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This investigation is part of a collaboration between Bellingcat and Evident. You can watch Evident’s video here.

Children in Chicago’s Old Irving Park neighbourhood were preparing for a Halloween parade on Oct. 25 when federal agents reportedly deployed tear gas on the street to disperse protesters opposing immigration-related arrests in the neighbourhood.

“Those kids were tear gassed on their way to celebrate Halloween in their local school parking lot,” US District Judge Sara Ellis said in court on Tuesday, according to a CBS News report. “I can only imagine how terrified they were.” 

Ellis was questioning US Customs and Border Patrol Commander Gregory Bovino over this and other incidents that protesters allege violate a temporary restraining order (TRO) she issued earlier this month. 

The Oct. 9 TRO was issued after a group of journalists, faith leaders and protesters filed a lawsuit against the Trump administration over what they described as a “pattern of extreme brutality” by federal agents against peaceful protesters since Operation Midway Blitz – a multi-agency operation against “criminal illegal aliens” in Illinois – began on Sept. 2. 

When Judge Ellis asked Bovino to produce all use-of-force reports since Sept. 2 from agents involved in Operation Midway Blitz by the end of Tuesday, Bovino said it would be impossible because of the “sheer amount”. Ellis then ordered Bovino to turn over these reports, along with the accompanying body camera footage, by the end of Friday, Oct. 31.

The court order places restrictions on federal agents’ crowd-control measures within the state, including their use of “riot control weapons” such as tear gas and pepper spray, the use of force against individuals and requiring people to leave public spaces that they lawfully have the right to be in. 

A subsequent court filing on Oct. 27 alleges that federal agents have violated the TRO “almost every day” since it was issued. “Immigration enforcement does not typically require the daily use of tear gas on civilians in residential areas,” the filing stated.

Bellingcat’s analysis of social media videos from 28 events in Illinois from Oct. 9 to Oct. 27 found multiple examples of force and riot control weapons being used.

In total, we found seven that appeared to show the use of riot control weapons when there was seemingly no apparent immediate threat by protesters and no audible warnings given. Nineteen showed use of force, such as tackling people to the ground when they were not visibly resisting. Another seven showed agents ordering or threatening people to leave public places. Some of the events identified showed incidents that appeared to fall into more than one of these categories. 

You can view the full dataset here. 

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It is important to note that the full context of an incident may be unclear from videos on social media alone. Bystanders often only begin filming when an arrest is already ongoing, for example, which can make it difficult to determine what happened in the moments before force was applied. Each of the events included in our dataset were verified to have taken place in Illinois in recent weeks with at least two sources – videos taken by different people, local reporting or statements from the Department of Homeland Security (DHS).

The DHS – which oversees Customs and Border Patrol (CBP) as well as the United States Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) – has justified the use of force or riot control weapons by saying that protesters were threatening or attacking agents. 

Bellingcat asked DHS whether it had any response to the TRO or allegations that agents had violated the TRO.

In a response received after the publication of this piece, Assistant Secretary Tricia McLaughlin did not directly address the TRO but said DHS officers “only use crowd control methods as a last resort when repeated warnings have been given”. 

DHS also said, several times in its response, that its officers were “facing a 1,000 percent increase in assaults against them”. This is a claim that the department has previously made when commenting on clashes with protesters during immigration operations in other cities such as Los Angeles and Portland. However, an NPR analysis of court records earlier this month only showed about a 25 percent rise in charges for assault against federal officers through mid-September, compared with the same period a year ago.

The TRO does say that riot control weapons or force may be deployed in circumstances such as where there is an “immediate threat” of physical harm to the agents or others, multiple warnings have been given, or where “necessary and proportional” for an arrest. We did not include videos where it was obvious that such conditions had been met. 

Despite the limitations, videos taken by eyewitnesses are often the only evidence of such incidents, which may not be reported by media or may have concluded by the time journalists reach the scene.

Riot Control Weapons

In our analysis, we found videos showing the use of riot control weapons such as tear gas, pepper spray and other less-lethal weapons in seven events where protesters appeared to be posing no visible threat in the footage, and where no audible warnings appeared to be given. 

Among its provisions, the TRO prohibits the use of these types of weapons on people “who are not posing an immediate threat to the safety of a law enforcement officer or others” and also in cases where using them on intended targets would result in injury to those who aren’t posing any threat. 

One of these videos captured the moment Bovino threw what looked like a tear gas canister during the Oct. 23 clashes in the Little Village neighbourhood, during an operation where eight people were arrested, including a 16-year-old US citizen. Bovino and DHS have said that he was hit on the head by objects thrown by protesters before he threw the tear gas canister.  

DHS posted a video on Facebook, claiming that it was evidence that “the use of chemical munitions was conducted in full accordance with CBP policy and was necessary to ensure the safety of both law enforcement and the public”. 

