loading . . . Pluralistic: Ideas Lying Around (03 Mar 2025)
# Today's links
* Ideas Lying Around: Trumpism is our oil crisis.
* Hey look at this: Delights to delectate.
* Object permanence: 2005, 2010, 2015, 2020
* Upcoming appearances: Where to find me.
* Recent appearances: Where I've been.
* Latest books: You keep readin' em, I'll keep writin' 'em.
* Upcoming books: Like I said, I'll keep writin' 'em.
* Colophon: All the rest.
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# Ideas Lying Around (permalink)
I get a special pleasure from citing Milton Friedman. I like to imagine that as I do, he groans around the red-hot spit protruding from his jaws, prompting howls of laughter from the demons who pelt him with molten faeces for all eternity.
If you're lucky enough not to know about Friedman, here's the short version. Friedman was a kind of court sorcerer to Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher, Augusto Pinochet, and other assorted authoritarian, hard-right leaders who set us on the path to the hellscape we inhabit today. But before Friedman rose to prominence and influence, he was a crank. Specifically, he was a crank who dedicated his life to rolling back all the progress of the New Deal and re-establishing the Gilded Age:
https://pluralistic.net/2022/11/06/the-end-of-the-road-to-serfdom/
In his crank days, people were justifiably skeptical of this project. "Milton," they'd say, "people _like_ New Deal programs. They like the minimum wage, the 40-hour work-week, and the assurance that they won't be maimed, poisoned, burned alive, or otherwise killed on the job. They relish a dignified retirement, quality education for their children, and the assurance that no one is starving to death in their country's borders. People like national parks! They like Medicare! They like libraries, museums, and reliable weather forecasts! How, Milton, do you propose to convince the vast majority of people that they should settle for being forelock-tugging plebs, groveling before their social betters for the chance to scrub their toilets?"
Friedman had an answer: "In times of crisis, ideas can move from the fringe to the center in an eyeblink. Our job is to keep good ideas lying around, in anticipation of that crisis."
When the oil crisis hit, when prices spiked in the USA and abroad, Friedman seized his opportunity. The years following the oil crisis saw a violent political revolution in which organized labor, social justice movements, and the political opposition to oligarchy were crushed under police batons and the guns of Pinochet's thugs. The world was transformed. Left parties like UK Labour were remade as austerity-pilled neoliberals (not for nothing did Margaret Thatcher call Tony Blair "her greatest accomplishment," and it took Bill Clinton to pass a welfare "reform" bill that was too extreme even for Reagan to get through Congress).
Friedman was a monster.
But.
He had a hell of a theory of change.
When prices spiral, when people can't pay their bills anymore, when their retirement savings are wiped out, _anything_ is possible. The oil crisis wasn't Jimmy Carter's fault, but the voters still delivered a Ba'ath Party-style Republican majority in 1980. The covid shocks weren't the fault of the world governments that presided over pandemic inflation, but they were _creamed_ in the ensuing elections.
Let's talk about Trump's tariffs here. Trump's goal is to force a re-shoring of the American industrial capacity that was shipped to low-wage, low-regulation corporate havens around the world after the Reagan revolution. The pandemic provided a vivid lesson about the problems with long, brittle supply chains where all the slack has been extracted and converted to dividends and stock buybacks. That kind of system may work well – at least to the extent that it keeps Walmart's shelves full of cheap goods – but holy shit did it ever fail badly. Re-shoring is a good idea, as are other forms of pro-resiliency industrial policy.
But re-shoring doesn't happen overnight. As we saw during China's covid lockdowns, when one supplier ceases to ship goods, other suppliers can't spring up overnight to take up the slack. China itself became a manufacturing powerhouse thanks to extensive state support and planning, and it took decades. That kind of patient, long-run, planned process is the best-case scenario (and it still caused wrenching dislocations to Chinese society). Simply throwing up tariff walls and demanding that industry figure it – amid the resulting economic chaos and the political instability it brings – isn't a plan, it's a disaster.
