Today's links I told you so: Microsoft is too big to live. Hey look at this: Delights to delectate. Object permanence: Canada's corrupt copyright czar; Universal Music CEO v iPod owners; Berlusconi x neo-fascists; Balancing 3,118 coins on a dime; All for-profit healthcare is a problem. Upcoming appearances: Folkestone, Oxford, Sheffield, Virtual, Oxford, Santa Barbara, Montreal. Recent appearances: Where I've been. Latest books: You keep readin' em, I'll keep writin' 'em. Upcoming books: Like I said, I'll keep writin' 'em. Colophon: All the rest. I told you so (permalink) Here's the one weird trick that made it possible for monopolies to conquer the world: the antitrust bar changed the rules so that it was impossible to prove whether a company had formed an illegal monopoly, and then these rules meant that monopolies were almost never challenged, and what challenges did arise were usually unsuccessful, and even the successful challenges resulted in meaningless "penalties" that left monopolists unscathed. Every policy has three important dimensions: substance, scope and administrability: "Substance" is what the policy actually says. For example, the basic substance of copyright law is, "You can't display, transmit or reproduce a copyrighted work without permission." "Scope" is when the policy gets applied. When copyright law was formulated, the key activities it regulated all required a bunch of expensive industrial equipment. Every boo

Today's links Uber's labor crash: Replacing serfs with robots just doesn't pencil out. Hey look at this: Delights to delectate. Object permanence: Asimov inspired Al Qaeda; PATRIOT Act scares Canadian customers off US servers; EFF v Trump; Internet infrastructure is unsupported and failing; Nominative determinism debunked; How to fight Trump; Burglars v burglary; NYT said Hitler was only kidding; Folky Song Funny Note; Surviving autocracy; Corporate criminals. Upcoming appearances: Vancouver, Folkestone, Oxford, Sheffield, Virtual, Oxford, Santa Barbara, Montreal. Recent appearances: Where I've been. Latest books: You keep readin' em, I'll keep writin' 'em. Upcoming books: Like I said, I'll keep writin' 'em. Colophon: All the rest. Uber's labor crash (permalink) There's a specific kind of lie that tech bosses tell: the "premature truth." That's a lie that they excuse by saying it'll come true soon: https://pluralistic.net/2024/12/04/its-not-a-lie/#its-a-premature-truth Elon Musk is the world's most enthusiastic teller of these lies. That's not surprising: any kind of radical promise about the automotive sector has a 90% chance of being this kind of bullshit. Musk can barely mention the subject of transportation without lying his face off: from "full self-driving" to "hyperloops" to "tunnels" to "flying cars," Musk is a fountain of extremely untrue "premature truths": https://karlbode.com/musks-fake-flying-car-and-ceo-said-a-thing-

Today's links The EU should go big and hard over border IT failure: Sometimes you have to execute an IT contractor to encourage the others. Hey look at this: Delights to delectate. Object permanence: Toothpick sculptures; McRib as a commodities volatility hedge; Hitler's British passport; Why we get tech wrong; France jails spying EDF execs; SF v Trump; Clinton's data-driven ground game sucked; Risk compensation sucks; "Flexible labor" is risk compensation. Upcoming appearances: Vancouver, Folkestone, Oxford, Sheffield, Virtual, Oxford, Santa Barbara, Montreal. Recent appearances: Where I've been. Latest books: You keep readin' em, I'll keep writin' 'em. Upcoming books: Like I said, I'll keep writin' 'em. Colophon: All the rest. The EU should go big and hard over border IT failure (permalink) If the EU has a future as a political project, it will have to be as a living, breathing repudiation of Ronald Reagan's maxim that "The nine most terrifying words are 'I'm from the government and I'm here to help.'" In other words, the EU's future depends on its ability to publicly perform competence and capacity. The EU is a technocratic project, and the one trait technocrats must show is undeniable technical competence. This is the secret of Zohran Mamdani's administration: being seen in public, constantly fixing things that are broken, and making things that work even better: https://www.nyc.gov/conten

