Source: Berkeley Earth

It has been a brutal winter in much of the United States. Weather is a chaotic system in which extreme events are always happening somewhere. But as I am sure you have noticed, extreme weather events — catastrophic storms and flooding, punishing droughts, and yes, extreme cold snaps — are becoming more common as a result of climate change.

For climate change is not just continuing: it’s accelerating. Multiple estimates find that 2025 was one of the warmest years on record for the planet, exceeded only by 2024 and 2023. Indeed, Berkeley Earth reports that “The warming spike observed in 2023 to 2025 has been extreme and suggests an acceleration in the rate of Earth’s warming.”

In other news, the Trump administration has gone to war against any and all efforts to limit climate change. The administration is also imposing a “blockade” against wind and solar projects, delaying or even revoking permits, whether or not these projects have received federal subsidies.

Now, there isn’t a genuine scientific dispute about the reality of global warming and its causes. There isn’t even a serious dispute about the costs of fighting climate change: the economics of green energy are more favorable than they have ever been.

So what’s going on? The Trump administration hates science and science-based policies in general; look at its war on vaccines, which will end up causing an enormous number of deaths. Its assault on universities threatens the best scientific research centers in the world. Its irrational treatment of immigrants means the best and brightest from the around the world no longer want to come here. But in the case of energy, its destructive policy largely reflects the corrupting influence of big money.

I’ll explain in a minute. First, some background.

Almost 40 years have passed since James Hansen’s landmark Senate testimony warning about global warming. He was right. Climate science has been overwhelmingly vindicated by reality.

However, the economics and politics of climate policy have played out very differently from what almost anyone expected.

As late as the 2010s, many observers — myself included — would have said that the big problem in addressing climate change was who would bear the cost. Policies to limit greenhouse gas emissions, everyone believed, would slow the growth of the economy and of real incomes. True, anti-environmentalists were grossly exaggerating these costs. In 2009 I wrote that

[T]he best available economic analyses suggest that even deep cuts in greenhouse gas emissions would impose only modest costs on the average family.

But what we knew at the time nonetheless said that there would be significant costs to slowing global warming. And this was problematic, because the costs of limiting emissions would be incurred right away, while the benefits of reduced warming would accrue decades later — and many of them would go to other countries. So action on climate appeared to require (a) international cooperation (b) persuading voters to accept costs now in exchange for a better world many years in the future.

And it was all too easy to be pessimistic about the prospects both for cooperation and for persuading voters to accept even modest future-oriented sacrifices.

Then came the renewable energy revolution. Solar and wind power have become cost-competitive with fossil fuels — they are, in particular, clearly cheaper than coal. Huge progress in batteries has rapidly reduced the problem of intermittency (the sun doesn’t always shine, the wind doesn’t always blow.) There’s now a clear path for a transition to an “electrotech” economy in which renewable-generated electricity heats our homes, powers our cars, and much more.

This transition would make us richer, not poorer. In fact, nations that for whatever reason fail to take advantage of electrotech will be left behind in global competition.

And at this precise moment — a moment in which acting to accelerate the energy transition would increase, not reduce, economic growth — the U.S. government has been taken over by people who want us to go backward on energy. The Trump administration has even introduced a mascot, “Coalie,” in an attempt to make an extremely dirty fuel cute. But coal isn’t cute. Even if we ignore the role of coal in climate change, coal-burning power plants caused hundreds of thousands of excess U.S. deaths between 1999 and 2020.

What explains this extraordinary rejection of progress and embrace of energy know-nothingism?

Money may not be the whole story, but it’s a lot of the story.

Indeed, much of what is happening to American democracy has its origins in the long-term strategy of the billionaire Koch brothers. The Kochs spent decades promoting right-wing politics in general, with a special role in the takeover of the Supreme Court by the Federalist Society. But an important part of their agenda, and hence that of the right-wing movement as a whole, has always been to keep America burning the fossil fuels on which their wealth rested. If you want to know more, read Lisa Graves’ book on the Roberts Supreme Court, “Without precedent”.

At this point, moreover, it’s not just about normal channels of political influence, nor it just about domestic billionaires. We now live in a time in which U.S. policy is shaped by sheer, naked corruption (enabled in part by the Koch takeover of the courts). Notably, Middle Eastern petrostates, which have a strong interest in blocking the energy transition, have played a huge role in enriching the Trump family.

It’s somewhat surprising that other big-money interests haven’t pushed back. After all, crippling the development of renewable energy is bad for business, and especially bad for the electricity-hungry crypto and AI industries, which ordinarily have a great deal of sway with the Trump administration. But maybe they have decided that special treatment, and especially a green light for their own unethical behavior, matters more than affordable energy.

If there’s any good news here, it is that from a global point of view this malignancy may not matter very much. America is not the world. In fact, at this point we’re responsible for only a small fraction of global greenhouse gas emissions:

So America’s hard turn against renewables and climate action won’t be decisive for the climate future as long as other countries continue to move ahead on green energy, which they are. For the most part, all MAGA will do is help make the United States backward, poorer, sicker and irrelevant.

MUSICAL CODA

Over the past decade, India has built the world’s largest real-time payments system. By using public infrastructure to expand financial inclusion, it offers a model for other developing countries that want to modernize payments without being dependent on a few multinational corporations.

Childhood vaccination is one of public policy’s greatest success stories. People who view the 1950s through rose-colored glasses, seeing them as an era of American greatness, miss many ways in which life was much worse then than now, ranging from gross racism and sexism to high poverty rates among the elderly. One often-overlooked feature of the “good old days” was that many children contracted, and some died from, infectious diseases that have now been almost eliminated — or had been almost eliminated, until today’s right-wing anti-vaccine agitators set the stage for their comeback.

In many ways the Trump administration’s hostility to vaccines is similar to its hostility to clean energy, which I wrote about yesterday. Both policy swerves will kill Americans. If Trumpists succeed in forcing the U.S. to burn more coal, thousands will die from air pollution. Only a year into the Trump 47 administration, there is already a resurgence in almost conquered diseases due to the anti-vax MAGA crusade. Both these sudden policy serves are economically destructive: A 2024 report from the Centers for Disease Control estimated that each dollar spent on childhood vaccination has saved around $11 in societal costs.

Moreover, the Trumpists aren’t content with just cutting off federal funding — they’re determined to stop anyone else from doing the right thing. The Trump administration has imposed a blockade on privately funded wind and solar projects, while RFK Jr.’s allies are pushing to prevent states from implementing childhood vaccine mandates.