Redistributing the means of production around the world is a necessary and urgent project, but it won't be advanced through Trump's rapid, unscheduled mid-air disassembly of the global system of trade. Tariffs will cause breakdowns in neoliberalism's fragile supply chains, and the ensuing chaos – mass unemployment, shortages, political rage – will make it even harder for countries (including the USA) to rebuild the productive capacity vaporized by 40 years of neoliberalism.
This is our oil crisis, in other worlds: a moment in which a belligerent superpower's ill-considered monkeying with the underpinnings of global production will cause chaos, the crisis in which "ideas can move from the periphery to the center" in an eyeblink. If Steve Bannon can call himself a Leninist, then leftists can call themselves Friedmanites. This is our opportunity.
Or rather, it's our opportunity to seize – or lose. Governments are defaulting to retaliatory tariffs as the best response to Trump's tariffs. This is political poison: making everything your country imports from the USA _more expensive_ is a very weird way to punish America for its trade war. Remember the glaring lesson of pandemic inflation: a government that presides over rising prices will be _destroyed_ by the electorate.
There's a _much_ better alternative, one that strikes at the very roots of American oligarchy, whose extreme wealth and corrosive political influence comes from its holdings in rent-extracting monopolies, especially Big Tech monopolies.
Tech giants are the major factor in US economic health. Take Big Tech stocks out of the S&P 500 and you've got a stagnant market punctuated by periods of decline. Superficially, US tech companies have different sources of extraordinary profit, but a closer look reveals that they all share the same foundation: Big Tech makes the bulk of its money in the form of monopoly rents, backstopped by global IP treaties.
Apple and Google take a 30% cut of every dollar spent in an app, and it's a felony to jailbreak a phone to make a new app store with the industry standard 1-3% transaction fees. Google and Meta take 51% out of every ad dollar, and publishers and advertisers are locked into their ecosystems by abusive contracts and technological countermeasures. HP charges $10,000/gallon for the colored water you put in your printer, and third-party ink and refills violate the anti-circumvention laws the US has crammed down the throats of every country's legislature. Tesla makes its fattest margins by renting you features that are installed in your car at the factory, from autopilot to the ability to use your battery's whole charge, raking in monthly fees from you and anyone you sell your car to – and the reason your mechanic can't just permanently unlock all that DLC for $50 is the IP laws that your country agreed to enforce in order to trade with the USA. Mechanics pay $10k/year per manufacturer for the tools to interpret the error codes generated by your car, and the only reason no one is selling a $50/month universal diagnostic service is – once again – US-originated IP laws that came in a parcel with trade agreements that gave your country's exporters access to US markets. Farmers pay John Deere $200 every time they fix their own tractors, because the repairs won't work until a technician comes out and types an unlock code into the tractor's keyboard – and bypassing that unlock code is a crime under the laws passed to comply with international treaties.
These aren't profits – they're rents. It's money Big Tech gets from owning a factor of production, not money it gets from actually making something. The app maker takes all the risks, but Apple and Google cream off 30% of their gross income. Big Tech's profits are almost an afterthought when compared to its rents, the junk-fee platform fees and farcically expensive consumables. For tech firms, capitalism was a transitional phase between feudalism…and technofeudalism:
https://pluralistic.net/2023/09/28/cloudalists/#cloud-capital
America's robust GDP figures are a mirage, artificially buoyed up by the monopoly rents extracted by US Big Tech, who prey on Americans _and_ foreigners:
https://pluralistic.net/2025/02/18/pikettys-productivity/#reaganomics-revenge
But foreigners don't have to tolerate this nonsense. Governments around the world signed up to protect giant American companies from small domestic competitors (from local app stores – for phones, games consoles, and IoT gadgets – to local printer cartridge remanufacturers) on the promise of tariff-free access to US markets. With Trump imposing tariffs will-ye or nill-ye on America's trading partners large and small, there is no reason to go on delivering rents to US Big Tech.
