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Author: tio

  • Tech Industry Warns of Piracy Blocking Risks as FIFA World Cup Kicks Off

    Tech Industry Warns of Piracy Blocking Risks as FIFA World Cup Kicks Off

    Today, the 2026 FIFA World Cup officially kicked off with the opener between Mexico and South Africa.

    With a record number of 48 participating countries and 104 matches in well over a month, the high-profile tournament is the largest live broadcasting operation the sport has ever seen.

    The FIFA World Cup is also the most valuable sports event, with roughly $4 billion in broadcasting rights on the line for a single tournament. Rightsholders do everything in their power to protect these exclusive broadcasts, in part through piracy blocking efforts.

    While sports broadcasters believe that far-reaching anti-piracy measures are needed to protect their financial interests, critics warn that piracy countermeasures should not be disproportionate.

    ‘Fighting Piracy Without Breaking the Internet’

    To mark the start of the World Cup, the Computer & Communications Industry Association (CCIA) Europe, a trade group that represents major tech players including Amazon, Cloudflare, and Google, published an explainer detailing piracy blocking risks.

    The document, “Fighting Piracy Without Breaking the Internet,” criticizes blocking efforts based on IP addresses and the DNS. CCIA argues these methods are too blunt to separate legal from illegal content, since a single IP address or domain name can be used by thousands of unrelated services.

    The result, it says, is that many lawful businesses and public services are taken offline alongside the pirate streaming targets.

    The explainer (full version pdf)

    explainer

    Charlotte Dantin, CCIA Europe’s Intellectual Property and Audiovisual Policy Manager, cautions against the slowly expanding private and automated site blocking efforts.

    “Major sporting events must not become a testing ground for private, automated censorship of internet infrastructure. Illegal streaming can and should be addressed, but enforcement must remain lawful, proportionate, and subject to independent judicial oversight.”

    “The mistakes already visible in national blocking experiments should not be allowed to proliferate across the EU. When IP addresses are added to opaque blocking lists without continuous court review or meaningful redress, innocent businesses and users suffer. Piracy enforcement must target pirates, not the basic infrastructure that underpins the internet.”

    Rightsholders as ‘De Facto’ Piracy Regulators

    CCIA is not alone in its concerns about privatized blocking measures, and it points to independent backing. A study published in April by two copyright researchers, João Pedro Quintais of the University of Amsterdam’s Institute for Information Law and Miquel Aznar of the University of Valencia, reached similar conclusions.

    Their paper, “Between Effectiveness and Fundamental Rights,” does not dispute that blocking works. On the contrary, it accepts that blocking measures meaningfully reduce piracy.

    According to the authors, the main concern is that this effectiveness is increasingly achieved by handing over public enforcement powers to private actors, turning them into “de facto regulators of internet traffic.”

    The research

    the paper

    The researchers found that courts increasingly let private rightsholders compile their own blocklists, with an order from Barcelona, Spain, as the clearest example.

    As we previously covered, a December 2024 order from a Barcelona court allows LaLiga and its partners to identify the IP addresses that providers should block, without clearly defining how those addresses are chosen or how wrongly blocked parties can appeal.

    Collateral Damage

    Both CCIA and the researchers ultimately warn that the expanding piracy blocking efforts are not without risk. In fact, recent blocking efforts in Spain and Italy have resulted in several overblocking incidents.

    The research, for example, points to the temporary blocking of the Redsys payment platform in Spain and of Google Drive in Italy as cases that were anything but hypothetical.

    In addition to directly disrupting third-party services, CCIA’s explainer notes that blocking requirements are expanding to more intermediaries, including CDN and VPN providers, which puts these companies in an ‘impossible’ position.

    “CDN, DNS, and VPN providers face liability, for both failing to block quickly and for overblocking lawful content. Moreover, obliging VPNs to enforce copyright undermines the privacy-by-design and cybersecurity of the VPN ecosystem,” CCIA notes.

    The U.S. Finale

    Site blocking is now established in dozens of countries, and in most it operates under some form of judicial or administrative oversight. That oversight, however, varies widely in quality, and transparency is limited. With increased calls for tighter measures, concerns are growing.

    The research and CCIA’s report warn that there’s a slippery slope when it comes to expanding blocking powers. And with rightsholders requesting tougher enforcement measures, caution is warranted.

    With the FIFA World Cup underway, it will be worth watching whether new site-blocking stories unfold before the final kicks off in New York on July 19. In India, they already have: days before kickoff, the Delhi High Court handed rightsholder Zee a dynamic injunction to block pirate streams of the tournament in real time.

    That brings us to an interesting parallel. After well over a decade of site blocking expansion around the globe, the ‘final’ blocking battle is set to take place in U.S. Congress later this year.

    From: TF, for the latest news on copyright battles, piracy and more.

  • Yes to California’s Bill to Ban Surveillance Pricing

    Corporations harvest and monetize ever-growing amounts of our personal data, such as our browsing history and physical location. One bitter fruit of this poisonous tree is known as “surveillance pricing”: corporations offer the same product to two different people at two different prices, based on scrutiny of these people’s respective personal data.

    Surveillance pricing is bad for privacy, equity, and price transparency. So EFF supports a California bill, S.B. 2564, which would ban this creepy practice.