The video showed a rock skidding on the ground behind Bovino, but did not show the moment that it allegedly hit the Border Patrol chief on the head. A protester who filmed the encounter has reportedly disputed that Bovino was hit. 

Tear gas was also deployed on Oct. 12 in Albany Park, Oct. 14 in the East Side of Chicago, Oct. 24 in Lakeview and Oct. 25 in Avondale. Bellingcat reviewed footage of each of these incidents and could not see threats to the agents’ safety in the videos before tear gas was deployed, or that audible warnings were issued within the footage.

Videos we reviewed also showed other types of riot-control weapons mentioned in the TRO. Another video from the Oct. 23 protests in Little Village, posted by a protester named Enrique Bahena, shows an agent shooting a less-lethal projectile directly at the person filming. An Oct. 26 court filing said Bahena was shot in the “neck from five feet away with a pepper ball”. 

Bellingcat’s analysis of the video, which appears to be the same one shown in screengrabs in the court filing, found that the video in fact shows the agent deploying a B&T GL-06 40mm launcher, which can be used to launch chemical irritant rounds such as the one visible in the video.  

Bahena said in an interview with local outlet Chicago Block Club that agents did not give warnings before they shot him “in the throat” and threw gas canisters at the group of protesters who were shouting at them to leave. He also said in the interview that protesters did throw objects at agents, but that this was after agents had already used force.

B&T technical specifications for their 40mm projectiles state that “shots to the head, neck, spine, or heart are to be avoided unless lethal force is justified”, and advise users to aim at the waistline. 

A DHS Office of Inspector General Report in 2021 states that “ICE’s use of force policy indicates that the 40MM launcher is deadly force when fired at someone, while the CBP use of force policy only directs officers not to target a person’s head or neck”.

During this same event in Little Village, videos show other officers appearing to fire less-lethal weapons towards protestors.

The TRO restricts the use of Compressed Air Launchers or Munitions Launchers such as 40mm launchers to strike a person, including on the neck, unless they pose an “immediate threat of causing serious bodily injury or death”.  

In another incident on Oct. 22, an agent appeared to quickly roll down a window and spray what appeared to be a chemical irritant at protesters who were confronting federal officers near a Sam’s Club store in the Cicero neighbourhood of Chicago. 

The incident was captured in two separate livestreams, which show a few protesters near an unmarked dark grey Chevrolet Tahoe with no front licence plate. One of the protesters taps on the window of the vehicle. Someone then rolls down the window and sprays what appears to be a liquid very quickly before rolling the window back up as the car leaves the scene. One of the people filming said in the post for the livestream that this was pepper spray, although Bellingcat was unable to verify this. 

DHS did not respond directly to Bellingcat’s questions about whether it believed that the use of riot-control weapons – including during the Oct. 23 Little Village protests – was justified based on the terms of the TRO. 

Use of Force

Bellingcat also reviewed multiple videos of agents using force in arrests that appeared to be related to Operation Midway Blitz, and identified those where the force shown being used looked potentially excessive and the person being arrested did not appear to pose an “immediate threat of physical harm to others” – a requirement in the TRO for using force such as tackling or shoving someone to the ground.

On Oct. 10, a day after the TRO was issued, an ICE agent was seen dragging a teenage girl out of a car in Hoffman Estates, a suburb of Chicago, and tackling her to the ground while she shouted “I’m not resisting”. The teenager, reportedly an 18-year-old US citizen, was handcuffed and an officer appeared to put a knee on her back. DHS Assistant Secretary McLaughlin said in a post that the incident was a “burglary” arrest from 2024 which did not involve ICE – although this has been debunked by multiple news outlets. 

Bellingcat asked DHS about this specific incident and why McLaughlin’s post remains up on X despite multiple news outlets verifying that the incident took place this month in Hoffman Estates, but did not receive a response. 

This was not the only case where DHS’ version of events appears to contradict video footage of the incident posted on social media. 

On Oct. 22, a woman identified by DHS as Isabel Mata was arrested by Border Patrol agents in Little Village. A video of the incident shows multiple agents tackling her while one of them has his knee on her back to hold her to the ground. DHS stated Mata “allegedly threatened a law enforcement officer after stating she would put a hit out on Chief Gregory Bovino”. Bellingcat reviewed a video that showed the minutes before Mata was tackled by agents but did not hear any threat being made, even though Mata appeared to have been standing near the person filming.

DHS initially did not respond to Bellingcat’s questions about this incident, but after publication it sent us the same statement it made on Oct. 24 with the allegation that Mata had threatened Bovino.

Another video from Oct. 10 appears to show agents colliding with a car on Hubbard Street and dragging the driver out by her legs. The woman, identified as Dayanne Figueroa, told Newsweek that she was on her way to get coffee before work and “instead of handling the situation as a routine traffic incident”, masked armed agents forcibly removed her without questions or informing that she was under arrest.

