Author: tio

  • The Minneapolis Resistance Will Do Your Laundry

    The Minneapolis Resistance Will Do Your Laundry

    Here in the North Star State, “ice out” used to refer to a springtime limnological phenomenon, when a freshwater lake’s frozen surface transitions to liquid. However, since the beginning of December 2025, the phrase has become a chant, a mantra, and a call to action posted on yard signs, lamp posts, and store windows. You can see ICE OUT graffitied on concrete bridge archways and pinned to the high visibility vests worn by volunteer school patrols. You can hear the words snarled by constitutional observers honking their cars behind federal agent convoys. In late Januaryyou could have watched snow shovel activistscarve out six giant letters into the frozen surface of Lake Nokomisin South Minneapolis, then light them up with luminaries so the message could be seen from airplanes landing at Minneapolis-St. Paul International airport. “ICE out” sentiment is embedded in the relentless organization of mutual aid that supports vulnerable community members who are sheltering in place to avoid abduction by ICE and Border Patrol agents. While this might seem like a geographically specific, colloquially charming anomaly—a ruddy-faced, wind-chapped rebellion dressed in snowsuits and fueled by tater-tot hotdish—residents in other sanctuary cities should dog-ear this chapter in Trump’s retribution playbook. They should highlight Minnesotans’ strategies and be ready to apply them when the Department of Homeland Security chooses its next undeserving victims on Stephen Miller’s racist retribution tour of blue states.

  • The Seers: Mystic Cats, Feminist Histories, and the Art of the Archive

    The Seers: Mystic Cats, Feminist Histories, and the Art of the Archive

    Internet Archive’s latest Artist in Residence, Cindy Rehm, has created The Seers, a project comprised of one hundred college drawings using images largely sourced from historic books at the Internet Archive. The Seers is inspired by the work of Hélène Cixous and Carolee Schneemann around their interest in the creative process, and mysticism often centered in the figure of the cat. Rehm searched historic books related to women and their feline companions including books on the history of cats in mysticism and witchcraft. For her collages, she gleaned images for their aesthetic and symbolic resonance, focusing on books related to histories of women including books on textiles and handiwork, art history, nature, cats, and other creatures. 

    For the format of the series, Rehm researched Internet Archive’s collection of antique scrapbooks. The scrapbook is a vernacular form often associated with women and their private lives, and also shares a process relationship with collage, where small fragments are cut and pasted. Historic scrapbooks were often made using repurposed books like catalogs, ledgers, and music books. Rehm borrowed this gesture of layering fragments over a main image, as image cut outs were repeated and remixed across the series to develop a symbolic language and esoteric taxonomy. 

    As part of her project, Rehm created a limited-edition poster that she distributed during her participation in Public Domain Day on site at Internet Archive. Rehm gave a talk about her project and process, view the livestream recording here.

    In February, Rehm will take The Seers to Automata in Los Angeles for a residency focused on extending the project to include an installation and performance. Please visit Rehm’s website to view The Seers full series.

    About the artist

    Cindy Rehm (https://www.cindyrehm.com/) is a Los Angeles-based artist and an educator. She serves as co-facilitator of the Cixous Reading Group, and is co-founder of the feminist-centered projects Craftswoman House and Feminist Love Letters. She is the founder and former director of spare room, a DIY installation space in Baltimore, MD. In 2021, she launched HEXENTEXTE, a collaborative project at the intersection of image, text and the body. 

    Rehm has held residencies at Performing Arts Forum in Saint Ermes, France and at Casa Lü, Mexico City. A book of her collage drawings, Transference, was released by Curious Publishing in 2022.

  • Cambodia: Over 48,000 Scammers Deported amid Scam Center Crackdown

    Cambodia has deported more than 48,000 foreign nationals accused of involvement in online scam operations since August 2023, Deputy Prime Minister and Interior Minister Sar Sokha said. A separate statement from the Ministry of Information estimated that over 210,000 suspected foreign scammers left the country voluntarily during the crackdown.

    Authorities have raided about 2,500 sites since June 2025, dismantling 200 scam centers and initiating deportation proceedings against more than 8,000 suspects. Those detained include Chen Zhi, a U.S.-sanctioned alleged ringleader arrested on Jan. 6, 2026.

