Whether a journalist or painter, creative people always find themselves in the same predicament. The best ideas come when they least expect; not when it’s forced or one is pressured to find a quick solution. It’s just human nature. One could be in the shower or lying in bed, as the adages go. For musicians – pianists as much as songwriters – it’s no different. An idea of a melody or lyric pops up out of the blue and has to be captured for safekeeping and later review. Rudimentary smartphone apps and voice memos can only go so far in accommodating that need or fully facilitating the experience.

Designed by Korean up-and-comer Woojin Yang, Everglow is a handheld mini-keyboard that fits into any bag. The “musical sketchbook” of sorts allows artists to quickly jot down ideas when they’re not in front of their instruments or computers. The sleekly-designed device comes with a generative AI-based sound system that allows them to iterate and develop a song on the spot, not just transcribe the initial tune.

“It’s all about capturing the emotion and nuance of the moment,” Yang says. There’s also a lot more freedom in not always having to open up a full computer set up, or even a laptop for that matter. What’s more, there aren’t hundreds of additional functions that can distract and ultimately let the spark of inspiration pass.

The pared-back, triangulated instrument – reflecting the fundamental modulated configuration of a traditional piano-forte – has much more variability than it might seem at first. Comprising a full octave, Everglow’s keys are sensitive and adaptive to the touch. When one slides upward while holding a key, the built-in pressure sensor detects the movement, allowing them to control velocity and adjust FX levels. Move left or right, the sensor registers the motion enabling half-step pitch shifts.

“This design enhances both visual form and tactile clarity,” Yang adds. “It offers new expressive options for keyboard players and familiar physical feedback for guitarists, supporting different composition styles based on each instrument.”

Emulating the physical play of a guitar as well, Everglow’s keys are not limited to individual notes. When multiples are touched horizontally, a strumming function is activated allowing it to be played back during chord performances. AI comes into the picture and adds additional harmonies, those it generates or that were previously recorded.

Though compact, Everglow can be used to develop ever-elaborate cumulative compositions. Everything is backed up on the accompanying Companion App. Exported files are compatible with most software. And no idea is left unrecorded.

To learn more about the designer’s device, visit behance.net.

Photos courtesy of Woojin Jang.

Today's links

• Europe takes a big step towards a post-dollar world: Recapturing $24t worth of transactions from Visa/Mastercard.
• Hey look at this: Delights to delectate.
• Object permanence: API for Congress; Steampunk fetish mask; Hillary x AOL login screen; Suffragist Valentines; Musk x Intuit vs the American people.
• 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.

Europe takes a big step towards a post-dollar world (permalink)

There's a reason every decentralized system eventually finds its way onto a platform: platforms solve real-world problems that platform users struggle to solve for themselves.

I've written before about the indie/outsider author Crad Kilodney, who wrote, edited, typeset and published chapbooks of his weird and wonderful fiction, and then sold his books from Toronto street-corners with a sign around his neck reading VERY FAMOUS CANADIAN AUTHOR BUY MY BOOKS (or, if he was feeling spicy, simply: MARGARET ATWOOD):

https://pluralistic.net/2024/02/19/crad-kilodney-was-an-outlier/#intermediation

Crad was a hell of a writer and a bit of a force of nature, but there are plenty of writers I want to hear from who are never going to publish their own books, much less stand on a street-corner selling them with a MARGARET ATWOOD sign around their necks. Publishers, editors, distributors and booksellers all do important work, allowing writers to get on with their writing, taking all the other parts of the publishing process off their shoulders.

That's the value of platforms. The danger of platforms is when they grow so powerful that they usurp the relationship between the parties they are supposed to be facilitating, locking them in and then extracting value from them (someone should coin a word to describe this process!):

https://pluralistic.net/2024/11/07/usurpers-helpmeets/#disreintermediation

Everyone needs platforms: writers, social media users, people looking for a romantic partner. What's more, the world needs platforms. Say you want to connect all 200+ countries on Earth with high-speed fiber lines; you can run a cable from each country to every other country (about 21,000 cables, many of them expensively draped across the ocean floor), or you can pick one country (preferably one with both Atlantic and Pacific coasts) and run all your cables there, and then interconnect them.

