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 Cory Doctorow
Cory Doctorow is a science fiction author, activist and journalist

His latest book is ATTACK SURFACE, a standalone adult sequel to LITTLE BROTHER. He is also the author HOW TO DESTROY SURVEILLANCE CAPITALISM, nonfiction about conspiracies and monopolies; and of RADICALIZED and WALKAWAY, science fiction for adults, a YA graphic novel called IN REAL LIFE; and young adult novels like HOMELAND, PIRATE CINEMA and LITTLE BROTHER. His first picture book was POESY THE MONSTER SLAYER (Aug 2020). He maintains a daily blog at Pluralistic.net. He works for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, is a MIT Media Lab Research Affiliate, is a Visiting Professor of Computer Science at Open University, a Visiting Professor of Practice at the University of North Carolina’s School of Library and Information Science and co-founded the UK Open Rights Group. Born in Toronto, Canada, he now lives in Los Angeles.
Liens : - « Détruire le capitalisme de surveillance » 68 p. pdf, trad. Framalang, gratuit. - How to destroy surveillance capitalism Online version.

Publié le 16.01.2026 à 18:21

Pluralistic: Catch this! (16 Jan 2026)


Today's links


A juggler, who is juggling email icons. Instant message icons are flying at him from all directions. In the background is a frantic scene from Bosch's 'Garden of Earthly Delights.'

Catch this! (permalink)

Call it "lifehacking," or just call it, "paying attention to how you stay organized" – I don't care what you call it, I am an ardent practitioner of it.

I like improving my processes because I like what I do, and the more efficient I am at all of it (with apologies to Jenny Odell), the more of that stuff I can get done:

https://memex.craphound.com/2019/04/09/how-to-do-nothing-jenny-odells-case-for-resisting-the-attention-economy/

I want to do a lot of stuff. I am one of those people who is ten miles wide and one inch deep (it probably has something to do with imbibing Heinlein's maxim that "specialization is for insects" at an impressionable age). There's a million waterways I want to dip my toe (or my oar) into, and the better organized I am, the more of that stuff I'll get to do before I kick off. I'm 54, and while there's a lot of road ahead of me, I can see the end, off there in the distance. It's coming, and I'm not done – I'm barely getting started.

I've been around lifehacking since the very moment it was born. I was there. I published the notes on Danny O'Brien's seminal 2004 talk at the O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference, "Life Hacks: Tech Secrets of Overprolific Alpha Geeks":

https://craphound.com/lifehacksetcon04.txt

In the years since, I've cultivated a small – but mighty – repertoire of organizational habits and tools that let me get a hell of a lot done. Weirdly, many of these tools are things that other people hate, and I can see why – they use them in very different ways from me. That's true of browser tabs (I loooove browser tabs):

https://pluralistic.net/2024/01/25/today-in-tabs/#unfucked-rota

And to-do lists, which will totally transform your life, once you realize that the most important to-do list is the one you maintain for everyone else who owes you a response, a package, or money:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/10/26/one-weird-trick/#todo

Other essential tools languish in neglect, artifacts of the old, good web – the elegant weapons that dominated a more civilized age. First among these? RSS readers:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/10/16/keep-it-really-simple-stupid/#read-receipts-are-you-kidding-me-seriously-fuck-that-noise

I will freely stipulate that people have a good reason to hate all this stuff. "Productivity porn" is often proffered as a mix of humblebrag (a way to make other people jealous of your almighty "productivity") and denial (fiddling with your systems is a ready substitute for actually doing things). Many (most?) of the foremost self-appointed pitchmen for "lifehacking" are cringey charlatans peddling "courses" and other nonsense.

But if you keep digging, there's a solid foundation beneath all the rot. At its very best, this stuff is a way to figure out what you really want to do, and to organize your life so that the stuff you want to do is the stuff you're doing.

A lot of people get into this kind of thing thinking it'll let them do everything. No one can do everything. The best you can hope for is to make conscious decisions about which stuff you'll never get to, while leaving at least a little room for serendipity.

Like I said, I want to do a lot of stuff. My organizing tactics are as much about deciding what I won't do as they are about deciding what I will do:

https://locusmag.com/feature/cory-doctorow-how-to-do-everything-lifehacking-considered-harmful/

Which brings me to another tool that everyone hates and I love: email. I live and die by email.

First of all, I filter all my incoming email: mail from people who are in my address book stays in my inbox; mail from people I've never heard from before goes into a mailbox called "People I don't know." When I reply to a message, Thunderbird adds the recipient to my address book, so the next time I hear from them, they'll stay in my main mailbox.

I also filter out anything containing the word "unsubscribe," sending it into a folder called "Unlikely" (but not if the message contains my name – which is how I can stay subscribed to mailing lists I don't have time to read and make sure to reply when someone mentions me).

Second of all, I have a zillion Quicktext macros that I use to reply to frequently asked questions. I have one that spits out my mailing address; another that spits out my bio; and others for politely saying no to things I don't have time for, for information about how to pay one of my invoices, etc, etc.

Third: I have a small folder of emails that I can't reply to right away (usually because I need some information from a third party), which I review every morning and answer anything that I can clear.

Finally, I save it all. I have so much saved email, which means that if you ask me about something from 20 years ago, there's a good chance I can find it – provided we organized it over email.

All of which explains why I refuse – to the extent that I can – to do anything important over instant messaging, whether that's Signal or any of the other messaging tools that come with social media, workplace software, etc.

I understand why people like instant messaging: it does not overwhelm you with the burdens of the past. It is largely ahistorical, with archives that are hard to access and search. Its norms and register are less formal than email.

And, of course, instant messaging is far superior to email in some contexts. If you're on vacation with friends, having a big group-chat where you can say, "I'm making dinner – is everyone OK with cheese?" is indispensable. Same goes for asking a friend for directions, announcing that you've arrived at someone's office, or confirming whether it's OK to substitute 2% for whole milk on a grocery run.

But if you're like me – if you've figured out how to do as many of the things that matter to you as you can possibly squeeze in, then getting an IM mid-flow is like someone walking up to a juggler who's working on a live chainsaw, a bowling ball, and a machete and tossing him a watermelon while shouting, "Hey, catch this!"

The problem is that if you are asking about something important, something that can't be instantaneously managed by the recipient, then they will have to drop everything they're doing and, at the very least, make a note to themselves to go back to your message later and deal with it. Instant messaging doesn't have an inbox with everything you've been sent. Of course, that's why people love it. But the fact that you can't see all the things other people are expecting you to answer doesn't mean that they aren't expecting it. It also doesn't mean that everything will be fine if you just ignore all those messages.

Instant messaging is a great tool for managing something that everyone is doing at the same time. It's also a nice way to keep an ambient social flow of updates from people in a rocking groupchat. But IM is fundamentally unserious. It is antithetical to the project of making a conscious decision about what you won't do, so that you do as many of the things that matter to you before you get to the end of the road.

A massive email inbox is intimidating, but switching to IMs doesn't make all the demands in the email go away. It just puts them out of sight until they either expire or explode. Far better to decide what balls you're going to drop than to have them knocked out of your hand by a fast-moving watermelon.

(Image: Mark James, CC BY 2.5, modified)

Hey look at this (permalink)


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

Object permanence (permalink)

#25yrsago Teresa Nielsen Hayden’s formal excommunication from the Latter Day Saints https://web.archive.org/web/20010203204300/http://www.panix.com/~pnh/GodandI.html

#20yrsago King Foundation uses copyright to suppress “I Have a Dream” speech https://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/01/14/AR2006011400980.html

#20yrsago Firefly fans trying to raise enough dough to produce a new season https://web.archive.org/web/20060118033219/https://www.browncoatsriseagain.com/

#20yrsago New discussion draft of GNU General Public License is released https://gplv3.fsf.org/

#10yrsago “Late stage capitalism” is the new “Christ, what an asshole” https://x.com/mjg59/status/688238257935548416

#10yrsago Worried about Chinese spies, the FBI freaked out about Epcot Center https://www.muckrock.com/news/archives/2016/jan/14/fbi-epcot/

#10yrsago India’s Internet activists have a SOPA moment: no “poor Internet for poor people” https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/jan/15/india-net-neutrality-activists-facebook-free-basics

#5yrsago Pelosi kicks Katie Porter off the Finance Committee https://pluralistic.net/2021/01/16/speaker-willie-sutton/#swampgator

Upcoming appearances (permalink)

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


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

Recent appearances (permalink)


A grid of my books with Will Stahle covers..

Latest books (permalink)


A cardboard book box with the Macmillan logo.

Upcoming books (permalink)

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

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

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

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


Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources:

Currently writing: "The Post-American Internet," a sequel to "Enshittification," about the better world the rest of us get to have now that Trump has torched America (1141 words today, 8278 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

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

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

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

How to get Pluralistic:

Blog (no ads, tracking, or data-collection):

Pluralistic.net

Newsletter (no ads, tracking, or data-collection):

https://pluralistic.net/plura-list

Mastodon (no ads, tracking, or data-collection):

https://mamot.fr/@pluralistic

Medium (no ads, paywalled):

https://doctorow.medium.com/

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

https://twitter.com/doctorow

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

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

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

READ CAREFULLY: By reading this, you agree, on behalf of your employer, to release me from all obligations and waivers arising from any and all NON-NEGOTIATED agreements, licenses, terms-of-service, shrinkwrap, clickwrap, browsewrap, confidentiality, non-disclosure, non-compete and acceptable use policies ("BOGUS AGREEMENTS") that I have entered into with your employer, its partners, licensors, agents and assigns, in perpetuity, without prejudice to my ongoing rights and privileges. You further represent that you have the authority to release me from any BOGUS AGREEMENTS on behalf of your employer.

ISSN: 3066-764X

Publié le 15.01.2026 à 21:31

Pluralistic: How the Light Gets In (15 Jan 2026)


Today's links


A wall with a crack running through it. Light is flooding through the crack. Circuit board traces are bleeding through the periphery of the wall.