And the damage from the assault on vaccines continues to widen. Last week the Food and Drug Administration refused to review Moderna’s new mRNA-based flu vaccine. They didn’t reject it based on evidence; they wouldn’t even look at it, in line with RFK Jr.’s evidence-free, dogmatic assertion that mRNA technology, which gave us Covid vaccines, is useless and harmful. Pharmaceutical companies, understandably, are retreating from vaccine development.

The motivations behind the crusade against clean energy and the crusade against vaccines are also similar. The conspiracy-theorizing hostility to science and expertise in general that underpins both movements also predisposes people to become right-wing extremists, which means that their movements are now in power. The headline on a 2023 article in The Guardian captured this perfectly: “ ‘Everything you’ve been told is a lie’: Inside the wellness-to-fascism pipeline.”

Last but by no means least, in both cases it’s crucial to follow the money.

It may seem strange to think of the wellness industry as a corrupt and corrupting force comparable to the fossil-fuel sector. But wellness is big business. McKinsey estimates that U.S. spending on wellness is running at around $500 billion a year, while spending on nutritional supplements alone was close to $70 billion last year.

And sellers of nutritional supplements, unlike companies selling pharmaceuticals, are effectively allowed to make false, outlandish claims about what their products do. Here’s how the National Institutes of Health summarized the law:

Dietary supplement labels may include certain types of health-related claims. Manufacturers are permitted to say, for example, that a supplement promotes health or supports a body part or function (like heart health or the immune system). These claims must be followed by the words, “This statement has not been evaluated by the Food and Drug Administration. This product is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any disease.”

In other words, it’s OK to peddle snake oil with false medical claims as long as you mumble some content-freeboilerplate.

And where do the snake-oil salesmen peddle their wares? Largely on right-wing media. After all, that’s where they can find customers who have the right mix of anti-intellectualism and disdain for experts. And the snake-oil purveyors are, in turn, a key part of the extreme right’s financial ecosystem.

I wrote about this almost five years ago. The relationship between quack medicine and right-wing extremism has a long history. As the historian Rick Perlstein has documented, extremists have been marketing medical snake oil, and snake oil purveyors have been financially supporting extremism, since the days when misinformation had to be disseminated through paper newsletters. This mutually beneficial relationship continued through the eras of talk radio, cable TV, and now podcasts.

But now we have entered a new era. As many observers have noted, the Trump administration is a kakistocracy: rule by the worst. A history of personal corruption is no longer a bar to high office — it’s practically a requirement.

Under Trump 47, people who have enriched themselves by peddling medical misinformation are no longer just influencing policymakers. They have become policymakers. Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., who appears to have made millions in salary and book royalties thanks to his anti-vaccine screeds, is now the secretary of health and human services. Dr. Oz is running Medicare and Medicaid.

In short, the kakistocracy is also a quackistocracy.

And the reign of the quacks will condemn thousands, perhaps millions of Americans — many of them children — to gratuitous illness and in some cases death.

MUSICAL CODA

Some Americans have been talking about our shared European culture lately!  As CT’s resident American-in-Europe, I feel I must respond.  So, here’s a European culture story.  (This is Part 2,  You can find Part 1 here.)

Okay, so Imperia!  Big concrete statue on the shore of Lake Constance.  Medieval sex worker.  9 meters tall, weighs 18 tons, rotates once every four minutes.  Here she is again:

Let’s look at some details.


Imperia is Ready for her Closeup

In her right hand, Imperia holds this sad chump:

He’s a medieval Emperor.  In his own hand he holds an orb, representing universal secular power.  He wears Roman-style sandals.  He’s naked, and his genitals dangle limply.  His expression is glum, dejected, resigned.

In her left hand, this guy:


He’s a Pope.  While the Emperor has the physique of an aging athlete, the Pope is a flabby nerd.  He’s naked too, but his legs are crossed.  He wears delicate little socks with pointy toes.  His plump face is pulled into a moue of annoyance.  While the Emperor’s body language is limp and drooping, the Pope is tense with irritation.  The Emperor is impotent; the Pope is frustrated.

And then there’s Imperia herself:



There’s a lot going on with Imperia, but the detail that catches the eye?  Her small, cruel smile. 

More generally, everything about her radiates strength, confidence, command.  Her head is upright — the flowery ornament emphasizes this — but her eyes are directed very slightly downward, de haut en bas, as if contemplating something beneath her.  She’s literally looking down her nose at you.

Her posture is erect, shoulders broad.  She’s holding up the two shrunken men without the slightest sign of effort.  She’s strong: you can see muscle under her sleeves, and more muscle along her extended thigh.

One foot is off the ground, but this doesn’t suggest imbalance.  She’s obviously stepping forward, advancing. 

(I found one critic who thought she was inspired by the Minoan Snake Goddess.  That’s a pretty deep cut, but… maybe?)



So Imperia went up in 1993.  The sculptor was a guy named Peter Lenk, who is still around.  I’m not a fan.  Most of Lenk’s sculptures are 3-D political cartoons, and they’re usually some combination of ugly and vulgar.  He’s got a following, but most of his stuff leaves me flat.  

Imperia, though… Imperia, in my opinion, goes pretty hard.  I view Lenk as a one-hit wonder, and Imperia is his Macarena.

Scandal at the Council

In the previous post, I went on at some length about the Council of Constance.  One detail I omitted: during the years of the Council, 1415-18, Constance was famously full of sex workers. 

Makes sense, right?  The Council was all men — priests, bishops, noblemen, professors, lawyers.  Plus their servants, plus all the workers who came into town to support them.  Thousands of men, away from home for years at a time.  Obviously there were going to be sex workers.  And because Constance was a small city that was drastically overcrowded, the sex workers were really obvious.  They couldn’t be herded into a red light district, because there literally wasn’t room.

And this was very much commented on at the time.  You had the densest concentration of religious and political elites that Europe had seen in generations.  They were here to reform the Church, so that it could provide spiritual and moral guidance to the world.  But the moment you set foot in Constance… 

The optics were not great.  Before long, Europe was abuzz.  It was an age of cheap woodcuts, and these told the story better than any thousand words:


[included: hot bath, dinner, musical accompaniment]

And then of course the Council was mostly a failure.  Yes, they fixed the problem of the three Popes.  But they didn’t solve the Hussite heresy.  (In fact, by the brutal judicial murder of Jan Hus, they created a martyr and made it worse.)  They didn’t repair the broken system that kept producing bad Popes.  And they barely gestured half-heartedly in the direction of reforming the Church.

