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  • Delusion Update

    Delusion Update

    A look at some of the years homeopathy papers on PubMed.

    The post Delusion Update first appeared on Science-Based Medicine.

  • Why mental health problems are different from medical conditions

    The medical nature of psychiatry is a key area of contention and, as I argue in this blog, gives rise to many of the problems that psychiatry is associated with.

    As highlighted recently by Robert Whitaker, psychiatrist, Awais Aftab, has become a frequent defender of institutional psychiatry and its medical credentials. The fact that he acknowledges some of psychiatry’s problems, including the iatrogenic effects of psychiatric drugs, gives him credibility, yet his views on the nature of psychiatric problems are difficult to reconcile with psychiatry being a medical speciality ‘just like any other.’

    It is hard to argue with much of Aftab’s recent blog, The Ground Beneath the Clinic. He describes how psychiatry is an institution designed to manage a variety of social and personal problems that people, families and communities struggle to manage themselves, for example, and he points out that ‘There is no objective or a priori way of determining the authority of medicine and clinical disciplines, and the scope of these disciplines is pragmatic and institutional in nature.’

    His argument is that medical disorders are hard to define clearly and objectively, therefore just because psychiatric conditions are too should not exclude them from being conceived of as medical conditions. Aftab gives an example of the philosopher and stoic, Ivan Illich, who viewed his cancer as part of life rather than an ‘illness’ that needed to be removed and treated. Aftab suggests that because cancer can be viewed differently by different people – that is, its nature as an ‘illness’ is not an objective fact – psychiatric disorders, which are also subject to varying perspectives, can legitimately be classified as an illness if people think they are.

    Aftab is not the only one to make this argument. Many thinkers trying to encompass psychiatry within the bounds of medicine have taken a similar position, as I explained in a paper detailing my response to them in 2020 (to which, incidentally, Aftab responded and I replied). Indeedthe WHO’s famous definition of health as ‘a state of complete physical, mental, and social well-being’ is similar with its implication that ill health or illness is anything that interferes with this state.

    This sort of definition comfortably accommodates mental disorder, but the trouble is it also includes poverty, loneliness, being a victim of crime and many other situations that are generally experienced as distressing. In other words, it fails to identify what is distinctive about states of illness or disease – what we might call medical conditions. It misses the fact that the core feature that distinguishes them from other unwanted situations is that they are a condition of the body – in other words they are caused by specific bodily processes.

    Aftab, the WHO and others suggest that medical conditions are simply states that involve suffering or distress, but the concepts ‘illness’ and ‘disease’ are not just defined by this. They have two defining features – that they are conditions of the body and that that they cause suffering or are unwanted for one reason or another. The being unwanted or causing suffering is clearly subjective, but the physical or biological nature of the condition is not.

    Those, like Aftab, who want to accommodate mental disorders within medicine but don’t necessarily want to equate them with physical conditions tend to gloss over the intrinsic bodily nature of disease. But many in psychiatry understand it well and this is why research aimed at finding the biological basis of psychiatric disorders is so well-funded and so high profile. Biological psychiatrists understand that only by demonstrating the physical basis of mental disorder will psychiatry secure its place within medicine. 

    At times, Aftab seems to recognise this too. So although in one blog he states that ‘Paradigmatic psychiatric disorders are not disorders of the brain in the narrow sense,’ in another he stresses the biological nature of mental conditions. In relation to emotions he declares ‘the brain-based nature of emotions is not in dispute’, while quoting neuroscientist, Feldman Barrett, that “Even after a century of effort, scientific research has not revealed a consistent, physical fingerprint for even a single emotion.” On depression he says the ‘involvement of biological factors can take many different forms’. However, he then goes on to admit that there may be ‘no biological dysfunctions or biological risk factors’ at play, but ‘due to the embodied nature of mind, there will still be biological mechanisms involved’.

    Although it remains somewhat unclear, Aftab appears to be suggesting that mental disorders and emotions in general are biological in the sense that all human actions and experiences are biologically mediated at some level or ‘instantiated in the brain,’ as he puts it. Yet this is merely saying that everything human beings think, feel and do is biological because we are biological creatures, and in other writings Aftab himself criticises this argument as ‘uninformative and vacuous’.

    Whatever his precise views, Aftab argues there is nothing wrong with giving medicine jurisdiction over situations that are not diseases in a strict sense, as long as we recognise that other institutions may play a useful role too. This sounds reasonable, but aligning mental suffering with physical conditions is not neutral – there are consequences.