Today's links America cannot undo Trumpism: The only way out is through. Hey look at this: Delights to delectate. Object permanence: Bruces x Pokemon; Rich countries and WIPO conspire to kill developement agenda; Wired photos go CC; "Mortality Bridge"; Drones over Disney; CBC v podcast apps; Realtor x election eschatology; Right-clicker mentality; "Victories Greater Than Death"; Facebook's fraud files; Zune v Universal; Ben and Jerry's x OWS; Nudging is bunk; History of Chinese sf; How Audi cheated; Trump runs the surveillance state; Stockholm v interop. Upcoming appearances: Courtenay, Vancouver, Folkestone, Oxford, Sheffield, Virtual, Oxford, Santa Barbara, Montreal. Recent appearances: Where I've been. Latest books: You keep readin' em, I'll keep writin' 'em. Upcoming books: Like I said, I'll keep writin' 'em. Colophon: All the rest. America cannot undo Trumpism (permalink) True Carneyism has never been tried. When Canadian PM Mark Carney traveled to Davos to declare a "rupture" in the old order (and admit that this old order was never that great to begin with) he told us that there was no going back from Trumpism. The only way out of Trumpism was through: https://www.weforum.org/stories/forum-institutional/davos-2026-special-address-by-mark-carney-prime-minister-of-canada/ This is easy to say, but hard to do. If the old order is over, then we will never again be able to trust America to serve as the world's cop, bank

Today's links JS Tan and Clarissa Redwine's "Against Tech Oligarchy": Inventing a new labor playbook for a unique and powerful industry. Hey look at this: Delights to delectate. Object permanence: EMI x Gnutella; ETCON photos; Piracy loss claims are "self-serving hyperbole"; Shareholder supremacy let Google conquer and enshittify the world; Cat causes kernel panic; HK erupts; National Guard x 1 weed plant; Enshittification of labor. Upcoming appearances: Kilkenny, Courtenay, Vancouver, Folkestone, Oxford, Sheffield, Virtual, Oxford, Santa Barbara, Montreal. Recent appearances: Where I've been. Latest books: You keep readin' em, I'll keep writin' 'em. Upcoming books: Like I said, I'll keep writin' 'em. Colophon: All the rest. JS Tan and Clarissa Redwine's "Against Tech Oligarchy" (permalink) JS Tan and Clarissa Redwine are veterans of a string of hard-fought unionization drives at tech workplaces that started with some astounding successes but ran up against ferocious resistance in the second Trump term; their book about tech labor, Against Tech Oligarchy, is a superb analysis of the challenges and potential for tech labor organizing: https://againsttecholigarchy.com/ For decades, tech workers enjoyed extraordinary power, despite the fact that virtually no tech workers were in unions. That's because tech workers were both extremely valuable to their employers (each engineer hired by a Silicon Val

Today's links Without CDA 230, Facebook will own the internet forever: Small, well-managed online communities are especially vulnerable to legal threats. Hey look at this: Delights to delectate. Object permanence: "Perfect Thing"; Recruiters tell students Iraq war is over; Toothpick Final Fantasy replicas; "Eleanor & Park"; Voter Suppression Trail; "Science Comics Computers." Upcoming appearances: Kilkenny, Courtenay, Vancouver, Folkestone, Oxford, Sheffield, Virtual, Oxford, Montreal. Recent appearances: Where I've been. Latest books: You keep readin' em, I'll keep writin' 'em. Upcoming books: Like I said, I'll keep writin' 'em. Colophon: All the rest. Without CDA 230, Facebook will own the internet forever (permalink) The road to hell is paved with the depraved indifference to badly considered tech policy. The internet is one of those charismatic hyperobjects that wraps around our lives in myriad ways, so tech policy changes have a big blast radius. This isn't a counsel of despair. I firmly believe that we can make tech policy, and furthermore, that we must, but that policy has to be crafted in a way that's mindful of collateral damage. Take scraping. Most creative workers are rightly furious at the palpable glee of tech bosses, who want to take everything we've made in order to train models whose express purpose is to destroy our livelihoods and transfer our wages to AI companies and the med

