Today's links

• Love of corporate bullshit is correlated with bad judgment: Synergizing the strategic inflection points on the global data network.
• Hey look at this: Delights to delectate.
• Object permanence: Bluetooth headsets; Fruit sticker decoder; iPod batteries v DRM; Bruces's SXSW keynote; Piracy isn't funding terrorism; Hope v optimism; Identical twin time-travel prank; Prisoners draw corporate crooks; Spanish junkbots; Sheriff's rape-kit denial; Non-dorky magic; Poetic bureaucrat mourns wolf; SXSW v MPAA; "Burning Days"; NYT paywall; Police rap-battle warning; Unions de-risk labor; "Murder the Truth"
• 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.

Love of corporate bullshit is correlated with bad judgment (permalink)

I'm a writer, so of course I care about words! But I'm a writer, so I also think that words are improved by their malleability, duality and nuance.

This is one of the things I love about being a native English speaker – this glorious mongrel language of ours is full of extremely weird words, like "cleave," which means its own opposite ("to join together" and "to cut apart"). English is full of these words that mean their own opposite, from "dust" to "oversight" to "weather":

https://www.mentalfloss.com/language/words/25-words-are-their-own-opposites

This is what you get when you let a language run wild, with meaning determined (and contested) by speakers. Not for nothing, my second language is Yiddish, another glorious higgeldy-piggeldy of a tongue with no authoritative oversight and innumerable dialects.

Semantic drift is a feature, not a bug. It's how we get new words, and new meanings for old words. I love semantic drift! I mean, I'd better, since, having coined "enshittification," I'm now destined to have a poop emoji on my headstone. Having coined a word – and having proposed a precise technical meaning for it – I am baffled by people who make it their business to scold others for using enshittification "incorrectly." "Enshittification" is less than five years old, and we know when and how it was invented. If you like it when I make up a word, you can't categorically object to other people making up new meanings for this word. I didn't need a word-coining license to come up with enshittification, and you don't need a semantic drift license to use it to mean something else.

I wrote a whole danged essay about this, but still, hardly a day goes by without someone trying to enlist me in their project to scold and shame strangers for using the word incorrectly:

The fact that a neologism is sometimes decoupled from its theoretical underpinnings and is used colloquially is a feature, not a bug. Many people apply the term "enshittification" very loosely indeed, to mean "something that is bad," without bothering to learn – or apply – the theoretical framework. This is good. This is what it means for a term to enter the lexicon: it takes on a life of its own. If 10,000,000 people use "enshittification" loosely and inspire 10% of their number to look up the longer, more theoretical work I've done on it, that is one million normies who have been sucked into a discourse that used to live exclusively in the world of the most wonkish and obscure practitioners. The only way to maintain a precise, theoretically grounded use of a term is to confine its usage to a small group of largely irrelevant insiders. Policing the use of "enshittification" is worse than a self-limiting move – it would be a self-inflicted wound.

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

Colloquialization doesn't dilute language, it thickens it. Using a powerful word to describe something else can be glorious. It's allusion, metaphor, simile. It's poesie. It's fine. Bemoaning the "tsunami" of bad news doesn't cheapen the deaths of people who die in real tsunamis. Saying that the Trump administration "nuked" the Consumer Finance Protection Bureau doesn't desecrate the dead of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Calling creeping authoritarianism a "cancer" doesn't denigrate the suffering of people who have actual cancer.

What's more, devoting your energies to "correcting" other people's allusive language makes you a boring, tedious person. Sure, you can have a conversation with a comrade about making inclusive word choices, but interrupting a substantive debate to have that discussion is unserious. The words people use matter (I care a lot about words!) but they matter less than the things people mean. Keep your eye on the prize (metaphorically) (for avoidance of doubt, there is no prize) (both the prize and the eye are metaphors).

(By all means, get angry at people who intentionally use slurs. None of this is to say that you should tolerate – or be subjected to – language that is intended to dehumanize you.)

It's time we admitted that it's no good replacing an offensive term with a phrase that no one understands. Calling it "child sexual abuse material" is a good idea, but no one actually calls it that. The customary phrase is actually "child sexual abuse material, which most people call 'child porn,' but which we should really call 'child sex abuse material.'" If your goal is to avoid saying "child porn" (a laudable goal!), this isn't achieving it.

None of this means that I am immune to being rubbed up the wrong way by other people's language choices. Having been mentored by the science fiction great Damon Knight, I have been infected by many of his linguistic peccadillos, which means that if you say "out loud" in my earshot, I will (mentally) "correct" it to "aloud" (yes, "out loud" is fine, but Damon had a thing about it and it got stuck in my brain).

I am especially perturbed by "business English," the language of the commercial class, their cheerleaders in the press, and (alas) many of their critics. Anytime someone refers to a sector as a "space" (as in "I'm really getting into the AI space") it's like they're making me chew tinfoil. Superlatives like "thought-leader" are so self-parodying I have to check every time someone utters one aloud (see?) to verify that they're not being sarcastic. Objects of derision should be referred to by their surnames, not their given names ("Musk" is vituperative, "Elon" is friendly – though, thanks to the glorious and thickening contradictions of language, calling someone by their surname can also be affectionate). I steer clear of jargon used by firms to lionize themselves, like "hyperscaler."

