loading . . . Pluralistic: Plenty of room at the bottom (of the tech stack) (29 Sep 2025)
# Today's links
* Plenty of room at the bottom (of the tech stack): Apple is out of low-hanging fruit.
* Hey look at this: Delights to delectate.
* Object permanence: "Julia," HP DRM talk; Atheists know more theology than "Christians"; D&D v MMORPGs; Scandanavia's CSAM filter-creep; Snowden's on Twitter; Limbaugh says Martian water is a leftist plot.
* 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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# Plenty of room at the bottom (of the tech stack) (permalink)
Freedom or safety: choose one. This is the false bargain we were offered after 9/11, the ideology underpinning the PATRIOT Act and the (permanent) suspension of human rights. This ideology has metastasized out of the realm of airport security theater and mass surveillance, ossifying into a bedrock axiom about technology design itself.
Ironically, it's not just conservative bed-wetters who've rejected the idea that freedom isn't free, and we all have to trade away our autonomy for a safe and secure online experience. There were plenty of techno-progressives who insisted that the problems with Twitter and Facebook could be solved by forcing their zuckermuskian overlords to invest sufficient resources in their Trust and Safety teams.
There's nothing wrong with asking people who host social spaces to invest in moderation, but the idea that we can improve the lives of people stuck in these obviously irreparable corporate spaces is by making their owners care about our welfare is just _bankrupt_. Far better to make it easy for us to _leave_ these platforms:
https://www.eff.org/interoperablefacebook
Mandating interoperability – federation – for these legacy social media services means that if somehow it turns out that neither Zuck, nor Musk (nor anyone who succeeds them) is fit to preside over the social lives of hundreds of millions or billions of people, then those users can _leave_ , and they won't lose touch with the people they currently stay on these platforms to be in community with.
We don't have to choose between safety and freedom. We can have both. Franklin had it wrong when he wrote, "Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety."
It's not that you don't _deserve_ these things, it's that you won't _get_ them. Give Apple control over which apps you can install and who can fix your device and which accessories you can use with your devices, and Apple will spy on you and they'll let other people spy on you and rip you off:
https://pluralistic.net/2025/09/26/empty-threats/#500-million-affluent-consumers
They'll block you from installing and using tools that improve the user experience of Instagram while blocking Meta from spying on you:
https://www.digitaltrends.com/phones/the-og-app-ad-free-instagram-removed-app-store-iphone/
Apple's security model _works_ well. To the extent that Apple is both benevolent and competent, it makes products that are safe and reliable. But this model _fails_ horribly, because any time Apple decides to trade off its customers' privacy, safety, or utility for its own priorities, those customers are rendered defenseless by Apple's total control:
https://pluralistic.net/2022/11/14/luxury-surveillance/#liar-liar
Being an Apple customer is like being in a 24/7 BDSM relationship…without a safe-word. Maybe you like the control Apple exerts over your life most of the time, but if they ever start to hurt you, there's no way to make them stop:
https://pluralistic.net/2024/01/12/youre-holding-it-wrong/#if-dishwashers-were-iphones
Apple's story – the story of all centralized, authoritarian technology – is that you have to trade freedom for security. If you want technology that Just Works(TM), you need to give up on the idea of being able to override the manufacturer's decisions. It's always prix-fixe, never a la carte.
This is a kind of vulgar Thatcherism, a high-tech version of her maxim that "there is no alternative." Decomposing the iPhone into its constituent parts – thoughtful, well-tested technology; total control by a single vendor – is posed as a logical impossibility, like a demand for water that's not wet:
https://locusmag.com/feature/commentary-cory-doctorow-there-were-always-enshittifiers/
Today, much of the world is trying to figure out what life looks like after US Big Tech. Outside of the USA, there's a growing consensus that Big Tech is an arm of the US state, a way to project soft (and even hard) American power around the globe:
https://pluralistic.net/2025/06/25/eurostack/#viktor-orbans-isp
Europe in particular is investing in free/open source alternatives to American Big Tech (the "Eurostack"). A big question is whether software built and maintained as a commons can ever match the slick user-friendliness of the tech companies – in other words, are we going to have to sacrifice the convenience of a Just Works(TM) platform for freedom from Big Tech?
