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Pluralistic: AI and amateurism (15 Jun 2026) Pluralistic: AI and amateurism (15 Jun 2026) by Cory Doctorow
Monday June 15th, 2026 at 4:38 PM

Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
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Today's links


A man's head made out of contorted bodies. Set into the middle of his brain is a Radio Shack 150-in-1 electronic experimentation kit.

AI and amateurism (permalink)

Over the weekend, I did an interview about my forthcoming book The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI (a book about being a better AI critic), and the interviewer said she was surprised that I wasn't an AI booster, based on my demographics and work history:

https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374621568/thereversecentaursguidetolifeafterai/

I could see where she was coming from. I encountered computers in the mid-seventies, as a small child. My first computer was a CARDIAC, a working, Turing-complete, mechanical computer made entirely of cardboard, that I spent endless hours with:

https://www.instructables.com/CARDIAC-CARDboard-Illustrative-Aid-to-Computation-/

Then I graduated to a teletype terminal and acoustic coupler connected to a minicomputer at the University of Toronto. My mom, a kindergarten teacher, used to smuggle home 1,000' rolls of paper towel from the kids' bathroom. I'd get 1,000' feet of computing up one side, then another 1,000' down the other side, then I'd carefully re-roll the paper towel so she could put it back in the bathroom for the kids to dry their hands on.

After that, I got an Apple ][+ in 1979, and shortly thereafter acquired a modem, and that was it: I was hooked for life. I became an amateur programmer, then a professional programmer. I hosted forums on dial-up BBSes where I distributed software and offered support to strangers who wanted to connect their computers to the internet. I got a job as a gopher developer, then a web developer, then a CIO-for-hire, helping wire up small businesses and connect them to the net. Eventually, I co-founded a free/open source software startup, before transitioning to 25 years as a digital rights activist with the Electronic Frontier Foundation. And for most of that time, I was energetically writing science fiction, eventually becoming associated with a school sometimes called "post-cyberpunk":

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rewired:_The_Post-Cyberpunk_Anthology

The force that energized all this work was a dialectical one, the contradiction that powered cyberpunk literature itself. For all that cyberpunk was undeniably enamored with the coolness and combustibility of new technology, it was also terrified of how technology could be a force for oppression, surveillance and control. As William Gibson says, "cyberpunk was a warning, not a suggestion."

Gibson's more famous quote, of course, is "the street finds its own use for things." In Gibson's novels (and in my own life in technology) all the most interesting things happen when users of technology (often without formal training or credentials) find ways to adapt the technology they use to suit their needs:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/03/17/technopolitics/#original-sin

This is why I remain an ardent fan of Hypercard, Scratch and other meta-tools that are designed to allow non-programmers to write software that exactly conforms to their desires. Whatever the apps produced by these tools lack in sophistication and efficiency is more than offset by the fact that they give everyday people the power to directly control the tools they rely upon.

If "epistemic humility" means anything, it means acknowledging that no amount of "requirements gathering" can capture the needs of people totally unlike yourself as faithfully as those users can capture their own needs. Giving people the tools to produce their own software is always going to make tools – vernacular, idiosyncratic, homespun – that are more suited to their own hands and minds than anything a technologist working on their behalf could make.

The ancient dictum of "nothing about us without us" – born in 16th century Poland and taken up by the modern disability rights movement – asserts the right of people to control their own living conditions, and also the unique capacity of people to understand their own needs. You know what's even better than being consulted on the design of the technology you use? Having direct control over that technology!

This is why I was so suspicious of the iPad. The iPad's much-lauded "ease of use" was entirely about how easy it was to use an iPad to consume technology. But the iPad remains the single most user-innovation-hostile technology in modern history, a device designed to make it impossible to produce technology without permission from a remorseless multinational corporation. This is cyberpunk as a demand, not a warning:

https://memex.craphound.com/2010/04/01/why-i-wont-buy-an-ipad-and-think-you-shouldnt-either/

The technology I've championed all my life is technology that gives more control to its users. One of my immutable precepts is that people who are different from me know things I can't know, and the only way I can get the benefit of their unique knowledge and perspective is if they are free to make and share things that matter to them. As Dan Gillmor said, back when he was inventing the study of citizen journalism, "My readers know more than I do":

https://www.oreilly.com/openbook/wemedia/book/ch00.pdf

And while I am broadly very skeptical of AI, and deeply alarmed by the proliferation of "vibe coded" software in production environments, vibe coding for personal projects is a useful and exciting addition to the lineage of tools that let computer users decide how their computers will work. For people making personal projects, vibe coding extends the power of shell scripting, cron jobs, Applescript, and other desktop automation tools to a wider audience.