  • Uzbek Mining Giant Defends $200M in Tenders to Secretive Firms, Silent on Other OCCRP Findings

    A major state-owned company in Uzbekistan has defended the more than $200 million in tenders it awarded to foreign companies that OCCRP found included firms with proxy owners, financial filings that falsely declared they were dormant, and procurement contracts featuring  signatures of people who deny signing them. 

    The statement issued this week by Almalyk Mining Metallurgical Complex (AMMC) follows a joint investigation by OCCRP and Finance Uncovered revealing that in several cases these foreign firms competed against one another for AMMC tenders despite being under common control – and had their true beneficiaries hidden behind apparent straw owners.

    AMMC, often described as a “crown jewel” of the Uzbek economy, said in a statement Wednesday that all cited tenders were awarded to the lowest bidder through an automated government procurement system. 

    “The winners of the tenders/competitions delivered goods in full – in compliance with the quality indicators stipulated in the contract, and, most importantly, within the timeframes specified in the contract – to the plant’s warehouses,” the company said, adding that it had conducted an internal probe. 

    AMMC did not respond to previous questions from OCCRP and Finance Uncovered regarding contracts worth more than $7 million awarded to two U.K.-registered firms, Lemixton Solutions Ltd and Golders Business Ltd, that feature electronic signatures of accounting associates who deny signing the documents. One of them has since reported the matter to British authorities.

    The two firms collectively received over $35 million in tenders and sent dozens of shipments of goods to the Uzbek mining giant despite U.K. financial filings stating they were dormant, OCCRP revealed.

    The investigation found both firms were under common control but competed against one another for the same AMMC tenders.

    Similar patterns were identified in Georgia, where firms that had won tens of millions of dollars in AMMC tenders were purchased for a nominal amount  by a South Korean medical coordinator with Uzbek roots and no apparent experience in the mining sector.

    Like the U.K.-based tender winners, the Georgian firms did not indicate any economic activity in financial filings during the period in which they were awarded the tenders.

    A representative for the U.K. companies said that a single individual controlled both of the firms. The Uzbek, Colombian, and Georgian figures identified in the report did not respond to inquiries or declined to comment.

    The findings raise questions about transparency and oversight in one of Uzbekistan’s key industrial sectors, though AMMC maintains that all procurement processes complied with internal and legal requirements.

  • Eastern Europe’s Synthetic Drug Network Dismantled in Major Raids

    Authorities in Ukraine, Poland and Moldova, with support from Europol, dismantled dozens of synthetic drug laboratories and storage sites and arrested more than 100 suspects in one of the largest coordinated crackdowns on Eastern Europe’s synthetic drug trade, officials said Thursday.

    The operation, conducted February 12–17, targeted a network producing and trafficking synthetic cathinones, including alpha-PVP, a potent stimulant often sold as “bath salts” and associated with high risk of addiction, psychosis, and violent behavior. On the main action day, officers from the Ukrainian National Police and Poland’s Central Bureau of Investigation (CBŚP) carried out coordinated checks at roughly 510 locations.

    Ukrainian police reported more than 500 searches across 21 regions, dismantling 34 laboratories and 74 storage facilities, and seizing over 27 million doses of drugs, including 220 kilograms of alpha-PVP, 156 kilograms of amphetamine, 17.6 kilograms of mephedrone, seven kilograms of methamphetamine and 47 kilograms of cannabis. Authorities said 97 people were detained during the nationwide operation, and 123 suspects have been formally charged. Investigators also seized nearly $290,000 in several real and virtual currencies and 41 vehicles.

    CBŚP said its officers in Poland dismantled two fully equipped illegal laboratories producing mephedrone and alpha-PVP, arrested six suspects, and confiscated drugs, cash and vehicles. Investigators noted the labs posed major public safety risks due to flammable chemicals and environmental contamination.

    Ukrainian authorities said the network built a full illegal production cycle, from smuggling precursors from the EU countries to synthesizing and distributing drugs to end users in Ukraine, Poland, and Moldova. Investigators estimated the labs’ combined monthly output exceeded 700 kilograms, with profits surpassing 400 million hryvnias ($9.25 million).

    Europol, which provided operational and analytical support during the action days, said the network employed several tactics to facilitate its illicit activities. It misused legal business structures operated by Polish and Lithuanian individuals with prior involvement in synthetic drug production, allowing it to import chemicals—including precursors not yet subject to control—and support illegal laboratories in multiple countries. By operating across several EU member states and exploiting legal loopholes, the group spread the risk of exposure and complicated law enforcement efforts. Europol said it also facilitated real-time data sharing to help dismantle the network’s logistics, sales channels and communications infrastructure.