    How Surveillance Pricing Works

    In 2025, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) published a report about the practices of six companies that provide surveillance pricing services to hundreds of other companies, including grocery stores and apparel retailers. The report found that surveillance pricing draws upon customers’ browsing history, physical location, and shopping transaction history. Customers’ data can come from the vendor itself, from its surveillance pricing service provider, or from third-party data brokers. Customers are sorted into groups based on their personal data, as is done for targeted ads. As a result of surveillance pricing, a business might offer two customers different prices for the same product, based for example on whether they are a new parent, or whether they live near a business’s competitor.

    As former FTC Chair Lina Khan explained:

    Initial staff findings show that retailers frequently use people’s personal information to set targeted, tailored prices for goods and services – from a person’s location and demographics, down to their mouse movements on a webpage.

    Unfortunately, the current FTC chair closed the FTC’s portal for public comments regarding surveillance pricing. Fortunately, the California Attorney General has initiated its own investigation of this practice.

    Researchers have identified many examples of surveillance pricing:

    • The Princeton Review offered people who lived in some zip codes a higher price for test prep services, compared to people in other zip codes. As a result, Asians were twice as likely as non-Asians to be offered a higher price.
    • In a year-long study of tens of millions of rides in Chicago, Uber and Lyft offered a higher price for trips that ended in neighborhoods with high non-white populations.
    • Tindr offered older people (aged 30 to 49) higher prices for Tindr Plus, compared to younger people (aged 18-29).
    • Orbitz offered people who used Apple computers a higher price for hotel rooms, compared to people who used other types of computers.
    • Hotel booking sites offered people from San Francisco a higher price for hotel rooms, compared to people from other cities.
    • Target offered a higher price to people physically located at the store, compared to people located elsewhere.
    • Staples offered a higher price to customers who lived further from the company’s competitors, compared to customers who lived closer.

    Why EFF Hates Surveillance Pricing

    This practice is harmful in many ways. First, surveillance pricing invades our privacy.  Vendors offer us a price only after scrutinizing our personal data about what we’ve clicked online and where we’ve travelled offline. Moreover, surveillance pricing incentivizes all businesses to harvest as much of our personal data as possible. Some businesses will use it for their own surveillance pricing. Other businesses, which might not themselves use it this way, will sell it to data brokers, which in turn will sell it to others for use in surveillance pricing.

    Second, surveillance pricing can disparately burden people of color and other vulnerable groups. For example, as described above, surveillance pricing led to Asian people paying more for test prep services, older people paying more for dating services, and people living in non-white neighborhoods paying more for a ride home.

    Third, surveillance pricing is opaque. Many people don’t even know when they’ve been subjected to it. Those that do often cannot determine the unknown reasons for the price they’re offered. As a result, consumer advocates will be less able to publish meaningful price comparisons to help consumers make choices. And regulators will be less able to identify unlawful pricing practices.

    Thus, EFF and many other groups object to surveillance pricing.

    Its defenders sometimes argue that surveillance pricing benefits consumers because it can lead to lower prices. But while some consumers some of the time might get lower prices because of surveillance of their personal data, other consumers will get higher prices, as shown by the examples above. Some recent studies indicate there will be losers and winners based on factors like whether a consumer is willing or able to switch products. Who loses or wins also will turn on the accuracy of the underlying data – yet surveillance pricing is often based on false information.

    In any event, both losers and winners of this price discrimination are harmed by surveillance. Privacy is a human right, not a property to be bought and sold on a market. For this reason, EFF has long opposed pay-for-privacy schemes, in which a company charges a higher price to a customer who refuses to submit to processing of their personal data. Thus, even if surveillance pricing sometimes leads to lower prices (and again, it often will not), we oppose it as just another way that corporations try to make customers pay for their privacy.

    What the California Bill Would Do

    The key term of California’s S.B. 2564 is short and sweet: “a retailer shall not engage in surveillance pricing.”

    The banned practice is defined as: “[i] a customized price for a good for a specific consumer or group of consumers, [ii] based, in whole or in part, on personally identifiable information collected through electronic surveillance,” including if that information is “acquired from a third party.” In other words, “surveillance pricing” is a customized price based on personal information.

    The bill has two enforcement methods. First, state and local government may bring enforcement actions, and seek all manner of remedies including monetary penalties. Second, individual consumers may bring their own enforcements lawsuits, and seek the remedies of an injunction and attorney fees. We are pleased the bill provides this private right of action, which is the most important method of enforcement (we’d be even more pleased if the private remedies included liquidated damages).

    The bill has three exemptions where surveillance pricing is allowed:

    • First, for price differences “based solely on costs associated with providing the good to different consumers.”
    • Second, for a discount offered to a consumer who is taking steps to terminate a service.
    • Third, for a discount, conspicuously posted on a retailer’s website, that is uniformly available based on (1) criteria anyone can meet, such as signing up for a mailing list, (2) membership in a broadly defined group, such as seniors, or (3) participation in a loyalty program.

    The bill’s author is California Assembly Member Chris Ward. Its co-sponsors are Consumer Reports and TechEquity. Its supporters include Consumer Federation, EPIC, Kapor Center Advocacy, Oakland Privacy, Privacy Rights Clearinghouse, labor unions, and other groups. The bill has advanced through the California Assembly and has arrived for consideration in the California Senate.

    Why EFF Supports the California Bill

    Surveillance pricing is just one part of a much larger problem: corporations maximizing their profits by invading our privacy. The all-too-common business model is to systematically harvest, collate, and store as much of our personal data as possible, and then monetize it through use and sale.