That's America, the world's global fiber hub. The problem is, America isn't just a platform for fiber interconnections – it's a Great Power that uses its position at the center of the world's fiber networks to surveil and disrupt the world's communications networks:

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

That's a classic enshittification move on a geopolitical scale. It's not the only one America's made, either.

Consider the US dollar. The dollar is to global commerce what America's fiber head-ends are to the world's data network: a site of essential, (nominally) neutral interchange that is actually a weapon that the US uses to gain advantage over its allies and to punish its enemies:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/10/10/weaponized-interdependence/#the-other-swifties

The world's also got about 200 currencies. For parties in one country to trade with those in another country, the buyer needs to possess a currency the seller can readily spend. The problem is that setting up 21,000 pairwise exchange markets from every currency to every other currency is expensive and cumbersome – traders would have to amass reserves of hundreds of rarely used currencies, or they would have to construct long, brittle, expensive, high-risk chains that convert, say, Thai baht into Icelandic kroner to Brazilian reals and finally into Costa Rican colones.

Thanks to a bunch of complicated maneuvers following World War II, the world settled on the US dollar as its currency platform. Most important international transactions use "dollar clearing" (where goods are priced in USD irrespective of their country of origin) and buyers need only find someone who will convert their currency to dollars in order to buy food, oil, and other essentials.

There are two problems with this system. The first is that America has never treated the dollar as a neutral platform; rather, American leaders have found subtle, deniable ways to use "dollar dominance" to further America's geopolitical agenda, at the expense of other dollar users (you know, "enshittification"). The other problem is that America has become steadily less deniable and subtle in these machinations, finding all kinds of "exceptional circumstances" to use the dollar against dollar users:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/11/26/difficult-multipolarism/#eurostack

America's unabashed dollar weaponization has been getting worse for years, but under Trump, the weaponized dollar has come to constitute an existential risk to the rest of the world, sending them scrambling for alternatives. As November Kelly says, Trump inherited a poker game that was rigged in his favor, but he still flipped over the table because he resents having to pretend to play at all:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/01/26/i-dont-want/#your-greenback-dollar

Once Trump tried to steal Greenland, it became apparent that the downsides of the dollar far outweigh its upsides. Last month, Christine Lagarde (president of the European Central Bank) made a public announcement on a radio show that Europe "urgently" needed to build its own payment system to avoid the American payment duopoly, Visa/Mastercard:

https://davekeating.substack.com/p/can-europe-free-itself-from-visamastercard

Now, there's plenty of reasons to want to avoid Visa/Mastercard, starting with cost: the companies have raised their prices by more than 40% since the pandemic started (needless to say, updating database entries has not gotten 40% more expensive since 2020). This allows two American companies to impose a tax on the entire global economy, collecting swipe fees and other commissions on $24t worth of the world's transactions every year:

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/europe-banks-launching-product-break-101215642.html

But there's another reason to get shut of Visa/Mastercard: Trump controls them. He can order them to cut off payment processing for any individual or institution that displeases him. He's already done this to punish the International Criminal Court for issuing a genocide arrest warrant for Benjamin Netanyahu, and against a Brazilian judge for finding against the criminal dictator Jair Bolsonaro (Trump also threatened to have the judge in Bolsonaro's case assassinated). What's more, Visa/Mastercard have a record of billions (trillions?) of retail transactions taking place between non-Americans, which Trump's officials can access for surveillance purposes, or just to conduct commercial espionage to benefit American firms as a loyalty bonus for the companies that buy the most $TRUMP coins.

Two days after Lagarde's radio announcement, 13 European countries announced the formation of "EuroPA," an alliance that will facilitate regionwide transactions that bypass American payment processors (as well as Chinese processors like Alipay):

https://news.europawire.eu/european-payment-leaders-sign-mou-to-create-a-sovereign-pan-european-interoperable-payments-network/eu-press-release/2026/02/02/15/34/11/168858/

As European Business Magazine points out, EuroPA is the latest in a succession of attempts to build a European payments network:

https://europeanbusinessmagazine.com/business/europes-24-trillion-breakup-with-visa-and-mastercard-has-begun/

There's Wero, a 2024 launch from the 16-country European Payments Initiative, which currently boasts 47m users and 1,100 banks in Belgium, France and Germany, who've spent €7.5b through the network:

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/europe-banks-launching-product-break-101215642.html

Wero launched as a peer-to-peer payment system that used phone numbers as identifiers, but it expanded into retail at the end of last year, with several large retailers (such as Lidl) signing on to accept Wero payments.

