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Make Everything to Markdown

Sun, 02 Aug 2026 00:21:27 GMT

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The Religion of Speed

Fri, 31 Jul 2026 09:38:35 GMT

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Read This Before You Buy That TV Streaming Stick

Thu, 30 Jul 2026 21:33:23 GMT

Security experts have been sounding the alarm for years about the risks of using generic TV boxes that promise unlimited content streaming for a one-time fee, warning that they secretly rent the user’s Internet connection out to strangers. But a groundbreaking new analysis finds these devices also routinely spoof themselves as mobile phones clicking ads on AI-generated websites as part of a sprawling operation that seeks to defraud online merchants and advertising networks.

Pedro Falé is a threat researcher with the security firm Bitsight. Falé told KrebsOnSecurity he was able to peer inside a vast and complex ad fraud network by registering an expired domain name that was used to coordinate fake ad clicks across a particularly popular brand of these streaming devices known as H96.

An H96 TV streaming device currently advertised for sale on Amazon.

Falé said the domain he scooped up was previously used for telemetry, periodically collecting full hardware information and the entire list of installed apps from tens of thousands of H96 streaming sticks plugged into television sets around the globe. But upon inspecting the traffic being funneled to the domain, he discovered nearly all of the TV boxes transmitting data claimed to be mobile phone models from a variety of manufacturers, including Samsung, Vivo, Huawei, and Xiaomi.

“We noticed something was wildly wrong,” Falé said. “Multiple devices reporting to this factory Android TV Box backdoor were ‘phones.'”

Image: Bitsight.

The researcher found all of the devices reported having the same two apps installed, and that those apps were made by a company called Zhejiang Fengwo IoT Technology Ltd, an entity founded in 2019 in mainland China which operates an ad-publishing portfolio under the name Fengwo Group. Further investigation into the Fengwo Group revealed it has registered multiple patents that match the inner workings of these apps.

“Bitsight TRACE identified several Hong Kong, Singapore, and single person ‘legal’ shell identities used to collect the monetization and traced the operation back to a mainland China company known as Zhejiang Fengwo IoT Technology Co., Ltd, which operates under the Fengwo Group,” Falé wrote in a report released today about their findings.

Falé said an analysis of the apps shows they help to coordinate an ad fraud network that uses these H96 devices as a captive traffic source to click on ads at AI-generated websites operated by the Fengwo Group.

Bitsight discovered the websites contain machine-generated news articles and graphics across a range of categories, including finance, health, education, gaming, music and food blogs. But they also found none of those sites displayed ads unless the device visiting the page matched the spoofed mobile profile of these H96 devices.

AI DIGITAL HUMANS

The domain for the Fengwo Group — fwgcloud[.]com — claims the company is “redefining the boundaries of human-AI interaction,” and that it has created more than 120,000 “AI digital humans” available to rent for everything from emotional companionship to 24/7 customer service and creative design.

The homepage for fwgcloud dot com.

Falé said the Fengwo Group’s domain shared its SSL certificate data with other domains associated with the apps found on H96 devices, specifically the phone spoofing mechanism. He noted the domain also has an internal wiki platform that directly ties the Fengwo Group to a proprietary implementation of a Google-built visual programming language called Blockly, which was originally designed to help kids learn how to write software.

According to Bitsight, the Fengwo Group’s employees use Blockly to build the sham websites, allowing low-skilled operators to drag blocks of code together in their Blockly editor — without any need to understand what the underlying code blocks do or how they work.

The Blockly homepage.

“An operator can drag blocks together in their Blockly editor, to define each fraud routine, given a task type,” reads Bitsight’s report. “Once the routine is saved, it gets exported as JavaScript and uploaded to the S3 buckets. An operator doesn’t need as much understanding of the underlying technicalities, as it is all set in place for ease of use.”

Bitsight even found one of the Fengwo Group app developers mentioning exactly these advantages, noting the developer remarked that “only a small number of highly-skilled developers are needed to build the template execution-unit images,” and that “developers who create execution units from those templates have significantly lower technical requirements, greatly reducing the company’s operating costs.”

Falé said if a user’s H96 streaming stick is selected for a specific fraud task, it will be pushed the appropriate Blockly module according to the task desired, which can include silently launching a web browser, visiting websites, browsing pages, managing tabs, and clicking on ads.

To ensure the TV boxes masquerading as mobile phones can reliably click on ads displayed via the AI-generated websites, the Fengwo group “fuses three vision and reasoning systems into a single interface,” allowing the bots to correctly identify an ad on the webpage and navigate the site much like a human would, the Bitsight report observed.

Examples of ad landing pages linked to the Fengwo Group. Image: Bitsight.

TV ON? PROXY. TV OFF? AD FRAUD

Bitsight found the H96 devices were either relaying residential proxy traffic or participating in ad fraud, but never both at the same time. In fact, they concluded that when these TV boxes detect an HDMI signal from an attached television — indicating the user intends to stream video content — the box is usually functioning as a residential proxy. When the TV is off, it switches back to waiting for ad fraud jobs.

Falé said he believes the TV boxes are set up this way because its ad fraud activities are far more resource intensive and could interfere with the device’s stated purpose — streaming video content over the Internet.

Despite repeated warnings from the FBI and security industry leaders about the security and privacy risks of using these streaming devices, major e-commerce providers like Amazon, Best Buy, Newegg and others continue to sell hundreds of different models and brands that bundle unofficial versions of Google’s Android operating system and are frequently marketed (via online influencers) as a way to access a broad array of streaming services and live broadcasts without a subscription.

Image: fbi.gov.

In addition to enlisting the user’s TV box in ad fraud networks, these off-brand streaming devices almost universally come with residential proxy software pre-installed. This software rents the user’s Internet address out to anonymous paying customers, who run the gamut from aggressive content scraping firms to ticket scalpers and outright cybercriminals.

What’s more, because these generic (and generally dirt cheap) TV boxes are all horribly insecure by default and bereft of any kind of authentication, installing one on your home or office network only invites further mischief. In January, the proxy tracking service Synthient documented how multiple botnets had rapidly enslaved millions of TV boxes using a complex interplay of security vulnerabilities in both the residential proxy software and the streaming devices themselves.

SHOW ME THE MONEY

Bitsight said it tracked approximately 38,000 TV boxes globally phoning home to the expired Fengwo Group domain, and based on that number the report estimates this ad fraud network brings in revenues of close to $50,000 a day (not counting substantial revenue from the residential proxy side of the business). However, Falé emphasized that these estimates are highly conservative and based on telemetry from just one of the Fengwo Group’s core (but older) domains.

As for the Fengwo Group’s claim to have 120,000 “digital humans” at their disposal, Bitsight’s report concludes it could be just a clever marketing scheme and/or a way to avoid drawing suspicion to the company’s operations.

“Historically, when dealing with proxy services or DDoS, we sometimes see these websites undertake inconspicuous facades, so as not to advertise their DDoS capability or botnet size,” Falé wrote in the report. “This could also be the case here.”

If the Fengwo Group truly does have tens of thousands of “AI humans” at its beck and call, it does not appear to have dedicated any of them to fielding inquiries from its own website. KrebsOnSecurity sought comment from the Fengwo Group by emailing the contact address listed on the company’s homepage, but the request bounced back with the reply, “Your message couldn’t be delivered to postmaster@fwgcloud[.]com. Their inbox is full, or it’s getting too much mail right now.”

As Bitsight’s analysis shows, when it comes to TV boxes and streaming sticks, it’s best to stick to name brands from reputable manufacturers, and then to be sparing and careful with any apps you choose to install on the device — as many of those can bundle residential proxy software as well. Google says consumers can confirm whether or not a device is built with the official Android TV OS and Play Protect certification by following these instructions.

Additionally, Synthient maintains a running list of IoT devices that have been known to ship to consumers with residential proxy software and other malicious apps pre-installed. Careful readers will notice Synthient’s list includes other IoT devices apart from streaming sticks and boxes: As the FBI has warned, residential proxy software has also been found in other popular consumer IoT devices from random brands, particularly digital photo frames.

Faith No More And System Of A Down Tour Dates Announced

Mon, 27 Jul 2026 23:22:13 GMT

After nearly 10 years off the road, Faith No More are returning for a run of stadium shows with System of a Down. Continue reading…

A City We Build Together

Mon, 27 Jul 2026 23:11:49 GMT

How one citizen and one mayor showed what local government is supposed to be.

Pluralistic: Dealing with dickovers (21 Jul 2026) dickovers

Sun, 26 Jul 2026 13:33:37 GMT

Today's links Dealing with dickovers: The web is an open platform, and that matters. Hey look at this: Delights to delectate. Object permanence: Broadcast's bad week; Congress v wifi; EFF v DRM law; Snowden and bunnie's smartphone smartcase. Upcoming appearances: Edinburgh, Sydney, Melbourne, Brighton, London, South Bend. 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.

Dealing with dickovers (permalink)

One of 2026's better tech-related coinages is "dickover," John Gruber's term for

a modal panel, popover, or curtain presented by a website or app, deliberately obscuring its own content to frustrate the user with an unwanted, unnecessary, mandatory interaction; e.g. asking the user to accept “cookies”, subscribe to a newsletter, install the website’s mobile app, agree to terms of service, or anything else that the user couldn’t give two shits about.

https://daringfireball.net/2026/05/what_is_a_dickover

These are bad everywhere, but they are especially terrible in the UK and EU, where websites practice a form of malicious compliance to the GDPR, Europe's landmark privacy law. Under the GDPR, websites are required to secure your affirmative consent to process your data. The obvious way that websites should respond to this is by not collecting your data unless there's a damned good reason for it, but the actual response is to repeatedly shove cookie-consent dialogs in your face before letting you use the site.

These are absolutely unnecessary. Your browser can be configured to transmit a "global privacy control signal" by default that tells websites you don't consent to be spied on while you look at their pages:

https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/global-privacy-control

But many websites punish you by throwing up a "Global Privacy Control detected" dickover that forces you to click through to affirm their confirmation of your confirmation that you don't want to be spied on.

If you don't have the GPC set, websites will demand that you tell them whether you want to be spied on – and they'll do it again, every time you visit them. The website operators falsely claim that they have to do this under the terms of the GDPR (or other laws, like California's CCPA). This is a lie. Every privacy law contains an exception that allows websites to store data about you for a "legitimate interest," and that obviously includes setting a cookie that says, "don't ever spy on this user."