How the Light Gets In (permalink)

Of all the tools that I use to maintain my equilibrium in these dark days, none is so important as remembering the distinction between happiness, optimism and hope.

Happiness is self-explanatory – and fleeting. Even in the worst of times, there are moments of happiness – a delicious meal with friends, a beautiful sunrise, a stolen moment with your love. These are the things we chase, and rightly so. But happiness is always a goal, rarely a steady state.

Optimism, on the other hand, is a toxin to be avoided. Optimism is a subgenre of fatalism, the belief that things will get better no matter what we do. It's just the obverse of pessimism. Both are ways of denying human agency. To be an optimist is to be a passenger of history, along for the ride, with no hope of changing its course.

But hope? That's the stuff. Hope is the belief that if we change the world for the better, even by just a little, that we will ascend a gradient towards a better future, and as we rise up that curve, new terrain will be revealed to us that we couldn't see from our lower vantage-point. It's not necessary – or even possible – to see a course from here to the world you want to live in. You can get there in stepwise fashion, one beneficial change at a time:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/10/03/hope-not-optimism/

These days, I am often unhappy, but I am filled with hope.

A couple of weeks ago, I gave a speech, "The Post-American Internet," at the 39th Chaos Communications Congress in Hamburg:

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

In that talk, I laid out the case for hope. So many of the worst aspects of modern life can be traced to our enshittified technology, from mass surveillance and totalitarian control to wage suppression and conspiratorial cults. This enshittified technology, in turn, is downstream of policy decisions made by politicians who were bullied into their positions by the US trade rep, who used the threat of tariffs to push for laws that protected the right of tech giants to plunder the world's money and data, by criminalizing competitors who disenshittified their products, leaving technology users defenseless.

Trump's tariffs have effectively killed that threat. If you can't tell from day to day – let alone year to year – whether the US will accept your exports, you can't rely on exporting to the USA. What's more, generations of pro-oligarch policies have stripped America's bottom 90% of discretionary income, stagnating their wages and leaving them mired in health, education, and housing debt (even as the system finds ever more sadistic and depraved ways for arm-breakers to collect on that debt):

https://pluralistic.net/2025/12/16/k-shaped-recovery/#disenshittification-nations

This is terrible for Americans, but when life gives you SARS, you make sarsaparilla. With the decline of the US market for global exporters, there's finally political space to stop worrying about tariffs and reconsider anti-circumvention laws, to create "disenshittification nations" that stage raids on the most valuable lines of business of the most profitable companies in world history – Big Tech:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/01/13/not-sorry/#mere-billions

People who dream of turning American tech trillions into their own billions are powerful allies in the fight against enshittification, but they're only one group that we can recruit to our side. There's another powerful bloc waiting in the wings: national security hawks.

These people are rightly terrified that Trump will order his tech companies to switch off their governments, businesses and households, all of whom are dependent on US cloud-based administrative software for email, document creation and archiving, databases, mobile devices. Trump's tech companies could also brick any nation's mobile phones, medical devices, cars, and tractors.

It's the same risk that China hawks warned of when it looked as though Huawei would provide all of the world's 5G infrastructure: allow companies that are absolutely beholden to an autocrat who is not restrained by the rule of law to permeate your society, and your society becomes a prisoner to the autocrat's whims and goodwill.

A coalition of digital rights activists; investors and entrepreneurs; and national security hawks makes for a powerful bloc indeed. Each partner in the coalition can mobilize different constituencies and can influence different parts of the state. These are very different groups, and that's why this coalition is so exciting: this is a three-pronged assault on the hegemony of Big Tech.

That's not to say that this will automatically happen. Nothing happens automatically. Fuck pessimism, and fuck optimism, too. Things happen because people do stuff:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/10/17/against-the-great-forces-of-history/

That's where hope comes in. The door to a better technological future has been slammed shut and triple-locked for 25 years. Today, it is open a crack. A crack isn't much, but as Leonard Cohen taught us, "that's how the light gets in":

https://genius.com/Leonard-cohen-anthem-lyrics

Understand: this isn't a bet on politicians discovering heretofore unsuspected wellsprings of courage or principle. This is a bet on politicians confronting unstoppable political will that corners them into doing the right thing.

I understand why Europeans, Canadians and Britons might feel cynical about their political classes (to say nothing of Americans, of course). It has been decades since a political party delivered broad, structural change that improved the lives of everyday people. Instead, we've had generations of neoliberal austerity sadists, autocrats and corrupt dolts who've helped billionaires stripmine our civilization and set the world on fire.

But politics have changed before, and they can change again (note that I didn't say they will change – just that they can, because we can change them). Society may feel deadlocked, but crises precipitate change. As I said in my Hamburg speech, the EU went from 15 years behind in their solar transition to ten years ahead, in just a few years, thanks to the energy crisis that slammed into the continent after Putin invaded Ukraine.

Crises precipitate change. The fact that the EU pivoted so quickly away from fossil fuels to solar is nothing short of a miracle. Anyone who feels like their politicians would never buck Big Tech needs to explain how it came to pass that these politicians just told Big Oil to fuck off. The fossil fuel industry is losing. This is goddamned wild – indeed, their loss might just be locked in at this point, because fossil fuel and its applications (like internal combustion) are now more expensive and more impractical than the cleantech alternatives:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/10/02/there-goes-the-sun/#carbon-shifting

Sure, it sucks that Trump has killed incentives to drive an EV and that the EU is dropping its goal for phasing out internal combustion engines, but given that EVs are faster, cheaper and better than conventional automobiles, the writing is on the wall for the IC fleet.

That's the wild thing about better technology: people want it, and they get pissed off when they're told they can't have it. When the Texas legislature tried to pass a law requiring that power companies add a watt of fossil-fuel generation capacity for every watt of solar they brought online, Trump-voting farmers and ranchers from the deepest red parts of Texas (Texas!!) flooded town halls and hearings, demanding an end to "DEI for natural gas":

https://billmckibben.substack.com/p/for-reality

They won.

Politics aren't just terrible today, they're in chaos. Crises precipitate change.

After World War II, one of Britain's two parties, the Liberals (AKA "Whigs") imploded. With them out of the way, the Labour Party rose to power, with a transformative agenda backed by a mass movement, which created the British welfare state.

Today, the British Conservative Party (AKA "Tories") are also imploding, and look set to be taken over by a fascist MAGA-alike party, Reform. As of a couple months ago, that seemed like very bad news, since Labour is also set to implode, thanks to Prime Minister Keir Starmer's austerity, authoritarianism, corruption and cowardice. For quite a while, it looked like when Starmer's Labour is totally wiped out in the next election, they would give way to Reform, plunging Britain into Hungarian- (or American)-style autocracy.

But all that has changed. Today, the UK Greens have a new leader, Zack Polanski, who has dragged the Greens into an agenda that promises transformations as bold as the ones that remade the country under Clement Attlee's Labour government. Polanski is a fantastic campaigner, and he is committed to the same kind of grassroots co-governance with a mass movement that characterized Zohran Mamdani's historic NYC mayoral campaign.

In other words, it seems like both of Britain's sclerotic mainstream parties will be wiped out in the next election, and the real fight in the UK is between two transformative upstart parties, one of which plans to spend billionaires' dark money to mobilize fascists yearning for ethnic cleansing; and the other wants a fair, prosperous and equitable society where we abolish billionaires, confront the climate emergency, and smash corporate power. In other words, the UK is heading into an election in which voters have a choice that's more meaningful than Coke vs Pepsi.

Versions of this are playing out around the world. Anti-billionaire policies have surfaced time and again, everywhere, since the late 2010s:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/06/28/mamdani/#trustbusting

None of this means that we will automatically win. I'm not asking you to be an optimist here, but I am demanding that you have hope. Hope is a discipline: it requires that you tirelessly seek out the best ways to climb up that gradient toward a better world, trusting that as you attain higher elevation, you will find new paths up that slope.

The door is open a crack. Now isn't the time to complain that it isn't open wider – now's the time to throw your shoulder against it.

(Image: Joe Mabel, CC BY 3.0)

Hey look at this (permalink)


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

Object permanence (permalink)

#25yrsao Journal of a homeless woman in San Francisco: witty, articulate, pregnant, and addicted to heroin https://web.archive.org/web/20010124050200/https://www.thematrix.com/~sherrod/diary.html

#20yrsago Study: how Canadian copyright law is bought by entertainment co’s https://web.archive.org/web/20060207141159/http://www.michaelgeist.ca/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=1075

#20yrsago My Toronto Star editorial about Hollywood’s Member of Parliament https://web.archive.org/web/20060616024225/http://www.thestar.com/NASApp/cs/ContentServer?pagename=thestar/Layout/Article_Type1&call_pageid=971358637177&c=Article&cid=1137279034770

#10yrsago Aaron Swartz’s “Against School” – business leaders have been decrying education since 1845 https://newrepublic.com/article/127317/school

#10yrsago Yosemite agrees to change the names of its significant locations to appease trademark troll https://www.outsideonline.com/outdoor-adventure/environment/yosemite-rename-several-iconic-places/?scope=anon

#10yrsago Bernie Sanders support soars among actual voters, if not Democratic Party power-brokers https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/jan/14/bernie-sanders-is-winning-with-the-one-group-his-rivals-cant-sway-voters

#5yrsago Tesla's valuation is 1600x its profitability https://pluralistic.net/2021/01/15/hoover-calling/#intangibles

#5yrsago Disneyland kills annual passes https://pluralistic.net/2021/01/15/hoover-calling/#disney-dash

#5yrsago Machine learning is a honeypot for phrenologists https://pluralistic.net/2021/01/15/hoover-calling/#phrenology

#5yrsago Yugoslavia's Cold War obsession with Mexican music https://pluralistic.net/2021/01/15/hoover-calling/#yu-mex

#5yrsago I was investigated by the FBI https://pluralistic.net/2021/01/15/hoover-calling/#g-man

#5yrsago Facebook says it's the best henhouse fox https://pluralistic.net/2021/01/15/hoover-calling/#hens-need-foxes

#5yrsago Laura Poitras fired from First Look ( https://pluralistic.net/2021/01/15/hoover-calling/#poitras

Upcoming appearances (permalink)

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


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

Recent appearances (permalink)


A grid of my books with Will Stahle covers..

