A year-long Channel 4 Dispatches investigation has raised serious questions about Stephen Lennon’s finances. Add your name and call on the Government to refer them to HMRC for investigation.

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A groundbreaking study hints at a hazy boundary between “life” and “non-life,” as well as two distinct origins of biology on Earth

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I am an AI skeptic. I am baffled by anyone who isn’t. I don’t see any path from continuous improvements to the (admittedly impressive) ”machine learning” field that leads to…

Today's links Stock swindles: A buyback is not just a dividend by another name. Hey look at this: Delights to delectate. Object permanence: Acme License-Plate Maker; IPV4 delenda est; Mandatory gun-ownership; Sukey; Ross and Carrie x LRH; Criti-hype. Upcoming appearances: Where to find me. Recent appearances: Where I've been. Latest books: You keep readin' em, I'll keep writin' 'em. Upcoming books: Like I said, I'll keep writin' 'em. Colophon: All the rest. Stock swindles (permalink) There are plenty of American historical antecedents of Trumpism – fascist movements like the Jim Crow reign of terror, the McCarthy hearings, the gleeful genocide of indigenous people. But when you're thinking about the rise of Trumpism, never forget that America isn't just a nation of cruel bigots; it's also a nation of rich swindlers. We call Trump a "reality TV star" and it's true, as far as it goes. Trump did play a billionaire on TV long before he grifted actual billions, using his status as the poor man's idea of a rich man to secure liar loans and rip off creditors, contractors, business partners, workers, and governments – local, state and federal. He rose to power on this, boasting on stage that cheating "makes me smart": https://pluralistic.net/2024/12/04/its-not-a-lie/#its-a-premature-truth Like so many crooked officials, Trump's brand is "He steals, but he works" (except of course that he doesn't – at any given moment, odds are that he's either taking a nap, watching Fox News, or playing golf): https://www.reddit.com/r/AskBalkans/comments/utui8s/in_romania_we_have_a_saying_about_corrupt/ Remember: the right is the movement that says that governments are inefficient and corrupt, so right wing elected leaders make their own case by being incompetent and corrupt. Someone like Trump has to convince people that they can't rely on institutions or their neighbors. His path to power lies through convincing people that the system is rigged and that he – as a man who is an expert at cheating – knows how to rig it in your favor: https://www.factcheck.org/2016/07/trumps-rigged-claim/ But merely claiming "the system is rigged" doesn't actually win the day. If you want to convince people that the system is rigged, it really helps if the system is actually rigged. Want to convince people that elections are corrupt? Legalize unlimited dark money spending and fill our polling places with defective, unauditable voting machines made by Beltway Bandits selling into no-bid contracts: https://web.archive.org/web/20210203113531/https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2021/02/03/voting-machines-election-steal-conspiracy-flaws/ Want to convince people that there's a shadowy cabal of rich pedophiles hiding children in a pizza parlor basement? It helps if there's an actual cabal of rich pedophiles hanging out on a private island, abusing more than a thousand children (and counting). Want to convince people that the financial system is a rigged casino so you might as well just gamble on cryptocurrency and betting markets? It helps if the actual financial system is run by banks who receive billions in public money and then steal millions of Americans' homes after Obama takes Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner's advice to "foam the runways" for the banks using Americans' houses: https://keystoneky.com/article/all-we-can-do-is-put-foam-on-the-runway-tim-geithner-speaking-before-the-collapse-of-lehman/ Which is all to say, if you want to understand the origins of the surge of suckers for fascists who are desperate for a strong man to cheat on their behalf in a rigged system, it helps to look beyond racism and xenophobia, to the ways in which the system is, indeed, rigged. Racism and misogyny alone aren't enough to bring about fascism. To groom a nation of fascist patsies, you first need a crooked system: https://pluralistic.net/2025/07/22/all-day-suckers/#i-love-the-poorly-educated This is why it's worth understanding finance. The finance sector hides its sins behind the Shield of Boringness (h/t Claire Evans). The layers of overlapping jargon and performative complexity make it hard for everyday people to criticize the finance sector. Finance ghouls exploit this, leveraging confusing ambiguities in the system to insist that their critics don't know what they're talking about and that everything is fine, actually. This is an incredibly destabilizing dynamic. Living in a system where you're being fleeced every day but where people who seem smarter than you have reasonable-seeming explanations about why it's all legit and above-board is a recipe for abandoning all faith in the system, in experts, and in lawful processes, and throw your lot in with a strongman who promises to cheat on your behalf. Take stock buybacks, a form of stock swindle that was illegal until 1982. In a stock buyback, a company buys its own shares on the open market. When the number of shares goes down, the price per share goes up. This is just a form of "wash-trading," like when NFT and shitcoin scammers buy their own products in order to make