What's a legit interest? Well, I can tell you what it isn't. Facebook claimed that they had to spy on you, even if you opted out by laboriously clicking through one of their dickovers or by transmitting a GPC signal to their servers, because you had also clicked through their terms of service, which say, "Facebook is going to spy on you with every hour that god sends, from asshole to appetite, abandon hope all ye who enter here" (a direct quote). Facebook claims that this is a contract with you, whereby the company has promised to spy on you, and if they stop, they would be violating the contract, which might make you mad, so they are legally required to eavesdrop on every conversation you have and follow you everywhere you go:

https://www.cliffordchance.com/content/dam/cliffordchance/briefings/2023/07/european-court-of-justice-in-facebook-ruling-clarifies-interplay-between-eu-competition-law-and-data-protections-enforcement.pdf

This is bullshit, and the European Court of Justice affirmed it. But despite the fact that surveillance advertising companies are happy to stretch the definition of "legitimate interest" to cover "spying on you because our ToS say we will," these same companies insist that "legitimate purpose" can't possibly include "remembering the fact that you told us not to spy on you the last time you were here," and so every time you click through to one of many popular websites, you get a dickover, and the only way to make it stop is to "consent" to being spied upon.

But it doesn't have to be this way. While the right answer to this kind of rampant lawlessness is stonking fines and even the corporate death penalty for repeat offenders, internet users have a myriad of options available to them for banishing dickovers to the scrapheap of history. These measures aren't difficult to avail yourself of, and using them will make your life infinitely better, so I'm going to tell you about some of them.

Before I start, one note: these measures only work on browsers, not apps. An app is a webpage wrapped in the right kind of IP law to make it a felony to change how it works, which is why companies are infinitely horny to get you to use their apps, not their websites:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/05/07/treacherous-computing/#rewilding-the-internet

What's more, these measures really only work on desktop browsers, because mobile browsers are apps, and are severely limited by law and mobile operating systems, making it hard-to-impossible to customize them so that they'll respect your rights. This is true of all mobile browsers, but it goes triple for iOS (iPhones and iPads):

https://pluralistic.net/2022/12/13/kitbashed/#app-store-tax

Finally, this mostly only works on Firefox, and it works worst on Chrome, Google's monopolistic browser. When it comes to customizing your browsing experience to get rid of annoyances like dickovers and ads, Chrome is hands-down the worst choice, and Google is about to make it much, much worse, forcing a change that will kill the most popular blockers. Stop using Chrome, switch to Firefox:

https://protonprivacy.substack.com/p/google-is-finally-killing-ublock

So, once you're on your actual computer, using Firefox, how can you disenshittify your internet experience? The first thing to familiarize yourself with is Reader Mode, a built-in Firefox feature that switches any webpage to a black type/white background column of text. Just click the little "page view" icon next to the Firefox location bar or use the key combo "ctrl-alt-r."

Some power tips for Reader Mode: Firefox tries to guess whether a given page should have a Reader Mode option based on its layout. This sometimes blocks Reader Mode on pages that badly need it. You can force Firefox to always allow you to try Reader Mode by going to "about:config" in your location bar, then searching for "reader.parse-on-load.force-enabled" and toggling it to "true". If you switch to Reader Mode and the page breaks, you can switch back by hitting ctrl-alt-r again.

Many websites' "soft paywalls" (which allow you to read an article or two before getting a demand to register and/or pay) can be defeated with Reader Mode. Just hit ctrl-alt-r and see if the whole article appears. If it doesn't, try one or both of: a) reloading the page while still in Reader Mode, and/or; b) Clearing cookies for the page (click the shield next to the site's URL in Firefox's location bar, then click "Clear cookies and site data"), and then reload.

That's Reader Mode, and it comes built into Firefox, and can be installed via various extensions on other browsers. Now let's move on to more advanced techniques, starting with "Kill Sticky," a bookmarklet that deletes any "static" elements in a web-page you've loaded (broadly, this is anything that won't change position when you scroll your browser).

Just click the "Kill Sticky" bookmarklet and all the static elements in the current tab go away. This includes things like navigation bars, which are often (but not always) useless annoyances. The original Kill Sticky, created by Alisdair McDiarmid, is 13 years old, and it still works great, but eight years ago, gala8y created a new version that caught some outliers that the original Kill Sticky missed. I've been running gala8y's version for a year now with no problems, and I recommend it as your second line of dickover defense (after Reader Mode):

https://github.com/gala8y/kill-sticky–forked

Kill Sticky is great for getting rid of the dickovers on a website you're not planning to visit more than once. But if you visit a dickover website regularly, you can permanently block its dickovers by using the Adblock Plus (ABP) browser extension:

https://adblockplus.org/

Once you have Adblock Plus installed, you can instruct your browser never to render a given website's dickover. Just load the website, hover your pointer over the dickover, and click your right mouse-button (Mac users need to ctrl-click). This will pop up a Firefox context menu, and at the bottom of that menu is "Block Element…".

Select "Block Element," then move your mouse around the screen. Different regions of the screen will glow pink, showing you which element (part of the page) ABP can access there. Once you've highlighted the dickover, click the "Preview" button on the ABP dialog in the bottom right corner. This will show you how the page looks after you've banished that element.

If it's an element you want to delete forever, click "Create" and ABP will create a new rule for that page that blocks that element. Note that many dickovers consist of several elements, each atop the other, and after you block one element, you might have to repeat the process to delete the element "behind" it, digging your way down to the actual webpage. Each element you block is listed in the top pane of the ABP dialog box. For example, here's Wired.com's UK dickover:

||media.wired.com/photos/6a565246c8e0799a2981818e/1:1/w_*c_limit/WEB_2026-06-21_EA-WIRED-NBNO-FullQual_0011.jpg

If you block an element by accident and want to restore it, just delete its corresponding line in the Block Element dialog. When websites change their layouts and their dickovers come back, just add the new one to the Block Element for that page. No need to delete the old entries.

Finally, if all else fails, there's Remove Paywall, a website that tries several different ways to load a page without its interrupters, nag screens, regwalls and paywalls:

https://www.removepaywall.com/

It's also available as a browser plugin, so you can just right-click on any page and select "Remove Paywall" from the pop-up menu. Remove Paywall often loads a page with all of its dickovers, and you can use all the techniques enumerated above – Reader Mode, Kill Sticky and Block Element – with Remove Paywall versions of pages.

Back in 2024, Ed Zitron tried an experiment: he bought Amazon's bestselling laptop and tried to use it, discovering it to be a horror-show of shovelware, including processor-devouring preinstalled spyware that rendered it all but unusable:

https://www.wheresyoured.at/never-forgive-them/

Zitron's (excellent) point is that technically proficient people have better computers than most users, and these computers are configured in better ways, and as a result, we participate in a fundamentally different internet to the one that normies are forced to use.

It's an excellent observation, and Zitron's point – that these laptops were actively enshittified by hardware makers and OS vendors – is an important one (the essay is called "Never Forgive Them").

But to this point, I would like to add another: we have a duty and obligation to the people we love to show them how to seize the means of computation. The normies in your life need the tips and tricks I lay out in this article more than anyone. Sure, it takes some doing to install Firefox, Kill Sticky, Adblock Plus and Bypass Paywalls; it takes a minute to figure out Reader Mode.

But if you install these tools for the people you love and show them how to use them (or just reconfigure the sites they visit most frequently to block dickovers and other annoyances), you will permanently improve their internet experience, clawing back hours of annoyances every week, while also protecting their privacy.

Anyone who is confused by switching to Firefox is also going to be confused by the deceptive language and practices that go along with dickovers. By leaving your unsophisticated loved ones exposed to dickovers, you're not decreasing the amount of technological confusion they're likely to experience in a day – you're vastly increasing the amount of danger they face as a result of that confusion.

There's never been a better time to disenshittify your cherished normies' computers. The AI companies' illegal monopolization of the memory market has sent the price of new computers, RAM and storage skyrocketing:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BORRBce5TGw

All of us – but especially normies – are having to do more with less. The best way to squeeze extra performance out of any computer (but especially an aged and underpowered computer) is by switching to a free/open operating system like GNU/Linux and replacing your proprietary, resource-gobbling apps with free/open alternatives:

https://www.fosslinux.com/158206/linux-on-older-hardware-revival-guide.htm

Seizing the means of computation isn't theft, it's bargaining. Commercial surveillance companies will tell you that by spying on you, they are simply engaged in a marketplace exchange in which you swap your privacy for access to online services. But they are running a very curious sort of market: it's a "market" where as soon as you stop to browse someone's wares, the stallholder gets to reach into your pocket and clean out your wallet. In "markets," prices are announced and bargained over, not set unilaterally and extracted from anyone unwise enough to cross the threshold.

Adblocking, dickover blocking and other customizations are a way for you to bargain back, to answer the opening bid of "How about you give me all of your data forever and let me do anything I want with it?" with "How about 'nah?'"

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/07/adblocking-how-about-nah

Dickovers are companies' illegal response to privacy laws. Privacy laws are the public response to companies' out-of-control data theft and weaponization. They call us thieves, but they're the ones who embarked upon a generation-long campaign of unrestricted data plunder. What they call "theft" is just self-defense.

A generation ago, publishers and advertisers fell in love with pop-up ads. Early pop-ups were virulent in ways that are hardly imaginable today: visiting a website summoned dozens of pop-ups, some of them employing dirty tricks like spawning as an invisible 1×1 pixel, or running away from your cursor when you tried to close them. They auto-played sound and music. They were Satanic.

We got rid of pop-ups by installing pop-up blockers. Browser vendors (starting with Opera, then Mozilla) blocked pop-ups by default. Soon, pop-ups simply ceased to exist for the majority of internet users, and at that point, the same companies who'd insisted that they would go out of business unless they could fill your screen with pop-ups quietly gave up on them and found another way to advertise.

No one should ever have to look at another dickover. If dickovers become invisible for everyone on the web, there won't be any dickovers. Companies claim they need dickovers to survive. It's bullshit. They want dickovers, but if dickovers cease to be rendered on their target audience's screens, they'll switch to less invasive tactics, just like they've always done.

