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I think I could do about 100 of these if there were a market for a McRib compilation and no such thing as copyright lawsuits.

Today's links

• Michael Swanwick's "The Universe Box": Short stories from a science fiction master at the top of his form.
• Hey look at this: Delights to delectate.
• Object permanence: DRM lobotomizes “human memory”; Crayola hex values; Tattoo artists copyright customers' bodies.
• 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.

Michael Swanwick's "The Universe Box" (permalink)

No one writes short stories like Michael Swanwick, the five-time Hugo-winning master of science fiction. To prove it, you need only pick up The Universe Box, Swanwick's just-published short story collection, a book representing one of the field's greatest writers at the absolute pinnacle of his game:

https://tachyonpublications.com/product/the-universe-box/

Science fiction has a long and honorable history with the short story. Sf is a pulp literature that was born in the pages of magazines specializing in short fiction and serials, and long after other genres had given up the ghost, sf remained steadfastly rooted in short form fiction. There are still, to this day, multiple sf magazines that publish short stories every month, on paper, and pay for it. I started my career as a short story writer, and continue to dabble in the form, but I have mostly moved onto novels.

That's a pretty common trajectory in sf, where – notwithstanding the field's status as a haven for the short story – the reach (and money) come from novels. But sf has always had a cohort of short fiction writers who are staunchly committed to the form: Harlan Ellison, Martha Soukup, Martha Wells, Ray Bradbury, Ted Chiang, James Tiptree Jr, Theodore Sturgeon, and, of course, Michael Swanwick.

It's a little weird, how sf serves as a powerful redoubt for short fiction. After all, sf is a genre in which everything is up for grabs: the reader can't assume anything about the story's setting, its era, the species of its characters. Time can run forwards, backwards, or in a loop. There can be gods and teleporters, faster-than-light drives and superintelligent machines. There can be aliens and space colonies.

All of that has to be established in the story. The most straightforward way to do this is, of course, through exposition. There's a commonplace (and wrong) notion that exposition is bad ("show, don't tell"). It's fairer to say that exposition is hard – dramatization is, well, dramatic, which makes it easier to engage the reader's attention. But great exposition is great and sf is a genre that celebrates exposition, done well:

https://maryrobinettekowal.com/journal/my-favorite-bit/my-favorite-bit-cory-doctorow-talks-about-the-bezzle/

The opposite of exposition is what Jo Walton calls "incluing," "the process of scattering information seamlessly through the text, as opposed to stopping the story to impart the information":

https://web.archive.org/web/20111119145140/http:/papersky.livejournal.com/324603.html

Incluing is a beautiful prose technique, but it makes the reader work. You have to pay close attention to all these subtle clues and build a web of inferences about the kind of world you've been plunged into. Incluing turns a story into a (wonderful and engaging) puzzle. It makes the aesthetic affect of short sf into something that's not so much a reverie as a high-engagement activity, a mystery whose solution is totally unbounded.

This is a terrific experience, but it is also work. Doing that kind of work as part of the process of consuming a 300-page novel is one thing, but trying to get the reader up to speed in a 7,000 word story and still have room left over for the story part is a big lift, and even the best writers end up asking a lot of the reader in their short stories. Sf shorts can be the "difficult jazz" of literature, a form and genre that requires – and rewards – very active attention.

(Incidentally, my favorite incluing example is Mark Twain's classic comedic short, "The Petrified Man":)

https://americanliterature.com/author/mark-twain/short-story/the-petrified-man/

But here's the thing. None of this applies to Swanwick. His stories use a mix of (impeccable) exposition and (subtle) incluing, and yet, there's never a moment in reading a Swanwick story where it feels like work. It's not merely that he's a gorgeous prose-smith whose sentences are each more surpassingly lovely than the last (though he is). Nor does he lack ambition: each of these stories has a more embroidered and outlandish premise than the last.

Somehow, though, he just slides these stories into your brain.

And what stories they are! They are, by turns, individually and in combination, slapstick, grave, horny, hilarious, surreal, disturbing and heartwarming. They have surprise endings and surprise middles and sometimes surprise beginnings (Swanwick does an opening paragraph like no one else).

This is what it means to read a short story collection from an absolute master at the absolute peak of his powers. He can slide you frictionlessly between Icelandic troll tragedies to lethal drone-leopard romantic agonies to battles of the gods and the cigar box that has the universe inside of it. All with the lyricism of Bradbury, the madcap wit of Sturgeon, the unrelenting weirdness of Dick, the heart of Tiptree and the precision of Chiang.

