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Pluralistic: Break up bad companies; replace bad union bosses (15 Dec 2025) by Cory Doctorow
Monday December 15th, 2025 at 12:10 PM

Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
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Today's links


A picket line; the picketers are holding militant hand-lettered signs. Behind them, in a red halo, is a cigar-chomping boss figure.

Break up bad companies; replace bad union bosses (permalink)

Unions are not perfect. Indeed, it is possible to belong to a union that is bad for workers: either because it is weak, or corrupt, or captured (or some combination of the three).

Take the "two-tier contract." As unions lost ground – thanks to changes in labor law enforcement under a succession of both Republican and Democratic administrations – labor bosses hit on a suicidal strategy for contract negotiations. Rather than bargaining for a single contract that covered all the union's dues-paying members, these bosses negotiated contracts that guaranteed benefits for existing members, but did not extend these benefits to new members:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/11/25/strikesgiving/#shed-a-tier

A two-tier contract is one where all workers pay dues, but only the dwindling rump of older, more established workers get any protection or representation from their union. An ever-larger portion of the membership have to pay dues, but get nothing for them. You couldn't come up with a better way to destroy unions if you tried.

Thankfully, union workers figured out that the answer to this problem was firing their leaders and replacing them with militant, principled leaders who cared about workers, not just a subsection of their members. Radicals in big unions – like the UAW – teamed up with comrades from university grad students' unions to master the arcane rules that had been weaponized by corrupt bosses to prevent free and fair union elections. Together, they forced the first legitimate union elections in generations, and then the newly elected leaders ran historic strikes that won huge gains for workers (and killed off the two-tier contract):

https://theintercept.com/2023/04/07/deconstructed-union-dhl-teamsters-uaw/

Corrupt unions aren't the only life-destroying institutions that radicals have set their sights on this decade. Concentrated corporate power is the most dangerous force in the world today (indeed, it's large, powerful corporations that corrupted those unions). Antitrust activists, environmental activists, consumer rights activists, privacy activists and labor activists have stepped up the global war on big business all through this decade. From new antitrust laws to antitrust lawsuits to strikes to boycotts to mass protests and direct action, this decade has marked a turning point in the global consciousness about the danger of corporate power and the need to fight it.

But there's a big, important difference between bad corporations and bad unions: what we should do about them.

The answer to a powerful, corrupt corporation is to take action that strips it of its power: break the company up, whack it with fines, take away its corporate charter, strip its executives of their fortunes, even put them in prison. That's because corporations are foundationally undemocratic institutions, governed by "one share, one vote" (and the billionaires who benefit from corporate power are building a society that's "one dollar, one vote").

They fundamentally exist to consolidate power at the expense of workers, suppliers and customers, to extract wealth by imposing costs on the rest of us, from pollution to political corruption. When a corporation gets big enough to pose a risk to societal wellbeing, we need to smash that corporation, not reform it.

But the answer to a corrupt union is to fire the union bosses and replace them with better ones. The mission of a union is foundationally pro-democratic. A unionized workplace is a democratic workplace. As in any democracy, workplace democracies can be led by bad or incompetent people. But, as with any democracy, the way you fix this is by swapping out the bad leaders for good ones – not by abolishing democracy and replacing it with an atomized society in which it's every worker for themself, bargaining with a boss who will always win a one-on-one fight in the long run.

I raise this because a general strike is back on the table, likely for May Day 2028 (5/1/28):

https://labornotes.org/2025/12/maybe-general-strike-isnt-so-impossible-now

Unions are an important check against fascism. That's why fascists always start by attacking organized labor: solidarity is the opposite of fascism.

To have unions that are fit for purpose in this existential battle for the future of the nation – and, quite possibly, the human race – we desperately need better leaders. Like the union bosses who gave us the two-tier contract, many of our union leaders see their mission as narrowly serving their existing members, and not other workers – not even workers who might someday become their members.

To get a sense of how bad it's gotten, consider these five facts:

I. Public support for unions is at its highest level since the Carter administration;

II. More workers want to join unions than at any time in living memory;

III. Unions have larger cash reserves than at any time in history;

IV. Under Biden, the National Labor Relations Board was more friendly to unions than at any time in generations; and

V. During the Biden years, the number of unionized workers in America went down, not up.

That's because union bosses – sitting on a mountain of cash, surrounded by workers begging to be organized – decided that their priority was their existing members, and declined to spend more than a pittance of their cash reserves on organizing efforts.

