A new feature on X is making people suddenly realize that some large portion of the divisive, hateful, and spammy content designed to inflame tensions or, at the very least, is designed to get lots of engagement on social media, is being published by accounts that are pretending to be based in the United States but are actually being run by people in countries like Bangladesh, Vietnam, India, Cambodia, Russia, and other countries. An account called “Ivanka News” is based in Nigeria, “RedPilledNurse” is from Europe, “MAGA Nadine” is in Morocco, “Native American Soul” is in Bangladesh, and “Barron Trump News” is based in Macedonia, among many, many of others. 

Inauthentic viral accounts on X are just the tip of the iceberg, though, as we have reported. A huge amount of the viral content about American politics and American news on social media is from sock puppet and bot accounts monetized by people in other countries. The rise of easy to use, free AI generative tools have supercharged this effort, and social media monetization programs have incentivized this effort and are almost entirely to blame. The current disinformation and slop phenomenon on the internet today makes the days of ‘Russian bot farms’ and ‘fake news pages from Cyprus’ seem quaint; the problem is now fully decentralized and distributed across the world and is almost entirely funded by social media companies themselves. 

This will not be news to people who have been following 404 Media, because I have done multiple investigations about the perverse incentives that social media and AI companies have created to incentivize people to fill their platforms with slop. But what has happened on X is the same thing that has happened on Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, and other social media platforms (it is also happening to the internet as a whole, with AI slop websites laden with plagiarized content and SEO spam and monetized with Google ads). Each social media platform has either an ad revenue sharing program, a “creator bonus” program, or a monetization program that directly pays creators who go viral on their platforms. 

This has created an ecosystem of side hustlers trying to gain access to these programs and YouTube and Instagram creators teaching people how to gain access to them. It is possible to find these guide videos easily if you search for things like “monetized X account” on YouTube. Translating that phrase and searching in other languages (such as Hindi, Portuguese, Vietnamese, etc) will bring up guides in those languages. Within seconds, I was able to find a handful of YouTubers explaining in Hindi how to create monetized X accounts; other videos on the creators’ pages explain how to fill these accounts with AI-generated content. These guides also exist in English, and it is increasingly popular to sell guides to make “AI influencers,” and AI newsletters, Reels accounts, and TikTok accounts regardless of the country that you’re from. 

Examples include “AK Educate” (which is one of thousands), which posts every few days about how to monetize accounts on Facebook, YouTube, X, Instagram, TikTok, Etsy, and others. “How to create Twitter X Account for Monitization [sic] | Earn From Twitter in Pakistan,” is the name of a typical video in this genre. These channels are not just teaching people how to make and spam content, however. They are teaching people specifically how to make it seem like they are located in the United States, and how to create content that they believe will perform with American audiences on American social media. Sometimes they are advising the use of VPNs and other tactics to make it seem like the account is posting from the United States, but many of the accounts explain that doing this step doesn’t actually matter.

Americans are being targeted because advertisers pay higher ad rates to reach American internet users, who are among the wealthiest in the world. In turn, social media companies pay more money if the people engaging with the content are American. This has created a system where it makes financial sense for people from the entire world to specifically target Americans with highly engaging, divisive content. It pays more. 

For the most part, the only ‘psyop’ here is one being run on social media users by social media companies themselves in search of getting more ad revenue by any means necessary. 

For example: AK Educate has a video called “7 USA Faceless Channel Ideas for 2025,” and another video called “USA YouTube Channel Kaise Banaye [how to].” The first of these videos is in Hindi but has English subtitles.

“Where you get $1 on 1,000 views on Pakistani content,” the video begins, “you get $5 to $7 on 1,000 views on USA content.” 