So Imperia is a sarcastic commentary on the hypocrisy of the Council members, 600 years after the fact?  Sure, that works.  But I think there’s a lot more going on here.  Good art has layers, and while I wouldn’t call Imperia great art, I think she’s a serious work.

Here’s one layer:  Sculptor Lenk has acknowledged an inspiration.  It’s the short story “La Belle Imperia”, written in 1831 by French author Guy de Balzac. 

The Veterinary of Incurable Diseases
 
I have learned more from Balzac than from all the professional historians, economists, and statisticians of the period altogether — Friedrich Engels



I’m not going to go down a rabbit hole about Balzac, but he was a damn interesting dude.  He’s one of those characters who combined a love of life — eating, drinking, chasing women, parties and arguments — with rigorous and terrifying work habits: he wrote over 90 novels plus millions of words of essays and short stories.   

Lots of writers have drunk themselves to death.  Balzac may be the only one who did it with coffee.  He drank forty to fifty tall, strong cups per day, every day, for thirty years.  Unsurprisingly he developed heart problems, which claimed his life at the age of 51.  (To be fair, the three or four bottles of wine and several cigars per day probably didn’t help.)

Balzac got the odd nickname “vétérinaire des maladies incurables,” possibly because a lot of his stories involved situations that were simply screwed beyond hope of redemption.  His short story “La Belle Imperia” fits this pattern. In the story, Imperia is a high-status courtesan at the Council of Constance.  A naive young priest falls in love with her, and wackiness ensues. 

I don’t think it’s a fantastic story — I’m not a huge Balzac fan to begin with, and I don’t think this is his best — but if you like, you can read it for yourself.  And I do think Balzac’s introduction of Imperia is worth noting:

Imperia was the most precious, the most fantastic girl in the world, although she passed for the most dazzling and the beautiful, and the one who best understood the art of bamboozling cardinals and softening the hardiest soldiers and oppressors of the people. She had brave captains, archers, and nobles, ready to serve her at every turn. She had only to breathe a word, and the business of anyone who had offended her was settled. A free fight only brought a smile to her lips, and often the Sire de Baudricourt — one of the King’s Captains — would ask her if there were any one he could kill for her that day… Thus she lived beloved and respected, quite as much as the real ladies and princesses, and was called Madame.

In 1855, Gustave Dore did an illustration of Imperia:


It’s early Dore — he was just getting started — and not that great.  Still, we’ll come back to it.

So Imperia is just a story about a very charismatic sex worker who rules men with her wiles?  Well… there’s more.  Because Balzac got the idea for a courtesan named Imperia from actual history.  

Scarlet Woman

There was a real Imperia.  Her name was Imperia Cognati, and she lived in Rome around the turn of the 16th century —  a contemporary of Machiavelli and Leonardo da Vinci.  For about a decade right after 1500, she utterly dominated the Roman social scene.  Her lovers included Agostino Chigi.  Chigi is now forgotten, but he was the richest man in Italy for decades, and a major patron of the Renaissance.

[as he got richer, his images looked ever more like Jesus]

Rabbit hole avoided: I was going to write a couple of thousand words about Chigi, his monopoly on the alum trade, and how that brought him into head-on conflict with King Henry VII of England, whose grandfather Owen Tudor we glimpsed as a handsome young courtier in the last post.  But no.  I will note that Chigi was the banker to three Popes in a row.  Pope Alexander VI was a murderous gangster, Pope Julius II was harsh and brutal, and Pope Leo X was a cheerful hedonist who drove the Church into bankruptcy.  Together, they helped set off the Protestant Reformation!


[that’s Alexander VI.  he was pretty evil.  good choice for this cover, though.]

Meanwhile: remember in the previous post, where I talked about how the Medici became the Papal bankers by providing money to bribe the College of Cardinals?  Well, Chigi filled that position after the Medici left it.  And what became of the Medici, you ask?  Well, that’s complicated, but part of the answer is that they graduated from helping others become Pope to becoming Pope themselves. Leo X, that fun-loving patron of art and music, was a Medici Pope, and he wouldn’t be the last.

Another of Imperia’s lovers was the painter Raphael.  


[“Self-Image Of A University Economics Department“, fresco by Raphael, c. 1510)

There’s a woman who pops up in several of Raphael’s paintings: young, blonde, with high cheekbones and a long nose.  We’ll never be completely sure, but it’s widely suspected that she’s Imperia.  Here’s an example:



I am not an art guy, but I did take a couple of courses back when.  And I remember the professor mentioning that Renaissance Italian artists Had A Thing for blonde models.  Olive-skinned beauties do occasionally pop up, but the default female phenotype isn’t very Mediterranean.  More like Scandinavia.  Or the upper Midwest: give her a parka and a toque and hey it’s Janet Luedtke, sophomore at the University of Wisconsin – Eau Claire.  

Anyway!  You’ll notice that Raphael gave her a baby unicorn, symbol of innocence and purity.  Raphael did like his little jokes.

The descent of Imperia

So now we have a genealogy of sorts.

 (1) In 1415 you have the Council of Constance, full of prostitution and hypocrisy. 

(2) About 100 years later, you have a real-life courtesan named Imperia.  She’s in Rome, not Constance, but she has powerful men as her lovers, is herself a high-status celebrity, and moves in the social circles of the hedonistic Medici Pope. 

(3)  Around 1830 Balzac writes a short story in which he puts the 16th century Imperia back into the 15th century Council of Constance, because why not. 

(4)  In 1993, inspired by the Balzac story, Peter Lenk erects Imperia.

That’s good as far as it goes, but now we’re going to complicate it a bit.  Because Peter Lenk wasn’t the only creative to be inspired by the Balzac story.

A Little Flesh, A Little History

Back in the early 20th century there was a German painter named Lovis Corinth.  Corinth started as a realist, but became much more of an Expressionist after he had a stroke in 1911.  Here’s one of his earlier pieces:


[portrait of a woman who’s going to have an interesting life]

That’s Corinth’s student Charlotte Berend, who became a respectable painter in her own right.  At the time of the painting, they were lovers.  Later they married.

Corinth liked painting women, and he liked painting nudes, and he liked painting nude women.  So it’s maybe not surprising that he took inspiration from the Balzac story.  He did his own painting of Imperia, in his late Expressionist style:


[Janet Luedtke Gets Drunk And Wins A Bet]

Done in the spring of 1925, it was one of Corinth’s last paintings.  A few months later he would die of pneumonia.

