starting his own fortune.

It's a very important idea, and a provocative explanation for one of the 20th Century's defining events. That's why it struck me so hard when I first read it, but the reason it stuck with me for the decade-plus since I encountered that it is a vital observation about the human condition: as a species, we forget so much. Something that was commonplace a generation ago becomes unimaginable today, and vice versa.

Even people who lived through those years forget who they were and what they took for granted in those days. Think, for example, of all those evangelicals who would vote for Satan himself if he promised to hang any woman who obtained an abortion; the same evangelicals who, just a few decades ago, viewed anti-abortionism as a politically suspect form of crypto-papacy:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/12/18/schizmogenesis/

Perhaps the reason Piketty's primogeniture-based explanation for WWI struck me so forcefully and durably is that I imbibed a prodigious amount of science fiction as a boy, including the aphorism that "all laws are local, and no law knows how local it is":

https://locusmag.com/feature/cory-doctorow-a-cosmopolitan-literature-for-the-cosmopolitan-web/

In other words, things that seem eternal and innate to the human condition to you are apt to have been invented ten minutes before you started to notice the world around you and might seem utterly alien to your children. As Douglas Adams put it:

Anything that is in the world when you're born is normal and ordinary and is just a natural part of the way the world works. Anything that's invented between when you're fifteen and thirty-five is new and exciting and revolutionary and you can probably get a career in it. Anything invented after you're thirty-five is against the natural order of things.

https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Douglas_Adams

This notion is much on my mind right now because the world is (to me, at least) unassailably in a state of change, and everything is up for grabs. Europe went from 15 years behind on its climate goals to ten years ahead of schedule after the supply of Russian gas dried up and Europeans found themselves shivering in the dark. The massive leap in EU solar means that the (seemingly) all-powerful fossil fuel lobby has absolutely, comprehensively eaten shit, something that was unthinkable just a few years ago:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/09/23/our-friend-the-electron/#to-every-man-his-castle

Indeed, this happened so fast that many people (including many Europeans) haven't even noticed that it happened. Back in December, when I was at CCC in Hamburg, I talked to a bunch of European activists, close watchers of the Commission and the Parliament, who were completely convinced that Europe would never spurn the fossil fuel sector – despite the fact that it had already happened.

Indeed, it may be that intimate familiarity with European politics is a liability when things change. Spend enough time observing up close how supine European politicians and their Eurocrats are and you may find yourself so reflexively conditioned to view them as spineless corporate lackeys and thus unable to notice when they finally dig up a vertebra or two.

Smart financiers are familiar with Stein's Law: "anything that can't go on forever eventually stops." Change happens. Eternal verities might be fifteen minutes older than you. Pink used to be the color of ferocious masculinity, whereas blue was so girly as to be practically titular:

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

Real talk: I have serious, debilitating chronic pain. One of the reasons I'm so prolific is that the only time I stop noticing how much I hurt is when I'm lost in work (compartmentalization is a hell of a drug, and while it's not always healthy, it has its upsides). Ask anyone with chronic pain and they'll tell you that treating pain eventually becomes your hobby, a bottomless well of esoteric dives into various "modalities" of pain treatment.

Thus it is that I've found myself on one or two psychologists' couches, learning about different mental approaches to living with constant pain. One of the most useful pieces of advice I've gotten was to attend closely to how my pain changes – how it ebbs and flows. The point is that if pain changes, that means that it can change. It feels eternal, but it comes and goes. Maybe someday it will go altogether. And even if it doesn't, it may improve. It probably will, at least for a while.

Things change.

Our current crop of cowardly, weak appeasers – in Congress, in Parliament, in the European Parliament – have, at various times (and very recently), found their spines. The factions within them that militated for the kind of bold action that might meet this moment have, from time to time, won the day. We have lived through total transformations in our politics before, and that means we might live through them again:

https://hypertext.niskanencenter.org/p/the-fragmentation-flywheel

Sure, it's easy and tempting to assume that our leaders will always suck as hard as they suck now. But latent in that assumption is that the leaders who presided over big, incredible transformations were exceptional people. Maybe they were and maybe they weren't, but I'm here to tell you, ten minutes' worth of research into the biographies of the "heroes" of our history will reveal them to have been every bit as capable of monstrousness, cowardice, cruelty and pig-ignorant bigotry as any of today's rotating cast of fascist goons:

https://truthout.org/articles/disrupting-the-myth-of-franklin-d-roosevelt-in-the-age-of-trump-sanders-and-clinton/

The question isn't merely "How do we elect better leaders?" It's "How do we make our leaders follow us?" Today's Democrats are unserious quislings who keep bringing a squirt-gun to a mass-casualty assault-rifle spree-shooting. How do we terrorize these cowards into rising to the moment? If we want Congressional Democrats to form a Nuremburg Caucus and start holding hearings on who they're going to put in the dock when the Trump regime collapses, we're going to have to drive them to it.