This is a book of worlds that each exist for just a handful of pages but occupy more space than those pages could possibly contain. It's a series of cigar boxes, each with the universe inside of it.

Hey look at this (permalink)

• U.S. Envoys Refused to Report "Apocalyptic" Conditions in Gaza. Exclusive Photos Show the Reality They Suppressed https://www.dropsitenews.com/p/northern-gaza-apocalyptic-wasteland-jack-lew-israeli-war-supressed

• To Avoid a Tax Hike, Billionaires Decide to Take Over California https://prospect.org/2026/02/02/billionaires-california-tax-hike/

• Mentioned in Hell’s Dispatches https://ftrain.com/mentioned-in-satans-dispatches

• MAGA's "People's Capitalism" https://www.unpopularfront.news/p/magas-peoples-capitalism

• The Onion’s Exclusive Interview With Pete Hegseth https://theonion.com/the-onions-exclusive-interview-with-pete-hegseth/

Object permanence (permalink)

#20yrsago Sony CD spyware vendor caves to EFF demands https://web.archive.org/web/20060208033113/https://www.eff.org/news/archives/2006_02.php#004378

#20yrsago British Library: DRM lobotomizes “human memory” http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/4675280.stm

#15yrsago Hex values for Crayola colors https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Crayola_crayon_colors

#15yrsago Michael Lewis explains the Irish econopocalypse https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2011/03/michael-lewis-ireland-201103?currentPage=all

#15yrsago Canada’s Internet rescued from weak and pathetic regulator https://web.archive.org/web/20110203054651/http://www.thestar.com/news/canada/article/932571–ottawa-threatens-to-reverse-crtc-decision-on-internet-billing

#10yrsago Tattoo artist asserts copyright over customers’ bodies https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/business/business-news/nba-2k-videogame-maker-sued-861131/

#10yrsago EU plans to class volunteers who rescue drowning Syrian refugees as “traffickers” https://www.statewatch.org/news/2016/january/refugee-crisis-council-proposals-on-migrant-smuggling-would-criminalise-humanitarian-assistance-by-civil-society-local-people-and-volunteers-greece-ngos-and-volunteers-have-to-register-with-the-police-and-be-vetted/

Upcoming appearances (permalink)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Recent appearances (permalink)

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

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

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

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

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

Latest books (permalink)

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

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

• "Picks and Shovels": a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about the heroic era of the PC, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), February 2025 (https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250865908/picksandshovels).

• "The Bezzle": a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about prison-tech and other grifts, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), February 2024 (thebezzle.org).

• "The Lost Cause:" a solarpunk novel of hope in the climate emergency, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), November 2023 (http://lost-cause.org).

• "The Internet Con": A nonfiction book about interoperability and Big Tech (Verso) September 2023 (http://seizethemeansofcomputation.org). Signed copies at Book Soup (https://www.booksoup.com/book/9781804291245).

• "Red Team Blues": "A grabby, compulsive thriller that will leave you knowing more about how the world works than you did before." Tor Books http://redteamblues.com.

• "Chokepoint Capitalism: How to Beat Big Tech, Tame Big Content, and Get Artists Paid, with Rebecca Giblin", on how to unrig the markets for creative labor, Beacon Press/Scribe 2022 https://chokepointcapitalism.com

Upcoming books (permalink)

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

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

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

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

Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources:

Currently writing: "The Post-American Internet," a sequel to "Enshittification," about the better world the rest of us get to have now that Trump has torched America (1053 words today, 20644 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.

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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

Elon Musk wants to merge his rocket company, SpaceX, with his AI company, xAI. Then he wants to take the combined company public on the stock exchange. [Reuters]

Musk previously combined X Corp — formerly Twitter — with xAI. That made no sense either — but Twitter was a mature corporation with no chance of a startup payday, while xAI was an AI bonfire for money. If you’re a vapor capitalist looking for a lottery ticket, a bonfire for money is very exciting!

SpaceX is a bit different. SpaceX has a lot of problems — its rockets keep blowing up — but the company lives off government contracts. It’s a load-bearing component of US national security. So for all its woes, SpaceX isn’t a company that can be allowed to fail.

SpaceX has made noises about going public and there are banks lined up for the deal. It’d be a huge IPO — SpaceX has a private valuation of $800 billion. But it’s not a ridiculous idea.

xAI’s financials are a bit too stupid to take it public: [Bloomberg, archive]

XAI reported a net loss of $1.46 billion for the September quarter, up from $1 billion in the first quarter, according to documents reviewed by Bloomberg. In the first nine months of the year, it spent $7.8 billion in cash.