Okay, now scroll up to the Gustav Dore engraving about a thousand words back.  See the resemblance?  Corinth (1925) was obviously riffing on the illustration that Dore (1855) had done 70 years earlier — utterly different style, but same layout.

Now scroll up again and look at the Raphael.  Both women are round-faced, pale-skinned blondes with high cheekbones. It’s much less certain, but… maybe Corinth was drawing from Raphael as well as from Dore?

And in the other direction, we know that sculptor Lenk (1993) draw inspiration from the Balzac story (1831).  Was he aware of the Corinth painting as well?  

Well: on one hand, googling shows no connection.  And it doesn’t appear that Lenk ever mentioned the painting. 

On the other hand, Lovis Corinth is pretty famous in Germany.  And there are some similarities — the upraised arm, the bracelets, the fact that they’re both stepping forward with one (right) foot.  And while the painted Imperia isn’t holding up any dwarves, she is utterly dominant over the little dark priest to the right. 

Other-other hand, could be coincidence.  Or one of those things where an artist just picks up on details from another artist’s work entirely unconsciously.  We’ll probably never know.

Also Nazis because really, why not

Corinth’s wife — the former student Charlotte — seems to have been pretty level-headed.  Left a widow with two children, she took charge of her husband’s collection and managed it pretty successfully for the next few years, 1925-33.  And then the Nazis came to power in Germany.

Did I mention that Charlotte was Jewish?  Well, she was.  And she seems to have instantly realized what a deadly threat the Nazis were.  She left Germany in 1933 with her children, taking some of Corinth’s paintings — she couldn’t get them all out.  The family settled in New York City.  Charlotte eventually died there, an old lady, in the 1960s.  

Meanwhile, back in Germany, Corinth’s remaining paintings were judged by the Nazis and found wanting.  A number of them were hung in Goebbel’s “Degenerate Art” exhibition —

[Nazis:  fuck those guys.]

— and then several were publicly burned, along with other “degenerate” works of art.  So there are various Corinth paintings that we only know from photographs or descriptions.

(But of course, Nazis being Nazis, some of the more interesting paintings quietly slipped into the hands of senior Party members and their particular friends.  Every few years another one surfaces somewhere.  Yes, eighty years after the end of  the Second World War, we’re still recovering paintings that the Nazis looted.  Dotted across Europe there are schlosses and chateaus where someone — usually, a very wealthy someone — can appreciate great art in comfort and privacy.  Why should they suffer, just because Grandfather had some questionable friends?)  

“Imperia” made it to New York, though.  She’s in a private collection, but occasionally appears in public for Corinth retrospectives.

I Can Do This, I Swear

All right: this article may have gotten just a tiny bit out of control. 

But just one more post, honest.  Come back in a day or two and we’ll talk about candy everybody wants, belated respectability, what we see when all that is solid melts into air, and — finally — why I think Imperia is important, serious art, and well worth a look.

Thanks for reading!  See you again in a bit.

Yesterday, California Attorney General Rob Bonta filed for an immediate halt to what he says is a widespread price-fixing scheme run by the largest online retailer in America, Amazon. “Amazon tells vendors what prices it wants to see to maintain its own profitability,” Bonta alleged. “Amazon can do this because it is the world’s largest, most powerful online retailer.”

His claim is that Amazon has been forcing vendors who sell on and off the platform to raise prices, and cooperating with other major online retailers to do so.

Vendors, cowed by Amazon’s overwhelming bargaining leverage and fearing punishment, comply—agreeing to raise prices on competitors’ websites (often with the awareness and cooperation of the competing retailer) or to remove products from competing websites altogether. , and it should be immediately enjoined.

Amazon is scheduled for a series of trials in January of 2027, but Bonta’s legal move is a big deal, because he’s asking a court to bring Amazon to heel now, a year early. The only way a judge can do that is if he concludes Amazon is likely to lose, which means that Bonta believes his evidence is so strong it’s basically a foregone conclusion Amazon will be held liable for fostering serious harm to consumers.

The scale of the scheme is almost unfathomable; according to its latest investor reports, Amazon earned $426 billion of revenue in its 2025 North America online shopping business, which is about $3000 for every household in America. As Stacy Mitchell noted, prices for third party goods on the online platform, roughly 60% of its total sales, have been going up at 7% a year, more than twice the rate of inflation. And because this scheme impacts goods sold off of Amazon’s website as well, there’s a reasonable chance that it has had an impact on price levels overall in America. With a similar Pepsi-Walmart alleged conspiracy revealed earlier this year, it’s becoming increasingly clear that consolidation and price-fixing are linked to inflation.

How exactly does the scheme work? Long-standing readers of BIG may remember a piece in 2021 titled “Amazon Prime is an Economy-Distorting Lie” in which I laid out what’s happening. At the time, the D.C. Attorney General, a lawyer named Karl Racine, sued Amazon for prohibiting vendors that sold on its website from offering discounts outside of Amazon. Such anti-discounting provisions raise prices for consumers, and prevent new platforms from emerging to challenge Amazon.

The key leverage point for Amazon is the scale of its Prime program, which has 200 million members nationwide. As Scott Galloway noted a few years ago, more U.S. households belong to Prime than decorate a Christmas tree or go to church.

Prime members get ‘free shipping,’ which means they tend not to shop around. They just accept the price and vendor they are given on Amazon through what’s called the “Buy Box.”

So which vendor gets the ‘Buy Box’ and thus the sale to the Prime member? Here’s what I wrote in 2021.

Amazon awards the Buy Box to merchants based on a number of factors. One factor is whether a product is ‘Prime eligible,’ which is to say offered to Prime members with free shipping. In order to become Prime eligible, a seller often must use Amazon’s warehousing and logistics service, Fulfillment by Amazon (FBA). In other words, Amazon ties the ability to access Prime customers to whether a seller pays Amazon for managing its inventory. This strategy has worked - Amazon now fulfills roughly two thirds of the products bought on its platform.

