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Pluralistic: The 40-year economic mistake that let Google conquer (and enshittify) the world (06 Nov 2025) by Cory Doctorow
Thursday November 6th, 2025 at 9:05 AM

Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
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Today's links


The ruins of the Temple of Jupiter, taken in the late 18th century, overlooking a stretch Lebanon. It has been emblazoned with the 1970s-era logo for the University of Chicago Graduate School of Business. Before it stands a figure taken from an early 1900s illustrated bible, depicting a Hebrew priest making an offering to the golden calf at the foot of Mt Sinai. The priest's head has been replaced with the head of Milton Friedman. The calf has been adorned with a golden top-hat and a radiating halo of white light.

The 40-year economic mistake that let Google conquer (and enshittify) the world (permalink)

A central fact of enshittification is that the growth of quality-destroying, pocket-picking monopolists wasn't an accident, nor was it inevitable. Rather, named individuals, in living memory, advocated for and created pro-enshittificatory policies, ushering in the enshittocene.

The greatest enshittifiers of all are the neoliberal economists who advocated for the idea that monopolies are good, because (in their perfect economic models), the only way for a company to secure a monopoly is to be so amazing that we all voluntarily start buying its products and services, and the instant a monopoly starts to abuse its market power, new companies will enter the market and poach us all from the bloated incumbent.

This "consumer welfare" theory of antitrust is obviously wrong, and it's the best-known neoliberal monopoly delusion. But it's not the only one! Another pro-monopoly ideology we can thank the Chicago School economists for is "industrial organization" (IO), a theory that insists that vertical monopolies are actually really good. This turns out to be one of the most consequentially catastrophic mistakes in modern economic history.

What's a "vertical monopoly"? That's when a company takes over parts of the supply chain both upstream and downstream from it. Take Essilor Luxottica, the eyeglasses monopoly that owns every brand of frames you've ever heard of, from Coach and Oakley to Versace and Bausch and Lomb. That's a horizontal lobby – the company took over every eyewear brand under the sun. But they also created a vertical monopoly by buying most of the major eyeglass retailers (Sunglass Hut, Lenscrafters, etc), and by buying up most of the optical labs in the world (Essilor makes the majority of corrective lenses, worldwide). They also own Eyemed, the world's largest eyeglasses insurer.

IO theory predicts that even if a company like Essilor Luxxotica uses its monopoly power to price gouge in one part of the eyeglass supply chain (e.g. by raising the price of frames, which Essilor Luxxotica has done, by over 1,000%), that they will use some of those extraordinary profits to keep all their other products as cheap as possible. If Luxottica can use its market power to mark up the price of frames by a factor of ten, then IO theory predicts that they'll keep the prices of lenses and insurance as low as possible, in order to make it harder for lens or insurance companies to get into the frame business. By using monopoly frame profits to starve those rivals of profits, Essilor Luxxotica can keep them so poor that they can't afford to branch out and compete with Essilor Luxottica's high-priced frames.

Like so much in neoliberal economics, this is nothing but "a superior moral justification for selfishness" (h/t John Kenneth Galbraith). IO is a way for the greediest among to convince policymakers that their greed is good, and produces a benefit for all of us. By energetically peddling this economic nonsense, monopolists and their pet economists have done extraordinary harm to the world, while getting very, very rich.

Google is a real poster-child for what happens to a market when regulators adopt IO ideas. "Google’s hidden empire," is a new paper out today from Aline Blankertz, Brianna Rock and Nicholas Shaxson, which tells the story of how IO let Google become the enshittified, thrice-convicted monopolist it is today:

https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.02931

The authors mostly look at the history of how EU regulators dealt with Google's long string of mergers. By the time Google embarked on this shopping spree, the European Commission had already remade itself as a Chicago School, IO-embracing regulator. The authors trace this to 2001, when the EC blocked a merger between GE and Honeywell, which had been approved in the USA. This provoked howls of disapproval and mockery from Chicago School proponents, who mocked the EC for not hiring enough "IO expertise," contrasting the Commission's staff with the US FTC, which had 50 PhD (neoliberal) economists on the payroll. Stung, the EU embarged on a "Big Bang" hiring spree for Chicago School economists in 2004, remaking the way it viewed competition policy for decades to come.

This is the context for Google's wave of highly consequential vertical mergers, the most important of which being its acquisition of Doubleclick, the ad-tech company that allowed Google to acquire the monopoly it was last year convincted of operating:

https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/google-found-guilty-of-monopolization

When Google sought regulatory approval in the EU for its Doubleclick acquisition, the EC's economists blithely predicted that this wouldn't lead to any harmful consequences. Sure, it would let Google dominate the tools used by publishers to place ads on their pages; and by the advertisers who placed those ads; and the marketplace in which the seller and buyer tools transacted business. But that's a vertical monopoly, and any (IO-trained) fule no that this is a perfectly innocuous arrangement that can't possibly lead to harmful monopoly conduct.

The EC arrived at this extraordinary conclusion by paying outside economists a lot of money for advice (that kind of pretzel logic doesn't come cheap). Two decades later, Google/Doubleclick was abusing its monopoly so badly that the EU fined the company €2.95 billion.

