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  • Wife of Spanish Prime Minister Faces Trial for Influence Peddling and Embezzlement

    Begoña Gómez, the wife of Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez, will stand trial on four counts of corruption and financial misconduct, a Madrid court ruled on Monday.

    According to a court document cited by state broadcaster RTVE, Gómez, 55, faces charges of embezzlement, influence peddling, corruption in business dealings, and misappropriation of funds.

    The court alleges she exploited her status as the prime minister’s wife to advance her private career—including securing a position co-directing a master’s program at Madrid’s Complutense University—and embezzled public funds for personal gain.

    The ruling follows a two-year investigation opened by Judge Juan Carlos Peinado in April 2024. While a specific start date has not yet been determined, Peinado has proposed that the trial be held before a jury later this month.

  • World failing Sudan as war enters a fourth year, UN relief chief warns

    Sudan remains the world’ s largest humanitarian and displacement crisis, UN agencies and partners said on Tuesday, calling for an end to the war between rival militaries on the eve of the three-year mark. 

  • Yemenis are ‘hanging by a thread’ top aid official warns Security Council

    Yemen must not be drawn into the escalating conflict in the Middle East, the Security Council heard on Tuesday, stressing the need for de-escalation, political progress and urgent humanitarian funding for beleaguered civilians battered by years of grinding war. 

  • Reparations ‘key to dismantling systemic racism’: UN rights chief

    The UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, Volker Türk, has described reparatory justice for colonialism, enslavement and the trade in enslaved Africans as “key to dismantling systemic racism.”

  • ‘Now is the moment to invest’: Syria needs global backing, says UN expert

    Syria has made “remarkable progress” on transitional justice within the past year, raising hopes for accountability and recovery after more than a decade of civil conflict.

  • Pluralistic: In praise of (some) compartmentalization (14 Apr 2026)

    Today’s links


    A male figure in an inner tube, floating down a river. The figure has been altered. He now has a zombie's head, and his skin has been tinted green, with large, suppurating sores oozing out of his skin.

    In praise of (some) compartmentalization (permalink)

    If there’s one FAQ I get Q’ed most F’ly, it’s this: “How do you get so much done?” The short answer is, “I write when I’m anxious (which is how I came to write nine books during lockdown).” The long answer is more complicated.

    The first complication to understand is that I have lifelong, degenerating chronic pain that makes me hurt from the base of my skull to the soles of my feet – my whole posterior chain. On a good day, it hurts. On a bad day, it hurts so bad that it’s all I can think about.

    Unless…I work. If I can find my way into a creative project, the rest of the world just kind of fades back, including my physical body. Sometimes I can get there through entertainment, too – a really good book or movie, say, but more often I find myself squirming and needing to get up and stretch or use a theragun after a couple hours in a movie theater seat, even the kind that reclines. A good conversation can do it, too, and is better than a movie or a book. The challenge and engagement of an intense conversation – preferably one with a chewy, productive and interesting disagreement – can take me out of things.

    There’s a degree to which ignoring my body is the right thing to do. I’ve come to understand a lot of my pain as being a phantom, a pathological failure of my nervous system to terminate a pain signal after it fires. Instead of fading away, my pain messages bounce back and forth, getting amplified rather than attenuated, until all my nerves are screaming at me. Where pain has no physiological correlate – in other words, where the ache is just an ache, without a strain or a tear or a bruise – it makes sense to ignore it. It’s actually healthy to ignore it, because paying attention to pain is one of the things that can amplify it (though not always).

    But this only gets me so far, because some of my pain does have a physiological correlate. My biomechanics suck, thanks to congenital hip defects that screwed up the way I walked and sat and lay and moved for most of my life, until eventually my wonky hips wore out and I swapped ’em for a titanium set. By that point, it was too late, because I’d made a mess of my posterior chain, all the way from my skull to my feet, and years of diligent physio, swimming, yoga, occupational therapy and physiotherapy have barely made a dent. So when I sit or stand or lie down, I’m always straining something, and I really do need to get up and move around and stretch and whatnot, or sure as hell I will pay the price later. So if I get too distracted, then I start ignoring the pain I need to be paying attention to, and that’s at least as bad as paying attention to the pain I should be ignoring.