Latest books (permalink)


A cardboard book box with the Macmillan logo.

Upcoming books (permalink)

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

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

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

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


Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources:

Currently writing: "The Post-American Internet," a sequel to "Enshittification," about the better world the rest of us get to have now that Trump has torched America (1058 words today, 7122 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

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

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

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

How to get Pluralistic:

Blog (no ads, tracking, or data-collection):

Pluralistic.net

Newsletter (no ads, tracking, or data-collection):

https://pluralistic.net/plura-list

Mastodon (no ads, tracking, or data-collection):

https://mamot.fr/@pluralistic

Medium (no ads, paywalled):

https://doctorow.medium.com/

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

https://twitter.com/doctorow

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

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

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

READ CAREFULLY: By reading this, you agree, on behalf of your employer, to release me from all obligations and waivers arising from any and all NON-NEGOTIATED agreements, licenses, terms-of-service, shrinkwrap, clickwrap, browsewrap, confidentiality, non-disclosure, non-compete and acceptable use policies ("BOGUS AGREEMENTS") that I have entered into with your employer, its partners, licensors, agents and assigns, in perpetuity, without prejudice to my ongoing rights and privileges. You further represent that you have the authority to release me from any BOGUS AGREEMENTS on behalf of your employer.

ISSN: 3066-764X

Publié le 14.01.2026 à 17:30

Pluralistic: It's not normal (14 Jan 2026)


Today's links


A 1790 illustration entitled 'The World Turned Upside-Down.' It features a topsy-turvy nature scene in which a giant fish stands on the bank, fishing for a human who is gasping in the water. The sky is filled with flying fishes and eels, the sea is filled with swimming birds. The image has been hand-tinted. The background has been replaced with a printed circuit board.

It's not normal (permalink)

Samantha: This town has a weird smell that you're all probably used to…but I'm not.

Mrs Krabappel: It'll take you about six weeks, dear.

-The Simpsons, "Bart's Friend Falls in Love," S3E23, May 7, 1992

We are living through weird times, and they've persisted for so long that you probably don't even notice it. But these times are not normal.

Now, I realize that this covers a lot of ground, and without detracting from all the other ways in which the world is weird and bad, I want to focus on one specific and pervasive and awful way in which this world is not normal, in part because this abnormality has a defined cause, a precise start date, and an obvious, actionable remedy.

6 years, 5 months and 22 days after Fox aired "Bart's Friend Falls in Love," Bill Clinton signed a new bill into law: the Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 1998 (DMCA).

Under Section 1201 of the DMCA, it's a felony to modify your own property in ways that the manufacturer disapproves of, even if your modifications accomplish some totally innocuous, legal, and socially beneficial goal. Not a little felony, either: DMCA 1201 provides for a five year sentence and a $500,000 fine for a first offense.

Back when the DMCA was being debated, its proponents insisted that their critics were overreacting. They pointed to the legal barriers to invoking DMCA 1201, and insisted that these new restrictions would only apply to a few marginal products in narrow ways that the average person would never even notice.

But that was obvious nonsense, obvious even in 1998, and far more obvious today, more than a quarter-century on. In order for a manufacturer to criminalize modifications to your own property, they have to satisfy two criteria: first, they must sell you a device with a computer in it; and second, they must design that computer with an "access control" that you have to work around in order to make a modification.

For example, say your toaster requires that you scan your bread before it will toast it, to make sure that you're only using a special, expensive kind of bread that kicks back a royalty to the manufacturer. If the embedded computer that does the scanning ships from the factory with a program that is supposed to prevent you from turning off the scanning step, then it is a felony to modify your toaster to work with "unauthorized bread":

https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2020/01/unauthorized-bread-a-near-future-tale-of-refugees-and-sinister-iot-appliances/

If this sounds outlandish, then a) You definitely didn't walk the floor at CES last week, where there were a zillion "cooking robots" that required proprietary feedstock; and b) You haven't really thought hard about your iPhone (which will not allow you to install software of your choosing):

https://pluralistic.net/2024/01/12/youre-holding-it-wrong/#if-dishwashers-were-iphones

But back in 1998, computers – even the kind of low-powered computers that you'd embed in an appliance – were expensive and relatively rare. No longer! Today, manufacturers source powerful "System on a Chip" (SoC) processors at prices ranging from $0.25 to $8. These are full-fledged computers, easily capable of running an "access control" that satisfies DMCA 1201.

Likewise, in 1998, "access controls" (also called "DRM," "technical protection measures," etc) were a rarity in the field. That was because computer scientists broadly viewed these measures as useless. A determined adversary could always find a way around an access control, and they could package up that break as a software tool and costlessly, instantaneously distribute it over the internet to everyone in the world who wanted to do something that an access control impeded. Access controls were a stupid waste of engineering resources and a source of needless complexity and brittleness:

https://memex.craphound.com/2012/01/10/lockdown-the-coming-war-on-general-purpose-computing/

But – as critics pointed out in 1998 – chips were obviously going to get much cheaper, and if the US Congress made it a felony to bypass an access control, then every kind of manufacturer would be tempted to add some cheap SoCs to their products so they could add access controls and thereby felonize any uses of their products that cut into their profits. Basically, the DMCA offered manufacturers a bargain: add a dollar or two to the bill of materials for your product, and in return, the US government will imprison any competitors who offer your customers a "complementary good" that improves on it.

It's even worse than this: another thing that was obvious in 1998 was that once a manufacturer added a chip to a device, they would probably also figure out a way to connect it to the internet. Once that device is connected to the internet, the manufacturer can push software updates to it at will, which will be installed without user intervention. What's more, by using an access control in connection with that over-the-air update mechanism, the manufacturer can make it a felony to block its updates.

Which means that a manufacturer can sell you a device and then mandatorily update it at a later date to take away its functionality, and then sell that functionality back to you as a "subscription":

https://pluralistic.net/2022/10/28/fade-to-black/#trust-the-process

A thing that keeps happening:

https://www.theverge.com/2024/7/20/24202166/snoo-premium-subscription-happiest-baby

And happening:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2020/11/ink-stained-wretches-battle-soul-digital-freedom-taking-place-inside-your-printer

And happening:

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

In fact, it happens so often I've coined a term for it, "The Darth Vader MBA" (as in, "I'm altering the deal. Pray I don't alter it any further"):

https://pluralistic.net/2025/09/01/fulu/#i-am-altering-the-deal

Here's what this all means: any manufacturer who devotes a small amount of engineering work and incurs a small hardware expense can extinguish private property rights altogether.

What do I mean by private property? Well, we can look to Blackstone's 1753 treatise:

The right of property; or that sole and despotic dominion which one man claims and exercises over the external things of the world, in total exclusion of the right of any other individual in the universe.

You can't own your iPhone. If you take your iPhone to Apple and they tell you that it is beyond repair, you have to throw it away. If the repair your phone needs involves "parts pairing" (where a new part won't be recognized until an Apple technician "initializes" it through a DMCA-protected access control), then it's a felony to get that phone fixed somewhere else. If Apple tells you your phone is no longer supported because they've updated their OS, then it's a felony to wipe the phone and put a different OS on it (because installing a new OS involves bypassing an "access control" in the phone's bootloader). If Apple tells you that you can't have a piece of software – like ICE Block, an app that warns you if there are nearby ICE killers who might shoot you in the head through your windshield, which Apple has barred from its App Store on the grounds that ICE is a "protected class" – then you can't install it, because installing software that isn't delivered via the App Store involves bypassing an "access control" that checks software to ensure that it's authorized (just like the toaster with its unauthorized bread).

It's not just iPhones: versions of this play out in your medical implants (hearing aid, insulin pump, etc); appliances (stoves, fridges, washing machines); cars and ebikes; set-top boxes and game consoles; ebooks and streaming videos; small appliances (toothbrushes, TVs, speakers), and more.

Increasingly, things that you actually own are the exception, not the rule.

And this is not normal. The end of ownership represents an overturn of a foundation of modern civilization. The fact that the only "people" who can truly own something are the transhuman, immortal colony organisms we call "Limited Liability Corporations" is an absolutely surreal reversal of the normal order of things.

It's a reversal with deep implications: for one thing, it means that you can't protect yourself from raids on your private data or ready cash by adding privacy blockers to your device, which would make it impossible for airlines or ecommerce sites to guess about how rich/desperate you are before quoting you a "personalized price":

https://pluralistic.net/2025/12/11/nothing-personal/#instacartography

It also means you can't stop your device from leaking information about your movements, or even your conversations – Microsoft has announced that it will gather all of your private communications and ship them to its servers for use by "agentic AI":

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0ANECpNdt-4

Microsoft has also confirmed that it provides US authorities with warrantless, secret access to your data:

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

This is deeply abnormal. Sure, greedy corporate control freaks weren't invented in the 21st century, but the laws that let those sociopaths put you in prison for failing to arrange your affairs to their benefit – and your own detriment – are.

But because computers got faster and cheaper over decades, the end of ownership has had an incremental rollout, and we've barely noticed that it's happened. Sure, we get irritated when our garage-door opener suddenly requires us to look at seven ads every time we use the app that makes it open or close:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/11/09/lead-me-not-into-temptation/#chamberlain

But societally, we haven't connected that incident to this wider phenomenon. It stinks here, but we're all used to it.

It's not normal to buy a book and then not be able to lend it, sell it, or give it away. Lending, selling and giving away books is older than copyright. It's older than publishing. It's older than printing. It's older than paper. It is fucking weird (and also terrible) (obviously) that there's a new kind of very popular book that you can go to prison for lending, selling or giving away.