(Image: Kanerva T, CC BY 4.0, modified)

Hey look at this (permalink)

WRITERS GUILD OF AMERICA, WEST, INC., and WRITERS GUILD OF AMERICA EAST, INC., Plaintiffs, vs. PARAMOUNT SKYDANCE CORPORATION, and WARNER BROS. DISCOVERY, INC https://www.wga.org/uploadedfiles/news_and_events/public_policy/wga-v-paramount-warner-bros-complaint.pdf

Deliria 2, Cyberpunks Mutants & Mondoids https://grayarea.org/event/deliria-2-cyberpunks-mutants-mondoids/

Can machines replace human workers? Notes on agency, automation, and AI https://publications.jrc.ec.europa.eu/repository/handle/JRC147594

Scorpions bite again https://jasminatesanovic.wordpress.com/2026/07/14/scorpions-bite-again/

Mandatory Update: A Short Story https://micahflee.com/mandatory-update-a-short-story/

Object permanence (permalink)

#20yrsago Worst week in the history of broadcast TV https://web.archive.org/web/20060717100605/http://asia.news.yahoo.com/060711/ap/d8iq1l8g0.html

#20yrsago Pen with built-in WiFinder https://web.archive.org/web/20060808191736/https://informatica.shopwprintit.com/index.cfm?action=ViewDetails&ItemID=135&Category=95

#15yrsago Russian Pirate Party must change name, contemplates “Pira7e Party” https://torrentfreak.com/judge-pirate-party-name-ban-decision-stands-110722/

#15yrsago Public special ed employee has $0 paycheck after health insurance deductions https://web.archive.org/web/20110726080414/http://www.educationvotes.nea.org/2011/07/20/a-special-education-worker-talks-candidly-about-empty-paychecks-organizing/

#15yrsago Act now! Congress wants to kill WiFi-like spectrum, sell it off to highest bidder instead https://web.archive.org/web/20110722113231/https://publicknowledge.org/dont-let-cos-buy-way-out-regulation

#15yrsago New Yorkers freestyle rap in Union Square https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N3fd9mzfRoQ

#10yrsago Advances in transparent, brain-revealing skull-windows https://web.archive.org/web/20160722140424/https://www.medgadget.com/2016/07/transparent-skull-implant-repeat-brain-laser-therapy.html

#10yrsago EFF is suing the US government to invalidate the DMCA’s DRM provisions https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/jul/21/digital-millennium-copyright-act-eff-supreme-court

#10yrsago Ed Snowden and Andrew “bunnie” Huang announce a malware-detecting smartphone case https://www.tjoe.org/pub/direct-radio-introspection/release/

Upcoming appearances (permalink)

Edinburgh International Book Festival with Jimmy Wales, Aug 17
https://www.edbookfest.co.uk/events/the-front-list-cory-doctorow-and-jimmy-wales

Sydney: The Festival of Dangerous Ideas, Aug 23-24
https://festivalofdangerousideas.com/cory-doctorow/

Melbourne: Enshittification at the Wheeler Centre, Aug 25
https://www.wheelercentre.com/events-tickets/season-2026/cory-doctorow-enshittification

Brighton: The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI with Carole Cadwalladr (Brighton Dome), Sep 8
https://brightondome.org/whats-on/LSC-cory-doctorow-the-reverse-centaurs-guide-to-life-after-ai/

London: The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI with Riley Quinn (Foyle's Picadilly), Sep 9
https://www.foyles.co.uk/events/enshittification-cory-doctorow-riley-quinn

South Bend: An Evening With Cory Doctorow (Notre Dame), Oct 6
https://franco.nd.edu/events/2026/10/06/an-evening-with-cory-doctorow/

Recent appearances (permalink) Talk Tech Bock (Vera Linß)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3PFjGvQoBgc

How To Think About AI Before It’s Too Late (This Is Hell)
https://thisishell.com/episodes/1919

AI Won't Replace You… But This Might (Deep Focus)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oorWq_m48AQ

Who Owns Your Tractor? (Growing the Future)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IU9eBPUZBI4

You Bought it, They Break It (What Now? with Trevor Noah)
https://www.podbean.com/media/share/dir-ir36t-2f4a1ac6

Latest books (permalink) "The Reverse-Centaur's Guide to AI," a short book about being a better AI critic, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, June 2026
https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374621568/thereversecentaursguidetolifeafterai/

"Canny Valley": A limited edition collection of the collages I create for Pluralistic, self-published, September 2025 https://pluralistic.net/2025/09/04/illustrious/#chairman-bruce

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Upcoming books (permalink) "The Post-American Internet," a geopolitical sequel of sorts to Enshittification, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2027

"Unauthorized Bread": a middle-grades graphic novel adapted from my novella about refugees, toasters and DRM, FirstSecond, April 20, 2027

"Enshittification, Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It" (the graphic novel), Firstsecond, 2027

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

Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources:

Currently writing: "The Post-American Internet," a sequel to "Enshittification," about the better world the rest of us get to have now that Trump has torched America. Fourth draft completed. Submitted to editor.

A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING

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

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

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

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

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

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ISSN: 3066-764X

Fretboard Memorisation with Modular Arithmetic

Wed, 22 Jul 2026 23:27:01 GMT

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We Are Living in Pinocchio’s World

Sat, 30 May 2026 14:20:09 GMT

I have always wanted to own a Montblanc Writers Edition dedicated to Carlo Collodi, the Italian author whose real name was Carlo Lorenzini. He took his pen name from the Tuscan village where his mother was born, and then spent his career writing under a false name about a character who could not sustain one. I grew up reading the tales of Pinocchio, but only read the non-Disneyfied version as a grown-up. The book left an indelible impression on me. It is a great parable for modern times.

In case you were wondering, I did get the pen. It is one of the most beautiful and underrated pens in the Montblanc Writers Series. I have been mildly obsessed with it for a long time. It is not overwhelming, gaudy, or over the top. It tells the full story, not just of the pen but the story behind it. And it starts with the clip, that subtly hints at Pinocchio’s nose.

The cap is where Montblanc’s craftsmen did their most serious work. It is cylindrical, dark resin, topped by the Montblanc snowflake, wrapped in a silver and platinum skeletal overlay, a filigree of characters and scenes from the story, the dark resin visible beneath through the cutouts. The effect is like looking at a shadow puppet theater contained in your hand. The barrel is restrained by comparison, dark resin with horizontal platinum ring banding, letting the cap hold the eye. The nib carries its own engraving tied to the story.

Holding it in my hands recently, I found myself thinking about the story of Pinocchio, and how it throws the names that dominate our headlines into sharp relief — the ones who shape our zeitgeist of half-truths.

Most Montblanc Writers Editions honor their subjects through association. A name on the clip, a period-appropriate color, a design that nods toward an author’s era. My favorites from this series are Edgar Allan Poe, Oscar Wilde, Schiller, and Dostoevsky. And in recent times I have been drawn to R.L. Stevenson. I love these authors.

Compared to these famous names, most people know Pinocchio but not the author behind it. We all have a surface-level understanding of what the story is. Lies equal long nose. We don’t quite understand the real story or know the real author. And that is why the pen itself is so mysterious and, yes, underrated.

Collectors chasing the more obviously prestigious editions walk right past it, missing the one that is actually doing the most interesting thing. Collodi’s story inhabits the pen, and in one glimpse you know it is telling you something. The story it commemorates is not the one most people remember. I do.

The Adventures of Pinocchio was published in serial form in 1881, aimed at Italian children in the way the 19th century aimed things at children, full of suffering, consequence, and moral instruction delivered through catastrophe. The puppet is hanged. He is swallowed by a giant fish. He watches companions degrade into beasts of burden. The world he moves through is predatory at every level, and the institutions that should protect him are either absent, corrupted, or actively hostile to his interests.

I can only imagine the outrage and horror over this story should it have been published today. I am old enough to have been smacked for my stupid mistakes as a kid. So this was actually not a bad story to read. Still, I can understand how much anxiety it might cause today’s parents.

Most people remember Pinocchio as a story about lying. The nose grows. You get caught. Lesson learned. But that reading misses almost everything Collodi was actually doing. The book is a close study of a society where deception has gone ambient, woven into every institution, every transaction. Courts punish victims. Authority figures perform competence without exercising it. Experts are decorative. Society holds together through spectacle and habit rather than accountability. Into this environment, a naive creature is released, constitutionally unable to resist a good story about easy reward.

The nose is the least interesting lie in the book. The interesting lies are the ones that work.

The Fox and the Cat are the novel’s most modern characters. They persuade Pinocchio to bury his coins in the Field of Miracles on the promise that they will multiply overnight. Exploit impatience, exploit greed, frame skepticism as a failure of imagination, and dismiss skeptics as lacking vision. Remind you of someone? Space Cowboy for example?

That structure is so familiar I barely need to name it. But let me name it anyway.

Everyone from Jensen Huang to Sam Altman to Elon Musk spent a decade accumulating what I have called symbolic capital, the reputation, the prestige, the weight of being seen as someone who understands the future better than the rest of us. Now each of them seems to be running some version of the Field of Miracles, with promises that keep not arriving, timelines that dissolve, products that exist primarily as announcements, and platforms run as machines for generating more reputation regardless of what they actually do. They don’t need to be right. They need to be believed. Velocity is the new authority, and no one has weaponized that more effectively.

We are living, as I wrote years ago, in the golden age of half-truths.

Your average influencer flogging a supplement, a course, a skin cream, or a crypto token on TikTok and Instagram is running the same operation, just cheaper. The confidence is the product. The audience wants to believe. The Field of Miracles is open for business everywhere you look.

Collodi in 1881 was writing about all this at a point of major societal inflection. So perhaps now you understand why I am drawn to this story. Pinocchio is a story about a society organized around deception.

The Land of Toys is the sequence that haunts me most, especially now. Children abandon school and responsibility for a place of permanent amusement. They play. And then, gradually, they begin to change. They grow ears. They grow tails. They become donkeys, beasts of labor and exploitation, stripped of language, used until they break.

This is a parable of who we have become, a BNPL-fueled spectacle in itself.

Collodi was writing during rapid industrialization and the early emergence of mass entertainment. He understood, earlier than most, that distraction offered as pleasure can be a leash. The children who choose the Land of Toys over school are not liberated. They are owned more completely than any schoolroom could manage.

The algorithmic feed is the Land of Toys. It is built to keep you there past the point of nourishment, past the point where you are even enjoying it. Outrage travels faster than understanding. Spectacle beats judgment. The algorithm doesn’t care whether something is true. It cares whether it moves. And it keeps you scrolling, reacting, and returning in ways that benefit the platform, not you.

The political system has learned the same lesson. Governance is slow and grinding and unsatisfying. Performance is fast and shareable. We have built media and political economies that reward entertainers over administrators, and the clean story over the complicated truth.

Collodi refuses to assign blame only upward. That is what keeps the novel from collapsing into moralism. Pinocchio is deceived because he wants to be deceived. He chooses shortcuts over work, belonging over truth, spectacle over judgment, every time, until the costs become too steep to ignore. The Fox and the Cat succeed because he hands them what they need. His credulity is not innocent. It is participation.

The grifters and the hucksters and the influencers selling impossible things succeed because audiences reward certainty and punish doubt. They honor confidence and resist complication. A clean story about a genius who will fix everything travels faster than a difficult story about tradeoffs. The Field of Miracles stays open because people keep wanting to bury their coins there.

The Fox and the Cat is how the whole thing works.