DHS reportedly told Newsweek that Border Patrol was making a targeted arrest when Figueroa’s vehicle blocked agents and struck an unmarked government vehicle. They also said she “violently resisted” and was arrested for assault on a federal agent.

The video shows agents arresting someone, before one of their vehicles swerves into another lane and appears to hit Figueroa’s car. Multiple bystanders can be heard shouting that the agents hit Figueroa’s car first and that they were making a U-turn in the middle of the street.

Bellingcat asked DHS about the conditions under which it would consider the use of force – such as tackling or shoving people to the ground – proportionate and necessary, but did not receive a direct response to this question. 

Dispersal Orders

The TRO prohibits federal agents from “issuing a crowd dispersal order requiring any person to leave a public place that they lawfully have a right to be, unless dispersal is justified by exigent circumstances as defined by Department of Homeland Security Use of Force Policy”. 

Bellingcat has asked DHS about when agents are justified in telling people to get off the streets, or people in cars to stop following them, and whether there are any laws preventing people from following or filming federal agents from a distance. DHS did not respond to these questions in their response after this story was published.

However, we found several examples of agents telling people to leave public places when they did not appear to be impeding arrests in video footage. 

In a video recorded in Chicago’s Arlington Heights on Oct. 24, a masked man with a rifle tells someone filming to “get the f*** across the street” and “get back to your car”. The person filming is shouting that agents have assaulted a woman and slapped her phone out of her hands, and the video appears to show a woman in a scuffle with a masked agent. A separate video from the same location and date shows agents arresting a man who is on the ground. 

In some of these cases, agents appear to be pointing non-lethal weapons at civilians while ordering them to leave public spaces. A video from Oct. 16 shows agents telling protesters to “get out of the street”, pointing pepper spray at them and threatening them with arrest in Chicago’s Evanston neighbourhood.

A similar incident took place in Rolling Meadows on Oct. 19 when an officer was pictured pointing a pepper ball gun from a moving vehicle at a person filming him in a parking lot. A federal judge reportedly said the incident was “troubling” and has called for answers. 

On Oct. 20, in Berwyn, an agent pointed a gun at a woman who said she was pregnant. By the woman’s account, the agents were chasing after two people and the video shows her honking to alert those nearby. A DHS agent told Newsweek that the agent “acted to protect his life and safety of others around him and showed great restraint”.

Judge Ellis’ TRO is set to expire on Nov. 6. There is a scheduled hearing the day prior, Nov. 5, to determine if the TRO should be converted into a preliminary injunction. 

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Editor’s Note (Oct. 31): This story was updated to include a response by the Department of Homeland Security who responded to our request for comment after publication.

Pooja Chaudhuri, Kolina Koltai, Youri van der Weide, Sebastian Vandermeersch, Melissa Zhu and Trevor Ball contributed research to this piece, alongside Fraser Crichton, Olivia Gresham, Bonny Albo and Vladimir Zaha from Bellingcat’s Global Authentication Project.

Bellingcat is a non-profit and the ability to carry out our work is dependent on the kind support of individual donors. If you would like to support our work, you can do so here. You can also subscribe to our Patreon channel here. Subscribe to our Newsletter and follow us on Twitter here and Mastodon here.

The post ‘Pattern of Extreme Brutality’: Tear Gas, Pepper Balls Among Weapons Deployed Against Protesters in Illinois appeared first on bellingcat.

Established in 1925, Bang & Olufsen (B&O) has been a bulwark of Danish Design – especially in the audio-tech sector – for a century now, processing the key tenets of quality production and sober aesthetics. That isn’t to say that it hasn’t periodically pushed the envelope of formal configuration and innovation in that time.

Take the Beosound A9 freestanding speaker. First released in 2012, the sculpture-disk-form device was a game changer, demonstrating the full potential of rapidly advancing technologies. While Beoplay H100 represented a significant improvement in headphone performance upon its release, the Beosound A5 Century Weave set forward the revolution in portable speaker modality.

A just released limited edition capsule collection, named The Centennial Collection, comprises all three key products in a special reskinning – marking the brand’s century of excellence. “Since our founding, timeless design has been at the heart of everything we craft,” says Kristian Teär, B&O CEO. “The Centennial Collection honors our past, celebrates our present, and looks to the future. It is a tribute to the icons that have shaped the brand and to the enduring values that define our legacy.”

The three distinctive devices have been reimagined with a coherence of design features from various defining eras: the checkered grill patterns of early radios, the vibrant yet tempered hues of the 1970s, and the brushed aluminum of the 1980s; a period cropping back up the trend cycle and becoming popular again. A ‘century’ red and ‘blue’ – as well as a chestnut brown – perfectly tie everything together. There’s something comfortable, transcendent even, in the deft melding of these subtle yet decipherably historic details.