I think this is a lazy conclusion. It's true that it takes more steps to sign up for Mastodon than it does to get onboard with Instagram, and that Instagram has a recommendation system that can help you bootstrap your network and start to populate your feed. But it's also true that Instagram has _thousands_ of engineers and UX/UI people working on it, while Mastodon operates on a skeleton crew.
The idea that Mastodon's rough edges are due to the fact that it's open and federated – and not because it operates with a fraction of a percent of the resources as Instagram – is pretty implausible to my mind.
Indeed, there's a long history of tools designed by and for developers being picked up by commercial teams and polished into mass consumer products, which suggests that the tools' usability problems stemmed from resource constraints, not the openness or the flexibility of the tool. Think of how Slack transformed irc, or how Android packaged up GNU/Linux.
Another way to think about investment in improving free/open tools that suffer from being overly technical is that there is _tons of room for improvement_. There are so many easy wins to be scored when it comes to Libreoffice, Mastodon, The Gimp, ffmpeg, etc. Under the hood, these tools are _stunning_ , but their front-ends have lagged.
By contrast, Big Tech has done so much fine-tuning of its user interfaces and workflows that there's very little room to maneuver. Every new product release for a dominant Big Tech tool is as much a regression as it is an improvement, and often these releases are expensive catastrophes:
https://www.reddit.com/r/ChatGPT/comments/1mkhros/gpt5_sucks_thats_all/
People are often baffled at how a company with all these experts can produce "improvements" that are actually massive steps backwards, but that's what happens when you try to add more polish to something you've already been polishing for a decade or more:
https://kottke.org/25/09/0047552-im-usually-pretty-go-with
There's plenty of room at the bottom (of the tech stack). It's hard to overstate just how under-resourced some free/open projects are, how many millions of people rely on the work of just one dedicated maintainer. Snowden coordinated his disclosures to journalists using GPG, the free/open version of Pretty Good Privacy (PGP), a way to secure email conversations. After the Snowden revelations, many people tried to use GPG – and failed. It was just too complicated.
But is GPG too complicated to use because it's impossible to make it easier to use? Maybe. But maybe it was the fact that one part-time volunteer was doing _all_ the work on GPG/email integration:
https://www.propublica.org/article/the-worlds-email-encryption-software-relies-on-one-guy-who-is-going-broke
Likewise, there are millions of people who rely on Pidgin, a tool that lets you use multiple chat systems from a single interface. Those millions of users are supported by one part-time developer who funds the work out of his dayjob:
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2021/07/tower-babel-how-public-interest-internet-trying-save-messaging-and-banish-big
If the EU were to fund even a small team to improve the usability of these systems, they could plausibly make them ten or twenty times easier to use (that is, put them within the technical understanding of ten to twenty times more users). What a growth opportunity! Does anyone think Apple can make iOS twenty times more legible?
Getting these free/open tools over a threshold for everyday usage puts them on a glide path to sustainability. As more users – and more kinds of users – pile into them, this improves the business-case for different kinds of organizations (co-ops, tinkerers, government agencies, startups) investing in improving them. And because these tools are free/open, those improvements go back into the commons, and benefit all the users. This is the kind of network effect we love to see.
And these tools won't just work better – they'll also _fail_ better. For years now, I've been using Framework laptops, designed to be upgraded, repaired and maintained by their users:
https://pluralistic.net/2021/09/21/monica-byrne/#think-different
The Framework is the best computer I've ever owned. Not only does it _work_ brilliantly, but it _fails_ even better:
https://pluralistic.net/2022/11/13/graceful-failure/#frame
For years, I relied on Apple hardware, and had to buy my Powerbooks in pairs, because one of them was _always_ broken and had to be sent back to Applecare for repair. After I switched to Thinkpads, I was able to buy IBM (then Lenovo's) global, onsite, next-day hardware replacement warranty, and so I was able to just have _one_ laptop at a time, and use an old one for 24-36 hours while I waited for a technician to travel to my home or hotel room to fix my machine.
But with the Framework, I just fix whatever breaks myself. When I dropped my laptop during a UK tour, I was able to get a replacement screen Fedexed to my hotel. I did the screen swap in 15 minutes, at midnight, after getting off a late train from Edinburgh. It worked the first time, and the next day I turned in two columns and did a livecast.