Today's links The AI fatfinger economy has come for my receipts app: Every heretofore useful button now summons a useless AI genie. Hey look at this: Delights to delectate. Object permanence: Army Times v Rumsfeld; RIAA v soccer mom; Skateboard truck table; Internet scare-story prof won't show her workings; IoT botnet v Liberia; BLM v TPP. Upcoming appearances: Kilkenny, Courtenay, Vancouver, Folkestone, Oxford, Sheffield, Virtual, Oxford, Montreal. Recent appearances: Where I've been. Latest books: You keep readin' em, I'll keep writin' 'em. Upcoming books: Like I said, I'll keep writin' 'em. Colophon: All the rest. The AI fatfinger economy has come for my receipts app (permalink) "AI is being shoved down our throats" can mean any of several things. It can mean that our bosses are demanding that we use AI in reckless or nonsensical ways on the job: https://www.404media.co/manifestos-fear-and-loser-thinking-inside-protons-ai-reckoning/ It can mean that Elon Musk and the NASDAQ have colluded to force ordinary retirement savers to bail out his emirati and tech oligarch buddies: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/06/05/technology/spacex-indexes-401k.html These are arguably the most important ways in which AI is shoved down our throats, but the most visible form of conscription into the number-go-up AI project is happening at the user interface level. This UI fuckery predates AI. For more than a decade, te

Today's links Separable: AI makes us deal with paintings without painters, words without writers and mathematics without mathematicians. Hey look at this: Delights to delectate. Object permanence: Haircase; There's no copyright policy; Sole and despotic dominion; Trump x fraud; Brexit requires an act of Parliament; Official Air Travel Replacement Knives; UK hospitals v malware. Upcoming appearances: Kilkenny, Courtenay, Vancouver, Folkestone, Oxford, Sheffield, Virtual, Oxford, Montreal. Recent appearances: Where I've been. Latest books: You keep readin' em, I'll keep writin' 'em. Upcoming books: Like I said, I'll keep writin' 'em. Colophon: All the rest. Separable (permalink) Long before the Turing Test, there was the touring Edison Test: from 1915 to 1925, the scoundrel Thomas Edison put on a traveling show for his phonograph machine, touring venues around the USA. Edison set live performers and an Edison phonograph playing behind closed curtains that would be periodically pulled aside to reveal that the music the audience had taken to be live performance was actually a record player: https://www.tomedison.org/blog/edisons-tone-tests Now, if you've ever heard an Edison phonograph, this might seem like yet another tale in which old-timey people are revealed to be credulous yokels. You would never mistake one of those scratchy, hissing recordings for a live performance: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=96gIIFmEjY4 And indeed you wouldn't, b

Today's links Autodoxing: The road to hell is paved with badly thought-through tech policy. Hey look at this: Delights to delectate. Object permanence: Shakespeare programming language; DeCSS is "pure speech"; Blue Coat sold surveillance tools to Syrian secret police; "Extraordinary Catalog of Peculiar Inventions"; Cable prices rose at double the rate of inflation for 20 years; Supercuts; Antivax x Trump. Upcoming appearances: Kilkenny, Courtenay, Vancouver, Folkestone, Oxford, Sheffield, Virtual, Oxford, Montreal. Recent appearances: Where I've been. Latest books: You keep readin' em, I'll keep writin' 'em. Upcoming books: Like I said, I'll keep writin' 'em. Colophon: All the rest. Autodoxing (permalink) After 25 years of fighting for human rights amid the wreckage of bad tech policy, I'm here to tell you that the road to hell is paved with badly thought-through tech policy. The most galling thing about this wreckage is that it was both foreseeable and foreseen. Back when Sun Microsystems CEO Scott McNealy was telling the world "Privacy is dead, get over it," digital rights advocates were saying, "Not only are digital tools pretty dang good at helping you protect your privacy, but a society-wide abolition of privacy sets us up for infinite harms long into the future": https://pluralistic.net/2025/10/31/losing-the-crypto-wars/#surveillance-monopolism It wasn't just business leaders who hated privacy, it was also our political classes. Bil

Today's links Formalities: When it comes to AI, the Copyright Office is restoring copyright to its proper status, as something you have to work to get. Hey look at this: Delights to delectate. Object permanence: GWB x martial law; Li'l Sparky; Dueling Starbuckses; Microsoft buys Skype (does fuckery); Bieber v SOPA; SOPA is the worst; Snowden x rule of law; "Laserwriter II"; Russia v DST; Class war funnies; Minnesota's miracle; Icelandic women v sexism; Image analogies; Aussie DMCA ratfucked; "Authorised Domain"; Sales tax is regressive; Prince Charles's secret veto; Wells Fargo blackballed workers for refusing to crime; Poe read by Vincent Price and Basil Rathbone; Put it back!; The internet was made for privacy. Upcoming appearances: Kilkenny, Courtenay, Vancouver, Folkestone, Oxford, Sheffield, Virtual, Oxford, Montreal. Recent appearances: Where I've been. Latest books: You keep readin' em, I'll keep writin' 'em. Upcoming books: Like I said, I'll keep writin' 'em. Colophon: All the rest. Formalities (permalink) It's not often that I find myself on the same side as the US Copyright Office. In fact, I think this is the first time in 25 years that I've found myself cheering on the office's official actions as good for art and good for free expression, taking the side of creative workers over our bosses. The source of our miraculous accord: the US Copyright Office's position on AI. The CO has taken the (entirely correct) position that cop