One of the journalists I spoke to last week about my book described how he had vibe coded an app that showed him an alert every time a plane flew over his house, giving the tail number and other details of the flight. This is information that I have no need for, no interest in, and that I'm therefore excited to learn about, because its very existence affirms that the world is full of people who are delightfully, irreducibly, amazingly different from me, and moreover, that their unique needs can be directly met using their imaginations and their personal computers.

I recently sat down with my colleague Naomi Novik, a brilliant author who also co-founded Archive of Our Own. Naomi demoed her followup to AO3 for me: Wreccer, a system to help you find small groups of people with taste similar to your own, in order to facilitate media recommendations within that group – a kind of personal, relationship-driven alternative to massive, centralized, monolithic algorithmic recommendation systems:

https://github.com/wreccer

Naomi told me that Wreccer was being built using the same design ethos that the original Twitter embraced. When Twitter launched, it was an API first, and the official Twitter front end was built on that API – but anyone could build their own front end for Twitter that worked in the way they wanted it to. Now, the word "anyone" is doing a lot of work in that sentence, because most people don't even know what an API is, and of the people who do, most of them were not capable of writing their own software front end for Twitter.

But Wreccer is being designed for the age of vibe coding, and the API will really allow anyone who uses the service to design their own interface to the system, one that elevates and centers the features they find useful and tucks away the ones they're not interested in. Your personal, custom front end could also bring in other data-sources – pulling in your Mastodon messages, for example, or even showing you an alert with the tail-number of any plane flying over your home.

This is the part of vibe coding that I'm quite excited about, but it's not the part the industry focuses on. Instead of hearing about how personal, homemade software utilities can be an end unto themselves, we hear about vibe coded projects as prototypes for commercial production code. We hear about clueless bosses vibe coding software products and services that run fine for one user on a siloed desktop computer, and then demanding to know why it takes 50 engineers a year to make the same thing work for millions of users on the public internet. We hear about people who vibe code and submit patches to free/open-source software projects with millions of users, overwhelming project maintainers with slop code that is riddled with security vulnerabilities.

Of course, there's an obvious reason why the industry wants to focus on the potential for vibe coded software to replace production code. The AI bubble has burned up $1.4t to date, while bringing in mere tens of billions of dollars per year, even as its unit economics grow steadily worse:

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2026/06/04/ai-is-the-greatest-money-wasting-scheme-humanity-has-ever-i/

To keep the bubble inflated, AI hucksters must promise massive economic returns to the technology. They want investors to believe that vibe code is about to replace working programmers, who are skilled, high-waged, high-demand workers. Their pitch is that for every million dollars' worth of programmers that an AI salesman and a boss conspire to fire, half a million dollars will go to the AI company whose bots shit out that vibe code.

That's par for the course with the AI bubble, whose focus is entirely on how AI can centralize, control and homogenize our lives. Whereas early desktop publishing, web publishing and social media gave us a glorious higgledy-piggledy of chaotic, weird and transgressive hobbyist media and retina-searing designs, AI art and design are instantly recognizable at a thousand yards, and it all looks the same, boring, and washed:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/07/20/ransom-note-force-field/#antilibraries

AI companies have released open weight/open source models that can run on your own computer, but these are treated as side-shows and toys and demos. The real action, we're told, is in "frontier models," which is industry-speak for "a piece of software whose running costs exceed the GDP of most countries":

https://pluralistic.net/2026/02/19/now-we-are-six/#stock-buyback

Perhaps this is why the dynamics of AI are so different from the early dynamics of the web. Early web users were workers, who demanded that their bosses allow them to use the web and so devolve more power to people doing their jobs. By contrast, today's most ardent AI boosters are bosses, who threaten workers who don't use AI enough in the course of their duties:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/05/26/the-ai-will-continue/#until-morale-improves

Where we do see idiosyncrasy emerging from AI usage, it's often terrible. AI can help you create a folie-a-un in which you and a chatbot team up to reinforce your delusions and drive you deeper into a world of dangerous mirage:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/06/03/mission-space/#gsd

There's a (false) story that's told about people who championed the early internet: that we were blithely certain that technology could only be a force for good, and negligently disinterested in the possibility that technology could control, extract and harm. That's demonstrably untrue: recall cyberpunk's dualism of "the street finds its own use for things" and "cyberpunk is a warning, not a suggestion."