The limited edition Beosound A5 Century Weave portable speaker is clad in a beige and chestnut brown raffia weave; evoking the boldly geometric radio grills of the 1950s. Carefully introduced metal framing and meticulously treated leather straps represent a superior focus on craftsmanship, an approach B&O has fostered since day one.

Wrapped in fellow Danish design brand Kvadrat’s Centennial Cadence fabric, the Beosound A9 Century Blue speaker is a color-block statement piece if there ever was one. Its slim and sleek brushed aluminum frame keeps the form perfectly together.

Developed for Dolby Atmos, the Beoplay H100 Century Brown headphones feature titanium drivers and advanced noise cancellation for an elevated listening experience. Finished in brown leather ear cushions, its glass disc is rendered in natural silver tone.

Each product is furnished with an “B&O Est. 1925 Anniversary” and “A never failing will to create only the best” moniker, recalling founders Peter Bang and Svend Olufsen’s original mission.

For more information on Bang & Olufsen’s The Centennial Collection, please visit bang-olufsen.com.

Photography courtesy of Bang & Olufsen.

Click here to go see the bonus panel!

Hovertext:
The good news is they're also telling the aliens to do something about the dolphins.

Today's News:

Today's links

• O(N^2) nationalism: Trumpism can only be defeated throuh international nationalism.
• Hey look at this: Delights to delectate.
• Object permanence: Paywall kremlinology; How to fix everything; Office365 is spyware; State-owned Amazon.
• 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.

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O(N^2) nationalism (permalink)

In their 2023 book Underground Empire, political scientists Henry Farrell and Abraham Newman describe how the modern world runs on US-based systems that other nations treat(ed) as neutral platforms, and how that is collapsing:

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

Think of the world's fiber optic cables: for most of the internet's history, it was a given that one end of the majority of the world's transoceanic fiber would make landfall on one of the coasts of the USA. US telcos paid to interconnect these fiber head-ends – even ones on opposite coasts – with extremely reliable, high-speed links.

This made a certain kind of sense. Pulling fiber across an ocean is incredibly expensive and difficult. Rather than run cables between each nation in the world, countries could connect to the US, and, in a single hop, connect to anywhere else.

This is a great deal, provided that you trust the USA to serve as an honest broker for the world's internet traffic. Then, in 2013, the Snowden leaks revealed that America's National Security Agency was spying on pretty much everyone in the world.

Since then, the world has undergone a boom in new transoceanic fiber, most of it point-to-point links between two countries. Despite the prodigious logistical advantages of a hub-and-spoke model for ocean-spanning fiber networks, there just isn't any nation on Earth that can be entrusted with the world's information chokepoint, lest they yield to temptation to become the world's gatekeeper.

Don't get me wrong: there are also advantages to decentralized (or even better, distributed) interconnections in the world's data infrastructure. A more dispersed network topology is more resilient against a variety of risks, from political interference to war to meteor strikes.

But connecting every country to every other country is a very expensive proposition. Our planet has 205 sovereign nations, and separately connecting each of them to the rest will require 20,910 links.

In complexity theory, this is an "Order N-squared" ("O(n^2)") problem – every additional item in the problem set squares the number of operations needed to solve it. We aren't anywhere near a world where every country has a link to every other country on Earth. Instead, we're in an unsettled period, where warring theories about how to decentralize, and by how much, have created a weird, lopsided network topology.

Obviously, fiber interconnection isn't the most important "neutral platform" that the US (formerly) provided to the rest of the world. The most important American platform is the US dollar, which most countries in the world use as a reserve currency, and also as a standard for clearing international transactions. If someone in Thailand wants to buy oil from someone in Saudi Arabia, they do so in dollars. This is called "dollar clearing."

The case for dollar clearing is similar to the case for linking all the world's fiber through US data-centers. It's a big lift to ask every seller to price their goods in every potential buyer's currency, and it's a lot to ask every Thai baht holder to race around the world seeking someone who'll sell them Saudi riyals – and then there's the problem of what they do with the change left over from the transaction.

Establishing liquid markets for every pair of every currency has the same kind of complexity as the problem of establishing fiber links between every country.

Since the mid-20th century, we've solved this problem by treating the US dollar as a neutral platform. Countries opened savings accounts at the US Federal Reserve and stashed large numbers of US dollars there (when someone says, "China owns umpty-billion in US debt," they just mean, "There's a bank account in New York at the Fed with China's name on it that has been marked up with lots of US dollars").

Merchants, institutions and individuals that wanted to transact across borders used the SWIFT system, which is nominally international, but which, practically speaking, is extremely deferential to the US government.

Issuing the world's reserve and reference currency was a source of enormous power for the US, but only to the extent that it used that power sparingly, and subtly. The power of dollarization depended on most people believing that the dollar was mostly neutral – that the US wouldn't risk dollar primacy by nakedly weaponizing the dollar. Dollarization was a bet that America First hawks would have the emotional maturity to instrumentalize the dollar in the most sparing and subtle of fashion.

