YunoBlog

Author: tio

  • Rent-Only Copyright Culture Makes Us All Worse Off

    We’re taking part in Copyright Week, a series of actions and discussions supporting key principles that should guide copyright policy. Every day this week, various groups are taking on different elements of copyright law and policy, and addressing what’s at stake, and what we need to do to make sure that copyright promotes creativity and innovation.

    In the Netflix/Spotify/Amazon era, many of us access copyrighted works purely in digital form – and that means we rarely have the chance to buy them. Instead, we are stuck renting them, subject to all kinds of terms and conditions. And because the content is digital, reselling it, lending it, even preserving it for your own use inevitably requires copying. Unfortunately, when it comes to copying digital media, US copyright law has pretty much lost the plot.

    As we approach the 50th anniversary of the 1976 Copyrights, the last major overhaul of US copyright law, we’re not the only ones wondering if it’s time for the next one. It’s a high-risk proposition, given the wealth and influence of entrenched copyright interests who will not hesitate to send carefully selected celebrities to argue for changes that will send more money, into fewer pockets, for longer terms. But it’s equally clear that and nowhere is that more evident than the waning influence of Section 109, aka the first sale doctrine.

    First sale—the principle that once you buy a copyrighted work you have the right to re-sell it, lend it, hide it under the bed, or set it on fire in protest—is deeply rooted in US copyright law. Indeed, in an era where so many judges are looking to the Framers for guidance on how to interpret current law, it’s worth noting that the first sale principles (also characterized as “copyright exhaustion”) can be found in the earliest copyright cases and applied across the rights in the so-called “copyright bundle.”

    Unfortunately, courts have held that first sale, at least as it was codified in the Copyright Act, only applies to distribution, not reproduction. So even if you want to copy a rented digital textbook to a second device, and you go through the trouble of deleting it from the first device, the doctrine does not protect you.

    We’re all worse off as a result. Our access to culture, from hit songs to obscure indie films, are mediated by the whims of major corporations. With physical media the first sale principle built bustling second hand markets, community swaps, and libraries—places where culture can be shared and celebrated, while making it more affordable for everyone.

    And while these new subscription or rental services have an appealing upfront cost, it comes with a lot more precarity. If you love rewatching a show, you may be chasing it between services or find it is suddenly unavailable on any platform. Or, as fans of Mad Men or Buffy the Vampire Slayer know, you could be stuck with a terrible remaster as the only digital version available

    Last year we saw one improvement with California Assembly Bill 2426 taking effect. In California companies must now at least disclose to potential customers if a “purchase” is a revocable license—i.e. If they can blow it up after you pay. A story driving this change was Ubisoft revoking access to “The Crew” and making customers’ copies unplayable a decade after launch. 

    On the federal level, EFF, Public Knowledge, and 15 other public interest organizations backed Sen. Ron Wyden’s message to the FTC to similarly establish clear ground rules for digital ownership and sales of goods. Unfortunately FTC Chairman Andrew Ferguson has thus far turned down this easy win for consumers.

    As for the courts, some scholars think they have just gotten it wrong. We agree, but it appears we need Congress to set them straight. The Copyright Act might not need a complete overhaul, but Section 109 certainly does. The current version hurts consumers, artists, and the millions of ordinary people who depend on software and digital works every day for entertainment, education, transportation, and, yes, to grow our food. 

    We realize this might not be the most urgent problem Congress confronts in 2026—to be honest, we wish it was—but it’s a relatively easy one to solve. That solution could release a wave of new innovation, and equally importantly, restore some degree of agency to American consumers by making them owners again.

  • Pluralistic: The petty (but undeniable) delights of cultivating unoptimizability as a habit (22 Jan 2026)

    Today’s links


    A pegboard into which a square peg has been jammed, cracking the surface. The background is a messy, indistinct pile of papers.

    The petty (but undeniable) delights of cultivating ungovernability as a habit (permalink)

    I am on record as being skeptical of the notion that if you shop very carefully, you can make society better. “Conscious consumption” is not a tool for structural change, and any election that requires you to “vote with your wallet” is always won by the people with the thickest wallets (statistically speaking, that’s not you):

    https://pluralistic.net/2025/09/13/consumption-choices/#marginal-benefits

    Now, that’s not to say that boycotts are useless. But a boycott is a structured and organized campaign. The Montgomery bus boycott wasn’t a matter of a bunch of people waking up one morning and saying, “You know what, fuck it, I’m gonna walk today”:

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

    The Montgomery bus boycott was an organized project, put together by a powerful membership organization, the NAACP, that demanded far more of its members than merely shopping very carefully. The boycott was the end stage of an organized resistance, not a substitute for it.

    The problem with “conscious consumption” is that it comes out of the neoliberal tradition in which every political matter is supposedly determined by your individual actions, and not your actions as part of a union or other political institution that works as a bloc to overthrow the status quo.

    “Conscious consumption” arises out of the tradition that gave us Margaret Thatcher’s maxim, “There is no such thing as society. There are individual men and women and there are families and no government can do anything except through people and people look to themselves first.”

    Any attempt to change society by shopping very carefully is destined to fail, but it’s worse than that. Because “shopping very carefully” never makes systemic change, its practitioners inevitably decide the reason they’re not seeing the change they yearn for is that their allies aren’t shopping carefully enough. This turns the careful shopper into a cop who polices other people’s consumption, demanding that they stop eating some foodstuff or using Twitter or watching HBO Max. Squabbling over whether using a social media network makes you a Nazi generates far more heat than light – so much heat that it incinerates the solidarity you need to actually fight Nazis.

    Which is not an argument against boycotts! Boycotts work. If boycotts didn’t work, then genocide apologists wouldn’t be apoplectic over the BDS movement:

    https://bdsmovement.net/

    But a “boycott” isn’t the same thing as “you and your social circle deciding that buying the wrong product makes you a Bad Person and then devoting your energies to scolding your allies for choosing Coke instead of Pepsi.” Boycotts are downstream of organizing; they are not a substitute for organizing. There is such a thing as society.

