Today's links

• Disney has lost Roger Rabbit: Termination of Transfer is the most pro-artist form of copyright.
• Hey look at this: Delights to delectate.
• Object permanence: Why didn't AV apps block Sony's rootkit? Surveillance doesn't stop terror attacks; The last Pratchett; The true cost of terrorism.
• 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.

Disney has lost Roger Rabbit (permalink)

Gary K Wolf is the author of a fantastic 1981 novel called Who Censored Roger Rabbit? which Disney licensed and turned into an equally fantastic 1988 live action/animated hybrid movie called Who Framed Roger Rabbit? But despite the commercial and critical acclaim of the movie, Disney hasn't made any feature-length sequels.

This is a nightmare scenario for a creator: you make a piece of work that turns out to be incredibly popular, but you've licensed it to a kind of absentee landlord who owns the rights but refuses to exercise them. Luckily, the copyright system contains a provision designed to rescue creative workers who fall into this trap: "Termination of Transfer."

"Termination of Transfer" was introduced via the 1976 Copyright Act. It allows creators to unilaterally cancel the copyright licenses they have signed over to others, by waiting 35 years and then filing some paperwork with the US Copyright Office.

Termination is a powerful copyright policy, and unlike most copyright, it solely benefits creative workers and not our bosses. Copyright is a very weak tool for protecting creators' interests, because copyright only gives us something to bargain with, without giving us any bargaining power, which means that copyright becomes something we bargain away.

Think of it this way: for the past 50 years, copyright has only expanded in every direction. Copyright now lasts longer, covers more kinds of works, prohibits more uses without permission, and carries stiffer penalties. The media industry is now larger and more profitable than at any time in history. But at the same time, the amount of money being earned by creative workers has only fallen over this period, both in real terms (how much money an average creative worker brings home) and as a share of the total (what percentage of the revenues from a creator's work the creator gets to keep). How to explain this seeming paradox?

The answer lies in the structure of creative labor markets, which are brutally concentrated. Creative workers bargain with one of five publishers, one of four studios, one of three music labels, one of two app marketplaces, or just one company that controls all the ebooks and audiobooks.

The media industry isn't just a monopoly, in other words – it's also a monopsony, which is to say, a collection of powerful buyers. The middlemen who control access to our audiences have all the power, so when Congress gives creators new copyrights to bargain with, the Big Five (or Four, or Three, or Two, or One) just amend their standard, non-negotiable contract to require creators to sign those new rights over as a condition of doing business.

In other words, giving creative workers more rights without addressing their market power is like giving your bullied kid more lunch money. There isn't an amount of lunch money you can give that kid that will buy them lunch – you're just enriching the bullies. Do this for long enough and you'll make the bullies so rich they can buy off the school principal. Keep it up even longer and the bullies will hire an ad agency to run a global campaign bemoaning the plight of the hungry schoolkids and demanding that they be given more lunch money:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/08/21/what-is-chokepoint-capitalism/

This is an argument that Rebecca Giblin and I develop in our 2022 book Chokepoint Capitalism: How Big Tech and Big Content Captured Creative Labor Markets and How We'll Win Them Back:

https://www.beacon.org/Chokepoint-Capitalism-P1856.aspx

Rebecca is a law professor who is, among other things, one of the world's leading experts on Termination of Transfer, who co-authored the definitive study on the use of Termination since the 1976 Copyright Act, and the many ways this has benefited creators at the expense of media companies:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/09/26/take-it-back/

Remember, Termination is one of the only copyright policies that solely benefits creative workers. Under Termination, a media company can force you to sign away your rights in perpetuity, but you can still claim those rights back after 35 years. Termination isn't just something to bargain away, it's a new power to bargain with.

The history of how Termination got into the 1976 Copyright Act is pretty gnarly. The original text of the Termination clause made Termination automatic, after 25 years. That would have meant that every quarter century, every media company would have to go hat in hand to every creative worker whose work was still selling and beg them to sign a new contract. If your original contract stank (say, because you were just starting your career), you could demand back-payment to make up for the shitty deal you'd been forced into, and if your publisher/label/studio wouldn't cough up, you could take your work somewhere else and bargain from a position of strength, because you'd be selling a sure thing – a work that was still commercially viable after 25 years!

Automatic termination would also solve the absentee landlord problem, where a media company was squatting on your rights, keeping your book or album in print (or these days, online), but doing nothing to promote them and refusing to return the rights to you so you could sell them to some who saw the potential in your old works.

Naturally, the media industry hated this, so they watered down Termination. Instead of applying after 25 years, it now applies after 35 years. Instead of being automatic, it now requires requires creators to go through red tape at the Copyright Office.