Pinocchio becomes real, becomes human, only after he accepts obligation. Collodi is saying that it is important to have self-governance. It is necessary to choose the difficult truth over the easy satisfying one. That doesn’t jibe with everything the attention economy is selling, dopamine hits delivered so frequently that it becomes hard to distinguish stimulation from autonomy.

There is an obvious irony in a luxury pen commemorating a story about the seductions of wanting things you have not earned. The Montblanc Collodi is made to be admired, displayed, collected. And it honors a puppet who had to lose everything, friends, coins, his own body, before he understood what was actually worth having.

I am not sure Collodi would find that irony disqualifying. A beautiful object that makes you think seriously about the spectacle we are living in. It makes you think about what is the cost of being real. It is a more interesting pen to own than one that simply confirms your taste.

The clip is shaped like Pinocchio’s nose because the nose is the one honest thing in a world built on performance. It grows because the body keeps the score even when the mouth doesn’t.

When I hold this pen, I try to remember what that means.

Related reading: Velocity Is the New Authority | The Cost of Lies | Neo Symbolic Capitalism | The Golden Age of Half-Truths

The Adventures of Pinocchio by Carlo Collodi was first published in serial form in Il Giornale per i Bambini, 1881–83, and as a complete volume in 1883. The Montblanc Writers Edition dedicated to Collodi was released in 2011.

Ooh.directory: a place to find good blogs that interest you

Sat, 14 Feb 2026 15:57:23 GMT

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Resist and Unsubscribe

Thu, 05 Feb 2026 03:52:07 GMT

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Antirender: remove the glossy shine on architectural renderings

Sat, 31 Jan 2026 00:19:29 GMT

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The Lowdown on Debasement

Fri, 30 Jan 2026 12:52:42 GMT

Not what I mean by debasement, but whatever

I’ve never considered the price of gold an important economic indicator. After all, gold isn’t money — that is, it is neither a medium of exchange, which can be used to make purchases, nor a unit of account, in which prices are quoted. It just sits there in vaults. And I mocked right-wing commentators who hyperventilated about rising gold prices during the Obama years, claiming that those rising prices were a harbinger of soaring inflation and a plunging dollar. They weren’t.

Still, gold remains an important asset. At current prices the value of the world’s above-ground gold reserves is around $36 trillion, more than a dozen times the combined value of all cryptocurrencies.

And gold prices have been on a remarkable tear since Donald Trump regained power:

Source: Haver Analytics

Do people who got all apocalyptic about the meaning of rising gold prices under Obama have anything to say about the much bigger rise under Trump? Well, if they were objective they would have a lot to say.

For the recent surge in gold prices isn’t just far bigger than the rise from 2009 to 2012. Crucially, the jump in gold prices since Trump 47 assumed the throne presidency is a reflection of fears about America’s economic future – fears that weren’t present during the Obama-era rise.

Under Obama, gold prices rose mainly as a result of ultra-low interest rates, which made speculating in gold attractive. That was a completely different dynamic from what is happening now. Interest rates aren’t low enough currently to make gold an attractive speculative trade, and long-term rates have actually risen slightly.

The skyrocketing gold prices we are seeing now are a consequence of what finance types call the “debasement trade.” While the effect of the debasement trade is shown most spectacularly in sharply rising gold and silver prices, it’s also visible in the falling value of the dollar and in rising long-term interest rates.

To understand what the term “debasement trade” means, we have to first understand what “debasement” means in this context. Debasement here means a shift away from US financial assets by investors due to fears of future erosion of the value of those assets. It could be caused by fears of an outbreak of inflation, as Trump pressures the Fed to roll the printing presses. It could be caused by fears of a fiscal crisis as he slashes taxes for the wealthy and hands out “Trump checks” in an attempt to win back voters. Or it could be caused by fears of expropriation of foreign investors in US assets. Such expropriation is not a far-fetched concern: in 2025 Trump officials floated the idea of forcibly converting holdings of short-term Treasuries into long-term loans. And the main architect of this scheme was none other than Stephen Miran, who Trump appointed to the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve.

No one, including me, knows whether any of these destabilizing possibilities will come to pass. But in the past, when policy and policymakers were sane and rule of law prevailed, investors could and did rule out the possibility that U.S. policy would turn wildly irresponsible. Now we have an administration that casually ripped up three generations’ worth of solemn trade agreements, has threatened to seize allies’ territory, and more. Who’s to say that one of these days Trump might not declare a Liberation Day on U.S. debt? It may not be the most likely outcome, but it’s no longer in the realm of the inconceivable.

So the debasement trade – whether it’s in precious metals, the dollar or long-term Treasures -- is essentially how markets respond to the increased possibility of crazy American policy.

I want to be careful to not to overstate the case here. The explosive rise in gold prices is eye-catching but has few direct economic consequences. The value of the dollar matters much more; but while it has fallen a lot under Trump, part of that fall simply reverses an earlier rise after the 2024 election, when investors wrongly believed that Trump’s policies would boost the dollar. Still, the dollar is now significantly weaker than it was in the last two years of the Biden administration.

As for long-term long-term interest rates, they are roughly the same now as they were when Trump took office — although it’s notable that the Federal reserves rate cuts in 2025, which one would normally expect to reduce long rates, haven’t done so.

What is more telling than the absolute levels of the dollar and interest rates is the way they now react to changing conditions. Before Trump’s second coming, investors regarded U.S. investments in general and U.S. government debt in particular as safe havens. Whenever there was bad news, investors would pile into dollar assets, driving the dollar up and U.S. interest rates down — even when the bad news was coming from the United States, as it did during the 2008 financial crisis. That hasn’t happened at all under Trump. For example, the dollar fell and U.S. interest rates rose after Trump imposed his massive Liberation Day tariffs, indicating that markets didn’t consider the U.S. at all safe compared with investments elsewhere.

But aren’t stocks up under Trump? Yes, but they’re up almost everywhere, and less in the United States than in other major markets:

Source: Haver Analytics

These are stock indexes measured in local currency. Because the dollar has declined against most other currencies, in dollar terms foreign markets have strongly outperformed the U.S.

In short, the debasement trade signals that financial markets are losing faith in the United States. It’s not a full-blown panic, at least not yet, more of a gradual erosion. And it doesn’t amount to an imminent crisis. In particular, fears of debasement would have to get much worse to dethrone the dollar’s role as the world’s preeminent currency, a subject I will write about over the weekend.

But the debasement trade will hurt the United States, for example by raising the cost of refinancing U.S. debt. And it should be seen in the context of other forms of erosion, as the world signs trade agreements without America, as U.S. scientific preeminence is undermined by budget cuts and anti-science ideology, and more.

The diminishing band of Trump loyalists may believe that he is making America great again. But it’s not just liberals who realize that he’s doing the opposite. International investors are reaching the same conclusion.

MUSICAL CODA

Does Evidence Even Matter?

Tue, 27 Jan 2026 13:18:00 GMT

I was taught never to discuss money, politics, or religion in public. Those childhood lessons are why I avoid political commentary, though I don’t lack beliefs or convictions. With the growing rancor in our social, political, and economic arenas, I turn away from the news and toward longer, more considered writing.

And for that I look to writers and thinkers who do in-depth reporting and analysis. They see things more clearly. I am comfortable talking about technology and its impact on the present and future. I look for patterns that matter beyond today. Today, though, I had to put all that aside. My heart and my conscience couldn’t ignore the events in Minnesota. I couldn’t ignore Alex Pretti. I felt sad and sickened. I couldn’t look away. There is a deep sadness within me.

Pretti was a 37-year old ICU nurse at the VA hospital. On January 24th, federal agents shot him multiple times. The videos show him holding a phone. Filming. And then helping a woman. The Department of Homeland Security called him a “domestic terrorist” who arrived to “massacre law enforcement.” Video evidence contradicts the official story. How did we get here?

This is not what I thought could happen in America. The sixties protests, Vietnam. That’s just history I read about in books. Grainy photos. Distance. I used to see similar scenes on early CNN: Tiananmen Square in 1989. Arab Spring! I covered that story as a writer who covered social media.

Beijing. Tunis. Cairo. Not Minneapolis. And the sweet irony is that we are threatening to send our army to root out the Iranian regime because it is killing its citizens.

Federal agents shot an American citizen, and it was caught on video. It is the sickening outcome of virulent tribalism sweeping our world, enabled by the internet. We have forgotten that life is not a football game. Pick your team. Defend your side. Ignore evidence if it contradicts your tribe.

We think democracy is the flag, the ability to vote, or words in the Constitution. It is not. Democracy is an idea, an ideal, an agreement. Once you decide evidence does not matter if it hurts your team, you have already lost the thing you think you are defending. We are not seeing what is happening to us.

Red Sox vs. Yankees. Mac vs. Windows. Harmless tribalism. Then the internet scaled it to everything. Cable news figured it out first. Outrage gets ratings. Social networks weaponized it. Algorithms reward tribal warfare. Fight harder, see more content that makes you angrier. That’s the business model.

Divide and rule. The oldest trick in the book, supercharged by platforms built to profit from our blindness. This isn’t a conspiracy. Cable needs viewers. Social platforms need engagement. Politicians need votes. Tribal warfare delivers. Political machinery seized the chance to capitalize on it. Now we’re trapped. The system profits when we cannot see clearly. Videos show X. Your tribe tells you Y. You believe your tribe because the infrastructure has trained you to. Innocents die!

“All that happens must be known.” The Circle by Dave Eggers

Being a guy who looks at the world through a technology lens, I have been noodling about how reality is being presented to us outside our normal channels. Raw footage from hundreds, if not thousands, of phones. They are recording historynot for posterity, but for the present. Yet in our present, history has no meaning, just as the future seems futile.

For long-time readers, my fascination with cameras and their omnipresence isn’t new. In 2017, I framed it as The Third Eye, a new era in which the omnipresence of cameras would redefine society. The idea came from Hindu tradition: thethird eye as the eye of insight, seeing beyond ordinary sight. The phone camera has become our virtual third eye. A witness. A way to document reality that official narratives cannot control.

A smile is a smile in Chinese, Hindi, Portuguese, Spanish, and English. The emotional payload is universal. The visual web was emerging as a universal language. Photos were becoming the atomic unit of social platforms. I was excited. Millions of vantage points were creating a collective sight. I asked: How can we create a way for visuals to tell the near history of our time?

Minnesota is answering that question, and I don’t like what I see.

Cameras are everywhere. More than a billion surveillance cameras are installed worldwide. Last year, 1.2 billion smartphones with cameras were shipped. Two trillion photos are taken each year. In Minneapolis bystanders filmed everything. Reuters verified the footage, as did the BBC, the Wall Street Journal, and the Associated Press. The visual record is unambiguous. It contradicts the official story completely. Yet the official story continues.