And we can! The Democrats who gave us the New Deal weren't braver or more moral than the self-dealing millionaires in Congress today – they were more afraid of their base.

Things change.

Some years ago, I gave a speech at Consumer Reports headquarters in Poughkeepsie, trying to get them to refuse to give a passing grade to any product with DRM, on the grounds that the manufacturer could alter how that device worked at any time in the future, meaning that no matter how well a device worked now, it might turn into a pile of shit at any time in the future:

https://www.soundguys.com/the-sonos-app-death-spiral-132873/

They didn't take me up on this suggestion, obviously. They made the (seemingly) reasonable point that people bought Consumer Reports to find out what to buy, not to be told that they shouldn't buy anything. Every product in many key categories came with DRM, meaning that their recommendation would have had to be "just don't buy any of it."

But today, consumer review sites do sometimes recommend nothing:

https://www.mozillafoundation.org/en/blog/privacy-nightmare-on-wheels-every-car-brand-reviewed-by-mozilla-including-ford-volkswagen-and-toyota-flunks-privacy-test/

And of course, there's some precedent here. Somewhere between the emergence of the evidence for seatbelts and the appearance of seatbelts in most makes and models of cars, there would have been a time when the answer to "which car should I buy?" was "don't buy a car, they're all unsafe at any speed."

Things change. Today, every car has a seatbelt, and they'd continue to do so, even if we did away with regulations requiring seatbelts. Driving a car without a seatbelt would be as weird and terrible as using a radium suppository:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/09/19/just-stop-putting-that-up-your-ass/#harm-reduction

Things change. The nine-justice Supreme Court isn't an eternal verity. It didn't come down off a mountain on two stone tablets. It's about ten seconds old:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Judiciary_Act_of_1869

Tomorrow, it will be different:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/09/20/judicial-equilibria/#pack-the-court

Our eternals are all ephemerals. The idea that we should tax capital gains at half the rate of wages? It was practically invented yesterday. You know who thought we should tax all income at the same rate? That noted Bolshevik, Ronald fuckin' Reagan:

https://archive.thinkprogress.org/flashback-reagan-raised-capital-gains-taxes-to-the-same-level-as-wage-taxes-for-first-time-444438edf242/

We're living through a time of change. Much of it is calamitous. Some of it wondrous:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/06/28/mamdani/#trustbusting

It's so easy to slip into the habit of thinking that nothing will change, that our politicians will never fear us more than they love the money and power they get from catering to the Epstein class. I'm not denying that this is how they view the world today, but there was a time in living memory when it wasn't true. If it changed before, it can change again:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/01/15/how-the-light-gets-in/#theories-of-change

Things change.

Hey look at this (permalink)

• The Scourge of Online Sports Betting https://prospect.org/2026/02/04/feb-2026-magazine-sports-scourge-online-betting-fanduel-draftkings/

• ICE has offices in 5 Canadian cities. Here’s what it can — and can’t — do https://www.cbc.ca/lite/story/9.7073273

• RIP, Fobazi M Ettarh https://bsky.app/profile/fobettarh.bsky.social/post/3me34k3rtvc2j

• The Roots of the Youth Sports Gold Rush https://prospect.org/2026/02/05/feb-2026-magazine-youth-sports-private-equity/

Object permanence (permalink)

#20yrsago UK nurses want to supply clean blades and cutting advice to self-harmers https://web.archive.org/web/20060206205108/http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2087-2025748,00.html

#20yrsago PC built into whisky bottle https://web.archive.org/web/20060210043104/https://metku.net/index.html?sect=view&n=1&path=mods/whiskypc/index_eng

#15yrsago Startups of London’s “Silicon Roundabout” https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2011/feb/06/tech-startup-internet-entrepreneurs

#15yrsago Antifeatures: deliberate, expensive product features that no customer wants https://mako.cc/copyrighteous/antifeatures-at-the-free-technology-academy

#15yrsago Steampunk Etch-a-Sketch https://www.reddit.com/r/pics/comments/erbnf/a_steampunk_etchasketch_we_made_for_a_friend_this/

#10yrsago There’s a secret “black site” in New York where terrorism suspects are tortured for years at a time https://web.archive.org/web/20160205143012/https://theintercept.com/2016/02/05/mahdi-hashi-metropolitan-correctional-center-manhattan-guantanamo-pretrial-solitary-confinement/

