Blurblogs
Global
Popular
Log in
Michael's Shares
Resident of the world, traveling the road of life
68710 stories
·
21 followers

Pluralistic: The world needs an Ireland for disenshittification (17 Jan 2026) by Cory Doctorow
Saturday January 17th, 2026 at 11:27 AM

Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
2 Shares


Today's links


A green Irish pillarbox, standing before a verdant, rolling Irish countryside. The pillarbox is emblazoned with the poop emoji from the cover of 'Enshittification,' with angry eyebrows and a grawlix-scrawled black bar over its mouth.

The world needs an Ireland for disenshittification (permalink)

Ireland is a tax haven. In the 1970s and 1980s, life in the civil-war wracked country was hard – between poverty, scarce employment and civil unrest, the country hemorrhaged its best and brightest. As the saying went, "Ireland's top export is the Irish."

In desperation, Ireland's political class hit on a wild gambit: they would weaponize Ireland's sovereignty in service to corporate tax evasion. Companies that pretended to establish their headquarters in Ireland would be able to hoard their profits, evading their tax obligations to every other country in the world:

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

A single country – poor, small, at the literal periphery of a continent – was able to foundationally transform the global order. Any company that has enough money to pretend to be Irish can avoid 25-35% in tax, giving it an unbeatable edge against competitors that lack the multinational's superpower of magicking all its profits into a state of untaxable grace somewhere over the Irish Sea.

The effect this had on Ireland is…mixed. The Irish state is thoroughly captured by the corporations that pretend to call Ireland home. Anything those corporations want, Ireland must deliver, lest the footloose companies up sticks and start pretending to be Cypriot, Luxembourgeois, Maltese or Dutch. This is why Europe's landmark privacy law, the GDPR, has had no effect on America's tech giants. They pretend to be Irish, and Ireland lets them get away with breaking European law. The Irish state even hires these companies' executives to regulate their erstwhile employers:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/12/01/erin-go-blagged/#big-tech-omerta

But there is no denying that Ireland has managed to turn the world's taxable trillions into its own domestic billions. The fact that Ireland is cashing out less than 1% of what it's costing everyone else is terrible for the world's tax systems and competitive markets, but it's been a massive windfall for Ireland, and has lifted the country out of its centuries of colonial poverty and privation.

There are many lessons to be learned from Ireland's experiment with regulatory arbitrage, but one is unequivocal: even a small, poor, disintegrating nation can change the world system by offering a site where you can do things that you can't do anywhere else, and if it does, that poor nation can grow wealthy and comfortable.

What's more, there are plenty of "things that you can't do anywhere else" that are very good. It's not just corporate tax evasion.

First among these things that you can't do anywhere else: it's a crime in virtually every country on earth to modify America's defective, enshittified, privacy-invading, money-stealing technology exports. That's because the US trade representative has spent the past 25 years using the threat of tariffs to bully all of America's trading partners into adopting "anti-circumvention" laws:

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

There is nothing good about this. The fact that local businesses can't sell you a privacy blocker, an alternative client, a diagnostic tool, a spare part, a consumable, or even software for your American-made devices leaves you defenseless before US tech's remorseless campaign of monetary and informational plunder – and it means that your economy is denied the benefits of creating and exporting these incredibly desirable, profitable products.

Incredibly, Trump deliberately blew up this multi-trillion dollar system of US commercial advantage. By chaotically imposing and rescinding and re-imposing tariffs on the world, he has neutralized the US trade rep's tariff threats. Foreign firms just can't count on exporting to America anymore, so the threat of (more) tariffs grows less intimidating by the minute:

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

The time is ripe for the founding of a disenshittification nation, an Ireland for disenshittification. I have no doubt that eventually, most or all of the countries in the world will drop their anti-circumvention laws (the laws that ban the modification of US tech exports). Once one country starts making these disenshittifying tools, there'll be no way to prevent their export, since all it takes to buy one of these tools from a circumvention haven is an internet connection and a payment method.