Last week, Wero announced an alliance with EuroPA, making another 130m people eligible to use the service, which now covers 72% of the EU and Norway. They're rolling out international peer-to-peer payments in 2026, and retail/ecommerce payments in 2027.

These successes are all the more notable for the failures they follow, like Monnet (born 2008, died 2012). Even the EPI has been limping along since its founding, only finding a new vigor on the heels of Trump threatening EU member states with military force if he wasn't given Greenland.

As EBM writes, earlier efforts to build a regional payment processor foundered due to infighting among national payment processors within the EU, who jealously guarded their own turf and compulsively ratfucked one another. This left Visa/Mastercard as the best (and often sole) means of conducting cross-border commerce. This produced a "network effect" for Visa/Mastercard: since so many Europeans had an American credit card in their wallets, European merchants had to support them; and since so many EU merchants supported Visa/Mastercard, Europeans had to carry them in their wallets.

Network effects are pernicious, but not insurmountable. The EU is attacking this problem from multiple angles – not just through EuroPA, but also through the creation of the Digital Euro, a Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC). Essentially, this would give any European who signs up an account with the ECB, the federal bank of the Eurozone. Then, using an app or a website, any two Digital Euro customers could transfer funds to one another using the bank's own ledgers, instantaneously and at zero cost.

EBM points out that there's a critical difficulty in getting EuroPA off the ground: because it is designed to be cheap to use, it doesn't offer participating banks the windfall profits that Visa/Mastercard enjoy, which might hold back investment in EuroPA infrastructure.

But banks are used to making small amounts of money from a lot of people, and with the Digital Euro offering a "public option," the private sector EuroPA system will have a competitor that pushes it to continuously improve its systems.

It's true that European payment processing has been slow and halting until now, but that was when European businesses, governments and households could still pretend that the dollar – and the payment processing companies that come along with it – was a neutral platform, and not a geopolitical adversary.

If there's one thing the EU has demonstrated over the past three years, it's that geopolitical threats from massive, heavily armed mad empires can break longstanding deadlocks. Remember: Putin's invasion of Ukraine and the end of Russian gas moved the EU's climate goals in ways that beggar belief: the region went from 15 years behind on its solar rollout to ten years ahead of schedule in just a handful of months:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/02/05/contingency/#this-too-shall-pass

This despite an all-out blitz from the fossil fuel lobby, one of the most powerful bodies in the history of civilization.

Crises precipitate change, and Trump precipitates crises.

Hey look at this (permalink)

• Killing in the name of… nothing https://www.theverge.com/policy/849609/charlie-kirk-shooting-ideology-literacy-politics

• Best gas masks https://www.theverge.com/policy/868571/best-gas-masks

• As Was The Style At The Time: How We Became Cruel https://www.oblomovka.com/wp/2026/02/09/as-was-the-style-at-the-time-how-we-became-cruel/

• Remove Your Ring Camera With a Claw Hammer https://www.hamiltonnolan.com/p/remove-your-ring-camera-with-a-claw

• The truth about covering tech at Bezos’s Washington Post https://geoffreyfowler.substack.com/p/washington-post-layoffs-bezos-tech-reporting

Object permanence (permalink)

#15yrsago Realtime API for Congress https://web.archive.org/web/20110211101723/http://sunlightlabs.com/blog/2011/the-real-time-congress-api/

#15yrsago Steampunk fetish mask with ear-horn https://bob-basset.livejournal.com/156159.html

#10yrsago Facebook’s “Free Basics” and colonialism: an argument in six devastating points https://web.archive.org/web/20160211182436/https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2016/02/facebook-and-the-new-colonialism/462393/