Last week, I discovered that my laptop battery had overheated and swollen so much I could barely keep the case screwed shut – something that happens to all kinds of hardware. It's _really_ dangerous, presenting a serious risk of fire. If that had happened to a Mac or a Thinkpad, I would have been screwed, unable to safely board my airplane on Friday morning.
But I was able to remove the battery before checking out of my hotel in Ithaca (the desk clerk accepted it to be given to facilities people for safe disposal), and Framework sent a replacement battery to my next hotel in NYC, so after I got off my plane and checked in there, I was able to swap my new battery in and pick right up again.
The other day, my wife said that she thought that between my operating system (Ubuntu, a flavor of GNU/Linux) and hardware (the Framework), I was having _more_ technical problems than I used to have with my Macs. I was shocked – but after we talked it over, I realized she got that impression because when something goes wrong with my laptop, I can _fix it_ , so I spend a bunch of time tinkering with things, rather than bringing it to an Apple Store and switching to a backup computer.
Another example: while I was in Ithaca, I decided to upgrade my 2TB solid state drive to a 4TB one. The reliable way to do this is to install the OS and all my apps on the new drive, and then copy over my user files, but that requires a lot of manual attending. I wanted a process that I could start before bed and then pick up in the morning. So I used "dd," a command that duplicates whole disks, to copy the 2TB disk to the 4TB one.
Then I used a bunch of arcane utilities to resize the partition to fill the disk (a task that was made much more complex because I have full-disk encryption turned on). It worked – but then the disk wouldn't boot. Turned out this operation had messed up GRUB, a key part of the Linux boot system.
I had many choices at that juncture. I could have scrapped the project and started over, wiping the disk, installing the OS and apps, and re-copying my data. I could have parked the whole project until I was back home in LA. Instead, I worked with some great tech support people at Canonical (who make Ubuntu) to fix GRUB, and an hour or two later, I was up and running.
The point here is that I had _all_ options open to me. I could do this The Mac Way (bringing my machine to a technician and asking them to do it). I could do it the labor-intensive but reliable way (install OS and apps, move data). I could do it the risky, high-tech way (dd, resize partition, fix GRUB). If I'd been at home with a light work week, I might have done the middle option. If I was advising a friend without a lot of technical chops on how to do this, I might have recommended the first option. But the fact that I was on the road with limited time didn't place this upgrade out of reach. I got to decide which tradeoffs I wanted to make.
What's more, the only reason my method was so damned tricky is that no one's bothered to automate it. The process involved cutting and pasting a lot of long, machine-readable, alphanumeric identifiers into config files, and I screwed up a step. There's nothing about this process that's _intrinsically_ hard, it's just hard because I was doing it manually. If _lots_ of people had the ability to swap their hard drives (a process that takes less than five minutes with a Framework), it would absolutely be worth someone's time to turn all that fiddly work into an app with one big button labeled "MAKE BOOTABLE COPY GO NOW."
I love it when a system works well, but I really _hate_ it when a system fails badly. It doesn't matter how much you can get done with your technology when it works properly if it's broken and you can't get it to work.
We've had decades of massive investment in systems that work well, but fail badly. With US Big Tech off the menu for more and more of us, it's time to think about making our resilient, gracefully failing tools easier to use – and stop hoping that someday, somehow, companies with an investment in selling us something new when their products break decide to make them easier to fix.