    For a start, it means that psychiatry becomes about treating things, that is disorders, diagnoses or  diseases, instead of helping people to navigate their unique and individual problems. It prevents what we call mental disorders from being understood not as conditions of the body, but of the person as a whole that are intrinsically related to the individual’s personal history, relationships, circumstances and personality and cannot actually be explained at the level of biological processes.

    The idea that mental health problems are medical diseases is also responsible for the  vast exposure of the population to drugs, such as antidepressants, that have little benefit and cause plenty of harm, as I documented in Chemically Imbalanced. Current levels of antidepressant prescribing were achieved by persuading the population that the physical origins of depression have been identified, when this is not, in fact, the case.  

    Intellectual critics of psychiatry (Conrad, Szasz, Foucault to name a few), have long pointed out that it is the assumption that psychiatric conditions are medical, and that medical conditions arise from the body, that forms the justification for legal powers that over-ride people’s bodily autonomy and freedom. The idea that someone is behaving in a certain way because their brain is deranged, enables various things to be done to them in the name of ‘treatment’ that might not be acceptable if these interventions were viewed as forms of behavioural control. 

    All this is not to say that medicine has no role in the management of certain forms of distress or disturbance. There are times when drug treatment can be helpful  – sedatives can bring calm and sleep to someone who is acutely manic, antipsychotics effectively suppress intrusive psychotic experiences in some people, for example. But this does not mean that these conditions are inherently medical. Conceiving them as such leads to confusion, massive over-use of physical interventions and dehumanisation of the individuals caught up in the system.

  • EFFecting Change: LGBTQ+ Solidarity Against the Tide of Surveillance

    LGBTQ+ communities are facing an escalating wave of censorship and targeted surveillance, but we can push back through mutual solidarity. Join us live to learn how safer virtual spaces get built, how platform policies and government pressure are reshaping the digital landscape, and what platform accountability actually looks like. Our panel will share ideas for direct action and concrete strategies you can bring back to your community. Whether you’re an activist, an ally, or just paying attention, this conversation is for you. Join the livestream online followed by live Q&A.

    EFFecting Change Livestream Series:
    LGBTQ+ Solidarity Against the Tide of Surveillance
    Wednesday, June 17th
    9:00 am – 10:00 am Pacific – Check Local Time
    Livestream followed by Q&A

    This event is LIVE and FREE!

    About the Speakers

    Paige Collings
    As a lawyer, digital policy activist and community organizer, Paige works to dismantle systems of oppression and advance collective liberation. Her work focuses on highlighting how state surveillance and corporate restrictions stifle marginalized communities and perpetuate historic injustices and harm. She has worked with activists across the globe to facilitate systemic change by speaking truth to power and creating spaces for alternative imaginations; and her writing on digital justice has been featured in Wired, Politico, Teen Vogue, the Daily Beast and more.

    Jillian C. York
    Jillian is EFF’s Director for International Freedom of Expression, based in London. Her work examines state and corporate censorship and its impact on culture and human rights, with a focus on historically marginalized communities. At EFF, she organizes coalitions, writes about and researches topics related to freedom of expression, leads the Speaking Freely interview series, and contributes to various other areas of the organization’s work. Jillian is the author of Silicon Values: The Future of Free Speech Under Surveillance Capitalism (Verso, 2021), a contributor to several academic volumes, and has written for MIT Technology Review, The Guardian, and WIRED, among others. She is also a visiting professor at the College of Europe Natolin in Warsaw, and a regular speaker at global events.

    Soatok Dreamseeker
    Soatok Dreamseeker is a gay furry security engineer. He blogs about applied cryptography on his blog, Dhole Moments, and is developing key transparency to enable end-to-end encryption on the Fediverse. His puns are 100% whole groan.

    Luísa Franco Machado
    Luísa Franco Machado is an award-winning international expert in digital rights and data justice. She has also been a technical advisor in data governance and AI ethics for governments, NGOs, and international organizations worldwide, including the UN, OECD.AI, GIZ, and others. Luísa has carried on policy research at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE) and Sciences Po Paris on the intersection between technology and socio-economic development. In 2022, the United Nations recognized them as a global Young Leader for the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) among more than 6,500 advocates. In 2025 she was featured in Apolitical’s Government AI 100 list as a rising star.