    Which brings me to anxiety. These are anxious times. I don’t know anyone who feels good right now. Particularly this week, as the Strait of Epstein emergency gets progressively worse, and there’s this January 2020 sense of the crisis on the horizon, hitting one country after another. Last week, Australia got its last shipment of fossil fuels. This week, restaurants in India are all shuttered because of gas rationing. People who understand these things better than I do tell me that even if Trump strokes out tonight and Hegseth overdoes the autoerotic asphyxiation, it’ll be months, possibly years, before things get back to “normal” (“normal!”).

    Any time I think about this stuff for even a few minutes, I start to feel that covid-a-comin’, early-2020 feeling, only it’s worse this time around, because I literally couldn’t imagine what covid would mean when it got here, and now I know.

    When I start to feel those feelings, I can just sit down and start thinking with my fingers, working on a book or a blog-post. Or working on an illustration to go with one of these posts, which is the most delicious distraction, leaving me with just enough capacity to mull over the structure of the argument that will accompany it.

    I can’t do anything about the impending energy catastrophe, apart from being part of a network of mutual aid and political organizing, so it makes sense not to fixate on it. But there are things that upset me – problems my friends and loved ones are having – where there’s such a thing as too much compartmentalization. It’s one thing to lose myself in work until the heat of emotion cools so I can think rationally about an issue that’s got me seeing red, and another to use work as a way to neglect a loved one who needs attention in the hope that the moment will pass before I have to do any difficult emotional labor.

    Compartmentalization, in other words, but not too much compartmentalization. During the lockdown years, I transformed myself into a machine for turning Talking Heads bootlegs into science fiction novels and technology criticism, and that was better than spending that time boozing or scrolling or fighting – but in retrospect, there’s probably more I could have done during those hard months to support the people around me. In my defense – in all our defenses – that was an unprecedented situation and we all did the best we could.

    Creative work takes me away from my pain – both physical and emotional – because creative work takes me into a “flow” state. This useful word comes to us from Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, who coined the term in the 1960s while he was investigating a seeming paradox: how was it that we modern people had mastered so many of the useful arts and sciences, and yet we seemed no happier than the ancients? How could we make so much progress in so many fields, and so little progress in being happy?

    In his fieldwork, Csikszentmihalyi found that people reported the most happiness while they were doing difficult things well – when your “body or mind is stretched to its limits in a voluntary effort to accomplish something difficult and worthwhile.” He called this state “flow.”

    As Derek Thompson says, the word “flow” implies an effortlessness, but really, it’s the effort – just enough, not too much – that defines flow-states. We aren’t happiest in a frictionless world, but rather, in a world of “achievable challenges”:

    https://www.derekthompson.org/p/how-zombie-flow-took-over-culture

    Thompson relates this to “the law of familiar surprises,” an idea he developed in his book Hit Makers, which investigated why some media, ideas and people found fame, while others languished. A “familiar surprise” is something that’s “familiar but not too familiar.”

    He thinks that the Hollywood mania for sequels and reboots is the result of media execs chasing “familiar surprises.” I think there’s something to this, but we shouldn’t discount the effect that monopolization has on the media: as companies get larger and larger, they end up committing to larger and larger projects, and you just don’t take the kinds of risks with a $500m movie that you can take with a $5m one. If you’re spending $500m, you want to hedge that investment with as many safe bets as you can find – big name stars, successful IP, and familiar narrative structures. If the movie still tanks, at least no one will get fired for taking a big, bold risk.

    Today, we’re living in a world of extremely familiar, and progressively less surprising culture. AI slop is the epitome of familiarity, since by definition, AI tries to make a future that is similar to the past, because all it can do is extrapolate from previous data. That’s a fundamentally conservative, uncreative way to think about the world:

    https://pluralistic.net/2020/05/14/everybody-poops/#homeostatic-mechanism

    The tracks the Spotify algorithm picks out of the catalog are going to be as similar to the ones you’ve played in the past as it can make them – and the royalty-free slop tracks that Spotify generates with AI or commissions from no-name artists will be even more insipidly unsurprising:

    https://pluralistic.net/2022/09/12/streaming-doesnt-pay/#stunt-publishing

    Thompson cites Shishi Wu’s dissertation on “Passive Flow,” a term she coined to describe how teens fall into social media scroll-trances:

    https://scholarworks.umb.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=2104&context=doctoral_dissertations

    Wu says it’s a mistake to attribute the regretted hours of scrolling to addiction or a failure of self-control. Rather, the user is falling into “passive flow,” a condition arising from three factors:

    I. Engagement without a clear goal;

    II. A loss of self-awareness – of your body and your mental state;

    III. Losing track of time.

    I instantly recognize II. and III. – they’re the hallmarks of the flow states that abstract me away from my own pain when I’m working. The big difference here is I. – I go to work with the clearest of goals, while “passive flow” is undirected (Thompson also cites psychologist Paul Bloom, who calls the scroll-trance “shitty flow.” In shitty flow, you lose track of the world and its sensations – but in a way that you later regret.)