It's not like Google/Doubleclick took two decades to start screwing over advertisers and publishers. Right from the jump, it was clear that this merger was an anticompetitive disaster, but that didn't stop the EC from waving through more mergers, like 2020's Google acquisition of Fitbit:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/10/01/the-years-of-repair/#google-fitbit

Once again, the EC concluded that this merger, being "vertical," couldn't have any deleterious effects. In reality, Google-Fitbit was a classic "killer acquisition," in which Google bought out and killed the dominant player in a sector it was planning to enter, in order to shut down a competitor. Within a few years, the Fitbit had been enshittified beyond all recognition.

Despite these regulatory failures (and many more like them), the EC remains firmly committed to IO and its supremely chill posture on vertical monopolization. But as bad as IO is for regulating vertical mergers, it's even less well suited for addressing Google's main tactic for shaping markets: vertical investments.

Google Ventures (GV) is Google's investment arm, and it is vastly larger than the venture arms of other Big Tech companies. Google invests in far more companies than it buys outright, and also far more companies than any other Big Tech company does. GV is the only tech company investment fund that shows up in the top-ten list of VCs by deal.

In the paper, the authors use data from Pitchbook to create a sense of Google's remarkable investment portfolio. Many of these deals go through "Google for Startups," which allows Google to acquire an equity stake in companies for "in-kind contributions," mainly access to Google's cloud servers and data.

By investing so widely, Google can exert enormous force on the shape of the entire tech ecosystem, ensuring that the companies that do succeed don't compete with Google's most lucrative lines of business, but rather funnel users and businesses into using Google's services.

This activity isn't tracked by academics, regulators, or stock analysts. It's the "hidden empire" of the paper's title. 9556 companies that show up in Pitchbook as receiving Big Tech investments since 2024. 5,899 of those companies got their investments from Google.

Combine Google's free hand to engage in vertical acquisitions and its invisible empire of portfolio companies, and you have a world-spanning entity with damned few checks on its power.

What's more, as the authors write, Google is becoming an arm of US foreign power. Back in 2024, Google made a $24b acquisition offer to the cybersecurity company Wiz, which turned it down, out of fear that the Biden administration's antitrust enforcers would tank the deal. After Donald Trump's election – which saw antitrust enforcement neutralized except as a tool for blackmailing companies Trump doesn't like – Wiz sold to Google for $32b.

The Wiz acquisition is an incredibly dangerous one from a competitive perspective. Wiz provides realtime cybersecurity monitoring for the networks of large corporations, meaning that any Wiz customer necessarily shares a gigantic amount of sensitive data with the company – and now, with Google, which owns Wiz, and competes with many of its customers.

Google has already mastered the art of weaponizing the data that it collects from users, but with Wiz, it gains unprecedented access to sensitive data from the world's businesses.

Google's consolidation of market power – power it has abused so badly that it has lost three federal antitrust cases – can be directly traced to the foolish notions of Industrial Organization theory and its misplaced faith in vertical mergers.

As the authors write, it's long past time we abandoned this failed ideology. The Google/Wiz merger still has to clear regulatory approval in the EU. This represents a chance for the EC to abandon its tragic, decades-long, unrequited love affair with IO and block this nakedly anticompetitive merger.

Hey look at this (permalink)


A shelf of leatherbound history books with a gilt-stamped series title, 'The World's Famous Events.'

Object permanence (permalink)

#20yrsago BBC Archive database — early info https://web.archive.org/web/20051102024643/https://www.hackdiary.com/archives/000071.html

#20yrsago Sony releases de-rootkit-ifier, lies about risks from rootkits https://web.archive.org/web/20051126084940/http://www.freedom-to-tinker.com/?p=921

#20yrsago Pew study: Kids remix like hell https://web.archive.org/web/20051104022412/http://www.pewinternet.org/PPF/r/166/source/rss/report_display.asp

#15yrsago How I use the Internet when I’m playing with my kid https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2010/nov/02/cory-doctorow-children-and-computers

#15yrsago Bedtime Story: Supernatural thriller about the dark side of “getting lost in a good book” https://memex.craphound.com/2010/11/02/bedtime-story-supernatural-thriller-about-the-dark-side-of-getting-lost-in-a-good-book/

#15yrsago The Master Switch: Tim “Net Neutrality” Wu explains what’s at stake in the battle for net freedom https://memex.craphound.com/2010/11/01/the-master-switch-tim-net-neutrality-wu-explains-whats-at-stake-in-the-battle-for-net-freedom/

#15yrsago Times Online claims 200K paid users: but where’s the detailed breakdown? https://memex.craphound.com/2010/11/01/times-online-claims-200k-paid-users-but-wheres-the-detailed-breakdown/

#15yrsago Duelling useless machines: a metaphor for polarized politics https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UkgoSOSGrx4

#15yrsago Hari Prasad, India’s evoting researcher, working to save Indian democracy from dirty voting machines https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2010/11/2010-pioneer-award-winner-hari-prasad-defends

#15yrsago Science fiction tells us all laws are local — just like the Web https://locusmag.com/feature/cory-doctorow-a-cosmopolitan-literature-for-the-cosmopolitan-web/

#15yrsago UK Lord claims mysterious "foundation" wants to give Britain £17B, no strings attached http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2010/11/conspiracy-theories.html

#15yrsago New Zealand proposes “guilty until proven innocent” copyright law to punish accused infringers https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2010/11/new-zealand-p2p-proposal-guilty-until-proven-innocent/

#15yrsago Toronto cops who removed their name-tags during the G20 to avoid identification will be docked a day’s pay https://web.archive.org/web/20101107144339/https://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/national/toronto/nearly-100-toronto-officers-to-be-disciplined-over-summit-conduct/article1784884/

