Pluralistic: Drinkslump linkdump (24 May 2025)


Today's links


My hand holding an advance copy of my next book, ENSHITTIFICATION WHY EVERYTHING GOT WORSE AND WHAT TO DO ABOUT IT, up against an ivy-covered wall. The cover features a poop emoji with a black bar over its mouth, and the bar is filled with grawlix (punctuation indicating profanity).

Drinkslump linkdump (permalink)

It's linkdump time, in which I skillfully weave together all the links that I was too busy to cram into the week's newsletter issues. Here's the previous 31 (!) installments:

https://pluralistic.net/tag/linkdump/

This week's linkdump comes with a great excuse: I was off at the staff retreat for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, for intensive policy work (and a lot of team-bonding socializing – I karaoked "The Piano Has Been Drinking") with my colleagues on the front lines of the battle to disenshittify the internet. If you'd like to join that fight, here's a chance to do so: we're hiring a staff technologist!

https://www.paycomonline.net/v4/ats/web.php/jobs?clientkey=28620672D234BF368306CEB4A2746667

Of course, you don't have to work for EFF to make disenshittificatory tech. "Just a QR Code" is a new site that generates QR codes, operating entirely in your browser, without transmitting any data to a server or trying to cram ads into your eyeballs. The fact that it runs entirely in-browser means you can save this webpage and work with an offline copy to generate QR codes forever – even if the site goes down:

https://justaqrcode.com/

One of the best, longest-tenured gatherings of anti-enshittification technologists is HOPE, the Hackers On Planet Earth con spawned by 2600: The Hacker Quarterly. After getting evicted from their traditional digs at the Hotel Pennsylvania (which was bought by a billionaire who turned it into a crater and then lost interest), HOPE had to find new digs. The new location, St John's University in Queens, is fantastic, and the last event was so great they decided to go from biennial to annual:

https://hope.net/

But then, Trump hit. HOPE draws a sizable cohort of international attendees and speakers, and most of these people have decided that attending a genuinely fantastic hacker con isn't worth risk being sent to a Salvadoran slave-labor camp by a surly border guard. As a result, HOPE's numbers are dangerously low:

https://www.404media.co/hacker-conference-hope-says-fewer-people-buying-tickets-because-u-s-immigration-crackdown/

Please consider attending! HOPE is consistently one of the best events I've attended. The vibes are impeccable and the information is deep, gnarly and fantastic, and has a long, long track record of just being great.

Another beloved, long-running, print based institution is The Onion, which got a new lease on life when former disinformation reporter Ben Collins bought the site after quitting NBC, which had censured him for being too mean to Elon Musk:

https://variety.com/2022/tv/news/nbc-news-ben-collins-twitter-elon-musk-1235463474/

Having been burned by corporate journalistic cowardice, Collins decided to revive The Onion's tradition of merciless, trenchant parody. He also revived The Onion's tradition of showing up in the world as a printed artifact, spraying gallons of ink onto tons of vegetable pulp and shipping the result to mailboxes around the world (including mine):

https://membership.theonion.com/

Collins sat down for a long interview with Vanity Fair's Chris Murphy that is full of so many excellent moments and quips that I actually cheered aloud while reading it, more than once!

https://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/story/the-onions-ben-collins-knows-how-to-save-media

Collins believes he saved The Onion from "AI death," and I think he's right. Instead, he's produced a site that fights fascism using one of history's most reliable methods, satire: "There’s nothing fascists hate more than getting truly ripped on." Collins points out something interesting about Trump: "He never laughs…He’s funny in the sense that callous people can be particularly biting, but he’s not funny."

Here's his advice to other would-be media barons: "Kowtowing to power— your job is not that, nobody fucking wants that."

Among other things, Collins used The Onion to acquire Alex Jones's Infowars out of bankruptcy, only to have far-right legal shenanigans interrupt the hostile takeover (it's still in the courts).

(Paywall-busting version here:)

https://archive.is/aV2av

Another funny – but much angrier – independent media voice is Ed Zitron, one of the best ranters in technology. Ed's motto is "I hate them for what they did to the computer," a phrase I like so much I used it as the epigraph for my next book. Ed's just published the longest-ever post on his excellent "Where's Your Ed At?" newsletter, called "The Era of the Business Idiot":

https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-era-of-the-business-idiot/

In this post, Ed tried to answer the burning question, "Why are these objectively very stupid people given so much power over so much capital, and the lives of so many of us?" He lashes out at everyone – MBA programs, sociopathic Jack Welch-alikes, the supine press, and more. And he coins a truly excellent epithet for one of our most cherished business idiots, Open AI CEO Sam Altman:

SLOPPENHEIMER.

I love Ed's work, which focuses extensively on the internal ideological and personal traits of business leaders. But I think that any study of the enshittocene – and any effective opposition to enshittification – needs to start with policy, the legal arrangements that create an enshittogenic environment that allow the business idiots to wreak havoc without the constraints of competition, regulation, an empowered workforce or technological countermeasures.