But today, no one believes that the dollar is neutral. First came the Argentine sovereign debt default: in 2001, the government of Argentina wiped out investors who were holding its bonds. In 2005, a group of American vulture capitalists scooped up this worthless paper for pennies, then sued in New York to force Argentina to make good on the bonds, and a US court handed over Argentina's foreign reserves, which were held on US soil.

That was the opening salvo in a series of events showed everyone in the world that the US dollar wasn't a neutral platform, but was, rather, a creature of US policy. This culminated with the Russian invasion of Ukraine, which saw the seizure of Russian assets in the USA and a general blockade on Russians using the SWIFT system to transfer money.

Whether or not you like the fact that Russian assets were transferred to Ukraine to aid in its defense against Russian aggression (I like it, for the record), there's no denying that this ended the pretense that the dollar was a neutral platform. It was a signal to every leader in the world that the dollar could only be relied upon for transaction clearing and foreign reserves to the extent that you didn't make the USA angry at you.

Today, Donald Trump has made it clear that the US's default posture to every country in the world is anger. The US no longer has allies, nor does it have trading partners. Today, every country in the world is America's adversary and its rival.

But de-dollarization isn't easy. It presents the same O(n^2) problem as rewiring the world's fiber: creating deep, liquid markets to trade every currency against every other currency is an impossible lift (thus far), and there's no obvious candidate as a replacement for the dollar as a clearing currency.

As with fiber, we are in an unsettled period, with no obvious answer, and lots of chaotic, one-off gestures towards de-dollarization. For example, Ethiopia is re-valuing its foreign debt in Chinese renminbi:

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-10-20/ethiopia-in-talks-with-china-to-convert-dollar-loans-into-yuan

But fiber and dollars aren't the only seemingly neutral platforms that America provided to the world as a way of both facilitating the world's orderly operation and consolidating America's centrality and power on the global stage.

America is also the world's great digital exporter. The world's governments, corporations and households run on American cloud software, like Google Docs and Office365. Their records are held in Oracle databases. Their messages and media run on iPhones. Their cloud compute comes from AWS.

The Snowden revelations shook this arrangement, but it held. The EU extracted a series of (ultimately broken) promises from the US to the effect that America wouldn't spy on Europeans using Big Tech. And now, after a brittle decade of half-measures and uneasy peace with American tech platforms, Trump has made it clear that he will not hesitate to use American tech platforms to pursue his geopolitical goals.

Practically speaking, that means that government officials that make Trump angry can expect to have their cloud access terminated:

https://apnews.com/article/icc-trump-sanctions-karim-khan-court-a4b4c02751ab84c09718b1b95cbd5db3

Trump can – and does – shut down entire international administrative agencies, without notice or appeal, as a means of coercing them into embracing American political goals.

What's more, US tech giants have stopped pretending that they will not share sensitive EU data – even data housed on servers in the EU – with American spy agencies, and will keep any such disclosures a secret from the European governments, companies and individuals who are affected:

https://www.forbes.com/sites/emmawoollacott/2025/07/22/microsoft-cant-keep-eu-data-safe-from-us-authorities/

All this has prompted a rush of interest in the "Eurostack," an effort to replicate the functionality of US tech companies' cloud services:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/10/15/freedom-of-movement/#data-dieselgate

But the Eurostack's proponents are really working on the preliminaries to digital sovereignty. It's not enough to have alternatives to US Big Tech. There also needs to be extensive work on migration tools, to facilitate the move to those alternatives. No one is going to manually copy/paste a million documents out of their ministry or corporation's GSuite repository and into a Eurostack equivalent. There are a few tools that do this today, but they're crude and hard to use, because they are probably illegal under America's widely exported IP laws.

Faithfully transferring those files, permissions, edit histories and metadata to new clouds will require a kind of guerrilla warfare called "adversarial interoperability." Adversarial interoperability is the process of making a new thing work with an existing thing, against the wishes of the existing thing's manufacturer:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/10/adversarial-interoperability

The problem is that adversarial interoperability has been mostly criminalized in countries all around the world, thanks to IP laws that prohibit study, reverse engineering and modification of software without permission. These laws were spread all over the world at the insistence of the US Trade Representative, who, for 25 years, has made this America's top foreign trade priority.

Countries that balked at enacting laws were threatened with tariffs. Virtually every country in the world fell into line:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/01/15/beauty-eh/#its-the-only-war-the-yankees-lost-except-for-vietnam-and-also-the-alamo-and-the-bay-of-ham

But then Trump happened. The Trump tariffs apply to countries that have voluntarily blocked their own investors and entrepreneurs from making billions by supplying products that unlock and improve America's enshittified tech exports. These blocks also exposed everyone in the world to the data- and cash-plundering scams of US Big Tech, by preventing the creation of privacy blockers, alt clients, jailbreaking kits, and independent app stores for phones, tablets and consoles.