it look like they're valuable and desirable: https://pluralistic.net/2025/09/06/computer-says-huh/#invisible-handcuffs Advocates for markets as a system of allocation (as opposed to allocating via a democratically accountable state, say) insist that markets are efficient because prices "encode information" about the desirability, viability, and other qualities of goods and services. This is the whole argument for the new crop of rigged casinos we call "prediction markets" that are grooming the next generation of fascist footsoldiers by robbing them blind and then insisting that the whole process was not only legitimate, but scientific, a way to retrieve the "encoded information" about the world around us. In a market system, stock prices are supposed to reflect the aggregated information about the health and prospects of a company. When a company buys its own stock back, though, its price goes up while its value goes down. I mean that literally: say a company that's sitting on a billion dollars cash is valued at $10 billion. From this, we can infer that the company's capital stock (factories, inventory, etc), IP (patents, processes, copyrights, etc) and human capital (payrolled employees, contractors) are worth $9 billion. That's a reliable estimate, because we know exactly how much one billion dollars cash is worth: it's worth one billion dollars. Now, let that company piss that billion dollars up the wall with a stock buyback. The company is relieved of its billion dollars cash on hand, leaving it with no cash, only its physical capital, IP and human capital, which are worth $9b. The company is now worth less than it was before the stock buyback. What's more, the drop in corporate valuation is more than the billion the company just blew on its buyback. A company with no cash reserves is brittle and prone to failures. Without a cash cushion, any rent shock, change in market conditions, or other adverse incident will leave the company scrambling to borrow money (at punitive rates, thanks to its desperation) to weather the storm. If share prices are actually "encoding information" about a company's worth, a billion dollar buyback should lop more than a billion dollars off the company's share price. Instead, it sends the share price up. This is just stock manipulation, which is why it was illegal until 1982. But apologists for this system will tell you that a stock buyback is just a dividend by another name – just another way for a company to return value to its shareholders, who, after all, are the owners of the company and entitled to extract those profits. This is categorically untrue. Dividends do take money out of the company's coffers and distribute them to its shareholders, sure – but a dividend is a bet on the company's future success, which is why a company's share prices rise after a dividend is declared. Investors observe a company that is so well-run that it can afford to drain some of its cash reserves in favor of its shareholders, so they buy the company's stock in anticipation of more dividends derived from more skilled operations. But imagine if a company parted with a dividend so large that it meant that the firm would struggle to keep its doors open in the coming year. Imagine a publisher, say, whose dividend was so large that it couldn't afford to pay advances for any more books in the next season, meaning it could only make money from the backlist titles it already had in the warehouse, but was entirely out of the running when it came to publishing next year's blockbuster book. That dividend would not send investors chasing the company's stock. Why would you bet on a stock whose management had just doomed the company to a bad season, and maybe an unrecoverable death-spiral? Without new books to sell, the company won't have any cash to pay dividends, and when it stops paying dividends, its stock price will fall, leaving shareholders with a hole in their own balance-sheets. Contrast that with buybacks: to do a buyback, the company need merely spend its free cash flow, or money it borrows, or money derived from the sale of key capital, or money saved through mass layoffs, to buy its own stock. Then the share price goes up. In other words: when a company's stock price rises on news of a dividend, that's "encoding information" about the market's confidence in the company's management and its future growth. When a company's stock price rises on news of a buyback, that's "encoding information" about the market's confidence in the company's future looting to the point of collapse. I used to think that this was the whole stock buyback story, but as is ever the case with finance, buybacks are fractally corrupt. This week, I've been reading Boston College law prof Ray D Madoff's book The Second Estate: How the Tax Code Made an American Aristocracy, and I've learned even more scummy truths about buybacks: https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/S/bo256019296.html For tax purposes, dividends are "ordinary income," meaning that they are taxed at up to 37%. Meanwhile, if you sell your shares after a stock buyback juices the price, the profits are treated as "capital gains," whose tax rate caps out at about half that (20%). This means that shareholders pay half the tax on money that comes from strip-mining a company than they would get from money derived from managing a company for sustainable growth. It's worse than that, though, because capital gains can be offset by capital losses. If you invested in a stock that tanked, you can hold that stock in your portfolio until you are ready to sell a profitable stock, and deduct your losses from the gains you've made. But you don't even have