In the EU, the epicenter of enshittogenesis is Ireland, a tax haven that has attracted the largest and worst American tech companies who maintain the fiction that they are based in Eire. But these companies are hardly loyal to Dublin: any company footloose enough to pretend that it's Irish this week can pretend to be Maltese, Luxembourgeois, Cypriot or Dutch next week. To keep those companies from upping sticks, Ireland must not only offer them criminally favorable tax treatment, they have to slow walk or ignore all regulations that discipline the enshittificatory impulses of Big Tech:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/05/15/finnegans-snooze/#dirty-old-town

Writing in Politico, Eoin Drea lays out the ways that Ireland is serving Trump's agenda to protect US Big Tech from EU regulators:

https://www.politico.eu/article/ireland-donald-trump-fines-white-house-washington-uk/

In particular, Drea identifies the risk that Ireland will shelter US companies from enforcement of the Digital Markets Act, the EU's "crowning legislative jewel." Ireland's PM has been carrying water for Trump, pressuring the EU to "considered and measured" in its response to Trump's aggression; he's also vowed to "resist" the EU's digital taxes. Drea argues that centralizing enforcement of EU tech regulation in Brussels and the federal courts will relieve Ireland of the pressure to defend Trump's policies, since they will no longer be in a position to protect tech companies from Europe's rules.

When it comes to flouting EU rules, of the most egregious "Irish" tech offenders is Meta. In a long article for Ars Technica, Ashley Belanger looks at Zuckerberg's recent statements about Facebook's future as a place where lonely people, having been alienated from their actual friends and families by a system that downranks posts from your social network to create space for ads and boosted posts, befriend AI chatbots instead:

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2025/05/meta-hypes-ai-friends-as-social-medias-future-but-users-want-real-connections/

I contributed a little to Belanger's excellent reporting, discussing my work with EFF on what an interoperable Facebook might look like, and how it might set Facebook's prisoners free:

https://www.eff.org/interoperablefacebook

Mark Zuckerberg's transformation from a historically awful person to a historically monstrous person has been really something to see. In this week's Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal webtoon, Zach Wienersmith scores a body-blow on Zuck that was so perfect it made me bark with laughter:

https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/gently

I firmly believe that Zuckerberg's transformation isn't due to the decay of his character. I think Zuck was always a creep, as any reader of Sarah Wynn-Williams's tell-all Facebook memoir Careless People can attest:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/04/23/zuckerstreisand/#zdgaf

Rather, I think the collapse of the internet into what Tom Eastman calls "five giant websites filled with screenshots of the other four" relieved Zuck of his nagging fear that a competitor would poach his users if he abused them too much. This is the enshittogenic environment at work – when we let firms form cartels, their owners become oligarchs.

Tech is far from the only cartel. In publishing, we only have five major publishers left, and the largest, Bertelsmann, dwarfs the other four. It's hard to overstate how gigantic Bertelsmann is, but here's a trenchant example: Bertelsmann owns Penguin-Random House, and PRH has publishing deals with five sitting Supreme Court justices. This meant that a majority of the court had to recuse itself from hearing a plagiarism case involving a Ta-Nehisi Coates book. It's the first time a mass-recusal has scuppered a Supreme Court case since 1945, when the majority of justices disclosed that they were stockholders in the Alcoa, a monopolist:

https://www.newsweek.com/five-supreme-court-justices-sit-out-case-rare-move-2074666

Oligarchs are intrinsically enshittogenic. Oligarchs use their money and power to support strongmen who will trade money for government action, like Donald Trump, who offered a private dinner for major holders of his TRUMP shitcoin. The announcement prompted a ferocious bidding war among foreign agents and convicted criminals to buy up Trumpcoins and get a seat at the table:

https://www.citationneeded.news/trump-memecoin-dinner-guests/

Trump defenders claimed that the president was just rewarding people who understood the value of his coin, and not selling influence at all. Apparently, the attendees didn't get the memo, with many of them dumping their Trumpcoins the instant they were added to the guest-list:

https://protos.com/trump-token-15-since-dinner-as-40-of-guests-dump-by-dessert/

Joke's on them, though: Trump stiffed them! He showed up, gave a 15 minute speech (practically a haiku by Trump's normal standard of bloviation), then climbed into a helicopter and flew away, hundreds of millions of dollars richer thanks to the suckers left to their rubber chicken banquet:

https://link.nymag.com/view/640f640416f22cc291043cebntiap.15g1/0da0f946

Those specific oligarchs didn't get a chance to petition Trump to enact their favored policies, but Trump is still delivering for oligarchs. The "Big Beautiful Bill" that was passed in the dead of night last week included a whole raft of "sleeper" provisions, each worse than the last, as enumerated by The American Prospect's Robert Kuttner:

https://prospect.org/blogs-and-newsletters/tap/2025-05-23-ten-sneaky-sleeper-provisions-trumps-big-beautiful-bill/