This is suicidal – as self-destructive as the two-tier contract was. To pull off a general strike, we will need mass civil disobedience, a willingness to ignore the Taft-Hartley Act's ban on solidarity strikes. Trump's NLRB isn't just hostile to workers – he's illegally fired so many of its commissioners that they can't even perform most of their functions. But a militant labor movement could turn that to its advantage, because militants know that when Trump fires the refs, you don't have to stop the game – you can throw out the rule book:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/01/29/which-side-are-you-on-2/#strike-three-yer-out

This is the historic opportunity and challenge before us – to occupy our unions, save our workplace democracies, and then save our national democracy itself.

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 Sony Artists offering home-burned CDs to replace spyware-infected discs https://web.archive.org/web/20060719082355/http://www.rollingstone.com/news/story/8950981/copyprotection_troubles_grow

#20yrsago Pentagon bravely vigilant against sinister, threatening Quakers https://www.nbcnews.com/id/wbna10454316

#20yrsago Brooklyn camera-store crooks threaten activist’s life https://thomashawk.com/2005/12/brooklyn-photographer-don-wiss.html

#20yrsago Britannica averages 3 bugs per entry; Wikipedia averages 4 https://www.nature.com/articles/438900a

#20yrsago Diane Duane wonders if she should self-publish trilogy conclusion https://web.archive.org/web/20051215151654/https://outofambit.blogspot.com/archives/2005_12_01_outofambit_archive.html#113446948274092674

#20yrsago Table coverts to truncheon and shield http://www.jamesmcadam.co.uk/portfolio_html/sb_table.html

#20yrsago Royal Society members speak out for open access science publishing https://web.archive.org/web/20051210023301/https://www.frsopenletter.org/

#20yrsago TiVo upgrading company offers $25k for hacks to the new DirecTV PVR https://web.archive.org/web/20051215050848/https://www.wkblog.com/2005/12/weaknees_offers_up_to_25000_fo.html

#20yrsago Michigan HS students will need to take online course to graduate https://web.archive.org/web/20051215052603/https://www.chronicle.com/free/2005/12/2005121301t.htm

#15yrsago Hiaasen’s STAR ISLAND: blisteringly funny tale of sleazy popstars and paparazzi https://memex.craphound.com/2010/12/13/hiaasens-star-island-blisteringly-funny-tale-of-sleazy-popstars-and-paparazzi/

#15yrsago Dan Gillmor’s Mediactive: masterclass in 21st century journalism demands a net-native news-media https://memex.craphound.com/2010/12/13/dan-gillmors-mediactive-masterclass-in-21st-century-journalism-demands-a-net-native-news-media/

#15yrsago Council of Europe accuses Kosovo’s prime minister of organlegging https://www.theguardian.com/world/2010/dec/14/kosovo-prime-minister-llike-mafia-boss

#15yrsago Gold pills turn your innermost parts into chambers of wealth https://web.archive.org/web/20110930011010/https://www.citizen-citizen.com/collections/all/products/gold-pills

#10yrsago The Red Cross brought in an AT&T exec as CEO and now it’s a national disaster https://www.propublica.org/article/the-corporate-takeover-of-the-red-cross

#10yrsago Philips pushes lightbulb firmware update that locks out third-party bulbs https://www.techdirt.com/2015/12/14/lightbulb-drm-philips-locks-purchasers-out-third-party-bulbs-with-firmware-update/

#10yrsago UK spy agency posts data-mining software to Github https://github.com/gchq/Gaffer

#10yrsago Cybercrime 3.0: stealing whole houses https://memex.craphound.com/2015/12/14/cybercrime-3-0-stealing-whole-houses/

#10yrsago US politicians, ranked by their willingness to lie https://www.nytimes.com/2015/12/13/opinion/campaign-stops/all-politicians-lie-some-lie-more-than-others.html

#10yrsago 24 privacy tools — not messaging apps — that don’t exist https://dymaxion.org/essays/pleasestop.html