I was right about cameras democratizing witnessing. Anyone can document reality. We bypassed gatekeepers. But I was wrong about accountability. I thought seeing would create it. I thought evidence would force consensus. That shared visual reality would make it harder to lie. The assumption was simple: if enough people saw the same thing, power couldn’t ignore it. Minnesota proved me wrong.

I keep thinking about The Circle, a wonderful book by Dave Eggers. It imagines a world dominated by one company, loosely modeled on Facebook, where cameras record everything and no one even pretends otherwise. “Secrets are lies,“ the company insists, and total transparency is sold as moral progress. This is the kind of nonsense I believed in my younger days.

In The Circle, a man is hunted in real time by crowdsourced tracking. The footage is not denied. It is reinterpreted, and it eventually loses moral weight. Truth does not disappear; it drowns in commentary, metrics, and ephemera. In 1984, George Orwell wrote, “The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears.” Together, Eggers and Orwell reach the same unsettling conclusion. The crisis is no longer whether technology can show us what happened; it iswhether society is still willing to believe its own eyes.

Forgive me if I sound fatalistic, but the Third Eye can document everything. It doesn’t change anything. It was supposed to overcome official narratives, and it has. Yet it has left us drowning in fragments, each of us constructing a reality from the pieces we choose to believe. The cameras have shifted the burden of judgment from institutions to individuals. We all see the fragments. We all have access to evidence. So we all decide what it means. In a tribal system, we decide based on our team.

“People of Illinois, we need your help. Get your cell phones out—record what you see. Put it on social media.” JB Pritzker, Governor of the State of Illinois

If this is where we are now, when we can still verify videos, what happens when AI gets better at generating convincing ones? We are already primed to deny inconvenient truths and question everything as fake, or true, depending on which side you’re on. Inconvenient footage surfaces. Someone claims it’s AI-generated. What if the “powers” decide to label any real footage as AI and fake?

In a tribal system where people already believe their side over their own eyes, you don’t need to prove the video is fake. You only need to plant the question. Doubt is the weapon.

Perception is becoming reality. Propaganda has moved from pamphlets to radio, television, social media, and now AI, each transition faster, cheaper, and more personalized. Governments have always used propaganda. What’s different now is scale and speed. AI generates content faster than humans can fact-check it. It tailors the message to what you’re predisposed to believe, hyper-targeted, inside your own bubble. And it is moving so fast.

Velocity has replaced authority in media. Algorithms reward motion over truth. Doubt is the virus that will eat us from within. AI doesn’t just create fake content; it creates doubt about what is real. That is more powerful. You don’t need to convince people the fake is real. You only need to convince them the real might be fake.

I wrote these as separate essays: cameras as witness, tribalism as blindness, velocity as authority, AI as reality distortion, Half truths. Suddenly, they have converged into an ugly reality.

Today I feel deep sadness, a sense of loss for Alex, for his family, for all of us as citizens, and, most of all, as humans.

January 26, 2026. San Francisco

Addendum

“We need to assert this rhetoric with urgency, make their names shameful, lest the slur become our name — “American.” — John Gruber, Daring Fireball.

What is the cost of lies? It’s not that we will mistake them for the truth. The real danger is that, if we hear enough lies, then we no longer recognize the truth at all. What can we do then? What else is left but to abandon even the hope of truth and content ourselves instead with stories? In these stories, it doesn’t matter who the heroes are. All we want to know is who is to blame. From Chernobyl via my post The Cost of Lies

The past week has also shown us the power of the third eye — the camera on our phone. Hundreds of thousands of videos, photos, and voices have been recorded and shared on social platforms. These same social platforms have been the source of much consternation, raising questions about who we are trusting to decide what and how we get to view information. So far, the response of those in power has largely been a denial of what the eyes can plainly see for themselves. We may not have a complete handle on whether the information being fed to us by our algorithmic masters is fact or half-truth, but it is easy enough to see what’s happening in a short clip of an old man pushed to the ground and bleeding. It is difficult to refute the brutal and repeated beating of a young black woman. It is hard to ignore that.

From my June 2020 piece, The Good, The Bad, The Ugly of Technology

Early Arthropods

Tue, 27 Jan 2026 12:52:38 GMT

Pluralistic: Trump and the unmighty dollar (26 Jan 2026)

Tue, 27 Jan 2026 12:44:29 GMT

Today's links Trump and the unmighty dollar: "Flipping the table over in a poker game rigged in your favor because you resent having to pretend to play the game at all." Hey look at this: Delights to delectate. Object permanence: H2G2 v BBC; Anti-capitalist bank rave; Narrative and magic; It's still censorship; Boss politics antitrust; Game library; Gamers 6-65; Google Cache; "Probiotics" aren't; "Starve"; Uptown Funk mashup; Not a crime if we do it with an app; Gibson on Stuxnet; Gates sells Tank Man pic to China; Paul Allen's yacht destroys a reef; Mass surveillance in Anaheim. 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.

Trump and the unmighty dollar (permalink)

The best summary of Trump's trade "philosophy" comes from Trashfuture's November Kelly, who said that Trump is flipping over the table in a poker game that's rigged in his favor because he resents having to pretend to play the game at all.

After all, the global system of trade was designed and enforced by American officials, especially the US Trade Representative. The US created a world whose most important commodities (food, oil, etc) were priced in dollars, meaning that anyone who wanted to buy these things from any country would first have to get US dollars, which they could only get by shipping their valuable stuff to the US, which sends them dollars in return.

Think about this trade for a minute: to get US dollars, people outside of the US would have to dig up or chop down or manufacture real things that were in finite supply. Meanwhile, to get the US dollars to pay for these real, finite things, the US just had to type zeros into a spreadsheet at the Federal Reserve:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=54fg-A1gCrM

The technical term political scientists use for this arrangement is "fucking sweet."

Two of my favorite political scientists are Henry Farrell and Dan Davies, whose new paper, "The US dollar system as a source of international disorder," was just published by The British Academy as part of its "Global (Dis)Order international policy programme":

https://www.thebritishacademy.ac.uk/documents/6018/Global_Disorder_-_The_US_Dollar_System_as_a_Source_of_International_Disorder.pdf

Farrell and Davies explore the history of the weaponization of "dollar centrality" (their term for the arrangement where the whole world agreed to treat the dollar as a neutral trade instrument), and show how Trump's incontinent belligerence fits into it, and lay out some shrewd possibilities for where this could all end up.

Farrell is one of the leading experts on how these boring, invisible, complex systems of financial settlement, fiber optic connections and other plumbing of the post-war era have been increasingly weaponized by successive US administrations. In 2023, he and Abraham Newman published The Underground Empire, an excellent book on the subject (really, the definitive book on the subject):

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

Davies, meanwhile, is a brilliant scholar (and explainer) of complex systems. Last year, he published The Unaccountability Machine, about the way that the feedback mechanisms in the systems that keep the world running are badly broken, leading to much of our modern dysfunction:

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

Their paper represents a fusion of both of their approaches, and makes for fascinating reading. They start by characterizing the post-war global system as broadly "homeostatic," meaning that it can maintain stability in the face of shocks. Homeostasis requires a feedback mechanism so that it can constantly adjust itself – think of your home thermostat, which needs a thermometer so it can figure out when to run your furnace/air conditioner and when to stop.

Political scientists have identified many of these feedback systems. For example, KN Waltz describes how, when one "great power" starts to dominate the world, the weaker states in its orbit will switch their alliances to rival powers, in order to "balance" power between the big beasts. Smaller, poorer, and/or weaker countries that have looked to the US for trade and military alliances might switch to China if it looks like the US is getting too powerful – not necessarily because China offers a better deal than the US, but because a decisive global victory by the US would give it the power to squeeze these countries, because they'd have nowhere else to go.

Waltz's work is especially relevant this month, with Canada inking a Chinese trade deal and Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney publicly declaring a "rupture" with the US-dominated order:

https://www.programmablemutter.com/p/davos-is-a-rational-ritual

When great powers ignore the feedback of these systems, the result is a collapse in global homeostasis, and radical shifts in the global order. Farrell and Davies argue that this is what's happening with the weaponization of the dollar, which has prompted many countries to take action that should have caused the US to back off, but which the US has ignored as it doubled down on the weaponized dollar:

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

Even when the US has a "rational" case for weaponizing the dollar – for example, by forcing the world to join in a global financial surveillance project aimed at stemming financing for terrorism – it runs the risk of making things worse. If the US's anti-terror financial demands are so onerous that they provoke other countries into setting up multiple, independent, fragmented global financial schemes, then terrorists and their backers will have their pick of ways to move money around.

Even where the US has had limited success with financial sanctions (by isolating North Korea, or by targeting specific individuals rather than countries), it has undermined those successes by peddling and formalizing cryptocurrencies that evade those sanctions. With Trump's crypto project, America gets the worst of both worlds: ineffective financial sanctions that nevertheless weaken the dollar's centrality to the world, and the power that confers upon America.

The world relies on the dollar because it has to rely on something. There are hundreds of currencies in the world, and it's prohibitively expensive for exchange brokers to maintain deep reserves of all of those currencies so that any currency can be swapped for any other. Likewise, it is cumbersome and risky for transactions to rely on a chain of exchanges: if someone in Thailand can only buy oil from Norway by first trading Thai baht for Japanese yen, and then Australian dollars, and then euros, and then Norwegian kroner, they'll be bedeviled by shifting exchange rates, transaction fees, and, possibly, shady brokers who just take the money and run.

After WWII, when the great powers and middle powers were hammering out the global financial system, economists like John Maynard Keynes proposed an international supercurrency that would only be used to facilitate exchanges, but he was outmaneuvered by America's chief negotiator, Harry Dexter White, who insisted that the US dollar will fill that role:

https://profstevekeen.substack.com/p/this-is-the-end-of-the-us-global

So everyone uses the dollar, and because everyone uses the dollar, everyone has to use the dollar: the dollar enjoys "network effects," where the more parties there are who will accept it, the more valuable it becomes and the harder it is to find an alternative.

In my theory of enshittification, network effects are a powerful temptation to make a service worse. If you own a system with strong network effects, you can make it worse for all its users (and better for you) without risking your users' departure, because they are all holding each other hostage:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2021/08/facebooks-secret-war-switching-costs

So it is with dollar weaponization. In order to use the dollar to settle transactions, parties must have access to systems that are directly under US government control (like a dollar account at the Federal Reserve), or are, practically speaking controlled by America (like the SWIFT system for moving money across borders). The fact that you have to use dollars, and you can't use dollars without the US government's say-so, means that the US can impose onerous terms on dollar users and not have to worry that they'll switch to another currency.