“As cricket is seen in Pakistan and India, boxing and MMA are widely seen in America,” he says. Channel ideas include “MMA,” “Who Died Today USA,” “How ships sink,” news from wars, motivational videos, and Reddit story voiceovers. To show you how pervasive this advice to make channels that target Americans is, look at this, which is a YouTube search for “USA Channel Kaise Banaye”:

One of these videos, called “7 Secret USA-Based Faceless Channel Ideas for 2026 (High RPM Niches!)” starts with an explanation of “USA currency,” which details what a dollar is and what a cent is, and its value relative to the rupee, and goes on to explain how to generate English-language content about ancient history, rare cars, and tech news. Another video I watched showed, from scratch, how to create videos for a channel called “Voices of Auntie Mae,” which are supposed to be inspirational videos about Black history that are generated using a mix of ChatGPT, Google Translate, an AI voice tool called Speechma, Google’s AI image generator, CapCut, and YouTube. Another shows how to use Bing search, Google News Trends, Perplexity, and video generators to create “a USA Global News Channel Covering World Events,” which included making videos about the war in Ukraine and Chinese military parades. A video podcast about success stories included how a man made a baseball video called “baseball Tag of the year??? #mlb” in which 49 percent of viewers were in the USA: “People from the USA watch those types of videos, so my brother sitting at home in India easily takes his audience to an American audience,” one of the creators said in the video. 

I watched video after video being created by a channel called “Life in Rural Cambodia,” about how to create and spam AI-generated content using only your phone. Another video, presented by an AI-generated woman speaking Hindi, explains how it is possible to copy paste text from CNN to a Google Doc, run it through a program called “GravityWrite” to alter it slightly, have an AI voice read it, and post the resulting video to YouTube. 

A huge and growing amount of the content that we see on the internet is created explicitly because these monetization programs exist. People are making content specifically for Americans. They are not always, or even usually, creating it because they are trying to inflame tensions. They are making it because they can make money from it, and because content viewed by Americans pays the most and performs the best. The guides to making this sort of thing focus entirely on how to make content quickly, easily, and using automated tools. They focus on how to steal content from news outlets, source things from other websites, and generate scripts using AI tools. They do not focus on spreading disinformation or fucking up America, they focus on “making money.”  This is a problem that AI has drastically exacerbated, but it is a problem that has wholly been created by social media platforms themselves, and which they seem to have little or no interest in solving. 

The new feature on X that exposes this fact is notable because people are actually talking about it, but Facebook and YouTube have had similar features for years, and it has changed nothing. Clicking any random horrific Facebook slop page, such as this one called “City USA” which exclusively posts photos of celebrities holding birthday cakes, shows that even though it lists its address as being in New York City, the page is being run by someone in Cambodia. This page called “Military Aviation” which lists its address as “Washington DC,” is actually based in Indonesia. This page called “Modern Guardian” and which exclusively posts positive, fake AI content about Elon Musk, lists itself as being in Los Angeles but Facebook’s transparency tools say it is based in Cambodia. 

Besides journalists and people who feel like they are going crazy looking at this stuff, there are, realistically, no social media users who are going into the “transparency” pages of viral social media accounts to learn where they are based. The problem is not a lack of transparency, because being “transparent” doesn’t actually matter. The only thing revealed by this transparency is that social media companies do not give a fuck about this.

In the deserted town square of the city of Springfield, three people huddle in an empty courthouse. Two of these people are civilians; one is a “vulnerable,” someone being pursued and targeted by government agents. They talk in hushed tones to one another, playing music to keep fear at bay. Above the door of the courthouse, a plaque reads, “Liberty and Justice for Most.”

At the bottom of the courthouse stairs, two government agents step out of a purple golf cart. They approach the door. They’re carrying guns. 

“Hey, is anyone inside?” one of them says. “Any vulnerables in here? We have a warrant. We have a warrant for any vulnerables in the area.” 

One civilian opens the door, sees the agents, and immediately slams it shut. After more warrant calls, the civilian says, “Slip it under the door.”

“I would slip it under the door, but there’s no space under the door,” the agent says, stuttering. 

The civilian pauses. “Well. Sounds like a personal problem.”

This was the scene in a Simpsons-themed Fortnite lobby on November 21, where members of a new 500-person gaming group gathered to practice what they would do if Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents came knocking at their doors in real life. The group, New Save Collective, is an effort to organize people in the gaming world who have more progressive ideas but no place to discuss them. 