But that wasn't enough for the media companies. In 1999, an obscure Congressional staffer named Mitch Glazier slipped a rider into the Satellite Home Viewer Improvement Act that ended Termination of Transfer for musicians. Musicians really need Termination, since record deals were and are so unconscionable and one-sided. The bill passed without anyone noticing:

https://www.wired.com/2000/08/rule-reversal-blame-it-on-riaa/

Musicians got really pissed about this, and so did Congress, who'd been hoodwinked by this despicable pismire. Congress actually convened a special session just to delete Glazier's amendment, and Glazier left his government job under a cloud.

But Glazier wasn't unemployed for long. Within three months, he'd been installed as the CEO of the Recording Industry Association of America, a job he has held ever since, where he makes over $1.3 million/year:

https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/organizations/131669037

I recently got a press release signed by Glazier, supporting Disney and Universal's copyright suit against Midjourney, in which begins, "There is a clear path forward through partnerships":

https://www.riaa.com/riaa-statement-on-midjourney-ai-litigation/

In other words, Glazier doesn't want these lawsuits to get rid of Midjourney and protect creative workers from the threat of AI – he just wants the AI companies to pay the media companies to make the products that his clients will use to destroy creators' livelihoods. He wants there to be a new copyright that allows creators to decide whether their work can be used to train AI models, and then he wants that right transferred to media companies who will sell to to AI companies in a bid to stop paying artists:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/10/19/gander-sauce/#just-because-youre-on-their-side-it-doesnt-mean-theyre-on-your-side

US Copyright has always acknowledged the tension between creators' rights and the rights of publishers, studios, labels and other media companies that buy creators' works. The original US copyright lasted for 14 years, and could be renewed for another 14 years, but only by the creator (not by the publisher). This meant that if a work was still selling after 14 years, the publisher would have to convince the writer to renew the copyright, or the work would go into the public domain.

This was in an era in which writers were typically paid a flat fee for their work, so from a writer's perspective, it didn't matter if the publisher made any money from subsequent sales of their books, or whether the book entered the public domain so that anyone could sell it. The writer made the same amount either way: zero.

Copyright's original 14 year renewal was a way for creative labor markets to look back and address historic injustices. If your publisher underpaid you 14 years ago, you could demand that they make good on their moral obligation to you, and if they refused, you could punish them by putting the work into the public domain.

Termination has been a huge boon to artists of all description from Stephen King to Ann M Martin, creator of The Babysitters' Club. One of my favorite examples is funk legend George Clinton, whose shitweasel manager forged his signature on a contract and stole his royalties for decades (the reason Clinton is still touring isn't merely that he's an unstoppable funk god, but because he's broke). Clinton eventually gave up on suing his ex-manager and instead just filed for Termination of Transfer:

https://www.billboard.com/pro/george-clinton-lawsuit-ex-agent-music-rights/

If that sounds familiar, it may be because I used it as the basis for a subplot in my novel The Bezzle:

https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250865878/thebezzle/

Back to Roger Rabbit. Author Gary K Wolf has successfully filed for Termination of Transfer, meaning he's recovered the rights to Roger Rabbit and the other characters from his novel:

https://www.imnotbad.com/2025/11/roger-rabbit-copyright-reverts-to.html

He discusses his plans for a sequel starring Jessica Rabbit in this interview with "I'm Not Bad TV":

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L_0lUiplxZk

Writing about the termination for Boing Boing, Ruben Bolling wonders what this means for things like the Roger Rabbit ride at Disneyland, and the ongoing distribution of the film:

https://boingboing.net/2025/11/17/disney-loses-the-rights-to-roger-rabbit-characters-as-they-revert-to-original-author-of-novel.html

It's not clear to me what the answer is but my guess is that Disney will have to offer Wolf enough money that he agrees to keep the film in distribution and the ride running. Which is the point: when you sell your work for film adaptation, no one know if it's going to be a dud or a classic. Termination is copyright's lookback, a way to renegotiate the deal once you've gotten the leverage that comes from success.

If you have a work you signed away the copyright for 35 years or more ago, here is a tool from Creative Commons and the Authors Alliance for terminating the transfer and getting your rights back (disclosure: I am an unpaid member of the Authors Alliance advisory board):

https://rightsback.org/

(Image: Ken Lund, CC BY-SA 2.0, modified)

Hey look at this (permalink)

• NZ Supreme Court says Uber drivers are employees https://www.courtsofnz.govt.nz/assets/cases/2025/MR-2025-NZSC-162.pdf

• Excellence over mediocrity, from Mamdani to Marx to food https://coreyrobin.com/2025/11/15/excellence-over-mediocrity-from-mamdani-to-marx-to-food/

• Google is collecting troves of data from downgraded Nest thermostats https://www.theverge.com/news/820600/google-nest-learning-thermostat-downgraded-data-collection

Object permanence (permalink)