    Now, all that said, I will confess: I sometimes do something that looks a lot like “shopping very carefully,” and when I do, I derive enormous satisfaction from it (but I am always careful not to mistake my tiny victories for political action). But I get it, honestly, I do. Sometimes, “shopping very carefully” is a way to eke out a tiny, personal victory in the face of overwhelming odds against a wildly overmatched opponent. That feels very good.

    One example would be patronizing my local repair shop (or fixing my stuff myself). The big structural barriers to repair are things like “parts pairing”:

    https://pluralistic.net/2024/05/24/record-scratch/#autoenshittification

    And manufacturers who abuse trademark law to get CBP to seize refurbished parts at the border:

    https://www.shacknews.com/article/108049/apple-repair-critic-louis-rossmann-takes-on-us-customs-counterfeit-battery-seizure

    The repair problem isn’t that your neighbors are “sheeple” who’ve had their minds warped by a “throwaway society.” The problem is that technical and legal countermeasures have made repair so hard and unprofitable that getting your stuff fixed is more expensive and time-consuming than it needs to be.

    That said: I love going to my local repair shop. I love fixing things on my own. It’s great. It makes me feel great. I think you should do it because it may make you feel great, too, and it’d be nice for you to support your local fix-it place, but let’s not pretend that we’ll change society that way.

    Here’s another example: for the past couple years, I’ve been navigating a (thankfully very treatable) cancer diagnosis. The fact that my cancer is very treatable doesn’t mean it’s easily treated. America’s shitty, for-profit healthcare system is terrible at the best of times, and nearly unnavigable when coping with a complex condition that crosses a lot of disciplinary lines and requires access to specialized, expensive equipment.

    I’m asymptomatic, so the hardest part of having cancer – so far – is fighting the Kaiser bureaucracy to make sure my treatment goes off as planned:

    https://pluralistic.net/2024/11/05/carcinoma-angels/#squeaky-nail

    The fact that the different Kaiser departments drop so many balls when handing off care between them means that I have to juggle those balls for them. I make extensive use of organizational tactics like “suspense files,” which are a kind of inverted to-do list, in that they let you manage other people’s to-do lists, rather than your own:

    https://pluralistic.net/2024/10/26/one-weird-trick/#todo

    (In case you’re wondering, the best part of having cancer is that Kaiser comps 100% of your parking! Free cancer parking!)

    Now, I also make sure to note each of Kaiser’s failures and I raise grievances and California health ombudsman complaints for each one – not because I’m angry and want an apology, but because I’m a well-organized, native English-speaking cancer patient with no symptoms, which means that I can do the advocacy that other people can’t, and help them (I also track these complaints with suspense files, calendar entries, etc, to make sure that they’re followed through).

    Partly, I’m able to do this because I’m very organized. I’m not organized because I worship at the cult of “personal productivity”; I’m definitely Jenny Odell-pilled on that score:

    https://memex.craphound.com/2019/04/09/how-to-do-nothing-jenny-odells-case-for-resisting-the-attention-economy/

    I’m organized because I pursue The Way of Jim Munroe’s “Time Management for Anarchists” (“once I learned how to make my own structure, I was able to kick my expensive boss habit and work on my own”):

    https://jimmunroe.net/comics/pamphlets/time_management_for_anarchists/time_management_for_anarchists.html

    Having invested a lot of energy into being organized, I now get massive discounts on dealing with other people’s shit. Remember: giant corporations and other remorseless bureaucracies throw up roadblocks on the assumption that you will be a “rational economic actor.” The airline assumes that if it costs you 15 hours to collect on the $50 voucher you’re entitled to, you will just let them steal $50 from you. But once you get organized enough, you can cut that 15-hour investment down to a 15-minute one, and I will absolutely trade 15 minutes of dealing with an airline’s bullshit for $50 of that airline’s money.

    (Why yes, Air Canada did fuck me over on Jan 3 and get me home at 5AM the next day, instead of 730PM the night before; and yes, they did deny my compensation claim; and yes, I have filed an appeal with the Canada Transport Agency; why do you ask?)

    One of my favorite podcasts is “An Arm and a Leg,” which divides itself between deep dive structural analyses into how corrupt and ghastly American medical billing is, and enumerations of sweet hacks that ninja bill-fighters have come up with to slice through the billing labyrinth your insurer and hospital trap you in and cut straight to the bullseye:

    https://armandalegshow.com/

    For example, the latest episode tells the story of Jared Walker, who figured out that hospitals were stealing billions of dollars every year from the poorest people in America, who were all entitled to have their medical bill canceled. He founded Dollarfor, a nonprofit that helps patients get their medical debt canceled:

    https://armandalegshow.com/episode/our-favorite-project-of-2025-levels-up-and-you-can-help/

    Dollarfor now has an automated tool that guides you through a survey and then generates and files the completed, hospital-specific paperwork needed to get your medical debt canceled (they’ve made versions of this for every hospital in America!):

    https://dollarfor.org/

    (If you’re a health worker, here’s a printable guide with QR codes that you can clip to your lanyard and show to patients while you deliver care):

    https://drive.google.com/file/d/14cfwK66A_mfBBBqn35_Lp7930uoY-73f/view

    Now, the real problem here isn’t that hospitals steal billions from charity cases: it’s that America has a garbage for-profit healthcare system that kills and bankrupts people at scale. Dollarfor is amazing, but it’s not going to fix that problem. I don’t know Walker, but I bet if you asked him, he’d agree with this, and say something like, “Yes, and I’m helping people not have their lives destroyed by this garbage system, which is good unto itself; and also, it might give them the free time and wherewithal to participate in movements to overthrow the garbage system.”