#10yrsago UK surveillance bill condemned by a Parliamentary committee, for the third time https://web.archive.org/web/20250523013320/https://www.wired.com/story/technology-ip-bill-surveillance-committee/

#10yrsago Haunted by a lack of young voter support, Hillary advertises on the AOL login screen https://web.archive.org/web/20160211080839/http://www.weeklystandard.com/hillary-reaches-base-with-aol-login-page-ad/article/2001023

#10yrsago Celebrate V-Day like an early feminist with these Suffragist Valentines https://web.archive.org/web/20160216100606/https://www.lwv.org/blog/votes-women-vintage-womens-suffrage-valentines

#10yrsago Elements of telegraphic style, 1928 https://writeanessayfor.me/telegraph-office-com

#10yrsago Disgraced ex-sheriff of LA admits he lied to FBI, will face no more than 6 months in prison https://web.archive.org/web/20160211041117/https://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-ln-ex-l-a-county-sheriff-baca-jail-scandal-20160210-story.html

#5yrsago Apple puts North Dakota on blast https://pluralistic.net/2021/02/11/rhodium-at-2900-per-oz/#manorial-apple

#5yrsago Catalytic converter theft https://pluralistic.net/2021/02/11/rhodium-at-2900-per-oz/#ccscrap

#5yrsago Adam Curtis on criti-hype https://pluralistic.net/2021/02/11/rhodium-at-2900-per-oz/#hypernormal

#5yrsago Dependency Confusion https://pluralistic.net/2021/02/11/rhodium-at-2900-per-oz/#extra-index-url

#1yrago Musk steals a billion dollars from low-income Americans and sends it to Intuit https://pluralistic.net/2025/02/11/doubling-up-on-paperwork/#rip-freefile

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)

• Panopticon :3 (Trashfuture)
  https://www.patreon.com/posts/panopticon-3-150395435

• America's Enshittification is Canada's Opportunity (Do Not Pass Go)
  https://www.donotpassgo.ca/p/americas-enshittification-is-canadas

• Everything Wrong With the Internet and How to Fix It, with Tim Wu (Ezra Klein)
  https://www.nytimes.com/2026/02/06/opinion/ezra-klein-podcast-doctorow-wu.html

• 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/

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)

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

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

• "The Post-American Internet," a geopolitical sequel of sorts to Enshittification, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2027

• "Unauthorized Bread": a middle-grades graphic novel adapted from my novella about refugees, toasters and DRM, FirstSecond, 2027

• "The Memex Method," Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2027

Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources:

Currently writing: "The Post-American Internet," a sequel to "Enshittification," about the better world the rest of us get to have now that Trump has torched America (1027 words today, 26735 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

America, it’s time to refamiliarize yourself with Ring. 

At Sunday’s Super Bowl, Ring advertised “Search Party,” a cute, horrifyingly dystopian feature nominally designed to turn all of the Ring cameras in a neighborhood into a dragnet that uses AI to look for a lost dog: “One post of a dog’s photo in the Ring app starts outdoor cameras looking for a match,” Ring founder Jamie Siminoff said in the Super Bowl commercial. “Search Party from Ring uses AI to help families find lost dogs.” Onscreen, an AI-powered box forms around a missing dog: “Milo Match,” it says. “Since launch, more than a dog a day has been reunited with their family. Be a hero in your neighborhood with Search Party. Available to everyone for free right now.”

It does not take an imagination of any sort to envision this being tweaked to work against suspected criminals, undocumented immigrants, or others deemed ‘suspicious’ by people in the neighborhood. Many of these use cases are how Ring has been used by people on its dystopian “Neighbors” app for years. Ring rose to prominence as a piece of package theft prevention tech owned by Amazon and by forming partnerships with local police around the country, asking them to shill their doorbell cameras to people in their neighborhoods in return for a system that allowed police to request footage from individual users without a warrant. 

Chris Gilliard, a privacy expert and author of the upcoming book Luxury Surveillance, told 404 Media these features and its Super Bowl ad are “a clumsy attempt by Ring to put a cuddly face on a rather dystopian reality: widespread networked surveillance by a company that has cozy relationships with law enforcement and other equally invasive surveillance companies.”