to sell the stock to realize tax-free income from it: the ultra-rich live according to a financial arrangement called "buy, borrow, die" that lets them avoid all taxes. Here's how that works: if you're sitting on a bunch of stock, you can stake it as collateral for a loan that is tax-free. Better than that, if you're smart, some or all of the interest on that loan is tax-deductible. If you're rich enough, you don't have to make regular payments on the loan, either – you just wait as the stock continues to grow while your loan is maturing, and when it's due, you borrow even more money against the new valuation and pay off the old loan. That's "buy" and "borrow." Here's "die." When you die, you transfer your assets to your kids, who benefit from something called the "step-up in basis," which lets them avoid all capital gains on the appreciated value of your assets. Now, maybe you're thinking that you can benefit from this arrangement. I've got bad news for you: you won't qualify for one of those cool loans that you don't need to pay regularly! What's more, if you own any stock you almost certainly own it through a retirement plan like a 401(k), and when you cash out that 401(k), that is treated as "ordinary income" at nearly twice the rate that our plutocrat overlords pay. Buybacks, then, are part of a system whereby rich people get much richer every time a company that makes something good and employs ordinary people guts itself and sets itself on the path to bankruptcy. Meanwhile, working people don't benefit from this system, even if they own stock. They just get to live in a world where businesses are looted and shuttered and public services are slashed thanks to balanced budget rules that mean that governments can't spend when rich people don't pay taxes. This is why buybacks have apologists. Buybacks – a stock swindle that was illegal in living memory – make rich people richer, and they spend some of that loot to fund an army of reply-ghouls who push the message that buybacks are dividends by another name. It's part of the ripoff economy that has seen crypto-billionaires lobby, bribe and terrorize lawmakers into merging their speculative assets with the real economy, endangering the economic well-being of everyday people: https://www.levernews.com/what-tech-wants-crypto-reign-of-terror/ It's part of the ripoff economy that has seen AI bros put the global market in peril with crooked accounting and empty promises: https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-enshittifinancial-crisis/ The ripoff economy is baked into the American experience. It is the foundation of Trumpism. It is the financial basis for things like "Project 2025" – literally! The Heritage Foundation (who created Project 2025) was founded and funded by the founders of Amway, a destructive Ponzi scheme that was rescued from criminal prosecution when Gerald Ford (Congressman to Amway's founders) became president and ordered the FTC to let them off the hook: https://pluralistic.net/2025/05/05/free-enterprise-system/#amway-or-the-highway Trump's right: the system is rigged. If you're going to pull the people you love back from the nihilistic descent into fascism, you have to be able to understand and explain how the rigging works. We can't insist – as Hillary Clinton did – that "America is already great": https://www.politico.com/blogs/2016-dem-primary-live-updates-and-results/2016/03/clinton-america-is-already-great-220078 America is not great. It has been gutted by the Epstein class, who robbed us blind, raped our kids, and are now selling us shitcoins and chatbots and the spectacle of protesters being shot in the streets. But it's not enough to know that the system is rigged. Everybody knows the system is rigged. To build a movement and save our future, we have to know how it is rigged and who rigged it. Hey look at this (permalink) Wherein I have some thoughts on food delivery apps https://www.dnalounge.com/backstage/log/2026/02/01.html A Letter On Justice And Open Debate About Raping Children https://www.popehat.com/p/a-letter-on-justice-and-open-debate-about-raping-children Impeach President Miller https://prospect.org/2026/01/31/impeach-president-miller/ Google Settlement May Bring New Privacy Controls for Real-Time Bidding https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2026/01/google-settlement-may-bring-new-privacy-controls-real-time-bidding U.S. government has lost more than 10,000 STEM Ph.D.s since Trump took office https://www.science.org/content/article/u-s-government-has-lost-more-10-000-stem-ph-d-s-trump-took-office Object permanence (permalink) #25yrsago Acme License-Plate Maker https://www.acme.com/licensemaker/licensemaker.cgi?state=California&text=NSHITKN&plate=1987&r=943099606 #15yrsago Apple implements iStore changes, prohibits Sony from selling competing ebook app https://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/01/technology/01apple.html?