    I really dote on the fact that Dollarfor has literally built a different version of their tool for every single hospital in the country. It’s a perfect example of how turning yourself into a highly organized adversary can overcome the time-based economics our enemies rely on to keep their garbage systems intact.

    Whenever I think of this stuff, I flash on two pop-culture references that made a deep impression on me. The first comes from 1985’s Real Genius, Val Kilmer’s best ever movie (fight me!). Real Genius is set at a fictionalized version of Caltech in which young prodigies slowly discover that their scumbag prof has tricked them into working on a weapons contract for the DoD.

    This being fictional-Caltech, there are all these scenes in which very smart people do weird and amazing things. At one point, we learn that there’s a former child prodigy living in the basement under the dorms, a guy named Lazlo Hollyfeld who became a hermit after discovering that he, too, had been duped into working on a baby-killer project. We get these tantalizing glimpses of Lazlo in his subterranean redoubt, where he has built some kind of giant Rube Goldberg machine that is engaged in a mysterious mechanical process that involves manipulating cards of some sort.

    At the film’s denouement (spoiler alert for a 40 year old movie), we discover what he was doing:

    Lazlo: These are entries into the Frito-Lay Sweepstakes. “No purchase necessary, enter as often as you want” – so I am.

    Chris: That’s great! How many times?

    Lazlo: Well, this batch makes it one million six hundred and fifty thousand. I should win thirty-two point six percent of the prizes, including the car.

    Chris: That kind of takes the fun out of it, doesn’t it?

    Lazlo: They set up the rules, and lately I’ve come to realize that I have certain materialistic needs.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I6kBfBXZBdc

    Then there’s a scene from the otherwise tepid (fight me!) Batman Returns (1992) in which we encounter the Penguin in his subterranean redoubt, brandishing pages full of kompromat that have been laboriously taped together:

    The Penguin: What about the documents that prove you own half the firetraps in Gotham City?

    Maximillian ‘Max’ Shreck: If there were such documents – and that’s not an admission – I would have seen to it they were shredded.

    The Penguin: Ah, good idea! [pulls out a sheaf of documents]

    The Penguin: A lot of tape and a little patience make all the difference.

    https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0103776/quotes/

    Both Lazlo and the Penguin are defeating the time-based security assumptions of their adversaries. Frito Lay treats filling in 1.65m sweepstakes entries as the same thing as filling in infinity entries; Max Schrek treats the time needed to piece together shredded paper as infinite. Rounding a very large number up to infinity isn’t entirely irrational, but once you get organized enough, you just might be able to find the time – or a system – to bring that very big number down to an entirely tractable value.

    Yes, this is a species of “careful shopping” but my point isn’t to say that shopping carefully is useless – rather, that it’s a drastic error to mistake this useful (and surprisingly satisfying) tactic for a strategy that will truly alter the system.

    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)

    #25yrsago Karl Schroeder’s “Ventus” https://www.mindjack.com/books/ventus.html

    #20yrsago Hollywood’s Canadian MP plagiarizes entertainment industry in op-ed https://web.archive.org/web/20060814015107/http://www.michaelgeist.ca/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=1082

    #20yrago Pope: Divine inspiration is copyrighted https://web.archive.org/web/20070219175621/http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/europe/article717916.ece

    #10yrsago Gay Tory MP outs himself as a “poppers” user, slams proposed ban https://web.archive.org/web/20160122212659/https://www.msn.com/en-gb/news/uknews/mp-crispin-blunt-admits-using-poppers-while-attacking-proposed-ban/ar-BBotElv

    #10yrsago Donald Trump’s dad was Woody Guthrie’s hated Klansman landlord https://theconversation.com/woody-guthrie-old-man-trump-and-a-real-estate-empires-racist-foundations-53026

    #5yrsago How one of America’s most abusive employers gets away with it https://pluralistic.net/2021/01/22/paperback-writer/#toothless

    #1yrago EFF’s transition memo for the Biden admin https://pluralistic.net/2021/01/22/paperback-writer/#memo

    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 (1023 words today, 12377 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

    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.

    How to get Pluralistic:

    Blog (no ads, tracking, or data-collection):

    Pluralistic.net

    Newsletter (no ads, tracking, or data-collection):

    https://pluralistic.net/plura-list

    Mastodon (no ads, tracking, or data-collection):

    https://mamot.fr/@pluralistic

    Medium (no ads, paywalled):

    https://doctorow.medium.com/

    Twitter (mass-scale, unrestricted, third-party surveillance and advertising):

    https://twitter.com/doctorow

    Tumblr (mass-scale, unrestricted, third-party surveillance and advertising):

    https://mostlysignssomeportents.tumblr.com/tagged/pluralistic

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

    READ CAREFULLY: By reading this, you agree, on behalf of your employer, to release me from all obligations and waivers arising from any and all NON-NEGOTIATED agreements, licenses, terms-of-service, shrinkwrap, clickwrap, browsewrap, confidentiality, non-disclosure, non-compete and acceptable use policies (“BOGUS AGREEMENTS”) that I have entered into with your employer, its partners, licensors, agents and assigns, in perpetuity, without prejudice to my ongoing rights and privileges. You further represent that you have the authority to release me from any BOGUS AGREEMENTS on behalf of your employer.

    ISSN: 3066-764X

  • Hospitals still under pressure with another cold snap and norovirus rise

    The NHS is facing continuing winter pressures as the country approaches another cold snap, and as rising pressures are pushing hospitals to their busiest levels for this time of year since before COVID-19. Figures released today show more general and acute hospital beds were occupied in the week ending 18 Jan (94.5%) than at any […]

  • That Cancer Conversation Podcast Season 4: Ep.2 ‘Could AI help us beat cancer?’