#10yrsago North Carolina town rejects solar because it’ll suck up sunlight and kill the plants https://web.archive.org/web/20250813151735/https://www.roanoke-chowannewsherald.com/2015/12/08/woodland-rejects-solar-farm/

#10yrsago Giant hats were the cellphones of the silent movie era https://pipedreamdragon.tumblr.com/post/135065922736/movie-movie-etiquette-warnings-shown-before

#10yrsago Plaid Lumberjack Cake https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_1hDl53c-kw

#10yrsago MRA Scott Adams: pictures and words by Scott Adams, together at last https://web.archive.org/web/20151214002415/https://mradilbert.tumblr.com/

#10yrsago American rents reach record levels of unaffordability https://www.nbcnews.com/business/economy/its-not-just-poor-who-cant-make-rent-n478501

#5yrsago Well-Armed Peasants https://pluralistic.net/2020/12/13/art-thou-down/#forsooth

#5yrsago Where money comes from https://pluralistic.net/2020/12/14/situation-normal/#mmt

#5yrsago China's best investigative stories of 2020 https://pluralistic.net/2020/12/14/situation-normal/#gijn

#5yrsago Situation Normal https://pluralistic.net/2020/12/14/situation-normal/#more-constellation-games

#1yrago Social media needs (dumpster) fire exits https://pluralistic.net/2024/12/14/fire-exits/#graceful-failure-modes

#1yrago The GOP is not the party of workers https://pluralistic.net/2024/12/13/occupy-the-democrats/#manchin-synematic-universe

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, June 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. LEGAL REVIEW AND COPYEDIT COMPLETE.

  • "The Post-American Internet," a short book about internet policy in the age of Trumpism. PLANNING.

  • A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING

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

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

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

How to get Pluralistic:

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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

Tumblr (mass-scale, unrestricted, third-party surveillance and advertising):

https://mostlysignssomeportents.tumblr.com/tagged/pluralistic

"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

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Chillhop Essentials Winter 2025 by Michael Kalus
Monday December 15th, 2025 at 12:10 PM

Michael Kalus.ca
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Chillhop Essentials Winter 2025

The season, once again is changing.

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Let’s power AI with supersonic jet engine turbines! by David Gerard
Monday December 15th, 2025 at 10:02 AM

Pivot to AI
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Boom Supersonic is a jet plane startup. They want to bring back the days of Concorde and fly supersonic planes around the world! With massive expense and inefficiency.

Boom brags how they have “preorders” for 130 planes, including Japan Airlines preordering 20 planes in … 2017. Zero planes have been built. But it’s only been eight years, so it’s early days. [Boom]

Boom doesn’t have a great track record. There’s no Overture plane. There’s no plan for the Overture plane. The videos of the plane are CGI mockups, some recycled for years. The jet engine for the Overture doesn’t exist. It’s not clear any of the “preorders” involve an actual dollar moving. And then it’ll be at least ten years to get their supersonic jet certified once it’s built.

So Boom needs just that little bit more cash. Guess what bubble they decided to tap into: [YouTube]

We call it Superpower. We’re taking the engine that we’re developing for supersonic flight and adapting it for ground power generation. This is 42 megawatts in a shipping container package with modern cloud connectivity and rapid install.

Boom is producing their forthcoming Superpower turbines for AI! Boom says they’ll deliver the first generator in 2027, and they’ve already got a contract with Crusoe AI to deliver 1.21 gigawatts. [blog post]

This wizard scheme makes Boom an AI company! So Boom just got another $300 million in venture funding.

AI is hungry. Data centres are utterly constrained by power. Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella admitted in November that Microsoft’s got Nvidia rigs piled in warehouses waiting for power: [YouTube, 18:26 on]

The biggest issue we are now having is not a compute glut, but it’s power and it’s sort of the ability to get the builds done fast enough close to power. So, if you can’t do that, you may actually have a bunch of chips sitting in inventory that I can’t plug in. In fact, that is my problem today, right? It’s not a supply issue of chips. It’s actually the fact that I don’t have warm shells to plug into.

Ed Zitron says this is industry-wide — there’s a lot more Nvidia chips being sold than there are actually switched on in data centres: [Where’s Your Ed At]

In really simple terms: there isn’t enough power or built data centers for those six million Blackwell GPUs, in part because the data centers aren’t built, and in part because there isn’t enough power for the ones that are.