The first country or bloc (hi there, EU!) to do this will have a giant first-mover advantage, and could become a global export powerhouse, dominating the lucrative markets for tools that strike at the highest-margin lines of business of the most profitable companies in the history of the human race. Like Jeff Bezos told the publishers: "your margin is my opportunity":
https://www.marketplacepulse.com/articles/the-cost-of-your-margin-is-my-opportunity
In times of crisis, ideas can move from the periphery to the center in an eyeblink. Many of us have spent decades organizing and mobilizing against these extractive, dangerous, destabilizing abuses of technology, where the computer-powered devices we rely on for everything are designed to serve their manufacturers' shareholders, at our expense. And yet, these technologies have only proliferated, infecting everything from insulin pumps and ventilators to coffee makers and "smart" TVs.
It's time for a global race to the top – for countries to compete with one another to see who will capture US Big Tech's margins the fastest and most aggressively. Not only will this make things cheaper for everyone else in the world – it'll also make things cheaper for Americans, because once there is a global, profitable trade in software that jailbreaks your Big Tech devices and services, it will surely leak across the US border. Canada doesn't have to confine itself to selling reasonably priced pharmaceuticals to beleaguered Americans – it can also set up a brisk trade in the tools of technological self-determination and liberation from Big Tech bondage.
Taking the margins for Big Tech's most profitable enterprises to zero, globally, will strike at the very heart of American oligarchy, and the hundreds of millions tech giants flushed into the political system to put Trump into office again. A race to the top for technological liberation benefits everyone – including Americans.
Truly, it would be a rising tide that lifted all boats (except for oligarchs' superyachts – those, it will swamp and sink).
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# Hey look at this (permalink)
* Norman Jewison’s ‘Rollerball’ depicted a world in which corporations controlled all information – is this dystopian vision becoming reality? https://theconversation.com/norman-jewisons-rollerball-depicted-a-world-in-which-corporations-controlled-all-information-is-this-dystopian-vision-becoming-reality-222099
* PrivacySafe Bot – Secure Password Generator https://privacysafe.bot
* Review: Rewind Cassette Player https://www.wired.com/review/review-rewind-cassette-player/
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# Object permanence (permalink)
#20yrsago Free Software Foundation tears MPAA a new one in Grokster brief http://moglen.law.columbia.edu/publications/grokster-amicus.pdf
#20yrsago Best-selling musicians’ ask SCOTUS to keep P2P legal https://www.nbcnews.com/id/wbna7052758
#20yrsago Canadian defense minister on US no-fly list? https://web.archive.org/web/20050304010813/https://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/7067117/
#15yrsago LibDem Lords seek to ban web-lockers (YouSendIt, etc) in the UK https://memex.craphound.com/2010/03/03/libdem-lords-seek-to-ban-web-lockers-yousendit-etc-in-the-uk/
#15yrsago Building high-speed wireless in Afghanistan out of garbage https://freerangeinternational.com/2010/02/05/the-jalalabad-fab-fi-network-continues-to-grow-with-a-little-help-from-their-friends/
#15yrsago HOWTO make smarter dumb mistakes about the future https://web.archive.org/web/20100305123739/https://locusmag.com/Perspectives/2010/03/cory-doctorow-making-smarter-dumb.html
#15yrsago EFF’s annual DMCA whitepaper gets a refresh https://www.eff.org/wp/unintended-consequences-under-dmca
#15yrsago Audiobook DRM versus the patrons of the Cleveland Library https://web.archive.org/web/20100304072959/http://www.bradcolbow.com/archive.php/?p=205
#15yrsago Danish activists demand to know why their governments block ACTA transparency https://www-computerworld-dk.translate.goog/art/55244/lene-espersen-skal-i-samraad-om-antipirat-aftale?_x_tr_sl=da&_x_tr_tl=en&_x_tr_hl=en
#10yrsago America’s growing gangs of armed, arrest-making, untrained rent-a-cops https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/crime/private-police-carry-guns-and-make-arrests-and-their-ranks-are-swelling/2015/02/28/29f6e02e-8f79-11e4-a900-9960214d4cd7_story.html
#10yrsago Bruce Schneier’s Data and Goliath: The Hidden Battles to Collect Your Data and Control Your World https://memex.craphound.com/2015/03/02/bruce-schneiers-data-and-goliath-the-hidden-battles-to-collect-your-data-and-control-your-world/