  • Interview series with Professor John Read: Challenging the Medical Model of Mental Health

    Interview series with Professor John Read: Challenging the Medical Model of Mental Health

     

    interview-series-with-john-read-1080×1080

    A new series of interviews hosted by Piia Tuominen with Professor John Read

    Challenging the Medical Model of Mental Health – A Call for Humane, Evidence-based Services that Respect Human Rights

    Here are the themes:

    November 2025 – ECT
    December 2025 – Psychiatric Diagnoses
    January 2026 – Antidepressants
    February 2026 – Antipsychotics
    March 2026 – Psychosis

    Pila Tuominen has a page dedicated to this series on her English website

    https://piiatuominen.com/jr

    On that page, you’ll also find an interview Piia recorded with Professor Read on October 3rd, 2025. After that conversation, they decided to create this forthcoming series of interviews.

    The post Interview series with Professor John Read: Challenging the Medical Model of Mental Health appeared first on Mad in the UK.

  • My DIY Recovery from “Bipolar Disability” Part 2: Healing

    My DIY Recovery from “Bipolar Disability” Part 2: Healing

    Once free from the gaslighting and control of mental health professionals I instinctively knew the things I needed in order to heal from the experiences of abuse, violence and sexual violation which were the actual cause of my “bipolar symptoms”. The first step was finding safety (both physical and psychological), which thanks to the long shadow of psychiatry proved to be an epic struggle, recounted in my previous blog Searching For Safety. 

    My medicine has been the love, kindness and understanding I’ve found from ordinary empathetic people, and the spiritual meaning, strength and comfort that I have reconnected to. My therapy has been sharing my story openly, in my blogs and on my Facebook, and connecting with others who share similar experiences. My treatment has been time in nature, music, singing, dancing, open-air swimming, cuddles with my cats, good food, reading, rest, relaxation, and above all rebuilding my relationships with my children.

    My years as a psychiatric patient shattered my sense of self as well as my sense of safety. Once I accepted that my feelings, thoughts and behaviours were due to my “bipolar illness”, there was no more “me” that I could believe in. I was possessed by a pathology that could never be exorcised. My conscious experiences were merely “symptoms of my disorder” and the only meaning they held was as signals of my need for psychiatric “medication”. It took years before I realised that these psychoactive substances were actually themselves the abnormal thing that had been exerting control over both my inner world and my outward behaviour. ‘Antipsychotic’ drugs had originally been promoted in the 1950s as a “chemical lobotomy” and sold as “major tranquilisers” – they work by blocking dopamine, a neurotransmitter that is fundamental to the functioning of human motivation, and many of the systems in our brains. No wonder I felt so unlike my normal self. No wonder I felt so mentally ill.

    Freeing my natural human feelings from the chemical control that my mind had been under was more than a liberation. It literally felt like coming alive after living as some sort of zombie. I had always hated taking my ‘antipsychotic’ Olanzapine, but all the ways in which the ‘mood stabiliser’ Lithium also affected me were only really apparent to me when I finally emerged from under its flattening influence. As Dr Peter Breggin so eloquently explains, these psychoactive drugs have a “spellbinding” effect on us.

    As the drug effects began to lessen, the intensity of my emotions –  both the positive and the painful ones – began to increase. But the more I let them flow freely – crying, screaming, ranting, swearing (and laughing and smiling too!) – the more manageable they began to be. As soon as I stopped fearing strong emotions, they stopped sucking me down into the spiral of feeling anxious about my anxiety and depressed about my depression. The biggest breakthrough for me was finding people it was safe to share my distress with, without being met with rejection, judgement, or worst of all having my emotions perceived as “symptoms” that ought to be “medicated”. I found I had to keep a distance from people who persisted in seeing me through a psychiatric lens, which sadly meant rebuilding my social world almost entirely. The vulnerability of having to repeatedly reach out felt excruciating. But I knew there was no other option – we humans need social connection almost as much as we need oxygen. I often wished I had at least one person close by my side, actively looking out for me and walking with me all the way, but I’ve had some truly special people step into my life and support me. It’s also helped me a lot to try to remember that there is a big difference between those who don’t care and those who just don’t have the capacity to be there.

    I have found a huge source of strength and support through reconnecting with my spirituality and my faith. Psychiatry is strongly suspicious of spiritual beliefs in the ‘unseen’, but believing in possibilities and powers that lie beyond the limits of our human perception was the strongest source of hope that I held on to. And finding a secure sense of self-worth from a deep spiritual perspective has been truly transformative.

    My holistic healing has not just been about my heart, my mind and my spirit, but it is also something that has happened very powerfully through my body. Our nervous system doesn’t end at the neck, and trauma impacts us profoundly at the level of the autonomic nervous system, operating through our subconscious perceptions and involuntary reactions. Physically experiencing safety, through empowering movement, and relaxing immersion in water and human touch, and through the deep breathing involved in singing, helped me to at long last give my whole nervous system what it needed to move beyond my traumatised state of almost constant high-alert, and finally be able to truly relax and live in the present.

    I found that the creative arts offered me fundamentally human modes of healing through self-expression and connection, and through all the ways that they can shift our focus and stimulate a state of ‘flow’. I’ve absorbed myself a lot in photography, just using my phone camera, and I especially love using it to play with different ways of perceiving the world, through things like reflections and unusual angles. Poetry has allowed me to express experiences that were simply too painful to put into prose. While music has connected me emotionally to shared human experience on a deeply cathartic level. And meanwhile the sensory delights of the natural world has also been a means to immerse my senses and calm my mind, in a way that no professional mindfulness class could ever provide.

    I also had to find my own ways of making sense of my experiences of madness. I devoured books and online videos by all those whose voices are critical of mainstream views on mental health. And I came to see my depression, my anxiety, my mania and even my psychosis as understandable human reactions to abnormal life events and circumstances. After having been thrown onto the scrapheap of society that is our mental health system, I had to rediscover the belief that I was a “normal” person with a contribution to make, and the ability to belong. I had to grasp hold of the fact that I am an equal human being. And most importantly I had to believe that I am not an intrinsically unstable and unfit mother.