  • OCCRP Anti-Crime & Corruption Hero Award

    Ruth López, El Salvador

    Chief Legal Officer in the Anti-Corruption Unit at Cristosal, a human rights organization

    Ruth López Alfaro is a preeminent figure in the fight against systemic corruption and authoritarian overreach in El Salvador, and is an internationally recognized defender of the rule of law. She spearheaded high-stakes legal challenges against President Nayib Bukele’s administration, including investigations into the misuse of public funds during the COVID-19 pandemic, state-sponsored espionage via Pegasus spyware, and the lack of transparency surrounding the country’s Bitcoin implementation. Beginning in 2024, Bukele’s second term has seen an alarming increase in the harassment, persecution, and criminalization of human rights defenders, journalists, activists, and civil society organizations.

    The arbitrary arrest of López on May 18, 2025, was part of an ongoing crackdown against human rights defenders and journalists. National Civil Police agents entered her home without a warrant late at night, holding her incommunicado for 32 hours in what international observers described as a “short-term forced disappearance.” 

    The state’s accusations against her — first embezzlement and later illicit enrichment — have been widely condemned as politically motivated fabrications. Under the Salvadoran criminal code, López could not have committed embezzlement during her time as a technical adviser because she never managed public funds. 

    Instead of a fair legal process, she faced a chain of unlawful actions: being shuttled between detention facilities, denied access to counsel for days, and eventually transferred to the high-security Izalco prison in defiance of a judicial order where she was held incommunicado for months. 

    Despite her continued imprisonment, López remains a symbol of resistance against the criminalization of dissent. Amnesty International declared her a prisoner of conscience in 2025, and the American Bar Association honored her with the 2025 International Human Rights Award. 

    In December 2025, the judge overseeing López’s case extended the prosecutors’ investigative deadline, and also extended her pretrial detention for six more months without holding a hearing or allowing the defense to present counter arguments. 

    In El Salvador, the excessive use of pretrial detention has been used in many cases to hold individuals in detention for years without trial. This systematic practice has been criticized by the United Nations special rapporteurs on human rights defenders, as a form of punishment imposed on political opponents and human rights champions.

    Cristosal and advocacy groups are demanding a public, speedy, and fair trial, as well as an end to Lopez’s unjustified pretrial detention. 

    López’s resilience in the face of injustice and judicial collapse shows profound bravery.

    Carmen Aristegui, Mexico

    Investigative Journalist, Aristegui Noticias

    Throughout a long and distinguished career in television, radio, and digital media, Carmen Aristegui has investigated corruption, abuse of power, and high-level conflicts of interest. 

    Most recently, her investigative team at Aristegui Noticias published the explosive “Televisa Leaks,” a five-terabyte trove of internal communications revealing a clandestine operation within the world’s largest Spanish-language broadcaster. The leak detailed the “Palomar” operation — a systematic smear campaign orchestrated from Televisa’s headquarters to fabricate news, manipulate public opinion through bot armies, and destroy the reputations of competitors, judges, and journalists. By shining a light on this playbook, Aristegui exposed how corporate giants can function as a shadow arm of the state to maintain political control and suppress dissent.

    Her role as a watchdog is defined by a refusal to be silenced, even after facing severe professional and personal retaliation. 

    Aristegui’s investigation into the “Casa Blanca” (White House) scandal — which revealed that the wife of then-President Enrique Peña Nieto had purchased a multi-million-dollar mansion from a government contractor — remains one of the most significant corruption exposés in modern Mexican history. The fallout from this report led to her firing from MVS Radio and marked the beginning of an era of unprecedented harassment. She was among the journalists, activists, and human rights defenders discovered to have been targeted by the invasive Pegasus spyware, with the government attempting to monitor not only her work but also the private life of her teenage son.

    In one of the world’s most dangerous environments for the press, Aristegui founded her own independent outlet, Aristegui Noticias, and despite constant smear campaigns and threats, she continues to hold power to account. Her bravery in taking on both the presidency and media monopolies like Televisa proves that she is a defender of the public’s right to know. 

  • Pluralistic: Six Years of Pluralistic (19 Feb 2026)

    Today’s links



    A screengrab from the first episode of 'The Prisoner,' showing Number Six (Patrick McGoohan) lying unconscious on the beach after being bowled over by a giant white sphere (a 'Rover'). The image has been altered; my head has been superimposed on McGoohan's body; TV scan lines have been added, and the image has been given a vertical 'ripple' of the sort that appears in a badly tuned broadcast TV signal.

