I’m back from a perfect summer upstate, which of course made me want to move there, which sent me into a decision spiral, which brought me back to my Notes file of decision-making processes, which I thought I’d share below.

I’ve been saving them ever since I read Ness Labs’ Tiny Experiments; I loved its critique of pro/con lists (they limit your thinking to just that one option) and alternate framework of external vs internal signals. I’ve noticed that in personal decisions I sometimes cede my authority to those with stronger opinions (including AI), so I’m trying to build and maintain that muscle in myself.

If you’re also deciding where to live, or which job to take, or what career path is right, or just what to do this weekend, here are some alternate thinking methods you can try. This list is not comprehensive; it’s just the ones I’ve actually used and found helpful. Copy/paste them to a Notes file and you can pull them up (instead of AI) when you need assistance and want to build your own intuition.

Decision making

Tiny Experiments

from Tiny Experiments by Anne-Laure Le Cunff

Do a small trial, then decide whether to persist, pause, or pivot based on:

1. External signals (facts, context, practicalities) — Does it fit my current circumstances? Is it manageable? Do other things need more energy? Has the world changed?

2. Internal signals (emotions, motivations, mentality) — Does it feel fulfilling, or stressful? Do I feel confident? What related beliefs or feelings can I identify?

WRAP

from Decisive by Chip and Dan Heath

1. Widen frames — Not this/that or pro/con, but “This AND that?” or “What’s the best use of time/money?” or “What are my inspirations?”

2. Reality test assumptions — Ask others with experience about any problems, looking specifically for information that would change your mind.

3. Attain detachment — Wait a bit. What should your successor/friend do?

4. Prepare for failure — Pre-mortem the future: What went wrong? Well?

The 10/10/10 Rule

from 10-10-10 by Suzy Welch

How will I feel about this decision in 10 minutes / 10 days / 10 months?

Feeling the Feelings

from various sources

Visualize each option, walking through space and time. Do you feel expanded or contracted? Excited or depressed? Relaxed or tense?

Design Thinking

from Stanford’s Design Your Life class

1. Accept! You can’t solve a problem you’re not willing to have

2. Bias towards action. Try something and see how it feels

3. Curiosity. Ask questions. Ask for help.

4. Reframe. Are you solving the right problem? A solvable one?

5. Prototype your way forward (draft, assess, learn, iterate)

1-pagers

from author Jack Carr on the How I Write podcast

Draft a one-sheet back-of-book summary of each option. Lay the pages out in front of you. Which one are you most interested in finishing right now?

Combinations!

For my situation, feeling the feelings + asking for help + bias towards action (a tiny experiment) worked in sequence: I visualized both options and noticed I felt way more excited and happy about one, then asked a couple like-minded friends to advise, then jumped into actually filling out the application and felt awful, and then knew it was not the right decision right now. It was like writing, I just kept iterating until I knew in my gut it was “done”.

How do you make big decisions? I’d love to hear it!

Super thrilled to announce that Threat Assessment, the novella I co-wrote with Mercurio D. Rivera has been selected for another year’s best anthology, this time appearing in The Best Science Fiction of the Year 2025, edited by Neil Clarke. Just look at this amazing table of contents. 

The book drops in November. Pre-order here.

Today's links

• How Canada can save Americans and defeat America: True Carneyism has never been tried.
• Hey look at this: Delights to delectate.
• Object permanence: Brazil v AIDS drug patents; TSA v gel-bras; After the Siege (Russian); Names are hard; Layton's last message; Hospital bill secrets; "The Unraveling"; Friction cannot be reduced, only redistributed; Free Kevin; EFF v Barney; MP3tunes; "Ghosts With Shit jobs"; Ikea as dystopian design-fiction; Torturing "young conservatives"; Roald Dahl body yeast ale; Prisoners die of heat; Privacy v antitrust; The internet is boring (2001); TSA v explosive water; Internet Archive x 9/11; Peter Thiel x litigation financing startup; Universities v unions.
• Upcoming appearances: Sydney, Melbourne, Brighton, London, South Bend.
• Recent appearances: Where I've been.
• Latest books: You keep readin' em, I'll keep writin' 'em.
• Upcoming books: Like I said, I'll keep writin' 'em.
• Colophon: All the rest.

How Canada can save Americans and defeat America (permalink)

As Canada is learning (the hard way), the "art" of all of Trump's deals can be summed up in a single word: "renege":

https://pluralistic.net/2026/07/22/table-flipper/#graveyard-of-indispensable-nations

In 2020, Donald Trump ripped up NAFTA, a trade deal that conferred a huge advantage to the USA at Canada's expense, and replaced it with CUSMA, a trade deal that was even more advantageous to America, and even worse for Canada. In 2024, after being elected for the second time, Trump publicly railed against CUSMA using the exact same language he'd used to decry NAFTA, branding it "a very bad deal" that needed to be shredded and renegotiated.