    Thompson has his own name for this phenomenon of algorithmically induced, regret-inducing flow: he calls it “zombie flow.” It’s flow that “recapitulates the goal of flow while evacuating the purpose.”

    Zombie flow is “progress without pleasure” – it’s frictionless, and so it gives us nothing except that sense of the world going away, and when it stops, the world is still there. The trick is to find a way of compartmentalizing that rewards attention with some kind of productive residue that you can look back on with pride and pleasure.

    I wouldn’t call myself a happy person. I don’t think I know any happy people right now. But I’m an extremely hopeful person, because I can see so many ways that we can make things better (an admittedly very low bar), and I have mastered the trick of harnessing my unhappiness to the pursuit of things that might make the world better, and I’m gradually learning when to stop escaping the pain and confront it.

    (Image: marsupium photography, CC BY-SA 2.0, modified)

    Hey look at this (permalink)


    A shelf of leatherbound history books with a gilt-stamped series title, 'The World's Famous Events.'

    Object permanence (permalink)

    #25yrsago Pee-Wee Herman on his career https://web.archive.org/web/20010414033156/https://ew.com/ew/report/0,6115,105857~1~0~paulreubensreturnsto,00.html

    #25yrsago Anxious hand-wringing about multitasking teens https://www.nytimes.com/2001/04/12/technology/teenage-overload-or-digital-dexterity.html

    #20yrsago Clever t-shirt typography spells “hate” – “love” in mirror-writing https://web.archive.org/web/20060413102804/https://accordionguy.blogware.com/blog/_archives/2006/4/12/1881414.html

    #20yrsago New Mexico Lightning Field claims to have copyrighted dirt https://diaart.org/visit/visit-our-locations-sites/walter-de-maria-the-lightning-field#overview

    #20yrsago Futuristic house made of spinach protein and soy-foam https://web.archive.org/web/20060413111650/http://bfi.org/node/828

    #15yrsago New Zealand to sneak in Internet disconnection copyright law with Christchurch quake emergency legislation https://www.stuff.co.nz/technology/digital-living/4882838/Law-to-fight-internet-piracy-rushed-through

    #10yrsago Bake: An amazing space-themed Hubble cake https://www.sprinklebakes.com/2016/04/black-velvet-nebula-cake.html

    #10yrsago Shanghai law uses credit scores to enforce filial piety https://www.caixinglobal.com/2016-04-11/shanghai-says-people-who-fail-to-visit-parents-will-have-credit-scores-lowered-101011746.html

    #10yrsago Walmart heiress donated $378,400 to Hillary Clinton campaign and PACs https://web.archive.org/web/20160414155119/https://www.alternet.org/election-2016/alice-walton-donated-353400-clintons-victory-fund

    #10yrsago Mass arrests at DC protest over money in politics https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/public-safety/mass-arrests-of-protesters-in-demonstration-at-capitol-against-big-money/2016/04/11/96c13df0-0037-11e6-9d36-33d198ea26c5_story.html

    #10yrsago Churchill got a doctor’s note requiring him to drink at least 8 doubles a day “for convalescence” https://web.archive.org/web/20130321054712/https://arttattler.com/archivewinstonchurchill.html

    #5yrsago Big Tech’s secret weapon is switching costs, not network effects https://pluralistic.net/2021/04/12/tear-down-that-wall/#zucks-iron-curtain

    #5yrsago Fraud-resistant election-tech https://pluralistic.net/2021/04/12/tear-down-that-wall/#bmds

    #1yrago Blue Cross of Louisiana doesn’t give a shit about breast cancer https://pluralistic.net/2025/04/12/pre-authorization/#is-not-a-guarantee-of-payment

    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, 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.

    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

    Bluesky (no ads, possible tracking and data-collection):

    https://bsky.app/profile/doctorow.pluralistic.net

    Medium (no ads, paywalled):

    https://doctorow.medium.com/

    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

  • Doctors’ strikes can have surprising benefits – but are they sustainable?