“ Our hypothesis since we started this project has been that opposition forces like corporations and the military and the far right have done a really good job at weaponizing the social features of gaming,” said one of the organizers, who goes by PitaBreadFace online and spoke to 404 Media on condition of pseudonymity due to security concerns, as they said people claiming to be ICE agents have already infiltrated the group’s Discord server a few times. “ They’re building institutions in the gaming landscape, which is the biggest entertainment industry in the world, lest people forget.” 

“Gaming wasn’t kind of a random genre that we chose,” Shauna Siggelkow of the organization Define American, which partnered with New Save Collective, told Wired ahead of the Friday event last week. “We’ve been tracking anti-immigrant myths and disinformation digitally for years.” 

Some examples of those weaponizations include the U.S. Navy playing e-sports to recruit teens and kids being roped into neo-Nazi propaganda groups in online shooter games. ICE is also using games, like the sci-fi first-person shooter Halo and the all-time favorite Pokémon, in its recruitment ads. “More pro-social forces have really lacked,” PitaBreadFace said. “We have not been as effective at creating institutions. So we’ve seen the hunger for those kinds of spaces for gamers.”

PitaBreadFace and other grassroots organizers have been working on the Collective for the past three years, more recently in partnership with formal non-profit advocacy groups like Define American and Immigrants Belong. The Fortnite event was run by the Collective, but is part of a larger campaign titled “Play Your Role,” which is intended to teach people about their rights and “counter fear-based misinformation about immigrants,” according to a statement written by the non-profits. The Play Your Role campaign also included a live-streamed Grand Theft Auto event last Thursday, in which gamers roleplayed with people dressed as real ICE agents during traffic stops or outside apparent detention centers. Earlier this year, Roblox players conducted similar roleplaying events to simulate ICE raids and protests. 

Organizers asked 404 Media not to join the official Fortnite lobby in real time; they said having reporters in the same space as Collective members might have exerted media pressure or kept them from getting the full experience. “ We’re not going to stream it for security reasons, and no reporters inside of it,” PitaBreadFace said on the morning ahead of the event. “Our main goal tonight is to really build and organize with the folks who are coming, and because I’m an organizer, that’s obviously the priority.”

However, they shared a number of clips from matches and discussions after the event had concluded. 

After some scuffling, the agents agree to “abandon the vehicle” and run off. As they are chased off, one person calls after them, “Yeah, I threw a pizza at you! I threw a pizza at you with extra bacon.” 

In another clip, the two gamers role-playing as ICE agents—portrayed by Fortnite’s Airhead character—are standing on their golf cart, surrounded by civilians in the middle of their pursuit of a “vulnerable,” the event’s chosen term for people being targeted by government agents.

“This does not concern you,” one of the agents says to the civilians, encouraging them to leave.

“We’re allowed to record,” one person responds. Another asks, “Who does it concern?” 

“We’re looking for two vulnerables,” the agent says, as the civilian group closes in on the golf cart. “Excuse us, you’re interfering. We have a court order.” 

After some scuffling, the agents agree to “abandon the vehicle” and run off. As they are chased off, one person calls after them, “Yeah, I threw a pizza at you! I threw a pizza at you with extra bacon.” 

The agents were played by the organizers behind the Collective, and they were noticeably less persistent than ICE agents in real life. That’s evidenced by them saying things like, “Excuse us,” but it’s also evident in their behavior. In the first clip, they don’t bust down the door of the courthouse; when a civilian briefly opens it, they don’t barge inside. At the end of that encounter, one agent says to the other, “This home is too protected; let’s go see if we can find a vulnerable somewhere else.” Given their reputation for violence in raids, IRL ICE agents are unlikely to give up as easily. 

But that kind of environment allows the training session to be a reasonable intensity for a gamer’s first round of practice responding to ICE, and still be a fun, safe place for people to hang out. According to PitaBreadFace, the main goal of the space wasn’t necessarily to be a specifically anti-ICE training facility, but more so to organize a community and build trust. And this tactical frivolity is a proven method of protest—ask anyone who wore a frog costume to a Portland protest earlier this year.