#15yrsago $2K bounty for free/open Kinect drivers (Microsoft thinks this is illegal!) https://blog.adafruit.com/2010/11/04/the-open-kinect-project-the-ok-prize-get-1000-bounty-for-kinect-for-xbox-360-open-source-drivers/

#15yrsago TSA official slipped white powder into fliers’ bags, told them they’d been caught with coke and were under arrest https://www.thesmokinggun.com/documents/stupid/memos-detail-tsa-officers-cocaine-pranks

#10yrsago Firefox’s new privacy mode also blocks tracking ads https://web.archive.org/web/20151104081611/https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2015/11/mozilla-ships-tracking-protection-firefox

#10yrsago Predatory lenders trick Google into serving ads to desperate, broke searchers https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2015/11/google-searches-privacy-danger/413614/

#10yrsago Fighting Uber’s Death Star with a Rebel Alliance of co-op platforms https://web.archive.org/web/20151107021010/http://www.shareable.net/blog/how-platform-coops-can-beat-death-stars-like-uber-to-create-a-real-sharing-economy

#10yrsago If the Kochs want criminal justice reform, why do they fund tough-on-crime GOP candidates? https://theintercept.com/2015/11/03/soft-on-crime-ads/

#10yrsago Chelsea Manning publishes a 129-page surveillance reform bill from her cell in Leavenworth https://web.archive.org/web/20151103175813/https://s3.amazonaws.com/fftf-cms/media/medialibrary/2015/11/manning-memo.pdf

#10yrsago EPA finds more Dieselgate emissions fraud in VW’s Audis and Porsches https://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/03/business/some-porsche-models-found-to-have-emissions-cheating-software.html

#10yrsago Ranking Internet companies’ data-handling: a test they all fail https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/nov/03/ranking-digital-rights-project-data-protection

#10yrsago Big Data refusal: the nuclear disarmament movement of the 21st century https://booktwo.org/notebook/big-data-no-thanks/

#10yrsago Made to Kill: 1960s killer-robot noir detective novel https://memex.craphound.com/2015/11/03/made-to-kill-1960s-killer-robot-noir-detective-novel/

#10yrsago Chrome won’t trust Symantec-backed SSL as of Jun 1 unless they account for bogus certs https://security.googleblog.com/2015/10/sustaining-digital-certificate-security.html

#10yrsago Beautiful, free/open 3D printed book of lost Louis H. Sullivan architectural ornaments https://web.archive.org/web/20151109231301/https://twentysomethingsullivan.com/

#10yrsago America’s a rigged carnival game that rips off the poor to fatten the rich https://web.archive.org/web/20151104012651/http://robertreich.org/post/132363519655

#10yrsago As America’s middle class collapses, no one is buying stuff anymore https://web.archive.org/web/20151105142153/http://uk.businessinsider.com/the-disappearing-middle-class-is-threatening-major-retailers-2015-10

#10yrsago Irish government to decriminalise personal quantities of many drugs https://www.irishtimes.com/news/ireland/irish-news/injection-rooms-for-addicts-to-open-next-year-in-drug-law-change-says-minister-1.2413509

#10yrsago Book and Bed: Tokyo’s coffin hotel/bookstore https://bookandbedtokyo.com/en/

#10yrsago Kim Stanley Robinson’s “Aurora”: space is bigger than you think https://memex.craphound.com/2015/11/02/kim-stanley-robinsons-aurora-space-is-bigger-than-you-think/

#5yrsago Trustbusting Google https://pluralistic.net/2020/11/02/unborked/#borked

#5yrsago Trump billed the White House $3 per glass of waterhttps://pluralistic.net/2020/11/02/unborked/#beltway-bandits

#5yrsago Trump's electoral equilibrium https://pluralistic.net/2020/11/02/unborked/#maso-fascism

#5yrsago A hopeful future https://pluralistic.net/2020/11/03/somebody-will/#somebody-will

#5yrsago Get an extra vote https://pluralistic.net/2020/11/03/somebody-will/#nudge-nudge

#5yrsago How Audible robs indie audiobook creatorshttps://pluralistic.net/2020/11/03/somebody-will/#acx

#5yrsago Past Performance is Not Indicative of Future Results https://pluralistic.net/2020/11/03/somebody-will/#a-not-i

#1yrago Bluesky and enshittification https://pluralistic.net/2024/11/02/ulysses-pact/#tie-yourself-to-a-federated-mast

#1yrago Shifting $677m from the banks to the people, every year, forever https://pluralistic.net/2024/11/01/bankshot/#personal-financial-data-rights

#1yrago Neal Stephenson's "Polostan" https://pluralistic.net/2024/11/04/bomb-light/#nukular

Upcoming appearances (permalink)

A photo of me onstage, giving a speech, pounding the podium.


A screenshot of me at my desk, doing a livecast.

Recent appearances (permalink)


A grid of my books with Will Stahle covers..

Latest books (permalink)


A cardboard book box with the Macmillan logo.

Upcoming books (permalink)

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

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

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

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


Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources:

Currently writing:

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

  • A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING

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

https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Quotations and images are not included in this license; they are included either under a limitation or exception to copyright, or on the basis of a separate license. Please exercise caution.