    Six years of Pluralistic (permalink)

    Six years ago today, after 19 years with Boing Boing, during which time I wrote tens of thousands of blog posts, I started a new, solo blog, with the semi-ironic name “Pluralistic.” I didn’t know what Pluralistic was going to be, but I wasn’t writing Boing Boing anymore, and I knew I wanted to keep writing the web in some fashion.

    Six years and more than 1,500 posts later, I am so satisfied with how Pluralistic is going. I spent a couple of decades processing everything that seemed interesting or significant through a blog, which created a massive database (and mnemonically available collection of partially developed thoughts) that I’m now reprocessing as a series of essays that make sense of today in light of everything that I’ve thought about for my whole adult life, which are, in turn, fodder for books, both fiction and nonfiction. I call this “The Memex Method”:

    https://pluralistic.net/2021/05/09/the-memex-method/

    “The Memex Method” is also the title of a collection of essays (from this blog) that I’ve sold to Farrar, Straus and Giroux, but that book keeps getting bumped because of other books I end up writing based on the work I do here, starting with last year’s Enshittification. I’m now fully two books ahead of myself, with The Reverse Centaur’s Guide to Life After AI coming in June, and The Post-American Internet in early 2027 (in addition to two graphic novels and a short story collection). Professionally speaking, these are the most successful books I’ve written, in a long, 30+ book career with many notable successes. Intellectually and artistically speaking, I’m incredibly satisfied with the direction my career has moved in over my six Pluralistic years.

    Blogging is – and always has been – a lot of work for me, but it’s work that pays off, even if I don’t always know what form that payoff will take.

    One essential part of this blog is my daily retrospective of posts from this day through my blogging history – 25 years ago, 20 years ago, 15 years ago, 10 years ago, 5 years ago, and last year. I used to call this “This day in history” but now I call it “Object permanence,” for the developmental milestone when toddlers gain the ability to remember and reason about things that have recently happened (roughly, it’s the point at which “peek-a-boo” stops being fun).

    The daily business of reviewing and selecting blog posts from different parts of my life started as a trivial exercise, but it’s become one of the most important things I do. I liken it to working dough and folding the dry crumbly edges back into the center; in this case, I’m folding all the fragments that are in danger of escaping my working memory back into the center of my attention.

    Six years ago, I didn’t know what Pluralistic was going to be. Today, I still don’t know. But because this is a labor of love, and a solo project, I get to try anything and either give it up or carry it on based on how it makes me feel and what effect it has on my life. I’m always tinkering with the format: this year, I also added a subhead to the Object Permanence section that tries to call out (in as few characters as possible) the most important elements of the day’s list.

    I also dropped some things this year, notably, my “linkdump” posts. A couple years ago, at the suggestion of Mitch Wagner, I added a new section called “Hey look at this,” which featured three bare links to things I thought were noteworthy but didn’t have time or inclination to delve into in depth. Later, I expanded this section to five.

    However, even with five bare links per edition, I often found myself with a backlog of noteworthy things. So I started writing the occasional Saturday “linkdump” essay in which I wove together the whole backlog into a giant, meandering essay. These made for interesting rhetorical challenges, as I found elegant ways to bridge completely disparate subjects – a kind of collaging, perhaps akin to how a mashup artist mixes two very different tracks together. Mentally, I thought of this as “ringing the changes,” but ultimately, I decided to drop these linkdump posts (for now, at least). They ended up being too much work, and of little value to me, because I found myself unable to remember what I wrote in them and thus to call them up to refer to them for future posts. Here’s all 33 linkdumps; they’re not gone forever (not so long as the links pile up in my backlog), but when they come back, they’ll be in a different form:

    https://pluralistic.net/tag/linkdump/

    This really is a labor of love, in the sense that I love doing it, and because it’s hard work. The fact that it’s hard work is a feature, not a bug. Working hard on stuff is really important to me, because when I am working hard, I gain respite from both physical and mental discomfort. As a guy with serious chronic pain living through the Trump years, I’ve got plenty of both kinds of discomfort. I can’t overstate how physically and mentally beneficial it is to me to have an activity that takes me out of the moment. This year, I wrote several editions of Pluralistic from an infusion couch at the Kaiser Sunset hematology center in LA, where I was receiving immunotherapy for a cancer diagnosis that I’m assured is very treatable, but which – to be totally honest – sometimes gets my old worrier running hot:

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

    Making Pluralistic is several kinds of hard work. Over the past six years, I’ve become an ardent collagist, spending more and more time on the weird, semi-grotesque images that run atop every edition. Anything you devote substantial time to on a near-daily basis is something that gives you insight – into yourself, and into the thing you’re doing. I’ve always had a certain familiarity with computer image editing (I think I got my start writing Apple ][+ BASIC programs that spat out ASCII art, before graduating to making pixel-art for Broderbund’s “Print Shop”), but I’ve never applied myself to any visual field in a serious way, until now.

    Amazingly, after 50 years of thinking of myself as someone who is “bad at visual art,” I find myself identifying as a visual artist. I find myself pondering visual works the same way I think about prose – mentally tearing it apart to unpick how it is done, and thinking about how I could productively steal some new techniques for my own work. I’m also privileged to have some accomplished visual artists in my circle, like my pal Alistair Milne, who generously share technical and aesthetic tips. It’s got to the point where I published a book of my art, and I think I’ll probably do it again next year:

    https://pluralistic.net/2025/09/04/illustrious/#chairman-bruce

    There’s also a ton of technical work that goes into publishing each edition of this newsletter. Things have moved on somewhat since I published an in-depth process-post in 2021, though I’m still totally reliant on Loren Kohnfelder’s python scripts that help me turn the XML file I compose every day into files that are (nearly) ready to publish:

    https://pluralistic.net/2021/01/13/two-decades/#hfbd

    Much of the technical work is down to the fact that I’m still completely wed to the idea of “POSSE” (Post Own Site, Syndicate Everywhere):

    https://pluralistic.net/2022/02/19/now-we-are-two/#two-much-posse

    This means that after I write the day’s post, I reformat it and republish it as a text-only newsletter, a Medium post, a Tumblr post, a Twitter thread and a Mastodon thread. This involves a ton of manual work, because none of the services I post to are designed to facilitate this, so I’m always wrestling with them. This year, all of them got worse (incredibly).

    Medium – where I used to have a paid column – has dropped its free-flag for my account, which now limits me to how many posts I can schedule. This doesn’t come up often, but when I do schedule a post, it’s generally because I’m going to be on a plane or a stage and won’t be able to do it manually. There’s no way I’m going to pay for this feature: I’m happy to give Medium my work gratis, but I will not and do not pay anyone to publish my work, and I never will.

    Tumblr did something to its post-composing text editor that completely broke it and I’ve given up on fixing it. I can’t even type into a new post field! I have to paste in some styled text, then delete it, then start typing. It’s ghastly. So now I just have a text file full of formatted HTML snippets and I work exclusively in the Tumblr HTML editor, pasting in blobs of preformatted HTML (including the florid, verbose HTML Tumblr uses for its own formatting) and then laboriously flip back and forth to the “visual” editor to see the parts that went wrong. Here’s how busted that visual editor is: searching for a word then double-clicking on it does not select it. You have to click once, wait about 1.5 seconds, click again, wait again, and then you can select the word.

    Twitter has entered a period of terminal technical decline. I know, I know, we always talk about how fucked Twitter’s content moderation is, for obvious and good reasons, but from a technical perspective, Twitter just sucks. If I make a post with an image and alt text in anticipation of later using it to start a thread, it often goes “stale” and will not publish until I delete the image and re-attach it and re-paste the alt text. Meanwhile, the thread editor is also decaying into uselessness. Fill in a 25-post thread and hit publish and, the majority of times, the thread publication will die midway through, displaying lots of weird failure modes (phantom empty posts at the end of the thread that need to be individually selected and deleted are a common one, but not the only one). The old Twitter’s ability to add a new thread to an existing one has been dead for at least a year, so every post after the 25th stanza has to be manually tacked on to the previous one, which is made far harder by the fact that Twitter no longer reliably shows you the post you just made after it publishes.