    EFF’s general approach to this problem is a strong regulatory framework that we call “privacy first.” For example, laws should require businesses to “minimize” their data processing, meaning they must not collect, store, use, or disclose our data unless doing so is strictly necessary to give us what we asked for. Likewise, laws should require businesses to get our voluntary and informed opt-in consent before processing our data, buttressed by legal bans on coercive pay-for-privacy schemes and manipulative “dark patterns.”

    A.B. 2564 is just a specific application of the minimization rule. Nobody who uses a web browser or a mobile app expects that, as a result, their clicks and footsteps will be funneled into personal dossiers, and later used by downstream businesses to offer a higher or lower price.

    A.B. 2564 is also a specific application of the “no pay-for-privacy” rule. At its best, surveillance pricing is a corporate offer of a lower price in exchange for a consumer’s submission to surveillance of their personal data. This scheme encourages all people to surrender their privacy in exchange for a lower price. This is especially coercive for people with lower incomes, and thus carries the risk of creating a society of privacy “haves” and “have nots.” And swept into this supposed “bargain” is the potential for higher surveillance-based prices based on false information or erroneous inferences.

    Surveillance pricing is very similar to online behavioral advertising, a business practice that EFF urges governments to ban. Both practices incentivize all businesses to collect as much of our personal data as possible, in order to later monetize it. Both practices lead some businesses to collate and store our data into dossiers about us for later use. Both practices use these surveillance-based dossiers to manipulate and limit our economic choices, by altering the advertisements and prices we see online. In the words of the FTC report discussed above: “Existing and common techniques used for targeted advertising can also be used for other forms of targeting prices.”

    Absent a specific ban on surveillance pricing, as in A.B. 2564, it would be very difficult to protect the public from the many harms it causes. Corporate price-setting is increasingly opaque, making it difficult for consumers and regulators to determine whether a particular company set a particular price for a particular consumer based on their data, and if so, the particular data that it used. As a result, it would be very difficult in this context to enforce general laws requiring minimization or consent. Moreover, many such laws exempt how a business processes the data it directly collected from its own customers; for example, the California Consumer Privacy Act’s limits on “cross-context behavioral advertising” do not apply to how a business uses personal data it collected on its own website. Yet many practitioners of surveillance pricing (like Tindr) rely on such data.

    Finally, there is little to no risk that A.B. 2564 will have unintended consequences that hurt internet users’ speech or technological innovation. The bill does not address any particular type of technology. It does not limit any collection, retention, or disclosure of personal data. It limits only one very narrow and easily defined use of data: use to set a customized price. And it has three broad exemptions.

    In sum, EFF is proud to join with other groups in support of California’s A.B. 2564. You can read our support letter here.

  • ‘News’ Site Keeps Hallucinating EFF Staffers

    What do EFF staffers Sarah Chen, Javier Morales, Caitlin Chin, Emma Rodriguez, and Mikko Kopponen have in common? 

    For one thing, they don’t exist. 

    For another, all have been quoted as EFF experts in articles published in the past two months on a site called News-USA Today, which describes itself as “an independent news publisher focused on clear, accurate, and useful journalism.” 

    Uh… 

    (Please don’t confuse this site with USA Today, in which real EFF experts are accurately quoted on a regular basis.) 

    News-USA Today is hardly the only slagheap that’s hallucinating or fabricating EFF personnel and quotes; as we wrote last September, media companies large and small are using AI to generate news content because it’s cheaper than paying for journalists’ salaries, but that savings can come at the cost of the outlets’ reputations— assuming they care about reputation at all. 

    But this many fake EFF sources in two months? That’s making a play for the championship title of bogus news content. 

    News-USA Today’s site proclaims, “Our goal is simple: give readers the facts and the context they need to make informed decisions.” It then defines its mission:

    • “Deliver timely, factual reporting grounded in verifiable sources and public documents.”
    • “Make complex topics understandable without losing nuance or accuracy.”
    • “Serve the public interest by surfacing stories that affect lives, institutions, and communities.”
    • “Maintain a clear separation between news, analysis, opinion, and sponsored content.” 

    Attempts to reach contacts listed on the site went unanswered. In fact, after we reached out to them, they published a story on June 9 with quotes from Electronic Frontier Foundation Executive Director Jared Cohen — who also doesn’t exist. 

    As we noted last year, EFF is all about having our words spread far and wide. Per our copyright policy, any and all original material on the EFF website may be freely distributed at will under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC-BY), unless otherwise noted.  

    However, we don’t want disreputable sites making up words (or false identities!) for us, whether or not they’re using AI. False quotations that misstate our positions damage the trust that the public and reputable media outlets have in us.  

    The best thing a news consumer can do is invest a little time and energy to learn how to discern the real from the fake. It’s unfortunate that it’s the public’s burden to put in this much effort, but while we’re adjusting to new tools and a new normal, a little effort now can go a long way.   

    As we’ve noted before in the context of election misinformation, the nonprofit journalism organization ProPublica has published a handy guide about how to tell if what you’re reading is accurate or “fake news,” as has FactCheck.org. 

  • The Military Budget Is Twice as Big as Social Security’s Projected Shortfall

    The release of the 2026 Social Security Trustees Report got the usual suspects (aka “very serious people”) genuflecting about the large projected shortfall. As of 2034, the program is projected to be unable to pay full benefits. This would mean a 22% cut in benefits if no additional revenue is added. 