Unlike, say, data analytics giant Palantir or some other high-profile surveillance companies, Ring is a surveillance network that homeowners have by and large deployed themselves, powered by fear mongering against our neighbors and unfettered consumerism.

After a lot of criticism in the late 2010s over its police contracts and its terrible security settings that resulted in hackers breaking into a series of indoor Ring cameras to terrorize children and families, Ring somehow found a way to more or less fly under the radar the last few years as a critical part of our ever-expanding surveillance state. It did this by scaling back police partnerships that were so critical to its growth but that received lots of scrutiny from journalists and privacy advocates. Siminoff left Ring in 2023, but returned last year; in his absence, Ring explicitly sought to take on a softer tone by branding itself as more or less as a device that could be used to film viral moments on people’s porches. It turned its owners into mini cops who would complain about delivery people who didn’t drop a package in the correct spot; who became hyperaware of the comings and goings of their friends, spouses, and children, or who might catch a potentially sharable moment when someone slipped on an icy porch or whatever. Part of this strategy included creating a short-lived reality TV show called Ring Nation, which consisted of precious little moments filmed through Ring cameras.

The days of big, bulky, often ominously dark-toned stereo equipment are numbered. This heavy-equipment can only really be concealed behind complex furniture within a wall to ‘function’ on an aesthetic level. Turning these unsightly devices into aesthetically pleasing statement pieces are brands like Danish Audiophile Loudspeaker Industries (DALI).

The multifaceted company’s systemized speaker products – KORE and EPIKORE – bring advanced performance to domestic environments but in sleekly contoured and soberly finished forms that take on the qualities of timeless furniture.

Packing a punch, the new KUPID Hi-Fi delivers comparable quality but in a more compact, easy to use, and sells for a lot less. Available as a pair for $600, the 6 x 10-inch device can sit almost anywhere: atop a desk, bookshelf, or side table.

It comes in varying yet versatile finishes: Dark Walnut, Black Ash, Caramel White, Golden Yellow, and Chilly Blue. Its slightly beveled edges, color-matched bass/midrange cones, and grilles are its only stylistic flexes. Though evidently pared back and Scandinavian in visual resolve, it has a slightly soft, even corporeal quality.

“KUPID is about simplicity and sound” says Krestian Pedersen, Dali Head of Product Management “It’s for anyone who wants a real Hi-Fi experience without any fuss. We’ve poured everything we know about speaker design into a form factor that’s easy to live with and easy to love. KUPID is designed to fit in, stand out and make the most of your music.”

The smaller but mighty loudspeaker doesn’t come in endless variation like some comparable products; features often shrouded in complex insider jargon. Everything is straight forward. The advanced tech beneath its near-monolithic shell includes DALI’s proprietary 4 1⁄2-inch paper and wood fiber bass/midrange driver and ferrite magnet system. KUPID’s low-loss rubber surround ensures quick, tight bass, as well as a dynamic midrange.

Delivering detailed, extended highs – no not that type of paraphernalia – the 26mm ultra-light soft dome tweeter has smooth dispersion and minimal distortion. KUPID is amplifier-optimized, easy to plug-in, compatible with the latest generation computers, bluetooth enabled and easily wall-mountable.

No one has to rely on feeble portable speaker or convoluted systems that take up half a living room anymore.

To shop the collection of cool, collectible speakers, visit dali-speakers.com.

Photography provided by DALI.

Today's links

• The Nuremberg Caucus: What do Democrats have to lose?
• Hey look at this: Delights to delectate.
• Object permanence: Bradbury x LA monorails; Red Cross vs first aid kits; Wyden on CIA Senate spying; Coates x Sanders; Nerdy Valentines; Duke U, trademark troll; "The Murder Next Door."
• 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 Nuremberg Caucus (permalink)

America's descent into authoritarian fascism is made all the more alarming and demoralizing by the Democrats' total failure to rise to the moment:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KADW3ZRZLVI

But what would "rising to the moment" look like? What can the opposition party do without majorities in either house? Well, they could start by refusing to continue to fund ICE, a masked thug snatch/murder squad that roams our streets, killing with impunity:

https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/congress/house-passes-sprawling-spending-package-democrats-split-ice-funding-rcna255273