#20yrsago Amazon offers refunds for all Sony rootkit CDs https://craphound.com/amznxmpsonycd.txt

#20yrsago Uninstaller for Sony’s other malware screws up your PC https://blog.citp.princeton.edu/2005/11/17/not-again-uninstaller-iotheri-sony-drm-also-opens-huge-security-hole/

#20yrsago Schneier: Why didn’t anti-virus apps defend us against Sony’s rootkit? https://web.archive.org/web/20051124121434/https://www.wired.com/news/print/0,1294,69601,00.html

#20yrsago Sony still advising public to install rootkits https://web.archive.org/web/20051124053020/https://cp.sonybmg.com/xcp/english/howtouse.html

#15yrsago Hilarious story of disastrous cross-country move with dogs https://hyperboleandahalf.blogspot.com/2010/11/dogs-dont-understand-basic-concepts.html

#15yrsago UK gov’t promises to allow telcos to hold Brits hostage on “two-speed” Internet https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-11773574

#15yrsago Sexually assaulted by a TSA groper https://web.archive.org/web/20101116004124/https://www.ourlittlechatterboxes.com/2010/11/tsa-sexual-assault.html

#10yrsago Former ISIS hostage: they want us to retaliate https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/nov/16/isis-bombs-hostage-syria-islamic-state-paris-attacks?CMP=share_btn_tw

#10yrsago There is no record of US mass surveillance ever preventing a large terror attack https://theintercept.com/2015/11/17/u-s-mass-surveillance-has-no-record-of-thwarting-large-terror-attacks-regardless-of-snowden-leaks/

#10yrsago The final Pratchett: The Shepherd’s Crown https://memex.craphound.com/2015/11/17/the-final-pratchett-the-shepherds-crown/

#10yrsago DRM in TIG welders https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b6mlr_MX2VI

#10yrsago We treat terrorism as more costly than it truly is https://timharford.com/2015/11/nothing-to-fear-but-fear-itself/

#10yrsago David Cameron capitulates to terror, proposes Britain’s USA Patriot Act https://web.archive.org/web/20151117154831/https://thestack.com/security/2015/11/16/cameron-draft-investigatory-powers-bill-timetable-paris/

#5yrsago Storage Wars https://pluralistic.net/2020/11/17/u-stor-it/#nyc

#5yrsago Cross-Media Sci-Fi with Amber Benson and John Rogers https://pluralistic.net/2020/11/17/u-stor-it/#asl

Upcoming appearances (permalink)

• London: Downstream IRL with Zack Polanski, Ash Sarkar, and Aaron Bastani (Novara Media), Nov 17
  https://dice.fm/partner/tickets/event/oen5rr-downstream-irl-aaron-bastani-in-conversation-with-cory-doctorow-17th-nov-earth-london-tickets

• London: Enshittification with Carole Cadwalladr (Frontline Club), Nov 18
  https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/in-conversation-enshittification-tickets-1785553983029

• Virtual: Enshittification at the Internet Archive, Nov 21
  https://www.eventbrite.com/e/book-talk-enshittification-tickets-1839608451399

• Virtual: Enshittification with Vass Bednar (Vancouver Public Library), Nov 21
  https://www.crowdcast.io/@bclibraries-present

• Toronto: Jailbreaking Canada (OCAD U), Nov 27
  https://www.ocadu.ca/events-and-exhibitions/jailbreaking-canada

• San Diego: Enshittification at the Mission Hills Branch Library, Dec 1
  https://libraryfoundationsd.org/events/doctorow

• Seattle: Neuroscience, AI and Society (University of Washington), Dec 4
  https://www.eventbrite.com/e/neuroscience-ai-and-society-cory-doctorow-tickets-1735371255139

• Madison, CT: Enshittification at RJ Julia, Dec 8
  https://rjjulia.com/event/2025-12-08/cory-doctorow-enshittification

• Hamburg: Chaos Communications Congress, Dec 27-30
  https://events.ccc.de/congress/2025/infos/index.html

Recent appearances (permalink)

• Enshittification with danah boyd and Lee Vinsel (Peoples & Things)
  https://newbooksnetwork.com/cory-doctorow-on-enshittification-why-everything-suddenly-got-worse-and-what-to-do-about-it

• Enshittification and Extraction: The Internet Sucks Now, with Tim Wu (Oxford Internet Institute)
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CkYxMQJ9c94

• Working it out: Job security in the AI era (Web Summit)
  https://websummit.com/summaries/lis25/working-it-out-job-security-in-the-ai-era/

• How to dis-Enshittify the world (Blood In the Machine)
  https://www.bloodinthemachine.com/p/how-to-dis-enshittify-the-world-with

• Reimagining Digital Public Infrastructure (Attention: Govern Or Be Governed)
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F8JuXDfDtBY

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 (the-bezzle.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, 2026

Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources:

Currently writing:

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

• A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING

This work – excluding any serialized fiction – is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license. That means you can use it any way you like, including commercially, provided that you attribute it to me, Cory Doctorow, and include a link to pluralistic.net.