    There are three points worth making here. 

    1. As an economic matter, the projected depletion of the trust fund and resulting shortfall in the program means nothing.
    2. The main reason for the projected shortfall is the upward redistribution of income over the last half-century.
    3. The projected shortfall is far less money than the increase in military spending that President Donald Trump is requesting for his 2027 budget.

    Trust fund accounting 

    On the first point, the spending to repay the bonds held from the trust fund in 2033 comes from the U.S. Treasury. Its impact on the economy would be the same as the spending in 2034, when the trust fund no longer holds any bonds.

    There is an issue that the law gives the program a claim to the funds needed to repay the bonds it holds. Social Security does not have a claim to the money needed to pay full benefits once the last bonds are sold and the trust fund is depleted. 

    This is an important legal point, but from an economic standpoint, it is money from the Treasury in both cases. If the country could afford to pay full benefits in 2033 when the trust fund held bonds. It can afford to pay full benefits after it has sold all its bonds; however, the law would need to be changed. 

    Upward redistribution hurt Social Security’s sinances

    In 1982, the last time the program had a major overhaul, just 10% of wage income went to high-wage earners whose income escaped taxation by being over the cap (currently around $185,000) for wages subject to the 12.4% Social Security tax. In the last quarter-century, close to 17% of wage income went over the cap. 

    This upward redistribution of wage income, coupled with the redistribution from wages to profits in the last quarter-century, has substantially reduced the revenue going into the trust fund. It shouldn’t be surprising that the people who engineered the upward redistribution of the last half-century — through trade policy, stronger patent and copyright protections, bank bailouts and tech policy — now want to reduce people’s Social Security benefits. 

    Donald Trump’s increase in military spending is twice the size of the shortfall projected for 2034

    The media seem to take pride in reporting huge budget numbers without providing any context that would make them meaningful to their audience. The projected Social Security shortfall is a great example. The usual group of budget hawks is being brought out to tell us that it is a huge program, which we can’t afford and requires cuts. 

    Yet, we did not hear the same chorus in response to Donald Trump’s proposed increase in the military budget from $864 billion in the last year (download file) of the Biden presidency to $1,500 billion in 2027. Even adjusting for inflation between the two years, the increase would still be close to $590 billion. There was no rationale given for why the country suddenly needs to spend so much more on its military. Trump certainly did not propose this sort of massive increase in spending in his campaign. 

    The proposed increase in military spending dwarfs the shortfall projected in the Social Security program for 2034.

    Adjusting for inflation (assuming 2.5% annually), Trump’s requested increase would be just under $700 billion in 2034 dollars. By contrast, the Social Security Trustees project that the program will face a $314 billion shortfall in its annual budget in 2034. 

    We can argue about what should be considered big and what should be considered small, but there is zero doubt that Trump’s proposed increase in military spending is hugely larger than the projected shortfall in Social Security. If anyone thinks that Social Security poses a big problem for the budget, they must believe that Trump’s military spending poses a much bigger problem, since it is more than twice as large. 

    And, as noted earlier, we are already paying the money for Social Security; it is just coming out of a different pocket. The proposed increase in military spending, at 1.6% of GDP, will be newly committed funds coming from the Treasury, which will impose substantial demands on the economy. Any honest person who says funding Social Security poses a serious budget problem must believe that Trump’s military spending poses a far bigger problem.

    The post The Military Budget Is Twice as Big as Social Security’s Projected Shortfall appeared first on Truthdig.

  • Weight-loss drug Wegovy to be available in pill form in UK for first time

    Manufacturer Novo Nordisk says a daily tablet of the drug could be more convenient for some people than weekly injections.

  • Pluralistic: The world has moved on (11 Jun 2026)

    Today’s links

    • The world has moved on: Notes from the enshittocene.
    • Hey look at this: Delights to delectate.
    • Object permanence: “Jpod”; Barlow v Glickman; Cyclist v bike lanes; Judge v copyright trolls; “The Uncertain Places”; Thatcher v Palin; NY v Time Warner; Banks v negative interest rates; Keeping the new web decentralized; “Prisoners’ Inventions.”
    • Upcoming appearances: LA, Menlo Park, Toronto, NYC, Philadelphia, Chicago, Edinburgh, South Bend.
    • Recent appearances: Where I’ve been.
    • Latest books: You keep readin’ em, I’ll keep writin’ ’em.
    • Upcoming books: Like I said, I’ll keep writin’ ’em.
    • Colophon: All the rest.


    A blasted wasteland with a mushroom cloud rising over it. In the foreground are swarms of drowning people climbing over each other to escape into the limbs of a dead tree, and a crowd of agonized skeletons. All sourced from Dore engravings illustrating the Old Testament.

    The world has moved on (permalink)

    Douglas Adams wrote, “Anything that is in the world when you’re born is normal and ordinary and is just a natural part of the way the world works. Anything that’s invented between when you’re 15 and 35 is new and exciting and revolutionary and you can probably get a career in it. Anything invented after you’re 35 is against the natural order of things.”

    I think about this quote whenever I get angry at the technology around me. When I rail against the Great Enshittening, am I simply committing the sin of nostalgia (“Nostalgia is a toxic impulse” -J. Hodgman)? I am, after all, old.