More true is to say that early internet champions were alive to the importance of the internet, and therefore both excited about the possibilities of the internet to deliver a world of connection, idiosyncrasy, love and solidarity; and about the danger of the internet as a dystopian system of surveillance and manipulation:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/02/13/digital-rights/#are-human-rights

History isn't finished. Long after the AI bubble pops, there will be local models and people vibe coding homemade software that respond directly to their needs. The stuff we make on our own computers, for ourselves, is deplatformed from its inception. It's part of the life we can build in technology's "shadowy corners" that we used to just call "technology." The fact that this stuff is utterly unsuited to be production code makes it inherently unmonetizable. It's how the street finds its own use for things:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/02/23/goodharts-lawbreaker/#no-metrics-no-targets

Hey look at this (permalink)


A shelf of leatherbound history books with a gilt-stamped series title, 'The World's Famous Events.'

Object permanence (permalink)

#25yrsago Disney characters win right to clean underwear https://web.archive.org/web/20010707023727/https://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/news/archive/2001/06/07/state1339EDT0171.DTL

#20yrsago Lampooning the American dismissal of Gitmo suicides https://fafblog.blogspot.com/2006/06/610-changed-everything-run-for-your.html

#20yrsago LA’s South Central Farm under police siege right now https://web.archive.org/web/20060616085732/http://www.southcentralfarmers.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=160&Itemid=2

#15yrsago Transparent Pontiac for sale https://web.archive.org/web/20110610113919/http://blog.hemmings.com/index.php/2011/06/07/the-tin-indian-that-wasnt-rm-to-offer-see-through-pontiac/

#15yrsago Pulp Fiction edited down to just the cussing https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5PcAQbhnGNs

#15yrsago New York State to pet cemeteries: no pet owners’ ashes allowed https://web.archive.org/web/20110614133359/https://www.foxnews.com/us/2011/06/11/new-york-tells-pet-cemeteries-to-stop-taking-in-humans/#ixzz1PAZoGS6l

#15yrsago A dog with persistence-of-vision LEDs in her shirt writes my novel Makers in the park at night https://web.archive.org/web/20110618011346/https://i.document.m05.de/?p=970

#15yrsago Head of UN copyright agency says fair use is a “negative agenda,” wants to get rid of discussions on rights for blind people and go back to giving privileges to giant companies https://memex.craphound.com/2011/06/14/head-of-un-copyright-agency-says-fair-use-is-a-negative-agenda-wants-to-get-rid-of-discussions-on-rights-for-blind-people-and-go-back-to-giving-privileges-to-giant-companies/

#10yrsago Air Force loses access to database tracking fraud investigations to 2004 https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2016/06/database-corruption-erases-100000-air-force-investigation-records/

#10yrsago Peter Thiel’s lawyer threatens Gawker for talking about Donald Trump’s “hair” https://web.archive.org/web/20160615022004/https://gawker.com/now-peter-thiels-lawyer-wants-to-silence-reporting-on-t-1781918385

#10yrsago Samantha Bee on Orlando shooting: angry and uncompromising https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t88X1pYQu-I

#10yrsago Goldman Sachs bribed Libyan officials with sex workers, private jet rides, then lost all their money https://www.theguardian.com/business/2016/jun/13/goldman-sachs-hired-prostitutes-to-win-libyan-business-court-told

#10yrsago Net Neutrality Wins: Federal Court Upholds FCC Open Internet Rules https://www.techdirt.com/2016/06/14/cable-industry-proclaims-more-competition-hurts-consumers-damages-economic-efficiency/

#10yrsago Microsoft will buy Linkedin for $26.2B https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2016/06/microsoft-will-acquire-linkedin-for-18-5b/

#10yrsago Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Tony Awards sonnet for the Orlando shooting victims https://www.rollingstone.com/tv-movies/tv-movie-news/see-lin-manuel-mirandas-stirring-tribute-to-orlando-victims-103131/

#10yrsago China’s online astroturf is mostly produced by government workers as “extra duty” https://web.archive.org/web/20160613194153/http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2016/06/red-astroturf-chinese-government-makes-millions-of-fake-social-media-posts/

#10yrsago Rio: your quadrennial reminder that the Olympics colonize host-states with Orwellian surveillance and human rights abuses https://web.archive.org/web/20160614122124/https://motherboard.vice.com/read/the-olympics-are-turning-rio-into-a-military-state

#5yrsago A Monopoly Isn’t the Same as Legitimate Greatness https://pluralistic.net/2021/06/13/a-monopoly-isnt-the-same-as-legitimate-greatness/

Upcoming appearances (permalink)

A photo of me onstage, giving a speech, pounding the podium.


A screenshot of me at my desk, doing a livecast.