    My life now as a single mum to three children, who were put through significant trauma themselves, isn’t a walk in the park. But it is full of love and joy in ways I never imagined would ever be possible, and every moment is a blessing, whether times of tears or times filled with fun.

    However I’m very aware that the amount of social privilege that I was able use in fighting my way out of the psychiatric system, and finding my way to healing and happiness, is something far too few people have available to them. And that in slightly different circumstances I would have been disabled for life, or even dead, and my children taken into care. I’m also aware that people who believe blindly in bio-medical psychiatry will simply say that I happen to be “in remission” and that I’m recklessly risking further serious episodes of my “bipolar disorder” by refusing to follow the regime of lifelong psychiatric medication that the consensus says is essential in cases such as mine. But I hope that all those with an open mind will be able to take some important insights from my story of survival and healing. And that by sharing my painful personal experiences as widely as possible I can help save others from such preventable suffering and harm – and contribute to bringing about much needed change in how our society understands and approaches mental health.

    ****

    Mad in the UK hosts blogs by a diverse group of writers. The opinions expressed are the writers’ own.

    The post My DIY Recovery from “Bipolar Disability” Part 2: Healing appeared first on Mad in the UK.

  • Copyright Kills Competition

    We’re taking part in Copyright Week, a series of actions and discussions supporting key principles that should guide copyright policy. Every day this week, various groups are taking on different elements of copyright law and policy, and addressing what’s at stake, and what we need to do to make sure that copyright promotes creativity and innovation.

    Copyright owners increasingly claim more draconian copyright law and policy will fight back against big tech companies. In reality, copyright gives the most powerful companies even more control over creators and competitors. Today’s copyright policy concentrates power among a handful of corporate gatekeepers—at everyone else’s expense. We need a system that supports grassroots innovation and emerging creators by lowering barriers to entry—ultimately offering all of us a wider variety of choices.

    Pro-monopoly regulation through copyright won’t provide any meaningful economic support for vulnerable artists and creators. Because of the imbalance in bargaining power between creators and publishing gatekeepers, trying to help creators by giving them new rights under copyright law is like trying to help a bullied kid by giving them more lunch money for the bully to take.

    Entertainment companies’ historical practices bear out this concern. For example, in the late-2000’s to mid-2010’s, music publishers and recording companies struck multimillion-dollar direct licensing deals with music streaming companies and video sharing platforms. Google reportedly paid more than $400 million to a single music label, and Spotify gave the major record labels a combined 18 percent ownership interest in its now- $100 billion company. Yet music labels and publishers frequently fail to share these payments with artists, and artists rarely benefit from these equity arrangements. There’s no reason to think that these same companies would treat their artists more fairly now.

    AI Training

    In the AI era, copyright may seem like a good way to prevent big tech from profiting from AI at individual creators’ expense—it’s not. In fact, the opposite is true. Developing a large language model requires developers to train the model on millions of works. Requiring developers to license enough AI training data to build a large language model would  limit competition to all but the largest corporations—those that either have their own trove of training data or can afford to strike a deal with one that does. This would result in all the usual harms of limited competition, like higher costs, worse service, and heightened security risks. New, beneficial AI tools that allow people to express themselves or access information.

    For giant tech companies that can afford to pay, pricey licensing deals offer a way to lock in their dominant positions in the generative AI market by creating prohibitive barriers to entry.

    Legacy gatekeepers have already used copyright to stifle access to information and the creation of new tools for understanding it. Consider, for example, Thomson Reuters v. Ross Intelligence, the first of many copyright lawsuits over the use of works train AI. ROSS Intelligence was a legal research startup that built an AI-based tool to compete with ubiquitous legal research platforms like Lexis and Thomson Reuters’ Westlaw. ROSS trained its tool using “West headnotes” that Thomson Reuters adds to the legal decisions it publishes, paraphrasing the individual legal conclusions (what lawyers call “holdings”) that the headnotes identified. The tool didn’t output any of the headnotes, but Thomson Reuters sued ROSS anyways. A federal appeals court is still considering the key copyright issues in the case—which EFF weighed in on last year. EFF hopes that the appeals court will reject this overbroad interpretation of copyright law. But in the meantime, the case has already forced the startup out of business, eliminating a would-be competitor that might have helped increase access to the law.

    Requiring developers to license AI training materials benefits tech monopolists as well. For giant tech companies that can afford to pay, pricey licensing deals offer a way to lock in their dominant positions in the generative AI market by creating prohibitive barriers to entry. The cost of licensing enough works to train an LLM would be prohibitively expensive for most would-be competitors.

    The DMCA’s “Anti-Circumvention” Provision

    The Digital Millennium Copyright Act’s “anti-circumvention” provision is another case in point. Congress ostensibly passed the DMCA to discourage would-be infringers from defeating Digital Rights Management (DRM) and other access controls and copy restrictions on creative works.

    Section 1201 has been used to block competition and innovation in everything from printer cartridges to garage door openers

    In practice, it’s done little to deter infringement—after all, large-scale infringement already invites massive legal penalties. Instead, Section 1201 has been used to block competition and innovation in everything from printer cartridges to garage door openers, videogame console accessories, and computer maintenance services. It’s been used to threaten hobbyists who wanted to make their devices and games work better. And the problem only gets worse as software shows up in more and more places, from phones to cars to refrigerators to farm equipment. If that software is locked up behind DRM, interoperating with it so you can offer add-on services may require circumvention. As a result, manufacturers get complete control over their products, long after they are purchased, and can even shut down secondary markets (as Lexmark did for printer ink, and Microsoft tried to do for Xbox memory cards.)

    Giving rights holders a veto on new competition and innovation hurts consumers. Instead, we need balanced copyright policy that rewards consumers without impeding competition.