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"When life gives you SARS, you make sarsaparilla" -Joey "Accordion Guy" DeVilla

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Click here to go see the bonus panel!

Hovertext:
Do what I want, not what I said.

Pre-orders for my new book Sawyer Lee and the Quest to Just Stay Home have begun!

Sawyer Lee is an illustrated middle grade novel starring an unadventurous kid who'd rather dig a deep dent in the couch than make a mark on the world, as many in his illustrious family of astronauts, scientists, spies, champion athletes... blah blah blah... have. He has decided that after generations of effort, it’s time to spend one lifetime relaxing. 

The problem is that Sawyer keeps getting caught up in the exhausting expectations of his wicked aunt Celia, his complex relationship with his ambitious other friend, Angela, and the shenanigans of every else in town hoping to win the yearly Gourd Thump festival celebrating nature’s dullest vegetable.

In this tale of mystery, treachery, conspiracy, plant husbandry, and an imaginary love triangle, Sawyer knows it will take a regrettable amount of energy to escape these entanglements and find a way back to his happy place on Gary’s couch, with a cozy throw blanket, a steaming mug of chamomile tea, and an empty schedule.

You can check out the first chapter here along with pre-order links!

Click here to go see the bonus panel!

Hovertext:
The worst part of selfless robotic servants is going to be how happy they are.

Pre-orders for my new book Sawyer Lee and the Quest to Just Stay Home have begun!

Sawyer Lee is an illustrated middle grade novel starring an unadventurous kid who'd rather dig a deep dent in the couch than make a mark on the world, as many in his illustrious family of astronauts, scientists, spies, champion athletes... blah blah blah... have. He has decided that after generations of effort, it’s time to spend one lifetime relaxing. 

The problem is that Sawyer keeps getting caught up in the exhausting expectations of his wicked aunt Celia, his complex relationship with his ambitious other friend, Angela, and the shenanigans of every else in town hoping to win the yearly Gourd Thump festival celebrating nature’s dullest vegetable.

In this tale of mystery, treachery, conspiracy, plant husbandry, and an imaginary love triangle, Sawyer knows it will take a regrettable amount of energy to escape these entanglements and find a way back to his happy place on Gary’s couch, with a cozy throw blanket, a steaming mug of chamomile tea, and an empty schedule.

You can check out the first chapter here along with pre-order links!

Click here to go see the bonus panel!

Hovertext:
This isn't the only high risk high reward pickup line, but it is the one that involves the most tentacles.

Pre-orders for my new book Sawyer Lee and the Quest to Just Stay Home have begun!

Sawyer Lee is an illustrated middle grade novel starring an unadventurous kid who'd rather dig a deep dent in the couch than make a mark on the world, as many in his illustrious family of astronauts, scientists, spies, champion athletes... blah blah blah... have. He has decided that after generations of effort, it’s time to spend one lifetime relaxing. 

The problem is that Sawyer keeps getting caught up in the exhausting expectations of his wicked aunt Celia, his complex relationship with his ambitious other friend, Angela, and the shenanigans of every else in town hoping to win the yearly Gourd Thump festival celebrating nature’s dullest vegetable.

In this tale of mystery, treachery, conspiracy, plant husbandry, and an imaginary love triangle, Sawyer knows it will take a regrettable amount of energy to escape these entanglements and find a way back to his happy place on Gary’s couch, with a cozy throw blanket, a steaming mug of chamomile tea, and an empty schedule.

You can check out the first chapter here along with pre-order links!

Online survey research, a fundamental method for data collection in many scientific studies, is facing an existential threat because of large language models, according to new research published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS). The author of the paper, associate professor of government at Dartmouth and director of the Polarization Research Lab Sean Westwood, created an AI tool he calls "an autonomous synthetic respondent,” which can answer survey questions and “demonstrated a near-flawless ability to bypass the full range” of “state-of-the-art” methods for detecting bots. 

According to the paper, the AI agent evaded detection 99.8 percent of the time.

"We can no longer trust that survey responses are coming from real people," Westwood said in a press release. "With survey data tainted by bots, AI can poison the entire knowledge ecosystem.”

Survey research relies on attention check questions (ACQs), behavioral flags, and response pattern analysis to detect inattentive humans or automated bots. Westwood said these methods are now obsolete after his AI agent bypassed the full range of standard ACQs and other detection methods outlined in prominent papers, including one paper designed to detect AI responses. The AI agent also successfully avoided “reverse shibboleth” questions designed to detect nonhuman actors by presenting tasks that an LLM could complete easily, but are nearly impossible for a human. 