How to get Pluralistic:

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Pluralistic.net

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https://pluralistic.net/plura-list

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https://mamot.fr/@pluralistic

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https://doctorow.medium.com/

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https://twitter.com/doctorow

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

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Pluralistic: "Science Comics Computers: How Digital Hardware Works" (05 Nov 2025) by Cory Doctorow
Thursday November 6th, 2025 at 8:58 AM

Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
1 Share


Today's links


The First Second cover for 'Science Comics Computers: How Digital Hardware Works.'

"Science Comics Computers: How Digital Hardware Works" (permalink)

In Science Comics Computers: How Digital Hardware Works, legendary cypherpunk Perry Metzger teams up with Penelope Spector and illustrator Jerel Dye for a tour-de-force young adult comic book that uses hilarious steampunk dinosaurs to demystify the most foundational building-blocks of computers. It's astounding:

https://www.veniac.com/

"Science Comics" is a long-running series from First Second, the imprint that also published my middle-grades comic In Real Life and my picture book Poesy the Monster-Slayer (they are also publishing my forthcoming middle-grades graphic novel Unauthorized Bread and adult graphic novel Enshittification). But long before I was a First Second author, I was a giant First Second fan, totally captivated by their string of brilliant original comics and English translations of beloved comics from France, Spain and elsewhere. The "Science Comics" series really embodies everything I love about the imprint: the combination of whimsy, gorgeous art, and a respectful attitude towards young readers that meets them at their level without ever talking down to them:

https://us.macmillan.com/series/sciencecomics

But as great as the whole "Science Comics" series is, How Digital Hardware Works is even better. Our guide to the most profound principles in computer science is a T Rex named Professor Isabella Brunel, who dresses in steampunk finery that matches the Victorian, dinosaur-filled milieu in which she operates.

Brunel begins by introducing us to "Veniac," a digital computer that consists of a specially designed room in which a person performs all the steps involved in the operations of a computer. This person – a celebrated mathematician (she has a Fields Medal) velociraptor named Edna – moves slips of paper in and out of drawers, looks up their meaning in a decoder book, tacks them up on a corkboard register, painstakingly completing the operations that comprise the foundations of computing.

Here the authors are showing the reader that computing can be abstracted from computing. The foundation of computing isn't electrical engineering, microlithography, or programming: it's logic.

When I was six or seven, my father brought home a computer science teaching tool from Bell Labs called "CARDiac," the "CARDboard Illustrative Aid to Computation." This was a papercraft digital computer that worked in nearly the same way as the Veniac, with you playing the role of Edna, moving little tokens around, penciling and erasing values in registers, and painstakingly performing the operations to run values through adders and then move them to outputs:

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

CARDiac was profoundly formative for me. No matter how infinitesimal and rapid the components of a modern computer are, I have never lost sight of the fact that they are performing the same operations I performed with a CARDiac on my child-sized desk in my bedroom. This is exactly the mission of CARDiac, whose creators, David Hagelbarger and Saul Fingerman, were worried that the miniaturization of computers (in 1968!) was leading to a time where it would be impossible to truly grasp how they worked. If you want to build your own CARDiac, here's a PDF you can download and get started with:

https://www.instructables.com/CARDIAC-CARDboard-Illustrative-Aid-to-Computation-/

But of course, you don't need to print, assemble and operate a CARDIac to get the fingertip feeling of what's going on inside a computer. Watching a sassy velociraptor perform the operations will work just as well. After Edna lays down this conceptual framework, Brunel moves on to building a mechanical digital computer, one composed of mechanical switches that can be built up into logic gates, which can, in turn, be ganged together to create every part of a universal computer that can compute every valid program.

This mechanical computer – the "Brawniac" – runs on compressed air, provided by a system of pumps that either supply positive pressure (forcing corks upwards to either permit or block airflow) or negative pressure (which sucks the corks back down, toggling the switch's state). This simple switch – you could probably build one in your kitchen out of fish-tank tubing and an aquarium pump – is then methodically developed into every type of logic gate. These gates are then combined to replicate every function of Edna in her special Veniac room, firmly anchoring the mechanical nuts-and-bolts of automatic computing with the conceptual framework.

This goes beyond demystification: the authors here are attaching a handle to this big, nebulous, ubiquitous hyperobject that permeates every part of our lives and days, allowing the reader to grasp and examine it from all angles. While there's plenty of great slapstick, fun art, and terrific characters in this book that will make you laugh aloud, the lasting effect upon turning the last page isn't just entertainment, it's empowerment.

No wonder they were able to tap the legendary hardware hacker Andrew "bunnie" Huang to contribute an outstanding introduction to this book, one that echoes the cri de coeur in in the intro that bunnie generously provided for my young adult novel Little Brother. No one writes about the magic of hacking hardware like bunnie:

https://memex.craphound.com/2016/12/30/the-hardware-hacker-bunnie-huangs-tour-de-force-on-hardware-hacking-reverse-engineering-china-manufacturing-innovation-and-biohacking/

Bunnie isn't the only computing legend associated with this book. Lead author Perry Metzger founded the Cryptography mailing list and is a computing pioneer in his own right.

The authors have put up a website at veniac.com that promises educator guides and a Veniac simulator. These will doubtless serve as excellent companions to the book itself, but even without them, this is an incredible accomplishment.

Hey look at this (permalink)


A shelf of leatherbound history books with a gilt-stamped series title, 'The World's Famous Events.'