_r=3 #15yrsago IPv4 is exhausted https://tech.slashdot.org/story/11/02/01/0036227/Last-Available-IPv4-Blocks-Allocated #15yrsago Harper’s publisher rejects $50K worth of pledges, will lay off staff anyway https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSdDoZvxCvsax1zkMKANucBCQU8v-08tcw6VIDrtnmnqLY9I0A/viewform?formkey=dGdtbXUtNUV3cmtpaXJienJ5bldwcUE6MQ #15yrsago South Dakota senator introduces mandatory gun-ownership law https://www.newser.com/story/111031/south-dakota-bill-every-adult-must-own-a-gun.html #10yrsago UK Snooper’s Charter is so broad, no one can figure out what it means https://web.archive.org/web/20160202092111/https://motherboard.vice.com/read/tech-firms-are-unclear-on-new-uk-surveillance-laws-warns-government-committee #5yrsago The good news about vaccination bad news https://pluralistic.net/2021/02/01/dinos-and-rinos/#mixed-news #5yrsago Unidirectional entryism https://pluralistic.net/2021/02/01/dinos-and-rinos/#entryism #15yrsago Inside Sukey the anti-kettling mobile app https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2011/feb/02/inside-anti-kettling-hq #10yrsago Swatting attempted against Congresswoman who introduced anti-swatting bill https://www.bostonglobe.com/metro/2016/02/01/cops-swarm-rep-katherine-clark-melrose-home-after-apparent-hoax/yqEpcpWmKtN6bOOAj8FZXJ/story.html #10yrsago A would-be clinic-bomber & friends are terrorizing a charter school for being too close to a future Planned Parenthood office https://web.archive.org/web/20160318235447/https://broadly.vice.com/en_us/article/inside-the-bizarre-war-anti-abortion-zealots-are-waging-against-school-kids #10yrsago Ross and Carrie become Scientologists: an investigative report 5 years in the making https://ohnopodcast.com/investigations/2016/2/1/ross-and-carrie-audit-scientology-part-1-going-preclear #10yrsago Exclusive: Snowden intelligence docs reveal UK spooks’ malware checklist https://memex.craphound.com/2016/02/02/exclusive-snowden-intelligence-docs-reveal-uk-spooks-malware-checklist/ #5yrsago The free market and rent-seeking https://pluralistic.net/2021/02/02/euthanize-rentiers/#poor-doors #5yrsago Criti-Hype https://pluralistic.net/2021/02/02/euthanize-rentiers/#dont-believe-the-hype Upcoming appearances (permalink) Salt Lake City: Enshittification at the Utah Museum of Fine Arts (Tanner Humanities Center), Feb 18 https://tanner.utah.edu/center-events/cory-doctorow/ Montreal (remote): Fedimtl, Feb 24 https://fedimtl.ca/ Victoria: 28th Annual Victoria International Privacy & Security Summit, Mar 3-5 https://www.rebootcommunications.com/event/vipss2026/ Berkeley: Bioneers keynote, Mar 27 https://conference.bioneers.org/ Berlin: Re:publica, May 18-20 https://re-publica.com/de/news/rp26-sprecher-cory-doctorow Berlin: Enshittification at Otherland Books, May 19 https://www.otherland-berlin.de/de/event-details/cory-doctorow.html Hay-on-Wye: HowTheLightGetsIn, May 22-25 https://howthelightgetsin.org/festivals/hay/big-ideas-2 Recent appearances (permalink) How the Internet Got Worse (Masters in Business) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=auXlkuVhxMo Enshittification (Jon Favreau/Offline): https://crooked.com/podcast/the-enshittification-of-the-internet-with-cory-doctorow/ Why Big Tech is a Trap for Independent Creators (Stripper News) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nmYDyz8AMZ0 Enshittification (Creative Nonfiction podcast) https://brendanomeara.com/episode-507-enshittification-author-cory-doctorow-believes-in-a-new-good-internet/ Enshittification with Plutopia https://plutopia.io/cory-doctorow-enshittification/ Latest books (permalink) "Canny Valley": A limited edition collection of the collages I create for Pluralistic, self-published, September 2025 "Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It," Farrar, Straus, Giroux, October 7 2025 https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374619329/enshittification/ "Picks and Shovels": a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about the heroic era of the PC, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), February 2025 (https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250865908/picksandshovels). "The Bezzle": a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about prison-tech and other grifts, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), February 2024 (thebezzle.org). "The Lost Cause:" a solarpunk novel of hope in the climate emergency, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), November 2023 (http://lost-cause.org). "The Internet Con": A nonfiction book about interoperability and Big Tech (Verso) September 2023 (http://seizethemeansofcomputation.org). Signed copies at Book Soup (https://www.booksoup.com/book/9781804291245). "Red Team Blues": "A grabby, compulsive thriller that will leave you knowing more about how the world works than you did before." Tor Books http://redteamblues.com. "Chokepoint Capitalism: How to Beat Big Tech, Tame Big Content, and Get Artists Paid, with Rebecca Giblin", on how to unrig the markets for creative labor, Beacon Press/Scribe 2022 https://chokepointcapitalism.com Upcoming books (permalink) "Unauthorized Bread": a middle-grades graphic novel adapted from my novella about refugees, toasters and DRM, FirstSecond, 2026 "Enshittification, Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It" (the graphic novel), Firstsecond, 2026 "The Memex Method," Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2026 "The Reverse-Centaur's Guide to AI," a short book about being a better AI critic, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, June 2026 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 (1007 words today, 19588 total) "The Reverse Centaur's Guide to AI," a short book for Farrar, Straus and Giroux about being an effective AI critic. LEGAL REVIEW AND COPYEDIT COMPLETE. "The Post-American Internet," a short book about internet policy in the age of Trumpism. PLANNING. A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING This work – excluding any serialized fiction – is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license. That means you can use it any way you like, including commercially, provided that you attribute it to me, Cory Doctorow, and include a link to pluralistic.net. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ Quotations and images are not included in this license; they are included either under a limitation or exception to copyright, or on the basis of a separate license. Please exercise caution. How to get Pluralistic: Blog (no ads, tracking, or data-collection): Pluralistic.net Newsletter (no ads, tracking, or data-collection): https://pluralistic.net/plura-list Mastodon (no ads, tracking, or data-collection): https://mamot.fr/@pluralistic Medium (no ads, paywalled): https://doctorow.medium.com/ Twitter (mass-scale, unrestricted, third-party surveillance and advertising): https://twitter.com/doctorow Tumblr (mass-scale, unrestricted, third-party surveillance and advertising): https://mostlysignssomeportents.tumblr.com/tagged/pluralistic "When life gives you SARS, you make sarsaparilla" -Joey "Accordion Guy" DeVilla READ CAREFULLY: By reading this, you agree, on behalf of your employer, to release me from all obligations and waivers arising from any and all NON-NEGOTIATED agreements, licenses, terms-of-service, shrinkwrap, clickwrap, browsewrap, confidentiality, non-disclosure, non-compete and acceptable use policies ("BOGUS AGREEMENTS") that I have entered into with your employer, its partners, licensors, agents and assigns, in perpetuity, without prejudice to my ongoing rights and privileges. You further represent that you have the authority to release me from any BOGUS AGREEMENTS on behalf of your employer. ISSN: 3066-764X

Today's links Threads' margin is the Eurostack's opportunity: Move fast and break kings. Hey look at this: Delights to delectate. Object permanence: Frank Chu; MPAA x TSA; Flint truths; Pastel Q; Bernie meme. Upcoming appearances: Where to find me. Recent appearances: Where I've been. Latest books: You keep readin' em, I'll keep writin' 'em. Upcoming books: Like I said, I'll keep writin' 'em. Colophon: All the rest. Threads' margin is the Eurostack's opportunity (permalink) OG App is the coolest app you've never heard of. Back in 2022, two teenagers unilaterally disenshittified Instagram by making an "alt-client" that restored all the parts of Insta that made it a success and blocked all the antifeatures that Meta crammed down users' throats after they had them locked in. Here's how OG App worked: first, it popped up a browser window and loaded the Instagram login screen. Then, after you'd logged into Insta, it stole the "session key" (the cryptographic proof that you were logged into your account). That let it impersonate you to Insta's servers, and slurp down the whole feed that Insta had queued up for you. After grabbing your feed, OG App deleted all the ads, all the slop, all the boosted content, all the months-old clickbait that The Algorithm (TM) had surfaced. What was left was pristine: the posts from people you followed, in reverse-chronological order. To make this all even sweeter, OG App sent no data back to Meta as you used it, except for the likes and comments you intended to transmit to the company. All the other data that Meta's apps gather got blocked: everything from your location, to which posts you slowed down your scrolling on, to accelerometer readouts that revealed minute changes in how you hold your phone from second to second. Boy did people like this! By the end of the day, OG App was in the top ten charts for both Google and Apple's app stores. By the next morning, it was gone. Meta sent a takedown notice to the app store duopoly and they killed OG App on its behalf (there is honor among thieves): https://techcrunch.com/2022/09/27/og-app-promises-you-an-ad-free-instagram-feed/ The funny thing is, the OG App creators were just following the Facebook playbook. When Facebook opened up to the general public in 2006, it had the problem that everyone who wanted social media already had an account on Myspace, and all of Facebook's improvements on Myspace (Zuck made a promise never to spy on his users!) didn't matter, because Myspace had something Facebook could not match: Myspace had all your friends. Facebook came up with an ingenious solution to this problem: they offered Myspace users a bot. You gave that bot your Myspace login credentials (just as OG App did with your Insta credentials) and the bot impersonated you to Myspace (just as OG App did with Insta), and it grabbed everything queued up for you on Myspace (just as OG App did with Insta), and then flowed those messages into your Facebook feed (just as OG App did with Insta). This was very successful! Users didn't have to choose between their friends on Myspace and the superior design and privacy policies of Facebook. They got to eat their cake and have it, too. This is actually a very old and important pattern in tech. It's what "move fast and break things" looks like when it's actually disrupting sclerotic and decaying companies that lock us in, take us for granted, and treat us like shit. It's what Apple did when they cloned the MS Office file formats and released iWork, whose Pages, Numbers and Keynote let Microsoft users escape from the prison of Windows and bring their documents with them: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/06/adversarial-interoperability-reviving-elegant-weapon-more-civilized-age-slay But like every pirate, the tech companies dreamed of being admirals. Once they'd attained the admiralty, they announced that when they did this stuff, it was progress, but if anyone does it to them, it would be piracy. What's more, they were able to take advantage of a metastasizing blob of IP laws that the US Trade Representative spread around the world (with threats of tariffs for noncompliance). Soon, nearly every country had enacted laws that made it a literal crime for their entrepreneurs and technologists to fix America's defective tech exports by adding privacy tools, bridging old services