Recent appearances (permalink)


A grid of my books with Will Stahle covers..

Latest books (permalink)


A cardboard book box with the Macmillan logo.

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 (https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374621568/thereversecentaursguidetolifeafterai/)

  • "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, April 20, 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. Third draft completed. Submitted to editor.

  • "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.

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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

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Aeron Gets an Upgrade in Style and System by Aria Lee
Monday June 15th, 2026 at 11:35 AM

Design MilkDesign Milk
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Aeron Gets an Upgrade in Style and System

What comes to mind when we think of sustainability in action? Is it in manufacturing, proximity, materiality, or a combination of the three? In terms of holistic design, every part of the process must be considered with tact, understanding the nuances of the world we exist within. Almost synonymous with the term ‘office chair’, the Aeron Chair from Herman Miller has been a symbol of peak American office design, long regarded as a well-earned gift for a job well done.

A black ergonomic office chair is positioned in front of black cabinets and shelves filled with books, binders, and wire baskets in a well-lit office space.

A stately way to take the load off of desk worker’s long-suffering backs, each metric on the Aeron Chair can be customized to fit your exact specifications, creating less strain on the body and therefore on the mind as well. Coming in four standardized sizes, each piece is designed with the human body in mind, creating a more harmonious relationship with the tasks at hand.

Three mesh-backed chairs, one green and two black, are partially illuminated by sunlight against a dark background.

Three empty mesh office chairs in green, brown, and blue are partially illuminated by light, set against a dark background.

In this newer iteration, not only are there new colors to choose from, but systemic upgrades as well. Since 2022, Herman Miller has achieved carbon savings of over 7,000 metric tons, equivalent to taking nearly 6,000 cars off the road for a year. With no compromise on durability or performance, the Herman Miller team also reduced the material in Aeron’s aluminum base by 1.85lbs/0.84 kg. At scale, this translates to enough aluminum saved annually to exceed the weight of 16 adult elephants. These equivalencies clearly demonstrate how small changes can meaningfully reduce impact. Even stronger, they can back these numbers up with third-party studies, an inspiring turn toward transparency in a time of increased obfuscation.

Close-up of the armrest and adjustment mechanism of an office chair, showing its smooth, dark green metallic finish.

Close-up of a mesh office chair backrest with an adjustable lumbar support knob and a green frame.

 

Close-up of a modern ergonomic office chair with a mesh backrest and armrests, shown in a dimly lit indoor setting.

A modern ergonomic office chair with a mesh back is positioned in front of a wooden desk with drawers and neatly arranged items.

A modern home office setup with a wooden desk, ergonomic chair, table lamp, decorative jar, and framed artwork, situated near a staircase and large window.

A modern home office with a black ergonomic chair, a black desk with a lamp and books, wooden floors, and an abstract painting on the wall.

A black ergonomic office chair with mesh back and seat is positioned at the corner of a wooden desk in an office setting.

An ergonomic office chair with a mesh backrest sits near a wooden desk in a modern office with large windows and natural light.

In keeping with the values that spur the type of innovation Herman Miller is known for, they invest heavily in the type of information gathering that is not only good for them internally, but good for all of us here on earth. The more we can understand distinct parts of the product cycle, the more we can make powerful and impactful decisions that will eventually shape our future. When a design is so ubiquitous, born of ergonomic ingenuity and meticulously designed, it begs the question: could improvements be made upon a system that inherently changes slowly? With the Aeron Chair, the answer has to be yes.

Close-up of a black mesh office chair backrest next to a wooden table in a carpeted room with natural light.

To learn more about Aeron from Herman Miller, visit hermanmiller.com.

Photography by Pippa Drummond, courtesy of Herman Miller.

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Judge Rules Blacked.com Can Sue Meta for Scraping Its Porn by Emanuel Maiberg
Monday June 15th, 2026 at 11:34 AM

404 Media
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Judge Rules Blacked.com Can Sue Meta for Scraping Its Porn

A federal judge has rejected Meta’s attempt to dismiss a lawsuit from Strike 3 Holdings, the company that owns popular sites like Blacked, Vixen, and Tushy, for scraping its porn videos. 

The decision shows Meta’s nonsensical justification for scraping massive amounts of copyrighted material from the internet in order to train its AI models, and is notable for adult content creators, who have been scraped for model training data long before the current generative AI boom.

