News

Saturday 2026-04-25

10:00 PM

Breathwork [Seth Godin's Blog on marketing, tribes and respect]

[Off topic, but I hope it might be useful]

Mindfulness can improve your life. So can stillness and spiritual grounding. This is not a post about that.

Breathing is an architectural challenge and a chemical necessity.

We breathe about 20 pounds of air a day (and if you’ve ever tried to weigh air, you can imagine that this is quite a bit.) Why bother?

The body is fueled by a series of chemical reactions, and most of them require the right balance of oxygen and carbon dioxide. The body is finely tuned to be aware of the available quantity of each, and reacts accordingly.

We evolved to have a particularly complicated system for ingesting air. We have two nostrils and a mouth. Thanks to speech and other requirements, the mouth is well suited to rapid inhalations and exhalations.

Which is a problem.

The first lesson of James Nestor’s book is simple: Shut your mouth.

Spend three days breathing only through your nose. Even when you work out. Especially then. (Except swimming. I tried. It doesn’t work.)

And consider slightly taping your mouth when you sleep. Just a small piece of surgical tape, about a half inch across–right in the center. Put some lip balm on before applying so it won’t irritate you. Don’t do this if you have apnea or other issues, or a doctor who suggests against it. It’s a very small piece of tape, easily removed.

That’s it. Three days.

Nestor spends hundreds of pages explaining a huge range of benefits and volumes of peer-reviewed research. Some of it might be a bit overblown, some is surprising, but all of it makes sense.

But you don’t need a Ph.D. to determine how it feels after three days. It’s like discovering you’ve been using the wrong door to get into and out of your house.

I had such a good experience that I felt like it was worth sharing. Breathe through your nose, small sips, not gulps. You may find that you sleep better, snore less, run further, and are less stressed.

No one told me. Now we know.

      

Pluralistic: Ada Palmer's "Inventing the Renaissance" (25 Apr 2026) [Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow]

->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->-> Top Sources: None -->

Today's links


The U Chicago Press cover for Ada Palmer's 'Inventing the Renaissance.'

Ada Palmer's "Inventing the Renaissance" (permalink)

Ada Palmer may just be the most bewilderingly talented person I know: a genius sf writer, incredible librettist and singer, wildly innovative educator, and a leading historian of the Renaissance, and last year, she published her magnum opus, Inventing the Renaissance, a stunning book about so much more than history:

https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/I/bo246135916.html

All of my friends seem to be writing their magnum opuses these days! When (modern) historian Rick Perlstein and I did an event last year for my Enshittification tour, he told me he'd just finished his 1,000 page (ish? I may be misremembering slightly) history of the American conservative movement. And I recently had dinner with China Mieville, who told me he'd just turned in the manuscript for a novel he'd been trying to figure out how to write all his life.

I can't wait to read these books! And I couldn't wait to read Inventing the Renaissance, and I would have been much quicker off the mark but for the exigencies of book tours and books due and so on – but I've been reading it for the past two months or so, and I think I've pitched it about a hundred times to strangers and friends as I savored it, because it's just that good.

Inventing the Renaissance isn't a work of history, it's a work of "historiography" – the study of how histories get written and rewritten. Palmer's point here isn't to make us merely understand the Renaissance – she wants us to understand how the idea of a Renaissance, a rebirth out of a "dark age" into a "golden age" – has been used, abused, created and demolished, for centuries and centuries, including during the centuries when the Renaissance was actually underway.

Palmer teaches Renaissance history at the University of Chicago, where she is legendary for a unique annual pedagogical exercise in which she leads her students through a weeks-long live-action role-playing game that re-enacts the election of the Medicis' Pope. Every student is given a detailed biography of their character's position, goals, proclivities and history, and for weeks, the students scheme, ally, betray and assassinate each other. At the climax, the students take over the university's faux-Gothic cathedral, dressed in Renaissance drag (Palmer has a Google alert for theater companies that are selling off their costumes, and her tiny office at the university overflows with racks of cardinals' robes and other period garb), and they invest a Pope:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/10/17/against-the-great-forces-of-history/

This exercise is nothing short of genius, and the students who experience it often report that it is life-changing. That's because the final candidates are never quite the same, nor are the cardinals who cast votes for the winner. And yet, there are certain bedrocks that never shift, including the fact that Italy is always invaded by some of the factions involved in the election, though which cities burn also changes.

The point of this exercise is to expose the students to the power and limits of both "great historical forces" and the human agency that every one of us has within the envelope defined by those forces. Palmer wants her students to get a bone-deep understanding that while every moment has great forces bearing down on it, that the people of each moment have an enormous amount of leeway to channel the floodwaters that history will unleash. From the servant who bears a message from one great power to another, up to those great powers themselves, each person guides the course of history, even if they can't halt some of its outcomes.

Though Palmer unpacks this exercise and its meaning and results in the final part of her magnum opus, this message about forces and people is really the key to her historiography. She develops these themes in the most charming, accessible manner imaginable, weaving her own journey into history with her accounts of how different eras consciously created and deployed the idea of "the Renaissance" and how these ideas were bolstered, undermined, or ultimately demolished by new evidence. You could not ask for a better account of why there is not, and can never be, a single, canonical "history" of an era or a moment. There will always be multiple histories, overlapping each other, warring with one another, supplanting each other, or being revived as "lost" histories that reveal a truth that "they" have buried.

This is such an ambitious book, and the ambition pays off in so many ways. Take the book's structure: there's a long middle section in which Palmer describes how more than a dozen figures from the Renaissance experienced their era, with many overlapping events and timelines. Palmer's sensitive, beautifully researched and written accounts of the lives of these figures – highborn and lowly, sinister and virtuous – highlights the contradictions of this centuries-long "moment" we call "the Renaissance" and shows us how those contradictions can't ever be resolved, only acknowledged and understood.

This is Palmer the novelist, blending seamlessly with Palmer the historian. Palmer is a close literary – and personal – ally of the equally brilliant sf/fantasy writer Jo Walton, whose work has mined classical and Renaissance history to great effect since she and Palmer struck up their friendship. First, there were Walton's "Philosopher Kings" books, a three-book long thought experiment in which every person of every era who ever dreamed of living in Plato's Republic is brought through time and space to the doomed volcanic island that will someday give rise to the story of Atlantis, to try out Plato's ideal society for real:

https://memex.craphound.com/2015/01/13/jo-waltons-the-just-city/

Then there was Lent, Walton's story of the fanatical reformer Savonarola, who is forced to re-live his life over and over, with breaks in hell where he is tormented by his failure:

https://web.archive.org/web/20190516170659/https://www.latimes.com/books/la-ca-jc-review-jo-walton-lent-20190516-story.html

And this June, she'll bring out Everybody's Perfect, a novel that uses Palmer's trick of telling a story from many viewpoint characters, each of whom perceives the events so differently that their versions can't really be reconciled, except by understanding that there is no one history and there cannot be one history. There are only the histories, ever changing. The omnipotent third person narrator is a lie. I don't know if Palmer got this idea from Walton, or if Walton was inspired by Palmer, but it is a wonderful living example of how intellectual and creative movements (like those that are attributed to the Renaissance) feed one another.

One of Palmer's areas of specialty is free speech and censorship. Along with Adrian Johns, we co-taught a grad seminar called "Censorship, Information Control, and Information Revolutions from Printing Press to Internet" that connected Ada's work to the current battles over online speech:

https://neubauercollegium.uchicago.edu/research/censorship-information-control-and-information-revolutions-from-printing-press-to-internet

Palmer wants us to understand that the majority of censorship is self-censorship – that the Inquisition could only intervene in a tiny minority of cases of prohibited thought and word, and they had to rely on key people – printers, for example – anticipating the Inquisitors' tastes and limiting their speech without an Inquisitorial edict (if this seems relevant to the Trump administration's "war on woke," then you're clearly paying attention):

https://pluralistic.net/2024/02/22/self-censorship/#hugos

Those correspondences between the deep historical record and our current moment make Inventing the Renaissance extremely important and timely – a book hundreds of years in the making, and bang up to date.

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 Gloating NYT editorial about the dotcom crash https://www.nytimes.com/2001/04/23/opinion/editorial-observer-after-the-fall-the-new-economy-goes-retro.html

#20yrsago RIAA sues family that doesn’t own a PC https://www.techshout.com/riaa-sues-local-family-without-computer-for-illegal-music-file-sharing/

#15yrsago Righthaven copyright troll loses domain https://web.archive.org/web/20110425035158/http://www.domainnamenews.com/legal-issues/righthavencom-invalid-whois/9232

#15yrsago Steampunk Venetian mask https://bob-basset.livejournal.com/160226.html

#5yrsago John Deere's dismal infosec https://pluralistic.net/2021/04/23/reputation-laundry/#deere-john

#5yrsago Foxconn's Wisconsin death-rattle https://pluralistic.net/2021/04/23/reputation-laundry/#monorail

#5yrsago Laundering torturers' reputations with copyfraud https://pluralistic.net/2021/04/23/reputation-laundry/#dark-ops

#1yrago Sarah Wynn-Williams's 'Careless People' https://pluralistic.net/2025/04/23/zuckerstreisand/#zdgaf

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:

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Pluralistic.net

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https://pluralistic.net/plura-list

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

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https://doctorow.medium.com/

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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

01:00 PM

RFK Jr. & White House Appear At Odds Over Attempts To Rein Him In [Techdirt]

Amidst all the other chaos and damage RFK Jr. is doing in his current role as Secretary of Health and Human Services, we noted a few weeks back that he was also seemingly having a hard time finding someone to fill the opening for CDC Director. That opening, created when Kennedy fired Susan Monarez after only a few weeks on the job back in August of last year (!!!), has been vacant this entire time, with only temporary stand-ins filling the gap.

And then something truly remarkable happened. The Trump administration announced it was nominating Dr. Erica Schwartz for the position. And the notable thing about Schwartz is that… she’s a perfectly qualified, reasonable pick for the role. Many took this as yet another sign that the White House had begun attempting to rein in Kennedy so that his particular brand of nonsense didn’t get the GOP killed in the midterms. The nomination was so bizarrely reasonable that public health policy wonks immediately worried aloud that this couldn’t possibly work under Kennedy.

Outside public health experts have praised her nomination, highlighting her qualifications. But, they’re also wary of how an evidence-based health official will be able to function amid Kennedy’s anti-vaccine efforts and interference from the many like-minded allies he has installed at the CDC.

“As a well-trained and credentialed physician and former Deputy Surgeon General, Erica Schwartz possesses the medical background and public health knowledge to understand that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention must be guided by evidence-based science,” Georges Benjamin, CEO of the American Public Health Association, said in a statement. “She will need to use sound managerial and negotiation skills to navigate the rebuilding of our nation’s public health system.”

Jerome Adams, who served as Trump’s surgeon general in his first administration, posted on social media that Schwartz is a “battle-tested leader with decades of distinguished public service,” and that he was “cautiously optimistic” of her selection. As the leader of the CDC, “she’ll excel,” he said, with the caveat, “if [she’s] allowed to follow the science without political interference.”

Unfortunately for anyone optimistic that this would force Kennedy to return to sanity in public health policy, his recent appearance before Congress indicates that he’s not interested in complying. In those hearings, Kennedy was asked several questions about whether he would stop screwing with vaccine policy to bend it to his personal whims, and whether he would support the work of and listen to Schwartz if confirmed as CDC Director.

In a Congressional hearing Tuesday, Kennedy refused to commit to supporting evidence-based vaccine policy from the next director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. At the same time, he refused to say that he wouldn’t interfere with the agency’s recommendations.