#10yrsago Ed Snowden says he’ll face trial in the US https://web.archive.org/web/20150303161035/http://news.yahoo.com/edward-snowden-ready-return-states-144245040.html
#10yrsago First-ever photo of light behaving as a wave and particle https://phys.org/news/2015-03-particle.html
#10yrsago Three steps to save ourselves from firmware attacks https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2015/03/hardwired-for-betrayal
#10yrsago Razorhurst: blood-drenched gang warfare and ghosts in Gilded Age Sydney https://memex.craphound.com/2015/03/03/razorhurst-blood-drenched-gang-warfare-and-ghosts-in-gilded-age-sydney/
#5yrsago Japanese condiment company releases "sliced mayo" https://pluralistic.net/2020/03/03/just-a-stick/#bourbonmayo
#5yrsago Recycling spy agencies' malware for fun and profit https://pluralistic.net/2020/03/03/just-a-stick/#nobus
#5yrsago Facebook neutered "Download Your Data" https://pluralistic.net/2020/03/03/just-a-stick/#foolmetwice
#5yrsago A Lever Without a Fulcrum Is Just a Stick https://pluralistic.net/2020/03/03/just-a-stick/#authorsbargain
#5yrsago EFF's Surveillance Self-Defense guide for students https://pluralistic.net/2020/03/03/just-a-stick/#yallow-complete
#5yrsago The next frontier for school censorware is spying on kids all the time https://pluralistic.net/2020/03/02/be-the-helper/#kiddyfud
#5yrsago My new podcast, "Disasters Don’t Have to End in Dystopia" https://pluralistic.net/2020/03/02/be-the-helper/#paradisebuiltinhell
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# Upcoming appearances (permalink)
* DC: Picks and Shovels with Matt Stoller, Mar 4
https://www.loyaltybookstores.com/picksnshovels
* Richmond, VA: Picks and Shovels with Lee Vinsel, Mar 5
https://fountainbookstore.com/events/1795820250305
* Virtual: With Great Power Came No Responsibility: How Enshittification Conquered the 21st Century and How We Can Overthrow It (Indiana University), Mar 7
https://events.iu.edu/mediaiub/event/1783095-with-great-power-came-no-responsibility-how-enshitti
* Austin: Reclaim, Reframe, Reimagine, Mar 7
https://schedule.sxsw.com/2025/events/PP150498
* Austin: EFF-Austin Salon, Mar 7
https://www.grotto101.com/effaustinsxsalon2025/
* Austin: Tensions in Creative Labor & Generative AI, Mar 8
https://schedule.sxsw.com/2025/events/PP149418
* Austin: The Next 25: A Conversation About the Future of Open, Mar 8
https://www.classy.org/event/creative-commons'-open-house-for-an-open-future/e663144
* Austin: Fediverse House, Mar 10
https://about.flipboard.com/fediverse-house/
* Austin: Picks and Shovels at First Light Books, Mar 10
https://thethirdplace.is/event/cory-doctorow-picks-shovels-1
* Burbank: Picks and Shovels with Wil Wheaton, Mar 13
https://www.darkdel.com/store/p3257/Thu%2C_Mar_13th_6_pm%3A_Pick_%26_Shovel%3A_A_Martin_Hench_Novel_HB.html#/
* Europa Park: Cloudfest, Mar 17-20
https://cloudfest.link/
* San Diego: Picks and Shovels at Mysterious Galaxy, Mar 24
https://www.mystgalaxy.com/32425Doctorow
* Virtual: Picks and Shovels at Imagine! Belfast, Mar 24
https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/cory-doctorow-in-conversation-with-alan-meban-tickets-1106421399189
* Chicago: Picks and Shovels with Peter Sagal, Apr 2
https://exileinbookville.com/events/44853
* Chicago: ABA Techshow, Apr 3
https://www.techshow.com/
* Bloomington: Picks and Shovels at Morgenstern, Apr 4
https://morgensternbooks.com/event/2025-04-04/author-event-cory-doctorow
* Pittsburgh: PyCon, May 16
https://us.pycon.org/2025/schedule/
* PDX: Teardown 2025, Jun 20-22
https://www.crowdsupply.com/teardown/portland-2025
* PDX: Picks and Shovels at Barnes and Noble, Jun 20
https://stores.barnesandnoble.com/event/9780062183697-0
* New Orleans: DeepSouthCon63, Oct 10-12, 2025
http://www.contraflowscifi.org/
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# Recent appearances (permalink)
* Democracy Now
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tKV5GB6dN3o
* The Culture Show
https://www.wgbh.org/podcasts/the-culture-show/february-20-2025-chelsea-handler-cory-doctorow-and-the-red-bull-heavy-metal-contest-at-boston-city-hall
* Picks and Shovels with Yanis Varoufakis and David Moscrop (Jacobin)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xkIDep7Z4LM
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# Latest books (permalink)
* * Picks and Shovels: a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about the heroic era of the PC, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), February 2025 (https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250865908/picksandshovels).