Object permanence (permalink)

#20yrsago Google print hurts kids! https://memex.craphound.com/2005/11/05/hospital-google-print-hurts-kids/

#15yrsago HOWTO graft the RFID from a payment-card onto your phone https://www.bunniestudios.com/blog/2010/rfid-transplantation/

#15yrsago Lincolnbot Mark I https://web.archive.org/web/20101107224026/http://disneyparks.disney.go.com/blog/2010/11/walt-disney-one-mans-dream-re-opens-with-new-magic-fond-memories-at-disney’s-hollywood-studios/

#15yrsago Crutchfield Dermatology of Minneapolis claims copyright in everything you write, forever, to keep you from posting complaints on the net https://memex.craphound.com/2010/11/05/crutchfield-dermatology-of-minneapolis-claims-copyright-in-everything-you-write-forever-to-keep-you-from-posting-complaints-on-the-net/

#15yrsago Botmasters include fake control interface to ensnare security researchers https://web.archive.org/web/20101106004833/https://blog.tllod.com/2010/11/03/statistics-dont-lie-or-do-they/

#15yrsago Young Asian refugee claimant sneaks onto Air Canada flight from HK disguised as old white guy https://www.cnn.com/2010/WORLD/americas/11/04/canada.disguised.passenger/index.html

#15yrsago Zoo City: hard-boiled South African urban fantasy makes murder out of magic https://memex.craphound.com/2010/11/05/zoo-city-hard-boiled-south-african-urban-fantasy-makes-murder-out-of-magic/

#15yrsago Shortly after Murdoch buys National Geographic, he fires its award-winning journalists https://www.pewresearch.org/journalism/2011/07/20/wall-street-journal-under-rupert-murdoch/

#10yrsago British government will (unsuccessfully) ban end-to-end encryption https://memex.craphound.com/2015/11/05/british-government-will-unsuccessfully-ban-end-to-end-encryption/

#10yrsago Man killed by his tapeworm’s cancer https://www.livescience.com/52695-tapeworm-cancer.html?cmpid=514645

#10yrsago Washington Redskins’ lawyers enumerate other grossly offensive trademarks for the USPTO https://www.techdirt.com/2015/11/04/how-redskins-delightfully-vulgar-court-filing-won-me-over/

#10yrsago New Zealand’s lost colossus: all-mechanical racetrack oddsmaking computer https://hackaday.com/2015/11/04/tote-boards-the-impressive-engineering-of-horse-gambling/

#5yrsago Ant, Uber, and the true nature of money https://pluralistic.net/2020/11/05/gotta-be-a-pony-under-there/#jack-ma

#1yrago How to have cancer https://pluralistic.net/2024/11/05/carcinoma-angels/#squeaky-nail

Upcoming appearances (permalink)

A photo of me onstage, giving a speech, pounding the podium.


A screenshot of me at my desk, doing a livecast.

Recent appearances (permalink)


A grid of my books with Will Stahle covers..

Latest books (permalink)


A cardboard book box with the Macmillan logo.

Upcoming books (permalink)

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

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

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

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


Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources:

Currently writing:

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

  • A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING

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

https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

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How to get Pluralistic:

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Villa Boe Is Built in Layers Along a Hillside in Lombok, Indonesia by Caroline Williamson
Tuesday November 4th, 2025 at 11:05 PM

Design MilkDesign Milk
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Villa Boe Is Built in Layers Along a Hillside in Lombok, Indonesia

Perched dramatically atop one of Lombok’s highest slopes, Villa Boë by Alexis Dornier is a topographical marvel. Spanning over 12,390 square feet, the villa doesn’t just sit on the steep hillside – it emerges from it, blending architecture, landscape, and art. At Tampah Hills – a community known for its commitment to sustainable luxury – Villa Boë feels like a natural extension of the landscape rather than an intrusion upon it.

Large modern house with spacious balconies situated on a lush, green hillside under a clear sky, with a winding driveway and distant mountains in the background.

Steep and raw, the terrain required ingenuity and sensitivity, resulting in Dornier creating a layered design that works with the contours of the hillside. At the base, a discreet garage and entrance are carved into the land. Moving upward, the spaces unfold with open living, dining, and kitchen areas connected by a series of steps and platforms. The private quarters are divided into two wings, each designed for a family, ensuring privacy without isolation. At the top is a circular yoga and contemplation pavilion, a quiet space with tranquil views of the lush hills and ocean beyond.

A modern multi-level house with a green roof sits on a hillside, overlooking a lush valley and distant mountains under a hazy sky.

Villa Boë’s floor plan mirrors the site with a system of concentric circles and radial lines defining how the roofs open up and how spaces work together. The approach gives the home a sense of flow – instead of a stack of rooms, it becomes a continuous unveiling, almost like a piece of art that slowly reveals itself. The roofs fan out allowing the oceanside rooms to enjoy more natural light through floor-to-ceiling windows. Cutouts in the roofs on the top two floors create sunlit patios for the occupants to use throughout the day when they desire quiet time away from the main outdoor space below.

Modern hillside villas with large windows and stone retaining walls overlook a lush, green landscape under a clear sky.

Modern house situated on a hillside surrounded by lush greenery, with a curved driveway leading up to the residence under a clear sky.

Modern multi-level house built into a hillside, featuring large glass windows, surrounded by greenery and stone retaining walls. A person is walking on the driveway.

Aerial view of a modern, multi-level house with tiered roofs, surrounded by dense greenery, featuring a swimming pool and a winding driveway.