What's more, the laws that block reverse-engineering are also used to block repair, forcing everyone from train operators to hospitals to drivers to everyday individuals to pay a high premium and endure long waits to get their equipment serviced by the manufacturer's authorized representatives:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/05/24/record-scratch/#autoenshittification

These US-forced IP laws come at a high price. They allow American companies to pick your nation's pockets and steal its data. They interfere with repair and undermine resiliency. They also threaten security researchers who audit critical technologies and identify their dangerous defects:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/09/30/life-finds-a-way/#ink-stained-wretches

On top of that, they expose your country to a range of devastating geopolitical attacks by the Trump administration, who have made it clear that they will order American tech companies to brick whole governments as punishment for failing to capitulate to US demands. And of course, all of these remote killswitches can be operated by anyone who can hack or trick the manufacturer, including the Chinese state:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/10/07/foreseeable-outcomes/#calea

Speaking of China, isn't this exactly the kind of thing we were warned would happen if we allowed Chinese technology into western telecommunications systems? The Chinese state would spy on us, and, in times of extremis, could shut down our critical infrastructure with a keystroke.

This is exactly what America is doing now (and has been doing for some time, as Snowden demonstrated). But it's actually pretty reasonable to assume that a regime as competent and ambitious (and ruthless) as Xi Jinping's might make use of this digital power if doing so serves its geopolitical goals.

And there is a hell of a lot of cloud-connected digital infrastructure that Xi does (or could) control, including the solar inverters and batteries that are swiftly replacing fossil fuel in the EU:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/09/23/our-friend-the-electron/#to-every-man-his-castle

And if you're worried about China shutting down your solar energy, you should also worry about America's hold on the embedded processors in your country's critical systems.

Take tractors. Remember when Putin's thugs looted millions of dollars' worth of tractors from Ukraine and spirited them away to Chechnya? The John Deere company sent a kill command to those tractors and bricked them, rendering them permanently inoperable:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/05/08/about-those-kill-switched-ukrainian-tractors/

Sure, there's a certain cyberpunk frisson in this tale of a digital comeuppance for Russian aggressors. But think about this for ten seconds and you'll realize that it means that John Deere can shut down any tractor in the world – including all the tractors in your country, if Donald Trump forces them to:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/10/20/post-american-internet/#huawei-with-american-characteristics

The national security case for digital sovereignty includes people worried about American aggression. It includes people worried about Chinese aggression. It includes people worried about other countries that might infiltrate and make use of these remote kill switches. And it includes people worried about criminals doing the same.

True digital sovereignty requires more than building Eurostack data-centers and the software to run on them. It requires more than repealing the IP laws that block cloud customers from migrating their data to those Eurostack servers. It requires the replacement of the cloud software and embedded code that power our infrastructure and administrative tools.

This is a gigantic task. Ripping out all the proprietary code that powers our cloud software and devices and replacing it with robust, auditable, user-modifiable free/open source software is a massive project.

It's also a project that's long overdue. And crises precipitate change. Putin's invasion of Ukraine vaporized every barrier to Europe's solar conversion, rocketing the bloc from ten years behind schedule to fifteen years ahead of schedule in just a few years.

The fact that changing out all the proprietary, opaque, vulnerable code in our world and replacing it with open, free, reliable code is hard has no bearing on whether it is necessary.

It is necessary. What's more, replacing all the code isn't like replacing the dollar, or replacing the fiber. It isn't hamstrung by the O(n^2) problem.

Because if the Eurostack code is open and free, it can also be the Canadian stack, the Mexican stack, the Ghanaian stack, and the Vietnamese stack. It can be a commons, a set of core technologies that everyone studies for vulnerabilities and improves, that everyone adds features to, that everyone localizes and administers and bears the costs for.

It is a novel and curious form of "international nationalism," a technology that is more like a science. In the same way that the Allies and the Axis both used the same radio technologies to communicate, a common, open digital infrastructure is one that everyone – even adversaries – can rely upon.

This is a move that's long overdue. It's a move that's in the power of every government, because it merely involves changing your own domestic laws to enable adversarial interoperability. Its success doesn't depend on a foreign state forcing Apple or Google or Microsoft or Oracle to do something they don't want to do:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/11/01/redistribution-vs-predistribution/#elbows-up-eurostack

The opportunity and challenge of building the post-American internet is part of the package of global de-Americanization, which includes running new fiber and de-dollarization. But the post-American internet is unique in that it is the only part of this project that can be solved everywhere, all at once, and that gets cheaper and easier as more nations join in.