Kennedy’s response Tuesday suggested Schwartz could face an equally short tenure. His answer came amid an exchange with Rep. Raul Ruiz (D-Calif.) in a hearing of the House Committee on Energy and Commerce. Ruiz asked Kennedy: “If Dr. Schwartz is confirmed, will you commit on the record today to implement whatever vaccine guidance she issues without interference?”

Kennedy replied without hesitation: “I’m not going to make that kind of commitment.”

There is danger in this for Kennedy. This administration, and particularly its mad king leader, do not like having their power challenged. There is a reason that Schwartz was tapped for this role and sure as hell isn’t because the Trump team thinks all is well at HHS. Or, at least, it knows they have a problem with public perception of the work that Kennedy is doing there. To have the administration offer up the rare sane nomination, only to have Kennedy state before Congress that he’s not committed to taking her seriously, is a public slap in the face to Trump. And one that will be memorialized in congressional hearing notes.

In other words, this nomination of Schwartz is a no-lose situation for the American public, in my view. Either she’ll be allowed to do her work in a competent way, which is great for a country suffering through a measles outbreak, or she won’t and the Trump administration will have to do something about it. Firing her would, I would guess, amount to Kennedy firing himself.

Now we wait to see which route this goes.

09:00 AM

Pluralistic: A free, open visual identity for enshittification (24 Apr 2026) [Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow]

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Today's links


The poop emoji from the cover of the US edition of 'Enshittification,' with a grawlix-scrawled black bar over its mouth. In the background is a blue tinted, rotated detail of the emoji's eyes and mouth.

A free, open visual identity for enshittification (permalink)

To my surprise, my life's work has turned out to be a long series of attempts to get people to engage with the abstract, distant issues of tech policy before it's too late. This is hard, because people naturally devote their attention to things that are concrete and immediate (for very good reasons!).

For nearly 25 years, I've worked with my comrades at the Electronic Frontier Foundation to raise the salience of these abstract, technical ideas. I've come up with metaphors, parables, framing devices, narratives, and then…a dirty little word: enshittification. It turned out that this word, and the minor license to vulgarity it confers, was the secret to unleashing a tide of interest in these issues, to my immense surprise and gratification.

But I don't confine my efforts to coming up with words to engage people on these matters. For several years now, I have been developing myself as a collagist, combining public domain images with Creative Commons-licensed materials to create several collages every week that aim to illustrate these abstract, technical issues in an engaging, visual way:

https://www.flickr.com/photos/doctorow/albums/72177720316719208

The US cover for Enshittification

This got a lot easier with the 2025 publication of my international bestseller Enshittification, and not just because a lot of people read that book. It was also because the US edition, from MCD/Farrar, Straus and Giroux had a gorgeous cover:

https://mpd-biblio-covers.imgix.net/9780374619329.jpg

That cover featured a (literally and figuratively) iconic variation of the "pile of poo" emoji, with angry eyebrows and a grawlix-scrawled black censor's bar over its mouth. It was designed by the brilliant Devin Washburn of No Ideas studio:

https://www.noideas.website/

A male figure in heavy canvas protective clothes, boots and gauntlets, reclining in the wheel-well of a locomotive, reading a book. The figure's head has been replaced with the poop emoji from the cover of the US edition of 'Enshittification,' whose mouth is covered with a black, grawlix-scrawled bar. The figure is reading a book, from which emanates a halo of golden light.

Devin's poop emoji became my go-to visual shorthand for illustrating stories about enshittification, an instantly recognizable way to identify my subject matter:

https://www.flickr.com/photos/doctorow/54957634601/in/album-72177720316719208

The staring red eye of HAL 9000 from Stanley Kubrick's '2001: A Space Odyssey. In the center is the poop emoji from the cover of the US edition of 'Enshittification,' with angry eyebrows and a black, grawlix-scrawled bar over its mouth. The poop emoji's eyes have also been replaced with the HAL eye.

I remixed it over and over:

https://www.flickr.com/photos/doctorow/54962122121/in/album-72177720316719208

The Earth from space. Squatting over North America, casting a long shadow and ringed by a red, spiky halo, is the poop emoji from the cover of the US edition of 'Enshittification,' with a grawlix-scrawled black bar over its mouth, wearing a Trump wig. Leaching through the starscape is a 'code waterfall' effect as seen in the credits of the Wachowskis' 'Matrix' movies.

And over:

https://www.flickr.com/photos/doctorow/54992219613/in/album-72177720316719208

I liked it so much I ordered a couple hundred enamel pins and a couple thousand vinyl stickers featuring the design, and handed them out for free to people I met on my 33-city book tour. Everywhere I went – and every time a video went out showing me wearing the pin – I was inundated with requests to buy this stuff. But my pins and stickers weren't merch (stuff you could buy) – they were swag (stuff I gave away). I had no interest in getting into the merch business!

But you folks kept asking, and also, I really loved that design, so I offered Devin a cash buyout for the rights to his enshittification poop emoji and then I released it under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license that lets you use it any way you want, including for commercial products, provided you attribute it and link back to the original:

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

And I made sure that my EFF comrades had first crack at this design, and they've made merch of it. You can get a $5 sticker:

https://shop.eff.org/products/enshittification-sticker

Or a $10 pin:

https://shop.eff.org/products/enshittification-pin

With all proceeds going to the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the most profound and powerful disenshittifying force on the planet Earth!

My xeriscaped lawn, featuring an Enshittification poop emoji lawn flag as well as several cacti and some rusty dinosaur sculptures.

But because this is CC licensed, you can make your own merch and swag! I made this great print-on-demand lawn flag my for front garden so I could let my enshittification flag fly:

https://www.flickr.com/photos/doctorow/55025045602/

My goal here is to create a free, open, remixable visual language for talking about platform decay, not owned by me or anyone, a part of the commons. Use it to illustrate anything you want, especially if you want to analogize enshittification to other phenomena, like politics or other non-digital phenomena. Semantic drift is good, actually!

https://pluralistic.net/2024/10/14/pearl-clutching/#this-toilet-has-no-central-nervous-system

You can get the high-rez of Devin's enshittification poop emoji from the internet's three most important repositories of Creative Commons licensed work.

There's a copy on Wikimedia Commons:

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Enshittification_poop_emoji_logo.png

And on Flickr:

https://www.flickr.com/photos/doctorow/55225631563/

And of course on the Internet Archive, along with a PSD that includes an ink-density adjustment layer:

https://archive.org/details/enshittification-poop-emoji-logo

I've supported Creative Commons literally since the very beginning. I worked with Larry Lessig, Aaron Swartz, Matt Haughey and Lisa Rein on the launch of the original licenses in 2002/3, and my first novel, Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom was the first book released under a CC license:

https://craphound.com/down/download/

Creative Commons is one of the most amazing feats of stunt-lawyering ever attempted, and it has been an unmitigated success, with tens of billions of works licensed CC, including all of Wikipedia. Like EFF, CC is a charitable nonprofit that depends on individual donors to keep its work going. The org turned 25 this year (along with my career as a novelist), and they've launched a giant fundraiser to carry their work forward.

As my contribution to the fundraiser, I've provided them with 375 signed, numbered copies of Canny Valley, my (otherwise) not-for-sale, extremely limited edition book of my collages, with an intro by Bruce Sterling. The book was designed by type legend John D Berry and printed at Pasadena's Typeworks, a century-old, family-owned print shop, on 100lb Mohawk paper, with a PVC binding that will last for generations:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/04/10/canny-valley/

CC tells me there's still some copies of Canny Valley left in the fundraiser. If you're intrigued by my collaging and want to own this very strange and beautiful little artifact, here's where to go:

https://mailchi.mp/creativecommons/were-turning-25-book-giveaway

And if you want to try your own hand at collaging – or making merch (or swag!) – help yourself to Devin's wondrous piece of poo and go to town.

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 Court throws out RIAA attempt to sue little girl https://web.archive.org/web/20060422232323/https://p2pnet.net/story/8603

#15yrsago Android secretly stores location data too — though less of it, and with less detail https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2011/04/android-phones-keep-location-cache-too-but-its-harder-to-access/

#15yrsago Portal turret Easter egg https://www.flickr.com/photos/57617475@N00/5638462322/

#15yrsago Michael Chabon’s introduction to The Phantom Tollbooth 50th anniversary edition https://web.archive.org/web/20110424055621/http://www.nybooks.com/blogs/nyrblog/2011/apr/21/michael-chabon-phantom-tollbooth-wonder-words/

#10yrsago UK spy agencies store sensitive data on millions of innocent people, with no safeguards from abuse https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2016/04/uk-secret-police-surveillance-bulk-personal-datasets/

#10yrsago Zombie company Atari wants exclusive right to make haunted house games https://www.techdirt.com/2016/04/21/ex-game-maker-atari-to-argue-to-us-pto-that-only-it-can-make-haunted-house-games/

#10yrsago Hackers take $81 million from Bangladesh’s central bank by pwning its $10 second-hand routers https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-36110421

#10yrsago Forget the one percent, it’s the 0.1% who run the show https://web.archive.org/web/20160416022112/https://www.alternet.org/economy/1-really-problem

#10yrsago The quest for the well-labeled inn https://memex.craphound.com/2016/04/22/the-quest-for-the-well-labeled-inn/

#5yrsago EFF sues Proctorio over copyfraud https://pluralistic.net/2021/04/22/ihor-kolomoisky/#copyfraud

#5yrsago Fighting FLoC is compatible with fighting monopoly https://pluralistic.net/2021/04/22/ihor-kolomoisky/#not-that-competition

#5yrsago Moxie hacks Cellebrite https://pluralistic.net/2021/04/22/ihor-kolomoisky/#petard

#5yrsago Banks made bank on covid overdraft charges https://pluralistic.net/2021/04/22/ihor-kolomoisky/#usurers

#5yrsago The awesome destructive power of a billionaire https://pluralistic.net/2021/04/22/ihor-kolomoisky/#force-multiplier

#1yrago More Everything Forever https://pluralistic.net/2025/04/22/vinges-bastards/#cyberpunk-is-a-warning-not-a-suggestion

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.

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

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

ISSN: 3066-764X

You Can’t Get What You Don’t Ask For, Right? [The Status Kuo]

In a couple hours, I will take the stage at the Human Rights Campaign (HRC) Equality in Action conference 2026, where I will introduce the next House member from Arizona’s 6th Congressional District, JoAnna Mendoza!

And drum roll, please! My readership has raised $36,592 from 818 contributions so far to JoAnna’s campaign! Woohoo!

I hope that in the next two hours, a few more of you will help put us over my personal goal of $40K. This is a priority red to blue key race, identified as such early by HRC, Latino Victory, and the DCCC. Winning in AZ-6 will help flip the House, and you can be a part of making it happen!

I want to get us to a lucky 888 contributors by 12:30pm today! So if you want to help take back our democracy, hit the button below and give a little today!

I’m in for JoAnna! Flip the House!

JoAnna’s opponent is a Trumper and NRA darling. So we’d not only be gaining an amazing leader and a Marine veteran, we’d be kicking out a MAGA sycophant. As I’ve said here before, our donation dollars have to work smarter, and that means focusing on the narrow band of House races that will actually flip control to the Dems. If you’re tired of seeing our country fall apart, as prices for everything rise and we wage yet another war, send a message TODAY. Read more about JoAnna at the donation link:

Yes! I want to do my part!

It’s not enough just to envision a better future. Hope is not a strategy. We have to take affirmative steps to help realize that future. Make yours a smart and strategic donation, right now, to win one of the swingiest districts in the country!

And thank you to EVERYONE who has given so far! Together we can make a real difference, starting with the midterms in November and the election of JoAnna Mendoza!

Okay—off to a full day of strategy, action and results! Back tomorrow morning with my Skeets and Giggles column to kick off your Saturday.