Boom’s turbine generators aren’t anything radical. We already have jet engines running as inefficient gas turbines, specially for the AI bozos.

Even the old jet engines have orders backed up to 2030. So if you say you can build new generators faster, you can get $300 million in funding for your neo-Concorde dream! At least while the bubble lasts.

The jet engine turbines are not just pumping out noise and carbon dioxide and pollution. They’re only about 40% efficient. Boom says the Superpower turbine will be about the same, and it’s up to the customer to bring the turbine up to 60% efficiency. And to limit the pollution and noise. I’m sure the AI bros will get right on that. [TechCrunch]

Boom CEO Blake Scholl tells TechCrunch that Boom’s supersonic turbines should be “no louder” than the existing gas turbine power plants — which you can hear jet engine noise from at half a mile away.

I’d link the sound of the Superpower turbine in action, but there’s no recording because there’s no prototype. It doesn’t exist. It’s all plans and mockup display builds and big promises. But: [Press release]

95% of the parts that make up Boom’s Symphony engine core prototype are in manufacturing, and testing is slated to begin in 2026.

Sounds great. And I hope Boom takes all of the AI bros’ money they can. Because given Boom’s track record with planes, there’s a fair chance this turbine never happens.

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Why Disney just put $1 billion into OpenAI by David Gerard
Sunday December 14th, 2025 at 10:49 PM

Pivot to AI
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The Walt Disney Company has invested $1 billion into OpenAI, and it’s also licensed Disney characters for OpenAI’s Sora video generator for three years. [press release]

If any of the eight-second Sora-generated clips are usable, they’ll be deployed as space-filler on Disney+ streaming, to see if Disney can save a penny on paying human animators.

Disney will also deploy ChatGPT across the company. Ehh, whatever.

The deal only covers 200 specific animated or masked characters — not voices or likenesses of human actors. It’s not for training, either — only to generate Disney characters.

The license fee has not been disclosed. You can bet it’ll be a big number on paper, because Disney is already suing Midjourney and just sent a cease-and-desist letter to Google, after what sounds like a failed licensing negotiation. [Variety]

Disney thinks it’s the Mafia. But OpenAI is not a regular business you can send the boys round to shake down. It’s a weird money-burning scam that’s shaped a bit like a business.

So OpenAI just talked Disney, the biggest thugs in Hollywood, into giving them money for a bag of magic beans. One thing I’ll give Sam Altman, he’s got a silver tongue. Best monorail salesman in the business.

What does all this mean?

Firstly, this is a lot of dumb ideas from people who think they’re being smart. If some part doesn’t make sense, it is indeed probably stupid. This deal is made of wishful thinking.

Secondly, the money. We know what OpenAI’s spending and what it’s promised to spend. And we know the end user market for generative AI, doesn’t exist, and none of the big promises can possibly pay off.

OpenAI is going to run out of money. Disney is betting it won’t, and AI will come through!

Disney’s cash on hand as of June was about $5 billion. So $1 billion is not trivial, but if OpenAI fails, Disney will be fine.

Thirdly, Disney hopes there’s a market for AI slop. Disney would really like it if slop was usable for production. They’re crossing their fingers and hoping AI video works one day. It won’t, but that’s the lottery ticket Disney is buying.

There is not, in fact, a real-world market for AI slop. Every LinkedIn AI pumper who tells you audiences will definitely buy AI slop, ask them when they last bought a movie ticket.

Audiences hate seeing slop on the screen. Every company that loudly brags they put AI slop into a production, it always turns out they snuck it into a background or something, just so they could tell their investors they’re doing slop now.

The Sora slop on Disney+ will be filtered by humans. It’s not clear how much usable content they’ll get, it’s not clear how it’ll be shown on Disney+ — little ad-rolls? Who knows — and it’s not clear if anyone will want to watch this.

Fourthly, this is Disney setting a tangible number for commercial terms so they can tell Midjourney and Google to pay them a fat ongoing licence fee and present the OpenAI number in court if needed.

I think this deal mostly exists so Disney can threaten all the other AI providers for licenses. Slop on the streaming may never happen. OpenAI goes down, Disney doesn’t care that much. But Steamboat Willie prevails.