* The Bezzle: a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about prison-tech and other grifts, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), February 2024 (the-bezzle.org). Signed, personalized copies at Dark Delicacies (https://www.darkdel.com/store/p3062/Available_Feb_20th%3A_The_Bezzle_HB.html#/).
* "The Lost Cause:" a solarpunk novel of hope in the climate emergency, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), November 2023 (http://lost-cause.org). Signed, personalized copies at Dark Delicacies (https://www.darkdel.com/store/p3007/Pre-Order_Signed_Copies%3A_The_Lost_Cause_HB.html#/)
* "The Internet Con": A nonfiction book about interoperability and Big Tech (Verso) September 2023 (http://seizethemeansofcomputation.org). Signed copies at Book Soup (https://www.booksoup.com/book/9781804291245).
* "Red Team Blues": "A grabby, compulsive thriller that will leave you knowing more about how the world works than you did before." Tor Books http://redteamblues.com. Signed copies at Dark Delicacies (US): and Forbidden Planet (UK): https://forbiddenplanet.com/385004-red-team-blues-signed-edition-hardcover/.
* "Chokepoint Capitalism: How to Beat Big Tech, Tame Big Content, and Get Artists Paid, with Rebecca Giblin", on how to unrig the markets for creative labor, Beacon Press/Scribe 2022 https://chokepointcapitalism.com
* "Attack Surface": The third Little Brother novel, a standalone technothriller for adults. The _Washington Post_ called it "a political cyberthriller, vigorous, bold and savvy about the limits of revolution and resistance." Order signed, personalized copies from Dark Delicacies https://www.darkdel.com/store/p1840/Available_Now%3A_Attack_Surface.html
* "How to Destroy Surveillance Capitalism": an anti-monopoly pamphlet analyzing the true harms of surveillance capitalism and proposing a solution. https://onezero.medium.com/how-to-destroy-surveillance-capitalism-8135e6744d59?sk=f6cd10e54e20a07d4c6d0f3ac011af6b) (signed copies: https://www.darkdel.com/store/p2024/Available_Now%3A__How_to_Destroy_Surveillance_Capitalism.html)
* "Little Brother/Homeland": A reissue omnibus edition with a new introduction by Edward Snowden: https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250774583; personalized/signed copies here: https://www.darkdel.com/store/p1750/July%3A__Little_Brother_%26_Homeland.html
* "Poesy the Monster Slayer" a picture book about monsters, bedtime, gender, and kicking ass. Order here: https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781626723627. Get a personalized, signed copy here: https://www.darkdel.com/store/p2682/Corey_Doctorow%3A_Poesy_the_Monster_Slayer_HB.html#/.
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# 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
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# Colophon (permalink)
Today's top sources:
**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
* Picks and Shovels, a Martin Hench noir thriller about the heroic era of the PC. FORTHCOMING TOR BOOKS FEB 2025
**Latest podcast:** With Great Power Came No Responsibility: How Enshittification Conquered the 21st Century and How We Can Overthrow It https://craphound.com/news/2025/02/26/with-great-power-came-no-responsibility-how-enshittification-conquered-the-21st-century-and-how-we-can-overthrow-it/
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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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