Jay

08:00 AM

Good News If You Have A Sony TV And Were Hoping It Would Become Less Useful For No Reason [Techdirt]

If you own one of the Sony Bravia lines of televisions (like I do) and were hoping that the expensive television would suddenly become slightly less functional for no good reason, I have some good news for you.

Sony just announced that the company is making adjustments that will reduce the usefulness and efficiency of watching over-the-air (OTA) broadcasts with an antenna (something many still do in order to “cut the cord,” but still watch local sports broadcasts). According to the Sony announcement, the TV’s internal guide for watching live OTA simply won’t work as well anymore:

“The changes primarily target the program guide functionality for over-the-air antenna TV channels received via the ATSC tuner. After the cutoff date, program information may fail to display on certain channels, limiting the guide’s usefulness for planning viewing schedules. Users will often see listings only for channels they have recently watched, rather than a comprehensive overview of available broadcasts. Additionally, channel logos that previously appeared in the guide will disappear, and any thumbnail images accompanying program descriptions will no longer load or show.”

Many of the TVs being impacted are several thousand-dollar televisions, including the 2025 BRAVIA 8 II (XR80M2) and BRAVIA 5 (XR50), and the 2024 BRAVIA 9 (XR90), BRAVIA 8 (XR80), and BRAVIA 7 (XR70).

Sony didn’t specify why it’s making several-thousand-dollar televisions slightly less useful, but as always it’s about money. Many companies are keen to direct consumers to their (or their own) ad-based streaming alternatives to live OTA broadcasts, which are easier to monitor and monetize through surveillance. As Ars Technica posits Sony is also just likely cutting costs:

“Sony’s plan to remove some TV guide and menu features may be aimed at reducing costs and burden associated with features that typically depend on backend data services. Things like channel logos and enhanced metadata often require licensing agreements and the use of third-party electronic program guide data providers and metadata aggregators.”

Again, some of these sets (especially of the larger screen sizes) can run upwards of $3000 to $4000. You don’t typically expect products that expensive to suddenly become less useful. Or perhaps you do, if you’ve watched repeatedly how you no longer actually own the products you buy, which can be routinely downgraded (or bricked entirely) with a firmware update out of the blue.

Kanji of the Day: 納 [Kanji of the Day]

納

✍10

小6

settlement, obtain, reap, pay, supply, store

ノウ　ナッ　ナ　ナン　トウ

おさ.める　-おさ.める　おさ.まる

納得   (なっとく)   —   consent
納豆   (なっとう)   —   natto (fermented soybeans)
収納   (しゅうのう)   —   storage
納め   (おさめ)   —   the end (of)
納付   (のうふ)   —   payment
奉納   (ほうのう)   —   dedication
納税   (のうぜい)   —   payment of taxes
滞納   (たいのう)   —   falling behind (with a payment)
納入   (のうにゅう)   —   payment (of taxes, fees, etc.)
納税者   (のうぜいしゃ)   —   taxpayer

Generated with kanjioftheday by Douglas Perkins.

Kanji of the Day: 塊 [Kanji of the Day]

塊

✍13

中学

clod, lump, chunk, clot, mass

カイ　ケ

かたまり　つちくれ

団塊世代   (だんかいせだい)   —   the babyboomers
団塊の世代   (だんかいのせだい)   —   baby boom generation (of 1947-1949)
金塊   (きんかい)   —   gold nugget
団塊   (だんかい)   —   mass
血の塊   (ちのかたまり)   —   clot of blood
氷塊   (ひょうかい)   —   lump of ice
一塊   (いっかい)   —   one lump
肉塊   (にくかい)   —   lump of meat
山塊   (さんかい)   —   mountain mass
岩塊   (がんかい)   —   mass of rock

Generated with kanjioftheday by Douglas Perkins.

OsmAnd 5.3 (iOS) [OsmAnd Blog]

OsmAnd 5.3 for iOS — Now Available!

Get ready to explore a new dimension. This update brings the highly anticipated 3D Buildings and Globe View to your iPhone, alongside a massive overhaul of the Trip Recording widgets. Whether you're navigating city skyscrapers or planning a transcontinental journey, version 5.3 offers more perspective and precision than ever before.

🔄 Update Now

OsmAnd 5.3

What's new​

Globe View​

Globe View allows you to display the map as a spherical Earth instead of a flat projection. This mode changes the geometry of the map surface and adapts map interaction to spherical navigation, providing a more realistic perspective for long-distance browsing.

Configure map → Topography → Globe View

OsmAnd 5.3

3D Buildings​

3D Buildings feature displays buildings as volumetric 3D models instead of flat shapes.

Configure map → Topography → 3D Buildings

OsmAnd 5.3

Speedometer Widget​

Speedometer widget now shows visual speeding alerts with color-coded tolerance and limit-exceed states, including animated transitions when crossing speed thresholds.

Speedometer

Map Buttons: Visibility & Appearance​

Map buttons can now be fully customized. You can control the visibility and adjust the appearance of both default and custom (Quick Action) buttons.

OsmAnd 5.3

Adjustable Position Icon Size​

You can now resize the My Location position icon independently from the app’s text size. Separate size settings are available for Resting and Navigation modes, allowing better visibility while driving. The icon size can be adjusted from 50% to 300%, with 100% set as default.

My location Appearance

New Trip Recording Widgets​

The Trip Recording plugin has been expanded with smarter widgets that provide deeper insights into your activity, especially for cycling and hiking in hilly terrain.

Multiple Display Modes​

Many Trip Recording widgets now support Multiple Display Modes. This allows you to toggle a single widget to show metrics for your overall trip or specifically for your Last Uphill or Last Downhill section. You can switch modes by tapping the widget or via the widget settings.

Max Speed Widget​

The Max Speed widget displays your peak speed. In its new modes, you can see exactly how fast you went during your most recent descent or climb, helping you analyze performance on specific segments of your track.

widgets

Average Slope Widget​

The Average Slope widget provides real-time data on the steepness of your current or last completed section. It’s an essential tool for gauging the difficulty of a climb or the intensity of a descent.

widgets

Moving Time Widget​

The Moving Time widget now tracks your active duration with higher granularity. By switching modes, you can see exactly how much time you spent on your last uphill grind versus your last downhill cruise.

widgets

Updates copying Waypoints​

Added option to copy waypoints between different Favorites folders or create new ones.

Waypoints

You can now quickly share a link to any Point of Interest (POI) or custom map location. When you select an object on the map, the Share action generates a universal osmand.net URL.

This link can be opened by other OsmAnd users to find the exact location on their devices, or viewed in a web browser.

Weather Quick Actions​

New quick actions make it easier to control weather layers directly from the map. Show/Hide – Weather layers works as a master toggle for all active weather layers. When turned off, it hides all currently enabled weather layers. When turned on again, it restores exactly the same set of layers that were active before. Show/Hide – Wind animation allows you to quickly enable or disable the wind animation layer independently.

CarPlay Enhancements​

This update brings a more stable and feature-rich experience to your vehicle’s display, addressing key community requests for map appearance and post-arrival actions.

New "You Have Arrived" Dialog​

When you reach your destination, CarPlay now displays a redesigned post-navigation screen. Instead of simply ending the trip, you are presented with several convenient actions:

  • Mark as parking position: Save your current location as a parking spot for easy return later.
  • Find Parking: Instantly search for nearby parking lots.
  • Recalculate route: Useful if you need to adjust your route at the last moment.
  • Finish navigation: Complete the trip and return to the main map.

Finish Navigation

Enhanced Map Controls​

  • Always Show Dark Map: You can now force the map to stay in Dark Mode regardless of your car's headlight status or the time of day. This is a highly requested feature for drivers who prefer high-contrast navigation at all times.
  • Smoother Location Icon: The "My Location" cursor now moves more fluidly across the screen, providing a more natural and precise representation of your vehicle's position.
  • Dashboard Stability: We've resolved an issue where the map could become unresponsive when viewed in the CarPlay Dashboard (multi-window) mode.

Improved OBD-II Connectivity​

For users who monitor their vehicle's health and performance in real-time, we have significantly improved the connectivity for paired OBD-II adapters.

This update focuses on the stability of the Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) link between your iOS device and the adapter. The connection is now more resilient to interruptions, ensuring a steady flow of data—such as engine RPM, speed, and fuel consumption—directly into your OsmAnd widgets and GPX logs.

  • Faster Reconnection: The app now reconnects more reliably when you return to your vehicle.
  • Data Accuracy: Improved handling of sensor data packets reduces "frozen" values in your dashboard widgets.

The Popular Places layer has been significantly updated to provide more control over how you discover points of interest. This feature helps you find the most notable locations in an area, now with improved data source management and visual previews.

Configure map → Show on map → Popular places (Wikipedia)

OsmAnd 5.3 OsmAnd 5.3

POI Source Selection​

You can now choose between Online and Offline sources for Popular Places.

  • Online: Fetches the most up-to-date popularity data from OsmAnd servers.
  • Offline: Uses data stored within your downloaded Wikipedia maps, allowing you to discover top sites even without an internet connection.

Image Previews on Map​

To make the map more interactive, you can now enable image previews. When this option is toggled on, small thumbnails from Wikipedia appear directly on the map for top-rated locations. This helps you visually identify landmarks and decide where to head next without needing to open the full POI description.

Unsupported Maps Management​

The Updates tab now detects unsupported and overlapping region maps. If a map has been deprecated and replaced by smaller regional maps, it appears under a new Unsupported maps section. You can review the list, remove outdated maps individually or use Delete all to clean them up at once (with confirmation). Large overlapping region maps are hidden to prevent duplication and confusion, helping keep your map data organized and up to date.

Other Improvements​

  • Redesigned Graph Axis Selection The "Analyze on map" graph now includes a redesigned axis selection menu. The new interface allows configuring both the X-axis and Y-axis in a single sheet and supports selecting up to two data types for the Y-axis. Additional data sources such as external sensors and vehicle metrics (OBD-II) are now available when present in the track data, making it easier to analyse different aspects of a recorded track.
  • Enhanced Search Result Details POI search results have been improved with a more consistent city display, optional thumbnails, and a refined layout to help you identify locations at a glance.
  • Improved Trail and Route Interaction We’ve refined how the map handles taps on trails and hiking/cycling routes. This update ensures that selecting a route directly from the map consistently opens the correct details and highlights the entire path, fixing previous issues where the selection would fail or become unresponsive. Route shields for specialized activities—including fitness, running, and canoe routes — are now fully interactive.
  • "Distance by Tap" Refinement Improved the "Distance by tap" tool to prevent the ruler from accidentally appearing or changing state while you are swiping or moving the map. The tool now correctly distinguishes between a deliberate tap to measure distance and general map navigation.
  • Widget Icon Visibility Added a new option to show or hide icon on widgets. This allows for a cleaner, more minimalist dashboard by displaying only data, which is especially useful for medium and large widget layouts.

Bug fixes​

If you have suggestions for improving the iOS version of the app, please get in touch with us. We appreciate and welcome your contribution to the further development of OsmAnd.

 Apple AppStore

06:00 AM

Fifth Circuit Continues Running The Table, Says Ten Commandments Law In Texas Is Constitutional [Techdirt]

In June 2025, the Fifth Circuit Appeals Court upheld what would seem to have been an extremely obvious conclusion reached by the federal court handling the case: yes, it definitely violates the Constitution to mandate the posting of a religious text in every classroom in Louisiana. This wasn’t about displaying an assortment of “foundational texts” as its defenders (disingenuously) claimed: It was about pushing their preferred religion on students by any means possible.