Farrell and Davies describe how, during the "high era" of globalization, US Treasury officials fought to insulate the dollar from control by the US security apparatus. Treasury officials understood that the dollar was a source of enormous US power and advantage, and they didn't want to risk all those benefits by beating up dollar users and tempting them to look elsewhere.

But ultimately, Treasury lost. This, too, is in accord with my theory of enshittification: once an institution locks in its users, the factions that want to make things worse will start winning the argument. This is exactly what happened to Google, when, having locked in search users, the company fell under control of its enshittifying faction, who oversaw a program that made search worse, so that you'd have to search repeatedly (and look at multiple screens' worth of ads) to get the answers you sought:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/24/naming-names/#prabhakar-raghavan

Google's anti-enshittification faction argued that making search worse was a betrayal of the company's mission. The pro-enshittification faction pointed out that lock-in meant that Google could make more money by betraying its mission without losing users, and they won the day. It's a lot easier to live your principles if you suffer when you betray them, and it's a lot easier to hold an institution to its principles if betraying those principles results in immediate penalties.

After 9/11, the US security apparatus demanded dollar weaponization: the Office of Foreign Asset Control bigfooted the international finance system, forcing them to spy on, report and block transactions the US disliked. The threat of being excluded from the dollar system was powerful: when one bank refused to stop doing business with North Korea, the US "designated" the bank as noncompliant, provoking a bank run. The rest of the world's banks fell into line.

The fact that the US could punish banks for actions that harmed American interests, even if the bank followed all the procedures required of it, encouraged banks to adopt a "zero risk" policy, where they made up policies that went well beyond America's rules, conducting even more surveillance, blocking even more transactions, and reporting even more activities than was required of them. All of this made participating in the dollar system steadily more costly, as dollar users had to pay for expensive compliance measures or risk the failure of key transactions, or exclusion from the dollar altogether.

Late in Obama's second term, officials sounded the alarm about the dollar becoming increasingly unattractive for international finance, and counseled a relaxation of the post-9/11 ratchet of ever-tighter rules for dollar users. But Trump's officials were totally uninterested in the long-term health of the dollar system, and pursued an even more aggressive policy of dollar weaponization during Trump's first term.

During Trump I, major blocs such as the EU began to formally prepare dollar alternatives and to formulate an "anti-coercion instrument." The anti-coercion instrument is an agreement among EU states to retaliate together in the event that the US (or some other country) used the dollar (or some other currency) to interfere in internal EU matters:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-Coercion_Instrument

(The anti-coercion instrument has never been used, but it was almost invoked last week over Trump's threat to steal Greenland):

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politics/eu-anti-coercion-instrument-greenland-trump-b2903998.html

The Biden years seemed to signal a return to normalcy – the US might continue to weaponize the dollar, but they would at least pretend that they were playing fair. In Kelly's formulation, they'd actually play the rigged poker-game, rather than just taking everyone's chips and flipping over the table, the way Trump liked to do.

But Biden also seemingly couldn't help himself, and his administration pursued a much blunter program of dollar weaponization than pre-Trump presidents. In particular, Biden's sanctions on Putin, his aligned oligarchs, and the Russian state were far more aggressive than anything any president (including Trump I) had ever done with the dollar.

Farrell and Davies write that:

Informal conversations with Biden officials suggest that they had noticed that, despite Trump’s actions, other countries had not moved away from the US dollar. Therefore, the Biden administration felt the US had greater leeway to use sanctions.

In other words, the fact that enshittification produced no downside for the institution meant that its pro-enshittification factions kept winning the argument, and engaged in ever more severe forms of enshittification.

The EU wasn't alone in worrying about US financial coercion. While China maintains much of its own transaction processing infrastructure, it is still very exposed to the dollar system, prompting it to take measures for retaliation and alternatives if the US overstepped.

Meanwhile, the increasing controls and costs of using the dollar drove many parties to cryptocurrencies. Some were criminals whom dollar weaponization was supposed to harass, but many were just innocent bystanders, dolphins caught in the tuna net (think of American relatives of Russians who wanted to send their families money for food, rent, or even a plane ticket out of Russia).

Biden responded to the growing use of crypto to evade dollar rules with regulations to bring crypto under tighter control, for example, by classing crypto as a security and subjecting it to financial regulation. The Biden administration's rules for banks that offered crypto services and trading made handling crypto so expensive that most banks just gave up on it altogether.

Crypto boosters used this response to campaign against Biden and for Trump, accusing Biden of "strangling" crypto and "debanking" its users. Trump won a second presidency, in part thanks to billions in dark money from crypto insiders (many of whom Trump went on to pardon for money-laundering convictions carrying heavy fines and long prison sentences).

At the outset of the second Trump presidency, Trump relied on tariffs, rather than dollar weaponization, to push the world around. As Farrell and Davies write, Trump gave speeches where he recognized the danger of squeezing dollar users too hard:

The problem with … sanctions … [is that] ultimately it kills your dollar and it kills everything the dollar represents. … So I use sanctions very powerfully against countries that deserve it, and then I take them off. Because, look, you’re losing Iran. You’re losing Russia. China is out there trying to get their currency to be the dominant currency as you know better than anybody. … So I want to use sanctions as little as possible.

Trump thinks that using sanctions is fine, provided that then he "take[s] them off." This has resulted in the trademark Trump chaos of announced and rescinded and reimposed sanctions – against Chinese refineries, a Yemeni bank, the International Criminal Court, and the nation of Colombia.

It's possible that this is less onerous than permanent (or at least, long-term) sanctions, but not by much. If no one can be sure that they'll be able to use the dollar tomorrow – even if they might be able to use it again the day after – there's far more pressure to find dollar alternatives.

Meanwhile, Farrell and Davies observe that:

[Trump is] more willing to impose sanctions on allies, since they are less able to defect from the dollar than neutrals and rivals, and less likely to act against crypto even though it facilitates sanctions evasion.

In other words, Trump's reserving his most destructive punishments for his friends, because his enemies are more likely to flee to China if he uses his most devastating attacks on them.

This is a very interesting observation, especially in light of Canada's announcement that it is leaving the American sphere of influence to become a neutral party with many alliances, including with China. If Farrell and Davies are right, this might mean that Canada will be less likely to face sanctions in the future than it risked when it was formally allied with the USA.

Meanwhile, Trump's indiscriminate use of tariffs is steadily worsening the American domestic situation, driving up prices:

https://fortune.com/2026/01/21/amazon-price-hikes-tariffs-2026-andy-jassy-davos/

Farrell and Davies predict that this will drive Trump to switch from using tariffs to using sanctions (after all, Trump's executive function has always been terrible, and it's only declined as his white matter disease has progressed). The EU is getting ready for this by finalizing the "Digital Euro." If Trump responds to this with more sanctions, it will only hasten the world's switch away from the dollar.

The authors call this a "positive feedback loop" (despite the word "positive," that's not a good thing – a positive feedback loop causes a system to keep on speeding up until it is shaken to pieces). The EU has good reasons to escape the dollar. The US has good reasons to fight the EU's escape. Everything the US does to punish the EU for trying to escape the dollar will make the EU want to escape the dollar even more.

The post-American era is being born around us, but when it comes to US "platforms" like the dollar (or even the transoceanic fiber links that all make landfall and interchange in the US), the expense and lock-in have left the world without any obvious and ready alternatives:

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

But there's one post-American platform that's right there for the taking: a global collaboration to develop open, auditable, trustworthy alternatives to US tech, from administrative tools like Office365 to the firmware in tractors, cars, and medical equipment:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/01/01/39c3/#the-new-coalition

It's a project that the EU is actively pursuing:

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/big-bazooka-europe-could-hit-100000361.html

But I don't think they've yet grasped how crucial the project of getting off US tech is – not just because it's urgent, but because it's also tractable. While replacing the dollar is hamstrung by network effects, building a global software commons benefits from network effects. It starts strong, and gets better every time someone else joins it.

What's more: I suspect that a world that is already bound together with a common tech stack would have a much easier time coordinating resistance to dollar weaponization.

Hey look at this (permalink)

Kyle Crutcher pottery http://www.brandbeorn.com/Sci-Fi.html

Avi Lewis endorsed by authors Gabor Maté, Cory Doctorow, Yann Martel, Astra Taylor, Carmen Aguirre, and Ann Douglas https://bsky.app/profile/avilewis.ca/post/3mcxh2jmd622x

AI hasn't delivered the profits it was hyped for, says Deloitte https://www.theregister.com/2026/01/21/deloitte_enterprises_adopting_ai_revenue_lift/

Zack Polanski to hand in NHS contract termination notice to Palantir https://www.thecanary.co/uk/news/2026/01/22/zack-polanski-to-hand-in-nhs-contract-termination-notice-to-palantir/

Minneapolis church has delivered more than 12,000 boxes of groceries to families in hiding https://www.mprnews.org/episode/2026/01/15/minneapolis-church-has-delivered-more-than-12000-boxes-of-groceries-to-families-in-hiding

Object permanence (permalink)

#20yrsago Universal DRM dystopia https://tarmle.livejournal.com/80182.html

#20yrsago Library’s one-year anniversary of lending video-games https://www.gamingtarget.com/article.php?artid=4941

#20yrsago UK music industry execs can’t talk straight about DRM https://web.archive.org/web/20060203090643/http://rock.thepodcastnetwork.com/2006/01/25/digital-music-the-industry-answers/

#20yrsago BBC report on UK gamers from 6-65 https://web.archive.org/web/20060207060943/http://crystaltips.typepad.com/wonderland/files/bbc_uk_games_research_2005.pdf

#20yrsago Norwegian ombudsman to review iTunes terms of service https://web.archive.org/web/20070208163427/http://forbrukerportalen.no/Artikler/2006/1138119849.71

#20yrsago Google Cache is legal https://web.archive.org/web/20060130212935/https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/archives/004344.php

#20yrsago NSA’s licensable patent portfolio https://web.archive.org/web/20060116103440/https://www.nsa.gov/techtrans/techt00002.cfm

#20yrsago Senators figure out the Broadcast Flag, curse it as an abomination! https://web.archive.org/web/20060130212403/https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/archives/004343.php

#20yrsago HOWTO turn a disposable camera into an RFID-killer https://events.ccc.de/congress/2005/wiki/RFID-Zapper(EN)

#20yrsago World of Warcraft: Don’t tell anyone you’re queer https://web.archive.org/web/20060131191638/http://www.innewsweekly.com/innews/?class_code=Ga&article_code=1172

#20yrsago Danny O’Brien’s Open Source con presentation on Evil https://www.spesh.com/danny/talks/evil/