  • You Can’t Have Both Democracy and Billionaires

    You Can’t Have Both Democracy and Billionaires

    “What exactly is wrong with the wealthy?” law professor John O. McGinnis asks in Why Democracy Needs The Rich. McGinnis thinks the 1 percent have been unfairly maligned by leftists like Bernie Sanders, and are in need of a vigorous defense. The rich, he says, are productive and useful members of society. If we redistribute their wealth, we only impoverish ourselves. Even those of us who will never be rich ourselves benefit from the presence of oligarchs.

  • GNU Press Shop open now through July 19

  • FBI Warns Cyber Extortion Group Is Targeting Law Firms

    A cyber extortion group is targeting U.S. law firms by impersonating IT workers, stealing sensitive files, and threatening to publish the data if the firms do not pay, the FBI warned in a recent alert.

    The so-called Silent Ransom Group, or SRG, has also been tracked under the names Luna Moth, Chatty Spider, and UNC3753. Unlike traditional ransomware gangs, which often encrypt victims’ systems and demand payment to unlock them, SRG focuses on stealing data and using the threat of public exposure as leverage, according to the FBI.

    Law firms are especially attractive targets because they often hold confidential client files, legal strategies, financial records, intellectual property, and privileged communications. A breach can therefore affect not only the firm itself, but also clients whose information may be exposed..

    The FBI said SRG has been targeting U.S.-based law firms since spring 2023 with phishing emails and phone calls in which attackers pose as IT support staff and persuade employees to give them access to computers or remote-management tools.

    In some cases SRG actors have sent people in person to law firm offices, pretending to be IT staff, to gain access to computers and copy data onto external hard drives or USB devices, according to the FBI.

    A recent report by Google Threat Intelligence Group and Mandiant also described the ongoing campaign against U.S. legal, professional, and financial services organizations, saying attackers have used voice phishing, fake IT support scenarios, and, in some cases, in-person access to steal data quickly.

    Although the FBI alert focused on U.S. law firms, European cybersecurity officials say the underlying threat — stealing data from trusted service providers and using it for extortion or follow-up attacks — is not limited to the United States. Europe’s cybersecurity agency, ENISA, told OCCRP on Monday that cybercriminals have increasingly relied on data exfiltration to monetize stolen information or use it as leverage in later attacks. Even ransomware operators are now encrypting less as a result, the agency said.

    ENISA also warned that stolen data can be bought or used by other threat actors, including state-aligned groups or hacktivists, blurring the lines between different types of cyber threats. The agency also pointed to third-party and supply-chain risks, saying attackers are increasingly using indirect pathways through service providers and other dependencies.

    Cybersecurity firm Resecurity said in a June report that SRG also uses public data-leak sites to pressure victims. These sites can be used to post stolen files or threaten publication if a ransom is not paid.

    Resecurity told OCCRP it had downloaded more than 1.6 million files from leak sites it links to SRG, and said some affected law firms may not be aware that their data was exposed. The company also said the sites remained accessible through clearnet domains registered via WebNIC, an ICANN-accredited domain registrar.

    OCCRP has not independently reviewed the full dataset, verified the authenticity of the leaked files, or confirmed Resecurity’s technical findings.

    The FBI urged organizations to train employees to verify unexpected IT requests, restrict remote access tools, monitor unusual logins, and report suspected incidents to law enforcement.

  • “I Want No States”: Norman Finkelstein on the Future of Gaza

    “I Want No States”: Norman Finkelstein on the Future of Gaza

    In the second half of his interview with Current Affairs, Dr. Norman Finkelstein discusses the changing political landscape surrounding Palestine, the growing critiques of Israel among right-wing commentators, and why he remains unconvinced by both the one-state and two-state solutions. The political scientist also explains why his latest book, Gaza’s Gravediggers: An Inquiry Into Corruption in High Places, focuses less on Israeli propaganda and more than on the failures of prominent human rights organizations to stop a genocide. Because these intuitions are meant to possess a certain “moral authority,” Finkelstein says, “it’s those betrayals that anger me 10,000 times more.”

  • Pluralistic: AI and amateurism (15 Jun 2026)

    Today’s links


    A man's head made out of contorted bodies. Set into the middle of his brain is a Radio Shack 150-in-1 electronic experimentation kit.