Last June, the Fifth Circuit exposed the hypocrisy of the mandate while upholding the lower court’s injunction blocking its enactment:

It is also unclear how H.B. 71 ensures that students in Louisiana public schools “understand and appreciate the foundational documents of [its] state and national government” when it makes displaying those “foundational” documents optional, and does not require that they also be printed in a large, easily readable font. La. R.S. § 17:2124(A)(9). When the Ten Commandments must be posted prominently and legibly, while the other “contextual” materials need not be visible at all, the disparity lays bare the pretext.

If only that had been the end of the story. Presumably, enough Fifth Circuit judges preferred to reach a different conclusion that the appellate court decided to take another look at it using its full slate of judges. Since this is the Fifth Circuit we’re talking about, you already know how that turned out.

This time, the majority pretended it was simply impossible to tell if this Louisiana law actually violated the Constitution. The only way to be sure was to let the state enact it first and allow the courts to deal with any rights violations after they’ve occurred. The injunction was lifted, with the majority claiming Supreme Court precedent (that hasn’t actually been overturned by the Supreme Court) is no longer valid when it comes to discussing possible Establishment Clause violations.

That same argument — that the three-prong test created by the Supreme Court in 1971’s Lemon v. Kurtzman, which dealt with another set of church/state separation issues. This is the test:

  • The “Purpose Prong”: The statute must have a secular legislative purpose.
  • The “Effect Prong”: The principal or primary effect of the statute must neither advance nor inhibit religion.
  • The “Entanglement Prong”: The statute must not result in an “excessive government entanglement” with religion.

While a handful of judges (you can guess which ones) have opined that the “Lemon test” is dead, having been “abrogated” by more recent decisions, the Supreme Court has never issued a ruling overturning it. In fact, elements of the test were still being applied more than 30 years later.

Nonetheless, the Fifth Circuit — as it did earlier this year during its en banc review of the Louisiana law — says Lemon is dead [PDF] and, therefore, pretty much any law requiring the posting of the Ten Commandments in classrooms doesn’t violate the Constitution.

We conclude the Texas law does not violate either the Establishment Clause or the Free Exercise Clause. Here is a summary of our reasons.

First, the Establishment Clause. Plaintiffs primarily claim we are bound by Stone v. Graham, 449 U.S. 39 (1980) (per curiam), which invalidated a similar Kentucky law decades ago. We disagree. Stone applied an analysis—the “Lemon test”—which confounded courts for decades. See Lemon v. Kurtzman, 403 U.S. 602 (1971). Mercifully, the Supreme Court jettisoned Lemon and its offspring some years ago. See Kennedy v. Bremerton Sch. Dist., 597 U.S. 507, 534 (2022) (recognizing the Court has “abandoned Lemon”). With Lemon extracted, there is nothing left of Stone.

After deciding Lemon (and Stone) no longer applies, the majority moves on to say even if it did, there would be no constitutional violation because:

No child is made to recite the Commandments, believe them, or affirm their divine origin…

While it is true that the law makes no demands of teachers or students to do anything more than be in the same room as a Ten Commandments poster that “must be visible” to all students from up to 16 feet away, it’s quite obvious that this law is crafted to sneak a bit of the state’s preferred religion (at least in terms of those writing, supporting, and defending this law) past the protections of the Constitution.

It’s obvious from the statements they made while pushing this bill through the legislature. And it’s just as obvious now that the law has been given a free pass by the Fifth Circuit Appeals Court.

Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, a Republican, called the ruling “a major victory for Texas and our moral values.”

“The Ten Commandments have had a profound impact on our nation, and it’s important that students learn from them every single day,” he said.

Pretty bold to use the royal “our” to mandate a specific set of moral values be posted prominently in taxpayer-funded public schools. It’s even bolder when it directly contradicts the desires of prominent members of this particular religious community — something that was pointed out by the dissenting judges in Fifth Circuit’s ruling on the Louisiana Ten Commandments law:

Indeed, every faith-based organization before us—on behalf of thousands of members—and every clergy and devout plaintiff agree that Louisiana must not pick and post specific scripture that the state commands will confront children in state classrooms. All religious voices submitted to us, barring one individual, oppose Louisiana’s attempt to select, inculcate, and enforce this version of gospel text in compulsory public education.

The people with power are pushing religion on kids against the wishes of the clergy and “devout plaintiffs.”

There’s a dissent attached to this ruling as well. This one tackles the Fifth Circuit majority’s decision to rely twice on its presumption that Lemon is dead law to hand Bible-thumping legislators wins in two states:

In Van Orden, despite applying a historical approach instead of Lemon, the plurality cited Stone as a “limit[] to the display of religious messages or symbols” and “an example” of the Court’s “vigilan[ce] in monitoring compliance with the Establishment Clause in . . . schools.” “The placement of the Ten Commandments monument on the Texas State Capitol grounds,” Van Orden explained, is “a far more passive use of those texts than was the case in Stone.” […] This is because “[t]he display [was] not on the grounds of a public school, where, given the impressionability of the young, government must exercise particular care in separating church and state.” Id. at 703 (Breyer, J., concurring in the judgment) (citing Lee v. Weisman, 505 U.S. 577, 592 (1992); Stone, 449 U.S. 39). And, unlike in Van Orden, “the text” of the Ten Commandments in Stone “confronted elementary school students every day.”

Van Orden recognized Stone’s viability, notwithstanding Lemon, given the special “concerns that arise in the context of public elementary and secondary schools.”

The Fifth Circuit majority — like the defendants whose unconstitutional law it has allowed to be enacted — cherry picks from post-Lemon Supreme Court jurisprudence to arrive at the conclusion it wants, rather than one the Constitution (and actual Supreme Court precedent) dictates. With two of the three states in the circuit already have been given a green light to mix church and state, it’s up to Mississippi to get this bill signed by the governor so the Fifth can complete its three-state sweep of the Establishment Clause.

05:00 AM

04:00 AM

Kash Patel Filed a Defamation Case Monday. His Other Defamation Case Got Dismissed Tuesday. [Techdirt]

To have one defamation case about public allegations of your drinking as FBI Director would be unfortunate. To have a second dismissed the very next day would be, well, perhaps a sign that something has gone wrong. Earlier this week we wrote about Kash Patel’s ridiculously weak defamation case against The Atlantic over its big, deeply sourced article with multiple sources claiming that there have been problems associated with Patel’s drinking.

His complaint was filed on Monday. In it, his lawyers mention that they already have an existing defamation lawsuit against MSNBC’s Frank Figliuzzi (a former FBI assistant director for counterintelligence). This is part of Patel’s argument for why the Atlantic should have known the reporting was false. From the Monday complaint:

The FBI further warned Defendants that these allegations echoed a similar fabrication previously aired by MSNBC’s Frank Figliuzzi on Morning Joe—anonymously sourced reporting that was later retracted by MSNBC and that is the subject of pending defamation litigation—yet Defendants published it anyway.

That was Monday. On Tuesday, that defamation lawsuit was dismissed. Judge George C. Hanks Jr. made quick work of it, noting that Figliuzzi’s statement was clearly rhetorical hyperbole — a form of opinion that cannot be defamatory.

The case was entirely about this exchange on MSNBC:

Host: “So, Frank, let’s turn to FBI Director Kash Patel, who has sort of taken a surprisingly backseat role—at least to this point, in the first 102 or 103 days, wherever we are right now. What do you make of that, that he’s just been a little less visible than I think a lot of people and Trump observers expected him to be?”

Figliuzzi: “Yeah, well, reportedly, he’s been visible at nightclubs far more than he has been on the seventh floor of the Hoover building. And there are reports that daily briefings to him have been changed from every day to maybe twice weekly. So this is both a blessing and a curse, because if he’s really trying to run things without any experience level, things could be bad. If he’s not plugged in, things could be bad, but he’s allowing agents to run things. So we don’t know where this is going.”

The court is not at all impressed by this lawsuit.

The Court finds that Figliuzzi’s statement, when taken in context, cannot have been perceived by a person of ordinary intelligence as stating actual facts about Patel. As alleged, Figliuzzi’s statement about Patel—again, made in response to a question about Patel’s decreased visibility as Director of the FBI—was that “he’s been visible at nightclubs far more than he has been on the seventh floor of the Hoover building.”…. A person of reasonable intelligence and learning would not have taken his statement literally: that Dir. Patel has actually spent more hours physically in a nightclub than he has spent physically in his office building. By saying that Patel spent “far more” time at nightclubs than his office, Figliuzzi delivered his answer “in an exaggerated, provocative and amusing way,” employing rhetorical hyperbole. …

The Court finds that Figliuzzi’s statement is rhetorical hyperbole that cannot constitute defamation. Accordingly, Dir. Patel has failed to state a claim against Figliuzzi, and his lawsuit must be dismissed.

If a person of reasonable intelligence and learning would not have taken this statement literally, what does that say about Patel and his lawyers?

Either way, that’s a point for The Atlantic’s legal team, which can now respond to Patel’s claim that the Figliuzzi suit was evidence of falsity with: “nope, not anymore.”

Separately, part of the case involved whether or not Figliuzzi could get attorney’s fees from Patel for filing a vexatious SLAPP suit. There was a dispute over which state’s anti-SLAPP law should apply — Texas, Nevada, or New York each had some claim — and the court (correctly, in my opinion) landed on Texas, since that’s where Figliuzzi resides. Speakers have a reasonable expectation that their home state’s anti-SLAPP law will shield them.

Unfortunately, though, because the Fifth Circuit a while back decided that you can’t use Texas’ anti-SLAPP law in federal court, it’s all for nothing, and he can’t get Patel to pay for his legal fees. This is yet another reminder of why we need a federal anti-SLAPP law — not just to protect free speech more broadly, but to protect SLAPP victims in federal courts in circuits where state anti-SLAPP statutes can’t reach.

The Court finds that Texas has the most significant relationship. Further, applying either Nevada’s or New York’s anti-SLAPP statute to a Texas Defendant would “impede on Texas’s interest in protecting its citizens and fulfilling the statute’s purpose.”…

The Fifth Circuit has found that, because Texas’s anti-SLAPP statute’s “burdenshifting framework imposes additional requirements beyond those found in Rules 12 and 56 and answers the same question as those rules, the state law cannot apply in federal court.” … Thus, while Figliuzzi prevails on the present motion to dismiss, the Court may not award him court costs and attorney’s fees under Texas’s anti-SLAPP law.

Still, even without the fee shifting, this is a good result, and underscores how these exceptionally weak defamation suits are little more than attacks on the press for reporting what multiple sources describe as problematic behavior from the FBI director.

Daily Deal: Hypergear 3-in-1 Wireless Charging Dock [Techdirt]

The Hypergear 3-in-1 Wireless Charging Dock is meticulously engineered to reduce the cable clutter and streamline your daily routine. Featuring 2 dedicated wireless charging surfaces, you can power up your phone and AirPods easily. In addition, you can charge your Apple Watch with the built-in charger mount. Stylish and compact, the dock is perfect for your tabletop, desk, or nightstand and will effortlessly charge your everyday essentials in one convenient place. It’s on sale for $33.

Note: The Techdirt Deals Store is powered and curated by StackCommerce. A portion of all sales from Techdirt Deals helps support Techdirt. The products featured do not reflect endorsements by our editorial team.

03:00 AM

The Federalist Is Super Mad Virginia Will No Longer Subsidize Racists [Techdirt]

The state of Virginia is trying to break with its racist past. It’s not pretending it doesn’t exist. But, better late than never, it’s trying to undo some of the damage still being perpetrated by Virginians and their legislators. Governor Abigail Spanberger signed a bill into law that stripped confederate-friendly organizations of their tax exempt status. (She also signed a bill that ended the production of specialty license plates featuring Robert E. Lee.)

Now, there’s a legitimate argument to be made against this legislation. (And a more nuanced argument to made in favor of it.) And we’ll get to all of that in a moment.