To that end, Trump declared sweeping tariffs on Canada's exports, thereby raising the costs Americans paid for many everyday goods, because while Canada does not ship a lot of finished products to the US, it is a key supplier of parts and materials, all of which were made instantly more expensive thanks to the Trump tariffs. Trump went on to insist that Canada should annex itself to the US, becoming the "51st State." His operatives openly meddled in Canadian separatist movements, backing the "Wexit" partisans who want to separate the oil-rich, boom/bust-plagued province of Alberta from Canada.

CUSMA was negotiated by Justin Trudeau's government, and Trump II's tariff war landed on Trudeau's successor, Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney, billed as a technocratic safe pair of hands who could be relied upon for sober, effective leadership.

Much to everyone's surprise, Carney – the epitome of a "Davos Man" – responded to the Trump tariffs by traveling to Davos and giving a fiery speech denouncing Trump and declaring a "rupture" that left the old world order dead:

https://www.weforum.org/stories/forum-institutional/davos-2026-special-address-by-mark-carney-prime-minister-of-canada/

Carney promised that Canada would go "elbows up" against America, with retaliatory tariffs, blockades and boycotts of key US exports. Cutting off this stream of goods would have the same effect on Canadians that Trump's tariffs had on Americans: raising prices. Unlike their American cousins, Canadians were far more tolerant of this increase in their cost of living, because, unlike Americans, Canadians believed the narrative that they were sacrificing for the good of their country against an existential threat from a fractious neighbour. Americans were far less willing to believe that Canada was somehow cheating the US or flooding the country with fentanyl.

"Elbows up" is largely a war of symbols, in which Canadians take pride in mastering the minute differences between "Product of Canada," "Made in Canada," "Assembled in Canada," and "Designed in Canada" so they can seek out maximal Canadianness in their consumption choices. There's even a kind of twisted honour in committing yourself to drinking Wayne Gretzky's shitty rye in preference to delicious American bourbon, a way to affirm your love of country with each astringent, metallic swallow.

When the trade war was confined to symbolic terrain, Carney's elbows remained reliably elevated. But outside the realm of symbols, Carney's elbows wilted.

Take the Digital Services tax, a plan to charge America's tax-evading tech giants a 3% levy to make up for the untaxed profits they keep by pretending to be Irish. So long as Trump's tech giants can dodge their tax obligations, they can always outcompete Canada's tech sector, who are expected to pay 38% federal and provincial tax.

American tech companies are closely allied with the Trump regime: they financed his campaign, conduct domestic and international surveillance for him, provide the software to administer his ethnic cleansing, and restrict access to software that helps Americans evade the armed secret police he sent into the streets to kidnap and disappear his enemies:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/10/06/rogue-capitalism/#orphaned-syrian-refugees-need-not-apply

Trump repaid his tech giants by threatening Carney with still more tariffs unless he canceled the Digital Service Act, and Carney capitulated. Meanwhile, Carney raced to enact a plan to fire tens of thousands of civil servants and replace them with AI chatbots running American software on American chips:

https://www.pm.gc.ca/en/news/news-releases/2026/06/04/prime-minister-carney-launches-ai-all-canadas-new-national-artificial

Canada's federal and provincial ministries are all entirely dependent on American cloud software, most notably Microsoft's Office 365, a package that Trump has fashioned into a geopolitical weapon, ordering Microsoft to shut down foreign officials who thwarted his plans, denying them access to all their data and cutting off their ability to communicate with the outside world:

https://apnews.com/article/icc-trump-sanctions-karim-khan-court-a4b4c02751ab84c09718b1b95cbd5db3

In other words, Canada is already terribly vulnerable to American cyberwarfare. Trump's tech companies don't have to hack into Canada's digital infrastructure to shut it down: they already control it. But – incredibly – Carney found a way to make this situation even worse, turning over key aspects of the digital back-end of Canada's military to Palantir, the tech company most closely aligned with Trump, whose CEO openly boasts that his company was founded to kill America's political enemies:

https://thedeepdive.ca/canada-military-palantir-license-deal/

Carney's symbolic gestures – memorable speeches and minor changes to consumption habits – are second to none. But when it comes to building a strong country that is resilient against the attacks we can all foresee (not least because Trump has repeatedly told us he intends to launch them), Carney himself becomes Carneyism's fiercest opponent:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/05/30/rupture/#deeds-not-words

It's not just the attacks that are foreseeable, alas. Trump can always be relied upon – to break his word. Carney repeatedly caved to Trump, and in response, Trump has hit Canada with massive new tariffs – 50%! Remember: the "art" of every Trump deal is renege:

https://www.pbs.org/newshour/economy/what-to-know-about-trumps-50-tariffs-on-canadian-goods-that-just-went-into-effect