Among these:

  • taking away the courts' ability to use federal funds to hold government officials in contempt;

  • $45 billion for immigration gulags, to be built by Trump's favorite beltway bandits;

  • a nonprofit killer that lets the president cancel the nonprofit status of any org that challenges him (this died earlier last week and was revived in the "Big Beautiful Bill");

  • doubling the threshold for estate taxes, so a couple can leave $30m to their heirs tax-free, meaning that only 0.8% of US households will face any estate tax;

  • gutting the child tax credit, taking away support from 4.5m children of taxpaying parents who lack a Social Security Number and making millions more ineligible;

  • cutting health coverage for millions of people dependent on Obamacare; and

  • getting rid of the excise tax on gun silencers.

We're heading into some dark times indeed. It can be hard to imagine things ever getting better, but there was one author who consistently imagined bold, utopian, audacious far futures: Iain M. Banks, whose "Culture" series remain one of the greatest science fiction visions ever published:

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

Banks's books are available in cheap paperbacks, and there's no shortage of used copies, but if you're looking to get a truly gorgeous Banks volume, the Folio Society has you covered, with a new, slipcased edition of Use of Weapons:

https://www.foliosociety.com/usa/use-of-weapons.html

I love Folio books and often give them as Christmas gifts to the people who matter most to me on my list. This one comes with seven full-page illustrations by Dániel Taylor.

In other publishing news, I got a care-package from my publisher this week: a box of advance review copies of my next book, Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It, which Farrar, Straus and Giroux will publish next October:

https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374619329/enshittification/

I'm very proud of how this one came out as a book, but I'm just as excited by how gorgeous this book is as an artifact:

https://www.flickr.com/photos/doctorow/54540006021/

I'm going into the studio to record the audiobook in August, and there's a graphic novel and documentary in the offing.


A Wayback Machine banner.

Object permanence (permalink)

#20yrsago Pat York: dear friend, writer, Boing Boing guestblogger, RIP https://memex.craphound.com/2005/05/22/pat-york-dear-friend-writer-boing-boing-guestblogger-rip/

#20yrsago Alan Moore tells DC Comics to get bent https://web.archive.org/web/20050527220922/http://www.comicbookresources.com/columns/index.cgi?column=litg&article=2153

#20yrsago Thurl Ravenscroft, RIP: voice of Haunted Mansion and Grinch song, Tony the Tiger https://web.archive.org/web/20050525220256/https://www.newsfromme.com/archives/2005_05_23.html#009891

#20yrsago Dutch mayor wants to ban hacker con https://web.archive.org/web/20050525160551/https://www.whatthehack.org/news/index_html

#15yrsago Ireland’s largest ISP begins disconnecting users who are accused of piracy https://web.archive.org/web/20100605170505/https://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/frontpage/2010/0524/1224271013389.html

#15yrsago Mark Twain’s autobiography to be finally published, 100 years after his death https://www.the-independent.com/arts-entertainment/books/news/after-keeping-us-waiting-for-a-century-mark-twain-will-finally-reveal-all-1980695.html

#15yrsago Igor Stravinsky, arrested for “tampering” with the Star Spangled Banner, 1940 https://web.archive.org/web/20100526120708/http://dcmusicaviva.blogspot.com/2009/03/stravinsky-mugshot.html

#15yrsago Mechanical irising peephole mechanism https://www.talkshopbot.com/forum/showthread.php?795-More-mechanical-wooden-silliness

#15yrsago InfoLadies of Bangladesh revolutionize rural life https://www.theguardian.com/journalismcompetition/professional-two-wheel-triumph

#15yrsago Google and Viacom blend high-profile copyright suits with extreme profanity, as nature intended https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2010/05/f-those-mother-f-ers-youtubeviacom-lawsuit-gets-dirty/

#15yrsago Google offers encrypted search https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2010/05/google-launches-encrypted-search

#15yrsago The Boneshaker: magic, latter-day Bradburian novel for young adults https://memex.craphound.com/2010/05/21/the-boneshaker-magic-latter-day-bradburian-novel-for-young-adults/

#15yrsago Scientology raid uncovers dossiers on local “enemies”: sexual habits, health info, political opinions https://www.ansa.it/web/notizie/rubriche/english/2010/05/20/visualizza_new.html_1794804082.html

#15yrsago Cracked vs. RIAA damages https://web.archive.org/web/20100524024915/http://www.cracked.com/funny-4003-the-pirate-bay/

#10yrsago NSA wanted to hack the Android store https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/spy-agencies-target-mobile-phones-app-stores-to-implant-spyware-1.3076546