“Once the reasoning engine decides on a response, the first layer executes the action with a focus on human mimicry,” the paper, titled “The potential existential threat of large language models to online survey research,” says. “To evade automated detection, it simulates realistic reading times calibrated to the persona’s education level, generates human-like mouse movements, and types open-ended responses keystroke by-keystroke, complete with plausible typos and corrections. The system is also designed to accommodate tools for bypassing antibot measures like reCAPTCHA, a common barrier for automated systems.”

The AI, according to the paper, is able to model “a coherent demographic persona,” meaning that in theory someone could sway any online research survey to produce any result they want based on an AI-generated demographic. And it would not take that many fake answers to impact survey results. As the press release for the paper notes, for the seven major national polls before the 2024 election, adding as few as 10 to 52 fake AI responses would have flipped the predicted outcome. Generating these responses would also be incredibly cheap at five cents each. According to the paper, human respondents typically earn $1.50 for completing a survey.

Westwood’s AI agent is a model-agnostic program built in Python, meaning it can be deployed with APIs from big AI companies like OpenAI, Anthropic, or Google, but can also be hosted locally with open-weight models like LLama. The paper used OpenAI’s o4-mini in its testing, but some tasks were also completed with DeepSeek R1, Mistral Large, Claude 3.7 Sonnet, Grok3, Gemini 2.5 Preview, and others, to prove the method works with various LLMs. The agent is given one prompt of about 500 words which tells it what kind of persona to emulate and to answer questions like a human. 

The paper says that there are several ways researchers can deal with the threat of AI agents corrupting survey data, but they come with trade-offs. For example, researchers could do more identity validation on survey participants, but this raises privacy concerns. Meanwhile, the paper says, researchers should be more transparent about how they collect survey data and consider more controlled methods for recruiting participants, like address-based sampling or voter files.

“Ensuring the continued validity of polling and social science research will require exploring and innovating research designs that are resilient to the challenges of an era defined by rapidly evolving artificial intelligence,” the paper said.

Today's links

• The games industry's self-induced traumatic brain injury: Amnesia is video games' default state.
• Hey look at this: Delights to delectate.
• Object permanence: Sony DRM nonpology; Misprinted prefab houses; Canada's repair law can't be fixed; BNL's USB-stick release; Pornoscanners vs pleats; The Internet will always suck.
• 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.

The games industry's self-induced traumatic brain injury (permalink)

Words have power. In 1991, I read "The Wonderful Power of Storytelling," the transcript of Bruce Sterling's keynote speech for that year's Game Developers Conference in San Jose, CA, and within a year, I'd dropped out of university to become a programmer:

https://bruces.medium.com/the-wonderful-power-of-storytelling-by-bruce-sterling-1991-9d2846c2c5df

Bruce's speech wasn't the only reason I dropped out, but it's certainly been the most durable, and I frequently return to it in my mind as I navigate the difficult and turbulent waters of art and technology. In particular, I've had much cause to ponder Sterling's ideas about the very weird way that game developers relate to their art-form's history:

My art, science fiction writing, is pretty new as literary arts go, but it labors under the curse of three thousand years of literacy. In some weird sense I’m in direct competition with Homer and Euripides. I mean, these guys aren’t in the SFWA, but their product is still taking up valuable rack-space. You guys on the other hand get to reinvent everything every time a new platform takes over the field. This is your advantage and your glory. This is also your curse. It’s a terrible kind of curse really…

…A lot of our art aspires to the condition of software, our art today wants to be digital… But our riches of information are in some deep and perverse sense a terrible burden to us. They’re like a cognitive load. As a digitized information-rich culture nowadays, we have to artificially invent ways to forget stuff. I think this is the real explanation for the triumph of compact disks…

…The real advantage of CDs is that they allow you to forget all your vinyl records. You think you love this record collection that you’ve amassed over the years. But really the sheer choice, the volume, the load of memory there is secretly weighing you down…

…By dumping the platform you dump everything attached to the platform and my god what a blessed secret relief. What a relief not to remember it, not to think about it, not to have it take up disk-space in your head…

…I’ve noticed though that computer game designers don’t look much to the past. All their idealized classics tend to be in reverse, they’re projected into the future. When you’re a game designer and you’re waxing very creative and arty, you tend to measure your work by stuff that doesn’t exist yet…

… I can see that it’s very seductive, but at the same time I can’t help but see that the ground is crumbling under your feet. Every time a platform vanishes it’s like a little cultural apocalypse…

…I can imagine a time when all the current platforms might vanish, and then what the hell becomes of your entire mode of expression?