    I’ve written before how conservatives’ yearning for “simpler times” is really just a wish to be a child again. The reason times seemed simpler during your childhood is that you were a child, and if your parents did their job, they shielded you from a lot of the complexity of their adulthood so you could enjoy your childhood:

    https://pluralistic.net/2025/04/24/hermit-kingdom/#simpler-times

    That’s where the “National Customer Rage Survey” comes in. It’s been surveying a panel of 1,000 representative consumers every three years for a decade, continuing a research project that started in 1976. The survey measures respondents’ attitudes towards the businesses they deal with, and as of 2025, it’s fair to say, customers are pissed:

    https://customercaremc.com/2025-national-customer-rage-study/

    We’re experiencing more problems with the products and services we use. Those problems are more severe, they make us angrier, and they produce lingering stress. More and more, we are seeking revenge on the businesses that piss us off.

    So it’s not just me, an old man yelling at the cloud. The world is getting shittier.

    The latest Customer Rage Survey inspired The Guardian‘s Heather Timmons to launch a new investigative series looking at how fucked up everything is. Her inaugural installment is very good, and it’s drawn a massive reader response:

    https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2026/jun/04/us-consumer-rage-prices-economy

    I spoke with Timmons this week about the series. She told me she’s been deluged with emails from readers who feel that the world is different now – and many of them cite my work on enshittification. Timmons wanted to know what advice I had for her readers. I told her that I don’t think you can solve this as a consumer, because this isn’t a market problem, it’s a political problem, and shopping isn’t politics:

    https://pluralistic.net/2026/05/21/purity-culture/#stop-fucking-that-chicken

    Later, Timmons forwarded one of those emails to me. It gave an eloquent and evocative account of just how rancid the vibe is these days. The writer said that when they and their spouse encounter this rot, they cite Stephen King’s Dark Tower novels, quoting the oft-repeated phrase from that series: “The world has moved on.”

    At this point, I should warn you that the following contains some Dark Tower spoilers, so if you’re planning to read a decades-old (but very good) dystopian western/science fiction crossover series, and if spoilers bug you, this might not be the essay for you.

    Spoiler alert!

    Still with me? OK, then.

    In the Dark Tower novels, we crisscross a fallen world in which decay is all around us. The buildings are rotten, the machines have stopped working and no one knows how to fix them, babies and livestock alike are frequently born with deadly congenital defects. Much of the world has fallen into wasteland, cracked and barren. An army of wreckers, led by the demagogue John Farson (who styles himself “The Good Man”) are slowly but surely conquering the land, laying waste to those few remaining outposts of civilization and conscripting the young men in the conquered lands to march on their neighbors.

    It wasn’t always this way. There was a time when the world was defined by hope and virtue and light, when the machines were fixed and the crops were harvested. Life wasn’t golden – there were still squabbles and sorrows and even wars – but life was good.

    And then the world moved on.

    For reasons that no one truly understands, the normal push/pull of decay and renewal turned into a one-way, irreversible process in which everything that crumbled or snapped or burned up couldn’t be repaired or replaced or recovered. Our mysterious ability to beat back the Second Law of Thermodynamics – an absurdity we probably should have always treated as an aberration – has collapsed. The world has moved on.

    The Dark Tower series is a long, long, long Bildungsroman, with many detours through the life-stories of the characters in the ensemble cast, as well as the biographies of many of the figures they meet along the road. It’s mostly an adventure novel, as road-trip tales tend to be, but those character studies and the lore that they surface – from our world and theirs – creates an overwhelming, many-layered, richly textured sense of loss and worse, of despair. For the world has moved on, and despite the love and care and bravery of many of the people in that world, the world cannot be redeemed. Each terrible day of those people’s lives is the best day of the rest of their lives. From here on in, it only gets worse.

    When Timmons’ reader and their spouse greet every fresh depredation in modern life – hours on the phone with customer service to resolve a billing error that the company repeats every month, say – with “the world has moved on,” they are invoking something heavy. This isn’t just a rancid vibe, it’s the fucking end-times.

    For all that the Dark Tower novels are a series of cracking adventures and thoughtful character studies, they are also a mystery. Over and over again, we are made to ask ourselves, why has the world moved on? Was it John Farson and his army? Was it the Man in Black, the evil wizard whom the book’s protagonist has pursued across time and space? Was it the Crimson King, the evil force whom the Man in Black serves?

    Well, yes – and no.

    Midway through the novels, we learn that the Crimson King and his evil minions have laid siege to “the beams,” vast ley-lines that span the universe and provide the force that pushes away entropy, creating breathing room where repair and care can live. “All things serve the beams,” we’re told. The beams are the organizing force of the universe, the answer to the riddle of how such pitiful things as we could have fought back remorseless entropy for so long. By attacking the beams, the villains of the series have all but snuffed out that force, and so the world has moved on.

    When I read that email and the invocation of the Dark Tower, I was immediately struck by how apt this comparison is. Because, as I’ve written many times, there were always enshittifiers who would have plundered your data and money and treated you with naked contempt:

    https://pluralistic.net/2025/03/04/object-permanence/#picks-and-shovels

    There were always enshittifiers, but those enshittifiers faced external forces that checked their wreckers’ urge. They were held in check by competition, and regulation, and workers’ sense of fairness and duty, and by the threat of new products and services that might pop up to correct the defects they deliberately introduced into their products by enshittifying them.