    Some hospital trusts tell the BBC previous action has seen shorter waits, faster decisions and calmer corridors.

  • The Dangers of California’s Legislation to Censor 3D Printing

    California’s bill, A.B. 2047, will not only mandate censorware — software which exists to bluntly block your speech as a user — on all 3D printers; it will also criminalize the use of open-source alternatives. Repeating the mistakes of Digital Rights Management (DRM) technologies won’t make anyone safer. What it will do is hurt innovation in the state and risk a slew of new consumer harms, ranging from surveillance to platform lock-in. California must stand with creators and reject this legislation before it’s too late.

    3D printing might evoke images of props from blockbuster films, rapid prototyping, medical research, or even affordable repair parts. Yet for a growing number of legislators, the perceived threat of “ghost guns” is a reason to impose restrictions on all 3D printers. Despite 3D printing of guns already being rare and banned under existing law, California may outright criminalize any user having control over their own device. 

    This bill is a gift for the biggest 3D printer manufacturers looking to adopt HP’s approach to 2D printing: criminalize altering your printer’s code, lock users into your own ecosystem, and let enshittification run its course. Even worse, algorithmic print blocking will never work for its intended purpose, but it will threaten consumer choice, free expression, and privacy.

    A misstep here can have serious repercussions across the whole 3D printing industry, lead the way for more bad bills, and leave California with an expensive and ineffective bureaucratic mess.

    What’s in the California Proposal?

    Compared to the Washington and New York laws proposed this year, California’s is the most troubling. It criminalizes open source, reduces consumer choice, and creates a bureaucratic burden.

    Criminalizing Open Source and User Control

    A.B. 2047 goes further than any other legislation on algorithmic print-blocking by making it a misdemeanor for the owners of these devices to disable, deactivate, or otherwise circumvent these mandated algorithms. Not only does this effectively criminalize use of any third-party, open-source 3D printer firmware, but it also enables print-blocking algorithms to parallel anti-consumer behaviors seen with DRM.

    Manufacturers will be able to lock users into first-party tools, parts, and “consumables” (analogous to how 2D printer ink works). They will also be able to mandate purchases through first-party stores, imposing a heavy platform tax. Additionally, manufacturers could force regular upgrade cycles through planned obsolescence by ceasing updates to a printer’s print-blocking system, thereby taking devices out of compliance and making them illegal for consumers to resell. In short, a wide range of anti-consumer practices can be enforced, potentially resulting in criminal charges.

    Independent of these deliberate harms manufacturers may inflict, DRM has shown that criminalizing code leads to more barriers to repair, more consumer waste, and far more cybersecurity risks by criminalizing research.

    Less Consumer Choice

    The bill favors incumbent manufacturers over newer competitors and over the interests of consumers.

    Less-established manufacturers will need to dedicate considerable time and resources to implementing the ineffective solutions discussed above, navigating state approval, and potentially paying licensing fees to third-party developers of sham print-blocking software. While these burdens may be absorbed by the biggest producers of this equipment, it considerably raises the barrier to entry on a technology that can otherwise be individually built from scratch with common equipment. The result is clear: fewer options for consumers and more leverage for the biggest producers. 

    Retailers will feel this pinch, but the second-hand market will feel it most acutely. Resale is an important property right for people to recoup costs and serves as an important check on inflating prices. But under this bill, such resale risks misdemeanor penalties. 

    The bill locks users into a walled garden; it demands manufacturers ensure 3D printers cannot be used with third-party software tools. By creating barriers to the use of popular and need-specific alternatives, this legislation will limit the utility and accessibility of these devices across a broad spectrum of lawful uses.

    Bureaucratic Burden 

    A.B. 2047’s title 21.1 §3723.633-637 creates a print-blocking bureaucracy, leaning heavily on the California Department of Justice (DOJ). Initially, the DOJ must outline the technical standards for detecting and blocking firearm parts, and later certify print-blocking algorithms and maintain lists of compliant 3D printers. If a printer or software doesn’t make it through this red tape, it will be illegal to sell in the state.

    The bill also requires the department to establish a database of banned blueprints that must be blocked by these algorithms. This database and printer list must be continually maintained as new printer models are released and workarounds are discovered, requiring effort from both the DOJ and printer manufacturers. 

    For all the cost and burden of creating and maintaining such a database, those efforts will inevitably be outpaced by rapid iterations and workarounds by people breaking existing firearms laws.