Today's links Agents vs ecommerce: Opacity is a feature, not a bug. Hey look at this: Delights to delectate. Object permanence: Aibo hacking; Calculator watches; What hath Occupy wrought; Dr Seuss v Trek parody; "Blacks for Trump" x murder-cults; "9 Times My Work Has Been Ripped Off." Upcoming appearances: Vienna, Kilkenny, Courtenay, Vancouver, Folkestone, Oxford, Sheffield, Virtual, Oxford, Montreal. Recent appearances: Where I've been. Latest books: You keep readin' em, I'll keep writin' 'em. Upcoming books: Like I said, I'll keep writin' 'em. Colophon: All the rest. Agents vs ecommerce (permalink) The first widely read piece of tech criticism I ever wrote was "Metacrap: Putting the torch to the seven strawmen of the meta-utopia," a response to the underlying philosophy of the "Semantic Web" that I published in 2001: https://people.well.com/user/doctorow/metacrap.htm The piece holds up surprisingly well today (if I do say so myself), and not just for its criticism of the ontological incoherence of "web semantics." The most relevant concept I develop in that piece is a criticism of any plan that starts with "first, everyone else in the world just needs to set aside their needs and advantages in favor of my priorities, and then my plan will work." This is especially relevant today in the context of "agentic AI." When this idea was first mooted, the big idea was that you could instruct a chatbot to venture out onto the public, un

Today's links History is something you do: Not something that happens to you. Hey look at this: Delights to delectate. Object permanence: Occupy Tents are speech; Piagram; SOPA; "I'm Rob Fucking Ford"; Blocking all porn in the UK; Pirates rule Iceland; Shake Shack v shitting to death. Upcoming appearances: Vienna, Kilkenny, Courtenay, Vancouver, Oxford, Sheffield, Virtual, Oxford, Montreal. Recent appearances: Where I've been. Latest books: You keep readin' em, I'll keep writin' 'em. Upcoming books: Like I said, I'll keep writin' 'em. Colophon: All the rest. History is something you do (permalink) Prediction is hard. Especially about the future. That Yogi Berra gem proves that you don't have to be a science fiction writer to get irritated with people insisting that you must know what's going to happen tomorrow, but (as a sf writer), I can tell you that this is one of our main occupational hazards. Obviously, this is a self-inflicted injury. Our genre is full of big names who self-mythologized as scientific Nostradamuses. From the "future history" bar-charts in Heinlein's books (I was once on a panel with Robert Silverberg where he referred to RAH as "Robert A Timeline") to the McGuffin of Asimov's Foundation series: a "scientific" discipline that could predict the trajectory of human civilization for millennia into the future. But me, I find the prospect of predicting the future incredibly dismal - even offensive. A pre

Today's links Sovereign citizens, but for news: By reading the LA Times, you agree" Hey look at this: Delights to delectate. Object permanence: Patenting tax dodges; 6-word sf; Newscorp shareholders v Murdoch; Ancient German ophthalmology cult; Trolley problem is stupid; Trump's influence peddling to Chinese millionaire; Al Franken v binding arbitration; Yoga pants spite parade; Dems' secret Congressional committee; RIAA v your PC; "Going Under"; "Machine Man"; Aging goths; "Everfair"; Kremlin will destabilize Ukraine; FCC fronts for Big Cable; Straight Outta Vagina; Remixed TED Talk about remixing; Authoritarian debt. Upcoming appearances: Vienna, Kilkenny, Courtenay, Vancouver, Oxford, Sheffield, Virtual, Oxford, Montreal. Recent appearances: Where I've been. Latest books: You keep readin' em, I'll keep writin' 'em. Upcoming books: Like I said, I'll keep writin' 'em. Colophon: All the rest. Sovereign citizens, but for news (permalink) When it comes to terrible practices by website operators, it takes a lot to shock me. I literally wrote the book on the subject. But last night, I encountered a piece of genuinely appalling fuckery and I can't get it out of my head, because it's such a perfect storm of outrageous conduct and institutional decay. It happened when I followed a link to an LA Times article. Having lived in LA three times (and having been an Angeleno for a decade and counting this time around) I generall