There’s also talk that xAI is having trouble finding all the investor funding it needs to keep going.

But if Musk folds xAI into SpaceX,  then the real company the US relies on protects the bad AI company! Maybe.

Musk is talking some gibberish about AI data centres in space. SpaceX has filed plans to launch one million satellites, a completely ridiculous plan that rapidly leads to a chain reaction of space collisions and low earth orbit being filled with rings of broken debris, and no satellites at all for several years. But I’m sure the meteor showers will be pretty. [FCC]

SpaceX and xAI have investors. But the investors are all on board for the Musk meme stock train. They believe in Elon. So if Elon wants it, they’ll be cheering him on.

The other possible merger is SpaceX and Tesla. This makes no sense either, though some of the investors like the idea? And Tesla is already publicly listed, so that’d save some time on a new listing. They’d need shareholder approval, but most Tesla shareholders are also on board the Musk meme stock train. [Bloomberg, archive]

When do they want to take SpaceX public? They’re talking about June — because it’s in time for Elon’s birthday! That’s the sort of meme thinking we need! Apparently.

Update: Deal’s gone through. $250 billion, apparently (in private company equity exchanged for private company equity, valued at what the last sucker paid for a piece). [Press release, archive; Information, archive]

• Video — Podcast

Today's links

• Stock swindles: A buyback is not just a dividend by another name.
• Hey look at this: Delights to delectate.
• Object permanence: Acme License-Plate Maker; IPV4 delenda est; Mandatory gun-ownership; Sukey; Ross and Carrie x LRH; Criti-hype.
• 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.

Stock swindles (permalink)

There are plenty of American historical antecedents of Trumpism – fascist movements like the Jim Crow reign of terror, the McCarthy hearings, the gleeful genocide of indigenous people. But when you're thinking about the rise of Trumpism, never forget that America isn't just a nation of cruel bigots; it's also a nation of rich swindlers.

We call Trump a "reality TV star" and it's true, as far as it goes. Trump did play a billionaire on TV long before he grifted actual billions, using his status as the poor man's idea of a rich man to secure liar loans and rip off creditors, contractors, business partners, workers, and governments – local, state and federal.

He rose to power on this, boasting on stage that cheating "makes me smart":

https://pluralistic.net/2024/12/04/its-not-a-lie/#its-a-premature-truth

Like so many crooked officials, Trump's brand is "He steals, but he works" (except of course that he doesn't – at any given moment, odds are that he's either taking a nap, watching Fox News, or playing golf):

https://www.reddit.com/r/AskBalkans/comments/utui8s/in_romania_we_have_a_saying_about_corrupt/

Remember: the right is the movement that says that governments are inefficient and corrupt, so right wing elected leaders make their own case by being incompetent and corrupt. Someone like Trump has to convince people that they can't rely on institutions or their neighbors. His path to power lies through convincing people that the system is rigged and that he – as a man who is an expert at cheating – knows how to rig it in your favor:

https://www.factcheck.org/2016/07/trumps-rigged-claim/

But merely claiming "the system is rigged" doesn't actually win the day. If you want to convince people that the system is rigged, it really helps if the system is actually rigged. Want to convince people that elections are corrupt? Legalize unlimited dark money spending and fill our polling places with defective, unauditable voting machines made by Beltway Bandits selling into no-bid contracts:

https://web.archive.org/web/20210203113531/https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2021/02/03/voting-machines-election-steal-conspiracy-flaws/

Want to convince people that there's a shadowy cabal of rich pedophiles hiding children in a pizza parlor basement? It helps if there's an actual cabal of rich pedophiles hanging out on a private island, abusing more than a thousand children (and counting). Want to convince people that the financial system is a rigged casino so you might as well just gamble on cryptocurrency and betting markets? It helps if the actual financial system is run by banks who receive billions in public money and then steal millions of Americans' homes after Obama takes Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner's advice to "foam the runways" for the banks using Americans' houses:

https://keystoneky.com/article/all-we-can-do-is-put-foam-on-the-runway-tim-geithner-speaking-before-the-collapse-of-lehman/