  • Pluralistic: Google’s AI pricing plan (21 Jan 2026)

    Today’s links


    Google's Mountain View headquarters. The scene is animated: the building is quickly covered with price-tags ranging from 0.99 to 99999.99. In the final frames, 99999.99 tags cover all the other price tags. In the background, rising over the roof of the Googleplex like the rising sun, is the staring red eye of HAL 9000 from Stanley Kubrick's '2001: A Space Odyssey.'

    Google’s AI pricing plan (permalink)

    Google is spending a lot on AI, but what’s not clear is how Google will make a lot from AI. Or, you know, even break even. Given, you know, that businesses are seeing zero return from AI:

    https://www.theregister.com/2026/01/20/pwc_ai_ceo_survey/

    But maybe they’ve figured it out. In a recent edition of his BIG newsletter, Matt Stoller pulls on several of the strings that Google’s top execs have dangled recently:

    https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/will-google-organize-the-worlds-prices

    The first string: Google’s going to spy on you a lot more, for the same reason Microsoft is spying on all of its users: because they want to supply their AI “agents” with your personal data:

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0ANECpNdt-4

    Google’s announced that it’s going to feed its AI your Gmail messages, as well as the whole deep surveillance dossier the company has assembled based on your use of all the company’s products: Youtube, Maps, Photos, and, of course, Search:

    https://twitter.com/Google/status/2011473059547390106

    The second piece of news is that Apple has partnered with Google to supply Gemini to all iPhone users:

    https://twitter.com/NewsFromGoogle/status/2010760810751017017

    Apple already charges Google more than $20b/year not to enter the search market; now they’re going to be charging Google billions to stay out of the AI market, too. Meanwhile, Google will get to spy on Apple customers, just like they spy on their own users. Anyone who says that Apple is ideologically committed to your privacy because they’re real capitalists is a sucker (or a cultist):

    https://pluralistic.net/2024/01/12/youre-holding-it-wrong/#if-dishwashers-were-iphones

    But the big revelation is how Google is going to make money with AI: they’re going to sell AI-based “personalized pricing” to “partners,” including “Walmart, Visa, Mastercard, Shopify, Gap, Kroger, Macy’s, Stripe, Home Depot, Lowe’s, American Express, etc”:

    https://blog.google/products/ads-commerce/agentic-commerce-ai-tools-protocol-retailers-platforms/

    Personalized pricing, of course, is the polite euphemism for surveillance pricing, which is when a company spies on you in order to figure out how much they can get away with charging you (or how little they can get away with paying you):

    https://pluralistic.net/2025/06/24/price-discrimination/#

    It’s a weird form of cod-Marxism, whose tenet is “From each according to their desperation; to each according to their vulnerability.” Surveillance pricing advocates say that this is “efficient” because they can use surveillance data to offer you discounts, too – like, say you rock up to an airline ticket counter 45 minutes before takeoff and they can use surveillance data to know that you won’t take their last empty seat for $200, but you would fly in it for $100, you could get that seat for cheap.

    This is, of course, nonsense. Airlines don’t sell off cheap seats like bakeries discounting their day-olds – they jack up the price of a last-minute journey to farcical heights.

    Google also claims that it will only use its surveillance pricing facility to offer discounts, and not to extract premiums. As Stoller points out, there’s a well-developed playbook for making premiums look like discounts, which is easy to see in the health industry. As Stoller says, the list price for an MRI is $8,000, but your insurer gets a $6000 “discount” and actually pays $1970, sticking you with a $30 co-pay. The $8000 is a fake number, and so is the $6000 – the only real price is the $30 you’re paying.

    The whole economy is filled with versions of this transparent ruse, from “department stores who routinely mark everything as 80% off” to pharmacy benefit managers:

    https://pluralistic.net/2024/09/23/shield-of-boringness/#some-men-rob-you-with-a-fountain-pen

    Google, meanwhile, is touting its new “universal commerce protocol” (UCP), a way for AI “agents” to retrieve prices and product descriptions and make purchases:

    https://www.thesling.org/the-harm-to-consumers-and-sellers-from-universal-commerce-protocol-in-googles-own-words/

    Right now, a major hurdle to “agentic AI” is the complexity of navigating websites designed for humans. AI agents just aren’t very reliable when it comes to figuring out which product is which, choosing the correct options, and putting it in a shopping cart, and then paying for it.

    Some of that is merely because websites have inconsistent “semantics” – literally things like the “buy” button being called something other than “buy button” in the HTML code. But there’s a far more profound problem with agentic shopping, which is that companies deliberately obfuscate their prices.

    This is how junk fees work, and why they’re so destructive. Say you’re a hotel providing your rate-card to an online travel website. You know that travelers are going to search for hotels by city and amenities, and then sort the resulting list by price. If you hide your final price – by surprising the user with a bunch of junk fees at checkout, or, better yet, after they arrive and put their credit-card down at reception – you are going to be at the top of that list. Your hotel will seem like the cheapest, best option.

    But of course, it’s not. From Ticketmaster to car rentals, hotels to discount airlines, rental apartments to cellular plans, the real price is withheld until the very last instant, whereupon it shoots up to levels that are absolutely uncompetitive. But because these companies are able to engage in deceptive advertising, they look cheaper.

    And of course, crooked offers drive out honest ones. The honest hotel that provides a true rate card, reflecting the all-in price, ends up at the bottom of the price-sorted list, rents no rooms, and goes out of business (or pivots to lying about its prices, too).

    Online sellers do not want to expose their true prices to comparison shopping services. They benefit from lying to those services. For decades, technologists have dreamed of building a “semantic web” in which everyone exposes true and accurate machine-readable manifests of their content to facilitate indexing, search and data-mining:

    https://people.well.com/user/doctorow/metacrap.htm

    This has failed. It’s failed because lying is often more profitable than telling the truth, and because lying to computers is easier than lying to people, and because once a market is dominated by liars, everyone has to lie, or be pushed out of the market.