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Pluralistic: Federal Wallet Inspectors (13 Dec 2025) by Cory Doctorow
Sunday December 14th, 2025 at 10:45 PM

Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
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Today's links

  • Federal Wallet Inspectors: Does tech *really* move too fast to regulate?
  • Hey look at this: Delights to delectate.
  • Object permanence: Soda can Van de Graff; Amazon rents a copy of the web; Boardgame Remix Kit; No furniture photos please we're British; Youtube vs fair use; Carbon offsets are bullshit; Arkham model railroad; Happy Birthday is in the public domain; Ted Cruz hires Cambridge Analytica; The kid who wanted to join the NSA; Daddy Daughter Xmas Podcast 2020.
  • 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.


A modified FBI badge. It now reads 'Federal Wallet Investigators.' It is made out to 'Timothy J Shotspotter.' It is held in the three-fingered, gloved grip of a cartoon character. Around its edges, we see a cartoon room from a public domain Betty Boop cartoon.

Federal Wallet Inspectors (permalink)

Look, I'm not trying to say that new technologies never raise gnarly new legal questions, but what I am saying is that a lot of the time, the "new legal challenges" raised by technology are somewhere between 95-100% bullshit, ginned up by none-too-bright tech bros and their investors, and then swallowed by regulators and lawmakers who are either so credulous they'd lose a game of peek-a-boo, or (likely) in on the scam.

Take "fintech." As Trashfuture's Riley Quinn is fond of saying, "when you hear 'fintech,' think 'unregulated bank'":

https://pluralistic.net/2022/03/02/shadow-banking-2-point-oh/#leverage

I mean, the whole history of banking is: "Bankers think of a way to do reckless things that are wildly profitable (in the short term) and catastrophic (in the long term). They offer bribes and other corrupt incentives to their watchdogs to let them violate the rules, which leads to utter disaster." From the 19th century "panics" to the crash of '29 to the S&L collapse to the 2008 Great Financial Crisis and beyond, this just keeps happening.

Much of the time, the bankers involved have some tissue-thin explanation for why what they're doing isn't really a violation of the rules. Think of the lenders who, in the runup to the Great Financial Crisis, insisted that they weren't engaged in risky lending because they had a fancy equation that proved that the mortgage-backed securities they were issuing were all sound, and it was literally impossible that they'd all default at once.

The fact that regulators were bamboozled by this is enraging. In hindsight (and for many of us at least, at the time), it's obvious that the bankers went to their watchdogs and said, "We'd like to break the law," and the watchdogs said, "Sure, but would you mind coming up with some excuse that I can repeat later when someone asks me why I let you do this crime?"

It's like in the old days of medical marijuana, where you'd get on a call with a dial-a-doc and say, "Please can I have some weed?" and the doc would say, "Tell me about your headaches," and you'd say, "Uh, I have headaches?" and they'd say "Great, here's your weed!"

The alternative is that these regulators are so bafflingly stupid that they can't be trusted to dress themselves. "My stablecoin is a fit financial instrument to integrate into the financial system" is as credible a wheeze as some crypto bro walking up to Cory Booker, flashing a homemade badge, and snapping out, "Federal Wallet Inspector, hand it over."

I mean, at that point, I kind of hope they're corrupt, because the alternative is that they are basically a brainstem and a couple of eyestalks in a suit.

What I'm saying is, "We just can't figure out if crypto is violating finance laws" is a statement that can only be attributed to someone very stupid, or in on the game.

Speaking of "someone very stupid, or in on the game," Congress just killed a rule that would have guaranteed that the US military could repair its own materiel:

https://federalnewsnetwork.com/congress/2025/12/congress-quietly-strips-right-to-repair-provisions-from-2026-ndaa-despite-wide-support/

Military right to repair is the most brainless of all possible no-brainers. When a generator breaks down in the field – even in an active war-zone – the US military has to ship it back to America to be serviced by the manufacturer. That's not because you can't train a Marine to fix a generator – it's because the contractual and technical restrictions that military contractors insist on ban the military from fixing its stuff:

https://www.pogo.org/fact-sheets/fact-sheet-the-right-to-repair-for-the-united-states-military

This violates a very old principle in sound military administration. Abraham Lincoln insisted that the contractors who supplied the Union army had to use standardized tooling and ammo, because it would be very embarrassing for the Commander-in-Chief to have to stand on the field at Gettysburg with a megaphone and shout, "Sorry boys, war's canceled this week, our sole supplier's gone on vacation."