Even by the high standards of a Bruce Sterling keynote, this is a very good one, and Sterling does that amazing thing where he's iterating different ways of making this point, examining it from every angle, and it makes it hard ro excerpt it for an article like this. I mean, you should just go and read the whole thing and then come back, honestly:

https://bruces.medium.com/the-wonderful-power-of-storytelling-by-bruce-sterling-1991-9d2846c2c5df

But the reason I quote those specific excerpts above is because of what they say about the strange terror and exhilaration of working without history, of inhabiting a world shorn of all object permanence. This was a very live question in those days. In 1993, Wired's Jargon Watch column ran a definition for "Pickling":

Archiving a working model of a computer to read data stored in that computer's format. Apple Computer has pickled a shrink-wrapped Apple II in a vault so that it can read Apple II software, perhaps in the not-too-distant future.

https://www.wired.com/1993/05/jargon-watch-12/

In 1996, Brewster Kahle founded the Internet Archive, with the mission to save every version of every web-page, ever, forever. Today, the Archive holds more than a trillion pages:

https://blog.archive.org/trillion/

Digital media are paradoxical: on the one hand, nothing is easier to copy than bits. That's all a computer does, after all: copy things. What's more mass storage gets cheaper and faster and smaller every year, on a curve that puts Moore's Law to shame.

After dropping out of university, I got a job programming multimedia CD ROMs for The Voyager Company, and they sent me my first 1GB drive, which was the size of a toaster, weighed 3lbs and cost $4,000.

30 years later, I've just upgraded my laptop's SDD from 2TB to 4TB: it cost less than $300, and is both the size and weight of a stick of gum. It's 4,000 times larger, at least 10,000 times faster, is 98% lighter, and cost 97% less.

We can store a hell of a lot of data for not very much money. And at that price, we can back it up to hell and back: I rotate two backup drives at home, keeping one off-site and swapping them weekly; I also have another drive I travel with and do a daily backup on. Parts of my data are also backed up online to various cloud systems that are, themselves, also backed up.

And while drives do fail, drives that are attached to computers that people use every day tend to fail gracefully in that their material defects typically make themselves felt over time, giving ample warning (at least for attentive users) that it's time to replace them.

Given the spectacular improvements in mass storage, there's also no problem migrating data from one system to the next. Back in the 1990s, I stored a ton of my data offline and near-line, on fragile media like floppies, Zip cartridges and DAT cassettes. I pretty much never conducted a full inventory of these disks, checking to see if they were working, much less transferring them to new media. That meant that at every turn, there was the possibility that the media would have rotted; and with every generation, there was the possibility that I wouldn't be able to source a working drive that was capable of reading the old media.

But somewhere in there, storage got too cheap to meter. I transferred all those floppies – including some Apple ][+ formatted 5.25" disks I'd had since the early 1980s – to a hard drive, which was subsequently transferred to a bigger hard drive (which, paradoxically, was much smaller!) and thence to another bigger (and smaller) drive and so on, up to the 4TB drive that's presently about 7mm beneath my fingers as I type these words.

This data may not be immortal, but it's certainly a lot more loss-resistant than any comparable tranche of data in human history.

Data isn't the whole story, of course. To use the data, you have to be able to open it in a program. There, too, the problems of yesteryear have all but vanished. First came the interoperable programs, which reverse-engineered these file formats so they could be read and written with increasing fidelity to the programs they were created in:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/06/adversarial-interoperability-reviving-elegant-weapon-more-civilized-age-slay

But then came the emulators and APIs that could simply run the old programs on new hardware. After all, computers are always getting much faster, which means that simulating a computer that's just a few years old on modern hardware is pretty trivial. Indeed, you can simulate multiple instances of the computer I wrote CD ROMs for Voyager on inside a browser window…on your phone:

https://infinitemac.org/1996/System%207.5.3

Which meant that, for quite some time, Bruce's prophecy of games living in an eternal ahistorical now, an art form whose earlier works are all but inaccessible, was dead wrong. Between emulators (MAME) and API reimplementations (WINE), a gigantic amount of gaming history has been brought back and preserved.

What's more, there's a market for this stuff. Companies like Good Old Games have gone into business licensing and reviving the games people love. But it keeps getting harder, because of a mix of "Digital Rights Management" (the "copy-protection" that games companies pursue with a virulence that borders on mania) and the difficulty of tracking down rightsholders:

https://www.pcgamer.com/games/just-in-case-you-thought-reviving-dead-games-seemed-easy-enough-gog-had-to-hire-a-private-investigator-to-find-an-ip-holder-living-off-the-grid-for-its-preservation-program/

And doing this stuff without permission is a fraught business, because the big games companies hate games preservation and wage vicious war on their own biggest fans to stamp it out:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/11/21/wrecking-ball/#ssbm

Which means that the games preservation effort is coming full circle, back to Bruce Sterling's 1991 description of "the ground crumbling under your feet"; of an endless series of "little cultural apocalypses."