Today's links Critique and writing: The most important part of a writing workshop is trying to fix other people's stories. Hey look at this: Delights to delectate. Object permanence: USPS nukes the mail; Enron Explorer; "Scored"; UAE's international hacker legion; NZ provides hacking tools to torturers; Truecrypt insecure; The Traitorous Eight. Upcoming appearances: Vancouver, Ottawa, Vienna, Kilkenny, Courtenay, Vancouver, Oxford, Sheffield, Virtual, Oxford, Montreal. Recent appearances: Where I've been. Latest books: You keep readin' em, I'll keep writin' 'em. Upcoming books: Like I said, I'll keep writin' 'em. Colophon: All the rest. Critique and writing (permalink) Through my own writing life, nothing has done more to improve my writing than diligent participation in peer-based workshops; that's where a group of writers, all at about the same stage in their artistic development, gather to read one another's work and offer feedback specifically aimed at improving each other's stories. This is a deceptively simple exercise, and the reasons it works so well are quite counter-intuitive. The most obvious benefit is the way that a workshop encourages you to write at all. When you're at the start of your writing career, you are almost totally reliant upon your own internal self-discipline to keep producing. Acquiring that self-discipline is infinitely valuable, but it's also incredibly hard. Being part of a group of writers who exp

Today's links Adversarial interoperability is a team sport: Vibe-coded jailbreaks are fun, but don't solve the problem. Hey look at this: Delights to delectate. Object permanence: Labour Whip's pro-Iraq war threats; LoC's emulators; Kevin Mitnick plays CIA stooge; ICE: "The warrant is coming out of my balls"; WIPO's secret trademark meeting; Linking isn't libel (in Canada); Make: singing busts; Tory minister kills Turing's Law; Trump hotels rebrand as "Scion". Upcoming appearances: Vancouver, Ottawa, Vienna, Kilkenny, Courtenay, Vancouver, Oxford, Sheffield, Virtual, Oxford, Montreal. Recent appearances: Where I've been. Latest books: You keep readin' em, I'll keep writin' 'em. Upcoming books: Like I said, I'll keep writin' 'em. Colophon: All the rest. Adversarial interoperability is a team sport (permalink) Enshittification is particularly galling because (in theory, at least), digital technology should be really hard to enshittify. That's because the only digital computer we know how to build is the "Turing-complete, universal von Neumann machine," which is to say, a calculating engine capable of computing every valid program. In some deep, important, foundational sense, every computer is the same as every other computer. Sure, they vary in terms of speed, storage and RAM, but given enough time and electricity, every computer can run every program. This has profound implications for enshittification. Sa

Today's links The death of history's most successful publisher: Google has a scorching case of "main character syndrome." Hey look at this: Delights to delectate. Object permanence: Civil War x 4,400 ceramic cats; Okaysellers; Frankenstein hat; Clockwork Fagin; Tracking trackers; "Fever Beach." Upcoming appearances: Victoria, Vancouver, Ottawa, Vienna, Kilkenny, Couretnay, Vancouver, Oxford, Sheffield, Virtual, Oxford, Montreal. Recent appearances: Where I've been. Latest books: You keep readin' em, I'll keep writin' 'em. Upcoming books: Like I said, I'll keep writin' 'em. Colophon: All the rest. The death of history's most successful publisher (permalink) I published my first story in 1988, when I was 17 years old. Today, at 55, I've published more than 30 books, with three more coming in the next year or so. In the intervening years, I've spent a lot of time thinking and talking about publishing. I've had plenty of opportunity to reflect on publishing: I've been a bookseller and worked in libraries, I wrote a column for Publishers Weekly, self-published a few books of my own, published the first-ever book licensed under Creative Commons, and broke several Kickstarter records for audiobook projects. But most of all, I've worked with publishing professionals: publicists, marketing directors, operations people, copyeditors, and, above all, editors. My first novel editor was the magnificent Patrick Niel