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 like 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

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

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