    Not just California

    Once implemented, this infrastructure will be difficult to rein in, causing unintended consequences. The database meant for firearm parts can easily expand to copyright or political speech. Scans meant to be ephemeral can be collected and surveilled. This is cause for concern for everyone, as these levers of control will extend beyond the borders of the Golden State.

    While California is at the forefront of print blocking, the impacts will be felt far outside of its borders. Once printer companies have the legal cover to build out anti-competitive and privacy-invasive tools, they will likely be rolled out globally. After all, it is not cost-effective to maintain two forks of software, two inventories of printers, and two distribution channels. Once California has created the infrastructure to censor prints, what else will it be used for?

    As we covered in “Print Blocking Won’t Work” these print-blocking efforts are not only doomed to fail, but will render all 3D printer users vulnerable to surveillance either by forcing them into a cloud scanning solution for “on-device” results, or by chaining them to first-party software which must connect to the cloud to regularly update its print blocking system.

    This law demands an unfeasible technological solution for something that is already illegal. Not only is this bad legislation with few safeguards, it risks the worst outcomes for grassroots innovation and creativity—both within the state and across the global 3D printing community.

    California should reject this legislation before it’s too late, and advocates everywhere should keep an eye out for similar legislation in their states. What happens in California won’t just stay in California.

  • Amy Goodman on Telling the Stories Power Wants Buried

    Amy Goodman on Telling the Stories Power Wants Buried

    Amy Goodman has long followed a simple mission to “go where the silence is.” Since co-foundingDemocracy Now!in 1991, she has reported from the front lines of some of the country’s most defining crises, long before mainstream outlets paid attention—traveling to New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina to confront authorities over their abandonment of residents, facing down riot police at the 2008 Republican National Convention, and even becoming the subject of an arrest warrant for covering protests against the Dakota Access Pipeline in North Dakota.

  • Hungary’s New Leader Promises to Dismantle ‘Industrial-Scale’ Corruption

    After ending Viktor Orbán’s 16-year rule in a landslide election victory, Hungary’s incoming leader, Péter Magyar, has promised a sweeping crusade to dismantle the country’s systemic graft.

    Fulfilling that pledge will require untangling a sprawling network of political and business alliances.

    Outlining his administration’s agenda on Monday, Magyar declared “zero tolerance” for the misuse of public money. He framed the status quo of the Orbán era not merely as a political failing, but as outright theft from the Hungarian public.

    To tackle this labyrinth of graft, Magyar announced during a press conference the creation of two new watchdog agencies. A new Anti-Corruption Office will be launched with a mandate focused on prevention, education, and shielding law enforcement from partisan interference, he said. Corrupt leaders will be removed and the political and operational leadership of the police force will be separated.

    Working alongside the Anti-Corruption Office will be the National Asset Recovery and Protection Office, a new institution that will coordinate deep-dive financial investigations without competing with existing police or tax authorities.

    The new asset recovery bureau’s early targets will include reviewing questionable real estate transactions, examining lucrative concession deals, and retroactively auditing all public procurements exceeding $32 million, Magyar explained.

    He pledged to have the apparatus fully operational by June. To fund the initiative, he plans to redirect the budget resources currently allocated to the Orbán government’s controversial Office for the Protection of Sovereignty. The stakes are existential for Hungary’s economy. Under Orbán, Brussels froze billions in funds over severe rule-of-law and procurement failures. The European Union is currently conditioning the release of up to €35 billion ($41.1 billion)—including more than €6.4 billion ($7.5 billion) in pandemic recovery funding—on 27 strict requirements, effectively demanding a total break from the democratic backsliding of the past 16 years.

    As a critical first step to restoring democratic institutions, the incoming government will officially launch the process of joining the European Public Prosecutor’s Office (EPPO), the EU body that investigates fraud involving European funds. Magyar acknowledged that the formal accession process could take at least six months.

    Magyar’s victory has drawn immediate sighs of relief across the continent, with European leaders welcoming the election as a rare chance to reset Budapest’s ties with the bloc. Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk called the election a blow to authoritarian rule, proving Eastern Europe’s capacity to resist corrupt systems. European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen heralded the moment as “a victory for fundamental freedoms,” comparing it to Hungary’s defining democratic turning points in 1956 and 1989.

    For Magyar, the mandate appears to be clear: bring Hungary closer to Brussels and dismantle one of Orban’s main legacies.

    “We are ready to eliminate industrial-scale corruption,” Magyar said.