Which is all to say, if you want to understand the origins of the surge of suckers for fascists who are desperate for a strong man to cheat on their behalf in a rigged system, it helps to look beyond racism and xenophobia, to the ways in which the system is, indeed, rigged. Racism and misogyny alone aren't enough to bring about fascism. To groom a nation of fascist patsies, you first need a crooked system:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/07/22/all-day-suckers/#i-love-the-poorly-educated

This is why it's worth understanding finance. The finance sector hides its sins behind the Shield of Boringness (h/t Claire Evans). The layers of overlapping jargon and performative complexity make it hard for everyday people to criticize the finance sector. Finance ghouls exploit this, leveraging confusing ambiguities in the system to insist that their critics don't know what they're talking about and that everything is fine, actually. This is an incredibly destabilizing dynamic. Living in a system where you're being fleeced every day but where people who seem smarter than you have reasonable-seeming explanations about why it's all legit and above-board is a recipe for abandoning all faith in the system, in experts, and in lawful processes, and throw your lot in with a strongman who promises to cheat on your behalf.

Take stock buybacks, a form of stock swindle that was illegal until 1982. In a stock buyback, a company buys its own shares on the open market. When the number of shares goes down, the price per share goes up. This is just a form of "wash-trading," like when NFT and shitcoin scammers buy their own products in order to make it look like they're valuable and desirable:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/09/06/computer-says-huh/#invisible-handcuffs

Advocates for markets as a system of allocation (as opposed to allocating via a democratically accountable state, say) insist that markets are efficient because prices "encode information" about the desirability, viability, and other qualities of goods and services. This is the whole argument for the new crop of rigged casinos we call "prediction markets" that are grooming the next generation of fascist footsoldiers by robbing them blind and then insisting that the whole process was not only legitimate, but scientific, a way to retrieve the "encoded information" about the world around us.

In a market system, stock prices are supposed to reflect the aggregated information about the health and prospects of a company. When a company buys its own stock back, though, its price goes up while its value goes down.

I mean that literally: say a company that's sitting on a billion dollars cash is valued at $10 billion. From this, we can infer that the company's capital stock (factories, inventory, etc), IP (patents, processes, copyrights, etc) and human capital (payrolled employees, contractors) are worth $9 billion. That's a reliable estimate, because we know exactly how much one billion dollars cash is worth: it's worth one billion dollars.

Now, let that company piss that billion dollars up the wall with a stock buyback. The company is relieved of its billion dollars cash on hand, leaving it with no cash, only its physical capital, IP and human capital, which are worth $9b. The company is now worth less than it was before the stock buyback.

What's more, the drop in corporate valuation is more than the billion the company just blew on its buyback. A company with no cash reserves is brittle and prone to failures. Without a cash cushion, any rent shock, change in market conditions, or other adverse incident will leave the company scrambling to borrow money (at punitive rates, thanks to its desperation) to weather the storm. If share prices are actually "encoding information" about a company's worth, a billion dollar buyback should lop more than a billion dollars off the company's share price. Instead, it sends the share price up.

This is just stock manipulation, which is why it was illegal until 1982. But apologists for this system will tell you that a stock buyback is just a dividend by another name – just another way for a company to return value to its shareholders, who, after all, are the owners of the company and entitled to extract those profits.

This is categorically untrue. Dividends do take money out of the company's coffers and distribute them to its shareholders, sure – but a dividend is a bet on the company's future success, which is why a company's share prices rise after a dividend is declared. Investors observe a company that is so well-run that it can afford to drain some of its cash reserves in favor of its shareholders, so they buy the company's stock in anticipation of more dividends derived from more skilled operations.

But imagine if a company parted with a dividend so large that it meant that the firm would struggle to keep its doors open in the coming year. Imagine a publisher, say, whose dividend was so large that it couldn't afford to pay advances for any more books in the next season, meaning it could only make money from the backlist titles it already had in the warehouse, but was entirely out of the running when it came to publishing next year's blockbuster book.

That dividend would not send investors chasing the company's stock. Why would you bet on a stock whose management had just doomed the company to a bad season, and maybe an unrecoverable death-spiral? Without new books to sell, the company won't have any cash to pay dividends, and when it stops paying dividends, its stock price will fall, leaving shareholders with a hole in their own balance-sheets.

Contrast that with buybacks: to do a buyback, the company need merely spend its free cash flow, or money it borrows, or money derived from the sale of key capital, or money saved through mass layoffs, to buy its own stock. Then the share price goes up.

In other words: when a company's stock price rises on news of a dividend, that's "encoding information" about the market's confidence in the company's management and its future growth. When a company's stock price rises on news of a buyback, that's "encoding information" about the market's confidence in the company's future looting to the point of collapse.