    And the foundation – the Dark Tower upon which all the beams converged- was antitrust enforcement, grounded in the idea that we could not afford to let any company – not a “good” company, nor a “bad” company – get so large that it could no longer be regulated, lest its executives become “autocrats of trade”:

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

    The same people who laid siege to antitrust law would later come after all forms of checks and balances. These are the people who gave us the “unitary executive” and Project 2025, and the collapse of accountability that has allowed the worst people to commit the gravest sins they could imagine and still reap vast fortunes. These beam-breakers wanted kings, and they got them.

    I collect definitions of “conservatism,” and one of my favorites comes from Corey Robin’s book, The Reactionary Mind. Robins asks how it is that we can call so many disparate, irreconcilable ideologies – various ethno-nationalisms, imperialism, financialism, patriarchy, Christian nationalism, libertarianism, white supremacy, etc – “conservative”? What binds all these views together?

    https://pluralistic.net/2025/07/22/all-day-suckers/#i-love-the-poorly-educated

    Robin’s answer: the foundation that all these otherwise disparate views share is that some people are born to rule, while others are born to be ruled over. When these lesser people are elevated to positions of power, their inferiority creates a system of misrule, by which we all suffer. The best outcome for everyone is for us all to know our place and defer to our social betters.

    That’s why conservatives are obsessed with affirmative action, DEI, and any form of anti-racism. For them, the discriminatory outcomes we see in the wild are natural, reflecting the in-born defects in the people at the bottom of the social order. That’s why, after every plane crash, every collision between a cargo ship and a bridge, every spectacular corporate bankruptcy, conservatives race to uncover the race, gender, religion and sexual orientation of the captain, the pilot or the CEO.

    If the person who oversaw the catastrophe has anything remotely resembling a marginalized identity, then this is loudly trumpeted as confirmation that “diversity hires,” promoted above their station, are ruining our society and wrecking our bridges. Naturally, if the person in charge was a wealthy, well-born, straight white guy, that’s just proof that shit happens – it definitely doesn’t prove that white straight guys, as a class, should be removed from positions of power.

    For conservatives, virtue is “whatever the people who are born to rule desire.” Hence Frank Wilhoit’s definition of conservativism, “exactly one proposition, to wit: There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect.” It’s not a crime if the president does it. It’s also not a crime if your boss does it, or if a monopolist does it, or if ICE does it. It’s not a crime if the IDF do it, or if the Epstein Class do it. “Taxes are for the little people”:

    https://pluralistic.net/2021/06/15/guillotines-and-taxes/#carried-interest

    The attack on antitrust law was part of the attack on the rule of law, the campaign to put everyone back in the their place. It’s a piece of the effort to establish a new hereditary aristocracy, and every hereditary aristocracy requires heredity serfs (that would be us):

    https://pluralistic.net/2022/11/06/the-end-of-the-road-to-serfdom/

    The ideology of economism – which says that market outcomes are the only way to govern a society – cashes out to “the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must.” If we interfere with mergers, or labor practices, or commercial conduct, we “distort the market,” which is literally going against nature:

    https://pluralistic.net/2022/10/27/economism/#what-would-i-do-if-i-were-a-horse

    That’s why Trump dismantled the consumer protection agencies, the antitrust agencies, the labor protection agencies, the environmental protection agencies. When someone in power cheats the system, that’s not a crime, no matter how many people they rob, maim or kill. As Trump told us on the debate stage in 2016, that kind of cheating “makes me smart”:

    https://pluralistic.net/2024/12/04/its-not-a-lie/#its-a-premature-truth

    That’s why Elon Musk (almost) got to force every pension saver in America to bail out his money-incinerating AI business and his failed social media takeover – because the rules that protect everyday investors are “for the little people.” Musk’s mistake was trying to get a bunch of billionaires to hold the bag, too. The one form of systemic violence our society will not tolerate is trillionaire-on-billionaire violence:

    https://www.cnbc.com/2026/06/05/spacex-blocked-from-early-us-benchmark-index-entry-as-sp-reaffirms-existing-rules.html

    The world has moved on. 50 years of neoliberal rule has weakened and snapped the beams – the rule of law, consumer and labor rights, civil rights – that radiated from our Dark Tower – antitrust law, which blocked the emergence of the “autocrats of trade.” The people who besieged these beams had the same motives as the Crimson King and John Farson and the Man in Black: they were willing to pay any price for a world free from consequences for people like them. They knew they were born to rule, and that the rules were “for the little people,” that breaking those rules “made them smart.”

    They wanted “bossism.” Or, as rendered in the original Afrikaans, “baasskap,” which means, “the social, political and economic domination of South Africa by its minority white population”:

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

    Not for nothing, baasskap is the foundation of Muskism, the ideology that Elon Musk epitomizes, even if he can’t articulate it:

    https://pluralistic.net/2026/04/21/torment-nexusism/#marching-to-pretoria

    In “The Utopia of Rules,” the late David Graeber described how neoliberal deregulation produced exactly the kind of state that we were warned we’d get under communism. Thanks to monopolies, all the stores were the same and they all sold the same goods. Thanks to the dismantling of labor protection and unions, no one had enough money to get by. Thanks to elite impunity, we were ruled by monsters who committed crimes in the open and thrived as a result. Thanks to unchecked greed, we paid everything we had for healthcare, only to be denied treatment when we needed it. Thanks to the dismantling of the welfare state, more and more of us had to wait in long lines to fill out absurdly long forms in triplicate. Thanks to the intrinsic instability of such a terrible system, more and more of us ended up in prison, and protest became more and more illegal:

    https://memex.craphound.com/2015/02/02/david-graebers-the-utopia-of-rules-on-technology-stupidity-and-the-secret-joys-of-bureaucracy/

    Graeber pointed out that the rise of the web made it seductively easy for people in authority to force us to fill in forms. When analog bureaucracies impose paperwork costs on us, they also impose paperwork costs on themselves, because processing and filing those forms requires substantial effort, even if filling in those forms requires even more effort from us.