We're just a few cycles away from a pair of shoes that can figure out which shoelaces you're using, or a dishwasher that can block you from using third-party dishes:

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/feb/13/if-dishwashers-were-iphones

It's not normal, and it has profound implications for our security, our privacy, and our society. It makes us easy pickings for corporate vampires who drain our wallets through the gadgets and tools we rely on. It makes us easy pickings for fascists and authoritarians who ally themselves with corporate vampires by promising them tax breaks in exchange for collusion in the destruction of a free society.

I know that these problems are more important than whether or not we think this is normal. But still. It. Is. Just. Not. Normal.

Hey look at this (permalink)


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

Object permanence (permalink)

#15yrsago Belarusian mobile operators gave police list of demonstrators https://charter97.org/en/news/2011/1/12/35161/

#15yrsago Threatened library gets its patrons to clear the shelves https://www.theguardian.com/books/2011/jan/14/stony-stratford-library-shelves-protest

#15yrsago Canadian regulator smacks Rogers for Net Neutrality failures https://web.archive.org/web/20110116044741/https://www.michaelgeist.ca/content/view/5574/125/

#10yrsago A day in the life of a public service serial killer’s intern https://web.archive.org/web/20160116122141/https://motherboard.vice.com/read/the-killing-jar

#10yrsago How an obsessive jailhouse lawyer revealed the existence of Stingray surveillance devices https://www.theverge.com/2016/1/13/10758380/stingray-surveillance-device-daniel-rigmaiden-case

#10yrsago The Internet of Things in Your Butt: smart rectal thermometer https://web.archive.org/web/20160116182024/https://motherboard.vice.com/read/this-rectal-thermometer-is-the-logical-conclusion-of-the-internet-of-things

#10yrsago UK Home Secretary auditions for a Python sketch: “UK does not undertake mass surveillance” https://web.archive.org/web/20160114224805/https://motherboard.vice.com/read/the-uk-does-not-undertake-mass-surveillance-says-uk-home-secretary

#10yrsago US Treasury Dept wants to know which offshore crimelords are buying all those NYC and Miami penthouses https://www.csmonitor.com/USA/USA-Update/2016/0113/Are-luxury-condo-purchases-hiding-dirty-money

#5yrsag Facebook shows mall ninja gear ads on insurrection articles https://pluralistic.net/2021/01/14/10-point-program/#monetizing

#5yrsago The Black Panther self-care method https://pluralistic.net/2021/01/14/10-point-program/#panthers

Upcoming appearances (permalink)

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


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

Recent appearances (permalink)


A grid of my books with Will Stahle covers..

Latest books (permalink)


A cardboard book box with the Macmillan logo.

Upcoming books (permalink)

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

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

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

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


Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources:

Currently writing: "The Post-American Internet," a sequel to "Enshittification," about the better world the rest of us get to have now that Trump has torched America (1001 words today, 6053 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

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

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

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

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

READ CAREFULLY: By reading this, you agree, on behalf of your employer, to release me from all obligations and waivers arising from any and all NON-NEGOTIATED agreements, licenses, terms-of-service, shrinkwrap, clickwrap, browsewrap, confidentiality, non-disclosure, non-compete and acceptable use policies ("BOGUS AGREEMENTS") that I have entered into with your employer, its partners, licensors, agents and assigns, in perpetuity, without prejudice to my ongoing rights and privileges. You further represent that you have the authority to release me from any BOGUS AGREEMENTS on behalf of your employer.

ISSN: 3066-764X

Publié le 13.01.2026 à 18:27

Pluralistic: Sorry, eh (13 Jan 2026)


Today's links


A Canadian flag, its elements replaced with circuit boards. In the foreground, a bent-double, exhausted Uncle Sam trudges over rocky terrain, shlepping a giant sack on his back. Centered in the maple leaf is the word SORRY.

Sorry, eh (permalink)

Like all the best Americans, I'm Canadian, and while I have lived abroad for most of this century, I still hew faithfully to our folkways, which is why I'd like to start this essay by apologizing.

I'm sorry.

I'm sorry! I'm a technology writer, which means I'm supposed to be encouraging you to throw hundreds of billions of dollars at the money-losingest technology in human history, AI. No one has ever lost as much money as the AI companies.

There is no way to operate one of Nvidia's big AI-optimized GPUs without losing money. The owners of these GPUs who have lost the least money are the ones who rushed into buying GPUs without ensuring they'd have electricity to power them, and have been forced to leave their GPUs to age in warehouses. The minute they plug in those GPUs, they'll start losing money, and the more they use them, the more money they'll lose.

I'm sorry. As a technology writer, I'm supposed to be telling you that this bet will some day pay off, because one day we will have shoveled so many words into the word-guessing program that it wakes up and learns how to actually do the jobs it is failing spectacularly at today. This is a proposition akin to the idea that if we keep breeding horses to run faster and faster, one of them will give birth to a locomotive. Humans possess intelligence, and machines do not. The difference between a human and a word-guessing program isn't how many words the human knows.

I'm sorry. I know that when we talk about "digital sovereignty," we're obliged to talk about how we can build more data-centres that we can fill up with money-losing chips from American silicon monopolists in the hopes of destroying as many jobs as possible while blowing through our clean energy goals and enshittifying as much of our potable water as possible.

I don't have any advice for how to do that. I'm sorry!

As Canada contemplates our response to the collapse of the American empire and its alliances with the world, the cornerstone of our current strategy is sacrificing our dollars, water and energy in order to become more dependent on America, in a weird and improbable bet that we will figure out how to make millions of Canadians unemployed. I'm sorry, that just doesn't sound like a great idea to me.

If I can beg your indulgence, I'd like to propose an alternative.

Back in 2012, Canada passed Bill C-11, the Copyright Modernization Act. It's a law that bans Canadian companies from modifying America's digital tech exports. We passed it because the US threatened us with tariffs:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/05/08/who-broke-the-internet/#bruce-lehman

Thanks to Bill C-11, a Canadian company can't sell jailbreaking kits for phones and consoles, which would let Canadian sellers offer goods and services to Canadian buyers outside of US app stores, sidestepping the 30% app tax that Apple, Google, Microsoft, Sony and others impose on our digital economy.

Thanks to Bill C-11, a Canadian company can't sell mechanics a universal diagnostic tool that turns every "check engine" light into a useful error message. Instead, Canadian mechanics have to send $10,000/year/manufacturer to America for a proprietary car diagnosis kit.

Thanks to Bill C-11, a Canadian company can't offer ink cartridge manufacturers software that will ensure their cartridges work in the printers Canadians buy from the American inkjet cartel. As a result, Canadians have to spend $10,000/gallon on ink, making it the most expensive fluid a Canadian civilian can purchase without a government permit.

Thanks to Bill C-11, a Canadian company can't sell our farmers software that lets them start using their tractors as soon as they've fixed them. Instead, after a Canadian farmer fixes their tractor, they have to wait for a service call from a rep for a US ag-tech monopolist who'll type an unlock code into the tractor's keyboard and charge the farmer a couple hundred bucks for this "service."

Thanks to Bill C-11, a Canadian company can't revive one of the most successful technologies in modern history: the home video recorder. Remember those? First we had VCRs, then we had digital successors like the Tivo. Canadian law says you're allowed to record the video that comes into your home, whether by broadcast, cable, satellite or streaming. But Bill C-11 bans a Canadian company from selling you a gadget that lets you save the video you get in an app or from a set-top box.

It's crazy: we have actually uninvented the VCR! You know how everyone is pissed off about their favourite shows being yanked from the streaming services? Repeal C-11 and you could just save those shows forever. Repeal C-11 and you'd kill the grinchy little racket that services like Prime pull, where Christmas cartoons are in the free tier from March to November, and cost $3.99 to watch between November and March. Just tape 'em in August and save 'em for later!

It doesn't stop there. Remember when Facebook banned all links to the news in Canada? Repeal C-11 and a Canadian company could sell you an alternative Facebook app that puts the news back into your feed! Repeal C-11 and Canadians could get an alternative app that replaces all the streaming services, letting you search and stream every service you have an account for in one place, mixing in Canadian content from the NFB, public broadcasters, and commercial services.

Virtually every Canadian ministry, corporation and household is locked into a US Big Tech silo. Any of these could be shut down at a single word from Trump to any of the tech giants who've lined up to do his bidding. Repeal C-11 and we can extract all our data from these walled gardens/prisons and get it onto auditable, trustworthy, transparent open source software, hosted in data-centres located safely on Canadian soil.

If there's one thing Canadians are good it, it's going to other countries and extracting their wealth. We're world champions at it.

America's tech monopolies have sequestered trillions of dollars worth of monopoly rents on their balance sheets. This is dead capital, being pissed up the wall on nonsense like stock buybacks and data-centres and grotesque executive bonuses.

As Jeff Bezos said to the publishers: "Your margin is my opportunity."

America's tech trillions represent a rich and readily accessible seam that we can extract – safely, from our own country! – and turn into our billions, and an exportable line of products that the whole world would beat a path to our door to buy.

Look, I'm sorry. I don't have any ideas for how Canada can get to a better future by lighting billions on fire in a bet on a failing technology whose dubious profitability depends on ruining our job market, our power grid and our water supply, which will tie the American political situation to our ankles.

All I've got is an idea for how we can make insanely profitable products that people really want to buy, that will insulate us from cyberattacks by US tech giants who are in thrall to Trump, and that Americans will pay us to use in order to free themselves from the tech giants who abuse them, too.

I'm really sorry. I know it's out of step with the times, but all I have is ideas that make money, make us safer, make us richer, and make our technology better.

On the other hand, those chatbots sure are cute. It's funny when they "hallucinate."