#10yrsago Error 53: Apple remotely bricks phones to punish customers for getting independent repairs https://www.theguardian.com/money/2016/feb/05/error-53-apple-iphone-software-update-handset-worthless-third-party-repair?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other

#10yrsago Toronto City Council defies mayor, demands open, neutral municipal broadband https://www.michaelgeist.ca/2016/02/toronto-city-council-sides-with-crtc-in-rejecting-mayor-torys-support-of-bell-appeal/

#5yrsago Amazon's brutal warehouse "megacycle" https://pluralistic.net/2021/02/05/la-bookseller-royalty/#megacycle

#5yrsago AT&T customer complains…via WSJ ad https://pluralistic.net/2021/02/05/la-bookseller-royalty/#go-aaron-go

#1yrago MLMs are the mirror-world version of community organizing https://pluralistic.net/2025/02/05/power-of-positive-thinking/#the-socialism-of-fools

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)

• 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/

• Why Big Tech is a Trap for Independent Creators (Stripper News)
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nmYDyz8AMZ0

• Enshittification (Creative Nonfiction podcast)
  https://brendanomeara.com/episode-507-enshittification-author-cory-doctorow-believes-in-a-new-good-internet/

• Enshittification with Plutopia
  https://plutopia.io/cory-doctorow-enshittification/

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)

• "Unauthorized Bread": a middle-grades graphic novel adapted from my novella about refugees, toasters and DRM, FirstSecond, 2026

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

• "The Memex Method," Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2026

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

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 (1005 words today, 22660 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

Click here to go see the bonus panel!

Hovertext:
Seneca would be releasing a 300 page self-help book with himself on the cover every six months.

Today's links

• Justin Key's "The Hospital at the End Of the World": A biopunk medical thriller from a major new talent.
• Hey look at this: Delights to delectate.
• Object permanence: Coconut volunteers; Astro Noise; Rich old men behind "Millennials Rising"; Stop the "Stop the Steal" steal; "Chasing Shadows."
• 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.

Justin Key's "The Hospital at the End Of the World" (permalink)

Justin C. Key is one of the most exciting new science fiction writers of this decade and today, Harpercollins publishes his debut novel, The Hospital at the End of the World:

https://www.harpercollins.com/products/the-hospital-at-the-end-of-the-world-justin-c-key?variant=43822999928866

I've followed Key's work for more than a decade, ever since I met him as a student while teaching at the Clarion West writers' workshop in Seattle. At the time, Key impressed me – a standout writer in a year full of standouts – and I wasn't surprised in the least when Harpercollins published a collection of his afrofuturist/Black horror stories, The World Wasn't Ready For You, in 2023:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/09/19/justin-c-key/#clarion-west-2015

This is virtually unheard of. Major genre publishers generally don't publish short story collections at all, let alone short story collections by writers who haven't already established themselves as novelists. The exceptions are rare as hell, and they're names to conjure with: Ted Chiang, say, or Kelly Link:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/02/13/the-kissing-song/#wrack-and-roll

But anyone who read World Wasn't Ready immediately understood why Key's work qualified him for an exception to this iron law of publishing. Key is an MD and a practicing psychiatrist, and he combines keen insights into personal relations and human frailty with a wild imagination, deep compassion, and enviable prose chops.

Hospital at the End of the World is Key's first novel, and it's terrific. Set in a not-so-distant future in which an AI-driven health monopolist called The Shepherd Organization controls much of the lives of everyday Americans, Hospital follows Pok, a young New Yorker who dreams of becoming an MD. Pok's father is also a doctor, famous for his empathic, human-centric methods and his scientific theories about the role that "essence" (a psychospiritual connection between doctors and patients) plays in clinical settings.

The story opens with Pok hotly anticipating an acceptance letter from The Shepherd Organization, and the beginning of his new life as a medical student. But when word arrives, Pok learns that he has been rejected from every medical school in the TSO orbit. In desperate confusion, he works with shadowy hackers in a bid to learn why his impeccable application and his top grades resulted in this total rejection. That's when he learns that someone had sabotaged his application and falsified his grades, and, not long thereafter, he learns that the saboteur was his father.

To make things worse, Pok's father has fallen grievously ill – so ill, in fact, that he ends up in a Shepherd Organization hospital, despite his deep enmity for TSO and its AI-driven practice of medicine. Pok doesn't accompany his father, though – he has secured a chance to sit a make-up exam in a desperate bid to get into med school. By the time he is finished with his exam, though, he learns that his father has died, and all that is left of him is an AI-powered chatbot that is delivered to Pok's apartment along with a warning to flee, because he is in terrible danger from the Shepherd Organization.