Every room opens to a view, highlighting the indoor/outdoor connection that the tropical location is know for. The pool, for instance, doesn’t stand apart from the house but extends through it, weaving together terraces and gardens in a seamless progression.

Infinity pool with lounge chairs under a wooden ceiling, overlooking a beach, ocean, and green hills under a partly cloudy sky.

Modern outdoor patio with wooden ceiling, white stone steps, lounge chairs, and a swimming pool, overlooking greenery and sky in the background.

Modern open-air lounge with poolside seating, infinity pool, and a view of mountains and the ocean at sunset.

Material restraint plays a vital role in maintaining Villa Boë’s overall aesthetic. Dornier and his collaborators – Somewhere Concept for interiors and Bali Landscape Company for the grounds – chose materials that tie the project to its location. Teak wood ceilings and soffits, off-white walls, and white Palimanan stone floors that cool the feet while reflecting the tropical light, echo the tones and textures of Lombok’s natural environment.

A modern outdoor patio with a wooden sofa set overlooks a coastal landscape, featuring ocean, beach, green hills, and partly cloudy sky.

Modern villa with open terrace, pool, and hillside view at sunset; tree branches frame the scene, mountains and clouds visible in the distance.

Modern hillside villa with an infinity pool overlooking a scenic valley at sunset, surrounded by lush greenery and distant mountains.

Modern luxury villa with open living area, infinity pool, and steps, overlooking mountains and a vibrant purple sunset sky.

Hints of American architect John Lautner emerge in the way the villa’s rooflines shape the views and anchor the building to its environment. The architecture acts as a frame – capturing fragments of sky, hillside, and horizon – so that every moment inside feels like part of an ever-evolving painting.

Modern villa with floor-to-ceiling windows overlooks a mountain landscape, featuring an infinity pool and clear blue sky.

A modern patio with wooden chairs and cushions faces lush greenery and a distant view, with sunlight streaming through tree branches beside a large glass window.

A modern terrace with a curved wood ceiling, potted plants, and mountain views under a partly cloudy sky.

Modern open-air interior with a potted tree, plants, light-colored flooring, wooden ceiling, stairs, and ocean view in the background.

Modern dining and kitchen area with wooden furniture, large windows, ocean view, and contemporary pendant light fixture.

The infinity pool, which follows the same curves as the roofline, visually connects to the ocean on the horizon while making it feel like you’re floating above it when taking a swim.

Modern living space with large windows overlooking an infinity pool and ocean view, featuring minimalist furniture and natural materials.

Modern living and dining area with large windows, wooden ceiling, neutral furnishings, and a scenic view of green hills and cloudy sky outside.

A modern interior with a spiral staircase, a round wooden table, and a white vase holding a leafy branch in the foreground.

Modern bedroom with a large bed, desk, and lounge chair, featuring wood finishes, neutral tones, and large windows overlooking the ocean at sunset.

Modern bathroom with a large round stone bathtub, floor-to-ceiling windows, wooden ceiling, and an ocean view. Natural light fills the space.

Modern bedroom with a wooden bed, neutral decor, large window, ocean view, two nightstands with lamps, and natural light.

Minimalist interior with light-colored walls, wood-paneled ceiling, a small staircase, and a sculpture displayed in a recessed wall niche.

Open-air space with a wooden ceiling overlooks a scenic view of green hills, the ocean, and partly cloudy skies. A small garden with tropical plants is on the left.

A large, multi-story modern house with illuminated windows is set on a lush, green hillside at dusk, with a pool and patio visible in front.

A modern house with curved architecture is nestled among green hills under a clear sky, with distant mountains visible on the horizon.

For more information on Villa Boë and Alexis Dornier, please visit alexisdornier.com.

Photography by KIE.

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It’s the fake thing: Coca-Cola tries another AI Christmas TV ad by David Gerard
Tuesday November 4th, 2025 at 11:05 PM

Pivot to AI
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It’s early November! And you know what that means? Coca-Cola’s done another of its terrible AI Christmas TV ads! Where they take their 1995 ad “Holidays Are Coming” and remake it with a slop generator.

We covered last year’s bad AI Coke ad. No shot over two or three seconds, animals and snowmen visibly warped their proportions over those three seconds, the trucks’ wheels didn’t actually move.

This year’s ad is still slop, but it’s a bit less slapdash. The trucks’ wheels turn now. Except when the AI forgets to put back wheels on the truck’s prime mover. The rendered animals don’t warp quite as badly over the course of three seconds, though the trucks do. It’s not clear why there’s a sloth in snow in what looks like Canada. Near the end, the truck nearly ploughs down the pedestrians, but it magically slows down instantly. In snow. [YouTube]

AI video hasn’t actually improved over the past year. You can’t direct the AI video generator — you just press the button and hope it spits out a good clip this time.

This sixty-second ad was assembled from seventy thousand individual rendered clips. Three seconds each. Then they went through this three days of generated video desperately hoping they had 20 to 30 clips they could actually use. [WSJ]

This is not an ad for Coke — it’s an ad for AI video slop generators, and its target market is putting the fear into the writers and animators.

AI still can’t render text, so the Coca-Cola logos are hand-composited onto the trucks, and you can see the logos moving around. Except when they didn’t bother and left in the messed-up AI renderings. Of their trademark.

The Coca-Cola Company is desperately trying to talk up this mediocre demo as the best demo ever. That’s how AI works now — AI companies don’t give you an impressive demo that can’t be turned into a product, they give you a garbage demo and loudly insist it’s actually super cool: [THR]

The company believes enough has changed in a year, in both the tech and society, to evoke a different response.