The high prices of overall marketplace access fees, including FBA, is how Amazon generates cash from its Marketplace and retail operations. From 2014 to 2020, the amount it charges third party sellers grew from $11.75 billion to more than $80 billion. “Seller fees now account for 21% of Amazon’s total corporate revenue,” noted Racine, also pointing out that its profit margins for Marketplace sales by third party sellers are four times higher than its own retail sales…

Now, if this were all that was happening, sellers and brands could just sell outside of Amazon, avoid the 35-45% commission, and charge a lower price to entice customers. “Buy Cheaper at Walmart.com!” should be in ads all over the web. But it’s not. And that’s where the main claim from Racine comes in. Amazon uses its Buy Box algorithm to make sure that sellers can’t sell through a different store or even through their own site with a lower price and access Amazon customers, even if they would be able to sell it more cheaply. If they do, they get cut off from the Buy Box, and thus, cut off de facto from being able to sell on Amazon.

The net effect is that prices everywhere, not just on Amazon, are higher than they ordinary would be.

So that’s how the scheme worked, and Racine was the first law enforcer to act. But others followed; Bonta filed his more comprehensive lawsuit in 2022. In 2023, Federal Trade Commission Chair Lina Khan filed against Amazon on similar grounds, though with more details and additional wrinkles. The FTC found that Amazon was running something called “Project Nessie” in which it would use its algorithm to encourage other online retailers, perhaps Walmart.com or Target.com, to raise prices on similar products.

All of these cases, as well as other similar ones, have passed the necessary legal hurdle to go to trial, but an actual remedy is years away. And Amazon keeps growing through this alleged illicit behavior, inflating prices not just on its own site, but across the retail landscape.

According to Bonta, Amazon has three primary methods of inflating prices. In the first one, if Amazon and a competitor are engaged in a price war over a product, Amazon will tell its vendor that sells to its rival to increase the price directly. In the second one, if a competitor is discounting an item, Amazon will ask it to stop through a vendor. And in the third, a vendor will stop selling a product for a lower price outside of Amazon, and Amazon will then raise its price.

This kind of arrangement is known as a “hub-and-spoke” conspiracy, or “vertical price-fixing,” because it’s cooperating on price through common customers or vendors. Such a scheme distinguishes it from direct collaboration among rivals, which is a more standard “horizontal” conspiracy. The relief requested by Bonta is extensive, but amounts to barring the company from making agreements through vendors to set pricing for the online retail economy and prohibiting the company from communicating with vendors about prices and terms for non-Amazon retailers. He is also seeking a monitor to ensure Amazon stops the bad behavior.

What makes it a big deal is that it’s a request for a temporary injunction right now, meant to last until the trial process concludes or it’s otherwise lifted. Judges only grant such injunctions when they think that a party is likely going to lose, the immediate harm of the behavior is significant, and the public interest is served. While we can’t see most of the evidence because it’s redacted, Bonta must really believe he’s got the goods. And if he succeeds in this gambit, it almost certainly means Amazon has violated antitrust law on a major line of business. It also flips the incentives, because Amazon will have less of an incentive to delay a trial. Instead, it will be subject to this injunction until the trial concludes. So it may stop trying dilatory tactics.

There’s one last observation about the complaint. Again, it’s redacted, but Bonta is hinting at Amazon’s internal process to hide what it is doing.

And that wouldn’t be surprising, since the FTC has told the judge in its case that top Amazon officials, including Jeff Bezos, have been destroying evidence.

According to Law.com: “The FTC said in a heavily redacted brief on Friday that it’s missing both the ‘raw notes’ of important meetings and key messages from the Signal apps of Bezos and other senior executives, who, in some instances, set messages to automatically delete in ‘as short as ten seconds or one minute.’”

That kind of behavior is the digital equivalent of shredding documents while under a legal hold, and evidence of lawlessness. And there’s a reason for that. For as long as I’ve been writing BIG, and years before that, laws have not really applied to the rich and powerful. But our work is bearing fruit. And it’s not just Amazon. Today, the Antitrust Division won a big legal motion on its price-fixing case against a meat conspiracy led by Agri-Stats, and the Ninth Circuit had a terrific ruling on a Robinson-Patman Act price discrimination suit. As the people elect new populist politicians, enforcers and plaintiff lawyers are developing the law and the cases to match their frustration.

There’s also a change in public attitudes. In years past, a company like Amazon used to be considered innovative and consumer-friendly. Today, it is understood as bureaucratic and coercive, a result of an environment of lawlessness. Americans are increasingly angry about the situation, seeing the Epstein class and the high inflation environment as a direct threat to their welfare, a conspiracy to extract. Because it is. And at least some elected leaders see that, and are acting to stop it.

Thanks for reading! Your tips make this newsletter what it is, so please send me tips on weird monopolies, stories I’ve missed, or other thoughts. And if you liked this issue of BIG, you can sign up here for more issues, a newsletter on how to restore fair commerce, innovation, and democracy. Consider becoming a paying subscriber to support this work, or if you are a paying subscriber, giving a gift subscription to a friend, colleague, or family member. If you really liked it, read my book, Goliath: The 100-Year War Between Monopoly Power and Democracy.

cheers,

Matt Stoller

Today's links

• Socialist excellence in New York City: The real efficiency is insourcing and ending public-private partnerships.
• Hey look at this: Delights to delectate.
• Object permanence: UK antipiracy office will catch Firefox crooks; Batpole flip-top bust; "Order of Odd-Fish"; Scott Walker v fake Kochl; Billg wants to backdoor Microsoft; NSA spied on world leaders; Trump They Live mask; "Unicorns vs Goblins"; Covid German.
• 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.

Socialist excellence in New York City (permalink)

In her magnificent 2023 book Doppelganger, Naomi Klein describes the "mirror world" of right wing causes that are weird, conspiratorial versions of the actual things that leftists care about:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/09/05/not-that-naomi/#if-the-naomi-be-klein-youre-doing-just-fine

For example, Trump rode to power on the back of Qanon, a movement driven by conspiratorial theories of a cabal of rich and powerful people who were kidnapping, trafficking and abusing children. Qanon followers were driven to the most unhinged acts by these theories, shooting up restaurants and demanding to be let into nonexistent basements:

https://www.newsweek.com/pizzagate-gunman-killed-north-carolina-qanon-2012850

And while Qanon theories about children being disguised as reasonably priced armoires are facially absurd, the right's obsession with imaginary children is a long-established phenomenon:

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-53416247

Think of the conservative movement's all-consuming obsession with the imaginary lives of children that aborted fetuses might have someday become, and its depraved indifference to the hunger and poverty of actual children in America:

https://unitedwaynca.org/blog/child-poverty-in-america/

Trump's most ardent followers reorganized their lives around the imagined plight of imaginary children, while making excuses for Trump's first-term "Kids in Cages" policy:

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-44518942

Obviously, this has only gotten worse in Trump's second term. The same people whose entire political identity is nominally about defending "unborn children" are totally indifferent to the actual born children that DOGE left to die by the thousands:

https://hsph.harvard.edu/news/usaid-shutdown-has-led-to-hundreds-of-thousands-of-deaths/

They cheered Israel's slaughter and starvation of children during the siege of Gaza and they are cheering it on still today:

https://www.savethechildren.net/news/gaza-20000-children-killed-23-months-war-more-one-child-killed-every-hour

As for pedophile traffickers, the same Qanon conspiracy theorists who cooked their brains with fantasies about Trump smiting the elite pedophiles are now making excuses for Trump's central role in history's most prolific child rape scandal:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Relationship_of_Donald_Trump_and_Jeffrey_Epstein

This is the mirror-world as Klein described it: a real problem (elite impunity for child abuse; the sadistic targeting of children in war crimes; the impact of poverty on children) filtered through a fever-swamp of conspiratorial nonsense. It's world that would do anything to save imaginary children while condemning living, real children to grinding poverty, sexual torture, starvation and murder.

Once you know about Klein's mirror-world, you see it everywhere – from conservative panics about the power of Big Tech platforms (that turn out to be panics about what Big Tech does with that power, not about the power of tech itself):

https://pluralistic.net/2026/02/13/khanservatives/#kid-rock-eats-shit

To conservative panics about health – that turn out to be a demand to dismantle America's weak public health system and America's weak regulation of the supplements industry:

https://www.conspirituality.net/episodes/brief-maha-is-a-supplements-grift

But lately, I've been thinking that maybe the mirror shines in both directions: that in addition to the warped reflection of the right's mirror world, there is a left mirror world where we can find descrambled, clarified versions of the right's twisted obsessions.

I've been thinking about this since I read a Corey Robin blog post about Mamdani's campaign rhetoric, in which Mamdani railed against "mediocrity" and promised "excellence":

https://coreyrobin.com/2025/11/15/excellence-over-mediocrity-from-mamdani-to-marx-to-food/

Robin pointed out that while this framing might strike some leftists as oddly right-coded, it has a lineal descent from Marx, who advocated for industrialization and mass production because the alternative would be "universal mediocrity.”

Robin went on to discuss a largely lost thread of "socialist perfectionism" ("John Ruskin and William Morris to Bloomsbury Bolsheviks like Virginia Woolf and John Maynard Keynes") who advocated for the public provision of excellence.

He identifies Marx's own mirror world analysis, pointing out that Marx identified a fundamental difference between capitalist and socialist theories of the division of labor. While capitalists saw the division of labor as a way to increase quantity, socialists were excited by the prospect of increasing quality.

(There's a centaur/reverse centaur comparison lurking in there, too. If you're a centaur radiologist, who gets an AI tool that flags some diagnoses you may have missed, then you're improving the rate of tumor identification. If you're a reverse centaur radiologist who sees 90% of your colleagues fired and replaced with a chatbot whose work you are expected to sign off on at a rate that precludes even cursory inspection, you're increasing X-ray throughput at the expense of accuracy):

https://pluralistic.net/2025/12/05/pop-that-bubble/#u-washington

(In other words: the reverse centaur is the mirror world version of a centaur.)

After the mayoral election, Mamdani doubled down on his pursuit of high-quality public services. In his inaugural speech, Mamdani promised a government "where excellence is no longer the exception":

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/01/nyregion/mamdani-inauguration-speech-transcript.html

Robin was also developing his appreciation for Mamadani's vision of public excellence. In the New York Review of Books, Robin made the case that it was a mistake for Democrats to have ceded the language of efficiency and quality to Republicans:

https://www.nybooks.com/online/2025/12/31/democratic-excellence-zohran-mamdani/

Where Democrats do talk about efficiency, they talk about it in Republican terms: "We'll run the government like a business." Mamdani, by contrast, talks about running the government like a government – a good government, a government committed to excellence.

Writing in Jacobin, Conor Lynch takes a trip into the good side of the mirror world, unpacking the idea of socialist excellence in Mamdani's governance promises:

https://jacobin.com/2026/02/zohran-mamdani-efficiency-nyc-budget/

During the Mamdani campaign, "efficiency" was just one plank of the platform. But once Mamdani took office, he learned that his predecessor, the lavishly corrupt Eric Adams, had lied about the city's finances, leaving a $12b hole in the budget:

https://www.nyc.gov/mayors-office/news/2026/01/mayor-mamdani-details–adams-budget-crisis-

Mamdani came to power in New York on an ambitious platform of public service delivery, and not just because this is the right thing to do, but because investment in a city's people and built environment pays off handsomely.

Maintenance is always cheaper than repair, and one of the main differences between a business and a government is that a business's shareholders can starve maintenance budgets, cash out, and leave the collapsing firm behind them, while governments must think about the long term consequences of short-term thinking (the fact that so many Democratic governments have failed to do this is a consequence of Democrats adopting Republicans' framing that a good government is "run like a business").

The best time to invest in New York City was 20 years ago. The second best time in now. For Mamdani to make those investments and correct the failures of his predecessors, he needs to find some money.

Mamdani's proposal for finding this money sounds pretty conservative: he's going to cut waste in government. He's ordered each city agency to appoint a "Chief Savings Officer" who will "review performance, eliminate waste and streamline service delivery." These CSOs are supposed to find a 1.5% across-the-board savings this year and 2.5% next year:

https://www.nyc.gov/mayors-office/news/2026/01/mayor-mamdani-signs-executive-order-to-require-chief-savings-off

Does this sound like DOGE to you? It kind of does to me, but – crucially – this is mirror-world DOGE. DOGE's project was to make cuts to government in order to make government "run like a business." Specifically, DOGE wanted to transform the government into the kind of business that makes cuts to juice the quarterly numbers at the expense of long-term health:

https://www.forbes.com/sites/suzannerowankelleher/2024/10/24/southwest-airlines-bends-to-activist-investor-restructures-board/

But Mamdani's mirror-world DOGE is looking to find efficiencies by cutting things like sweetheart deals with private contractors and consultants, who cost the city billions. It's these private sector delegates of the state that are the source of government waste and bloat.