Hey look at this (permalink)


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

Object permanence (permalink)

#25yrsago Hey, Mark made me a guest editor! https://memex.craphound.com/2001/01/13/hey-mark-made-me-a/

#15yrsago Woz on Network Neutrality https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2010/12/steve-wozniak-to-the-fcc-keep-the-internet-free/68294/

#15yrsago Disney World’s awful Tiki Room catches fire https://web.archive.org/web/20110116093950/http://thedisneyblog.com/2011/01/12/fire-reported-at-magic-kingdom-tiki-room/

#10yrsago For the first time in 15 years, there’s a new Violent Femmes album https://www.npr.org/sections/allsongs/2016/01/13/462656061/hear-a-song-from-violent-femmes-first-album-in-15-years

#10yrsago 3D Systems abandons its Cube printers, but DRM means you can’t buy filament from anyone else https://michaelweinberg.org/post/137045828005/free-the-cube

#10yrsago Why Moveon endorsed Bernie Sanders https://medium.com/middle-of-nowhere-center-of-everything/the-top-5-reasons-moveon-members-voted-to-endorse-bernie-with-the-most-votes-and-widest-margin-in-78c2e69990ec#.py5rdi9xc

#10yrsago Sneak-privatization of public schools: attacking teachers, unions and standards https://web.archive.org/web/20160112065749/https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/answer-sheet/wp/2016/01/07/a-primer-on-the-damaging-movement-to-privatize-public-schools/

#10yrsago Income inequality makes the 1% sad, too https://hbr.org/2016/01/income-inequality-makes-whole-countries-less-happy

#5yrsago Will Biden bust trusts? https://pluralistic.net/2021/01/13/two-decades/#thanks-obama

#5yrsago 20 years a blogger https://pluralistic.net/2021/01/13/two-decades/#hfbd

Upcoming appearances (permalink)

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


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

Recent appearances (permalink)


A grid of my books with Will Stahle covers..

Latest books (permalink)


A cardboard book box with the Macmillan logo.

Upcoming books (permalink)

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

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

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

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


Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources:

Currently writing: "The Post-American Internet," a sequel to "Enshittification," about the better world the rest of us get to have now that Trump has torched America (1037 words today, 5059 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

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

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

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

How to get Pluralistic:

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

READ CAREFULLY: By reading this, you agree, on behalf of your employer, to release me from all obligations and waivers arising from any and all NON-NEGOTIATED agreements, licenses, terms-of-service, shrinkwrap, clickwrap, browsewrap, confidentiality, non-disclosure, non-compete and acceptable use policies ("BOGUS AGREEMENTS") that I have entered into with your employer, its partners, licensors, agents and assigns, in perpetuity, without prejudice to my ongoing rights and privileges. You further represent that you have the authority to release me from any BOGUS AGREEMENTS on behalf of your employer.

ISSN: 3066-764X

Publié le 12.01.2026 à 17:01

Pluralistic: A winning trade war strategy for Canada (11 Jan 2026)


Today's links


A turn of the century Main Street, USA. Over the horizon looms a giant Canadian flag, made out of circuitry. In the foreground is a pixelboard sign reading 'U.S. BORDER CLOSED.'

A winning trade war strategy for Canada (permalink)

As the great Canadian philosopher Keanu Reeves averred in the 1994 public transportation documentary Speed, sometimes the winning move is to shoot the hostage.

That is: when your adversary has trapped you in a deadlock situation where neither of you can win, the winning move is to stop playing the game – rather, change the rules, and a bouquet of new moves will bloom.

Trump thinks he has Canada cornered, but we have a hell of a winning move. Unfortunately, we're not making it (yet).

Thus far, Canada's response to Trump's tariffs has been tit for tat: retaliatory tariffs. America smacked Canada's exports with tariffs, so Canada smacked the goods we import from the US with tariffs, too. This means that everything we buy in Canada is more expensive, which is certainly one way to punish Trump! It's like punching yourself in the face as hard as you can and waiting for the downstairs neighbour to say "ouch!"

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

Not only are retaliatory tariffs bad for Canadians, they're also bad for the Americans who are also suffering under Trump. Rather than fostering an alliance with Americans against our common enemy – America's oligarchs and their god-king Trump – Canadians have declared war on all of our American cousins.

Take the decision to eschew delicious American bourbon and switch to Wayne Gretzky's undrinkable rye. Somewhere in a state that begins and ends with a vowel, there is a corn farmer who never did anything to hurt Canada who's suffering as a result of this decision. We get shitty booze, and he can't afford to make payments on his tractor. Everyone loses!

Now, it's a funny thing about that tractor. Chances are, it's made by John Deere, a rapacious ag-tech monopolist that bought out all its competitors and now screws farmers in every imaginable way. One particularly galling scam is how John Deere handles repair. Farmers typically repair their own tractors. After all, a tractor is a business-critical machine with a lot of moving parts that can fail in a million ways.

But after the farmer fixes their tractor, it will not work until they pay John Deere to send a technician to their farm to type an unlock code in the tractor's keyboard. This is a totally superfluous step, inserted solely to allow Deere to rip off their customers. Farmers have been fixing their own farm implements since the first plow – after all, when you need to bring the crops in and the storm is coming, you can't wait for a service call at the end of your lonely country road – but John Deere has declared the end of history. In John Deere's world, farmers can only use their tractors when an ag-tech monopolist says they can:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/08/15/deere-in-headlights/#doh-a-deere

No farmer wants this anti-feature in their tractor. In a normal world, someone would go into business selling farmers a kit to disable it. After all, this is all accomplished with software, and software is infinitely flexible. Every computable program can be executed on every computer. John Deere installed a 10-foot pile of shit in its tractor software, so someone else could go into business shipping 11-foot ladders made out of software that can be delivered instantaneously to anyone in the world with an internet connection and a payment method.

But we don't live in a normal world. We live in a fundamentally broken world. It's been broken since 1998, when Bill Clinton signed a law called the "Digital Millennium Copyright Act" (DMCA). Section 1201 of the DMCA establishes a felony, punishable by a 5-year sentence and a $500k fine, for anyone who "bypasses an access control" on a digital system. This means that if John Deere designs its tractors to ensure that incoming instructions were authorized by the company (say, a manufacturer's password that needs to be entered before you can update the software), then it is a felony to bypass that check. When John Deere puts one of these access controls in its tractor, it conjures up a new felony out of thin air, making it a literal crime for a farmer to modify their own tractor to work the way they want it to. It's what Jay Freeman calls "felony contempt of business model."

The US isn't the only country with a law like this – far from it! At the very instant Bill Clinton signed the DMCA, the US Trade Rep sent officials all over the world to bully America's trading partners into enacting their own version of this law, threatening them with tariffs unless they changed their national laws to make it a crime to fix the broken technology America shipped around the globe.

Which brings me back to Canada's retaliatory tariffs, those self-punishing, indiscriminate, ally-alienating tits-for-tat.

Canada presented no more of a challenge for the bullying US Trade Rep than any of those other countries. In 2012, two of Stephen Harper's ministers, James Moore and Tony Clement, rammed a carbon copy of DMCA 1201 through Parliament: Bill C-11, the Copyright Modernization Act:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/05/08/who-broke-the-internet/#bruce-lehman

C-11 was incredibly unpopular. Three earlier attempts to pass a law like this had failed, and in the end, Clement and Moore had to ignore their own consultation results and dismiss the thousands of respondents who wrote in to object to the bill as "babyish…radical extremists."

Harper, Clement and Moore whipped C-11 through Parliament because the US trade rep threatened them with tariffs unless the did so, and promised them tariff-free access to the US if they toed the line. Now that Trump has whacked Canada with tariffs, Canada should wipe this law off its books.

There's so many good domestic reasons to do this. Without C-11, Canadian companies could defend their fellow Canadians from American data-theft and cash ripoffs by making alternative clients, jailbreaks, and other add-ons that disenshittified America's defective tech:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/01/10/markets-are-regulations/#carney-found-a-spine

But today, I want to focus on how repealing C-11 would benefit America. You see, America's businesses – large and small – are victims of Big Tech's extraction. The Big Five publishers get screwed by Amazon, as do all the little indie publishers. Every games company gets screwed by Apple and Google, who suck 30 cents out of every dollar their customers spend in an app. Same goes for console games companies, who pay a 30% tax on every dollar they make on Xbox, Nintendo or Playstations (the exception, of course, is the games companies owned by Microsoft, Sony and Nintendo, who don't pay the 30% tax and can therefore always outcompete the independents).

Merchants who sell on Amazon pay a 50-60% junk fee tax. Businesses large and small are locked into cloud products from Microsoft, Oracle, and Google who are training their AIs on their corporate customers' proprietary data. Health providers are locked into Epic, the giant electronic health record monopolist, whose abuses are the stuff of legend:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/10/02/upcoded-to-death/#thanks-obama

Many (if not all) of these scams could be mitigated with new code. For example, anyone stuck paying the app taxes could offer mobile phone and console owners jailbreaks that install third-party app stores, and then offer discounts to anyone who uses them – if you're saving 30% on every payment, you can split those savings with your customers.

Merchants could list their products for sale directly on Amazon through app and website plugins, and get paid and fulfill them themselves:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/07/10/view-a-sku/

Performers and content creators could encourage their audiences to escape the platforms' inscrutable algorithms and install jailbroken apps that let users control their recommendations:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2022/05/tracking-exposed-demanding-gods-explain-themselves

Social media startups could offer alt clients that let users who sign up see the messages posted by their friends on legacy platforms like Twitter and Facebook, and push replies to them:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/12/10/e2e/#the-censors-pen

Mechanics, farmers and repair depots who are locked out of diagnostics, who can't use generic parts, and can't initialize OEM parts without paying for a license could jailbreak their customers' devices for them and offer independent repair:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/09/22/vin-locking/#thought-differently

So think back to that corn farmer, currently wondering how to make tractor payments because Canadians are drinking Gretzky's shitty rye instead of delicious bourbon. Rather than pauperizing that blameless farmer, Canada could go into business selling him the tools to escape John Deere's rent-collecting repair racket, to extract all the soil condition data needed for precision agriculture, and to make use of competitors' front-ends (accessories that turn a tractor into a thresher or some other machine).