Strike 3 Holding first filed its lawsuit almost a year ago after internal Meta emails revealed in a different lawsuit showed that the company downloaded over 81 terabytes of data by scraping Anna’s Archive, a massive open search search engine for torrenting copyrighted material including books, movies, TV shows, and porn. A Strike 3 Holding investigation found that 47 IP addresses belonging to Meta were used to torrent 2,396 of its videos a total of 6,008 times between 2018 and 2025. On Thursday, Judge of the United States District Court for the Northern District of California Judge Eumi K. Lee rejected Meta’s attempt to dismiss the lawsuit, allowing it to move forward. 

Meta argued that Strike 3 Holdings failed to show that Meta actually intended to use Strike 3 Holdings’ videos to train its AI models and that Meta, the company, was actually responsible for downloading the videos, as opposed to rogue employees downloading porn on company time from company IP addresses. 

According to the judge’s ruling, Strike 3 Holdings’ investigation showed coordination across Meta’s IP addresses that proved “a coordinated effort to gather data,” as opposed to the action of random employees. Specifically, Strike 3 Holdings showed that Meta’s IP addresses torrented files with similar file names on the same day, ranging from porn to cartoons and sitcoms, suggesting the company was downloading files based on key terms. 

“For example, IP Ranges A and F torrented the following files on December 15, 2022: ‘Teen Sex Sessions 2 (2012),’ ‘Teen Titans Go to the Movies (2018),’ ‘Teens Love Tats XXX,’ ‘TeensLoveAnal.16.09.30.Amara,’ ‘Teenfidelity Pics,’ ‘TeensLoveAnal.16.06.10.Casey,’ ‘Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (1987-1996),’ ‘Teen Mom Girls Night In S02E08,’ ‘TeenyTaboo.22.12.07.Kiana,’ and ‘TeenageDelinquents.Maryjane,’” the decision says. “On the same day, a Corporate IP Address was used to torrent ‘TeenCurves.22.12.09.Willow.’ The connection between these files is plain: The word ‘teen’ appears in every file name.”

The judge said that Meta suggesting that its IP addresses downloading all these files at the same time was the work of different individual Meta employees acting independently “strains credulity.”

The judge also explained that whether Meta actually used Strike 3 Holdings’ videos to train its AI models is irrelevant because Meta violated Strike 3 Holdings’s copyright when it torrented its videos. It illegally downloaded the files and also “seeded” them, meaning they distributed the pirated to other users.

“In sum, Plaintiffs [Strike 3 Holdings] have plausibly alleged that Defendant [Meta] is liable for direct, vicarious, and contributory copyright infringement based on the torrenting of their films,” the decision said. “Defendant’s motion to dismiss is therefore DENIED.”

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Pluralistic: Google's new remote attestation scheme is every bit as terrible as its old remote attestation scheme (12 Jun 2026) by Cory Doctorow
Saturday June 13th, 2026 at 10:52 PM

Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
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Today's links


A pig in a sty. It is wearing badly applied lipstick. From behind one hairy ear pokes the Android droid.

Google's new remote attestation scheme is every bit as terrible as its old remote attestation scheme (permalink)

Long before "agentic AI," we had the idea that software would act as your agent on the internet. That's why the old-fashioned technical term for a browser is a "user agent." Your browser acts on your behalf to retrieve information and then show it to you, in the format you choose. It's your agent:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/05/07/treacherous-computing/#rewilding-the-internet

This is a powerful and profound idea. It is because browsers are our "agents" that we expect them to accept our directives, say, by blocking pop-ups, or by turning off autoplay sound, or by blocking commercial surveillance trackers:

https://privacybadger.org/

Your browser does all that because your browser works for you. The reason your browser can work for you is that the web is an open, standardized technology. In theory, anyone who follows the standards published by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) can make a browser, and that web browser can connect to any web server. Browsers and servers are interoperable. It's the same force that means you can put anyone's gas in your gas-tank, or anyone's shoelaces in your shoes, or anyone's milk on your cereal.

But what if manufacturers could dictate those choices to you? What if your light socket refused to use a lightbulb unless it was officially blessed by the socket's manufacturer? What if your dishwasher refused to wash your dishes unless you bought them from one of the manufacturer's "dish partners"? What if your toaster refused to toast "unauthorized bread"?

https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2020/01/unauthorized-bread-a-near-future-tale-of-refugees-and-sinister-iot-appliances/

It's hard to see how a company could win its market with this strategy. After all, if the dishes are really better than the competition's, you'd buy them voluntarily, without any need for law or technology to force the matter. The only reason to make a dishwasher that refuses a rival's dishes is if the manufacturer's own dishes are ugly, expensive, and/or badly made.