    Of course, it would be really cool if everyone diligently marked up everything they put into the public sphere with accurate metadata. But there are lots of really cool things you could do if you could get everyone else to change how they do things and arrange their affairs to your convenience. Imagine how great it would be if you could just get everyone to board an airplane from back to front, or to stand right and walk left on escalators, or to put on headphones when using their phones in public.

    Wanting it badly is not enough. People have lots of reasons for doing things in suboptimal ways. Often the reason is that it’s suboptimal for you, but just peachy for them.

    Google says that it’s going to get every website in the world to expose accurate rate cards to its chatbots to facilitate agentic AI. Google is also incapable of preventing “search engine optimization” companies from tricking it into showing bullshit at the top of the results for common queries:

    https://pluralistic.net/2024/05/03/keyword-swarming/#site-reputation-abuse

    Google somehow thinks that the companies that spend millions of dollars trying to trick its crawler won’t also spend millions of dollars trying to trick its chatbot – and they’re providing the internet with a tool to inject lies straight into the chatbot’s input hopper.

    But UCP isn’t just a way for companies to tell Google what their prices are. As Stoller points out, UCP will also sell merchants the ability to have Gemini set prices on their products, using Google’s surveillance data, through “dynamic pricing” (another euphemism for “surveillance pricing”).

    This decade has seen the rise and rise of price “clearinghouses” – companies that offer price “consulting” to direct competitors in a market. Nominally, this is just a case of two competitors shopping with the same supplier – like Procter and Gamble and Unilever buying their high-fructose corn-syrup from the same company.

    But it’s actually far more sinister. “Clearinghouses” like Realpage – a company that “advises” landlords on rental rates – allow all the major competitors in a market to collude to raise prices in lockstep. A Realpage landlord that ignores the service’s “advice” and gives a tenant a break on the rent will be excluded from Realpage’s service. The rental markets that Realpage dominates have seen major increases in rental rates:

    https://pluralistic.net/2025/10/09/pricewars/#adam-smith-communist

    Google’s “direct pricing” offering will allow all comers to have Google set their prices for them, based on Google’s surveillance data. That includes direct competitors. As Stoller points out, both Nike and Reebok are Google advertisers. If they let Google price their sneakers, Google can raise prices across the market in lockstep.

    Despite how much everyone hates this garbage, neoclassical economists and their apologists in the legal profession continue to insist that surveillance pricing is “efficient.” Stoller points to a law review article called “Antitrust After the Coming Wave,” written by antitrust law prof and Google lawyer Daniel Crane:

    https://nyulawreview.org/issues/volume-99-number-4/antitrust-after-the-coming-wave/

    Crane argues that AI will kill antitrust law because AI favors monopolies, and argues “that we should forget about promoting competition or costs, and instead enact a new Soviet-style regime, one in which the government would merely direct a monopolist’s ‘AI to maximize social welfare and allocate the surplus created among different stakeholders of the firm.’”

    This is a planned economy, but it’s one in which the planning is done by monopolists who are – somehow, implausibly – so biddable that governments can delegate the power to decide what we can buy and sell, what we can afford and who can afford it, and rein them in if they get it wrong.

    In 1890, Senator John Sherman was stumping for the Sherman Act, America’s first antitrust law. On the Senate floor, he declared:

    If we will not endure a King as a political power we should not endure a King over the production, transportation, and sale of the necessaries of life. If we would not submit to an emperor we should not submit to an autocrat of trade with power to prevent competition and to fix the price of any commodity.

    https://pluralistic.net/2022/02/20/we-should-not-endure-a-king/

    Google thinks that it has finally found a profitable use for AI. It thinks that it will be the first company to make money on AI, by harnessing that AI to a market-rigging, price-gouging monopoly that turns Google’s software into Sherman’s “autocrat of trade.”

    It’s funny when you think of all those “AI safety” bros who claimed that AI’s greatest danger was that it would become sentient and devour us. It turns out that the real “AI safety” risk is that AI will automate price gouging at scale, allowing Google to crown itself a “King over the necessaries of life”:

    https://pluralistic.net/2023/11/27/10-types-of-people/#taking-up-a-lot-of-space

    (Image: Noah_Loverbear; CC BY-SA 3.0; Cryteria, CC BY 3.0; modified)

    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)

    #20yrsago Disney swaps stock for Pixar; Jobs is largest Disney stockholder https://web.archive.org/web/20060129105430/https://www.telegraph.co.uk/money/main.jhtml?xml=/money/2006/01/22/cnpixar22.xml&menuId=242&sSheet=/money/2006/01/22/ixcitytop.html

    #20yrsago HOWTO anonymize your search history https://web.archive.org/web/20060220004353/https://www.wired.com/news/technology/1,70051-0.html

    #15yrsago Bruce Sterling talk on “vernacular video” https://vimeo.com/18977827

    #15yrsago Elaborate televised prank on Belgium’s terrible phone company https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mxXlDyTD7wo

    #15yrsago Portugal: 10 years of decriminalized drugs https://web.archive.org/web/20110120040831/http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/ideas/articles/2011/01/16/drug_experiment/?page=full

    #15yrsago Woman paralyzed by hickey https://web.archive.org/web/20110123072349/https://www.foxnews.com/health/2011/01/21/new-zealand-woman-partially-paralyzed-hickey/

    #15yrsago EFF warns: mobile OS vendors aren’t serious about security https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2011/01/dont-sacrifice-security-mobile-devices

    #10yrsago Trumpscript: a programming language based on the rhetorical tactics of Donald Trump https://www.inverse.com/article/10448-coders-assimilate-donald-trump-to-a-programming-language

    #10yrsago That time the DoD paid Duke U $335K to investigate ESP in dogs. Yes, dogs. https://www.muckrock.com/news/archives/2016/jan/21/duke-universitys-deep-dive-uncanny-abilities-canin/