#10yrsago GM says you don’t own your car, you just license it https://web.archive.org/web/20150522003554/https://consumerist.com/2015/05/20/gm-that-car-you-bought-were-really-the-ones-who-own-it/

#10yrsago Today’s terrifying Web security vulnerability, courtesy of the 1990s crypto wars https://memex.craphound.com/2015/05/21/todays-terrifying-web-security-vulnerability-courtesy-of-the-1990s-crypto-wars/

#10yrsago Mark Zuckerberg just dropped another $100M to protect his privacy https://slate.com/business/2015/05/tech-billionaires-and-privacy-why-facebook-s-mark-zuckerberg-is-spending-millions-on-a-private-island.html

#10yrsago Paper on changing peoples’ minds about marriage equality retracted https://retractionwatch.com/2015/05/20/author-retracts-study-of-changing-minds-on-same-sex-marriage-after-colleague-admits-data-were-faked/

#10yrsago The Man Who Sold The Moon https://memex.craphound.com/2015/05/22/the-man-who-sold-the-moon/

#10yrsago Popehat on depression https://web.archive.org/web/20150524013923/http://popehat.com/2015/05/21/happy-to-be-here/

#10yrsago An Internet of Things that act like red-light cameras https://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2015/05/the-evil-business-plan-of-evil.html

#10yrsago danah boyd explains student privacy bills https://medium.com/message/which-students-get-to-have-privacy-e9773f9a064

#10yrsago Hedge funds buy swathes of foreclosed subprimes, force up rents, float rent-bonds https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2014/02/blackstone-rental-homes-bundled-derivatives/

#10yrsago Hacktivist sees too much, FBI lock him up on child-porn charges, produce no evidence https://www.newsweek.com/2015/05/29/porn-run-333599.html

#5yrsago Casio censors calculator modder's Github project https://pluralistic.net/2020/05/23/penguin-farts/#copyfraud

#5yrsago Covid apps and false positives https://pluralistic.net/2020/05/23/penguin-farts/#false-alarms

#5yrsago Physical BLINK tag https://pluralistic.net/2020/05/22/crisis-for-thee-not-me/#html-follies

#5yrsago Mum uses GDPR to force Gran to take down pics https://pluralistic.net/2020/05/22/crisis-for-thee-not-me/#family-feud

#5yrsago Coronavirus has made the super-rich MUCH richer https://pluralistic.net/2020/05/22/crisis-for-thee-not-me/#what-crisis

#5yrsago Copyright bots are slaughtering classical musicians' performances https://pluralistic.net/2020/05/22/crisis-for-thee-not-me/#filternet

#5yrsago Oh Joy Sex Toy's new teen sex-ed book https://pluralistic.net/2020/05/22/crisis-for-thee-not-me/#ojst

#5yrsago How spy agencies targeted Snowden journalists https://pluralistic.net/2020/05/21/profitable-butchers/#sources-and-methods

#5yrsago Monopolies killed corporate R&D https://pluralistic.net/2020/05/21/profitable-butchers/#all-d

#5yrsago Spotify's trying to kill podcasting https://pluralistic.net/2020/05/21/profitable-butchers/#rogan-monopolist

#5yrsago Black Americans' covid mortality is 2.5X white mortality https://pluralistic.net/2020/05/21/profitable-butchers/#ethnic-cleansing

#5yrsago On Madame Leota's side-table https://pluralistic.net/2020/05/21/profitable-butchers/#details-details

#5yrsago Private equity's healthcare playbook is terrifying https://pluralistic.net/2020/05/21/profitable-butchers/#looted

#5yrsago Patent troll sues ventilator makers https://pluralistic.net/2020/05/21/profitable-butchers/#ip-edge

#5yrsago The Lost Cause and MMT https://pluralistic.net/2020/05/21/profitable-butchers/#byebye-falc

#5yrsago Walt's grandson calls for Disney execs' bonuses to be canceled https://pluralistic.net/2020/05/21/profitable-butchers/#brad-lund

#1yrago Linkrot https://pluralistic.net/2024/05/21/noway-back-machine/#pew-pew-pew

#1yrago How finfluencers destroyed the housing and lives of thousands of people https://pluralistic.net/2024/05/22/koteswar-jay-gajavelli/#if-you-ever-go-to-houston

#1yrago Red Lobster was killed by private equity, not Endless Shrimp https://pluralistic.net/2024/05/23/spineless/#invertebrates

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)

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

  • 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


Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources: Hacker News (https://news.ycombinator.com/), Kottke (http://kottke.org/), Tim Harford (https://timharford.com/), Super Punch (https://www.superpunch.net/), Jamie Boyle (https://www.thepublicdomain.org/).

Currently writing:

  • Enshittification: a nonfiction book about platform decay for Farrar, Straus, Giroux. Status: second pass edit underway (readaloud)

  • 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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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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