Yeah, that didn’t happen. Every video comment is negative. People hate AI slop more than they did a year ago.

Times are tough, the real economy where people live is way down, the recession is biting, and the normal folk know the ones promoting AI want them out of a job. If you push AI, you are the enemy of ordinary people. And the ordinary people know it.

This is the best ad that Pepsi never paid for. Coca-Cola: it’s the fake thing.

Edit: The video isn’t even AI, it’s CGI and 3D modelling. In the official the behind-the-scenes video, at 0:44 you will see the 3D model of the Coke bottle, and 0:53 onwards shows the artists at work. This is an ordinary animated production they put an AI gloss over. And it still looks like slop. [YouTube]

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CBP Quietly Launches Face Scanning App for Local Cops To Do Immigration Enforcement by Joseph Cox
Tuesday November 4th, 2025 at 11:04 PM

404 Media
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CBP Quietly Launches Face Scanning App for Local Cops To Do Immigration Enforcement

Customs and Border Protection (CBP) has publicly released an app that Sheriff Offices, police departments, and other local or regional law enforcement can use to scan someone’s face as part of immigration enforcement, 404 Media has learned.

The news follows Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s (ICE) use of another internal Department of Homeland Security (DHS) app called Mobile Fortify that uses facial recognition to nearly instantly bring up someone’s name, date of birth, alien number, and whether they’ve been given an order of deportation. The new local law enforcement-focused app, called Mobile Identify, crystallizes one of the exact criticisms of DHS’s facial recognition app from privacy and surveillance experts: that this sort of powerful technology would trickle down to local enforcement, some of which have a history of making anti-immigrant comments or supporting inhumane treatment of detainees.

Handing “this powerful tech to police is like asking a 16-year old who just failed their drivers exams to pick a dozen classmates to hand car keys to,” Jake Laperruque, deputy director of the Center for Democracy & Technology's Security and Surveillance Project, told 404 Media. “These careless and cavalier uses of facial recognition are going to lead to U.S. citizens and lawful residents being grabbed off the street and placed in ICE detention.”

💡
Do you know anything else about this app or others that CBP and ICE are using? I would love to hear from you. Using a non-work device, you can message me securely on Signal at joseph.404 or send me an email at joseph@404media.co.

Mobile Identify is designed “to identify and process individuals who may be in the country unlawfully,” according to its respective page on the Google Play Store. The app was published on Monday.

A source with knowledge of the app told 404 Media the app doesn’t return names after a face search. Instead it tells users to contact ICE and provides a reference number, or to not detain the person depending on the result. 404 Media granted the person anonymity because they weren’t permitted to speak to the press. 

404 Media downloaded a copy of the app and decompiled its code, a common practice among security researchers and technology journalists. Although the Play Store page does not mention facial recognition, multiple parts of the app’s code make clear references to scanning faces. One package is called “facescanner.” Other parts mention “FacePresence” and “No facial image found.”

CBP Quietly Launches Face Scanning App for Local Cops To Do Immigration Enforcement
A screenshot from the app's Google Play Store page.

Screenshots of the app on the Play Store page show the app requires users to login with their Login.gov account, and that the app “requires camera access to take photos of subjects.” At the time of writing the app has “1+” downloads, according to the Play Store page.

The Play Store page does not say exactly how the app processes scanned faces, such as what images it compares them to, or what data the app returns upon a hit. In statements to 404 Media, DHS and CBP did not provide any specifics.

The app is for agencies that are part of the 287(g) program, the Play Store page says. This program lets ICE delegate certain immigration-related authorities and powers to local and state agencies. Members of the 287(g) Task Force Model (TFM), for instance, are allowed to enforce certain immigration authorities during their police duties, ICE’s website explains. At the time of writing, 555 agencies in 34 states are part of the TFM program, according to data published by ICE. 

The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) has criticized the 287(g) program because a large number of participating sheriffs have made anti-immigrant statements, supported inhumane immigration and border enforcement policies, and have a pattern of racial profiling and other civil rights violations. 

Cooper Quintin, senior staff technologist at the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), told 404 Media “Face surveillance in general, and this tool specifically, was already a dangerous infringement of civil liberties when in the hands of ICE agents. Putting a powerful surveillance tool like this in the hands of state and local law enforcement officials around the country will only further erode peoples’ Fourth Amendment rights, for citizens and non-citizens alike. This will further erode due process, and subject even more Americans to omnipresent surveillance and unjust detainment.”

CBP Quietly Launches Face Scanning App for Local Cops To Do Immigration Enforcement
CBP Quietly Launches Face Scanning App for Local Cops To Do Immigration Enforcement

Screenshots from the app's Google Play Store page.

Mobile Fortify—the facial recognition app used by ICE which 404 Media first revealed in June—uses the CBP Traveler Verification Service (TVS) ordinarily designed for when people enter the U.S. The app took those systems and an unprecedented collection of U.S. government databases and turned them inwards, letting officers in the field reveal a person’s identity and immigration status. The app also uses data from the State Department, FBI, and state databases, and uses a bank of 200 million images. 

404 Media reported in October that multiple social media videos show Border Patrol and ICE officers scanning peoples’ faces on the street. 

“I’m an American citizen so leave me alone,” a person stopped by ICE says in one video.

“Alright, we just got to verify that,” one of the officers replies.