But once a company owns the market – once they've achieved dominance by buying out their rivals; by bribing potential competitors to stay out of their lane; and by engaging in deceptive conduct to trap key suppliers and customers – they could cement their dominance by blocking interoperability, keeping out rival dishes, milk, gas, lightbulbs, shoelaces and bread, capturing their whole market and squeezing it.

That's what Google has done, and that's what Google wants to do more of. Google's commercial behavior has been so unethical, deceptive and abusive that the company just lost three federal antitrust cases:

https://www.bigtechontrial.com/p/google-loses-the-adtech-monopolization

This thrice-convicted monopolist bribed Apple – more than $20b/year – to stay out of the search market:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2025/02/how-do-you-solve-problem-google-search-courts-must-enable-competition-while

They cheated app vendors, ripping them off with sky-high junk fees and onerous conditions that raised prices while lowering the share of your spending that went to the companies whose products you were paying for:

https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/boom-google-loses-antitrust-case

They cheated advertisers, rigging the ad market to gouge businesses on ad prices and underinvesting to fight rampant ad-fraud, sucking hundreds of billions out of the productive economy for overpriced ads that no one saw:

https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/department-justice-prevails-landmark-antitrust-case-against-google

Google wasn't always this way. The "don't be evil" company owes its very existence to the open web ecosystem. When the company started to index the web in 1998, it was playing on an open field, where any web server could talk to any "user agent," even one whose user was a startup like Google, that was making a copy of every page on the server.

For years, Google thrived on the open web, and built open technologies. Android – the mobile operating system that Google bought in 2005 – was presented as an "open" alternative to existing mobile offerings, and as the mobile market collapsed into two companies – Google and Apple – Google always presented Android as the open alternative to Apple's "walled garden."

There were always ways in which Google's "open" Android wasn't exactly open. The company engaged in illegal "tying" arrangements that forced hardware vendors and carriers to lock out versions of Android that were created by Google's competitors:

https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/ip_18_4581

In other words, even though Google offered a mobile platform that was (mostly) technically open, they used commercial and legal strategies to choke off the market oxygen for alternative Android versions that tried to capitalize on that technical openness.

But life finds a way. The existence of an open, modifiable, tinkerer-friendly mobile operating system meant Android hackers could create alternatives to Google's (de facto) walled garden, which thrived in the cracks in that garden wall. Operating systems like CalyxOS, PureOS and Graphene offered a more private, more secure Android experience, one that was largely "de-Googled," blocking Google's relentless acquisition of your private data:

https://grapheneos.org/

And Google's data-hunger is relentless. Android exfiltrates a chunk of your personal and behavioral data every five minutes. The "resting heartbeat" of Android surveillance pulses and pulses, irrespective of whether you're using your device, and the instant you unlock your screen, that heartbeat quickens, sending even more data to the company:

https://digitalcontentnext.org/blog/2018/08/21/google-data-collection-research/

All that data has proved irresistible to authoritarian governments. Donald Trump's enforcers have seized on Google data as a vital source of information about the identity of protesters and the location of migrants hunted by ICE:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2026/04/google-broke-its-promise-me-now-ice-has-my-data

So there are plenty of reasons why users would seek out these de-Googled alternatives to Android, finding them in spite of Google's illegal commercial tactics to block access to competing technologies. The worse it got, the better those alternatives looked.

Perhaps this explains Google's years-long effort to increase the technical barriers to using modified versions of Android, beefing these up to match the commercial restrictions that stand in the way of a de-Googled existence.

Back in 2023, Google floated the idea of "Web Environment Integrity" (WEI), a set of modifications to web standards that would force your computer to disclose its operating environment to the web servers it connected to, even if you objected to this disclosure:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/08/02/self-incrimination/#wei-bai-bai

WEI was a form of "remote attestation." That's when your device uses a sub-processor (sometimes called a "Technical Protection Module" or "TPM") or a walled off part of its main processor (sometimes called a "secure enclave") to produce a cryptographically signed description of your device and its configuration: which hardware, software, plug-ins and settings you're running.

When you connect to a server, it demands that your device send this "attestation" before it handles your request. If your device won't provide this data, or if the server doesn't like (or recognize) your device and its details, it can refuse to deal with you. And because the attestation is prepared by a TPM or a secure enclave that you can't modify or override, you don't get to decide which facts about your device it's allowed to see.

Practically speaking, this means that remote attestation lets a server refuse to deal with you until you turn off your ad-blocker and your tracker-blocker. It means that the server can discriminate against users who block auto-play sound and video, who block pop-ups, who put the tab in the background when it's playing a mandatory pre-roll ad.