And yet, after mergers of large military contractors resulted in just a handful of "primary" companies serving the Pentagon, private equity vampires snapped up all the subcontractors who were sole-source suppliers of parts to those giants. They slashed the prices of those parts so that the primary contractors used as many as possible in the materiel they provided to the US DoD, and then raised the prices of replacement parts, some with 10,000% margins, which the Pentagon now has to pay for so long as they own those jets and other big-ticket items:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/01/29/fractal-bullshit/#dayenu

This isn't a complicated scam. It's super straightforward, and the right to repair rule that Congress killed addressed it head on. But Congressional enemies of this bill insisted that it would have untold "unintended consequences" and instead passed a complex rule, riddled with loopholes, because there was something unique and subtle about the blunt issue of price-gouging:

https://www.warren.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/final_-_warren_letter_to_dod_re_right_to_repair_consequences_092524.pdf

Either these lawmakers are so stupid that they fell for the ole "Federal Wallet Inspector" gambit, or they're in on the game. I know which explanation my money is on.

Maybe this has already occurred to you, but lately I've come to realize that there's another dimension to this, a way in which critics of tech help this gambit along. After all, it's pretty common for tech critics to preface their critiques with words to the effect of, "Of course, this technology has raced ahead of regulators' ability to keep pace with it. Those dastardly tech-bros have slipped the net once again!"

The unspoken (and sometimes very loudly spoken) corollary of this is, "Only a tech-critic as perspicacious and forward looking as me is capable of matching wits with those slippery tech-bros, and I have formulated a sui generis policy prescription that can head them off at the pass."

Take the problem of deepfakes, including deepfake porn. There's a pretty straightforward policy response to this: a privacy law that allows you to prevent the abuse of your private information (including to create deepfakes) that unlawfully process your personal information for an illegitimate purpose. To make sure that this law can be enforced, include a "private right of action," which means that individual can sue to enforce it (and activist orgs and no-win/no-fee lawyers can sue on their behalf). That way, you can get justice even if the state Attorney General or the federal Department of Justice decides not to take your case.

Privacy law is a great idea. It can navigate nuances, like the fact that privacy is collective, not individual – for example, it can intervene when your family members give their (your) DNA to a scam like 23andme, or when a friend posts photos of you online:

https://jacobin.com/2021/05/cory-doctorow-interview-bill-gates-intellectual-property

But privacy law gets a bad rap. In the EU, they've had the GDPR – a big, muscular privacy law – for nine years, and all it's really done is drown the continent in cookie-consent pop-ups. But that's not because the GDPR is flawed, it's because Ireland is a tax-haven that has lured in the world's worst corporate privacy-violators, and to keep them from moving to another tax haven (like Malta or Cyprus or Luxembourg), it has to turn itself into a crime-haven. So for the entire life of the GDPR, all the important privacy cases in Europe have gone to Ireland, and died there:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/12/01/erin-go-blagged/#big-tech-omerta

Now, again, this isn't a complicated technical question that is hard to resolve through regulation. It's just boring old corruption. I'm not saying that corruption is easy to solve, but I am saying that it's not complicated. Irish politicians made the country's economy dependent on the Irish state facilitating criminal activity by American firms. The EU doesn't want to provoke a constitutional crisis by forcing Ireland (and the EU's other crime-havens) to halt this behavior.

That's a hard thing to do! It's just not a complicated thing to do. The routine violations of EU privacy law by American tech companies isn't the result of "tech racing ahead of the law." It's just corruption. You can't fix corruption by passing more laws; they'll just be corruptly enforced, too.

But thanks to a mix of bad incentives – politicians wanting to be seen to do something without actually upsetting the apple-cart; AI critics wanting to inflate their importance by claiming that they're fighting something novel and complex, as opposed to something that's merely boring and hard – we get policy proposals that will likely worsen the problem.