Once everyone in your country is buying and using jailbreaking tools from abroad, there'll be no point in keeping these laws on your own books. But the first country to get there stands a chance of establishing a durable first-mover advantage – of reaping hundreds of billions selling disenshittifying products around the world. That country could be to enshittification-resistant technology what Finland was to mobile phones during the Nokia decade (and wouldn't you know it, the EU's newly minted "Tech Sovereignty" czar is a Finn!):

https://commission.europa.eu/about/organisation/college-commissioners/henna-virkkunen_en

The world has experimented with many kinds of havens over the centuries. In the early 18th century, Madagascar became a haven for British naval deserters, who were adopted into the island's matriarchal clans. Together, they founded an anarchist pirate utopia:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/24/zana-malata/#libertalia

The global system of trade has allowed America's tech companies to steal and hoard trillions, and to put every country at risk of being bricked when their IT systems are switched off at a single word from Trump:

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

There are more than 200 countries in the world. There's also an ever-expanding cohort of brilliant international technologists whose Silicon Valley dreams have turned into a nightmare of being shot in the face by an ICE goon, or being kidnapped, separated from their families and being locked up in a Salvadoran slave-labor prison. These techies are looking for the next place to put down roots and "make a dent in the universe." Lots of countries could be that place.

The Ireland for disenshittification wouldn't just have their pick of international technologists – they'd have plenty of Americans hungering for a better life. Two-thirds of young Americans "are considering leaving the US":

https://www.newsweek.com/nearly-two-thirds-of-young-americans-are-considering-leaving-the-us-11010814

Ireland pulled off its tax-haven gambit by making influential people very rich, so that they would go to bat for Ireland. The Ireland for disenshittification will have the same chance. The new tech companies that unlock US Big Tech's trillions and turn them into their own billions (with the remainder being shared by us, tech users, in the form of lower prices and better products) will be a powerful bloc in support of this project.

Ireland showed us: it just takes one country to defect from this global prisoner's dilemma, and then everything is up for grabs.

(Image: Stuart Caie, CC BY 2.0; Sourabh.biswas003; CC BY-SA 3.0; modified)

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)

#20yrago Hollywood’s Member of Parliament makes national news https://web.archive.org/web/20060213161019/http://www.macleans.ca/topstories/politics/article.jsp?content=20060123_120006_120006

#20yrsago Skip $250/plate dinner for dirty MP, eat with copyfighters https://web.archive.org/web/20060118062522/http://www.onlinerights.ca/

#20yrago Octavia Butler’s “Fledgling”: subtle, thrilling vampire novel https://memex.craphound.com/2006/01/17/octavia-butlers-fledgling-subtle-thrilling-vampire-novel/

#10yrsago Revealed: the hidden web of big-business money backing Europe and America’s pro-TTIP “think tanks” https://thecorrespondent.com/3884/Big-business-orders-its-pro-TTIP-arguments-from-these-think-tanks/855725233704-2febf71a

#10yrsago The bizarre magnetic forest rings of northern Ontario https://www.bldgblog.com/2016/01/rings/

#10yrsago 2016 is the year of the telepathic election, and it’s not pretty http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2016/01/some-american-political-marker.html

#10yrsago Trump Casinos lost millions every single year that Donald Trump ran it (but he’s still rich) https://memex.craphound.com/2016/01/17/trump-casinos-lost-millions-every-single-year-that-donald-trump-ran-it-but-hes-still-rich/

#10yrsago Oregon domestic terrorists now destroying public property in earnest https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/jan/16/oregon-militias-behavior-increasingly-brazen-as-public-property-destroyed?CMP=edit_2221

#10yrsago Jeremy Corbyn proposes ban on dividends from companies that don’t pay living wages https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2016/jan/16/jeremy-corbyn-to-confront-big-business-over-living-wage

#10yrsago The Electable Mr Sanders https://web.archive.org/web/20160119083607/http://robertreich.org/post/137454417985

#10yrsago Suspicious, photo-taking “Middle Eastern” men were visually impaired tourists https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/vancouver-mall-video-men-1.3406619

#5yrsago Fighting fiber was the right's dumbest self-own https://pluralistic.net/2021/01/17/turner-diaries-fanfic/#1a-fiber

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)

  • "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 (1045 words today, 9348 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

Read the whole story
mkalus
1 hour ago
reply
iPhone: 49.287476,-123.142136
Share this story
Delete

Pluralistic: Catch this! (16 Jan 2026) by Cory Doctorow
Saturday January 17th, 2026 at 11:27 AM

Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
1 Share


Today's links


A juggler, who is juggling email icons. Instant message icons are flying at him from all directions. In the background is a frantic scene from Bosch's 'Garden of Earthly Delights.'