    Mastodon still lacks a decent thread editor, one that has even the minimal functionality of Twitter circa 2020. Meanwhile, the Fediverse HOA continues to surface from time to time, with someone who’s had a Masto account for ten seconds scolding me for posting threads – from my account whose bio starts “I post long threads.” It’s genuinely tedious to be shouted at for “using Mastodon wrong” by someone who started using Mastodon yesterday (I opened my first Mastodon account in 2018!), and even worse when they double down after I point them to the essay I’ve written to explain why I post the way I do, and what to do if you want to read my work somewhere that’s not your Mastodon timeline (“Can you believe this asshole wrote a whole essay to explain why he posts his stupid Mastodon threads?”):

    https://pluralistic.net/2023/04/16/how-to-make-the-least-worst-mastodon-threads/

    Then there’s email: I continue to love email, but email doesn’t love me back. After years of being blackholed by AT&T and then Google, this turns out to be the year that Microsoft bounces thousands of messages to its Hotmail and Outlook users because they have arbitrarily and without warning added my mail-server to a blacklist. Thank you to the Fediverse friends who escalated my trouble ticket – but man, this is a headache I could certainly do without:

    https://pluralistic.net/2021/10/10/dead-letters/

    My sysadmin, the incomparable and tireless Ken Snider, tells me that he’s got the long-overdue new hardware installed at the colo and he’s nearly ready to stand up my long-anticipated personal Mastodon server, which will let me solve all kinds of problems. He’s also going to stand up my own Bluesky server, at which point I will part ways with Twitter. I wish I could have used the regular Bluesky service while I waited, but just setting up an account permanently binds you to totally unacceptable and dangerous terms of service:

    https://pluralistic.net/2025/08/15/dogs-breakfast/#by-clicking-this-you-agree-on-behalf-of-your-employer-to-release-me-from-all-obligations-and-waivers-arising-from-any-and-all-NON-NEGOTIATED-agreements

    What’s the point of a service that has account- and data-portability if signing up for it makes you permanently surrender your rights, even if you switch servers? This might be the stupidest social media unforced error of the post-zuckermuskian era.

    There is one technology that has made my POSSE life better, and it might surprise you. This year, I installed Ollama – an open-source LLM – on my laptop. It runs pretty well, even without a GPU. Every day, before I run Loren’s python publication scripts, I run the text through Ollama as a typo-catcher (my prompt is “find typos”). Ollama always spots three or four of these, usually stuff like missing punctuation, or forgotten words, or double words (“the the next thing”) or typos that are still valid words (“of top of everything else”).

    The reason this is so valuable to me is that errors magnify through each stage of POSSE. Errors that make it through the python publication script take 10x the time to fix that they would if I caught them beforehand. Errors that I catch after running the scripts and publishing the posts take 10x time more. Errors that I have to fix later on – once I’ve closed all the relevant tabs and editors – take 10x again more time. Some POSSE channels (email, Twitter) can’t be fixed at all.

    So catching these typos at the start of the process is a huge time-saver. I have some very generous readers who have the proofreader’s gene and are very helpful in catching my typos (hi, Gregory and 9o6!), and I feel bad about depriving them of their fun, but there’s still the odd error that slips through, and they always catch it.

    Ollama is a pretty good typo-catcher. Probably half of the “errors” it points out are false positives, which is better than the false positive rate for Google Docs’ grammar-checker. As someone who uses a lot of jargon, made up words, etc in his prose, I’m used to overriding my text-editor. I wouldn’t simply trust an LLM’s edits any more than I would accept every suggestion from a spell-checker. Hell, yesterday I sent back a professionally copyedited manuscript (the intro for the paperback of Enshittification) and marked “STET” on about a third of the queries.

    Doubtless some of you are affronted by my modest use of an LLM. You think that LLMs are “fruits of the poisoned tree” and must be eschewed because they are saturated with the sin of their origins. I think this is a very bad take, the kind of rathole that purity culture always ends up in.

    Let’s start with some context. If you don’t want to use technology that was created under immoral circumstances or that sprang from an immoral mind, then you are totally fucked. I mean, all the way down to the silicon chips in your device, which can never be fully disentangled from the odious, paranoid racist William Shockley, who won the Nobel Prize for co-inventing the silicon transistor:

    https://pluralistic.net/2021/10/24/the-traitorous-eight-and-the-battle-of-germanium-valley/

    Further, we wouldn’t have the packet-switched network that delivered these words to you without the contributions of the literal war-criminals at the RAND corporation:

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

    Refusing to use a technology because the people who developed it were indefensible creeps is a self-owning dead-end. You know what’s better than refusing to use a technology because you hate its creators? Seizing that technology and making it your own. Don’t like the fact that a convicted monopolist has a death-grip on networking? Steal its protocol, release a free software version of it, and leave it in your dust:

    https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/07/samba-versus-smb-adversarial-interoperability-judo-network-effects