“ A situation, even though it’s virtual, where you can clearly overwhelm ICE’s numbers and do silly stupid things and work together easily and be connected to each other—it just felt like actually winning,” one gamer said in a clip provided to 404 Media. “It felt like a way to kind of heal some of the burnout.”

A virtual situation also allows players to fire back at ICE in ways that likely wouldn’t be practical in real life. In one clip, for example, two agents are chasing after a vulnerable, yelling, “Hey, stop right there!” 

When they get close enough, the vulnerable drops a Boogie Bomb, an item which forces another player to dance under a disco ball for about three seconds. 

“Oh,” the Boogie-Bombed agent exclaims, before the gamers start laughing. 

The event also had another component. Before the practice ICE raids, gamers went around to practice finding one another, creating groups and building connections. PitaBreadFace described this segment as learning how to “meet your neighbors, know those around you, and establish contact.” A lot of that, according to clips provided to 404 Media, involves doing dance emotes together; in one case, it was a team of about 10 people destroying an in-map mansion and yelling, “Pay your taxes!” 

But it also involved discussions about what community means. In the middle of a “Shout!” dance circle, one gamer said that they first learned the importance of community organizing when protesting the 2017 Muslim ban. 

“ I feel like community taught me that like if enough people came together and there was enough will, anything could happen,” they said. “I remember the first Muslim ban, and just hella people went to the airport, and we were able to petition for people to get released. And they were. It was cool to see that organically happen.”

New Save Collective plans to run more events similar to this one through the end of this year, at which point Fortnite is slated to get rid of the proximity chat mode it uses. PitaBreadFace said the response had been so far overwhelmingly positive.

“ I think gamers represent this constituency of people who are really common-sense,” PitaBreadFace said. “It’s not like they’re even super pro-immigrant. They’re just like, ‘No, this doesn’t make sense. This community member who’s been part of a community for 25 years is being ripped out of his home in the middle of the night. That doesn’t make sense, and we should do something about it.’ We have a lot of people who joined the [Discord] server who are like, ‘I actually don’t know, but I know this is wrong and I’m here to learn and participate.’” 

Hidekazu Araki betreibt in Tokio seit Jahren ein Uhrenfachgeschäft, in dem bereits über 10.000 Uhren von Hand gefertigt hat. ProcessX hat ihn dort besucht und ihm beim Fertigungsprozess über die Schulter geschaut.

(Direktlink)

Today's links

• Boss preppers: What does a captain of industry have to offer after the shit hits the fan?
• Hey look at this: Delights to delectate.
• Object permanence: Yahoo blocks webmail for adblockers; Badly forgiving student debt.
• 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.

Boss preppers (permalink)

Sometimes, you learn a fact that makes everything else make sense – one of those keystone insights that puts a whole phenomenon into perspective. For example, the fact that preppers are engaged in a very specific type of wish-fulfillment.

I learned this during the first part of the pandemic lockdowns, when preppers were very much in our collective consciousness. On the Media featured an interview between Micah Loewinger and Richard Mitchell, author of Dancing at Armageddon: Survivalism and Chaos in Modern Times which features ethnographic studies of preppers:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/03/22/preppers-are-larpers/#preppers-unprepared

Mitchell described how preppers make ready for specific forms of societal collapse, based not on the likelihood of the event itself, but rather, based on how useful they would be in that situation. For example, a water chemist has made extensive preparations for an event in which terrorists poison the water-supply. When pressed, he couldn't explain why terrorists would choose his town to target with an attack like this, but basically thought it would be really cool if the only person who could save his town was him.

This is the "disaster fantasy" that propels the prepper movement, in which a functional, high-tech world of wicked, systemic problems is replaced with a fallen, low-tech society where the problems are all simple. A world of simple problems is a world of individual actors, where every struggle is just about what one person can make someone else do, or offer to someone else. It's a perfect world if you've been raised on Thatcher's neoliberal doctrine that "there is no such thing as society," only to find yourself in a society in which you can only make real change by participating in collective efforts:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/11/24/mall-ninja-prophecy/#mano-a-mano

All this raises the question of what rich preppers are prepping for. If your contribution to society consists of "allocating capital" and/or giving people orders, what, exactly, is the disaster that fulfills your fantasy of a world where your unique skills are the only thing that can save us all? What kind of a disaster needs a boss?