    When it comes to virtual paperwork, the asymmetry is even more pronounced. Sure, it takes some admin to set up an online form and write the scripts to process its outputs, but that’s a one-off. The form-giver can perform a very little admin and still impose a giant, repeated admin burden on the rest of us.

    AI has only made this worse. Now, thanks to vibe coding, everyone can produce a form and its associated processing and analytics back-end with prompts, which creates a grave moral hazard. The kinds of activities that I used to fill in a single short form to accomplish now requires ten lengthy forms, created by different people in the same organization, all asking for variations on the same information. Through AI, we have democratized bureaucracy. It’s Kafka-as-a-service.

    What’s more, when you’re dealing with a monopoly, you have no choice but to complete whatever paperwork they throw at you. And when the vibe-coded back-end scripts shit the bed and lose or misinterpret your data, you have no choice but to endure an infinite telephone hold queue (if you’re lucky) or get shunted to a customer service bot (if you’re unlucky):

    https://pluralistic.net/2025/11/11/sorry-to-bother-you/#we-dont-care-we-dont-have-to

    It’s entirely possible to build webforms that are thoughtful, fast, respectful of our time, and well-processed. The problem is that fielding these forms requires that the form-giver undertake some intensive, moderately expensive work (once), while skipping this step merely requires that we all perform intensive, time-consuming work (over and over and over again):

    https://mohkohn.co.uk/writing/html-first/

    This is how we end up with government forms that require you to list every trip you have ever taken to the USA, since your infancy, with every flight number, which you can only get help with by talking to a chatbot that emails you an out-of-date PDF no matter what question you ask of it:

    https://pluralistic.net/2026/02/06/doge-ball/#n-600

    This is how we end up with massive customer service queues, long lines at tills, and no one at the gate to answer your questions when your flight is canceled. Understaffing is a form of enshittification, one that shifts value from shoppers to owners, and shifts consequences from owners to workers:

    https://pluralistic.net/2026/03/22/nobodys-home/#squeeze-that-hog

    This is how we end up with broken machines that no one can fix. Firing workers and replacing them with chatbots or contractors means incinerating their process knowledge – the precious, inchoate, unrecorded understanding that keeps everything working:

    https://pluralistic.net/2026/04/08/process-knowledge-vs-bosses/#wash-dishes-cut-wood

    This is how companies that make products we love suddenly decide to wreck those products: when the only consequences for shitty products is angry customers with nowhere to go and no one to vent their rage upon except workers who have no labor rights and can’t afford to quit, why not do a mafia bust-out for every business?

    https://pluralistic.net/2023/07/28/microincentives-and-enshittification/

    The world has moved on. Nothing works. Everything costs too much. No one can help. No one knows how to fix anything. The beams were broken by the Crimson King and his economism-crazed minions. The Dark Tower might fall.

    So what consumer advice do I have for people who are angry about this? I don’t have any consumer advice, I’m afraid. You can’t shop your way out of a monopoly. Once again, shopping is not politics.

    What I have for you is political advice. To restore the beams and beat back entropy again, we need a better system, not more virtuous individuals. If you feel – as I do – that “the world has moved on,” then to wrench it back, you will have to join a polity. Support activist groups like the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the digital rights group I’ve been at for the past 25 years:

    https://supporters.eff.org/donate/join-eff

    Join a union. If there’s no union at your jobsite, start a union. If you work in tech, you start this process by talking to techsolidarity.org and the techworkerscoalition.org. In the UK, get in touch with United Tech and Allied Workers:

    https://utaw.tech/

    Get involved in party politics. Find a political party whose local organization supports your values (even if the national version of that party sucks) and then work with your fellow grassroots activists to drag or replace the party leaders. Get involved in local politics: if there’s one thing Moms For Liberty has taught us, it’s that unregarded, seemingly unimportant local offices have enormous potential to change facts on the ground for the people where you live. Those changes don’t have to be change for the worse.

    Doing politics is hard. Hell, after all, is other people. It would be great if we could make change by changing ourselves, but that’s not how any of this works. The world has moved on, and you can’t save it. But together, we can restore the beams and beat back entropy. Hell is other people, but only because other people are so great but it’s so hard to figure out how to work together. We can do it, though. We did it with the post-war settlement, the 30 glorious years when we built the welfare state, regulated polluters and bosses, and kicked off the civil rights movement. We did it then, and we can do it again. We must. All things serve the beams.