That farmer is getting screwed by Trump, just like Canadians. He's not a shareholder in Big Tech. He's not gonna be pissed off when Canada turns Big Tech's trillions into Canadian billions – not if he gets lower prices and more reliable technology as a result.

When I talk to Canadians about retaliating against the Trump tariffs by repealing our anti-jailbreaking law, they often express concern that this will make Trump even angrier at us. I mean, of course it will: literally anything that works will make Trump angry. I don't think that means we should only respond to the Trump tariffs with useless gestures.

If Canada goes into business rescuing Americans from their own tech companies, they will become our allies. If those companies depend on selling to the Canadian market to remain profitable, they will become our allies.

Trump is an autocrat, but he's not omnipotent. He's an old, sick man with white matter disease dementia who can't stay awake through a 10-minute briefing or remember what he was talking about from minute to minute. To pursue his agenda, he needs to hold his coalition together, and that's something he's getting progressively worse at as he slides towards his incipient death/permanent incapacity.

All Canada will get if it sticks with its current response to the tariffs is Gretzky's undrinkable novelty booze and the permanent enmity of American businesses. On the other hand, if Canada repeals its anti-circumvention law, we can make billions of dollars, destroy the profits of America's most important technological allies, liberate ourselves from America's defective technology, and forge a durable, powerful anti-Trump alliance with American firms who are preyed upon just as surely as Canadians are.

Let's shoot the hostage. Let's change the rules of the game. Let's break the deadlock. It's what Keanu would tell us to do.

Hey look at this (permalink)


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

Object permanence (permalink)

#20yrsago Indie labels give free MP3s to customers who buy vinyl https://web.archive.org/web/20060111215100/https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/archives/004313.php

#20yrsago Hollywood’s Canadian politico lies about her approach to lawmaking https://web.archive.org/web/20110425163053/http://www.michaelgeist.ca/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=1071

#20yrsago Correcting the Record: Wikipedia vs The Register https://memex.craphound.com/2006/01/11/correcting-the-record-wikipedia-vs-the-register/

#20yrsago Hollywood’s MP denounces “users,” “EFF members” — video https://web.archive.org/web/20060323035434/http://accordionguy.blogware.com/blog/_archives/2006/1/12/1659162.html

#20yrsago My short-short story “Printcrime” in this week’s Nature magazine https://craphound.com/stories/2006/01/12/printcrime/#more

#15yrsago HOWTO teach your small children to swordfight https://reactormag.com/spec-fic-parenting-this-my-son-is-a-sword/

#15yrsago HOWTO make a secure, decentralized, human-readable name system http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/squarezooko

#15yrsago Demon rug https://www.flickr.com/photos/missmonstermel/5346690831/in/photostream/

#15yrsago Jeff Koons claims to own all balloon dogs https://www.designboom.com/art/jeff-koons-can-one-copyright-a-balloon-animal/

#10yrsago Brewster Kahle remembers Aaron Swartz: “an open source life” https://www.aaronswartzday.org/brewster-sf-memorial/

#10yrsago Sympathetic Bernie Sanders profile in Bloomberg Businessweek https://www.bloomberg.com/features/2016-bernie-sanders-fundraising/

#10yrsago Internal documents from breathalyzer company Lifesaver dumped online https://web.archive.org/web/20160113075611/https://motherboard.vice.com/read/car-breathalyzer-company-gets-hacked-internal-docs-dumped-on-dark-web

#10yrsago How fraudsters’ call centers work https://krebsonsecurity.com/2016/01/a-look-inside-cybercriminal-call-centers/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+KrebsOnSecurity+(Krebs+on+Security)

#10yrsago Why all scientific diet research turns out to be bullshit https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/you-cant-trust-what-you-read-about-nutrition/?ex_cid=story-facebook

#10yrsago NSA says it will take four years to answer questions about its kids’ coloring book https://web.archive.org/web/20160114074709/https://motherboard.vice.com/read/the-nsa-told-me-it-needs-4-years-to-answer-a-foia-about-a-coloring-book

#10yrsago Bowie, Eno and serendipity https://www.ted.com/talks/tim_harford_how_frustration_can_make_us_more_creative

#10yrsago Chelsea Manning reviews book of Aaron Swartz’s writing https://medium.com/@xychelsea/remembering-aaron-swartz-94d204b9e190#.5fcfs5mby

#10yrsago WATCH: documentary on Walt Disney, the futurist https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pwLznNpJz2I

#10yrsago Guns filled with guts: Anatomy of War https://www.noahscalin.com/#/anatomyofwar1/

#10yrsago Book says Daddy Koch built Nazi oil refinery & hired a Nazi nanny for his boys, who blackmailed their gay brother https://web.archive.org/web/20160114081716/https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-politics/wp/2016/01/11/new-book-father-of-politically-active-koch-brothers-built-a-refinery-for-the-nazis/

#10yrsago Rich Americans are embarrassed by Donald Trump https://web.archive.org/web/20160115052314/https://gawker.com/donald-trumps-personal-brand-is-slowly-excruciatingly-1752374812?utm_source=recirculation&utm_medium=recirculation&utm_campaign=tuesdayAM

#10yrsago New US law says kids can walk to school by themselves https://www.fastcompany.com/3055107/federal-law-now-says-kids-can-walk-to-school-alone

#10yrsago Toronto’s mayor demands an end to competition for fast, affordable broadband https://www.michaelgeist.ca/2016/01/why-mayors-john-tory-and-jim-watson-are-against-competition-for-access-to-affordable-fast-broadband/

#10yrsago Your smartwatch knows your ATM and phone PIN https://arxiv.org/pdf/1512.05616v1

#10yrsago Keep your scythe, the real green future is high-tech, democratic, and radical https://memex.craphound.com/2016/01/12/keep-your-scythe-the-real-green-future-is-high-tech-democratic-and-radical/

#10yrsago Will the W3C strike a bargain to save the Web from DRM? https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2016/01/you-cant-destroy-village-save-it-w3c-vs-drm-round-two

#5yrsago Bunkered, infectious, maskless Republicans infected Congress https://pluralistic.net/2021/01/12/maskholio/#maskholes

#5yrsago Awful voting-machine demands silence https://pluralistic.net/2021/01/11/seeing-things/#ess

#5yrsago Weaponing and monetizing apophenia https://pluralistic.net/2021/01/11/seeing-things/#woo

#5yrsago DC's security theater panned https://pluralistic.net/2021/01/11/seeing-things/#curtain-call

Upcoming appearances (permalink)

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

r


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

Recent appearances (permalink)


A grid of my books with Will Stahle covers..

Latest books (permalink)


A cardboard book box with the Macmillan logo.

Upcoming books (permalink)

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

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

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

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


Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources:

Currently writing: "The Post-American Internet," a sequel to "Enshittification," about the better world the rest of us get to have now that Trump has torched America ( words today, 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

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

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ISSN: 3066-764X

Publié le 10.01.2026 à 16:02

Pluralistic: Predistribution vs redistribution (Big Tech edition) (10 Jan 2026)


Today's links


A Canadian flag. The Maple Leaf has been replaced with a rotten apple. Crawling out of the apple is a woim. Over the apple is Apple's 'Think Different' wordmark. The woim is crawling through one of the 'e's.

Predistribution vs redistribution (Big Tech edition) (permalink)

All over the world, for all of this decade, governments have been trying to figure out how to rein in America's tech companies. During the Biden years, this seemed like a winner – after all, America was trying to tame its tech companies, too, with brave trustbusters like Lina Khan, Jonathan Kanter, Rohit Chopra and Tim Wu doing more work in four years than their predecessors had done in forty.

But under Trump, the US government has thrown its full weight into defending its tech companies' right to spy on and rip off everyone in the world (including Americans, of course). It's not hard to understand how Big Tech earned Trump's loyalty: from the tech CEOs who personally paid a million dollars each to sit behind Trump on the inauguration dais; to Apple CEO Tim Cook hand-assembling a gold participation trophy for Trump on camera; to Zuckerberg firing all his fact-checkers; to the seven-figure contributions that tech companies made to Trump's Epstein Memorial Ballroom at the White House. Trump is defending America's tech companies because they've bribed him, personally, to do so.

Given that these companies are so much larger than most world governments, this poses a serious barrier to the kind of enforcement that world governments have tried. What's the point of fining Apple billions of Euros if they refuse to pay? What's the point of ordering Apple to open up its App Store if it just refuses?

But here's the thing: most of these enforcement actions have been redistributive. In effect, lawmakers and regulators are saying to America's tech giants, We know you've stolen a bunch of money and data from our people, and now we want you to give some of it back. There's nothing inherently wrong with redistribution, but redistribution will never be as powerful or effective as predistribution – that is, preventing tech companies from stealing data and money in the first place.

Take Big Tech's relationship to the world's news media. All over the world, media companies have been skeletonized by collapsing ad revenues and even where they can get paid subscribers, tech giants rake off huge junk fees from every subscriber payment. Reaching new or existing subscribers is also increasingly expensive, as tech platforms algorithmically suppress the reach of media companies' posts, even for subscribers who've asked to see their feeds, which lets the platforms charge more junk fees to "boost" content.

Countries all over the world – Australia, Germany, Spain, France, Canada – have arrived at the same solution to this problem: imposing "link taxes" that require tech companies to pay for the privilege of linking to the news or allowing their users to discuss the news. This is pure redistribution: tech stole money from the media companies, so governments are making them give some of that money back.

It hasn't worked. First of all, the thing tech steals from the news isn't the news, it's money. Helping people find and discuss the news isn't theft. News you're not allowed to find or discuss isn't news at all – that's a secret.