Take Denmark's decision to fight deepfakes by creating a new copyright over your likeness:

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/jun/27/deepfakes-denmark-copyright-law-artificial-intelligence

Copyright – a property right – is an incredibly bad way to deal with human rights like privacy. For one thing, it makes privacy into a luxury good that only the wealthy can afford (remember, a discount for clicking through a waiver of your privacy right is the same thing as an extra charge for not waiving your privacy rights). For another, property rights are very poorly suited to managing things that have joint ownership, such as private information. As soon as you turn private information into private property, you have to answer questions like, "Which twin owns the right to their face" and "Who owns the right to the fact that your abusive mother is your mother – you, or her? And if it's her, does she get to stop you from publishing a memoir about the abuse?"

Copyright – a state-backed transferable monopoly over expression – is really hard to get right. Legislatures and courts have struggled to balance free expression and copyright for centuries, and there's a complex web of "limitations and exceptions" to copyright. Privacy is also incredibly complex, and has its own limitations and exceptions, and they are very different from copyright's limits. I mean, they have to be: privacy rules defend your human right to a personal zone of autonomy; copyright is intended to create economic incentives to produce new creative works. It would be very weird if the same rules served both ends.

I can't believe that Denmark's legislators failed to consider privacy as the solution to deepfakes. If they did, they are very, very stupid. Rather, they decided that fighting the corruption that keeps privacy law from being enforced in the EU was too hard, so they just did something performative, creating a raft of new problems, without solving the old one.

Here in the USA, there's lots of lawmakers who are falling into this trap. Take the response to chatbots that give harmful advice to children and teens. The answer that many American politicians (as well as lawmakers abroad, in Australia, Canada, the UK and elsewhere) have come up with is to force AI companies to identify who is and is not a child and treat them differently.

This boils down to a requirement for AI companies to collect much more information on their users (to establish their age), which means that all the AI harms that stem from privacy violations (AI algorithms that steal wages, hike prices, discriminate in hiring and lending and policing, etc) are now even harder to stop.

A simple alternative to this would be updating privacy law to limit how AI companies can gather and use everyone's data – which would mean that you could protect kids from privacy invasions without (paradoxically) requiring them (and you) to disclose all kinds of private information to determine how old they are.

The insistence – by AI critics and AI boosters – that AI is so different from other technologies that you can't address it by limiting the collection, retention and processing of private information is a way in which AI critics and AI hucksters end up colluding to promote a view of AI as an exceptional technology. It's not. AI is a normal technology:

https://www.aisnakeoil.com/p/ai-as-normal-technology

Sometimes this argument descends into grimly hilarious parody. Argue for limits on AI companies' collection, retention and processing of private information and AI boosters will tell you that this would require so much labor-intensive discernment about training data that it would make it impossible to continue training AI until it becomes intelligent enough to solve all our problems. But also, when you press the issue, they'll sometimes say that AI is already so "intelligent" that it can derive (that is, guess) private information about you without needing your data, so a new privacy law won't help.

In other words, applying privacy limitations to AI means we'll never get a "superintelligence,"; and also, we already have a superintelligence so there's no point in applying privacy limitations to AI.

It's true that technology can give rise to novel regulatory challenges, but it's also true that claiming that a technology is so novel that existing regulation can't resolve its problems is just a way of buying time to commit more crimes before the regulators finally realize that your flashy new technology is just a boring old scam.

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 Americans smile, Brits grimace? https://www.nytimes.com/2005/12/11/magazine/national-smiles.html

#20yrsago HOWTO make a soda-can Van de Graaf https://scitoys.com/scitoys/scitoys/electro/electro6.html

#20yrsago Credit-card-sized USB drive https://web.archive.org/web/20051214084824/http://walletex.com/

#20yrsago Homeland Security: Mini-golf courses are terrorist targets https://web.archive.org/web/20060215153821/https://www.kron.com/Global/story.asp?S=4226663

#20yrsago Amazon rents access to a copy of the Web https://battellemedia.com/archives/2005/12/alexa_make_that_amazon_looks_to_change_the_game

#15yrsago Pornoscanners trivially defeated by pancake-shaped explosives https://web.archive.org/web/20101225211840/http://springerlink.com/content/g6620thk08679160/fulltext.pdf

#10yrsago HO fhtagn! Detailed model railroad layout recreates HP Lovecraft’s Arkham https://web.archive.org/web/20131127042302/http://www.ottgallery.com/MRR.html