Trump can also be relied upon to circle back to his fixations and obsessions. Decades ago, someone showed Trump a Mercator projection map of the Earth and he became obsessed with "yuge" Greenland, to the point where he is prepared to dissolve Nato and go to war with Europe to steal it from Denmark:

https://archive.is/3Q8nj

By the same token, Trump has long been publicly obsessed with the Gilded Age president William McKinley, who enacted sweeping tariffs at a time when the US economy was rapidly growing, a fact that lodged in Trump's brain and led him to believe that tariffs are a surefire growth-hack that will let him eliminate taxes on the wealthy without shutting down the country:

https://edition.cnn.com/2025/02/12/business/trump-william-mckinley-tariffs/

Trump will still be obsessing about these idées fixes when he draws his last breath, gasping out "Greenland…tariffs" as he tumbles from his golden toilet, forehead and coronary arteries bulging from the strain of trying to pass a half-digested Big Mac with only a viscous paste of rectal mucus and Diet Coke to lubricate that final, unyielding bolus.

The fact that Trump is immune to learning from his mistakes (because that would require admitting that he made a mistake) does not bind Canada to do the same. Quite the contrary: Trump's inability to learn or reason means that if Canada engages in novel retaliatory tactics, it stands a good chance of flummoxing the Mad King, leaving him flat-footed and lumbering while it dekes him out and swarms past him.

Lucky for Canada, Trump's incontinent belligerence has opened up a large and diverse territory of novel tactics for conducting both geopolitical and economic policy. As November Kelly says, "Trump inherited a poker game rigged in his favour but he flipped over the table anyway because he resents having to pretend to play." The systems that Trump has dismantled as unfair to the US were, in fact, sources of tremendous advantage to America.

Take those tech companies that have fused so tightly with the Trump regime. These companies operate global monopolies that allow them to extract vast sums and even vaster troves of sensitive data from billions of people around the world. Having attained total economic dominance and total technical lock-in, these companies have embarked on a program of enshittification, squeezing their customers and suppliers for even more data and even more money:

https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374619329/enshittification/

Under normal market conditions, the decay of these American platforms would invite competitors from around the world. The fact that Apple and Google extract 30% of every dollar spent in their app stores would bring forth new app stores who were willing to give better deals to app makers and app users. The fact that HP charges $10,000/gallon for the coloured water in its printers would invite competitors who were willing to take a mere 100,000% margin on ink.

The fact that Meta and Google and Microsoft and Apple spy on you with your devices and software and use that data to target you, manipulate you and overcharge you – and to train their AIs to steal from you even more efficiently – would create demand for privacy blockers, jailbreakers, and other "adversarial interoperability" tools that force your technology to work for you, even if the manufacturer wishes it were otherwise:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/11/01/redistribution-vs-predistribution/#elbows-up-eurostack

But we don't have "normal market conditions." For more than a quarter of a century, the US Trade Representative has demanded that all of America's trading partners – including Canada – enact "anti-circumvention" laws that make it a crime to alter how a digital device works unless the original (usually American) manufacturer consents.

In other words, it's illegal for some Waterloo grads to tap ambitious RIM millionaires for the seed capital to start a company that helps Canadians install Canadian app stores on their Canadian phones so when they buy things from other Canadians, all the money stays in Canada, without a 30% "app tax" being siphoned off by either Google or Apple.

That's right: in 2012, Canada passed a law that lets American companies use Canada's courts to destroy Canadian companies that help Canadian technology users get more out of their own property. This law – the Copyright Modernization Act – was wildly unpopular from the start. A federal consultation drew over 6,000 opposing comments, and only 53 comments in support of the bill. But Prime Minister Stephen Harper whipped the vote among his Conservative MPs and passed it, because he judged that tariff-free access to America's markets to be a price worth paying:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/11/15/radical-extremists/#sex-pest

Trump's tariffs prove that this was a bad bargain. By voluntarily gluing its technological elbows to its sides, Canada made itself easy pickings for America's tech giants, who wiped out Canada's tech sector while making Canada geopolitically and economically dependent on – and vulnerable to – the US and its tech companies. Canada is long overdue for a reckoning with this blunder.

The best time to have made Canada digitally sovereign would have been before an American president announced his intention to annex Canada and began explicitly deploying America's tech companies to attack his geopolitical adversaries.

The second-best time is now.

By repealing Bill C-11 and legalizing reverse-engineering and modification of digital technology with consent of its users and in accordance with privacy, consumer and labour rights, Canada will gain a devastating counter to Trump's tariffs.

Not only will legalizing jailbreaking let Canadians get more out of their own property, it will turn America's tech trillions into Canada's tech billions – while making Canada digitally sovereign by facilitating the uncoupling of Canadian ministries, corporations, households, and devices from America's cloud. This is how Canada removes the digital kill switch it handed to America, a kill switch that can shut down its tractors, phones, and governments.

This is the best possible moment for such a move. To incubate a successful tech sector, you need a) an innovative product; b) skilled technologists; and c) capital. Thanks to Trump, Canada has all three.