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# Hey look at this (permalink)
* Viral call-recording app Neon goes dark after exposing users’ phone numbers, call recordings, and transcripts https://techcrunch.com/2025/09/25/viral-call-recording-app-neon-goes-dark-after-exposing-users-phone-numbers-call-recordings-and-transcripts/
* Kamala Harris has no lessons for the Democrats – or herself (by Nicola Sturgeon) https://observer.co.uk/culture/books/article/kamala-harri-has-no-lessons-for-the-democrats-or-herself
* Unknown Artist: Smokey the Fire Engine https://taylorjessen.blogspot.com/2025/09/unknown-artist-smokey-fire-engine.html
* Ed Zitron is mad as hell https://archive.is/A6XXp
* Story Seed Library https://storyseedlibrary.org/
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# Object permanence (permalink)
#20yrsago Anti-MMORPG ads from D&D https://craphound.com/images/wowdanddad.jpg
#20yrsago Phone unlockers versus the DMCA https://web.archive.org/web/20061005152056/https://www.wired.com/news/culture/0,1284,68989,00.html?tw=wn_tophead_6
#20yrsago My DRM talk for HP research https://craphound.com/hpdrm.txt
#15yrsago Legal blackmail: comprehensive look at tactics of copyright bounty-hunters https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2010/09/amounts-to-blackmail-inside-a-p2p-settlement-letter-factory/
#15yrsago HOWTO make a meat-head https://web.archive.org/web/20100928035616/https://makeprojects.com/Project/Meat-Head/294/1
#15yrsago What Internet activism looks like https://web.archive.org/web/20101001074040/http://dashes.com/anil/2010/09/when-the-revolution-comes-they-wont-recognize-it.html
#15yrsago American atheists and agnostics know more about religion than professed believers https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2010-sep-28-la-na-religion-survey-20100928-story.html
#15yrsago Only 1.7% of sites blocked by Scandinavia’s “child-porn” filters are actually child porn https://ak-zensur.de/2010/09/29/analysis-blacklists.pdf
#15yrsago Inside the finances of the UK “legal blackmail” copyright enforcement company https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2010/09/p2p-settlement-factory-expects-10-million-from-mailing-letters/
#15yrsago SUPERDAD: moving and infuriating memoir of fatherhood and crack https://memex.craphound.com/2010/09/29/superdad-moving-and-infuriating-memoir-of-fatherhood-and-crack/
#10yrsago Apple removes an app that tracks U.S. military drone strikes from its store https://www.dailydot.com/news/app-store-drone-strike-metadata/
#10yrsago Edward Snowden is now @snowden https://theintercept.com/2015/09/29/edward-snowden-twitter-snowden/
#10yrsago With Roca Labs smackdown, the FTC slams non-disparagement clauses for the first time https://web.archive.org/web/20150930020239/https://popehat.com/2015/09/29/in-roca-labs-case-ftc-takes-novel-stand-against-non-disparagement-clauses/
#10yrsago Execspeak singularity: the spectacular bullshit of Blackberry’s CEO https://web.archive.org/web/20151009122454/http://www.bloomberg.com/bw/magazine/content/10_42/b4199076785733.htm
#10yrsago The FBI has no trouble spying on encrypted communications https://theintercept.com/2015/09/28/hacking/
#10yrsago Rush Limbaugh: water on Mars is a leftist conspiracy https://www.mediamatters.org/rush-limbaugh/after-nasa-announces-it-found-water-mars-rush-limbaugh-says-its-part-climate-change
#10yrsago Jamaica wants slavery reparations from the UKhttps://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/sep/29/jamaica-calls-britain-pay-billions-pounds-reparations-slavery
#10yrsago Zeroes: it sucks to be a teen, even with powers https://memex.craphound.com/2015/09/29/zeroes-it-sucks-to-be-a-teen-even-with-powers/
#10yrsago Carly Fiorina boasts: I sold the NSA its mass-surveillance servers https://web.archive.org/web/20150929192051/https://motherboard.vice.com/read/carly-fiorina-i-supplied-hp-servers-for-nsa-snooping
#10yrsago Professional skeptics on misinformation & hoaxes: anti-vaxx, Planned Parenthood https://web.archive.org/web/20151001012616/http://www.hopesandfears.com/hopes/now/media/216577-hoax-busters-planned-parenthood-anti-vaxxer-disinformation
#10yrsago Righstcorp’s terrifying extortion script is breathtaking in its sleaze https://www.techdirt.com/2015/09/28/rightscorps-copyright-trolling-phone-script-tells-innocent-people-they-need-to-give-their-computers-to-police/
#10yrsago AP will use “climate doubters” instead of “climate skeptics” https://www.ap.org/the-definitive-source/announcements/an-addition-to-ap-stylebook-entry-on-global-warming/