Thus begins Pok's tale as he goes underground in a ubiquitous AI surveillance dystopia, seeking sanctuary in New Orleans, hoping to make it to the Hippocrates, the last holdout from America's AI-based medicine and surveillance dystopia. Pok's father learned to practice medicine at Hippocrates, and had urged Pok to study there, even securing a full-ride scholarship for him. But Pok had no interest in the mystical, squishy, sentimental ethos of the Hippocrates, and had been determined to practice the Shepherd Organization's rigorous, cold, data-driven form of medicine.

Now, Pok has no choice. Hitchhiking, hopping freight cars, falling into company with other fugitives, Pok makes his way to New Orleans, a city guarded by tall towers that radiate energy that dampens both the punishing weather events that would otherwise drown the city and the data signals by which the Shepherd Organization tracks and controls the American people.

This is the book's second act, a medical technothriller that sees Pok as an untrusted outsider in the freshman class at Hippocrates med school, amidst a strange and alarming plague that has sickened the other refugees from TSO America who have taken up residence in New Orleans. Pok has to navigate factions within the med school and in New Orleans society, even as he throws himself into the meat grinder of med school and unravels the secrets of his father and his own birth.

What follows is a masterful and suspenseful work of science fiction informed by Key's own medical training and his keen sense of the human psyche. It's one part smart whodunnit, one part heist thriller, and one part revolutionary epic, and at its core is a profound series of provocations and thought experiments about the role that deep human connection and empathy play in medical care. It's a well-structured, well-paced sf novel that probes big, urgent contemporary themes while still engrossing the reader in the intimate human relations of its principals. A wonderful debut novel from a major new writer.`

Hey look at this (permalink)

• Ken MacLeod: Imagined Futures https://plutopia.io/ken-macleod-imagined-futures/

• Elbows Up: How Canada Can Disenshittify Its Tech, Reclaim Its Sovereignty, and Launch a New Tech Sector Into a Stable Orbit https://archive.org/details/disenshittification-nation

• HOPE IS NOW A 501(C)(3) NON-PROFIT ORGANIZATION https://2600.com/content/hope-now-501c3-non-profit-organization

• Department of Justice appeals Google search monopoly ruling https://www.theverge.com/tech/873438/google-antitrust-case-doj-states-appeal

• List of Kennedy Center cancellations during the Trump administration https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Kennedy_Center_cancellations_during_the_Trump_administration (h/t Amanda Marcotte)

Object permanence (permalink)

#20yrsago AOL/Yahoo: our email tax will make the net as good as the post office! https://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/05/technology/postage-is-due-for-companies-sending-email.html

#20yrsago Volunteers ferry 15k coconuts every day to Indian temple http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/4677320.stm

#15yrsago Wikileaks ACTA cables confirm it was a screwjob for the global poor https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2011/02/secret-us-cables-reveal-acta-was-far-too-secret/

#10yrsago Laura Poitras’s Astro Noise: indispensable book and gallery show about mass surveillance https://www.wired.com/2016/02/snowdens-chronicler-reveals-her-own-life-under-surveillance/

#10yrsago How to prepare to join the Internet of the dead https://archive.org/details/Online_No_One_Knows_Youre_Dead

#10yrsago Who funds the “Millennials Rising” Super PAC? Rich old men. https://web.archive.org/web/20160204223020/https://theintercept.com/2016/02/04/millennials-rising-super-pac-is-95-funded-by-old-men/

#10yrsago They promised us a debate over TPP, then they signed it without any debate https://www.techdirt.com/2016/02/03/countries-sign-tpp-whatever-happened-to-debate-we-were-promised-before-signing/

#5yrsago Stop the "Stop the Steal" steal https://pluralistic.net/2021/02/04/vote-machine-tankies/#ess

#5yrsago Organic fascism https://pluralistic.net/2021/02/04/vote-machine-tankies/#pastel-q

#5yrsago Ron Deibert's "Chasing Shadows" https://pluralistic.net/2025/02/04/citizen-lab/#nso-group

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)

• Why Everything Got Worse and What to Do About It (Jordan Harbinger)
  https://www.jordanharbinger.com/cory-doctorow-why-everything-got-worse-and-what-to-do-about-it/

• 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/

• Why Big Tech is a Trap for Independent Creators (Stripper News)
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nmYDyz8AMZ0

• Enshittification (Creative Nonfiction podcast)
  https://brendanomeara.com/episode-507-enshittification-author-cory-doctorow-believes-in-a-new-good-internet/

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)

• "Unauthorized Bread": a middle-grades graphic novel adapted from my novella about refugees, toasters and DRM, FirstSecond, 2026

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

• "The Memex Method," Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2026

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

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 (1011 words today, 21655 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