    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 Coupland’s JPod: the Anti-Microserfs https://memex.craphound.com/2006/06/09/couplands-jpod-the-anti-microserfs/

    #20yrsago Anti-iTunes DRM demonstrations across the USA tomorrow https://www.defectivebydesign.org/node/98

    #20yrsago EFF co-founder Barlow debates MPAA prez Glickman http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/programmes/newsnight/5064170.stm

    #20yrsago Warehouse where old Disney World rides go to die https://limegreen-loris-912771.hostingersite.com/lost-horizons-another-look-back-at-a-future-world-favorite/

    #15yrsago IMF considered harmful https://www.independent.co.uk/voices/commentators/johann-hari/johann-hari-it-s-not-just-dominique-strausskahn-the-imf-itself-should-be-on-trial-2292270.html

    #15yrsago AT&T lobbies Wisconsin GOP to nuke Wisconsin’s best-of-breed co-op ISP for educational institutions https://communitynetworks.org/content/does-att-really-own-wisconsin-legislature-battle-over-wiscnet-continues

    #15yrsago Developmentally disabled man harrassed by TSA at Detroit airport https://web.archive.org/web/20110610141422/http://www.myfoxdetroit.com/dpp/news/taryn_asher/dad-special-needs-son-harassed-by-tsa-at-detroit-metropolitan-airport-20110608-wpms

    #15yrsago Miami cops intimidate citizen journalist who recorded shoot-em-up, smash camera https://web.archive.org/web/20110615035017/https://www.miamiherald.com/2011/06/02/v-fullstory/2248396/witnesses-said-they-were-forced.html

    #15yrsago NYC cyclist vs. bike lanes – kamikaze law-abiding https://web.archive.org/web/20110612100758/https://consumerist.com/2011/06/test.html

    #15yrsago Judge to copyright trolls: you are “inexcusable” https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2011/06/judge-furious-at-inexcusable-p2p-lawyering-cancels-subpoenas/

    #15yrsago Wah wah crybaby extortionists wah wah https://torrentfreak.com/anti-piracy-lawyers-defame-torrentfreak-in-court-110609/

    #15yrsago Lisa Goldstein’s The Uncertain Places: Grimm fairytale in California vibrates with believable unreality https://memex.craphound.com/2011/06/09/lisa-goldsteins-the-uncertain-places-grimm-fairytale-in-california-vibrates-with-believable-unreality/

    #15yrsago American right upset at report that Thatcher won’t meet Palin https://www.theguardian.com/world/2011/jun/09/margaret-thatcher-sarah-palin-meeting

    #15yrsago Lobbynomics: Canadian Chamber of Commerce manufactures fake $30 billion counterfeiting loss https://web.archive.org/web/20110611045202/https://www.michaelgeist.ca/content/view/5841/125/

    #10yrsago USA Swimming bans rapist Brock Turner for life https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-news/usa-swimming-bans-convicted-rapist-brock-turner-for-life-114108/

    #10yrsago Human advice for exercising while depressed https://web.archive.org/web/20160505140324/https://theestablishment.co/2016/05/05/depression-busting-exercise-tips-for-people-too-depressed-to-exercise/

    #10yrsago Every industry thinks it’s special, but only finance gets treated that way https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/06/John-Kay-BIS-speech.pdf

    #10yrsago Spain’s Podemos Party publishes its manifesto in Ikea Catalog form https://estaticos.elperiodico.com/resources/pdf/9/4/1465389843149.pdf

    #10yrsago Reminder: Neal Stephenson predicted Donald Trump in 1994 https://memex.craphound.com/2016/06/10/reminder-neal-stephenson-predicted-donald-trump-in-1994/

    #10yrsago Donald Trump, deadbeat https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/elections/2016/06/09/donald-trump-unpaid-bills-republican-president-laswuits/85297274/

    #10yrsago UK startup offers landlords continuous, deep surveillance of tenants’ social media https://web.archive.org/web/20160610150904/https://gawker.com/new-startup-that-sends-dossiers-on-your-private-social-1781576586

    #10yrsago UK Parliament votes in Snoopers Charter, now it goes to the House of Lords https://www.techdirt.com/2016/06/08/uk-parliament-ignores-concerns-moves-snoopers-charter-forward/

    #10yrsago Hard times for judge who sued dry-cleaner for $65M over missing pants https://www.loweringthebar.net/2016/06/pants-chapter-28.html

    #10yrsago New York Attorney General to Time Warner: your Internet is “abysmal” and “troubling” https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2016/06/time-warner-cable-internet-speeds-are-abysmal-ny-ag-claims/

    #10yrsago Banks confront negative interest rates with plans to store titanic bundles of money on-site https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2016/06/banks-rebel-against-negative-interest-rates.html

    #10yrsago Watchdogs 2: hacker kids led by a guy named Marcus fight the DHS in San Francisco https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5ipUwUcHASI

    #10yrsago Internet greybeards and upstarts gather to redecentralize the Internet https://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/08/technology/the-webs-creator-looks-to-reinvent-it.html

    #10yrsago How we will keep the Decentralized Web decentralized: my talk from the Decentralized Web Summit https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yth7O6yeZRE

    #5yrsago Prisoners’ Inventions https://pluralistic.net/2021/06/09/king-rat/#mother-of-invention

    #5yrsago Urban broadband deserts https://pluralistic.net/2021/06/10/flicc/#digital-divide

    #5yrsago A denialism taxonomy https://pluralistic.net/2021/06/10/flicc/#denialism

    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 (https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374621568/thereversecentaursguidetolifeafterai/)

    • “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, April 20, 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. Third draft completed. Submitted to editor.

    • “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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