#10yrsago Distinguished scientists call for RICO prosecution of climate deniers https://brucesterling.tumblr.com/post/130046509798/rico-for-climate-deniers
#10yrsago Dismaland will be dismantled, used for refugee shelters in Calais https://www.bbc.com/news/av/entertainment-arts-34375391
#5yrsago The Trump financial method https://pluralistic.net/2020/09/28/cyberwar-tactics/#grifts
#5yrsago Dark money and SCOTUS https://pluralistic.net/2020/09/29/betcha-cant-eat-just-one/#pwnage
#5yrsago Bust 'em all https://pluralistic.net/2020/09/29/betcha-cant-eat-just-one/#trustbusting-makes-me-feel-good
#5yrsago Zombie banks https://pluralistic.net/2020/09/28/cyberwar-tactics/#aligned-incentives
#5yrsago Newsletters' glorious history https://pluralistic.net/2020/09/28/cyberwar-tactics/#mimeograph
#5yrsago Belarus's online/offline uprising https://pluralistic.net/2020/09/28/cyberwar-tactics/#belarus
#1yrago Sandra Newman's "Julia" https://pluralistic.net/2024/09/28/novel-writing-machines/#fanfic
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# Upcoming appearances (permalink)
* Boston: Enshittification with Randall Munroe (Brattle Theater), Oct 7
https://www.eventbrite.com/e/cory-doctorow-at-the-brattle-theatre-tickets-1591235180259?aff=oddtdtcreator
* DC: Enshittification with Rohit Chopra (Politics and Prose), Oct 8
https://politics-prose.com/cory-doctorow-10825
* NYC: Enshittification with Lina Khan (Brooklyn Public Library), Oct 9
https://www.bklynlibrary.org/calendar/cory-doctorow-discusses-central-library-dweck-20251009-0700pm
* New Orleans: DeepSouthCon63, Oct 10-12
http://www.contraflowscifi.org/
* New Orleans: Enshittification at Octavia Books, Oct 12
https://www.octaviabooks.com/event/enshittification-cory-doctorow
* Chicago: Enshittification with Anand Giridharadas (Chicago Humanities), Oct 15
https://www.oldtownschool.org/concerts/2025/10-15-2025-kara-swisher-and-cory-doctorow-on-enshittification/
* Los Angeles: Enshittification with David Dayen (Diesel), Oct 16
https://dieselbookstore.com/event/2025-10-16/cory-doctorow-enshittification
* San Francisco: Enshittification at Public Works with Jenny Odell (The Booksmith), Oct 20
https://app.gopassage.com/events/doctorow25
* PDX: Enshittification at Powell's, Oct 21
https://www.powells.com/events/cory-doctorow-10-21-25
* Seattle: Enshittification and the Rot Economy, with Ed Zitron (Clarion West), Oct 22
https://www.clarionwest.org/event/2025-deep-dives-cory-doctorow/
* Madrid: Conferencia EUROPEA 4D (Virtual), Oct 28
https://4d.cat/es/conferencia/
* Miami: Enshittification at Books & Books, Nov 5
https://www.eventbrite.com/e/an-evening-with-cory-doctorow-tickets-1504647263469
* Miami: Cloudfest, Nov 6
https://www.cloudfest.com/usa/
* Burbank: Burbank Book Festival, Nov 8
https://www.burbankbookfestival.com/
* Lisbon: A post-American, enshittification-resistant internet, with Rabble (Web Summit), Nov 12
https://websummit.com/sessions/lis25/92f47bc9-ca60-4997-bef3-006735b1f9c5/a-post-american-enshittification-resistant-internet/
* Cardiff: Hay Festival After Hours, Nov 13
https://www.hayfestival.com/c-203-hay-festival-after-hours.aspx
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# Recent appearances (permalink)
* Enshittification (Cornell)
https://ecornell.cornell.edu/keynotes/view/K091225/
* Escaping Big Tech, Privacy Battles & “Enshittification” (Revolution.social)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=exvpetQRSVo
* Nerd Harder! (This Week in Tech)
https://twit.tv/shows/this-week-in-tech/episodes/1047
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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).
* "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).
* "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.
* "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
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# Upcoming books (permalink)
* "Canny Valley": A limited edition collection of the collages I create for Pluralistic, self-published, September 2025
* "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
* "The Reverse-Centaur's Guide to AI," a short book about being a better AI critic, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2026
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# Colophon (permalink)
Today's top sources:
**Currently writing:**
* "The Reverse Centaur's Guide to AI," a short book for Farrar, Straus and Giroux about being an effective AI critic. FIRST DRAFT COMPLETE AND SUBMITTED.
* A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING
* * *
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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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