First: innovative ideas. Thanks to the prohibition on modifying America's defective tech exports, there is a whole orchard of low-hanging fruit for product designers to pick from: an app that aggregates all of your streaming services into one place and lets you record shows to watch later, even if the service deletes them; reliable tools for using generic ink and independent app stores; new firmware for tractors and cars that facilitates independent repair and unlock subscription features, and, of course, privacy- and ad-blockers of all description. These are truly disruptive products, striking at the maddening antifeatures installed at the insistence of sclerotic, extractive tech bosses. Move fast and break their things!

Next: talent. Who will do that fast moving? Again, we can thank Trump for giving Canada an army of skilled technologists who have fled Silicon Valley one step ahead of an ICE chud who wanted to black-bag them and deport them to Liberia (or a Salvadoran slave-labor camp). Trump is creating the largest wave of reverse brain-drain in history, as everyone ambitious and smart realizes that their lifelong US tech work dream is a nightmare. If Canada can't get enough talent to harvest that orchard of low-hanging fruit from its returning Canadians, it need only open its borders to the skilled technologists of all nations who are racing out of America as fast as they can go.

Finally, money. The AI bubble collapse is imminent. The forces of capital are desperate for promising, high-return investment opportunities that aren't grossly overvalued, overhyped and underperforming AI companies. Even if you can find a company like that in America, it's increasingly apparent that to make that business a success, you will need to buy more $TRUMP coins than your rivals, lest Trump direct his agencies to destroy your fledgling business.

And here's the kicker: turning America's trillions into Canada's billions, moving fast and breaking America's tech-kings, fixing the defects in America's extractive tech exports? It's all good for Americans. Sure, cratering the share-price of America's Big Tech companies will be bad for America's retirement savers, but the median American worker only has $955 saved for retirement:

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/955-saved-for-retirement-millions-are-in-that-boat-150003868.html

Most Americans are far more exposed to the predatory conduct of US tech companies than they are to the share price of those companies. That's because Americans are the beta-testers for every ripoff and surveillance tool that Silicon Valley produces. Long before those tools get to Canada or find their way around the world, they are making Americans poorer and worse off.

Remember: Canada is America's second largest trading partner. Americans are really good at buying things from Canada – even when those things aren't allowed in America. Trump wasn't entirely wrong when he accused Canada of flooding America with drugs – but the drugs Canada sends to America aren't fentanyl and oxy. Canada sends America insulin and other cheap pharmaceuticals that cost 10-100x more in Ripoff America than they do in Canada. If Americans can figure out how to buy cheap generic meds from Canadians over the US Postal Service, they will be able to buy disenshittification tools from Canadians over the internet.

Selling Americans products that make their lives better is much better politics than boycotting American products that make Canadians' lives better. No politician can pursue a strategy of higher prices and lower living standards forever – not even if you've got a lot of "elbows up" rhetoric you can use to convince Canadians that they're doing their duty to the nation by paying more for everything. Paying more for everything to punish Americans is like punching yourself in the face as hard as you can and hoping the downstairs neighbours say "ouch."

When Canadians swap delicious American bourbon for Wayne Gretzky's shitty rye, they punish corn farmers in states that begin and end with a vowel – farmers who have nothing to do with Canada's problems. By swapping disenshittification for tariffs, Canadians can go back to drinking delicious bourbon, and make money from that farmer by selling him the jailbreaks he needs to fix his tractor without paying the John Deere tax of $200+ that the company charges after you do your own repair to send someone to the farm to type an unlock code into your console.

A lot of Very Serious Grown Up Canadians have told me that they think Carney should confine his response to Trump to toothless symbolic gestures, lest they make Trump mad. Trump is always mad. He gets mad at symbolic gestures. He gets mad if you point out that Ronald Reagan thought tariffs were stupid:

https://abcnews.com/Politics/trump-raises-tariffs-canada-10-after-reagan-ad/story?id=126866712

Freeing Americans from the tyranny of their own tech companies has the power to create a partisan army of American Canada weebs who will fight for Canada when – not if – Trump gets mad at Canada. That's the best defense Canada can have – common cause and solidarity with the people of America, who share a common enemy in Trump, the least popular president in history, who is looting billions and letting his cronies destroy Americas' lives.

That's some real elbows up stuff. True Carneyism has never been tried – especially by Carney. It's long past time someone gave it a go.