404 Media also obtained an internal DHS document which says ICE does not let people decline or consent to being scanned by the app. The document, called a Privacy Threshold Analysis, said photos taken by the app will be stored for 15 years, including those of U.S. citizens.

Ranking member of the House Homeland Security Committee Bennie G. Thompson previously told 404 Media in a statement that ICE will prioritize the results of the Mobile Fortify app over birth certificates. “ICE officials have told us that an apparent biometric match by Mobile Fortify is a ‘definitive’ determination of a person’s status and that an ICE officer may ignore evidence of American citizenship—including a birth certificate—if the app says the person is an alien,” he said. “ICE using a mobile biometrics app in ways its developers at CBP never intended or tested is a frightening, repugnant, and unconstitutional attack on Americans’ rights and freedoms.”

In response to questions about the new app for Sheriff Offices and other local law enforcement, a DHS spokesperson told 404 Media in an email “While the Department does not discuss specific vendors or operational tools, any technology used by DHS Components must comply with the requirements and oversight framework.”

CBP responded with a statement primarily discussing Mobile Fortify. “Biometric data used to identify individuals through TVS are collected by government authorities consistent with the law, including issuing documents or processing illegal aliens. The Mobile Fortify Application provides a mobile capability that uses facial comparison as well as fingerprint matching to verify the identity of individuals against specific immigration related holdings,” the statement said. CBP added it built the Mobile Fortify application to support ICE, and confirmed ICE has used the app in its operations around the U.S.

Google did not respond to a request for comment.

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How to Opt-Out of Airlines Selling Your Travel Data to the Government by Joseph Cox
Tuesday November 4th, 2025 at 9:36 AM

404 Media
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How to Opt-Out of Airlines Selling Your Travel Data to the Government

Most people probably have no idea that when you book a flight through major travel websites, a data broker owned by U.S. airlines then sells details about your flight, including your name, credit card used, and where you’re flying to the government. The data broker has compiled billions of ticketing records the government can search without a warrant or court order. The data broker is called the Airlines Reporting Corporation (ARC), and, as 404 Media has shown, it sells flight data to multiple parts of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and a host of other government agencies, while contractually demanding those agencies not reveal where the data came from.

It turns out, it is possible to opt-out of this data selling, including to government agencies. At least, that’s what I found when I ran through the steps to tell ARC to stop selling my personal data. Here’s how I did that:

  1. I emailed privacy@arccorp.com and, not yet knowing the details of the process, simply said I wish to delete my personal data held by ARC.
  2. A few hours later the company replied with some information and what I needed to do. ARC said it needed my full name (including middle name if applicable), the last four digits of the credit card number used to purchase air travel, and my residential address. 
  3. I provided that information. The following month, ARC said it was unable to delete my data because “we and our service providers require it for legitimate business purposes.” The company did say it would not sell my data to any third parties, though. “However, even though we cannot delete your data, we can confirm that we will not sell your personal data to any third party for any reason, including, but not limited to, for profiling, direct marketing, statistical, scientific, or historical research purposes,” ARC said in an email.
  4. I then followed up with ARC to ask specifically whether this included selling my travel data to the government. “Does the not selling of my data include not selling to government agencies as part of ARC’s Travel Intelligence Program or any other forms?” I wrote. The Travel Intelligence Program, or TIP, is the program ARC launched to sell data to the government. ARC updates it every day with the previous day’s ticket sales and it can show a person’s paid intent to travel.
  5. A few days later, ARC replied. “Yes, we can confirm that not selling your data includes not selling to any third party, including, but not limited to, any government agency as part of ARC’s Travel Intelligence Program,” the company said.
💡
Do you know anything else about ARC or other data being sold to government agencies? I would love to hear from you. Using a non-work device, you can message me securely on Signal at joseph.404 or send me an email at joseph@404media.co.

Honestly, I was quite surprised at how smooth and clear this process was. ARC only registered as a data broker with the state of California—a legal requirement—in June, despite selling data for years. 

What I did was not a formal request under a specific piece of privacy legislation, such as the European Union’s General Data Privacy Regulation (GDPR) or the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA). Maybe a request to delete information under the CCPA would have more success; that law says California residents have the legal right to ask to have their personal data deleted “subject to certain exceptions (such as if the business is legally required to keep the information),” according to the California Department of Justice’s website.

ARC is owned and operated by at least eight major U.S. airlines, according to publicly released documents. Its board includes representatives from Delta, United, American Airlines, JetBlue, Alaska Airlines, Canada’s Air Canada, and European airlines Air France and Lufthansa. 

Public procurement records show agencies such as ICE, CBP, ATF, TSA, the SEC, the Secret Service, the State Department, the U.S. Marshals, and the IRS have purchased ARC data. Agencies have given no indication they use a search warrant or other legal mechanism to search the data. In response to inquiries from 404 Media, ATF said it follows “DOJ policy and appropriate legal processes” and the Secret Service declined to answer.

An ARC spokesperson previously told 404 Media in an email that TIP “was established by ARC after the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks and has since been used by the U.S. intelligence and law enforcement community to support national security and prevent criminal activity with bipartisan support. Over the years, TIP has likely contributed to the prevention and apprehension of criminals involved in human trafficking, drug trafficking, money laundering, sex trafficking, national security threats, terrorism and other imminent threats of harm to the United States.” At the time, the spokesperson added “Pursuant to ARC’s privacy policy, consumers may ask ARC to refrain from selling their personal data.”

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