In Douglas Rushkoff's 2022 book Survival of the Richest, he describes a surreal "futurism" consulting gig in which a bunch of wealthy investor types asked him to help them figure out how to keep their mercenaries in line after "The Event" (the end of the world):

https://pluralistic.net/2022/09/13/collapse-porn/#collapse-porn

These guys had the idea that what a fallen civilization needed was bosses, you see, but they were self-aware enough to recognize that the people who survived the apocalypse might not recognize their unique genius and simply fall into line. In order to assert their natural role as leaders after the shit hit the fan, these guys would need an army of heavily armed mercenaries. But again, these guys were self-aware enough to recognize that the mercenaries might also fail to recognize their unique fitness to rule and opt instead to slaughter them and raid their hoarded food, ammo and medical supplies.

So they wanted Rushkoff's advice – should they fit the mercs with bomb-collars that were on a dead-man's switch that would go off if the boss croaked? This was such a weird and revealing moment that Rushkoff got a whole book out of exploring the desire of the wealthy to both secede from the rest of us, and keep us all in line.

I was inspired by this and other experiences with people fantasizing about the world's end to take a run at rewriting Edgar Allan Poe's "Masque of the Red Death" as a story about investor/ubermenschen in a luxury bunker at the end of the world (spoiler: it doesn't go well for them):

https://pluralistic.net/2020/03/14/masque-of-the-red-death/#masque

All of this has been very much on my mind lately because I've been reading Quinn Slobodian's amazing Hayek's Bastards, a closely researched history of the merger of the neoliberal wing of the conservative movement with its white nationalist faction, producing a conservativism obsessed with "hard borders, hard-wired human difference, and hard money":

https://www.penguin.co.uk/books/472194/hayeks-bastards-by-slobodian-quinn/9780241774984

It's a revelatory history, one that argues convincingly that the brooding, violent racism of MAGA isn't so much a break with "Romney conservativism" of the "respectable" Republican Party as it is the attainment of the goals of the party's longstanding dominant tendency.

"Hard-wired human differences" refers to the "scientific racism" that the likes of Elon Musk pushes, the junk science that insists that there is such a thing as a "race," and that IQ measures something important and immutable, and that different "races" have different IQs, which is why some "races" do well, while others do poorly:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/08/16/combat-wheelchairs/#race-realism

"Hard-wired human difference" militate for "hard borders," since the teeming billions of racially inferior people in other countries would – given half a chance – come to the "good" countries and turn them into "shithole countries." This is the nonsense that Musk is peddling when he compares Britons to "hobbits" and warns that they're about to be overrun by people who will "start raping the kids":

https://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/entry/elon-musk-compares-brits-to-hobbits-amid-shock-immigration-claim_uk_69089785e4b0c4a0f509d6f5?origin=home-latest-unit

But because the soft-headed, soft-hearted hobbits keep electing leaders who don't understand this, they'll get "overrun" by the bad "races," who demand welfare handouts, which the state can't afford, triggering "money printing" and Musk's other obsession, national debts:

https://fortune.com/2025/07/01/trump-spending-bill-pain-points-critics-elon-musk-medicaid-national-debt-clean-energy/

(Which is to say, Musk's understanding of money is just as wrongheaded as his understanding of genomics):

https://pluralistic.net/2020/06/10/compton-cowboys/#the-deficit-myth

In the disaster fantasy, the failure of hard borders leads to the inevitable consequences of hard-wired human differences, which means that we need "hard money" – gold. The modern right is a linear descendant of the goldbug movement, composed of grifters who made fortunes terrifying racists into buying gold as a hedge against the day when the collapse of the welfare state leads to race war and the dollar's vaporization:

https://mises.org/library/book/gold-peace-and-prosperity?d7_alias_migrate=1

For goldbugs, the coming collapse seems to be one that will demand coin collectors. In Hayek's Bastards, Slobodian quotes all these goldbug preppers furiously dreaming of a day when a single gold coin will let them buy a whole city block in Manhattan. Somehow, they've conceived of disaster scenario where the most needful of all things is a ductile metal with a few marginal uses in electronics.