Hey look at this (permalink)

• Shielded from Shame: Civil Immunity for Ontario's Long-Term Care Facilities in the Wake of Covid-19 https://www.canlii.org/en/commentary/doc/2021CanLIIDocs13991#!fragment//BQCwhgziBcwMYgK4DsDWszIQewE4BUBTADwBdoByCgSgBpltTCIBFRQ3AT0otokLC4EbDtyp8BQkAGU8pAELcASgFEAMioBqAQQByAYRW1SYAEbRS2ONWpA

• Many recent grads say AI is making it harder to get a job. Economists aren't so sure https://www.npr.org/2026/08/18/nx-s1-5910677/recent-college-graduates-employment-job-artificial-intelligence

• Shitbot https://dodoeraser.org/2026/07/29/shitbot/

• Nonfeasance, Misfeasance, and Malfeasance: Academic Freedom in a Nutshell https://3d.laboratorium.net/2026-08-23-academic-misfeasance

Object permanence (permalink)

#25yrsago Kevin Mitnick is out of prison https://web.archive.org/web/20010000000000*/https://www.techtv.com/screensavers/showtell/story/0,23008,3343816,00.html

#25yrsago Brazil to nationalize AIDS drug patents https://edition.cnn.com/2001/WORLD/americas/08/22/aids.drug/index.html

#25yrsago Copyright your DNA https://web.archive.org/web/20010827170510/http://www.cosmiverse.com/science08230102.html

#25yrsago The internet is boring now https://www.nytimes.com/2001/08/26/us/exploration-of-world-wide-web-tilts-from-eclectic-to-mudane.html

#20yrsago TSA busts “explosive water” that turns out to be cosmetics https://web.archive.org/web/20060822123448/http://www.kxma.com/getARticle.asp?ArticleId=35223

#20yrsago Windows Media DRM cracked, no one cares https://archive.blogs.harvard.edu/cmusings/2006/08/25/#a1889

#20yrsago Canadian music label puts fans and artists first https://web.archive.org/web/20060830211418/http://wired.com/wired/archive/14.09/nettwerk_pr.html

#20yrsago After the Siege in Russian https://craphound.com/Cory_Doctorow_-_After_the_Siege_Russian.html

#20yrsago Victory in War on Moisture: Gel-bras once again safe! https://web.archive.org/web/20060820185006/http://www.tsa.gov/travelers/airtravel/prohibited/permitted-prohibited-items.shtm

#20yrsago EFF sues Barney the humorless, copyright maximalist dinosaur https://web.archive.org/web/20060813093642/http://www.eff.org/news/archives/2006_08.php#004884

#15yrsago MP3tunes verdict: music lockers are legal https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2011/08/mp3tunes-victory-music-lockers-is-good

#15yrsago Lolita on Wikipedia: 2,300 edits later https://web.archive.org/web/20111008072145/http://www.theawl.com/2011/08/case-history-of-a-wikipedia-page-nabokov’s-lolita

#15yrsago SF mockumentary: ‘Ghosts With Shit Jobs’ — China looks at westerners with awful jobs https://ghostswithshitjobs.com/

#15yrsago Information consumes attention: focus in the age of abundant stimulus https://web.archive.org/web/20111113004501/http://nymag.com/print/?/news/features/56793/

#15yrsago Jack Layton’s final public words: “Love is better than anger. Hope is better than fear.” https://web.archive.org/web/20110829050308/http://beta.images.theglobeandmail.com/archive/01310/Jack_Layton_s_lett_1310744a.pdf

#15yrsago Getting people’s names right in software design: a LOT harder than it looks https://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2011/08/why-im-not-on-google-plus.html

#15yrsago Internet Archive’s cache of 24/7 TV footage from 9/11 and beyond https://archive.org/details/911

#10yrsago Peter Thiel & Y Combinator fund a “litigation financing” startup to make money off other peoples’ lawsuits https://gizmodo.com/a-startup-backed-by-peter-thiel-makes-bankrolling-civil-1785707590

#10yrsago Universities fought unionization’s ‘one-size-fits-all’ using identical arguments https://crookedtimber.org/2016/08/25/great-minds-think-alike/

#10yrsago 5 years after Texas GOP’s attack on women’s reproductive health, TX leads developed world in maternal mortality https://web.archive.org/web/20160820212602/https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/aug/20/texas-maternal-mortality-rate-health-clinics-funding

#10yrsago You didn’t find a meteorite https://sites.wustl.edu/meteoritesite/

#10yrsago Young Conservatives’ “leadership seminar” featured food & water deprivation, sexist epithets, physical abuse https://web.archive.org/web/20160824145226/https://www.thestar.com/news/queenspark/2016/08/23/ontario-tories-apologize-to-party-activists-after-controversial-youth-seminar.html

#10yrsago The 2017 Ikea Catalog considered as dystopian urban microapartment futurism https://web.archive.org/web/20160817154440/https://www.fastcodesign.com/3062854/ikeas-2017-catalog-is-a-terrifying-glimpse-into-the-tiny-apartments-of-the-future

#10yrsago Singapore will disconnect entire civil service from the internet https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/aug/24/singapore-to-cut-off-public-servants-from-the-internet

#10yrsago They’re making a Twits ale from Roald Dahl’s body-yeast https://web.archive.org/web/20160817154531/http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/news/beer-to-be-made-from-yeast-swabbed-from-roald-dahls-writing-chair-a7195721.html

#10yrsago As America’s temperatures soar, prisoners are dropping dead https://web.archive.org/web/20160825000426/https://theintercept.com/2016/08/24/deadly-heat-in-u-s-prisons-is-killing-inmates-and-spawning-lawsuits/