That's table stakes. What would a real political response to fascism look like? Again, it wouldn't stop with banning masks for ICE goons, or even requiring them to wear QR codes:

https://gizmodo.com/dem-congressman-wants-to-make-ice-agents-wear-qr-codes-2000710345

Though it should be noted that ICE hates this idea, and that ICE agents wear masks because they fear consequences for their sadistic criminality:

https://archive.is/0LNh8

This despite the fact that the (criminally culpable) Vice President has assured them that they have absolute impunity, no matter who they kill:

https://edition.cnn.com/2026/01/08/politics/ice-immunity-jd-vance-minneapolis

The fact that ICE agents worry about consequences despite Vance's assurances suggests ways that Dems could "meet the moment."

I think Dems should start a Nuremberg Caucus, named for the Nazi war-crimes trials that followed from the defeat of German fascists and the death of their leader:

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

What would this caucus do? Well, it could have a public website where it assembled and organized the evidence for the trials that the Democrats could promise to bring after the Trump regime falls. Each fresh outrage, each statement, each video-clip – whether of Trump officials or of his shock-troops – could be neatly slotted in, given an exhibit number, and annotated with the criminal and civil violations captured in the evidence.

The caucus could publish dates these trials will be held on – following from Jan 20, 2029 – and even which courtrooms each official, high and low, will be tried in. These dates could be changed as new crimes emerge, making sure the most egregious offenses are always at the top of the agenda. Each trial would have a witness list.

The Nuremberg Caucus could vow to repurpose ICE's $75b budget to pursue Trump's crimes, from corruption to civil rights violations to labor violations to environmental violations. It could announce its intent to fully fund the FTC and DoJ Antitrust Division to undertake scrutiny of all mergers approved under Trump, and put corporations on notice that they should expect lengthy, probing inquiries into any mergers they undertake between now and the fall of Trumpism. Who knows, perhaps some shareholders will demand that management hold off on mergers in anticipation of this lookback scrutiny, and if not, perhaps they will sue executives after the FTC and DoJ go to work.

While they're at it, the Nuremberg Caucus could publish a plan to hire thousands of IRS agents (paid for by taxing billionaires and zeroing out ICE's budget) who will focus exclusively on the ultra-wealthy and especially any supernormal wealth gains coinciding with the second Trump presidency.

Money talks. ICE agents are signing up with the promise of $50k hiring bonuses and $60k in student debt cancellation. That's peanuts. The Nuremberg Caucus could announce a Crimestoppers-style program with $1m bounties for any ICE officer who a) is themselves innocent of any human rights violations, and; b) provides evidence leading to the conviction of another ICE officer for committing human rights violations. That would certainly improve morale for (some) ICE officers.

Critics of this plan will say that this will force Trump officials to try to steal the next election in order to avoid consequences for their actions. This is certainly true: confidence in a "peaceful transfer of power" is the bedrock of any kind of fair election.

But this bunch have already repeatedly signaled that they intend to steal the midterms and the next general election:

https://www.nj.com/politics/2026/02/top-senate-republican-rejects-trumps-shocking-election-plan-i-think-thats-a-constitutional-issue.html

ICE agents are straight up telling people that ICE is on the streets to arrest people in Democratic-leaning states ("The more people that you lose in Minnesota, you then lose a voting right to stay blue"):

https://unicornriot.ninja/2026/federal-agent-in-coon-rapids-the-more-people-that-you-lose-in-minnesota-you-then-lose-a-voting-right-to-stay-blue/

The only path to fair elections – and saving America – lies through mobilizing and energizing hundreds of millions of Americans. They are ready. They are begging for leadership. They want an electoral choice, something better than a return to the pre-Trump status quo. If you want giant crowds at every polling place, rising up against ICE and DHS voter-suppression, then you have to promise people that their vote will mean something.

Dems have to pick a side. That means being against anyone who is for fascism – including other Dems. The Nuremberg Caucus should denounce the disgusting child abuse perpetrated by the Trump regime:

https://www.propublica.org/article/life-inside-ice-dilley-children

But they should also denounce Democrats who vote to fund that abuse:

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politics/fetterman-shutdown-dhs-ice-senate-b2916350.html

The people of Minneapolis (and elsewhere) have repeatedly proven that we outnumber fascists by a huge margin. Dems need to stop demoralizing their base by doing nothing and start demonstrating that they understand the urgency of this crisis.