Catch this! (permalink)

Call it "lifehacking," or just call it, "paying attention to how you stay organized" – I don't care what you call it, I am an ardent practitioner of it.

I like improving my processes because I like what I do, and the more efficient I am at all of it (with apologies to Jenny Odell), the more of that stuff I can get done:

https://memex.craphound.com/2019/04/09/how-to-do-nothing-jenny-odells-case-for-resisting-the-attention-economy/

I want to do a lot of stuff. I am one of those people who is ten miles wide and one inch deep (it probably has something to do with imbibing Heinlein's maxim that "specialization is for insects" at an impressionable age). There's a million waterways I want to dip my toe (or my oar) into, and the better organized I am, the more of that stuff I'll get to do before I kick off. I'm 54, and while there's a lot of road ahead of me, I can see the end, off there in the distance. It's coming, and I'm not done – I'm barely getting started.

I've been around lifehacking since the very moment it was born. I was there. I published the notes on Danny O'Brien's seminal 2004 talk at the O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference, "Life Hacks: Tech Secrets of Overprolific Alpha Geeks":

https://craphound.com/lifehacksetcon04.txt

In the years since, I've cultivated a small – but mighty – repertoire of organizational habits and tools that let me get a hell of a lot done. Weirdly, many of these tools are things that other people hate, and I can see why – they use them in very different ways from me. That's true of browser tabs (I loooove browser tabs):

https://pluralistic.net/2024/01/25/today-in-tabs/#unfucked-rota

And to-do lists, which will totally transform your life, once you realize that the most important to-do list is the one you maintain for everyone else who owes you a response, a package, or money:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/10/26/one-weird-trick/#todo

Other essential tools languish in neglect, artifacts of the old, good web – the elegant weapons that dominated a more civilized age. First among these? RSS readers:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/10/16/keep-it-really-simple-stupid/#read-receipts-are-you-kidding-me-seriously-fuck-that-noise

I will freely stipulate that people have a good reason to hate all this stuff. "Productivity porn" is often proffered as a mix of humblebrag (a way to make other people jealous of your almighty "productivity") and denial (fiddling with your systems is a ready substitute for actually doing things). Many (most?) of the foremost self-appointed pitchmen for "lifehacking" are cringey charlatans peddling "courses" and other nonsense.

But if you keep digging, there's a solid foundation beneath all the rot. At its very best, this stuff is a way to figure out what you really want to do, and to organize your life so that the stuff you want to do is the stuff you're doing.

A lot of people get into this kind of thing thinking it'll let them do everything. No one can do everything. The best you can hope for is to make conscious decisions about which stuff you'll never get to, while leaving at least a little room for serendipity.

Like I said, I want to do a lot of stuff. My organizing tactics are as much about deciding what I won't do as they are about deciding what I will do:

https://locusmag.com/feature/cory-doctorow-how-to-do-everything-lifehacking-considered-harmful/

Which brings me to another tool that everyone hates and I love: email. I live and die by email.

First of all, I filter all my incoming email: mail from people who are in my address book stays in my inbox; mail from people I've never heard from before goes into a mailbox called "People I don't know." When I reply to a message, Thunderbird adds the recipient to my address book, so the next time I hear from them, they'll stay in my main mailbox.

I also filter out anything containing the word "unsubscribe," sending it into a folder called "Unlikely" (but not if the message contains my name – which is how I can stay subscribed to mailing lists I don't have time to read and make sure to reply when someone mentions me).

Second of all, I have a zillion Quicktext macros that I use to reply to frequently asked questions. I have one that spits out my mailing address; another that spits out my bio; and others for politely saying no to things I don't have time for, for information about how to pay one of my invoices, etc, etc.

Third: I have a small folder of emails that I can't reply to right away (usually because I need some information from a third party), which I review every morning and answer anything that I can clear.

Finally, I save it all. I have so much saved email, which means that if you ask me about something from 20 years ago, there's a good chance I can find it – provided we organized it over email.

All of which explains why I refuse – to the extent that I can – to do anything important over instant messaging, whether that's Signal or any of the other messaging tools that come with social media, workplace software, etc.