The literature is clear on this: when governments eliminate their own capacity to serve the people and hire corporations to do it on their behalf, the corporations charge more and deliver less:

https://calmatters.org/commentary/2019/02/public-private-partnerships-are-an-industry-gimmick-that-dont-serve-public-well/

As Lynch writes, DOGE's purpose was to dismantle as much of the government as possible and shift its duties to Beltway Bandits who could milk Uncle Sucker for every dime. Mamdani's ambition, meanwhile, is to "restore faith in government [and] demonstrate that the public sector can match or even surpass the private sector in excellence."

As Mamdani said in his inauguration speech, "For too long, we have turned to the private sector for greatness, while accepting mediocrity from those who serve the public."

Turning governments into businesses has been an unmitigated failure. After decades of outsourcing, the government hasn't managed to shrink its payroll, but government workers are today primarily employed in wheedling private contractors to fulfill their promises, even as public spending has quintupled:

https://www.brookings.edu/articles/is-government-too-big-reflections-on-the-size-and-composition-of-todays-federal-government/

Instead of having a government employee do a government job, that govvie oversees a private contractor who costs twice as much…and sucks at their job:

https://www.pogo.org/reports/bad-business-billions-of-taxpayer-dollars-wasted-on-hiring-contractors

There's a wonderful illustration of this principle at work in Edward Snowden's 2019 memoir Permanent Record:

https://memex.craphound.com/2019/09/24/permanent-record-edward-snowden-and-the-making-of-a-whistleblower/

After Snowden broke both his legs during special forces training and washed out, he went to work for the NSA. After a couple years, his boss told him that Congress capped the spy agencies' headcount but not their budgets, so he was going to have to quit his job at the NSA and go to work for one of the NSA's many contractors, because the NSA could hire as many contractors as it wanted.

So Snowden is sent to a recruiter who asks him how much he's making as a government spy. Snowden quotes a modest 5-figure sum. The recruiter is aghast and tells Snowden that he gets paid a percentage of whatever Snowden ends up making as a government contractor, and promptly triples Snowden's government salary. Why not? The spy agencies have unlimited budgets, and will pay whatever the private company that Snowden nominally works for bills them at. Everybody wins!

Ladies and gentlemen, the efficiency of government outsourcing. Run the government like a business!

As bad as this is when the government hires outside contractors to do things, it's even worse when they hire outside contractors to consult on things. Under Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, the Canadian government spent a fortune on consultants, especially at the start of the pandemic:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/31/mckinsey-and-canada/#comment-dit-beltway-bandits-en-canadien

The main beneficiary of these contracts was McKinsey, who were given a blank cheque and no oversight – they were even exempted from rules requiring them to disclose conflicts of interest.

Trudeau raised Canadian government spending by 40%, to $11.8 billion, creating a "shadow civil service" that cost vastly more than the actual civil service – the government spent $1.85b on internal IT expertise, and $2.3b on outside contractors.

These contractors produced some of the worst IT boondoggles in government history, including the bungled "ArriveCAN" contact tracing program. The two-person shop that won the contract outsourced it to KPMG and raked off a 15-30% commission.

Before Trudeau, Stephen Harper paid IBM to build Phoenix – a payroll system that completely failed and was, amazingly, far worse than ArriveCAN. IBM got $309m to build Phoenix, and then Canada spent another $506m to fix it and compensate the people whose lives it ruined.

Wherever you find these contractors, you find stupendous waste and fraud. I remember in the early 2000s, when Dan "City of Sound" Hill was working at the BBC and wanted to try an experiment to distribute MP3s of a radio programme.

The BBC – an organization with a long history of technical excellence – had given the exclusive contract for web delivery to Siemens, who wanted £10,000 to set up a web-server for the experiment. Dan rented a server from an online provider and put it all on his personal card, serving tens of thousands of MP3s for less than £10. It turns out that letting your technical personnel do your technology development costs 1/1000th of what it costs to have contractors do it.

Running your public institution "like a business" is incredibly inefficient. Back when Musk and Ramaswamy announced their plan to cut $2t from the US federal budget, David Dayen published a plan to realize nearly that much savings just by attacking waste arising from running the government "like a business":

https://pluralistic.net/2025/01/27/beltway-bandits/#henhouse-foxes

The US government's own estimate of the losses due to contractor fraud comes out to $274b/year – roughly the size of the entire civil service payroll (the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which Musk sadistically destroyed, accounts for 0.012% of federal spending).

Medicare "upcoding" – a form of fraud committed by companies like United Healthcare, the largest Medicare Advantage provider in the country – costs the public $83b/year:

https://www.medpac.gov/wp-content/uploads/2024/03/Mar24_ExecutiveSummary_MedPAC_Report_To_Congress_SEC.pdf

Congress has banned Medicare and Medicaid from bargaining for pharma prices, which is why the US government pays 178% more than other governments, for the same drugs, which are often developed at public expense:

https://aspe.hhs.gov/reports/comparing-prescription-drugs

The Pentagon is a cesspit of waste. It's not just firing spies and rehiring them as contractors at a 300% markup – that's just for starters. The Pentagon receives $840b/year and has failed its last three audits:

https://thehill.com/policy/defense/4992913-pentagon-fails-7th-audit-in-a-row-but-says-progress-made/

The conservative version of "efficiency" cashes out to "efficient at extracting value from public institutions, workers and customers." Mamdani's (good) mirror world "efficiency" means providing great public service through investing in public excellence.

New York City is overdue for this kind of overhaul. Everywhere you look in the city, you find high price consultants making out like bandits and starving the city of the funds it needs to deliver. The Second Avenue subway spent more on consultants than it spent on digging tunnels:

https://gothamist.com/news/mta-plans-to-hire-186m-consultant-to-oversee-second-avenue-subway-construction

Mamdani has pledged to audit the Department of Education's 25 largest contracts (the DOE spends $10b/year on outside contractors). He's rolling out "fiscal training and certification" for any government employee involved in procurement.

Mamdani isn't pretending he can bridge the gap that Adams left in the city's finances through efficiency alone: to make up the difference, he is going to tax NYC's millionaires, and ask the state to "rebalance" its relationship with NYC's taxpayers (NYC contributes 54.4% of the state budget, but only gets 40.5% in return).

As Lynch writes, NYC was the birthplace of austerity-driven outsourcing, following from the city's bankruptcy in 1975. 50 years later, Mamdani is bringing that age to a close.