    #10yrsago Kathryn Cramer remembers her late husband, David Hartwell, a giant of science fiction https://web.archive.org/web/20160124050729/http://www.kathryncramer.com/kathryn_cramer/2016/01/til-death-did-us-part.html

    #10yrsago What the Democratic Party did to alienate poor white Americans https://web.archive.org/web/20160123041632/https://www.alternet.org/economy/robert-reich-why-white-working-class-abandoned-democratic-party

    #10yrsago Bernie Sanders/Johnny Cash tee https://web.archive.org/web/20160126070314/https://weardinner.com/products/bernie-cash

    #5yrsago NYPD can’t stop choking Black men https://pluralistic.net/2021/01/21/i-cant-breathe/#chokeholds

    #5yrsago Rolling back the Trump rollback https://pluralistic.net/2021/01/21/i-cant-breathe/#cra

    #1yrsago Winning coalitions aren’t always governing coalitions https://pluralistic.net/2025/01/06/how-the-sausage-gets-made/#governing-is-harder

    #1yrago The Brave Little Toaster https://pluralistic.net/2025/01/08/sirius-cybernetics-corporation/#chatterbox

    #1yrago The cod-Marxism of personalized pricing https://pluralistic.net/2025/01/11/socialism-for-the-wealthy/#rugged-individualism-for-the-poor

    #1yrago They were warned https://pluralistic.net/2025/01/13/wanting-it-badly/#is-not-enough

    Upcoming appearances (permalink)

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    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 (1010 words today, 11362 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

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

    READ CAREFULLY: By reading this, you agree, on behalf of your employer, to release me from all obligations and waivers arising from any and all NON-NEGOTIATED agreements, licenses, terms-of-service, shrinkwrap, clickwrap, browsewrap, confidentiality, non-disclosure, non-compete and acceptable use policies (“BOGUS AGREEMENTS”) that I have entered into with your employer, its partners, licensors, agents and assigns, in perpetuity, without prejudice to my ongoing rights and privileges. You further represent that you have the authority to release me from any BOGUS AGREEMENTS on behalf of your employer.

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  • FBI’s Washington Post Investigation Shows How Your Printer Can Snitch on You

    Federal prosecutors on January 9 charged Aurelio Luis Perez-Lugones, an IT specialist for an unnamed government contractor, with “the offense of unlawful retention of national defense information,” according to an FBI affidavit. The case attracted national attention after federal agents investigating Perez-Lugones searched the home of a Washington Post reporter. But overlooked so far in the media coverage is the fact that a surprising surveillance tool pointed investigators toward Perez-Lugones: an office printer with a photographic memory.

    News of the investigation broke when the Washington Post reported that investigators seized the work laptop, personal laptop, phone, and smartwatch of journalist Hannah Natanson, who has covered the Trump administration’s impact on the federal government and recently wrote about developing more than 1,000 government sources. A Justice Department official told the Post that Perez-Lugones had been messaging Natanson to discuss classified information. The affidavit does not allege that Perez-Lugones disseminated national defense information, only that he unlawfully retained it. The Justice Department and the Washington Post did not respond to request for comment.

    The affidavit provides insight into how Perez-Lugones allegedly attempted to exfiltrate information from a Secure Compartmented Information Facility, or SCIF, and the unexpected way his employer took notice.

    According to the FBI, Perez-Lugones printed a classified intelligence report, albeit in a roundabout fashion. It’s standard for workplace printers to log certain information, such as the names of files they print and the users who printed them. In an apparent attempt to avoid detection, Perez-Lugones, according to the affidavit, took screenshots of classified materials, cropped the screenshots, and pasted them into a Microsoft Word document.


    Related

    FBI Raid on WaPo Reporter’s Home Was Based on Sham Pretext

    By using screenshots instead of text, there would be no record of a classified report printed from the specific workstation. (Depending on the employer’s chosen data loss prevention monitoring software, access logs might show a specific user had opened the file and perhaps even tracked whether they took screenshots).

    Perez-Lugones allegedly gave the file an innocuous name, “Microsoft Word – Document1,” that might not stand out if printer logs were later audited.

    In this case, however, the affidavit reveals that Perez-Lugones’s employer could see not only the typical metadata stored by printers, such as file names, file sizes, and time of printing, but it could also view the actual contents of the printed materials — in this case, prosecutors say, the screenshots themselves. As the affidavit points out, “Perez-Lugones’ employer can retrieve records of print activity on classified systems, including copies of printed documents.”

    It’s unclear which printer management software was used by Perez-Lugones’s employer. But several commercial systems allow workplace administrators to view the contents of printed documents.

    For instance, PaperCut software offers a print archive feature that, when enabled, allows system administrators to browse the contents of all documents printed or scanned through its software system.


    Related

    How to Leak Under the Trump Administration

    Whenever someone presses print in a network outfitted with this printer monitoring software, the program creates a clandestine copy of the file and generates an image of page every printed. This happens in the background — users might be entirely unaware that the contents of printed files are archived. Workplace administrators can choose how long to retain copies of the documents and how much space the documents can take up.

    Aside from attempting to surreptitiously print a document, Perez-Lugones, investigators say, was also seen allegedly opening a classified document and taking notes, looking “back and forth between the screen corresponding the classified system and the notepad, all the while writing on the notepad.” The affidavit doesn’t state how this observation was made, but it strongly suggests a video surveillance system was also in play.

    Perez-Lugones’s lawyers did not respond to a request for comment.

    The post FBI’s Washington Post Investigation Shows How Your Printer Can Snitch on You appeared first on The Intercept.

  • The World Health Organization on Traditional Medicine

    The World Health Organization updated their guidelines on “traditional medicine.” Unfortunately, as has been the case in the past the WHO tends to be far too credulous about unproven and disproven treatments.

    The post The World Health Organization on Traditional Medicine first appeared on Science-Based Medicine.