#10yrsago Suicide rates are highest in spring — not around Christmas https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2015/12/no-suicides-dont-rise-during-the-holidays/419436/

#10yrsago Airbnb hosts consistently discriminate against black people https://www.benedelman.org/publications/airbnb-011014.pdf

#10yrsago What will it take to get MIT to stand up for its own students and researchers? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cQdl_JdTars

#10yrsago Experts baffled to learn that 2 years olds are being prescribed psychiatric drugs https://www.nytimes.com/2015/12/11/us/psychiatric-drugs-are-being-prescribed-to-infants.html?_r=0

#10yrsago Happy Birthday’s copyright status is finally, mysteriously settled https://www.nytimes.com/2015/12/10/business/media/happy-birthday-copyright-case-reaches-a-settlement.html?_r=0

#10yrsago Proposal: keep the nuclear launch codes in an innocent volunteer’s chest-cavity https://blog.nuclearsecrecy.com/2012/09/19/the-heart-of-deterrence/

#10yrsago Obama promises statement on encryption before Xmas (maybe) https://web.archive.org/web/20151211042128/https://www.dailydot.com/politics/white-house-encryption-policy-response-petition/

#10yrsago Harlem Cryptoparty: Crypto matters for #blacklivesmatter https://web.archive.org/web/20151218183924/https://motherboard.vice.com/read/the-black-community-needs-encryption

#10yrsago Backslash: a toolkit for protesters facing hyper-militarized, surveillance-heavy police https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2015/12/backslash-anti-surveillance-gadgets-for-protesters/

#10yrsago Ted Cruz campaign hires dirty data-miners who slurped up millions of Facebook users’ data https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/dec/11/senator-ted-cruz-president-campaign-facebook-user-data

#10yrsago The Tor Project has a new executive director: former EFF director Shari Steele! https://blog.torproject.org/greetings-tors-new-executive-director/

#10yrsago What I told the kid who wanted to join the NSA https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/dec/11/west-point-cybersecurity-nsa-privacy-edward-snowden

#10yrsago Copyfraud: Disney’s bogus complaint over toy photo gets a fan kicked off Facebook https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2015/12/disney-initially-drops-then-doubles-down-on-dmca-claim-over-star-wars-figure-pic/

#15yrsago Sales pitch from an ATM-skimmer vendor https://krebsonsecurity.com/2010/12/why-gsm-based-atm-skimmers-rule/

#15yrsago Boardgame Remix Kit makes inspired new games out of old Monopoly, Clue, Trivial Pursuit and Scrabble sets https://web.archive.org/web/20101214210548/http://www.boardgame-remix-kit.com/sample/boardgame-remix-kit-sample.pdf

#10yrsago Britons will need copyright licenses to post photos of their own furniture https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2015/12/you-may-soon-need-a-licence-to-take-photos-of-that-classic-designer-chair-you-bought/

#5yrsago Outgoing Facebookers blast the company https://pluralistic.net/2020/12/12/fairy-use-tale/#badge-posts

#5yrsago Carbon offsets are bullshit https://pluralistic.net/2020/12/12/fairy-use-tale/#greenwashing

#5yrsago Youtube, fair use, competition, and the death of the artist https://pluralistic.net/2020/12/12/fairy-use-tale/#content-id

#5yrsago A lethally boring story https://pluralistic.net/2020/12/11/number-eight/#erisa

#5yrsago Daddy Daughter Xmas Podcast 2020 https://pluralistic.net/2020/12/11/number-eight/#youll-go-down-in-mystery

#5yrsago Antitrust and Facebook's paid disinformation https://pluralistic.net/2020/12/11/number-eight/#curse-of-bigness

#1yrago The housing emergency and the second Trump term https://pluralistic.net/2024/12/11/nimby-yimby-fimby/#home-team-advantage

#1yrago A Democratic media strategy to save journalism and the nation https://pluralistic.net/2024/12/12/the-view-from-somewhere/#abolish-rogan

Upcoming appearances (permalink)

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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, June 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. LEGAL REVIEW AND COPYEDIT COMPLETE.

  • "The Post-American Internet," a short book about internet policy in the age of Trumpism. PLANNING.

  • A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING

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

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