But not yet. That’s why you’re getting the headline I gave you, because I’m not the one making a nuanced argument for or against this bill. And that’s why The Federalist is getting all the bile I can fit into a handful of words because it for goddamn sure isn’t making any valid arguments in support of letting historically racist organizations continue to operate as tax exempt entities.

Hayden Daniel (scope the rest of his output to confirm your suspicions about this Federalist contributor) of The Federalist seems to think that separating confederacy supporters from state tax exemptions is one of the more noxious violation of rights he’s ever had the opportunity to witness.

Spanberger’s signature represents, as The New York Times put it, part of “a yearslong Democrat-led push to shake off the state’s legacy as the capital of the 11 Southern, slaveholding states that seceded from the country in the 1860s.”

And indeed it has been a years-long campaign by the left to erase Virginia’s, and America’s, history. The era that began with the inauguration of President Barack Obama in 2009 and reached its fever pitch during the fiery George Floyd riots of summer 2020 saw the slow but sure disappearance of Confederate history from the public sphere. 

“Erase history.” What a convenient turn of phrase. Making entities like the United Daughters of the Confederacy (whose splash page pic looks about as inclusive as a “Gone With The Wind” cast photo) and the Sons of the Confederacy continue to do the apparently essential work of reminding people that there are still plenty of racists in Virginia without a state-sanctioned leg up is hardly “erasing history.” Everyone will remember the Civil War and the racists who lost the war they started because they were hooked on free, imported labor.

And try as you might, you’re not going to find Daniel arguing against the deliberate erasure of history being perpetrated by the Trump administration, which is steadily stripping parks and national monuments of anything that might portray white Americans as anything but fault-free heroes and saviors. (In fact, a perfunctory search immediately surfaces the opposite: The Federalist’s active participation in this administration’s bigoted erasure of US history.)

That’s the way it always goes with these people. The only history they think needs to be preserved is the stuff when white males were legally considered to be the owners or overseers of every other race and sex. These are people who yearn for simpler times when women and minorities couldn’t vote and people were willing to die to keep white Christian nationalists in power.

Moving on from this complaint about (non)erasure of Hayden Daniel’s favorites parts of US history, he then decides to pretend that white people who love the confederacy have been terrorized by people who don’t.

During a BLM riot in Richmond, Virginia, in May 2020, extremist agitators attacked the headquarters of the United Daughters of the Confederacy with “incendiary devices.” The building, deeded to the organization by the state in 1950, was filled with countless Civil War-era documents and artifacts. The resulting fire and destruction caused $4.1 million in damage to the building and its contents, according to a lawsuit filed by the UDC. The wanton vandalism that night also extended to the multiple Confederate monuments on Monument Avenue, including the famous equestrian statue of Robert E. Lee that was removed in 2021.

Wow, man. That’s rough. It’s almost as though it outweighs the decades of torture and slavery that were followed by more decades of terrorism perpetrated against Blacks by people who just couldn’t accept that non-white humans were actual human beings. A statute goes down and a pro-confederacy HQ gets torched and this nation is nowhere near breaking even in terms of what this state’s “legacy” is when it comes to slavery and the treatment of those who were only allowed their freedom after enough Virginians had died trying to prevent their emancipation.

Summing things up, Daniel veers into the hyperbolic:

[T]his law signed by Spanberger constitutes a new escalation. It is no longer about pieces of paper that need to censored or statues of bronze that need to be ripped down; it is about people who need to silenced and punished for daring to believe that America, and the South in particular, has its own unique identity independent of the left’s racialist and globalist dogma.

Spanberger is sending an unequivocal message — it’s open season on those who would honor American history and the heritage of their ancestors. And the full force of the state will be used to quash them.

I have no idea why you would want to “honor” that particular sliver of American history or celebrate the “heritage” left to you by racist slaveholders and the descendants that love them. You’re not using words like “history” and “heritage” because you don’t want Americans to ever forget the horrors we inflicted on others during our history. You’re just an awful person who wants similarly awful people to continue to be awful without fear of consequence.

A people without a history, or who are ashamed of their history, are easily manipulated by the whims and ambitions of the dystopian, tyrannical left. 

Tell that to Trump, you mook. You aren’t actually ashamed of this history. You — and the people running the party you love — are secretly proud of their racist past and bigoted present. That doesn’t make you immune from manipulation. It just means the people who subject you to their whims and ambitions not only won’t be members of an opposing political party, but they won’t be any smarter than you think you are.

Now… having said all that, here’s the argument against this law, which does make sense:

The new law strips property tax exemptions from the pro-Confederate groups, while leaving them in place for all the others. That’s pretty obvious discrimination based on political ideology. The Virginia state legislature could end this tax exemption for all the groups in question, or reduce it in various ways. It could eliminate some groups but not others based on nonideological criteria. But it cannot do so based purely on the views of the groups in question.

Such viewpoint discrimination with respect to tax exemptions and government benefits is a potentially very dangerous tool that government can use to penalize opposition (even as it rewards its supporters). If courts were to uphold the Virgina law against First Amendment challenges, it would set a dangerous precedent that state and federal officials of various political stripes could exploit to target their opponents.

That’s the argument Hayden or anyone else from the Federalist could have made. That would have clearly demonstrated the inherent danger of giving the government the legislated power to engage in viewpoint discrimination. But no one at the Federalist is apparently capable of coming up with cogent, nuanced arguments, not when the livelihood of people who resolutely celebrate the racist losers of America’s only Civil War (to date!) is on the line.

Beyond that, there’s the question of whether or not tax exempt status is government speech, which means viewpoint discrimination may actually be lawful if the government prefers not to throw tacit support to groups it doesn’t care for. That doesn’t make it much better than openly violating the First Amendment, but it does give it something to work with if this law is challenged in court.

For now, the sons and daughters of the confederacy will have to try to make do without their tax exempt status. On the hardship continuum that involves the Confederacy, this doesn’t even amount to a rounding error.

02:00 AM

12:00 AM

Spanish Film Archivist Faces Prison and €870,000 Fine Over ‘Non-Commercial’ Movie Site [TorrentFreak]

zoowomanLaunched in 2015, Zoowoman was a popular Spanish non-commercial film repository.

The site did not store any movies, but it hosted links to approximately 11,000 titles before it was shut down.

The site was purportedly operated by a group of people, including film enthusiast “El Feo,” who is also the creator of La Filmoteca Maldita, a YouTube channel with over 400,000 subscribers dedicated to film analysis and criticism.

El Feo told TorrentFreak that the site focused specifically on films that were out of circulation commercially, discontinued, or otherwise difficult to access through normal channels. As such, the project was recognized for its uniqueness and reportedly used as a teaching resource by several universities across Spain and Latin America.

La Filmoteca Maldita on X (translated)

tweet

However, despite their educational value, the films were not necessarily in the public domain, and many were protected by active copyrights. As a result, Zoowoman eventually attracted attention from rightsholders. And while the site specifically asked “creativity vampires” to leave it alone, that didn’t last.

Zoowoman Raid and Prosecution

In 2021, El Feo’s home was raided, with the authorities taking over the Zoowoman WordPress admin account using credentials recovered from his phone. The police locked the admin out of the site and blocked public access to the archive while leaving the hosting account untouched.

The enforcement action eventually led to a lawsuit backed by EGEDA, the Spanish audiovisual rights management headed by Enrique Cerezo, who is a film producer and president of the football club Atlético de Madrid. Through court, EGEDA requested two and a half years in prison and damages of €870,000.

The action against Zoowoman coincided with the launch of FlixOlé, a subscription streaming platform for classic Spanish cinema also backed by Cerezo, which served an overlapping audience.

Zoowoman in 2020 (translated)

zoowoman

After several years, the Zoowoman case went to trial earlier this month, where the prosecution presented evidence that the defendant generated approximately €12,000 in streaming income from YouTube, Patreon, and PayPal over four years. While this revenue wasn’t generated from the Zoowoman website, the prosecution argued that the defendant profited from the overall ecosystem.

The prosecution also argued that the film archive facilitated widespread copyright infringement, which also affected EGEDA as a collective rights management outfit.

“El Feo” Fights Back

Speaking with TorrentFreak, El Feo noted that the €12,000 in revenue cited by the prosecution is completely unrelated to the defunct film archive. In fact, the defense argued that he had stepped back from the project in late 2019, roughly two years before his arrest, because his YouTube work had become too demanding.

“El Feo”

El Feo

Nonetheless, the police investigation highlighted him as the sole and main defendant. According to El Feo, the other WordPress admins were reclassified as regular users by the investigators, effectively reducing the case to a single defendant.

“They came in, converted the rest of the admins into users, to focus the investigation on me. Better to have one defendant than 15,” El Feo told us (translated from Spanish), while stressing that he is glad that the other people who were involved in Zoowoman did not get in trouble.

Critically, El Feo also noted that the police failed to preserve the site’s server logs. As a result, there was no record of which administrators were accessing the site or from which IP addresses. According to El Feo, this means that he wasn’t able to mount a proper defense.

El Feo released a video on his case on the La filmoteca maldita YouTube channel earlier this month, after the trial was completed. At the time of writing, however, the verdict has yet to be released.

The verdict is expected to be released soon. The outcome is likely to be watched closely by digital preservation communities across Spain and Latin America, where Zoowoman built a dedicated following among cinephiles and academics.

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

Friday 2026-04-24

11:00 PM

Warner Bros CEO David Zaslav’s $550 Million Golden Parachute Sees ‘Symbolic’ Investor Rebuke [Techdirt]

We’ve noted how Warner Brothers CEO David Zaslav is poised to receive a $550 million golden parachute from the sale of Warner Brothers to Paramount, despite the fact that his tenure has been broadly viewed as disastrous at best.

Zaslav oversaw years of dysfunction during the last wave of pointless Warner Brothers mergers, which included tens of thousands of brutal layoffs, consistent creative infighting, endlessly higher prices, cancelled programming, and a steady wave of overall dysfunction. And that’s before we even get to this latest merger with Paramount, which is expected to see more layoffs and chaos than ever.

Warner Brothers investors this week voted to finalize the merger between Paramount and Warner Brothers anyway. Though a majority of investors also voted against giving Zaslav his comically outsized compensation package. That said, the vote is considered largely “symbolic,” and isn’t likely to stop Zaslav from walking away with a massive chunk of money for being incompetent:

“It’s a purely symbolic rebuke: The shareholder advisory vote is non-binding, meaning the Warner Bros. Discovery board can go ahead with the payouts as planned anyway. But it shows WBD shareholders aren’t happy by the generous payments to the company’s outgoing executive team and comes after shareholders last year also voted against the WBD executive compensation packages.”

It’s nice that investors took the time to realize these outsized compensation packages not only harm the company’s bottom line, but they reward incompetent leadership. But at the same time they approved a merger that, largely thanks to the whopping $111 billion in debt, is inevitably going to result in yet more layoffs, price hikes, customer defections, and overall chaos.

Investors turn a blind eye because they like the temporary stock bumps and tax breaks generated from pointless consolidation, but you’d think that the fact that every single Warner Brothers mega-transaction to date has been a giant disaster would be more foreword in their thinking.

Ever since the original AOL Time Warner merger back in 2001, pointless consolidation has promised no limit of innovative “synergies,” but instead resulted in more than 50,000 layoffs, shittier product, higher prices, the death of a ton of well-loved brands and IPs, decades of infighting, a decline in quality journalism at places like CNN (and now CBS), and a bottomless well of shit.

It’s the extraction class abusing the rules of the game to pretend to be good at business. They’re not actually building anything useful, nor are they remotely interested in the longevity of the company, its customers, the talent that powers it, or the people who work there. They’re playing with funny numbers to try and perpetually generate the illusion of impossible permanent growth at incredible scale, then cashing out when the check finally comes due for their complicated shell games.