WEI was especially disturbing in light of Google's efforts to kill ad-blockers and privacy blockers through updates to Chrome, an effort that continues to this day:

https://protonprivacy.substack.com/p/google-is-finally-killing-ublock

These blockers are an important part of the dynamic between web publishers and their users. In the real world, when you get an offer, you can make a counter-offer. That's all an ad-blocker is: a way for users to respond to a server whose opening bid is, "How about you give me all your data and let me take over your computer in exchange for showing you this page?" with "How about 'Nah?'"

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/07/adblocking-how-about-nah

We didn't get rid of pop-up ads by making them illegal, or by boycotting advertisers who used them. We got rid of pop-up ads when web users installed pop-up blockers, which made pop-up ads pointless. Take away our ability to block obnoxious digital content and you guarantee that we will be flooded with it.

These kinds of modifications aren't just used to block ads – they're also key to accessibility. People who have photosensitive epilepsy or who (like me) suffer from low-contrast vision problems use add-ons to reformat pages so that we can safely and legibly access them.

WEI's creators said they were only trying to put the web on a level playing field with apps, which routinely rat you out to the companies you connect to. Apps are a source of bottomless enshittification, not least because (unlike the web), they enjoy special, dangerous legal protections that make it very legally risky to modify them:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/07/31/unsatisfying-answers/#systemic-problems

WEI wasn't an effort to level the playing field between apps and the web – it was a race to the bottom, an attempt to make the web as enshittogenic as the app hellscape.

Public outrage to WEI killed the project, but Google's commitment to augmenting its illegal commercial lockdown efforts with technical lockdowns never ended. Now, Google has rolled out an experimental "reCAPTCHA Mobile Verification" that uses an app, your camera, and your device's TPM or secure enclave to produce an attestation about your Android device:

https://support.google.com/recaptcha/answer/16609652

This will make it much easier for the apps and other services you interact with to block your device if you run an Android alternative, or if you install a mod that overrides the actions of Google's stock Android:

https://www.reddit.com/r/PrivacySecurityOSINT/comments/1tbdjbj/privacy_concerns_around_googles_recaptcha_mobile/

This is a terrible idea – it's every bit as bad as WEI was. In an age in which Big Tech is ever-more tied to authoritarian governments, redesigning our devices to tell strangers things we don't want them to know isn't just shortsighted, it's inexcusable.

Hey look at this (permalink)


A shelf of leatherbound history books with a gilt-stamped series title, 'The World's Famous Events.'

Object permanence (permalink)

#20yrsago Images from anti-DRM protest at the San Fran Apple Store https://www.flickr.com/photos/quinn/tags/drmprotest/

#15yrsago Reasons people were arrested at the Toronto G20 https://memex.craphound.com/2011/06/11/reasons-people-were-arrested-at-the-toronto-g20/

#15yrsago Paul Krugman: Rule by rentiers favors billionaires, Chinese bond-holders over jobs and homeowners https://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/10/opinion/10krugman.html?_r=1

#15yrsago Ontario publicly funded Catholic school bans rainbows, appropriates student donations for LGBT cause and gives them to Catholic charity https://web.archive.org/web/20110610125236/https://www.xtra.ca/public/Toronto/Rainbows_banned_at_Mississauga_Catholic_school-10262.aspx

#10yrsago How to be less wrong about the First Amendment https://web.archive.org/web/20160611221927/https://popehat.com/2016/06/11/hello-youve-been-referred-here-because-youre-wrong-about-the-first-amendment/

#10yrsago Mounties used Stingrays to secretly surveil millions of Canadians for years https://web.archive.org/web/20160610182607/https://motherboard.vice.com/read/the-rcmp-surveilled-thousands-of-innocent-canadians-for-a-decade

#5yrsago Privacy Without Monopoly, EU edition https://pluralistic.net/2021/06/11/technological-self-determination/#dma

Upcoming appearances (permalink)

A photo of me onstage, giving a speech, pounding the podium.


A screenshot of me at my desk, doing a livecast.

Recent appearances (permalink)


A grid of my books with Will Stahle covers..

Latest books (permalink)


A cardboard book box with the Macmillan logo.

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 (https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374621568/thereversecentaursguidetolifeafterai/)

  • "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, April 20, 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. Third draft completed. Submitted to editor.

  • "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.

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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.

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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

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OmniOutliner 6.2 Languages Now Go To Eleven by Ken Case
Saturday June 13th, 2026 at 8:33 PM

The Omni Group
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Artwork: OmniOutliner app icon surrounded by "Welcome" in eleven languages.