into new ones, or reading and writing America's ubiquitous proprietary file-formats: https://pluralistic.net/2026/01/01/39c3/#the-new-coalition For decades, this system was immovable. The world couldn't afford tariffs on its exports to the USA, and it was able to maintain the pretense that America's platforms were trustworthy neutral parties, that would not be weaponized against their own national interest at the behest of the American state. Obviously, that is dead now. Donald Trump, debilitated by white matter disease and his endemic incontinent belligerence, has flipped the table over in a poker game that was rigged in his favor because he resented having to pretend to play (TM November Kelly): https://pluralistic.net/2026/01/26/i-dont-want/#your-greenback-dollar EU member-states are minting new "digital sovereignty" ministries as fast as they can print up new business cards, the EU itself has just appointed its first "Tech Sovereignty, Security and Democracy" czar: https://commission.europa.eu/about/organisation/college-commissioners/henna-virkkunen_en They're building the "Eurostack," a fleet of EU-based data centers that will host free, open, auditable, trustworthy equivalents to the US tech giants' offerings: https://pluralistic.net/2025/06/25/eurostack/#viktor-orbans-isp But Eurostack is about to run into a wall: Article 6 of the EU's own Copyright Directive, which prohibits reverse-engineering and modification of tech products. It's a law that the US Trade Rep lobbied hard for, winning the day by promising tariff-free access to the US for Europe's exports (a promise Trump has now broken): https://pluralistic.net/2025/10/15/freedom-of-movement/#data-dieselgate So long as Europe continues to hold up its end of this one-sided bargain, it will not be able to create the reverse-engineering based tools to let EU companies, governments and households get their data out of US tech silos, let alone let them build and enjoy successors to OG App, which will make it easy for them to leave US social media without sacrificing contact with the people who matter to them. Which brings me to Threads, Meta's latest social media network. Threads is built on Activitypub and Mastodon, these being open/free, auditable and trustworthy protocols, designed to support "federated" social media. That's social media that runs on servers managed by lots of different entities, whose users can all connect to one another no matter which server they use. Meta was clearly excited by the prospect of enclosing and conquering this open upstart, but also nervous at the prospect that its users would find, in federation, an easy path to escape from Meta's clutches. After all, if you can leave Threads and join a non-Meta Mastodon server without losing contact with the people you followed and were followed by on Threads, then why wouldn't you leave? Mark Zuckerberg's users don't like him – they just hate him less than they love the people they are in community with on Zuckerberg's platforms. So Threads never really joined the Fediverse. You can't quite follow and be followed by Mastodon users, and you can't quite migrate your account off Meta's servers and onto a better one. Zuck and his lieutenants are keenly attuned to any design that drives high "switching costs" for leaving their services, and they exploit these switching costs to figure out just how much pain they can inflict on users without risking their departure: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2021/08/facebooks-secret-war-switching-costs So now they've started to turn the screws on Threads users. They just announced a global program of Threads enshittification, with a promise to cram ads into the eyeballs of every Threads account: https://www.contentgrip.com/meta-threads-ads-go-global/ This represents a hell of an opportunity for the EU and Eurostack. Meta's ads are wildly illegal in the EU, violating Europe's landmark privacy law, the GDPR. The only reason Meta gets away with its flagrant lawbreaking is that it has captured the Irish state, and uses legal tricks to force all GDPR enforcement into Irish jurisdiction: https://pluralistic.net/2025/12/01/erin-go-blagged/#big-tech-omerta People hate ads. More than half of all web users have installed an adblocker (which also protects their privacy). It's the largest consumer boycott in human history: https://doc.searls.com/2023/11/11/how-is-the-worlds-biggest-boycott-doing/ But no one has ever installed an adblocker for an app, because reverse-engineering apps and the mobile platforms they run on is illegal under laws like Article 6 of the Copyright Directive. As a result, tech companies – especially US giants, who can violate EU law with impunity – love to enshittify their apps, because they know that no one can do unto them as they did unto their own rivals (like Myspace). Meta's new ad strategy for Threads is the perfect cue for a European repeal of Article 6 of the Copyright Directive. Procedurally, this is a great moment for it, as the EU is finalizing the Digital Fairness Act, which could include an exemption to EUCD 6 for privacy-enhancing technologies: https://www.europarl.europa.eu/legislative-train/theme-protecting-our-democracy-upholding-our-values/file-digital-fairness-act Giving Europeans an effective way to push back against Meta's wholesale violation of their rights is a way that the Eurostack can score popular support right now – not in five years when the new data centers come online. It's a way of improving the lives of Europeans in immediate, concrete ways, rather than asking them to be grateful that some ministry has changed cloud providers – an important change, sure, but one that has no real