08:00 PM

Courage vs. excuses [Seth Godin's Blog on marketing, tribes and respect]

There are more available excuses now than ever before. In just two letters, “AI” is a simple, brand-new, all-purpose excuse for laying people off, averaging things down, closing things up and generally finding an easier/quicker path.

Courage, on the other hand, is the commitment to take risks and work hard to make something better than most people think it needs to be.

Example:

Open Source software (the real kind, not the window-dressing some big companies use) takes courage. To share your code, to invite others to participate, to have to cycle faster and hide less–it doesn’t always make traditional investors happy, and it can be a hassle. But time has shown us, again and again, it leads to resilience, to better performance and to a tighter connection between users and providers.

The conversation behind most of the excuses all around us is built on a simple choice: what’s the purpose of our work? Why are we showing up, putting in the cycles and making promises to the world? The short-term path to quick returns is usually excusable, and then we can get back to what we were doing, even if we’re hesitant to label it. “We don’t do this because it’s important, we do it because we’re getting paid right now to do it and because it’s easier.”

On the other hand, if your purpose is bigger, longer-term or more important than the easy path to quick profit, labeling it is important.

Tom Peters called it Excellence. It’s valuable because it’s scarce, and it’s scarce because there are plenty of available excuses. Excellence is an option, and excellence is a choice.

It’s much easier to find courage if you know why you’re looking for it.

      

04:00 PM

Record Labels Drop Piracy Lawsuits Against Altice and Verizon in Wake of Cox Ruling [TorrentFreak]

pirate-flagWhen the Supreme Court ruled in favor of Cox Communications last month, it was immediately clear that the decision would also reach other ISP piracy cases.

Many of the same record labels that fought Cox, also have active cases against other ISPs. This includes high-profile cases against Verizon and Altice.

These cases were already paused last year, awaiting the Supreme Court decision. This week, it became clear that both sides have agreed to dismiss the cases. In both cases, the parties filed joint stipulations voluntarily dismissing the lawsuits.

According to the legal paperwork, the dismissals are with prejudice, meaning the claims cannot be refiled. In addition, all parties will pay their own costs and expenses.

“[All parties] hereby jointly stipulate to dismissal of all claims in this matter with prejudice under Fed. R. Civ. P. Rule 41(a)(1)(A)(ii), with each side bearing its own costs, expenses, and attorneys’ fees,” the filings read.

Billions of Dollars at Stake

The Verizon case, filed in July 2024, is particularly noteworthy as the record labels requested more than $2.6 billion in damages in that case alone.

In that lawsuit, UMG, Warner Music, Sony Music, and ABKCO, accused Verizon of burying its head in the sand by ignoring hundreds of thousands of copyright infringement notices. This includes more than 500 subscribers for whom the ISP received more than 100 notices each.

Joint stipulation

joint stipulation

The Altice lawsuit was filed in December 2023 by Warner Records, Sony Music Entertainment, and dozens of affiliated labels and publishers. The complaint also accused the ISP of not doing enough to stop piracy, with potential damages exceeding $1.6 billion.

In both cases, the music companies argued that the ISPs’ knowledge of the infringing activity, combined with their failure to act, was sufficient to be held liable for contributory copyright infringement. However, the new Supreme Court ruling narrowed this standard.

In Cox, the Supreme Court stated that contributory liability requires proof that the provider intended its service to be used for infringement. That intent can only be shown in one of two ways. Either the provider actively induced infringement, or the service is one that is tailored to piracy without substantial non-infringing uses.

The Cox Fallout Spreads

The Altice and Verizon dismissals are the most concrete sign yet that the labels see the post-Cox landscape as unfavorable terrain for this type of lawsuit. They are not the only fallout, however.

Earlier this month, the Supreme Court also vacated the Fifth Circuit’s $46.7 million verdict against Grande Communications, sending the case back for reconsideration in light of Cox.

Meanwhile, Elon Musk’s X Corp. cited the Cox decision within days of its release in its bid to dismiss the music publishers’ “weaponized DMCA” lawsuit.

Interestingly, however, not all ISP lawsuits appear to be ready for dismissal yet. The record labels still have an active case against Internet provider RCN in New Jersey. In that case, RCN recently informed the court of the impact of the Cox ruling, but there is no mention of a potential dismissal in that docket yet.

—

A copy of the Joint Stipulation of Dismissal filed by the labels and Altice in Texas federal court is available here (pdf). The joint stipulation filed by the labels and Verizon in New York federal court is available here (pdf).

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

01:00 PM

RFK Jr. Wipes His Hands Of This Whole Measles Outbreak Thing [Techdirt]

In the year 2,000 (cue the Conan O’Brien music), America had so successfully defeated measles as a disease that we were awarded elimination status for the disease. Then Trump was elected to a second term, for reasons I still can’t fully explain, after which RFK Jr. somehow was confirmed as the Secretary of HHS. Almost simultaneously, a massive measles outbreak began in Texas, spreading to most of the other states in the union, with particularly bad outbreaks in Arizona, Utah, and North Carolina. The reason for the outbreak is clear in the CDC statistics: falling vaccination rates for the MMR vaccine allowed the disease to gain a foothold and spread. Meanwhile, Kennedy offered up confused and confusing messaging to the public as to what do about it, oscillating between muted calls for vaccinations, musing that everyone should just get measles for natural immunity, and declaring out loud that measles victims were at fault for not being healthy enough.

Because of his inept leadership on the matter, measles in 2026 is going to be even worse than 2025. We’re on pace to blow past last year’s numbers and, again, it’s because not enough people are getting vaccinated.

Kennedy is, of course, the living avatar of the anti-vaxxer movement. He didn’t create it, but he has worked very hard to propel it into popularity and, now, into government policy. He has everything to do with the current outbreak. But he recently faced Congress and said with a straight face that it has nothing to do with him. Instead, it was those dirty immigrants that are to blame.

But despite Kennedy being the most vocal source of vaccine misinformation, the secretary tried to blame the outbreaks entirely on immigrants who come to the U.S. from countries where measles is not eliminated — framing the issue as a global epidemic rather than a national public health crisis.

“It has nothing to do with me,” he told lawmakers. “If you’re worried about polio and tuberculosis, you should look at the immigration policies in this country. ’Cause the place where it’s occurring are the place[s] where the immigrants are going, because they’re not vaccinated.”

So, a couple of things to say here, both equally important. The scapegoating of immigrants over disease outbreaks is an American tradition going back centuries. It’s stupid, it’s wrong, and it’s plainly racist. I have no doubt that diseases can be spread through foreign visitors, as they can be by domestic travelers as well. But the desire to blame immigrants for whatever the outbreak du jour happens to be is so reliable and predictable that it’s silly. And if you don’t believe that this happens as a result of bigotry, well, you’re just plain wrong.

The other item on which to take note is the complete failure of leadership exhibited by Kennedy. In his remarks, Kennedy went into full CYA mode. He said he’s not anti-vaxx, but he absolutely is. He said the measles outbreak isn’t his responsibility, but he’s the fucking Secretary of Health and Human Services, and it absolutely is. He said dropping vaccination rates are due solely to how the American government responded to COVID-19, but that isn’t remotely the full story, given that vaccination rates experienced declines long before 2020, after which they fell sharply.

And the question that remains for Kennedy is a simple one: what are you doing about all of this? What do you even plan to do about all of this? The job doesn’t end by saying it’s immigrants at fault and then we move on. The disease still has to be combated and, right now, nobody is fighting the fight at the federal level. Instead, we’re talking about curtailing vaccine schedule guidance even further, or eliminating childhood vaccines altogether. Even if Kennedy sincerely wants to help in all of this, his messaging is so muddled and misguided that it isn’t getting through to the public.

Rep. Debbie Dingell (D-Mich.) expressed concern to Kennedy, a longtime anti-vaxxer, over the rising number of infectious disease cases such as measles and polio.

“Every patient, every child with measles should be treated with compassion. But I had seven cases just in the last couple of weeks in my county. The contagious spots have been grocery stores and colleges, you can’t stop it,” Dingell said of measles, the highly contagious disease that U.S. officials announced they eliminated in 2000.

“I’ve met with the family of one of them, and I said, ‘Why didn’t you get immunized?’” she continued. “And they said, ‘We’re listening to our government. Our government tells us not to.’”

Even if you wanted to argue that those people are wrong, they’re not making up lies when they say this. The message they’re getting from HHS is to not vaccinate. This is why public health policy needs to be very clear and in a language the average person can understand. These are life and death situations we’re talking about.

Kennedy’s comments read like an abdication of his responsibility. I can’t think of another way to describe his hand-washing of our current measles fiasco. And that’s one of many reasons he has to go.

09:00 AM

Ctrl-Alt-Speech: Celebrating 100 Episodes & Launching Our Patreon [Techdirt]

Ctrl-Alt-Speech is a weekly podcast about the latest news in online speech, from Mike Masnick and Everything in Moderation‘s Ben Whitelaw.

Subscribe now on Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Spotify, Pocket Casts, YouTube, or your podcast app of choice — or go straight to the RSS feed.

In this special episode, Mike and Ben reflect on 100 episodes of the podcast, followed by an important announcement: we’re launching a Patreon and making some changes to Ctrl-Alt-Speech!

Starting on May 28th, Patreon members will get early access to extended weekly episodes with in-depth coverage of an extra major story. The free episodes will continue here on this feed, just slightly shorter and released one day later. 

You can become a member now at one of two levels: Supporters get early access to the extended episodes, and for a limited time Founders get that plus the opportunity to send us news stories that you think we should cover each week. After the new episodes begin at the end of May, the Founder tier will become the Insider tier with all the same benefits at a slightly higher price, so act now if you don’t want to miss out (you’ll also get bragging rights as a founding member!)

We’re immensely grateful to the incredible audience we’ve found over these past 100 episodes, and this is our way of helping make the podcast sustainable for the next 100!

James Cameron Is A Weird Hypocrite When It Comes To Giant Hollywood Mergers [Techdirt]

Back when Netflix was proposing a takeover of Warner Brothers, you might recall that director James Cameron had no shortage of critical things to say.  

Cameron went so far as to write a heavily publicized letter to Senator Mike Lee, lamenting the Netflix Warner Brothers merger (and only the Netflix merger) as “disastrous to the motion picture business.” In the letter, Cameron calls himself a “humble movie farmer,” and repeatedly insisted Netflix would shorten the 45-day theater-to-streaming window (Netflix repeatedly stated the opposite).

Here’s the weird thing: Cameron had absolutely no criticism to offer of the alternative (and now reality) $108 billion Ellison family merger of Paramount and Warner Brothers, despite the deal being exponentially worse across every possible metric.

As we’ve noted previously, the massive debt load, and the numerous structural parallels between the studios, means the Paramount/Warner Brothers merger will result in significantly more layoffs than the Netflix deal would have seen. And that’s before you get to the dodgy Saudi and Chinese money backing the bid, or the Ellson family’s ties gushing enthusiasm for corrupt authoritarianism.

Cameron at first was dead quiet as the Netflix deal faded and the Paramount merger came into view. But now he’s increasingly becoming gushingly supportive of the transaction (quite the contrast to the 3,700+ Hollywood insiders coming out against the deal):

“I know David quite well. And I know that he really cares about movies. And he’s a natural born storyteller and thinks like almost an old school entrepreneurial producer that was a storyteller that loves storytelling and loved putting on spectacular shows,” Cameron said. “He’s the right man for the job to run a major studio, and now it looks like he’s going to have two of them, you know, swept under his leadership, which doesn’t bother me at all.”