#20yrsago Can DRM be future-proof? https://blog.citp.princeton.edu/2006/01/28/cd-drm-compatibility-and-software-updates/

#15yrsago Francis Ford Coppola, copyfighter https://web.archive.org/web/20110125035605/http://the99percent.com/articles/6973/Francis-Ford-Coppola-On-Risk-Money-Craft-Collaboration

#15yrsago HOWTO make health-care cheaper by spending more on patients who need it https://web.archive.org/web/20140727223819/https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2011/01/24/the-hot-spotters?currentPage=all

#15yrsago William Gibson on Stuxnet https://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/27/opinion/27Gibson.html?_r=2&adxnnl=1&adxnnlx=1296233597-MyRiudJI0Nso7Tm/YIw4yw

#15yrsago PirateBox: anonymous, stand-alone wireless filesharing node https://web.archive.org/web/20110129205033/http://wiki.daviddarts.com/PirateBox

#15yrsago Where antibiotic resistant superbugs come from: biology explained at a “3d grade reading level” https://www.slideshare.net/slideshow/development-of-resistant-staphylococcus-aureus-over-time-v8-web/6712973

#15yrsago Provocative metaphor for the Irish bailout https://memex.naughtons.org/how-a-bail-out-works/12877/

#15yrsago Douglas Adams’ online encylopedia tries to buy itself back from the BBC https://web.archive.org/web/20110127104628/https://www.bbc.co.uk/dna/h2g2/brunel/A80173361

#15yrsago Ebert: 3D movies suck https://web.archive.org/web/20110131232913/http://blogs.suntimes.com/ebert/2011/01/post_4.html

#15yrsago Anti-capitalist rumba rave in a Spanish bank https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wv5dh8v7mDs

#15yrsago Meet Obama’s new Solicitor General: the copyright industry’s Donald Verrilli Jr https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2011/01/obama-nominates-former-riaa-lawyer-for-solicitor-general-spot/

#10yrsago The story of magic: how narrative destroys conjurers’ effects, or elevates them to transcendence https://www.thejerx.com/blog/2016/1/23/dqwn4rocxdovl0dqcqymdhekzmuzq4

#10yrsago Majority of UK booze-industry revenues come from problem drinkers https://www.theguardian.com/society/2016/jan/22/problem-drinkers-alcohol-industry-most-sales-figures-reveal

#10yrsago Oklahoma’s repeat-offender Republican Creationist lawmakers take another run at science education https://arstechnica.com/science/2016/01/this-years-first-batch-of-anti-science-education-bills-surface-in-oklahoma/

#10yrsago You can’t “boost” your immune system with “health food,” nor would you want to https://www.theguardian.com/science/2016/jan/24/health-foods-immune-system-colds-vitamins

#10yrsago Stop taking “probiotics” https://www.statnews.com/2016/01/21/probiotics-shaky-science/

#10yrsago Swiss pro-privacy email provider forces a referendum on mass surveillance https://web.archive.org/web/20160125153009/https://theintercept.com/2016/01/25/how-a-small-company-in-switzerland-is-fighting-a-surveillance-law-and-winning/

#10yrsago Howto social-engineer someone’s address and other sensitive info from Amazon https://medium.com/@espringe/amazon-s-customer-service-backdoor-be375b3428c4#.jkx7fwbqv

#10yrsago Uptown Funk as a mashup of 66 classic movie dance routines https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M1F0lBnsnkE

#10yrsago Starve: the best, meanest new graphic novel debut since Transmetropolitan https://memex.craphound.com/2016/01/25/starve-the-best-meanest-new-graphic-novel-debut-since-transmetropolitan/

#10yrsago Fury Road is still comprehensible at 12x speed https://vashivisuals.com/the-fastest_cut/

#10yrsago Police sergeant: 16 year old girl probably saw penises before I showed her mine, NBD https://www.wcvb.com/article/bpd-sergeant-may-plead-guilty-job-on-the-line/8230846

#10yrsago Chinese snatch-squads roam the globe, kidnapping dissidents and critics https://web.archive.org/web/20160416214222/https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/asia_pacific/pursuing-critics-china-reaches-across-borders-and-nobody-is-stopping-it/2016/01/26/cd4959dc-6793-473f-8b74-6cbac3f46422_story.html?postshare=7221453857631693&tid=ss_tw

#10yrsago Shootout in Oregon: one terrorist killed, eight arrested https://www.cnn.com/2016/01/26/us/oregon-wildlife-refuge-siege-arrests/index.html

#10yrsago Health insurer loses 1m customers’ health records https://web.archive.org/web/20170224042328/http://phx.corporate-ir.net/phoenix.zhtml?c=130443&p=irol-newsArticle_Print&ID=2132066

#10yrsago All your booze comes from a handful of titanic global corporations https://www.eater.com/drinks/2016/1/26/10830410/liquor-brands-hierarchy-diageo-beam-suntory-pernod-ricard

#10yrsago Man gasps dying words into officer’s bodycam: “They’re killing me right now… I can’t breathe.” https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2016/01/body-cam-captures-mans-final-words-begging-the-cops-to-get-off-of-him/

#10yrsago Help wanted: Burning Man’s Chief Fed https://web.archive.org/web/20160205123132/https://www.usajobs.gov/GetJob/ViewDetails/426715200

#10yrsago Guess who donated all the money to Black Americans for a Better Future Super PAC? Rich white men. https://web.archive.org/web/20160129001243/https://theintercept.com/2016/01/28/black-americans-for-a-better-future-super-pac-100-funded-by-rich-white-guys/

#10yrsago Bill Gates sold rights to the Tiananmen 1989 pictures to a Chinese company https://qz.com/601830/bill-gates-has-sold-a-set-of-iconic-images-to-a-beijing-firm-including-of-tiananmen-in-1989

#10yrsago Michael Moore: Flint needs a revolution, not bottled water https://web.archive.org/web/20160128161328/https://michaelmoore.com/DontSendBottledWater

#10yrsago The surveillance business model goes to war against the FTC https://thehill.com/blogs/congress-blog/technology/267070-businesses-are-invading-your-privacy/

#10yrsago Florida mayors write to GOP presidential hopefuls demanding action on climate change https://arstechnica.com/science/2016/01/florida-mayors-to-rubio-were-going-under-take-climate-change-seriously/

#10yrsago The Onion’s new owner is Hillary Clinton’s most lavish financial backer https://web.archive.org/web/20160126213016/https://theintercept.com/2016/01/26/ha-ha-hillary-clintons-top-financial-supporter-now-controls-the-onion/

#10yrsago Microsoft billionaire Paul Allen wipes out coral reef with his superyacht https://caymannewsservice.com/2016/01/billionaire-boater-destroys-wb-reef/

#10yrsago Head of NSA’s hacker squad explains how to armor networks against the likes of him https://www.wired.com/2016/01/nsa-hacker-chief-explains-how-to-keep-him-out-of-your-system/

#10yrsago Anaheim: the happiest surveillance state on earth https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2016/01/city-cops-in-disneylands-backyard-have-had-stingray-on-steriods-for-years/

#5yrsago Knowledge is why you build your own apps https://pluralistic.net/2021/01/28/payment-for-order-flow/#knowledge-is-power

#5yrsago Understanding /r/wallstreetbets https://pluralistic.net/2021/01/28/payment-for-order-flow/#wallstreetbets

#5yrsago How apps steal your location https://pluralistic.net/2021/01/28/payment-for-order-flow/#trackers-tracked

#5yrsago Mexican indigenous telco wins spectrum fight https://pluralistic.net/2021/01/28/payment-for-order-flow/#tic-victory

#5yrsago Goldman CEO gets $17.5m reward for $4.5b fraud https://pluralistic.net/2021/01/27/viral-colonialism/#failing-up

#5yrsago Facebook champions (its own) privacy https://pluralistic.net/2021/01/27/viral-colonialism/#ico-schtum

#5yrsago Casino mogul steals First Nation's vaccine https://pluralistic.net/2021/01/27/viral-colonialism/#seriously-fuck-that-guy

#5yrsago Plute buys mayor's house and serves eviction papers https://pluralistic.net/2021/01/25/money-is-power/#money-is-power

#5yrsago Trump's swamp gators find corporate refuge https://pluralistic.net/2021/01/24/1a/#gator-park

#5yrsago Stop saying "it's not censorship if it's not the government" https://pluralistic.net/2021/01/24/1a/#talk-hard

#1yrago The first days of Boss Politics Antitrust https://pluralistic.net/2025/01/24/enforcement-priorities/#enemies-lists

#1yrago It's not a crime if we do it with an app pluralistic.net/2025/01/25/potatotrac/#carbo-loading

#1yrago It's pretty easy to cut $2 trillion from the federal budget, actually https://pluralistic.net/2025/01/27/beltway-bandits/#henhouse-foxes

Upcoming appearances (permalink)

Ottawa: Enshittification at Perfect Books, Jan 28
https://www.instagram.com/p/DS2nGiHiNUh/

Toronto: Enshittification and the Age of Extraction with Tim Wu, Jan 30
https://nowtoronto.com/event/cory-doctorow-and-tim-wu-enshittification-and-extraction/

Salt Lake City: Enshittification at the Utah Museum of Fine Arts (Tanner Humanities Center), Feb 18
https://tanner.utah.edu/center-events/cory-doctorow/

Victoria: 28th Annual Victoria International Privacy & Security Summit, Mar 3-5
https://www.rebootcommunications.com/event/vipss2026/

Berkeley: Bioneers keynote, Mar 27
https://conference.bioneers.org/

Berlin: Re:publica, May 18-20
https://re-publica.com/de/news/rp26-sprecher-cory-doctorow

Berlin: Enshittification at Otherland Books, May 19
https://www.otherland-berlin.de/de/event-details/cory-doctorow.html

Hay-on-Wye: HowTheLightGetsIn, May 22-25
https://howthelightgetsin.org/festivals/hay/big-ideas-2

Recent appearances (permalink) How the Internet Got Worse (Masters in Business)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=auXlkuVhxMo

Enshittification (Jon Favreau/Offline):
https://crooked.com/podcast/the-enshittification-of-the-internet-with-cory-doctorow/

Why Big Tech is a Trap for Independent Creators (Stripper News)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nmYDyz8AMZ0

Enshittification (Creative Nonfiction podcast)
https://brendanomeara.com/episode-507-enshittification-author-cory-doctorow-believes-in-a-new-good-internet/

Enshittification with Plutopia
https://plutopia.io/cory-doctorow-enshittification/

Latest books (permalink) "Canny Valley": A limited edition collection of the collages I create for Pluralistic, self-published, September 2025

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

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

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

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

"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.