It's a very weird kind of disaster fantasy. One can only assume that the guys figuring out how to assemble an army of bomb-collared mercs will just stroll over to these goldbugs' lesser bunkers and take their precious coins.

The modern goldbug is, of course, a crypto weirdo, and man is that a weird thing to be a prepper about. It will be a very odd apocalypse indeed that takes down all of modern civilization except for blockchains.

(Image: Morten Jensen, CC BY 2.0, modified)

Hey look at this (permalink)

• Qualcomm enshittified Arduino https://www.linkedin.com/posts/adafruit_opensource-privacy-techpolicy-activity-7396903362237054976-r14H/

• Why is knowledge getting so expensive? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PygUK16aQgk

• Cooking Temperature and Hold Time Affect Beef Brisket Textural Properties and Cooking Yield https://www.iastatedigitalpress.com/mmb/article/id/18269/

• The Dairy Products Theory of Dead Media (2004) https://bruces.medium.com/the-dairy-products-theory-of-dead-media-2004-34842e069335

Object permanence (permalink)

#20yrsago Sony insider: DRM is discredited at Sony https://memex.craphound.com/2005/11/20/sony-insider-drm-is-discredited-at-sony/

#20yrsago Microsoft: Trusted Computing sucks! https://web.archive.org/web/20060821002450/http://news.com.com/Who+has+the+right+to+control+your+PC/2100-1029_3-5961609.html

#20yrsago EFF brings class-action against Sony! https://web.archive.org/web/20051125183030/https://www.eff.org/news/archives/2005_11.php#004192

#20yrsago Texas sues Sony over rootkits — YEE-HAW! https://web.archive.org/web/20060204212201/https://www.oag.state.tx.us/oagNews/release.php?id=1266

#20yrsago 1,000 sqft secret chamber discovered in Indian National Library https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/city/kolkata/secret-chamber-in-national-library/articleshow/6957358.cms

#15yrsago Who owns your mortgage, the mind-croggling flowchart edition https://web.archive.org/web/20101118032158/https://www.zerohedge.com/article/just-when-you-thought-you-knew-something-about-mortgage-securitizations

#15yrsago When did you choose to be straight? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QJtjqLUHYoY

#15yrsago Dear airlines: goodbye https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2010/11/dear-airline-im-leaving-you/66750/

#15yrsago How TSA screeners feel about junk-touching https://web.archive.org/web/20140928131617/https://flyingwithfish.boardingarea.com/2010/11/18/tsa-enhanced-pat-downs-the-screeners-point-of-view/

#10yrsago Yahoo blocks some users from accessing email until they turn off ad-blocking https://web.archive.org/web/20151121172408/https://consumerist.com/2015/11/20/use-adblock-and-yahoo-may-block-you-from-reading-your-e-mail/

#10yrsago Alan Moore’s brilliantly bonkers lost 1980s Star Wars comics https://web.archive.org/web/20151122232854/https://www.techtimes.com/tags/alan-moores-star-wars

#10yrsago The secret history of the Haunted Mansion’s hall of changing paintings https://longforgottenhauntedmansion.blogspot.com/2015/11/the-changing-portrait-hall-that-never.html

#10yrsago England: You have four days to reply to the secret consultation on the NHS’s future https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/nov/19/nhs-mandate-england-consulation-deadline

#10yrsago Southwest Airlines surrenders to racists, refuses boarding to Arab-American passengers https://www.nbcsandiego.com/news/national-international/philly-pizza-shop-owner-profiled-southwest-airlines/89976/

#5yrsago Nintendo vs Nintendees https://pluralistic.net/2020/11/21/wrecking-ball/#ssbm