So basically Cameron likes the deal, and is willing to overlook the massive layoffs looming just over the horizon due to unprecedented consolidation, because he personally likes the Ellison family. And the Ellison family promised him that they won’t touch the 45 day delay between theatrical runs and home release.

The problem (for James and everyone else) is that pre-merger promises are utterly meaningless. Every single time Warner Brothers has merged (now four times over 20 years) it’s been an abject disaster, preceded by all sorts of empty promises about amazing new synergies. The AT&T merger alone resulted in 50,000 layoffs, and there are indications that AT&T executives could be viewed as immeasurably competent compared to what we’re seeing out of Ellison-owned Paramount and CBS News.

It’s “funny” because in Cameron’s letter to Lee, he offers this observation about Netflix:

“What administrative body will hold them to task if they slowly sunset their so-called commitment to theatrical releases?”

But the exact same applies to the Ellison family promises. It’s potentially worse given the Ellisons’ close ties to the administration, which will not only mean rubber-stamped federal merger approval, but less accountability later down the line (in a country where Trump has already guaranteed that corporate regulators lack the ability to do this or any other job).

It seems likely that the Ellisons promised other things to Cameron. Time will tell.

But Paramount’s debt from the CBS, MMA, and now Warner Brothers deals is so historically massive, it’s simply inevitable that this results in all manner of layoffs and corner cutting to service it. Denying that this is coming is like trying to debate physics, or have a fist fight with a river. This sort of consolidation is uniformly harmful to labor, consumers, and creatives. We literally just went through all of this.

David Ellison is telling anybody who’ll listen that this merger will be different and will magically result in a bigger, bolder Hollywood, but there’s simply no historical evidence to believe a single word he’s saying. Every Warner Brothers merger to date has been pointless and awful, but this one has the potential to be historically so.

08:00 AM

How to Use the Order Import Tool for Easy Bulk Ordering [The Business of Printing Books]

📘
TL;DR
Ordering and delivering books in bulk is time-consuming and expensive. Many times, a large order must be parsed out so books can be delivered to many addresses; a time-consuming and expensive practice. So we fixed that. 
In this post, I’ll explain:
- How to set up your project on Lulu for large volume ordering
- Importing your customer’s order information
- Finalizing your order
How to Use the Order Import Tool for Easy Bulk Ordering

Successful creators have an audience. Period. That audience, of course, comes from consistently offering great products, content, or services. Brand trust and followers don’t just happen. It’s a long, hard road to build that audience. 

Then comes monetization. It’s great to have a thousand email subscribers or LinkedIn followers, but unless you can convince at least some of them to buy something from you, they’re just idle observers. 

One of the key innovations for individual creators and small businesses needing to monetize their audience is crowdfunding models. We’ve all heard of Kickstarter. Crowdfunding offers a relatively safe way to gauge interest and secure funds before you actually produce your products.

Understanding how valuable crowdfunding can be—both for new creators and established businesses launching a new product—we built a tool that helps enable fulfilling book orders en masse. 


Lulu’s Order Import Tool

The Order Import tool is Lulu’s solution for creators and authors using crowdfunding, pre-sales, and direct bulk sales. It lets you upload a list of orders for various buyers and fulfill all of them at once, in one transaction. This is a huge time saver if you need to send 50 or 100 orders out and don’t want to enter each one individually. 

But I’m not here to sell you on why the Order Import tool is so useful. Instead, I want to break down the nuts and bolts of actually using the thing. 

Order Import Tool | Lulu
Place bulk import orders for your book using Lulu’s free Order Import tool. Have bulk orders printed-on-demand and drop shipped.
How to Use the Order Import Tool for Easy Bulk OrderingLulu
How to Use the Order Import Tool for Easy Bulk Ordering

Steps to Using the Order Import Tool

First things first, we’ve got a great in-depth article in our Knowledge Base that breaks down the entire process. If you get stuck while creating your order, this is the resource I recommend.

We’ve also got this short video that runs through the process. 

Okay, here’s my breakdown, starting from the very beginning.

#1 Your Lulu Account & Project

If you’re new to Lulu, the first step is always to create a free account and sign in. Then you’ll need to create a book. Before you jump into importing your orders, you have to create and publish all the books you need to ship.

This is important, as the Order Import tool only allows you to select from published projects in your account. Note that you can publish a book using Lulu and keep it private to your account. It won’t be listed on our bookstore or through retailers, but you can still include a private access book in your order import. 

Lulu’s Publishing Steps in 1 Minute

Next, you’ll navigate to the Order Import tool page, found under My Stores. Now you’re ready to download and complete the orders spreadsheet.

How to Use the Order Import Tool for Easy Bulk Ordering

#2 Creating an Order Spreadsheet

This is the trickiest part for most. Download the template. Here’s a sample spreadsheet that’s worth having on hand as well. 

The spreadsheet has 15 columns, with the first row including a description of what goes into each column. Some of them are pretty obvious, but I’m going to describe each one.

  1. Channel_Order_ID - This must be a unique ID for each recipient, either one that you create for your order or one that is provided from your crowdfunding platform.
  2. Channel_Item_ID - You can create the Item ID or use one supplied by your crowdfunding platform, just like the Order ID. You’ll use this Item ID in the next step.
  3. Quantity - The total number of the book this customer should receive.
  4. Shipping_First_Name - Your customer’s first name…
  5. Shipping_Last_Name - …and their surname.
  6. Shipping_Organization - This is an optional column for your business name.
  7. Shipping_Street_Line_1 - The shipping address, up to 30 characters, including spaces. 
  8. Shipping_Street_Line_2 - Second line for additional shipping info, like suite or apartment number. 
  9. Shipping_City - The city the order is being delivered to.
  10. Shipping_State - The state, province, prefecture, or region.
  11. Shipping_Postal_Code - The postal code (where applicable).
  12. Shipping_Country - The 2-character country code. 
  13. Contact_Email - The contact email for your customer.
  14. Contact_Phone_Number - The contact phone number for your customer.
  15. Recipient_Tax_ID - The Tax ID for your customer (where applicable).

Not all fields are required (such as the Tax ID or State), but you will need to include the first three columns for every customer. You also need to do a separate row for each unique book. That means if you’ve got one customer who bought two different books from you, each book needs its own row, even if all the customer and shipping information is the same.

#3 Uploading Your Order Spreadsheet

Before you upload your completed order spreadsheet, you’ll have to complete two additional steps.

How to Use the Order Import Tool for Easy Bulk Ordering

The first is to select or create an order channel. This is entirely for you and has no impact on your order or your customers. It’s just a way to organize your orders within your Lulu account. For example, if you have a subscription magazine that you send to your subscribers monthly, the Order Import tool is an outstanding way to simplify sending the physical magazine. You might want to create a specific channel—like Monthly Magazine Subscribers—and use that for each monthly order. 

The second option involves order shipment emails. You can have us send those for you, or you can opt out and handle that on your side. If you’re using an ecommerce platform like Shopify to collect your orders, you may want to use Shopify’s features to send your customers shipping notifications. 

Once you’ve made these two selections, you’re ready to upload your order spreadsheet.

How to Use the Order Import Tool for Easy Bulk Ordering

When you click the ‘Map Your Products’ button, we’ll run a check on your CSV or XLSX file to ensure you’ve included all the necessary information and in the right format. If we find errors, you’ll see this message:

How to Use the Order Import Tool for Easy Bulk Ordering

If you download the order sheet from the error message, you’ll get a copy of the exact file you uploaded with an additional ‘errors’ column that calls out the issue. In this example, I entered ‘USA’ instead of ‘US’ for the country code. The error message is tied to the exact row with the error and calls out the problem for you to fix.

How to Use the Order Import Tool for Easy Bulk Ordering

Make updates to your spreadsheet and upload the corrected version to move on to mapping your products!

#4 Mapping Your Products

On this screen, you’ll select a published project in your Lulu account for each row in your order spreadsheet. This is how we know which books to send to each of your customers. It’s also where your Channel_Item_ID is helpful. If you’ve got three different books that you’re sending, you might assign them Item IDs like this:

  • Book #1 = Item ID 101
  • Book #2 = Item ID 102
  • Book #3 = Item ID 103

Now you know which book to assign to each order based on the Item ID.

How to Use the Order Import Tool for Easy Bulk Ordering

You’ll need to map a project to each of your orders before we move on to shipping.

#5 Selecting Shipping Options

On this step, you’ll select the shipping method for all orders going to each country. That means, if you have 10 orders going to addresses in the US, you’ll select one shipping method for all of them. You won’t be able to select Mail for some and Ground for others.

If you have orders going to multiple countries, you’ll see the available shipping options per country.

How to Use the Order Import Tool for Easy Bulk Ordering

For the shipping costs, you’ll see Starting At for the pricing. This is the shipping cost for a single book, but if a customer is receiving multiple books, the cost may increase slightly.

#6 Review & Payment

We’re almost done! 

At this point, you’ve uploaded your customer’s information, selected the books each customer should receive, and assigned shipping methods for each country. 

All that’s left is to give your order a review.

How to Use the Order Import Tool for Easy Bulk Ordering

You can download your order details here for close review and backup to change shipping options if you need to. Otherwise, you can move on to checkout and complete your order!

How to Use the Order Import Tool for Easy Bulk Ordering
Lulu's Order Import tool was originally codenamed Project Octopus, for obvious reasons.

Simplified Bulk Ordering & Dropshipping

That’s it. The Order Import tool is built for that one purpose. It’s ideal for bulk orders from crowdfunding campaigns, a book launch pre-sale, and subscription orders. But really, you can use it for any situation that involves sending multiple people copies of your books!

Lulu will package and ship each book just like we do for orders through our bookstore. If you opt into our shipping emails, we’ll automatically send updates to your customers as well, ensuring they know where their order is and when to expect it.

How to Use the Order Import Tool for Easy Bulk Ordering

Your Free Lulu Account

Create a Lulu Account today to print and publish your book for readers all around the world

Create a Free Account

Kanji of the Day: 売 [Kanji of the Day]

売

✍7

小2

sell

バイ

う.る　う.れる

発売   (はつばい)   —   sale
販売   (はんばい)   —   sales
発売日   (はつばいび)   —   day something goes on sale
読売   (よみうり)   —   Yomiuri (newspaper, etc. group)
売り上げ   (うりあげ)   —   amount sold
売り   (うり)   —   sale
売却   (ばいきゃく)   —   selling off
売上高   (うりあげだか)   —   sales
売買   (ばいかい)   —   crossing (shares)
売る   (うる)   —   to sell

Generated with kanjioftheday by Douglas Perkins.

Kanji of the Day: 艦 [Kanji of the Day]

艦

✍21

中学

warship

カン

戦艦   (せんかん)   —   battleship
イージス艦   (イージスかん)   —   Aegis-class cruiser
軍艦   (ぐんかん)   —   warship
潜水艦   (せんすいかん)   —   submarine
艦隊   (かんたい)   —   fleet
護衛艦   (ごえいかん)   —   escort vessel
艦船   (かんせん)   —   warships and other vessels
艦長   (かんちょう)   —   captain (of a warship)
旗艦   (きかん)   —   flagship
艦載機   (かんさいき)   —   ship-borne plane

Generated with kanjioftheday by Douglas Perkins.

07:00 AM

Consumers outnumber producers [Seth Godin's Blog on marketing, tribes and respect]

New technology often upends the careers of experienced professionals.

When the Mac offered typesetting to the masses, typographers were incensed. They had grown up with lead or photo composition, they understood why it was called a ‘case’ and they knew how to kern. The typographers warned us that we’d soon be inundated by ugly, careless or even unreadable type, and everything would get worse. They were half right.