Hey look at this (permalink)

• Prescription: Social Media https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k7_GTts4XTY&t=114s

• ENIAC Day Celebration https://www.helicoptermuseum.org/event-details/eniac-day-celebration

• Matrix is quietly becoming the chat layer for governments chasing digital sovereignty https://www.theregister.com/2026/02/09/matrix_element_secure_chat/

• The Children of Dilley https://www.propublica.org/article/life-inside-ice-dilley-children

• Martin Shkreli Had a Point https://lpeproject.org/blog/martin-shkreli-had-a-point/

Object permanence (permalink)

#20yrsago Ray Bradbury: LA needs monorails! https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2006-feb-05-op-bradbury5-story.html

#20yrsago How statistics caught Indonesia’s war-criminals https://web.archive.org/web/20060423232814/https://www.wired.com/news/technology/1,70196-0.html

#20yrsago Canadian Red Cross vows to sue first aid kits, too https://memex.craphound.com/2006/02/10/canadian-red-cross-vows-to-sue-first-aid-kits-too/

#20yrsago Sports announcer traded for Walt Disney’s first character https://web.archive.org/web/20060312134156/http://sports.yahoo.com/nfl/news?slug=ap-nbc-michaels&prov=ap&type=lgns

#15yrago Government transparency doesn’t matter without accountability https://www.theguardian.com/technology/blog/2011/feb/10/government-data-crime-maps

#10yrsago Hackers stole 101,000 taxpayers’ logins/passwords from the IRS https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2016/02/irs-website-attack-nets-e-filing-credentials-for-101000-taxpayers/

#10yrsago CIA boss flips out when Ron Wyden reminds him that CIA spied on the Senate https://www.techdirt.com/2016/02/10/cia-director-freaks-out-after-senator-wyden-points-out-how-cia-spied-senate/

#10yrsago Ta-Nehisi Coates will vote for Bernie Sanders, reparations or no reparations https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mSJmxN-L300

#10yrsago Gmail will warn you when your correspondents use unencrypted mail transport https://blog.google/products-and-platforms/products/gmail/making-email-safer-for-you-posted-by/

#10yrsago Detoxing is (worse than) bullshit: high lead levels in “detox clay” https://www.statnews.com/2016/02/02/detox-clay-fda-lead/

#10yrsago Nerdy Valentines to print and love https://www.evilmadscientist.com/2016/valentines-4/

#5yrsago A criminal enterprise with a country attachedhttps://pluralistic.net/2021/02/10/duke-sucks/#openlux

#5yrsago Tory donors reap 100X return on campaign contributions https://pluralistic.net/2021/02/10/duke-sucks/#chumocracy

#5yrsago Duke is academia's meanest trademark bully https://pluralistic.net/2021/02/10/duke-sucks/#devils

#5yrsago Crooked cops play music to kill livestreams https://pluralistic.net/2021/02/10/duke-sucks/#bhpd

#1yrago Hugh D'Andrade's "The Murder Next Door" https://pluralistic.net/2025/02/10/pivot-point/#eff

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)

• America's Enshittification is Canada's Opportunity (Do Not Pass Go)
  https://www.donotpassgo.ca/p/americas-enshittification-is-canadas

• Everything Wrong With the Internet and How to Fix It, with Tim Wu (Ezra Klein)
  https://www.nytimes.com/2026/02/06/opinion/ezra-klein-podcast-doctorow-wu.html

• 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

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)

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

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

• "The Post-American Internet," a geopolitical sequel of sorts to Enshittification, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2027

• "Unauthorized Bread": a middle-grades graphic novel adapted from my novella about refugees, toasters and DRM, FirstSecond, 2027

• "The Memex Method," Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2027

Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources:

Currently writing: "The Post-American Internet," a sequel to "Enshittification," about the better world the rest of us get to have now that Trump has torched America (1007 words today, 25708 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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