    That’s how we make good tech: not by insisting that all its inputs be free from sin, but by purging that wickedness by liberating the technology from its monstrous forebears and making free and open versions of it:

    https://pluralistic.net/2025/01/14/contesting-popularity/#everybody-samba

    Purity culture is such an obvious trap, an artifact of the neoliberal ideology that insists that the solution to all our problems is to shop very carefully, thus reducing all politics to personal consumption choices:

    https://pluralistic.net/2025/07/31/unsatisfying-answers/#systemic-problems

    I mean, it was extraordinarily stupid for the Nazis to refuse Einstein’s work because it was “Jewish science,” but not merely because antisemitism is stupid. It was also a major self-limiting move because Einstein was right:

    https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-2-pro-nazi-nobelists-attacked-einstein-s-jewish-science-excerpt1/

    Refusing to run an LLM on your laptop because you don’t like Sam Altman is as foolish as refusing to get monoclonal antibodies because James Watson was a racist nutjob:

    https://www.statnews.com/2025/11/07/james-watson-remembrance-from-dna-pioneer-to-pariah/

    Or to refuse to communicate via satellite because they were launched into space on a descendant of a rocket designed by the Nazi Wernher von Braun and built by slaves in a death camp:

    https://wsmrmuseum.com/2020/07/27/von-braun-the-v-2-and-slave-labor/4/

    The AI bubble sucks. AI itself is a normal technology:

    https://knightcolumbia.org/content/ai-as-normal-technology

    It’s not “unethical” to scrape the web in order to create and analyze data-sets. That’s just “a search engine”:

    https://pluralistic.net/2023/09/17/how-to-think-about-scraping/

    There’s plenty of useful things people can do with AI. There’s plenty of useful things people will do with AI. AI is bad because it’s an economic bubble and a grift, but not because we’ve created a bunch of utilities that would – under normal circumstances – be called “plug-ins”:

    https://pluralistic.net/2025/12/05/pop-that-bubble/#u-washington

    I started blogging 25 years ago, just before the dotcom bubble popped. That bubble-pop inflicted a lot of pain on people who didn’t deserve it, including the normie investors who’d been suckered into blowing their life’s savings on dogshit stocks, and everyday workers who found themselves out of a job. But the world was better off. So was the web. With the bubble popped, real, good stuff could access talent, servers and office space.

    In the six years I’ve been doing this, I’ve seen several bubbles come and go: crypto, web3, metaverse. Now it’s AI. But those bubbles were like Enron, frauds that left nothing good behind. AI is like the dotcom bubble, awash in sin and inflicting untold misery, but it will leave something useful behind:

    https://pluralistic.net/2023/12/19/bubblenomics/#pop

    And when it does, I’ll make sense of it on this blog.


    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 HOWTO resist warrantless searches at Best Buy https://www.die.net/musings/bestbuy/

    #20yrsago RIAA using kids’ private info to attack their mother https://web.archive.org/web/20060223111437/http://p2pnet.net/story/7942

    #20yrsago Sony BMG demotes CEO for deploying DRM https://web.archive.org/web/20060219233817/http://biz.yahoo.com/ap/060210/germany_sony_bmg_ceo.html?.v=7

    #20yrsago Sistine Chapel recreated through 10-year cross-stitch project https://web.archive.org/web/20060214195146/http://www.austinstitchers.org/Show06/images/sistine2.jpg

    #20yrsago J Edgar Hoover loved Lucy https://web.archive.org/web/20060425120915/http://www.lucylibrary.com/pages/lucy-news-fbi.letter.html

    #20yrsago Bad Samaritan family won’t return found expensive camera https://web.archive.org/web/20060222200300/https://lostcamera.blogspot.com/2006/02/camera-unlost-but-not-quite-found.html

    #15yrsago What does Libyan revolution mean for bit.ly? https://domainnamewire.com/2011/02/18/is-bit-ly-toast-if-libya-shuts-down-the-internet/

    #15yrsago Optical illusion inventor goes on to invent copyright threats against 3D printing company https://web.archive.org/web/20110221185839/https://blog.thingiverse.com/2011/02/18/copyright-and-intellectual-property-policy/#respond

    #15yrsago Crappy themepark operators convicted of “engaging in a commercial practice which was a misleading action” https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2011/feb/18/lapland-theme-park-brothers-convicted