I understand why people like instant messaging: it does not overwhelm you with the burdens of the past. It is largely ahistorical, with archives that are hard to access and search. Its norms and register are less formal than email.

And, of course, instant messaging is far superior to email in some contexts. If you're on vacation with friends, having a big group-chat where you can say, "I'm making dinner – is everyone OK with cheese?" is indispensable. Same goes for asking a friend for directions, announcing that you've arrived at someone's office, or confirming whether it's OK to substitute 2% for whole milk on a grocery run.

But if you're like me – if you've figured out how to do as many of the things that matter to you as you can possibly squeeze in, then getting an IM mid-flow is like someone walking up to a juggler who's working on a live chainsaw, a bowling ball, and a machete and tossing him a watermelon while shouting, "Hey, catch this!"

The problem is that if you are asking about something important, something that can't be instantaneously managed by the recipient, then they will have to drop everything they're doing and, at the very least, make a note to themselves to go back to your message later and deal with it. Instant messaging doesn't have an inbox with everything you've been sent. Of course, that's why people love it. But the fact that you can't see all the things other people are expecting you to answer doesn't mean that they aren't expecting it. It also doesn't mean that everything will be fine if you just ignore all those messages.

Instant messaging is a great tool for managing something that everyone is doing at the same time. It's also a nice way to keep an ambient social flow of updates from people in a rocking groupchat. But IM is fundamentally unserious. It is antithetical to the project of making a conscious decision about what you won't do, so that you do as many of the things that matter to you before you get to the end of the road.

A massive email inbox is intimidating, but switching to IMs doesn't make all the demands in the email go away. It just puts them out of sight until they either expire or explode. Far better to decide what balls you're going to drop than to have them knocked out of your hand by a fast-moving watermelon.

(Image: Mark James, CC BY 2.5, modified)

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 Teresa Nielsen Hayden’s formal excommunication from the Latter Day Saints https://web.archive.org/web/20010203204300/http://www.panix.com/~pnh/GodandI.html

#20yrsago King Foundation uses copyright to suppress “I Have a Dream” speech https://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/01/14/AR2006011400980.html

#20yrsago Firefly fans trying to raise enough dough to produce a new season https://web.archive.org/web/20060118033219/https://www.browncoatsriseagain.com/

#20yrsago New discussion draft of GNU General Public License is released https://gplv3.fsf.org/

#10yrsago “Late stage capitalism” is the new “Christ, what an asshole” https://x.com/mjg59/status/688238257935548416

#10yrsago Worried about Chinese spies, the FBI freaked out about Epcot Center https://www.muckrock.com/news/archives/2016/jan/14/fbi-epcot/

#10yrsago India’s Internet activists have a SOPA moment: no “poor Internet for poor people” https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/jan/15/india-net-neutrality-activists-facebook-free-basics

#5yrsago Pelosi kicks Katie Porter off the Finance Committee https://pluralistic.net/2021/01/16/speaker-willie-sutton/#swampgator

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)

  • "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 (1141 words today, 8278 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

Read the whole story
mkalus
1 hour ago
reply
iPhone: 49.287476,-123.142136
Share this story
Delete

Erika by Michael Kalus
Friday January 16th, 2026 at 2:16 PM

Uploads from Michael Kalus
1 Share

Michael Kalus posted a photo:

Erika



Read the whole story
mkalus
23 hours ago
reply
iPhone: 49.287476,-123.142136
Share this story
Delete

Pete by Michael Kalus
Friday January 16th, 2026 at 2:16 PM

Uploads from Michael Kalus
1 Share

Michael Kalus posted a photo:

Pete



Read the whole story
mkalus
23 hours ago
reply
iPhone: 49.287476,-123.142136
Share this story
Delete

Jeff by Michael Kalus
Friday January 16th, 2026 at 2:16 PM

Uploads from Michael Kalus
1 Share

Michael Kalus posted a photo:

Jeff



Read the whole story
mkalus
23 hours ago
reply
iPhone: 49.287476,-123.142136
Share this story
Delete

Kevin by Michael Kalus
Friday January 16th, 2026 at 2:15 PM

Uploads from Michael Kalus
1 Share

Michael Kalus posted a photo:

Kevin



Read the whole story
mkalus
23 hours ago
reply
iPhone: 49.287476,-123.142136
Share this story
Delete
Next Page of Stories