#5yrsago Are privacy and antitrust on a collision course? https://pluralistic.net/2021/08/24/illegitimate-greatness/#peanut-butter-in-my-antitrust

#5yrsago What kind of emergency is our emergency? https://pluralistic.net/2021/08/23/dont-wanna-spoil-the-surprise/#monocausotaxophilia

#5yrsago The secrets of hospital bills https://pluralistic.net/2021/08/23/dont-wanna-spoil-the-surprise/#surprise

#5yrsago Belarusian dictator pwned by "cyber-partisans" https://pluralistic.net/2021/08/25/taxes-are-for-the-little-stores/#cyber-partisans

#5yrsago Big Box stores' other shoe drops https://pluralistic.net/2021/08/25/taxes-are-for-the-little-stores/#metastatic-parasites

#5yrsago The Unraveling https://pluralistic.net/2021/08/23/dont-wanna-spoil-the-surprise/#the-two-genders

#1yrago Friction cannot be reduced, it can only be redistributed https://pluralistic.net/2025/08/23/become-unoptimizable/#downward-redistribution

Upcoming appearances (permalink)

• Melbourne: Enshittification at the Wheeler Centre, Aug 25
  https://www.wheelercentre.com/events-tickets/season-2026/cory-doctorow-enshittification

• London: AI and the Enshittification of the Media, NUJ (Sep 2)
  https://www.nuj.org.uk/learn/ems-event-calendar/ai-and-the-enshitification-of-the-media.html

• Brighton: The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI with Carole Cadwalladr (Brighton Dome), Sep 8
  https://brightondome.org/whats-on/LSC-cory-doctorow-the-reverse-centaurs-guide-to-life-after-ai/

• London: The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI with Riley Quinn (Foyle's Picadilly), Sep 9
  https://www.foyles.co.uk/events/enshittification-cory-doctorow-riley-quinn

• South Bend: An Evening With Cory Doctorow (Notre Dame), Oct 6
  https://franco.nd.edu/events/2026/10/06/an-evening-with-cory-doctorow/

• Hudson, OH: Hudson Library, Oct 7
  https://engagedpatrons.org/EventsExtended.cfm?SiteID=3850&EventID=596952&PK=

• Victoria: Munro's Books, Oct 20
  https://www.munrobooks.com/events/6113620261020

• Vancouver: BC Policy Solutions Gala, Nov 12
  https://bcpolicy.ca/gala/

Recent appearances (permalink)

• Hope, AI, Fixing the Internet and the Reverse Centaur of it all (Wilosophy)
  https://podcastaddict.com/everyone-relax/episode/231414816

• Deflating the AI Bubble (Do Not Pass Go)
  https://www.donotpassgo.ca/p/deflating-the-ai-bubble-with-cory

• Technofeudal Enshittification (Fucking Cancelled)
  https://www.fuckingcancelled.com/p/technofeudal-enshittification-with

• Who The Machine Serves (EFF)
  https://archive.org/details/effecting-change-who-the-machine-serves

• Speculative Fiction for Social Change II (Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff)
  https://pocketcasts.com/podcast/cool-people-who-did-cool-stuff/08cbb840-a6ae-013a-d8aa-0acc26574db2/part-two-cory-doctorow-on-speculative-fiction-for-social-change/937e8800-9404-45a6-b5e3-90ebee2cfaea

Latest 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/

• "Canny Valley": A limited edition collection of the collages I create for Pluralistic, self-published, September 2025 https://pluralistic.net/2025/09/04/illustrious/#chairman-bruce

• "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)

• "The Post-American Internet," a geopolitical sequel of sorts to Enshittification, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2027

• "Unauthorized Bread": a middle-grades graphic novel adapted from my novella about refugees, toasters and DRM, FirstSecond, April 20, 2027

• "Enshittification, Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It" (the graphic novel), Firstsecond, 2027

• "The Memex Method," Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2027

Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources:

Currently writing:

• “Once Is Enemy Action,” a science fiction novel about the origins of modern technofascism. Today's words: 557 (9258 total).

• "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. Fourth draft completed. Submitted to editor.

• A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING

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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

Interesting paper:

Abstract: With entrepreneurial fraud cases on the rise, we investigate how entrepreneurs carry out criminal deception, employing deceptive means to defraud audiences. Analyzing court data from Silicon Valley ventures and their founders prosecuted for fraud between 2000 and 2023, our findings reveal that entrepreneurs carry out criminal deception through a process of façading: Entrepreneurs construct, perform, and protect illusory appearances (façades) that externally project high-growth performance to audiences while masking ventures’ actual underperformance. We identify three forms of façading—­surface, reinforced, and deep façading­—that are contingent on the severity of the gap that entrepreneurs face between audiences’ performance expectations and ventures’ performance reality. Our theoretical framework captures how entrepreneurs facing minor, wide, and extreme expectation-reality gaps engage in evermore sophisticated efforts to detach the venture’s externally projected appearance from its actual operational reality. Practically, we propose several approaches to deter and detect criminal deception, including the extension of U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission surveillance and whistleblower program, investor due diligence reform, and dedicated entrepreneurship education interventions that clearly demarcate when entrepreneurs transgress into criminal deception. We make contributions to literatures on cultural entrepreneurship, organizational wrongdoing, and the social effects of entrepreneurship. ...