There was a lot of bad typography, but some great innovations as well. And the typographers who stuck it out ended up with far more opportunities (and more creative outlets) than they originally had.

When digital photography arrived, the skilled craftspeople who understood Bokeh and f-stops warned us about the same thing. People took their own pictures anyway. Many were lousy. Some changed the art form. And there are still professional photographers, even if the workaday gigs have mostly faded away.

And many doctors don’t want you to google your symptoms. Because it can lead to bad outcomes, and because it undermines their status and authority… but it has also saved countless lives. There are more patients than doctors, and so we go ahead and do what feels good to us, not to them.

A copywriter might say that it’s never okay to have an AI do your writing, but that same person uses AI to retouch photos or do the first pass on their spreadsheets… They even use a spellchecker instead of a human editor. You’re a producer some of the time, but also a consumer, and the consumer in you wants the best available option, regardless of how it was made.

These technological changes often have negative side effects. They don’t always make things better. But they happen when consumers insist. Mass production, factory farming, frozen food–they replace craft with accessibility and efficiency.

The market doesn’t care that much about the hard-won expertise of those that came before. And the shifts create muck and slop and then, over time, quality and taste and expertise often find their footing again.

The best way to complain is to make good stuff.

      

Pluralistic: The (other) problem with automatic conversion of free software to proprietary software (23 Apr 2026) [Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow]

->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->-> Top Sources: None -->

Today's links


The surface of Mars. In the foreground are a gnu and a giant pump-magazine killer robot whose head is being piloted by Tux the penguin. At their feet lies a dead robot, its head smashed in.

The (other) problem with automatic conversion of free software to proprietary software (permalink)

Here's an interesting stunt: a project called Malus.sh will take your money, and in exchange, it will ingest any free/open source code you want, refactor that code using an LLM, and spit out a "clean room" version that is freed from all the obligations imposed by the original project's software license:

https://www.404media.co/this-ai-tool-rips-off-open-source-software-without-violating-copyright/?ref=daily-stories-newsletter

Malus was co-created by Mike Nolan, who "researches the political economy of open source software and currently works for the United Nations." Nolan told 404 Media's Emanuel Maiberg that he shipped Malus as a real, live-fire business that will exchange money for an AI service that destroys the commons as a way to alert the free software movement to a serious danger.

As Maiberg writes, Malus relies on a legal precedent set in 1982, in which IBM brought a copyright suit against a small upstart called Columbia Data Products for reverse-engineering an IBM software product. IBM's argument was that Columbia must have copied its code – the copyrightable part of a work of software – in order to reimplement the functionality of that code. Functions aren't copyrightable: copyright protects creative expressions, not the ideas that inspire those expressions. The idea of a computer program that performs a certain algorithm is not copyrightable, but the code that turns that idea into a computer program is copyrightable.

Columbia's successful defense against IBM involved using a "clean room" in which two isolated teams collaborated on the reimplementation. The first team examined the IBM program and wrote a specification for another program that would replicate its functionality. The second team received the specification and turned it into a computer program. The first team did handle IBM software, but they did not create a new work of software. The second team did create a new work of software, but they never handled any IBM code.

This is the model for Malus: it pairs two LLMs, the first of which analyzes a free software program and prepares a specification for a program that performs the identical function. The second program receives that specification and writes a new program.

The Malus FAQ performs a "be as evil as possible" explanation for the purpose of this exercise:

Our proprietary AI robots independently recreate any open source project from scratch. The result? Legally distinct code with corporate-friendly licensing. No attribution. No copyleft. No problems.

This business about "attribution" and "copyleft" is a reference to the terms imposed by some free software licenses. The purpose of free software is to create a commons of user-inspectable, user-modifiable software that anyone can use, improve, and distribute. To achieve this, many free software licenses impose obligations on the people who distribute their code: you are allowed to take the code, improve the code, give it away or sell it, but you have to let other people do the same.

Typically, you have to inform people when there's free software in a package you've distributed (attribution) and supply them with the "source code" (the part that humans read and write, which is then "compiled" into code that a computer can use) on demand, so they can make their own changes. This system of requiring other people to share the things they make out of the code you share with them is sometimes called "copyleft," because it uses copyright, which is normally a system for restricting re-use to require people not to restrict that use.

Companies love to use free software, but they don't like to share free software. Companies like Vizio raid the commons for software that is collectively created and maintained, then simply refuse to live up to their end of the bargain, violating the license terms and (incorrectly) assuming no one will sue them:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/10/20/vizio-vs-the-world/#dumbcast

Malus's promise, then, is that you can pay them to create fully functional reimplementations of any free/open source software package that your company can treat as proprietary, without any obligations to the commons. You won't even have to attribute the original software project that you knocked off!

This is the risk that Nolan and his partner are trying to awaken the free/open source community to: that our commons is about to be raided by selfish monsters who serve as gut-flora for the immortal colony organisms we call "limited liability corporations," who will steal everything we've built and destroy the social contract we live by.

This is a real problem, but not because of AI. We already have this situation, and it's really bad. Most of the foundational free software projects were created under older licenses that did not contemplate cloud computing and software as a service. The "copyleft" obligations of these licenses are triggered by the distribution of the software – that is, when I send you a copy of the code.

But cloud services don't have to send you the code: when you run Adobe Creative Cloud or Google Docs, the most important code is all resident on corporate servers, and never sent to you, which means that you are not entitled to a copy of the new software that has been built atop of our commons. In other words, big companies have "software freedom" (the freedom to use, modify and improve software) and we've got "open source" (the impoverished right to look at the versions of these packages that are sitting on services like Github – itself a division of Microsoft):

https://mako.cc/copyrighteous/libreplanet-2018-keynote

Then there's "tivoization," a tactic for stealing from the commons that wasn't quite invented by Tivo, though they were one of its most notorious abusers. Tivoization happens when you distribute free software as part of a hardware device, then use "digital locks" (sometimes called "technical protection measures") to prevent the owner of this device from running a modified version of the code. With tivoization, I can sell you a device running free software and I can comply with the license by giving you the code, but if you change the code and try to get the device to run it, it will refuse. What's more, "anti-circumention" laws like Section 1201 of the US Digital Millennium Copyright Act make it a felony to tamper with these digital locks, so it becomes a crime to use modified software on your own device:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/03/16/whittle-a-webserver/#mere-ornaments

There's no question that the tech industry would devour the free software commons if they were allowed to, and the AI threat that Nolan raises with Malus seems alarming, but while there's something to worry about there, I think the risk is being substantially overstated.

That's because copyleft licenses – and indeed, all software licenses – are copyright licenses, and software written by AI is not eligible for a copyright, because nothing made by AI is eligible for copyright:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/03/03/its-a-trap-2/#inheres-at-the-moment-of-fixation

Copyright is awarded solely to works of human authorship. This fact has been repeatedly affirmed by the US Copyright Office, which has fought appeals of this principle all the way to the Supreme Court, which declined to hear the case. That's because the principle that copyright is strictly reserved for human creativity isn't remotely controversial in legal circles. This is just how copyright works.

Which means that the "be evil" version of Malus's business model has a fatal flaw. While the code that Malus produces is indeed "legally distinct" with "no attribution" and "no copyleft," it's not true that there are "no problems." That's because Malus's code doesn't have "corporate-friendly licensing." Far from it: Malus's code has no licensing, because it is born in the public domain and cannot be copyrighted.

In other words, if you're a corporation hoping to use Malus to knock off a free software project so that you can adapt it and distribute it without having to make your modifications available, Malus's code will not suit your needs. If you give me code that Malus produced, you can't stop me from doing anything I want with it. I can sell it. I can give it away. I can make a competing product that reproduces all of your code and sell it at a 99% discount. There's nothing you can do to stop me, any more than you could stop me from giving away the text of a Shakespeare play you sold me. You can't stick a license agreement or terms of service between me and the product that binds me to pretend that your public domain software is copyrighted – that's also not allowed under copyright.

Does that mean that Malus is a meaningless stunt? No, because this automated reimplementation does create some risks to our software commons. A troll who doesn't care about selling software could clone every popular free software project and make public domain versions that would be confusing and maybe demoralizing. Combining these clean-room reimplementations with cloud software or tivoization could create hybrid forms of commons-enclosure that are more virulent than the current strains.

But reimplementation itself is not a risk to free software. Reimplementation is the bedrock of free software. GNU/Linux itself is a reimplementation of AT&T Unix. Free software authors re-implement each other's code all the time, often because they think the license the original code was released under sucks. Literally the coolest free software thing I've seen in the past 12 months included a reimplementation of Raspberry Pi's PIO module to escape from its bullshit patent encumbrances:

https://youtu.be/BbWWGkyIBGM?si=vO5zLH3OG5JLW7OP&t=2253

Reimplementation is good, actually. And honestly, if corporations are foolish enough to reimplement their code using an LLM, and in so doing, create a vast new commons of public domain software, well, that's not exactly the freesoftwarepocalypse, is it?

(Image: Muhammad Mahdi Karim, GNU FDL; 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 PimpMySnack: homemade, gigantic versions of snack food https://web.archive.org/web/20060421034050/http://www.pimpmysnack.com/gallery.php

#20yrsago Thieves discover abandoned Soviet missile silo full of cash https://web.archive.org/web/20060411021047/http://www.mosnews.com/news/2006/03/07/moneyfound.shtml

#15yrsago Victorian house’s facade converted to a folding garage-door https://web.archive.org/web/20110423213819/https://www.blog.beausoleil-architects.com/2011/03/architectural-magic.html

#15yrsago Xerox’s first successful copier burst into flame so often it came with a fire-extinguisher https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xerox_914

#15yrsago MPAA: “democratizing culture is not in our interest” https://torrentfreak.com/mpaa-democratizing-culture-is-not-in-our-interest-110420/

#15yrsago Mail Rail: London’s long-lost underground postal railroad https://web.archive.org/web/20110805130854/http://www.silentuk.com/?p=2792

#10yrsago Kindle Unlimited is being flooded with 3,000-page garbage books that suck money out of the system https://web.archive.org/web/20160421055052/https://consumerist.com/2016/04/20/amazon-unintentionally-paying-scammers-to-hand-you-1000-pages-of-crap-you-dont-read/

#10yrsago America’s wealth gap has created an ever-increasing longevity gap https://www.counterpunch.org/2016/04/21/the-death-gap/

#10yrsago Why is Congress so clueless about tech? Because they fired all their experts 20 years ago https://www.wired.com/2016/04/office-technology-assessment-congress-clueless-tech-killed-tutor/

#10yrsago Why Internet voting is a terrible idea, explained in small words anyone can understand https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=abQCqIbBBeM

#10yrsago VW offers to buy back 500K demon-haunted diesels https://www.reuters.com/article/us-volkswagen-emissions-usa-idUSKCN0XH2CX/?feedType=RSS&feedName=topNews

#10yrsago Printer ink wars may make private property the exclusive domain of corporations https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2016/04/eff-asks-supreme-court-overturn-dangerous-ruling-allowing-patent-owners-undermine

#5yrsago Some thoughts on GWB's call for truth in politics https://pluralistic.net/2021/04/21/re-identification/#seriously-fuck-that-guy

#5yrsago What's wrong with EU's trustbusters https://pluralistic.net/2021/04/21/re-identification/#eu-antitrust

#5yrsago Hawley and Taylor Greene faked their donor-surge https://pluralistic.net/2021/04/21/re-identification/#jan-6-fraud

#5yrsago The Observatory of Anonymity https://pluralistic.net/2021/04/21/re-identification/#pseudonymity

#1yrago Trump's FTC opens the floodgates for tariff profiteering https://pluralistic.net/2025/04/21/trumpflation/#andrew-ferguson

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.

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

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

ISSN: 3066-764X

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