#5yrsago Google's monopoly rigged the ad market https://pluralistic.net/2020/11/20/sovkitsch/#adtech

#5yrsago Facebook bullies watchdog https://pluralistic.net/2020/11/20/sovkitsch/#adobserver

#5yrsago We're already (badly) forgiving student debt https://pluralistic.net/2020/11/20/sovkitsch/#student-debt

#5yrsago Little Revolutions https://pluralistic.net/2020/11/20/sovkitsch/#asl

#1yrago Expert agencies and elected legislatures https://pluralistic.net/2024/11/21/policy-based-evidence/#decisions-decisions

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

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

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

Recent appearances (permalink)

• Enshittification with Vass Bednar (Vancouver Public Library)
  https://www.crowdcast.io/c/0wzs9iu1q225

• Tech unions against enshittification (TUC)
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m11hmiHu6Tc

• It’s not your job to fix the internet (Vergecast)
  https://www.theverge.com/podcast/822822/enshittification-cory-doctorow-interview-vergecast

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

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

Latest books (permalink)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Upcoming books (permalink)

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

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

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

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

Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources:

Currently writing:

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

• A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING

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

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ISSN: 3066-764X

Ich hab’ den Tab seit Tagen offen, und es arbeitet sich zu dem im Hintergrund deutlich schöner als ohne. Ihr könnt dazu natürlich auch gerne nicht arbeiten und hebt euch diese vier Stunden für ein kaltes Wochenende an der Heizung, am Kamin oder am Ofen auf. Und das wäre dann wahrscheinlich ja schon morgen, wie es aussieht.

(Direktlink)

Tracklist:
0:00 Aleksandir – Reveries
02:58 The Solid Doctor – Lights On The Vibe
10:16 Ian O’Brien – Midnight Sunshine
13:44 The Seatbelts – Piano Black (Ian O’Brien Remix)
20:28 J-Walk – Soul Vibration
24:09 Extended Spirit – Caprice
32:27 Waiwan – Goddess
39:29 Fink – Ever Since I Was A Kid It Seemed I Collected Something (Hefner Remix)
45:42 The Irresistible Force – Power (Mixmaster Morris Remix)
51:02 AIR – Modular Mix
56:44 Living Room – Jazzistics
59:58 Dadamnphreaknoizphunk – One Size Fits All
1:05:16 Bullitnuts – Heavy Air
1:12:08 Procreation – Citizen
1:18:10 9Lazy9 – Bix Six
1:22:06 Beanfield – Planetary Deadlock
1:27:47 The Dining Rooms – African Loungesters
1:34:24 The Amalgamation Of Soundz – Shrinkin‘ Yo Hed
1:39:29 Soel – The Earth Mother
1:44:32 9Lazy9 – Life Goes On & On
1:49:20 King Kooba – California Suite
1:55:33 The Amalgamation Of Soundz – Cat In The Rain
2:00:35 Slide Five – Polestar
2:06:26 Mr. Scruff – After Time
2:08:51 Ralph Myerz & The Jack Herren Band – My Private Night
2:13:11 Ralph Myerz & The Jack Herren Band – A Special Morning
2:17:53 Akasha – Akasha Theme
2:22:26 Jon Kennedy – Funk Boutique
2:25:38 Jaffa – Elevator (Herbaliser Remix)
2:30:35 Tim Love Lee – Twilight Reservation
2:35:50 40Winks – For The Traveller
2:39:09 Rithma – The Return
2:42:37 A.P.E. – Striplight
2:48:10 Afternoons In Stereo – Tinto Brass
2:52:54 The Jazzual Suspects – Park Up
2:56:50 Sven Van Hees – Flute Salad
3:01:16 Emapea – Enjoy
3:05:02 Extended Spirit – The Hub
3:10:21 ZG – Ombre
3:17:13 Yonderboi – Fairy Of The Lake
3:22:11 Delavega – Blue Mon
3:25:03 LX72 – Passing Time
3:28:25 The Deadbeats – Made In The Shade
3:34:04 Gotts Street Park – Ozu
3:37:36 Jules Brennan – Paragons Of Bliss