I used to think that this was the whole stock buyback story, but as is ever the case with finance, buybacks are fractally corrupt. This week, I've been reading Boston College law prof Ray D Madoff's book The Second Estate: How the Tax Code Made an American Aristocracy, and I've learned even more scummy truths about buybacks:

https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/S/bo256019296.html

For tax purposes, dividends are "ordinary income," meaning that they are taxed at up to 37%. Meanwhile, if you sell your shares after a stock buyback juices the price, the profits are treated as "capital gains," whose tax rate caps out at about half that (20%). This means that shareholders pay half the tax on money that comes from strip-mining a company than they would get from money derived from managing a company for sustainable growth.

It's worse than that, though, because capital gains can be offset by capital losses. If you invested in a stock that tanked, you can hold that stock in your portfolio until you are ready to sell a profitable stock, and deduct your losses from the gains you've made.

But you don't even have to sell the stock to realize tax-free income from it: the ultra-rich live according to a financial arrangement called "buy, borrow, die" that lets them avoid all taxes.

Here's how that works: if you're sitting on a bunch of stock, you can stake it as collateral for a loan that is tax-free. Better than that, if you're smart, some or all of the interest on that loan is tax-deductible. If you're rich enough, you don't have to make regular payments on the loan, either – you just wait as the stock continues to grow while your loan is maturing, and when it's due, you borrow even more money against the new valuation and pay off the old loan.

That's "buy" and "borrow." Here's "die." When you die, you transfer your assets to your kids, who benefit from something called the "step-up in basis," which lets them avoid all capital gains on the appreciated value of your assets.

Now, maybe you're thinking that you can benefit from this arrangement. I've got bad news for you: you won't qualify for one of those cool loans that you don't need to pay regularly! What's more, if you own any stock you almost certainly own it through a retirement plan like a 401(k), and when you cash out that 401(k), that is treated as "ordinary income" at nearly twice the rate that our plutocrat overlords pay.

Buybacks, then, are part of a system whereby rich people get much richer every time a company that makes something good and employs ordinary people guts itself and sets itself on the path to bankruptcy. Meanwhile, working people don't benefit from this system, even if they own stock. They just get to live in a world where businesses are looted and shuttered and public services are slashed thanks to balanced budget rules that mean that governments can't spend when rich people don't pay taxes.

This is why buybacks have apologists. Buybacks – a stock swindle that was illegal in living memory – make rich people richer, and they spend some of that loot to fund an army of reply-ghouls who push the message that buybacks are dividends by another name.

It's part of the ripoff economy that has seen crypto-billionaires lobby, bribe and terrorize lawmakers into merging their speculative assets with the real economy, endangering the economic well-being of everyday people:

https://www.levernews.com/what-tech-wants-crypto-reign-of-terror/

It's part of the ripoff economy that has seen AI bros put the global market in peril with crooked accounting and empty promises:

https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-enshittifinancial-crisis/

The ripoff economy is baked into the American experience. It is the foundation of Trumpism. It is the financial basis for things like "Project 2025" – literally! The Heritage Foundation (who created Project 2025) was founded and funded by the founders of Amway, a destructive Ponzi scheme that was rescued from criminal prosecution when Gerald Ford (Congressman to Amway's founders) became president and ordered the FTC to let them off the hook:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/05/05/free-enterprise-system/#amway-or-the-highway

Trump's right: the system is rigged. If you're going to pull the people you love back from the nihilistic descent into fascism, you have to be able to understand and explain how the rigging works. We can't insist – as Hillary Clinton did – that "America is already great":

https://www.politico.com/blogs/2016-dem-primary-live-updates-and-results/2016/03/clinton-america-is-already-great-220078

America is not great. It has been gutted by the Epstein class, who robbed us blind, raped our kids, and are now selling us shitcoins and chatbots and the spectacle of protesters being shot in the streets. But it's not enough to know that the system is rigged. Everybody knows the system is rigged. To build a movement and save our future, we have to know how it is rigged and who rigged it.