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Hey look at this (permalink)

• On contrarian history https://going-medieval.com/2025/11/25/on-contrarian-history/

• Game Theory Explains How Algorithms Can Drive Up Prices https://www.wired.com/story/game-theory-explains-how-algorithms-can-drive-up-prices/

• Part 1: My Life Is a Lie https://www.yesigiveafig.com/p/part-1-my-life-is-a-lie

• The American Pay Cut That Gave Us Obama and Trump, Twice https://www.americasundoing.com/p/it-works-if-you-work-it

• Americans are holding onto devices longer than ever and it’s costing the economy https://www.cnbc.com/2025/11/23/how-device-hoarding-by-americans-is-costing-economy.html

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Object permanence (permalink)

#20yrsago Transformers costumes that turn into cars and jets https://web.archive.org/web/20051127021810/http://www.marksprojects.com/costumestrans.htm

#15yrsago London police brutally kettle children marching for education https://web.archive.org/web/20101126000126/http://www.newstatesman.com/blogs/laurie-penny/2010/11/children-police-kettle-protest

#15yrsago Kremlinology with Rupert Murdoch: what do the Times paywall numbers mean? https://www.theguardian.com/technology/blog/2010/nov/25/times-paywall-cory-doctorow

#10yrsago Ifixit is the new Justice League of America and Kyle Wiens is its Superman https://web.archive.org/web/20151125125009/https://motherboard.vice.com/read/how-to-fix-everything

#5yrsago Random Penguin to buy Simon & Schuster https://pluralistic.net/2020/11/25/the-peoples-amazon/#merger-to-monopoly

#5yrsago A state-owned Amazon https://pluralistic.net/2020/11/25/the-peoples-amazon/#correo-compras

#5yrsago Office 365 spies on employees for bosses https://pluralistic.net/2020/11/25/the-peoples-amazon/#clippys-revenge

#5yrsago Tech in SF https://pluralistic.net/2020/11/25/the-peoples-amazon/#asl

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Upcoming appearances (permalink)

• 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

• Virtual: Poetic Technologies with Brian Eno (David Graeber Institute), Dec 8
  https://davidgraeber.institute/poetic-technologies-with-cory-doctorow-and-brian-eno/

• 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

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Recent appearances (permalink)

• How the internet went to sh*t (Prospect Magazine)
  https://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/podcasts/prospect-podcast/71663/cory-doctorow-how-the-internet-went-to-sht

• Enshittification and “Breaking Kings” (Web Summit)
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CpLudlrwS_g

• Enshittification Nation (The Lever)
  https://www.levernews.com/enshittification-nation/

• Enshittification with Oh God What Now
  https://castbox.fm/episode/Why-Tech-Sucks-%E2%80%93%C2%A0Cory-Doctorow-on-Enshittification-and-how-to-fix-it-id4634015-id876127534

• Enshittification with The Lede (New Lines Magazine)
  https://newlinesmag.com/podcast/why-the-internet-got-bad-and-how-to-fix-it/

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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

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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

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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. 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

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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

So: I've had surgery on one eye, and have new glasses to tide me over while the cataract in my other eye worsens enough to require surgery (I'm on the low priority waiting list in the meantime). And I'm about to head off for a fortnight of vacation time, mostly in Germany (which has the best Christmas markets) before coming home in mid-December and getting down to work on the final draft of Starter Pack.

Starter Pack is a book I wrote on spec--without a contracted publisher--this summer when Ghost Engine just got a bit too much. It's a spin-off of Ghost Engine, which started out as a joke mashup of two genres: "what if ... The Stainless Steel Rat got Isekai'd?" Nobody's writing the Rat these days, which I feel is a Mistake, so I decided to remedy it. This is my own take on the ideas, not a copy of Harry Harrison's late 1950s original, so it's a bit different, but it's mostly there now and it works as its own thing. Meanwhile, my agent read it and made some really good suggestions for how to make it more commercial, and "more commercial" is what pays the bills so I'm all on board with that. Especially as it's not sold yet.

Ghost Engine is still in progress: I hit a wall and needed to rethink the ending, again. But at least I am writing: having working binocular vision is a sadly underrated luxury--at least, it's underrated until you have to do without it for a few months. Along the way, Ghost Engine required me to come up with a new story setting in which there is no general AI, no superintelligent AI, no mind uploading to non-biological substrates, and above all no singularity--but our descendants have gone interstellar in a big way thanks to that One Neat Magictech Trick I trialed in my novella Palimpsest back in 2009. (Yes, Ghost Engine and Starter Pack are both set very loosely in the same continuum as Palimpsest. Or maybe it's more accurate to say that Palimpsest is to these new novels what A Colder War was to the Laundry Files.) So I finally got back to writing far future wide screen space opera, even if you aren't going to be able to read any of it for at least a year.

Why do this, though?

Bluntly: I needed to change course. After the US election outcome of November 2024 it was pretty clear that we were in for a very bumpy ride over the next few years. The lunatics have taken over the asylum and the economy is teetering on the edge of a very steep precipice. It's not just the over-hyped AI bubble that's propping up the US tech sector and global stock markets--that would be bad enough, but macro policy is being set by feces-hurling baboons and it really looks as if Trump is willing to invade Central America as a distraction gambit. All the world's a Reality TV show right now, and Reality TV is all about indulging our worst collective instincts.