impact on their daily lives. What's more, legalizing jailbreaking for the purpose of making Threads alt-clients wouldn't just give Europeans a better social media experience – it could bootstrap European social media services. Remember, Threads was able to achieve instant scale by moving Instagram users onto Threads wholesale, maintaining their Insta follows and followers when they created their Threads accounts. Europe – like everywhere else – is full of entrepreneurs who are trying to get national, independent social media platforms off the ground, hoping to woo users by promising them a more privacy-respecting alternative. They've got the same problem Zuck had when he tried to compete with Myspace: users love their friends more than they hate being spied on, so merely offering a better service is insufficient. To get users off the old platforms, you have to lower their switching costs – you have to let them bring their friends to the new network, even if those friends are still stuck on the old network. Legalize jailbreaking in the EU and you'll make it possible to do "on-device bridging" – where a new social media app is able to break open the data storage of the Threads app on the same device and move that data into its own feeds. And because the EU has the GDPR, they have the privacy framework needed to police the privacy violations that breaking into other apps' data storage can lead to. Meta will squawk. They'll say Europe is legalizing the violation of its corporate rights. But Meta violates Europeans' rights at scale, and the "rights" that I'm talking about taking away from Meta are rights the EU gave it in the first place, in exchange for a broken promise of tariff-free access to the USA. Adblocking isn't stealing. Adblocking is bargaining. Without adblocking, the companies don't sell us services in exchange for our privacy – they plunder all the private data they can get, and dribble out services at whatever level they think we deserve. If ad-supported media was a restaurant, it'd be one where you got thrown up against a wall, relieved of your wallet, fed a handful of gruel, and then got kicked in the ass and sent on your way: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/07/adblocking-how-about-nah Every time Donald Trump threatens the EU, he makes the case for the Eurostack, but still, he can't help himself. Likewise, every time Zuckerberg enshittifies his services, he makes the case for repealing Article 6 of the Copyright Directive, and he can't help himself either. Threads' inexorable enshittification is an opportunity: an opportunity to make the case for the Eurostack, an opportunity to improve the lives of millions of Europeans, and an opportunity to break through the walled gardens that keep the people we love stuck on legacy social media platforms. When they did it to us, that wasn't progress. When we do it to them, it's not piracy. Hey look at this (permalink) EFF to Close Friday in Solidarity with National Shutdown https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2026/01/eff-close-friday-solidarity-national-shutdown Let's Make Hope Normal Again https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qxt4HCjd7VA Detecting Dementia Using Lexical Analysis: Terry Pratchett’s Discworld Tells a More Personal Story https://www.mdpi.com/2076-3425/16/1/94 How is Inventing the Renaissance an SFF-Related Work? https://www.exurbe.com/how-is-inventing-the-renaissance-an-sff-related-work/ The Good, the Pretty, and Fear Itself https://catvalente.substack.com/p/the-good-the-pretty-and-fear-itself Object permanence (permalink) #25yrsago Frank Chu explainer http://www.12galaxies.20m.com #20yrsago Kerouac curator invents copyright laws to keep photographers away https://thomashawk.com/2006/01/open-letter-to-myra-borshoff-cook-tour.html #20yrsago EFF suing AT&T for helping NSA illegally spy on Americans https://www.eff.org/cases/nsa-multi-district-litigation #20yrsago CD DRM software players are amateurish and easy to trick https://blog.citp.princeton.edu/2006/01/31/cd-drm-attacks-player/ #20yrsago MPAA puts TSA goon in charge of enforcement https://web.archive.org/web/20060209035921/http://www.mpaa.org/press_releases/2006_01_31.pdf #20yrsago US-VISIT immigration system spent $15 million per crook caught https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2006/01/the_failure_of_1.html #20yrsago Law firm fires clerk for personal opposition to DRM https://web.archive.org/web/20060203030500/http://www.freeculturenyu.org/2006/01/31/drm-fired/ #15yrsago Free excerpt from Jo Walton’s brilliant Among Others https://web.archive.org/web/20110204214337/http://www.tor.com/stories/2011/01/excerpt-among-others #15yrsago Debunking yet another bought-and-paid-for report on the need for non-neutral net https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2011/01/huge-isps-want-per-gb-payments-from-netflix-youtube/ #15yrsago Batman: billionaire plutocrat vigilante https://reactormag.com/batman-plutocrat/ #15yrsago Another copyright troll throws in the towel https://www.eff.org/press/archives/2011/01/31 #10yrsago Ten hard truths about the Flint water atrocity https://www.ecowatch.com/michael-moore-10-things-they-wont-tell-you-about-the-flint-water-trage-1882162388.html #10yrsago Watch: AMAZING slam poem about policing women’s speech habits https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=me4_QwmaNoQ #10yrsago Congress wants to know if agencies were compromised by the backdoor in Juniper gear (and where it came from) https://www.reuters.com/article/us-juniper-networks-congress-idUSKCN0V708P/ #5yrsago Know Nothings, conspiratorialism and Pastel Q https://pluralistic.net/2021/01/31/rhymes-with-pastel-q/#paranoid-style #5yrsago Mashing the Bernie meme https://pluralistic.net/2021/01/31/rhymes-with-pastel-q/#bernie-3d Upcoming appearances (permalink) Salt Lake City: Enshittification at the Utah Museum of Fine Arts (Tanner Humanities Center), Feb 18 https://tanner.utah.edu/center-events/cory-doctorow/ Victoria: 28th Annual Victoria International Privacy & Security Summit, Mar 3-5 https://www.rebootcommunications.com/event/vipss2026/ Berkeley: Bioneers keynote, Mar 27 https://conference.bioneers.org/ Berlin: Re:publica, May 18-20 https://re-publica.com/de/news/rp26-sprecher-cory-doctorow Berlin: Enshittification at Otherland Books, May 19 https://www.otherland-berlin.de/de/event-details/cory-doctorow.html Hay-on-Wye: HowTheLightGetsIn, May 22-25 https://howthelightgetsin.org/festivals/hay/big-ideas-2 Recent appearances (permalink) How the Internet Got Worse (Masters in Business) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=auXlkuVhxMo Enshittification (Jon Favreau/Offline): https://crooked.com/podcast/the-enshittification-of-the-internet-with-cory-doctorow/ Why Big Tech is a Trap for Independent Creators (Stripper News) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nmYDyz8AMZ0 Enshittification (Creative Nonfiction podcast) https://brendanomeara.com/episode-507-enshittification-author-cory-doctorow-believes-in-a-new-good-internet/ Enshittification with Plutopia https://plutopia.io/cory-doctorow-enshittification/ Latest books (permalink) "Canny Valley": A limited edition collection of the collages I create for Pluralistic, self-published, September 2025 "Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It," Farrar, Straus, Giroux, October 7 2025 https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374619329/enshittification/ "Picks and Shovels": a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about the heroic era of the PC, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), February 2025 (https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250865908/picksandshovels). "The Bezzle": a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about prison-tech and other grifts, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), February 2024 (thebezzle.org). "The Lost Cause:" a solarpunk novel of hope in the climate emergency, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), November 2023 (http://lost-cause.org). "The Internet Con": A nonfiction book about interoperability and Big Tech (Verso) September 2023 (http://seizethemeansofcomputation.org). Signed copies at Book Soup (https://www.booksoup.com/book/9781804291245). "Red Team Blues": "A grabby, compulsive thriller that will leave you knowing more about how the world works than you did before." Tor Books http://redteamblues.com. "Chokepoint Capitalism: How to Beat Big Tech, Tame Big Content, and Get Artists Paid, with Rebecca Giblin", on how to unrig the markets for creative labor, Beacon Press/Scribe 2022 https://chokepointcapitalism.com Upcoming books (permalink) "Unauthorized Bread": a middle-grades graphic novel adapted from my novella about refugees, toasters and DRM, FirstSecond, 2026 "Enshittification, Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It" (the graphic novel), Firstsecond, 2026 "The Memex Method," Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2026 "The Reverse-Centaur's Guide to AI," a short book about being a better AI critic, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, June 2026 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 (1048 words today, 18579 total) "The Reverse Centaur's Guide to AI," a short book for Farrar, Straus and Giroux about being an effective AI critic. LEGAL REVIEW AND COPYEDIT COMPLETE. "The Post-American Internet," a short book about internet policy in the age of Trumpism. PLANNING. A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING This work – excluding any serialized fiction – is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license. That means you can use it any way you like, including commercially, provided that you attribute it to me, Cory Doctorow, and include a link to pluralistic.net. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ Quotations and images are not included in this license; they are included either under a limitation or exception to copyright, or on the basis of a separate license. Please exercise caution. How to get Pluralistic: Blog (no ads, tracking, or data-collection): Pluralistic.net Newsletter (no ads, tracking, or data-collection): https://pluralistic.net/plura-list Mastodon (no ads, tracking, or data-collection): https://mamot.fr/@pluralistic Medium (no ads, paywalled): https://doctorow.medium.com/ Twitter (mass-scale, unrestricted, third-party surveillance and advertising): https://twitter.com/doctorow Tumblr (mass-scale, unrestricted, third-party surveillance and advertising): https://mostlysignssomeportents.tumblr.com/tagged/pluralistic "When life gives you SARS, you make sarsaparilla" -Joey "Accordion Guy" DeVilla READ CAREFULLY: By reading this, you agree, on behalf of your employer, to release me from all obligations and waivers arising from any and all NON-NEGOTIATED agreements, licenses, terms-of-service, shrinkwrap, clickwrap, browsewrap, confidentiality, non-disclosure, non-compete and acceptable use policies ("BOGUS AGREEMENTS") that I have entered into with your employer, its partners, licensors, agents and assigns, in perpetuity, without prejudice to my ongoing rights and privileges. You further represent that you have the authority to release me from any BOGUS AGREEMENTS on behalf of your employer. ISSN: 3066-764X

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