Mamdani knows what the stakes are, too. He called efficiency "the most paramount left-wing concern, because it is either the fulfillment or the betrayal of that which motivates so much of our politics":

https://www.derekthompson.org/p/what-speaks-to-me-about-abundance

Mamdani is reviving the tradition of "sewer socialism," a governing philosophy based on "bringing people into your politics by improving their lives in obvious ways":

https://jacobin.com/2025/12/digital-sewer-socialism-public-ownership

Sewer socialism, public excellence, real efficiency: these are the (good) mirror world versions of the right's obsession with "government efficiency." On the conservative side of the mirror, "efficiency" is an excuse for hamstringing government employees and turning their budgets over to lazy, crooked contractors. On the left's side of the mirror, "efficiency" is building capacity in democratically accountable institutions that care about helping every person, and who deliver tomorrow's excellence by making long-term investments today.

(Image: DAVID ILIFF, CC BY-SA 3.0, modified)

Hey look at this (permalink)

• The True North Strong And Speculative https://hugoclub.blogspot.com/2026/02/the-true-north-strong-and-speculative.html

• The Economic Democracy Project is hiring our first Program Director https://www.linkedin.com/posts/vera-franz_edp-program-director-jd-ugcPost-7429172997611003906-GmNW/

• A case study in civic fiction: A Gay Girl in Damascus and the structuring of cosmopolitan sympathy https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/14648849261426443

• Your AI-generated password isn't random, it just looks that way https://www.theregister.com/2026/02/18/generating_passwords_with_llms/

• Skull Season https://fieldnotes.christopherbrown.com/p/skull-season?utm_source=substack&publication_id=29951&post_id=188606662&utm_medium=email&utm_content=share&utm_campaign=email-share&triggerShare=true&isFreemail=true&r=1mh2k&triedRedirect=true

Object permanence (permalink)

#20yrago UK anti-piracy officer assures Firefox she’ll catch the pirates who copy it https://web.archive.org/web/20060511105535/http://business.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,9075-2051196,00.html

#20yrsago Diane Duane vows to finish trilogy as a reader-supported web-book https://web.archive.org/web/20060630094910/http://outofambit.blogspot.com/2006_02_01_outofambit_archive.html#114069083471800451

#15yrago Order of Odd-Fish, a funny, mannered, hilariously weird epic romp https://memex.craphound.com/2011/02/23/order-of-odd-fish-a-funny-mannered-hilariously-weird-epic-romp/

#15yrsago HOWTO make a batpole flip-top bust switch https://web.archive.org/web/20110218013400/https://www.thenewhobbyist.com/2011/02/wireless-light-switch-or-bust/

#15yrsago Travel guide for American invalids, 1887 https://web.archive.org/web/20110225235315/http://www.butifandthat.com/guide-for-invalids/

#15yrsago Archive.org and 150 libraries create 80,000 lendable ebook library https://archive.org/post/349420/in-library-ebook-lending-program-launched

#15yrsago Scott Walker tricked into spilling his guts to fake Koch brother https://web.archive.org/web/20110226135536/https://www.salon.com/news/the_labor_movement/index.html?story=/politics/war_room/2011/02/23/koch_walker_call

#10yrsago Bill Gates: Microsoft would backdoor its products in a heartbeat https://web.archive.org/web/20160223175618/https://recode.net/2016/02/22/bill-gates-is-backing-the-fbi-in-its-case-against-apple/

#10yrsago Wikileaks: NSA spied on UN Secretary General and world leaders over climate and trade https://wikileaks.org/nsa-201602/

#10yrsago Donald Trump They Live mask https://web.archive.org/web/20160224101815/http://www.trickortreatstudios.com/they-live-alien-donald-trump-limited-edition-halloween-mask.html

#10yrsago Unicorn vs. Goblins: the third amazing, hilarious Phoebe and her Unicorn collection! https://memex.craphound.com/2016/02/23/unicorn-vs-goblins-the-third-amazing-hilarious-phoebe-and-her-unicorn-collection/

#5yrsago German covid coinages https://pluralistic.net/2021/02/23/acceptable-losses/#Zeitgeist

#5yrsago A voyage to the moon of 1776 https://pluralistic.net/2021/02/23/acceptable-losses/#Filippo-Morghen

#5yrsago Malcolm X's true killers https://pluralistic.net/2021/02/23/acceptable-losses/#deathbeds-r-us

#5yrsago Private equity's nursing home killing spree https://pluralistic.net/2021/02/23/acceptable-losses/#disposable-olds

Upcoming appearances (permalink)

• Montreal (remote): Fedimtl, Feb 24
  https://fedimtl.ca/

• Oslo (remote): Seminar og lansering av rapport om «enshittification»
  https://www.forbrukerradet.no/siste-nytt/digital/seminar-og-lansering-av-rapport-om-enshittification/

• Victoria: 28th Annual Victoria International Privacy & Security Summit, Mar 3-5
  https://www.rebootcommunications.com/event/vipss2026/

• Victoria: Enshittification at Russell Books, Mar 4
  https://www.eventbrite.ca/e/cory-doctorow-is-coming-to-victoria-tickets-1982091125914

• Barcelona: Enshittification with Simona Levi/Xnet (Llibreria Finestres), Mar 20
  https://www.llibreriafinestres.com/evento/cory-doc

• Montreal: Bronfman Lecture (McGill) Apr 10
  https://www.eventbrite.ca/e/artificial-intelligence-the-ultimate-disrupter-tickets-1982706623885

• 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)

• Making The Internet Suck Less (Thinking With Mitch Joel)
  https://www.sixpixels.com/podcast/archives/making-the-internet-suck-less-with-cory-doctorow-twmj-1024/

• Panopticon :3 (Trashfuture)
  https://www.patreon.com/posts/panopticon-3-150395435

• America's Enshittification is Canada's Opportunity (Do Not Pass Go)
  https://www.donotpassgo.ca/p/americas-enshittification-is-canadas

• Everything Wrong With the Internet and How to Fix It, with Tim Wu (Ezra Klein)
  https://www.nytimes.com/2026/02/06/opinion/ezra-klein-podcast-doctorow-wu.html

• How the Internet Got Worse (Masters in Business)
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=auXlkuVhxMo

Latest books (permalink)

• "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 Reverse-Centaur's Guide to AI," a short book about being a better AI critic, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, June 2026

• "Enshittification, Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It" (the graphic novel), Firstsecond, 2026

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

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

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

Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources:

Currently writing: "The Post-American Internet," a sequel to "Enshittification," about the better world the rest of us get to have now that Trump has torched America ( words today, 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

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