It's too depressing to contemplate writing more Laundry Files stories; I get email from people who read the New Management as a happy, escapist fantasy these days because we've got a bunch of competent people battling to hold the centre together, under the aegis of a horrific ancient evil who is nevertheless a competent ancient evil. Unfortunately the ancient evil wins, and that's just not something I want to explore further right now.

I'm a popular entertainer and it seems to me that in bad times people want entertainments that take them out of their current quagmire and offers them escape, or at least gratuitous adventures with a side-order of humour. I'm not much of an optimist about our short-term future (I don't expect to survive long enough to see the light at the end of the tunnel) so I can't really write solarpunk or hopepunk utopias, but I can write space operas in which absolutely horrible people are viciously mocked and my new protagonists can at least hope for a happy ending.

Upcoming Events

In the new year, I've got three SF conventions planned already: Iridescence (Eastercon 2026), Birmingham UK, 3-6 April: Satellite 9, Glasgow, 22-24 May: and Metropol con Berlin (Eurocon 2026), Berlin, 2-5 July. I'm also going to try and set up a reading/signing/book launch for The Regicide Report in Edinburgh; more here if I manage it.

As during previous Republican presidencies in the USA it does not feel safe to visit that country, so I won't be attending the 2026 worldcon. However the 2027 world science fiction convention will almost certainly take place in Montreal, which is in North America but not part of Trumpistan, so (health and budget permitting) I'll try to make it there.

(Assuming we've still got a habitable planet and a working economy, which kind of presupposes the POTUS isn't biting the heads off live chickens or rogering a plush sofa in the Oval Office, of course, neither of which can be taken for granted this century.)

So, I'm cross-eyed and typing with one eye screwed shut, which sucks. Seeing an ophthalmologist tomorrow, expecting a priority referral to get the other eyeball stabbed. (It was not made clear to me at the time of the last stabbing that the hospital wouldn't see me again until my ophthalmologist referred me back to them. I'm fixing that oversight—hah—now.)

Anyway, my reading fatigue has gotten bad again, to about the same extent it had gotten to when I more or less stopped reading for fun and writing ground to a halt (because what do you spend most writing time doing, if not re-reading?). So don't expect to hear much from me until I've been operated on and ideally gotten a new set of prescription lenses.

Book news: A Conventional Boy is getting a UK paperback release (from Orbit), on January 6th 2026. And The Regicide Report, the 11th and final book in the main Laundry Files series, comes out on January 27th, 2026 in hardcover and ebook—from Orbit in the UK/EU/Aus/NZ, and from Tor.com in the USA.

Note that if you want a complete run of the series in a uniform binding and page size you will need to wait until probably January 6th-ish, give or take, in 2027, then you'll need to order the British paperbacks because There is no single US publisher of the series. The first two books were published by Golden Gryphon (who no longer exist), then it was picked up by Ace in hardcover and sometimes paperback (The Nightmare Stacks never made it into paperback in the USA as the mass market distribution channel was imploding at the time), then got taken on by Tor.com from The Delirium Brief onwards, and Tor.com don't really do paperbacks at all—they're an ebook publisher who also distribute hardcovers via original-Tor. I sincerely doubt that a US limited edition publisher would be interested in picking up and repackaging a series of 14 novels (and probably a short story collection that doesn't exist yet), some of which have been in print for 25 years. I mean, a complete run of the British paperbacks is more than a foot thick already and there are two books still to go in that format.

(Ordering the books: Transreal Books in Edinburgh will take orders by email and will get me in to sign stock, but is no longer shipping to the United States—blame Trump and his idiotic tariff war. (Mike is a sole trader and can't afford the risk of doofuses buying a bunch of books then refusing to pay the import and duty fees. Hitherto books were duty-exempt in the US market, but under Trump, who the hell knows?) I believe amazon.co.uk will still ship UK physical book orders to the USA, but I won't be signing them. If you're in North America your next opportunity to get anything signed is therefore to wait for the worldcon in 2027, which I believe is locked in now and will take place in Montreal.)

What happens after these books is an open question. As I noted in my last update, I'm working on two space operas. Or I would be working if I could stare at the screen for long enough to make headway. If the eyeball fairy would wave a magic wand over my left eye, I could finish both Starter Pack (a straightforward job—I have edit notes) and Ghost Engine (less straightforward but not really impossible) by the end of the year. But as matters stand, you should consider me to be off sick until further notice. Talking about anything that happens after those two is wildly ungrounded speculation: lets just say I expect a spurt of rebound productivity once I have my eyes working appropriately again, and I have some ideas.

For the same reason, blogging's going to be scarce around these parts. So feel free to talk among yourselves.