"It isn't the mountains ahead to climb that wear you out; it's the pebble in your shoe." - Muhammad Ali

Lots of monopoly news this past week, as usual.

Before getting to the full round-up, I want to explore a new concept I thought about recently, based on a conversation I had with a hotel owner. It has to do with the post-pandemic puzzle so many economists are noodling on, which is why the economy looks to be doing fine in most conventional measurements such as unemployment, jobs, economic growth, and so forth, but the public is just incredibly sour.

Sure, gas prices are high, but the sourness was there before the war in Iran. Sure there’s inequality and health care is expensive, but those problems has long predated this moment. I have identified interest rates, as well as surveillance pricing, as a meaningful cost of living that isn’t incorporated into the Consumer Price Index. But I’m not fully satisfied. Something that isn’t being measured is affecting how we perceive commerce. And I think it has to do with the increasing cost we are paying for everyday goods and services, not necessarily just in cash, but in terms of time dealing with bullshit.

I came to this realization because I was on vacation last week, and I had the common experience of being cheated by a tech platform that connects consumers and hotels. I know it’s common because the hotel owner told me so. “This year, it seems like the amount of cheating from tech platforms has just exploded,” he said. I’m going to keep some of the specifics vague because I don’t love revealing personal info online, but it doesn’t really matter, you’ll get the gist.

We were traveling in New England, and my wife booked a hotel on a third party site called Agoda. They apparently buy blocks of rooms, and then resell them to consumers. We have certain requirements, and my wife is very detail-oriented. She booked a certain sized room. Only when we arrived at our hotel, instead of having the room that my family could sleep in, they had a smaller room in which we couldn’t fit.

It was an independently owned inn, run by lovely people. We showed them our booking receipt for a bigger room, they showed us their booking bill for a smaller room. Clearly, some middleman broker selling blocks of rooms simply lied or had a screw-up somewhere. The innkeeper tried to accommodate us, but the hotel was fully booked. And he couldn’t refund us, because we hadn’t paid him, we had paid Agoda. So we had to book a new room at a different hotel.

As we were talking about the problem with the hotel owner, he explained that this situation has become far more common over the last year, particularly when it involves something called “B2B distribution network,” which is likely a wholesaler owned by Expedia that sells rooms to brokers and online travel agencies, like Agoda. He showed us this document.

We booked through Agoda, but the hotel was paid via Expedia, which had sent this information representing our reservation to the hotel. And sure enough, the sizes were different. But more interesting than just the screw-up was that he had to take a marker and black out the price he received for what we booked. The hotel is not allowed to tell customers the commission they must pay third parties like Expedia. In addition, the hotel doesn’t get our actual credit card, but a dummy credit card, and he wasn’t even able to get our contact information until we showed up.

The rest of the story won’t surprise you. My wife tried to get in touch with Agoda, but they had her use an AI chatbot and it kept disconnecting. So she went to her credit card company, which gave her the number of the merchant to contact. Somehow she wound up back on the AI chatbot, and presented all of the evidence. Agoda then conceded there had been an error, offered a “sincere” apology but kept asking on a loop if she agreed to keep her booking.

These actions are, of course, fraud. And it’s also a particular kind of fraud. It’s not that the innkeeper is trying to cheat us, or we’re trying to cheat the innkeeper. The actual people trying to conduct business - the consumer and the hotel - were operating in good faith. It’s just that some MBA dipshit realized there was an arbitrage opportunity in cheating both independent hotels and consumers, assuming that you could wear down just enough people to stop asking for refunds such that you’d have a profitable business.

The thing is, whether we get a refund or not, we had to spend time fighting this nonsense. The scammers here are dumping the burden of proof onto consumers and ordinary small business people like these hotel operators, which is a form of social pollution. They may only steal money from a few of us, but they steal time from all of us. They are time bandits. (And yes, I’m naming them after the classic 1981 movie.)

Now, a brief aside, the reason fraud and scams have skyrocketed this past year is because tech-enabled scammers know that there is no cop on the beat. That’s the fault of man named Andrew Ferguson, who is the Chair of the Federal Trade Commission. The FTC was the agency tasked with preventing cheating, but it no longer does that. I’ve known Andrew for a few years, he read my book (or at least said he did), and we had a few fun conversations in 2024 back when the right was doing their flirtation with populism. I may do an essay on Ferguson at some point, but why he has chosen not to police the marketplace is unimportant. That he has chosen not to police the marketplace is what matters, because that is why we’re living in a scammers paradise.