    #15yrsago HBGary’s high-volume astroturfing technology and the Feds who requested it https://www.dailykos.com/story/2011/02/16/945768/-UPDATED:-The-HB-Gary-Email-That-Should-Concern-Us-All

    #15yrsago Authors Guild argues in favor of censorship (also: they don’t know shit about Shakespeare) https://volokh.com/2011/02/17/there-should-be-a-name-for-this-one-too/

    #15yrsago Hollywood hospital ransoms itself back from hackers for a mere $17,000 https://web.archive.org/web/20160227094254/https://www.latimes.com/business/technology/la-me-ln-hollywood-hospital-bitcoin-20160217-story.html

    #15yrsago Chinese millionaire sues himself through an offshore shell company to beat currency export controls https://web.archive.org/web/20180526235055/https://blogs.wsj.com/chinarealtime/2016/02/16/china-capital-flight-2-0-lose-a-lawsuit-on-purpose/?guid=BL-CJB-28691&dsk=y

    #15yrsago Selling cookies like a crack dealer, by dangling a string out your kitchen window https://laughingsquid.com/cookies-sold-by-string-dangling-from-san-francisco-apartment-window/

    #15yrsago Midwestern Tahrir: Workers refuse to leave Wisconsin capital over Tea Party labor law https://www.theawl.com/2011/02/wisconsin-demonstrates-against-scott-walkers-war-on-unions/

    #10yrsago Back-room revisions to TPP sneakily criminalize fansubbing & other copyright grey zones https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2016/02/sneaky-change-tpp-drastically-extends-criminal-penalties

    #10yrsago Russian Central Bank shutting down banks that staged fake cyberattacks to rip off depositors https://web.archive.org/web/20160220100817/http://www.scmagazine.com/russian-bank-licences-revoked-for-using-hackers-to-withdraw-funds/article/474477/

    #10yrsago Stop paying your student loans and debt collectors can send US Marshals to arrest you https://web.archive.org/web/20201026202024/https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2016/02/us-marshals-forcibly-collecting-student-debt.html?mid=twitter-share-di

    #5yrsago Reverse centaurs and the failure of AI https://pluralistic.net/2021/02/17/reverse-centaur/#reverse-centaur

    #5yrsago Strength in numbers https://pluralistic.net/2021/02/18/ink-stained-wretches/#countless

    #5yrsago America and “national capitalism” https://pluralistic.net/2025/02/18/pikettys-productivity/#reaganomics-revenge

    #1yrago Business school professors trained an AI to judge workers’ personalities based on their faces https://pluralistic.net/2025/02/17/caliper-ai/#racism-machine


    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)

    • “The Reverse-Centaur’s Guide to AI,” a short book about being a better AI critic, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, June 2026
    • “Enshittification, Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It” (the graphic novel), Firstsecond, 2026

    • “The Post-American Internet,” a geopolitical sequel of sorts to Enshittification, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2027

    • “Unauthorized Bread”: a middle-grades graphic novel adapted from my novella about refugees, toasters and DRM, FirstSecond, 2027

    • “The Memex Method,” Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2027



    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 (1013 words today, 31953 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

  • Security Council LIVE: Sudan in focus amid genocide warnings in Darfur

    The UN Security Council meets this morning to discuss Sudan as the war nears its third year and fighting intensifying across multiple regions and civilians facing deepening humanitarian catastrophe. Senior UN political and humanitarian officials are expected to brief ministers on a conflict marked by shifting front lines, advanced weaponry and widespread displacement. The meeting comes amid fresh warnings that atrocities in Darfur, including acts bearing the “hallmarks of genocide” in El-Fasher, signal a dangerous escalation. Follow the live coverage below, UN News App users click here.
  • ‘No corner of Sudan is safe’: UN officials warn of famine and atrocities as war intensifies

    Nearly three years into Sudan’s war, violence is intensifying, famine conditions are looming in parts of the country, and civilians remain trapped between shifting front lines, senior UN political and humanitarian officials told the Security Council on Thursday, warning that the risk of further mass atrocities remains alarmingly high.
  • World News in Brief: Conflict deepens hunger crisis in South Sudan, restrictions hinder aid delivery in Gaza, UN child rights envoy concludes first visit to Syria

    The UN World Food Programme (WFP) is scaling up its emergency response in South Sudan’s Jonglei state, where escalating conflict has displaced hundreds of thousands of people and pushed hunger to critical levels.