    AI and amateurism (permalink)

    Over the weekend, I did an interview about my forthcoming book The Reverse Centaur’s Guide to Life After AI (a book about being a better AI critic), and the interviewer said she was surprised that I wasn’t an AI booster, based on my demographics and work history:

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

    I could see where she was coming from. I encountered computers in the mid-seventies, as a small child. My first computer was a CARDIAC, a working, Turing-complete, mechanical computer made entirely of cardboard, that I spent endless hours with:

    https://www.instructables.com/CARDIAC-CARDboard-Illustrative-Aid-to-Computation-/

    Then I graduated to a teletype terminal and acoustic coupler connected to a minicomputer at the University of Toronto. My mom, a kindergarten teacher, used to smuggle home 1,000′ rolls of paper towel from the kids’ bathroom. I’d get 1,000′ feet of computing up one side, then another 1,000′ down the other side, then I’d carefully re-roll the paper towel so she could put it back in the bathroom for the kids to dry their hands on.

    After that, I got an Apple ][+ in 1979, and shortly thereafter acquired a modem, and that was it: I was hooked for life. I became an amateur programmer, then a professional programmer. I hosted forums on dial-up BBSes where I distributed software and offered support to strangers who wanted to connect their computers to the internet. I got a job as a gopher developer, then a web developer, then a CIO-for-hire, helping wire up small businesses and connect them to the net. Eventually, I co-founded a free/open source software startup, before transitioning to 25 years as a digital rights activist with the Electronic Frontier Foundation. And for most of that time, I was energetically writing science fiction, eventually becoming associated with a school sometimes called “post-cyberpunk”:

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rewired:_The_Post-Cyberpunk_Anthology

    The force that energized all this work was a dialectical one, the contradiction that powered cyberpunk literature itself. For all that cyberpunk was undeniably enamored with the coolness and combustibility of new technology, it was also terrified of how technology could be a force for oppression, surveillance and control. As William Gibson says, “cyberpunk was a warning, not a suggestion.”

    Gibson’s more famous quote, of course, is “the street finds its own use for things.” In Gibson’s novels (and in my own life in technology) all the most interesting things happen when users of technology (often without formal training or credentials) find ways to adapt the technology they use to suit their needs:

    https://pluralistic.net/2026/03/17/technopolitics/#original-sin

    This is why I remain an ardent fan of Hypercard, Scratch and other meta-tools that are designed to allow non-programmers to write software that exactly conforms to their desires. Whatever the apps produced by these tools lack in sophistication and efficiency is more than offset by the fact that they give everyday people the power to directly control the tools they rely upon.

    If “epistemic humility” means anything, it means acknowledging that no amount of “requirements gathering” can capture the needs of people totally unlike yourself as faithfully as those users can capture their own needs. Giving people the tools to produce their own software is always going to make tools – vernacular, idiosyncratic, homespun – that are more suited to their own hands and minds than anything a technologist working on their behalf could make.

    The ancient dictum of “nothing about us without us” – born in 16th century Poland and taken up by the modern disability rights movement – asserts the right of people to control their own living conditions, and also the unique capacity of people to understand their own needs. You know what’s even better than being consulted on the design of the technology you use? Having direct control over that technology!

    This is why I was so suspicious of the iPad. The iPad’s much-lauded “ease of use” was entirely about how easy it was to use an iPad to consume technology. But the iPad remains the single most user-innovation-hostile technology in modern history, a device designed to make it impossible to produce technology without permission from a remorseless multinational corporation. This is cyberpunk as a demand, not a warning:

    https://memex.craphound.com/2010/04/01/why-i-wont-buy-an-ipad-and-think-you-shouldnt-either/

    The technology I’ve championed all my life is technology that gives more control to its users. One of my immutable precepts is that people who are different from me know things I can’t know, and the only way I can get the benefit of their unique knowledge and perspective is if they are free to make and share things that matter to them. As Dan Gillmor said, back when he was inventing the study of citizen journalism, “My readers know more than I do”:

    https://www.oreilly.com/openbook/wemedia/book/ch00.pdf

    And while I am broadly very skeptical of AI, and deeply alarmed by the proliferation of “vibe coded” software in production environments, vibe coding for personal projects is a useful and exciting addition to the lineage of tools that let computer users decide how their computers will work. For people making personal projects, vibe coding extends the power of shell scripting, cron jobs, Applescript, and other desktop automation tools to a wider audience.

    One of the journalists I spoke to last week about my book described how he had vibe coded an app that showed him an alert every time a plane flew over his house, giving the tail number and other details of the flight. This is information that I have no need for, no interest in, and that I’m therefore excited to learn about, because its very existence affirms that the world is full of people who are delightfully, irreducibly, amazingly different from me, and moreover, that their unique needs can be directly met using their imaginations and their personal computers.