Cue the song “It’s a Small World” as background music for today’s terrific announcement. We’re very pleased to share with you that OmniOutliner 6.2 is available today (universal across all platforms), now with localizations in Dutch, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, Russian, Simplified Chinese and Spanish. Or should we say, “now with localizations in Deutsch, Español, Français, 日本語, Nederlands, Italiano, Русский, 简体中文, Português do Brasil and 한국어”?

“Great things often begin with outlines” is true in any language. Outlines help clarify ideas, develop concepts, and stay organized amongst interruptions and chaos. This is all true anywhere in the world—but a powerful, helpful tool for outlining is a much better experience when it’s available in one’s own native language. We localize all of our apps, and it’s gratifying each time.

For us, localizing our software isn’t just a checkbox: it’s an expression of our values. We value people, respect our international neighbors, and encourage listening to each other with humility. They say to put your money where your mouth is, but what they don’t tell you is how great that really feels: to dedicate resources in a way that aligns with your values and mission.

Now that OmniOutliner 6 is a universal purchase across the Mac, iPad, iPhone and Apple Vision Pro, it’s especially fitting to have it localized across all of these languages. Our OmniOutliner 6 customers can now experience—in native tongue—the new design, visually refreshed with beautiful Liquid Glass design elements and a modernized look and feel; the new smart Dynamic Themes; the ability to open and work with concurrent multiple windows of the same document; Omni Automation with plug-ins to access Apple Intelligence language models; plus our groundbreaking Omni Links.

You can read more detail from our OmniOutliner 6 introduction blog post and the OmniOutliner product page. To get started with a free two-week trial that unlocks OmniOutliner 6 across all your devices, simply install OmniOutliner 6 on any device and sign into your Omni Account.

Here’s to keeping your thoughts in order, and the great things you’ll begin with an outline!

If you have any feedback, I’d love to hear from you! You can find me in the Mastodon corner of the Fediverse at @kcase@mastodon.social, or send me email at kc@omnigroup.com.

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9128.live still streaming, ambient adjacent music, free, 24-7: An update by Ryan Griffin
Friday June 12th, 2026 at 10:10 PM

Blog - A STRANGELY ISOLATED PLACE
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Our radio station project, 9128.live is still alive and kicking. Crazy to think it’s been 6 years now since we launched. I recently stumbled into someone at a show who was with us for our all-weekend takeovers during the pandemic era, and he said it helped him get through one of the hardest times of his life. It was very humbling to hear, and despite rarely hearing these comments, it’s one of the reasons I still keep this thing alive.

I’m quietly updating music in the background on the station - of course, ASIP music is easy for me to keep updated in rotation, and a few other labels keep on top of things with new releases. without much fanfare.

Here are a few key updates that you might have missed:

New label partners

In the past year or so, we’ve added three amazing catalogs into rotation, including Quiet Details (just this week), Never Late, and Analog Attic. Between these 3 labels alone, we’re hosting some of the most majestic music to hit our ears in recent years. I’m also adding some one-off artist music into rotation, as some listeners get in touch with their own music that fits.

Memberships

We had a membership that enabled paying users to access unreleased and exclusive sets. I let this dwindle for far too long, so I’m sorry to anyone who kept going with it. But I’ve now canceled it fully as I don’t see the time or space to make this worthwhile right now. Thank you to everyone who helped us keep the station going with their contributions.

Listening apps

Not new news, but very importantly, we have both iOS and Android apps that enable you to listen to the stream, and they also host the isolatedmix series as a podcast too. A few other bells and whistles to check out too. Links to the apps here.

Sonos

One of my favorite ways to listen is actually through Sonos (at night) and it’s not too easy to make that happen. But essentially, you need to add the stations custom listen URL into your TuneIn app (once downloaded), then add the TuneIn Service to Sonos, and it should then show in your faves. See here for more ways to listen.

The 9128 label

When we had regular weekend takeovers, artists were preparing sets for their slots, many of which were original, so we decided to release some of these sets and begin the label. Check out the releases here, by Jo Johnson & Hilary Robinson, Gailes, 36 and Ameeva. With no pipeline for original releases, the label is on a bit of a hiatus, but I hope to spin this up again one day and may open up the catalog to live releases in general.

The future

Being transparent, the radio costs thousands of dollars to run and host each year. For now, it’s an investment and a bit of a vanity project because I use it so much myself. So a big thank you to everyone who donates to help with this cost. I hope I get to spend more time on the project in the near future, and bring back proper programming and weekend takeovers again. Until then, I’m doing my best to keep the lights on and keeping 24/7 ambient and electronic music flowing.

Thanks for tuning in.

https://9128.live/

 
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