Meanwhile, tech companies have an easy way to escape the link tax: they can just ban links to the news on their platform. That's what Meta did in Canada, which means that Canadians on Instagram and Facebook no longer see the actual news, just far-right "influencer" content. Even when tech companies do pay the link tax, the results are far from ideal: in Canada, Google has become a partner of news outlets, which compromises their ability to report on Google's activities. Shortly after Google promised millions to the Toronto Star, the paper dropped its award-winning, hard-hitting "Defanging Big Tech" investigative series. Given that Google came within centimeters of stealing most of downtown Toronto just a few years ago, we can hardly afford to have the city's largest newspaper climb into bed with the company:

https://memex.craphound.com/2019/10/31/leaked-document-reveals-that-sidewalk-labs-toronto-plans-for-private-taxation-private-roads-charter-schools-corporate-cops-and-judges-and-punishment-for-people-who-choose-privacy/

Worse still: any effort to make Big Tech poorer – by curbing its predatory acquisition of our data and money – reduces its ability to pay the link tax, which means that, under a link tax, the media's future depends on Big Tech being able to go on ripping us off.

All of which is not to say that Big Tech should be allowed to go on ripping off the media. Rather, it's to argue that we should stop tech from ripping off Canadians in the first place, as a superior alternative to asking Big Tech to remit a small share of the booty to a few lucky victims.

Together, Meta and Google take 51 cents out of every advertising dollar. This is a huge share. Before the rise of surveillance advertising, the ad industry's share of advertising dollars amounted to about 15%. The Meta/Google ad-tech duopoly has cornered the ad market, and they illegally colluded to rig it, which allows them to steal billions from media outlets, all around the world:

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

What would a predistribution approach to ad-tech look like? Canada could ban the collection and sale of consumer data outright, and punish any domestic firm that collects consumer data, which would choke off much of the supply of data that feeds the ad-tech market.

Canada could also repeal its wildly unpopular "anticircumvention" law, The Copyright Modernisation Act of 2012 (Bill C-11), which was passed despite the public's overwhelming negative response to a consultation on the bill:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/11/15/radical-extremists/#sex-pest

Under this law, it's illegal for Canadian companies to reverse engineer and modify America's tech exports. This means that Canadian companies can't go into business selling an alternative Facebook client that blocks all the surveillance advertising and restores access to the news, and offers non-surveillant, content-based ways for other Canadian businesses to advertise:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2023/05/save-news-we-must-ban-surveillance-advertising

Repealing Bill C-11 would also allow Canadian companies to offer alternative app stores for phones and consoles. Google and Apple have a duopoly on mobile apps, and the two companies have rigged the market to take 30% of every in-app payment. The actual cost of processing a payment is less than 1%. This means that 30 cents out of every in-app subscriber dollar sent to a Canadian news outlet is shipped south to Cupertino or Mountain View. Legalizing made-in-Canada app stores, installed without permission from Apple or Google, would stop those dollars from being extracted in the first place. And not just media companies, of course – the app tax is paid by performers, software authors, and manufacturers. Extend the program to include games consoles and Canada's game companies would be rescued from Microsoft and Nintendo's own app tax, which also runs to 30%.

But a C-11 repeal wouldn't merely safeguard Canadian dollars – it would also safeguard Canadian data. Our mobile phones collect and transmit mountains of data about us and our activities. Yes, even Apple's products – despite the company's high-flying rhetoric about its respect for your privacy, the company spies on everything you do with your phone and sells access to that data to advertisers. Apple doesn't offer any way to opt out of this, and lied about it when they were caught doing it:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/11/14/luxury-surveillance/#liar-liar

These companies will not voluntarily stop stealing our data. That's the lesson of nine years under the EU's GDPR, a landmark, strong privacy law that US tech companies simply refuse to obey. And because they claim to be headquartered in Ireland (because Ireland lets them cheat on their taxes) and because they have captured the Irish state, they are able to simply flout the law:

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

Telling Big Tech not to gather our data is redistribution. So is dictating how they can use it after they collect it. The predistribution version of this is modifying our devices so that they don't gather or leak our data in the first place.

Big Tech is able to suck up so much of our data because anticircumvention law – like Canada's Bill C-11, or Article 6 of the EU Copyright Directive – makes it illegal to modify your phone so that it blocks digital spying, preventing the collection and transmission of your data.

Repeal anticircumvention law and businesses could offer Canadians (or Europeans) (or anyone in the world with a credit card and an internet connection) a product that blocks surveillance on their devices. More than half of all web users have installed an ad-blocker for their browser (which offers significant surveillance protection), but no one can install anything like this on their phones (or smart TVs, or smart doorbells, or other gadgets) because anticircumvention law criminalizes this act.

Big Tech are notorious tax cheats, colluding with captured governments like the Irish state to avoid taxes worldwide. Canada tried to pass a "digital service tax" that would make the US pay a small share of the tax it evades in Canada. Trump went bananas and threatened to hit the country with (more) tariffs, and Canada folded.

Tax is redistributive, and getting money back from American companies after they steal it from Canadians is much harder than simply arranging the system so it's much harder for American companies to steal from Canadians in the first place. Blocking spying, clawing back the app tax, unrigging the ad market – these are all predistributive rather than redistributive.

So is selling alternative clients for legacy social media products like Facebook and Twitter – clients that unrig their algorithms and let Canadians see the news they've subscribed to, so they can't be used as hostages to extract "boosting" fees from media outlets who want to reach their own subscribers.

Canada's redistribution efforts have been a consistent failure. Canada keeps trying to get streaming companies like Netflix to include more Canadian content in their offerings and search results. Legalize jailbreaking and a Canadian company could start selling an alternative client that lets you search all your streaming services at once, mixing in results from Canadian media companies and archives like the National Film Board – all while blocking surveillance by the tech giants. This client could also incorporate a PVR, so you could record shows to watch later, without worrying about the tech giants making your favorite program vanish. Remember, if it's legal to record a show from broadcast or cable with a VCR or a Tivo, it's legal to record it from a streaming service with an app.

These predistribution tactics don't rely on US tech companies obeying Canada's orders. Instead, they take away American companies' ability to use Canada's courts and law enforcement apparatus to shut down Canadian competitors who disenshittify America's spying, stealing tech exports. Canada may not be able to push Google or Apple or Facebook around, but Canada can always decide whether Google or Apple or Facebook can use its courts to push Canadian competitors around.

Back in December, when Trump started threatening (again) to invade Canada and take over the country, Prime Minister Mark Carney broke off trade talks. Those talks are slated to begin again in a matter of days:

https://www.detroitnews.com/story/business/2025/12/19/canada-u-s-to-start-talks-to-review-free-trade-deal-in-mid-january/87843153007/

Getting Trump to deal fairly with Canada is just as unlikely as getting Trump's tech companies to give Canadians a fair shake. Canada isn't going to win the trade war with an agreement. Canada will win the trade war by winning: with Made-in-Canada tech products that turn America's stolen trillions into Canadian billions, to be divided up among Canadian tech businesses (who will reap profits) and the Canadian public (who will reap savings).

(Image: Dietrich Krieger, CC BY-SA 4.0; Tiia Monto, CC BY 4.0, modified)

Hey look at this (permalink)


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

Object permanence (permalink)

#20yrsago HOWTO convert an Oral B flosser into a vibrating lockpick https://web.archive.org/web/20060113090614/http://www.inventgeek.com/Projects/lockpick/lockpick.aspx

#20yrsago Levi’s to ship iPod jeans https://web.archive.org/web/20060113045708/https://www.popgadget.net/2006/01/levis_ipod_jean.php

#20yrsago Chumbawamba: Why we don’t use DRM on our CDs https://web.archive.org/web/20060112044019/http://www.chumba.com/Chumbawambacopyprotect1.html

#20yrsago UK Parliamentarians demand WiFi https://www.cnet.com/home/internet/british-parliament-members-demand-wi-fi-access/

#15yrsago Sue Townsend talks Adrian Mole with the Guardian book-club https://www.theguardian.com/books/audio/2011/jan/10/sue-townsend-adrian-mole-book-club

#15yrsago Major record labels forced to pay CAD$45M to ripped-off musicians https://web.archive.org/web/20110112055510/https://www.michaelgeist.ca/content/view/5563/125/

#10yrsago Why Americans can’t stop working: the poor can’t afford to, and the rich are enjoying themselves https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2016/01/inequality-work-hours/422775/

#10yrsago Juniper blinks: firewall will nuke the NSA’s favorite random number generator https://www.reuters.com/article/us-spying-juniper-idUSKBN0UN07520160109/

#5yrsago Impeachment and realignment https://pluralistic.net/2021/01/10/realignments/#realignments

#5yrsago Busting myths about the Night of the Short Fingers https://pluralistic.net/2021/01/10/realignments/#mythbusting

Upcoming appearances (permalink)

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


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

Recent appearances (permalink)


A grid of my books with Will Stahle covers..

Latest books (permalink)


A cardboard book box with the Macmillan logo.

Upcoming books (permalink)

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

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

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

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


Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources:

Currently writing: "The Post-American Internet," a sequel to "Enshittification," about the better world the rest of us get to have now that Trump has torched America (1008 words today, 4020 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

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

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

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

How to get Pluralistic:

Blog (no ads, tracking, or data-collection):

Pluralistic.net

Newsletter (no ads, tracking, or data-collection):

https://pluralistic.net/plura-list

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ISSN: 3066-764X

Publié le 09.01.2026 à 15:59

Pluralistic: bunnie's piggyback hack (09 Jan 2026)


Today's links


A slide from bunnie Huang's 39C3 talk.

bunnie's piggyback hack (permalink)

If Andrew "bunnie" Huang didn't actually exist, I'd swear he was a character out of a(n extraordinarily technologically well-informed) cyberpunk novel. Every time I interact with this legendary hardware hacker, he blows my mind with some incredible project or insight that permanently alters how I think about technology.