Hey look at this (permalink)

• Wherein I have some thoughts on food delivery apps https://www.dnalounge.com/backstage/log/2026/02/01.html

• A Letter On Justice And Open Debate About Raping Children https://www.popehat.com/p/a-letter-on-justice-and-open-debate-about-raping-children

• Impeach President Miller https://prospect.org/2026/01/31/impeach-president-miller/

• Google Settlement May Bring New Privacy Controls for Real-Time Bidding https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2026/01/google-settlement-may-bring-new-privacy-controls-real-time-bidding

• U.S. government has lost more than 10,000 STEM Ph.D.s since Trump took office https://www.science.org/content/article/u-s-government-has-lost-more-10-000-stem-ph-d-s-trump-took-office

Object permanence (permalink)

#25yrsago Acme License-Plate Maker https://www.acme.com/licensemaker/licensemaker.cgi?state=California&text=NSHITKN&plate=1987&r=943099606

#15yrsago Apple implements iStore changes, prohibits Sony from selling competing ebook app https://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/01/technology/01apple.html?_r=3

#15yrsago IPv4 is exhausted https://tech.slashdot.org/story/11/02/01/0036227/Last-Available-IPv4-Blocks-Allocated

#15yrsago Harper’s publisher rejects $50K worth of pledges, will lay off staff anyway https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSdDoZvxCvsax1zkMKANucBCQU8v-08tcw6VIDrtnmnqLY9I0A/viewform?formkey=dGdtbXUtNUV3cmtpaXJienJ5bldwcUE6MQ

#15yrsago South Dakota senator introduces mandatory gun-ownership law https://www.newser.com/story/111031/south-dakota-bill-every-adult-must-own-a-gun.html

#10yrsago UK Snooper’s Charter is so broad, no one can figure out what it means https://web.archive.org/web/20160202092111/https://motherboard.vice.com/read/tech-firms-are-unclear-on-new-uk-surveillance-laws-warns-government-committee

#5yrsago The good news about vaccination bad news https://pluralistic.net/2021/02/01/dinos-and-rinos/#mixed-news

#5yrsago Unidirectional entryism https://pluralistic.net/2021/02/01/dinos-and-rinos/#entryism

#15yrsago Inside Sukey the anti-kettling mobile app https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2011/feb/02/inside-anti-kettling-hq

#10yrsago Swatting attempted against Congresswoman who introduced anti-swatting bill https://www.bostonglobe.com/metro/2016/02/01/cops-swarm-rep-katherine-clark-melrose-home-after-apparent-hoax/yqEpcpWmKtN6bOOAj8FZXJ/story.html

#10yrsago A would-be clinic-bomber & friends are terrorizing a charter school for being too close to a future Planned Parenthood office https://web.archive.org/web/20160318235447/https://broadly.vice.com/en_us/article/inside-the-bizarre-war-anti-abortion-zealots-are-waging-against-school-kids

#10yrsago Ross and Carrie become Scientologists: an investigative report 5 years in the making https://ohnopodcast.com/investigations/2016/2/1/ross-and-carrie-audit-scientology-part-1-going-preclear

#10yrsago Exclusive: Snowden intelligence docs reveal UK spooks’ malware checklist https://memex.craphound.com/2016/02/02/exclusive-snowden-intelligence-docs-reveal-uk-spooks-malware-checklist/

#5yrsago The free market and rent-seeking https://pluralistic.net/2021/02/02/euthanize-rentiers/#poor-doors

#5yrsago Criti-Hype https://pluralistic.net/2021/02/02/euthanize-rentiers/#dont-believe-the-hype

Upcoming appearances (permalink)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Recent appearances (permalink)

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

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

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

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

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

Latest books (permalink)

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

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

• "Picks and Shovels": a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about the heroic era of the PC, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), February 2025 (https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250865908/picksandshovels).

• "The Bezzle": a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about prison-tech and other grifts, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), February 2024 (thebezzle.org).

• "The Lost Cause:" a solarpunk novel of hope in the climate emergency, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), November 2023 (http://lost-cause.org).

• "The Internet Con": A nonfiction book about interoperability and Big Tech (Verso) September 2023 (http://seizethemeansofcomputation.org). Signed copies at Book Soup (https://www.booksoup.com/book/9781804291245).

• "Red Team Blues": "A grabby, compulsive thriller that will leave you knowing more about how the world works than you did before." Tor Books http://redteamblues.com.

• "Chokepoint Capitalism: How to Beat Big Tech, Tame Big Content, and Get Artists Paid, with Rebecca Giblin", on how to unrig the markets for creative labor, Beacon Press/Scribe 2022 https://chokepointcapitalism.com

Upcoming books (permalink)

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

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

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

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

Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources:

Currently writing: "The Post-American Internet," a sequel to "Enshittification," about the better world the rest of us get to have now that Trump has torched America (1007 words today, 19588 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.

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