It doesn't have to be this way. The decades since Bruce's talk proved that games can and should be preserved, that artists and their audiences need to continue to access these works even if the companies that make them would rather "reinvent everything every time a new platform takes over the field" and not have to be "in direct competition with Homer and Euripides."

The "Stop Killing Games" consumer movement is trying to save the library that games publishers have been trying to burn down since the 1990s:

https://www.stopkillinggames.com/

They're currently hoping to get games preservation built into the new EU "Digital Fairness" Act:

https://ec.europa.eu/info/law/better-regulation/have-your-say/initiatives/14622-Digital-Fairness-Act

It's a good tactical goal. After all, it's manifestly "unfair" to charge you money for a game and then take the game away later, whether that's because you don't want to pay to keep the servers on (or let someone else run them), or because you don't want the old game to exist in order to coerce your customers into buying a new one.

Or both.

No matter the reason, there is nothing good about the games industry's decades-long project of erasing its own past. It's bad for gamers, it's bad for game developers, and it's bad for games. No art form can exist in a permanent, atemporal now, with its history erased as quickly as it's created.

(Image: Erica Fischer, CC BY 2.0, modified)

Hey look at this (permalink)

• The EU has let US tech giants run riot. Diluting our data law will only entrench their power https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/nov/12/eu-gdpr-data-law-us-tech-giants-digital

• chud atlantis https://www.tumblr.com/mcmansionhell/800217589248819200/chud-atlantis

• Copyright Winter is Coming (to Wikipedia?) https://authorsalliance.substack.com/p/copyright-winter-is-coming-to-wikipedia

• Lina Khan Stays Remarkably on Message on ‘The Adam Friedland Show’ https://gizmodo.com/lina-khan-stays-remarkably-on-message-on-the-adam-friedland-show-2000685642

• CSI Fall 2025 Catalog https://csi.asu.edu/catalog-fall-2025/

Object permanence (permalink)

#20yrsago 5000 music cylinders digitized and posted https://cylinders.library.ucsb.edu/

#20yrsago Girl who didn’t do homework put on street with WILL WORK FOR FOOD sign https://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/11/16/AR2005111601926.html

#20yrsago Sony rootkit roundup, part II https://memex.craphound.com/2005/11/16/sony-rootkit-roundup-part-ii/

#20yrsago Sony CDs banned in the workplace https://memex.craphound.com/2005/11/16/sony-cds-banned-in-the-workplace/

#20yrsago Sony waits 3 DAYS to withdraw dangerous “uninstaller” for its rootkit https://web.archive.org/web/20051124053710/https://cp.sonybmg.com/xcp/english/uninstall.html

#20yrsago Student folds paper 12 times! https://web.archive.org/web/20051102085038/https://www.pomonahistorical.org/12times.htm

#20yrsago Barenaked Ladies release album on USB stick https://web.archive.org/web/20051124234734/http://www.bnlmusic.com/news/default.asp

#20yrsago Latest Sony news: 100% of CDs with rootkits, mainstream condemnation, retailers angry https://memex.craphound.com/2005/11/15/latest-sony-news-100-of-cds-with-rootkits-mainstream-condemnation-retailers-angry/

#20yrsago Sony disavows lockware patent https://web.archive.org/web/20051126133522/https://www.playfuls.com/news_3827.html

#20yrsago Sony infects more than 500k networks, including military and govt https://web.archive.org/web/20051231222014/http://www.doxpara.com/?q=/node/1129

#20yrsago Sony’s spyware “remover” creates huge security hole https://blog.citp.princeton.edu/2005/11/15/sonys-web-based-uninstaller-opens-big-security-hole-sony-recall-discs/

#20yrsago Sony issues non-apology for compromising your PC https://web.archive.org/web/20051124053248/http://cp.sonybmg.com/xcp/

#20yrsago Sory Electronics: Will Sony make amends for infecting our computers? https://web.archive.org/web/20051124203930/http://soryelectronics.com/

#15yrsago UK gov’t wants to legalize racial profiling https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2010/nov/15/stop-and-search-equality-commission

#15yrsago Canadian writers’ group issues FUD warnings about new copyright bill https://web.archive.org/web/20101117004549/http://www.michaelgeist.ca/content/view/5445/125/

#15yrsago Misprinted prefab houses https://zeitguised.wordpress.com/2010/11/08/concrete-misplots/

#15yrsago WWI-era photos of people pretending to be patriotic pixels https://web.archive.org/web/20101124060200/https://www.hammergallery.com/images/peoplepictures/people

#15yrsago Steampunk bandwidth gauge https://web.archive.org/web/20101118071250/https://blog.skytee.com/2010/11/torrentmeter-a-steampunk-bandwidth-meter/