    I recently sat down with my colleague Naomi Novik, a brilliant author who also co-founded Archive of Our Own. Naomi demoed her followup to AO3 for me: Wreccer, a system to help you find small groups of people with taste similar to your own, in order to facilitate media recommendations within that group – a kind of personal, relationship-driven alternative to massive, centralized, monolithic algorithmic recommendation systems:

    https://github.com/wreccer

    Naomi told me that Wreccer was being built using the same design ethos that the original Twitter embraced. When Twitter launched, it was an API first, and the official Twitter front end was built on that API – but anyone could build their own front end for Twitter that worked in the way they wanted it to. Now, the word “anyone” is doing a lot of work in that sentence, because most people don’t even know what an API is, and of the people who do, most of them were not capable of writing their own software front end for Twitter.

    But Wreccer is being designed for the age of vibe coding, and the API will really allow anyone who uses the service to design their own interface to the system, one that elevates and centers the features they find useful and tucks away the ones they’re not interested in. Your personal, custom front end could also bring in other data-sources – pulling in your Mastodon messages, for example, or even showing you an alert with the tail-number of any plane flying over your home.

    This is the part of vibe coding that I’m quite excited about, but it’s not the part the industry focuses on. Instead of hearing about how personal, homemade software utilities can be an end unto themselves, we hear about vibe coded projects as prototypes for commercial production code. We hear about clueless bosses vibe coding software products and services that run fine for one user on a siloed desktop computer, and then demanding to know why it takes 50 engineers a year to make the same thing work for millions of users on the public internet. We hear about people who vibe code and submit patches to free/open-source software projects with millions of users, overwhelming project maintainers with slop code that is riddled with security vulnerabilities.

    Of course, there’s an obvious reason why the industry wants to focus on the potential for vibe coded software to replace production code. The AI bubble has burned up $1.4t to date, while bringing in mere tens of billions of dollars per year, even as its unit economics grow steadily worse:

    https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2026/06/04/ai-is-the-greatest-money-wasting-scheme-humanity-has-ever-i/

    To keep the bubble inflated, AI hucksters must promise massive economic returns to the technology. They want investors to believe that vibe code is about to replace working programmers, who are skilled, high-waged, high-demand workers. Their pitch is that for every million dollars’ worth of programmers that an AI salesman and a boss conspire to fire, half a million dollars will go to the AI company whose bots shit out that vibe code.

    That’s par for the course with the AI bubble, whose focus is entirely on how AI can centralize, control and homogenize our lives. Whereas early desktop publishing, web publishing and social media gave us a glorious higgledy-piggledy of chaotic, weird and transgressive hobbyist media and retina-searing designs, AI art and design are instantly recognizable at a thousand yards, and it all looks the same, boring, and washed:

    https://pluralistic.net/2024/07/20/ransom-note-force-field/#antilibraries

    AI companies have released open weight/open source models that can run on your own computer, but these are treated as side-shows and toys and demos. The real action, we’re told, is in “frontier models,” which is industry-speak for “a piece of software whose running costs exceed the GDP of most countries”:

    https://pluralistic.net/2026/02/19/now-we-are-six/#stock-buyback

    Perhaps this is why the dynamics of AI are so different from the early dynamics of the web. Early web users were workers, who demanded that their bosses allow them to use the web and so devolve more power to people doing their jobs. By contrast, today’s most ardent AI boosters are bosses, who threaten workers who don’t use AI enough in the course of their duties:

    https://pluralistic.net/2026/05/26/the-ai-will-continue/#until-morale-improves

    Where we do see idiosyncrasy emerging from AI usage, it’s often terrible. AI can help you create a folie-a-un in which you and a chatbot team up to reinforce your delusions and drive you deeper into a world of dangerous mirage:

    https://pluralistic.net/2026/06/03/mission-space/#gsd

    There’s a (false) story that’s told about people who championed the early internet: that we were blithely certain that technology could only be a force for good, and negligently disinterested in the possibility that technology could control, extract and harm. That’s demonstrably untrue: recall cyberpunk’s dualism of “the street finds its own use for things” and “cyberpunk is a warning, not a suggestion.”