I first met bunnie when he came to EFF for help with the threats he'd received from Microsoft. At the time, bunnie was an electrical engineering grad student at MIT, and he'd taken the bootloader locks on the new Xbox platform as a personal affront and challenge. He applied his prodigious skill and talent to these digital handcuffs, and in short order, he had broken the Xbox and installed Linux on it. MIT's general counsel immediately washed its hands of any responsibility to defend this young grad student from bullying by a corporate monopolist, hanging him out to dry. So he turned to us – and we got his back. You can read all about it in Hacking the Xbox, his canonical work about hardware hacking and technological freedom (it's free!):

https://bunniefoo.com/nostarch/HackingTheXbox_Free.pdf

In the many years since, I've been lucky enough to count bunnie as a friend, colleague and comrade, albeit one I only physically run into every year or so, usually at some tech event or on the playa at Burning Man, where he still camps with the MIT crew at The Institute.

I just got to see bunnie in person again, over Christmas week at the Chaos Communications Congress in Hamburg. He gave a late-night presentation with his collaborator Sean "xobs" Cross, entitled "Xous: A Pure-Rust Rethink of the Embedded Operating System":

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

Don't let the technical-sounding title intimidate you! This was a banger of a talk, and as with every bunnie Huang production, it left a pleasant and persistent aftertaste.

The background for this talk is bunnie's obsession with building a trustworthy computer. For decades, bunnie has been chasing the dream of a computer whose every component – operating system, drivers, firmware, and hardware designs – are open to inspection. Bunnie's reasoning here is that anything that can't be inspected (and, by extension, modified) by its users is a spot where bad guys can hide bad stuff, and where lurking bugs can fester until they are exploited by bad guys. Remember the spectacular (and still mysterious) claims that Apple's servers had all been compromised with minuscule hardware bugs? The single best explanation of that you will find comes from bunnie:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RqQhWitJ1As

Bunnie was doing all this before there was an "open source hardware" movement, and he remains at its vanguard. His "Precursor" project is a reference hardware platform where every component is open to inspection and modification, from the chassis to the random number generator:

https://www.bunniestudios.com/blog/category/betrusted/precursor/

One area of especial concern and interest for bunnie is the promise and peril of the "system-on-a-chip" (SoC). This is exactly what it sounds like: a cheap chip that incorporates everything you need to do full-fledged computing, including interfaces and drivers for networks, screens, peripherals, etc. SoCs are ubiquitous. You find them in things like individual car engine components and inkjet printer cartridges, and each one is a whole-ass computer, capable of running some really ugly malware.

As bunnie explained back in 2020, there are two problems with SoCs: first, they are packaged such that the silicon traces inside of them can't be readily inspected, and second, they are so expensive to fabricate that someone like bunnie can't possibly come up with the millions needed to make an open, trustworthy, inspectable alternative:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/11/10/dark-matter/#precursor

That's where bunnie's CCC talk comes in. The chips that SoCs are etched upon have lots of space (relatively speaking – we're talking about nanometer-scale circuits, after all). Even after an SoC designer packs in a ton of extra traces to handle oddball applications, the chip is still mostly "dark matter" – blank silicon.

The first half of bunnie and xobs's talk concerns itself with "Xous," a secure operating system for an SoC, written in Rust. But the second half of the talk tackles the problem of procuring an SoC that you can trust to run Xous on. That's where this dark matter comes in.

Bunnie's day-job is consulting on extremely gnarly, high-stakes, high-value hardware design and manufacturing, so naturally, he's got lots of clients and contacts in the SoC manufacturing world. He approached one of these companies with a proposal: let me tape out a whole separate chip that fits in the dark matter for one of your upcoming chips. Adding these traces adds virtually no cost to the production, and adding bunnie's chips to the production run actually saves the manufacturer money, because the prices drop when the quantities increase.

The idea is to put two chips on the chip, and badge most of them with the OEM's branding, while a small rump of the chips will have bunnie's branding (he calls it the Baochip). On bunnie's chips, the traces to the OEM chip will be physically cut, meaning that the Baochips will just be Baochips – the original chip will be inaccessible and unusable.

What's more, bunnie didn't just fit one chip into the OEM's "dark matter" – he fit five separate, specialized SoCs into the unused space. Remember, the beauty of SoCs is that once they're taped out and sent to production, the cost of an actual chip is peanuts, meaning that these Baochips are cheap as hell.

Even better: the traces on these chips are scaled to be readily inspected using relatively low-cost equipment, meaning that many parties around the world can grab one of these chips, stick it in a machine, and compare the traces on the chip to the free, open sourcefile that was used to produce it, confirming that there are no nasty surprises lurking inside.

This was such an exciting talk, and as I sat through it, I had this nagging feeling that it reminded me of something else I'd learned about years before, though I couldn't quite place it. Finally, as bunnie and xobs were stepping off the stage, I had it – it reminded me of another bunnie talk I'd seen – this one at The Institute, the MIT Burning Man camp, more than a decade prior.

Back in 2015, bunnie designed and built a set of really cool, wearable radio-linked badges for his campmates, which would help them locate one another on the playa at night. These badges were really cool – they used a genetic algorithm to "have sex" with one another and mutate their color patterns. Bunnie even worked in a "consent" mechanism!

https://www.bunniestudios.com/blog/2015/sex-circuits-deep-house/

But the really cool part that stuck with me was the manufacturing story. Bunnie wanted to fabricate custom injection-molded plastic enclosures for these pendants, but injection molding – like chip design – is a mass production phenomenon, with sky-high setup costs and incredibly cheap per-unit costs thereafter.

So (and this might sound familiar) bunnie reached out to a die-maker that he worked with in China and said, "Hey, the next time you're contracted to mill out a die for a client, let me know if there's any extra space on the face of the die, and I'll provide you with a shapefile you can carve out of this 'dark matter.'" This doesn't add any cost to the die setup, and it means that bunnie can run just a couple dozen injection-molded, custom cases at a cost of pennies per unit.

I grabbed bunnie later that night and mentioned this old Burning Man project to him and he said, "You know, I haven't ever thought of it, but you're right, there's definitely a throughline between the two projects."

I asked him what he called this technique and he shrugged and said he didn't really have a name for it, but he thought of it as "piggybacking," which seems like a good name to me.

It seems to me that these two kinds of manufacturing can't be the only ones that can be "piggybacked" onto. That's what motivated me to write this post – to get people thinking about these high-setup/low-unit cost production types that might be piggybacked for small batch, delightful projects like bunnie's.

Well, that, and just to do one of my periodic bunnie Huang appreciation posts. If there's one person that I'd recommend people pay more attention to, it's him. He's also a terrific communicator, and an indecently great writer. My readers might be familiar with him thanks to the afterword he contributed to Little Brother:

https://craphound.com/littlebrother/download/

More recently, he wrote a fantastic intro for last year's Science Comics Computers: How Digital Computers Work, a brilliant middle-grades graphic novel that uses steampunk dinosaurs to explain digital logic and the building blocks of computation:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/11/05/xor-xand-xnor-nand-nor/#brawniac

He also co-authored a fascinating research paper with Edward Snowden, after the two of them collaborated on a daughter-board that spots otherwise untraceable malware:

https://assets.pubpub.org/aacpjrja/AgainstTheLaw-CounteringLawfulAbusesofDigitalSurveillance.pdf

Again, my readers will recognize this as a gimmick from my 2020 novel Attack Surface (a Little Brother novel for adults):

https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250757517/attacksurface/

That's not bunnie's only sweet hardware hack, of course. Check out the insanely clever design for a contact-tracing dongle he prototyped for the EU in 2020:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/06/23/cryptocidal-maniacs/#trace-together

But really, you owe it to yourself to read bunnie at book length, and his best book is 2016's The Hardware Hacker, a tour-de-force, lay-friendly exegesis on the theory and practice of hardware hacking:

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

Hey look at this (permalink)


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

Object permanence (permalink)

#20yrsago John McDaid’s brilliant sf story Keyboard Practice free online https://web.archive.org/web/20060112044109/https://www.sfsite.com/fsf/fiction/jm01.htm

#20yrsago Pledge to boycott DRM CDs https://web.archive.org/web/20060112061657/http://www.pledgebank.com/boycottdrm

#20yrsago Hollywood’s Canadian MP claims she’s no dirtier than the rest https://memex.craphound.com/2006/01/08/hollywoods-canadian-mp-claims-shes-no-dirtier-than-the-rest/

#10yrsago Gene Luen Yang’s inaugural speech as National Ambassador for Young People’s Literature https://memex.craphound.com/2016/01/08/gene-luen-yangs-inaugural-speech-as-national-ambassador-for-young-peoples-literature/

#10yrsago Menstruation is the mother of invention https://lastwordonnothing.com/2016/01/07/the-wonderful-world-of-period-patents/

#10yrsago Juniper’s products are still insecure; more evidence that the company was complicit https://www.wired.com/2016/01/new-discovery-around-juniper-backdoor-raises-more-questions-about-the-company/

#10yrsago Red-baiting water speculator plans to drain the Mojave of its ancient water https://www.wired.com/2016/01/the-2-4-billion-plan-to-water-la-by-draining-the-mojave/?mbid=social_alleniverson

Upcoming appearances (permalink)

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


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

Recent appearances (permalink)


A grid of my books with Will Stahle covers..

Latest books (permalink)


A cardboard book box with the Macmillan logo.

Upcoming books (permalink)

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

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

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

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


Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources:

Currently writing: "The Post-American Internet," a sequel to "Enshittification," about the better world the rest of us get to have now that Trump has torched America ( words today, 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

READ CAREFULLY: By reading this, you agree, on behalf of your employer, to release me from all obligations and waivers arising from any and all NON-NEGOTIATED agreements, licenses, terms-of-service, shrinkwrap, clickwrap, browsewrap, confidentiality, non-disclosure, non-compete and acceptable use policies ("BOGUS AGREEMENTS") that I have entered into with your employer, its partners, licensors, agents and assigns, in perpetuity, without prejudice to my ongoing rights and privileges. You further represent that you have the authority to release me from any BOGUS AGREEMENTS on behalf of your employer.

ISSN: 3066-764X

 

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