#15yrsago UK gov’t apologizes for decades of secret nuclear power industry corpse-mutilation https://web.archive.org/web/20101119171708/http://uk.reuters.com/article/idUKTRE6AF4CT20101116

#15yrsago Understanding COICA, America’s horrific proposed net-censorship bill https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2010/11/case-against-coica

#15yrsago London cops shut down anti-police website; mirrors spring up all over the net https://www.theguardian.com/education/2010/nov/16/web-advice-students-avoid-arrest

#15yrsago TSA tee: “We get to touch your junk” https://web.archive.org/web/20101119090103/http://skreened.com/oped/junk-search

#15yrsago Indie Band Survival Guide: soup-to-nuts, no-BS manual for 21st century artistic life https://memex.craphound.com/2010/11/16/indie-band-survival-guide-soup-to-nuts-no-bs-manual-for-21st-century-artistic-life/

#15yrsago New aviation risk: pleats https://web.archive.org/web/20101118015618/http://www.thelocal.de/sci-tech/20101116-31209.html

#10yrsago How scientists trick themselves (and how they can prevent it) https://www.nature.com/articles/526182a

#10yrsago Is Batman’s evidence admissible in court? https://lawandthemultiverse.com/2015/11/16/batman-constitution-how-gotham-da-convict-criminals/

#10yrsago Hello From the Magic Tavern: hilarious, addictive improv podcast https://memex.craphound.com/2015/11/16/hello-from-the-magic-tavern-hilarious-addictive-improv-podcast/

#10yrsago The Internet will always suck https://locusmag.com/feature/cory-doctorow-the-internet-will-always-suck/

#10yrsago How terrorists trick Western governments into doing their work for them https://web.archive.org/web/20151119044939/http://gawker.com/terrorism-works-1678049997

#5yrsago Youtube-dl is back https://pluralistic.net/2020/11/16/pill-mills/#yt-dl

#5yrsago HHS to pharma: stop bribing writing docs https://pluralistic.net/2020/11/16/pill-mills/#oig

#5yrsago The Attack Surface Lectures https://pluralistic.net/2020/11/16/pill-mills/#asl

#1yrago Canada's ground-breaking, hamstrung repair and interop laws https://pluralistic.net/2024/11/15/radical-extremists/#sex-pest

Upcoming appearances (permalink)

• London: Downstream IRL with Zack Polanski, Ash Sarkar, and Aaron Bastani (Novara Media), Nov 17
  https://dice.fm/partner/tickets/event/oen5rr-downstream-irl-aaron-bastani-in-conversation-with-cory-doctorow-17th-nov-earth-london-tickets

• London: Enshittification with Carole Cadwalladr (Frontline Club), Nov 18
  https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/in-conversation-enshittification-tickets-1785553983029

• Virtual: Enshittification at the Internet Archive, Nov 21
  https://www.eventbrite.com/e/book-talk-enshittification-tickets-1839608451399

• Virtual: Enshittification with Vass Bednar (Vancouver Public Library), Nov 21
  https://www.crowdcast.io/@bclibraries-present

• Toronto: Jailbreaking Canada (OCAD U), Nov 27
  https://www.ocadu.ca/events-and-exhibitions/jailbreaking-canada

• San Diego: Enshittification at the Mission Hills Branch Library, Dec 1
  https://libraryfoundationsd.org/events/doctorow

• Seattle: Neuroscience, AI and Society (University of Washington), Dec 4
  https://www.eventbrite.com/e/neuroscience-ai-and-society-cory-doctorow-tickets-1735371255139

• Madison, CT: Enshittification at RJ Julia, Dec 8
  https://rjjulia.com/event/2025-12-08/cory-doctorow-enshittification

• Hamburg: Chaos Communications Congress, Dec 27-30
  https://events.ccc.de/congress/2025/infos/index.html

Recent appearances (permalink)

• Enshittification with danah boyd and Lee Vinsel (Peoples & Things)
  https://newbooksnetwork.com/cory-doctorow-on-enshittification-why-everything-suddenly-got-worse-and-what-to-do-about-it

• Enshittification and Extraction: The Internet Sucks Now, with Tim Wu (Oxford Internet Institute)
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CkYxMQJ9c94

• Working it out: Job security in the AI era (Web Summit)
  https://websummit.com/summaries/lis25/working-it-out-job-security-in-the-ai-era/

• How to dis-Enshittify the world (Blood In the Machine)
  https://www.bloodinthemachine.com/p/how-to-dis-enshittify-the-world-with

• Reimagining Digital Public Infrastructure (Attention: Govern Or Be Governed)
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F8JuXDfDtBY

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 (the-bezzle.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, 2026

Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources:

Currently writing:

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

• A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING

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