So on our vacation, thanks to Ferguson, my wife and I were spending time doing logistical work to deal with being cheated. And time is a real cost, it is almost as if we were assigned a second job, with the pay being the original amount paid to Agoda. What kind of effect do these scams have on our psyches? It takes a toll. Now, despite being cheated, I’ve been on break, so I’m in a good mood and can take a step back. And all of a sudden, I realized this storm of tech-enabled cheating is relentless. My time is constantly being stolen.

It’s not a one-off here or there. I get 5-7 spam text messages a day from different scam political committees, and another 3-5 spam text messages from scammers trying to sell random services or offer jobs or surveys. I don’t even think about it now, I just type STOP or send them to junk, knowing that they won’t relent regardless. Apple could allow third parties to create text message spam filters, but it won’t, because it’s a monopolist and doesn’t have to. It’s easier to allow time theft.

Another example of time banditry are junk fees and deceptive practices. A few weeks ago, I was looking at hotels using Google Maps, and nearly all the prices were artificially low. You’d see a bunch of hotel prices on the map, and click on one of them, and then it turns out the room wasn’t available, or the price was much higher, or a combination. Again, very minor, but just more time thievery.

Even small things, like the ability to search emails to get receipts to contest fraudulent charges - those are worsening too. I have realized, I am constantly on guard someone might be cheating me. And that’s not even getting to the health care system, which is probably the biggest time bandit of all. In America, when you get sick, you also get a second job dealing with paperwork.

And I think that dynamic of time theft is impacting all of us. If you take that extra time spent dealing with all these hassles, and add it up, it is as if we are all working a lot more than we used to, with no pay. That isn’t measured by any statistic I can see, but it’s very real.

Before my vacation, I was feeling really burnt out. And that is kind of odd, considering the politics that I’ve been pointing to for almost twenty years - economic populism - is on the verge of what seems like some historic victories. Now, there are good reasons for pessimism, but the relentlessness of the scams and cheating, the very routinization of it, is a real and unknowable cost that I just hadn’t thought about. I mean, if I had to tell you how much hotels cost in New England, I couldn’t. Does that include the scam? Does that include the hours we spent frustrated at AI bots?

How extensive is time theft in America? No one knows, but I’m guessing it’s pretty common. Americans filed one million internet crime complaints with the FBI, with fraud losses increasing 26% from 2024 to 2025. Consumers lost eight times as much to scams in 2025 as they did in 2020. And Americans are turning on one another, it is the only nation where Pew found more people think the morality and ethics of their fellow countrymen is bad rather than good. Cheating, it seems, is routine.

Now, I believe Americans are by and large good and honest people. The cheating and bad morals are institutional in nature. Much of the corporate world engages in extractive corrupt pricing games, and there are judges and enforcers like Ferguson who refuse to use the political technology known as consumer protection law. It’s not most Americans acting badly. But it is very hard to know that, because our time is constantly being stolen, and it is increasingly hard to identify credible trusted ways to understand what is happening.

I think this constant barrage of time theft explains why Americans are so angry at data centers and AI. There’s nothing inherently bad about AI, which is just using structured statistical inference technology. But in this historical moment most use cases seem to be neutral or negative. I could point to our recent experience with AI this vacation, which has been dealing with chatbots offering “sincere” apologies while refusing to make us whole. We all know, at some level, that the mistakes AI fosters are going to be dumped on us, as workers, consumers, business owners, whoever we are, having to spend our precious time cleaning up the mistakes that someone else realized they could foist on others.

And so we’re just angry at these extra costs, even though we have no way of articulating them as such and economists and government beancounters aren’t looking for them when they compile their statistics of pricing and wages. But they are very real.

I’ll close out with a note of optimism. These problems aren’t hard to fix. We know how to stop cheating. Do more enforcement, allow people to sue directly by getting rid of arbitration agreements, and put liability onto platforms who are structural bedrock for deceptive practices in the marketplace. That would stop the time bandits, and let everyone chill out a bit more. I am optimistic on this front, because it’s so noticeable how much scamming is going on and the political winds are shifting. We can see that with the polling and action on data centers and surveillance pricing.

Oh, and since it’s the age of cheating, I have a confession. Remember that quote up top from Muhammad Ali on the pebble in your shoe? Yeah, that’s not his. It’s probably from an early 20th century insurance trade publication. Great line, though.

And now, the monopoly-related news of the week, with lots of great stories.

There are a whole bunch of new private antitrust cases, against giants in fertilizer, skiing, and apartment rentals in NYC. The Trump FTC takes a bold stance against price gouging people having heart attacks, saying that ambulance companies must disclose that they are overcharging a dying person. They can still do it, they just have to say they are doing it. Plus, Paramount unwisely aligns itself with the politics of Flock cameras.

That and a lot more, including some really optimistic news on coming elections.

Read more