    More true is to say that early internet champions were alive to the importance of the internet, and therefore both excited about the possibilities of the internet to deliver a world of connection, idiosyncrasy, love and solidarity; and about the danger of the internet as a dystopian system of surveillance and manipulation:

    https://pluralistic.net/2025/02/13/digital-rights/#are-human-rights

    History isn’t finished. Long after the AI bubble pops, there will be local models and people vibe coding homemade software that respond directly to their needs. The stuff we make on our own computers, for ourselves, is deplatformed from its inception. It’s part of the life we can build in technology’s “shadowy corners” that we used to just call “technology.” The fact that this stuff is utterly unsuited to be production code makes it inherently unmonetizable. It’s how the street finds its own use for things:

    https://pluralistic.net/2026/02/23/goodharts-lawbreaker/#no-metrics-no-targets

    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 Disney characters win right to clean underwear https://web.archive.org/web/20010707023727/https://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/news/archive/2001/06/07/state1339EDT0171.DTL

    #20yrsago Lampooning the American dismissal of Gitmo suicides https://fafblog.blogspot.com/2006/06/610-changed-everything-run-for-your.html

    #20yrsago LA’s South Central Farm under police siege right now https://web.archive.org/web/20060616085732/http://www.southcentralfarmers.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=160&Itemid=2

    #15yrsago Transparent Pontiac for sale https://web.archive.org/web/20110610113919/http://blog.hemmings.com/index.php/2011/06/07/the-tin-indian-that-wasnt-rm-to-offer-see-through-pontiac/

    #15yrsago Pulp Fiction edited down to just the cussing https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5PcAQbhnGNs

    #15yrsago New York State to pet cemeteries: no pet owners’ ashes allowed https://web.archive.org/web/20110614133359/https://www.foxnews.com/us/2011/06/11/new-york-tells-pet-cemeteries-to-stop-taking-in-humans/#ixzz1PAZoGS6l

    #15yrsago A dog with persistence-of-vision LEDs in her shirt writes my novel Makers in the park at night https://web.archive.org/web/20110618011346/https://i.document.m05.de/?p=970

    #15yrsago Head of UN copyright agency says fair use is a “negative agenda,” wants to get rid of discussions on rights for blind people and go back to giving privileges to giant companies https://memex.craphound.com/2011/06/14/head-of-un-copyright-agency-says-fair-use-is-a-negative-agenda-wants-to-get-rid-of-discussions-on-rights-for-blind-people-and-go-back-to-giving-privileges-to-giant-companies/

    #10yrsago Air Force loses access to database tracking fraud investigations to 2004 https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2016/06/database-corruption-erases-100000-air-force-investigation-records/

    #10yrsago Peter Thiel’s lawyer threatens Gawker for talking about Donald Trump’s “hair” https://web.archive.org/web/20160615022004/https://gawker.com/now-peter-thiels-lawyer-wants-to-silence-reporting-on-t-1781918385

    #10yrsago Samantha Bee on Orlando shooting: angry and uncompromising https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t88X1pYQu-I

    #10yrsago Goldman Sachs bribed Libyan officials with sex workers, private jet rides, then lost all their money https://www.theguardian.com/business/2016/jun/13/goldman-sachs-hired-prostitutes-to-win-libyan-business-court-told

    #10yrsago Net Neutrality Wins: Federal Court Upholds FCC Open Internet Rules https://www.techdirt.com/2016/06/14/cable-industry-proclaims-more-competition-hurts-consumers-damages-economic-efficiency/

    #10yrsago Microsoft will buy Linkedin for $26.2B https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2016/06/microsoft-will-acquire-linkedin-for-18-5b/

    #10yrsago Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Tony Awards sonnet for the Orlando shooting victims https://www.rollingstone.com/tv-movies/tv-movie-news/see-lin-manuel-mirandas-stirring-tribute-to-orlando-victims-103131/

    #10yrsago China’s online astroturf is mostly produced by government workers as “extra duty” https://web.archive.org/web/20160613194153/http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2016/06/red-astroturf-chinese-government-makes-millions-of-fake-social-media-posts/

    #10yrsago Rio: your quadrennial reminder that the Olympics colonize host-states with Orwellian surveillance and human rights abuses https://web.archive.org/web/20160614122124/https://motherboard.vice.com/read/the-olympics-are-turning-rio-into-a-military-state

    #5yrsago A Monopoly Isn’t the Same as Legitimate Greatness https://pluralistic.net/2021/06/13/a-monopoly-isnt-the-same-as-legitimate-greatness/

    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.

    https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

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  • Vietnam Arrests 19 Chinese Nationals in Online Scam Bust

    Police in Vietnam have arrested 19 Chinese nationals accused of running an online fraud ring in the northern province of Lao Cai after relocating from Cambodia. According to authorities, the group rented rooms at the Song Hong View Hotel, where they set up laptops, smartphones, and 5G broadcasting devices to target Chinese citizens seeking loans by posing as lending-app employees.

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