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 Post-American Internet," a sequel to "Enshittification," about the better world the rest of us get to have now that Trump has torched America (1019 words today, 14468 total)

"The Reverse Centaur's Guide to AI," a short book for Farrar, Straus and Giroux about being an effective AI critic. LEGAL REVIEW AND COPYEDIT COMPLETE.

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

A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING

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

ISSN: 3066-764X

Refusing to Use Twitter

Tue, 27 Jan 2026 12:19:23 GMT

Comments

Mental Models (2018)

Sat, 24 Jan 2026 00:43:39 GMT

Comments

A decentralized peer-to-peer messaging application that operates over Bluetooth

Mon, 19 Jan 2026 22:08:38 GMT

Comments

Big Business Should End Its Faustian Bargain With Trump

Mon, 19 Jan 2026 22:04:59 GMT

When Donald Trump returned to power, America’s billionaires and the leaders of its biggest corporations rushed to prostrate themselves at his feet. Some of them, especially but not only among the tech bros, did so because they themselves wanted an authoritarian regime that would stamp our wokeness. I still recall the top banker who, after Trump won, told the Financial Times that “I feel liberated. We can say ‘retard’ and ‘pussy’ without the fear of getting cancelled… it’s a new dawn.”

Many business leaders, however, understood how dangerous Trump was — they knew he was the least qualified individual, intellectually, psychologically, and morally, ever to occupy the White House. In the aftermath of January 9th, many Fortune 500 corporations announced to great acclaim that they would stop donating to Republicans. But after a few months of Republican threats of retaliation, those companies quietly turned the spigot back on.

I am sure that they convinced themselves that the Trump of January 6 was an aberration. In their minds, with enough flattery and bribes donations, and with Treasury Secretary Bessent to quietly steer the ship, Trump could be managed the way he was during his first term. Bessent, they figured, was a sensible businessman like them. After all, Bessent had worked closely with George Soros – the bete noire of the Right -- and ultimately ran his own hedge fund. Trump’s anti-immigrant, anti-trade and anti-democracy rhetoric, they reasoned, was just a show in order to get elected.

Bessent certainly understood that he was a critical actor in this supposed charade. For example, when Trump first began threatening to impose enormous tariffs on our trading partners, Bessent avowed that this was only a “bargaining tactic” in order to calm panicked markets. Moreover, believing that the extremism was a charade was made much easier by Corporate America’s expectations of future profits from the conventional right-wing parts of his agenda: tax cuts plus increased freedom to pollute and defraud consumers, along with lax financial regulation and permissive anti-trust. No more pesky Democrats to get in their way.

Even now people continue to treat TACO — Trump Always Chickens Out — as if it were an established fact, although the past few weeks show that it’s just wishful thinking. On tariffs, does this look like TACO to you?

Source: Penn Wharton Budget Model

On immigration and the response to dissent, does this look like TACO?

Source: Minnesota Star Tribune

Oh, and here’s a chart that also doesn’t look very TACO to me:

Source: New York Times

Granted, Trump sometimes appears to back down. We probably won’t be invading Greenland over the next few weeks. But this is only a temporizing tactic while he finds other means to escalate, such as imposing tariffs on countries that came to Greenland’s aid. Overall, Trump 47 is escalating, day by day.

The persistence of the TACO myth is part of the broader picture: Many people, especially in the business world, are still trying to convince themselves that they’ll do OK despite Trump’s craziness. Hey, the stock market is up, isn’t it? (It is, but US stocks, which are up 16 percent over the past year, have lagged stocks in other advanced countries, which rose 33 percent in 2025.)

Well, I have news for American business leaders: You will not do OK.

I’m not just talking about the threat Trump’s madness poses for corporate bottom lines, although that threat is larger than most people realize. For example, as Trump barrels into confrontation with Europe over Greenland, of all things — even I still have trouble believing that this is happening — I’m surprised not to see more people mention that U.S. corporations have invested around $4 trillion in Europe, investments that will definitely be at risk if this confrontation spirals out of control.

I’m also talking about the personal risks businesspeople increasingly face from a regime that demands abject, performative sycophancy.

Yesterday Scott Bessent, the purported grown-up in the room, appeared on TV, delivering a cringe-inducing defense of Trump’s apparent willingness to blow up NATO in order to gain control of Greenland (!):

Peace through strength. Make it part of the US and there will not be a conflict because the US right now, we’re the hottest country in the world, we’re the strongest country in the world. Europeans project weakness. The US projects strength.

Since the tariff-setting authority Trump is claiming only applies in a national emergency, Bessent was asked what national emergency justifies imposing tariffs in an attempt to seize Greenland. His answer: “The national emergency is avoiding a national emergency.”

Who knows what Trump has on Bessent, but it’s clear that Bessent made a Faustian bargain, selling his soul in return for … something. And the terms of the bargain clearly require that he humiliate himself in public on a regular basis. He no longer acts like a respectable Wall Street insider; now he behaves like a capo helping his mob boss run a protection racket.

The degradation of Scott Bessent serves as an illustration of where anyone who thinks they can manage Trump will end up. Corporate America needs to realize that they too must make Faustian bargains if they want to stay on Trump’s good side – and that the price of those bargains will be very high. Campaign contributions won’t be enough: they must pour money into Trump’s ballroom, and/or his family’s pocket, and/or his crazy adventures in places like Venezuela or Gaza. Refraining from criticism of Trump’s policies won’t be enough. Instead they must become sycophants, enthusiastically supporting Trump’s policies — especially if those policies are deeply stupid. If they don’t go along the punishment will be personal as well as financial.

Thus Trump lashed out at Darren Woods, CEO of ExxonMobil, for blurting out the obvious truth that Venezuelan oil is “uninvestable.” Then Jamie Dimon, CEO of JPMorgan, mildly suggested that undermining the Federal Reserve’s independence might be a bad idea. Dimon didn’t even mention the truly disturbing part of the story, the announcement that the Department of Justice had begun an obviously groundless criminal investigation of Jerome Powell, the Fed chair, whose only crime was not taking Trump’s orders on interest rate policy. Sure enough, Trump not only lashed out at Dimon but threatened to sue JPMorgan for allegedly “debanking” him after Jan. 6. This comes from a president who has pardoned criminals convicted (sometimes multiple times) for defrauding consumers of billions of dollars.

The lesson for businesspeople is that Faustian bargains never end well. Take a lesson from watching Scott Bessent – appease Trump and he will demand that you debase yourself even further. It’s been astonishing how quickly corporate greed has been replaced by corporate fear: Businesses who hoped to profit from Trump now toe the line because they’re afraid of being punished.

But despite what corporate CEOs tell themselves, they do have a choice. The reality is that Trump is growing weaker by the day. Americans aren’t falling into line behind his attempted authoritarian takeover. On the contrary, their resistance is stiffening. The Trumpists can’t even cow Minneapolis into submission, let alone the rest of the country. As he flails wildly in an attempt to recapture his lost momentum, his policies keep getting crazier.

So businesspeople have a choice: Continue to abase themselves, destroying their dignity and their reputations, in an attempt to curry favor with a wannabe dictator who’s falling short, or show some spine. And that stiffening of the spine must be a collective endeavour.

To paraphrase Benjamin Franklin, talking about how to deal with another tyrant: If you don’t hang together, you’ll all hang separately

MUSICAL CODA

Drones that recharge directly on transmission lines

Sun, 11 Jan 2026 12:36:42 GMT

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To be sure

Wed, 07 Jan 2026 22:33:25 GMT

Even though yeast is far more reliable than it used to be, many bakers still proof it before investing the time and materials to bake a loaf of bread. The extra few minutes waiting for it to bloom is cheap insurance to avoid a failed loaf a day later.

If you need to be sure there are no pits in your chopped dates, it makes sense to avoid mechanically de-pitted fruit. Every single date has exactly one pit, and if you find it yourself, you’ll know you found it.

We can’t do every task ourselves, and we can’t test every raw material, particularly if it’s a destructive test like whether or not this glass is tempered.

The math is simple, but easy to avoid: What are the chances that the component in question might fail, multiplied by the cost to the project if it does. Compare this to the cost of the test and you’ll know what to do.

In my experience, we focus on the easy tests, without thinking hard about the real costs. Three shortcuts to avoid: Tradition, proximity to failure and the vividness of the rare cataclysm.

Traditional tests might distract us from the checks we ought to be doing.

Proximity to failure puts our focus on things at the end of the process as opposed to thinking hard about the underlying components and system failure.

And vivid failures are failures that get our attention, but loud and urgent aren’t the same as important and useful.

The Post-American Internet

Tue, 06 Jan 2026 13:48:54 GMT

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All I want for Christmas is the SMH to do its job

Thu, 04 Dec 2025 14:44:07 GMT

Content warning for road violence and credulous reporting.

Yesterday, a person died near Central after being hit by a garbage truck. They were on a speed-limited e-bike at the time, which prompted an awful lot of media outlets to play the hits and blame kids on e-motorbikes for, as a reminder, this approx 13 tonne garbage truck being driven into this person.

The same morning, Chris Minns took to the airwaves to re-announce what appears to be sensible reform on the power of e-bikes that can be sold in NSW, and maybe undertake some light victim blaming live on air.

The good people at the Sydney Morning Herald editorial board mulled it over and this morning unveiled their latest “Herald view“, which unfortunately sucks very badly. After re-running the ubiquitous NSW Police press release ‘begging’ parents to only buy compliant e-bikes for kids at Christmas, they delve into the fact-free zone of the e-bike panic.

Here’s a quote:

“It is unclear how fast the rider and garbage truck were travelling, or who was at fault – the Herald has sympathy for the terrible grief the family of the rider must now be going through.

But this tragedy clearly illustrates the safety risks of this type of bicycle.”

Now, it’s Christmas, and the defining feature of Christmas is listening to some horrific opinions which you’d rather not entertain. But this isn’t your bigoted relative, this is the pedigree newspaper for a city of five million.

This tragedy does not illustrate the safety risks of this type of bicycle. With the facts undetermined, it seems very strange for the Herald to claim it illustrates anything just yet. But what we do know is that motorised vehicles hitting people’s bodies is the cause of the overwhelming majority of road deaths, and is very likely the cause here.

As non-voters, kids are a useful group to deflect blame onto for any politician. Quite why the Herald is willing to join in and divert scrutiny from our elected officials is not clear.

Perhaps it’s the spirit of Christmas.

Apex GPU: Run CUDA Apps on AMD GPUs Without Recompilation

Thu, 04 Dec 2025 05:32:02 GMT

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Do the thinking models think?

Mon, 01 Dec 2025 09:54:20 GMT

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