I share the impulse to impose my linguistic preferences on the people around me. I just (mostly) suppress that impulse and try to focus on substance rather than style, at least when I'm trying to understand others and be understood by them. But yes, I do silently judge the people around me for their word choices – all the time.

That's why I immediately pounced on "The Corporate Bullshit Receptivity Scale: Development, validation, and associations with workplace outcomes," an open access paper in the Feb 2026 edition of Personality and Individual Differences by Shane Littrell, a linguistics postdoc at Cornell:

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/400597536_The_Corporate_Bullshit_Receptivity_Scale_Development_validation_and_associations_with_workplace_outcomes

Littrell set out to evaluate "corporate bullshit," a linguistic category that is separate from mere "jargon." Jargon, Littrell writes, is a professional vocabulary that serves a useful purpose: "facilitat[ing] communication and social bonding, increas[ing] fluency, and help[ing] reinforce a shared identity among in-group members."

Bullshit, meanwhile, is "semantically, logically, or epistemically dubious information that is misleadingly impressive, important, informative, or otherwise engaging." There's a whole field of bullshit studies, with investigations into such exciting topics as "pseudo-profound bullshit" (think: Deepak Chopra).

Littrell borrows from that field and others to investigate corporate bullshit, formulating a measurement index he calls the "Corporate Bullshit Receptivity Scale." In a series of three experiments, Littrell sets out to determine who is the most susceptible to corporate bullshit, and what the correlates of that receptivity are.

Littrell concludes that corporate bullshitters themselves are pretty good at identifying bullshit (they have a high "Organizational Bullshit Perception Score"). In other words, bullshitters know that they're bullshitting. When a corporate leader declares that:

This synergistic look at our thought leadership will ensure that we are decontenting and avoiding reputational deficits with our key takeaways as effectively as we can in order to sunset our resonating focus.

they know it's nonsense.

This reminded me of the idea that cult leaders tell obvious lies to their followers as a way of forcing them to demonstrate their subservience. When Trump demands that his followers wear clown shoes:

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/trump-is-obsessed-with-these-145-shoes-and-won-t-let-anyone-leave-without-a-pair/ar-AA1XOEBm

Or that they pretend that "mutilization" is a word:

https://www.wonkette.com/p/is-trumps-save-america-fck-america

He's engaging in a dominance play that forces his feuding princelings and their lickspittles to humiliate themselves and reaffirm his supremacy.

There are plenty of rank-and-file workers inside corporations who have high OBPSes and know when they're being bullshitted, but Littrell also identifies a large cohort of low-OBPS workers who are absolutely taken in by corporate bullshit.

Here we get to a fascinating dichotomy. Both the low-OBPS and high-OBPS workers can be described as being "open minded," but "open" has a very different meaning for each group. Workers who are good at spotting bullshit score high on open-mindedness metrics like "willingness to engage" and "willingness to reflect," both characteristic of the "fluid intelligence" that makes workers good at solving problems and doing a good job.

Meanwhile, workers who are taken in by bullshit are "open minded" in the sense that they are bad at analytical reasoning and thus easily convinced. These people test poorly on metrics like "logical reasoning" and "decision-making," and score high on "overconfidence in one's intellectual and analytic abilities." They are apt to make blunders that "expose organizations to financial, reputational, or legal risks."

But they're also exactly the workers who score high on "job satisfaction," "trust in one's supervisor," and "degree to which they are inspired by corporate mission statements." These people are so open minded that their brains start to leak out of their ears. Or, as Carly Page put it in The Register: "jargon sticks around not just because executives enjoy using it, but because many people respond to it as if it were genuine insight":

https://www.theregister.com/2026/03/15/corporate_jargon_research/

This creates a feedback loop where bosses get rewarded for using empty and maddening phrases, and their workforce gets progressively more skewed towards people who are bad at spotting bullshit and at exercising their judgment on the job. It's quite a neat – and ugly – explanation of why bullshit proliferates within organizations, and how organizations come to be completely overrun with bullshit.

This is a fascinating research paper, and while I've focused on its conclusions, I really suggest going and reading about the methodology, especially the tables of "corporate bullshit" phrases they generated for their experiments (Tables 1, 2 and 3). This is some eldritch horror bullshit:

By solving the pain point of customers with our conversations, we will ideate a renewed level of end-state vision and growth-mindset in the market between us and others who are architecting to download on a similar balanced scorecard.

What's more, these are all based on real examples of corporate bullshit from leaders at large corporations, with a few words rotated to synonyms drawn from the business-press.

I'm a writer. I really do care about language. Sure, I get frustrated with scolds who rail against semantic drift or engage in petty, pedantic corrections, but not because words don't matter. They matter, a lot. But language isn't math (which is why double negatives are intensifiers, not negators). It can obscure (as with bullshit) or it can enlighten (as with poesie) or it can enable precision (as with jargon). Arguments about language matter, but what matters about them isn't subjective aesthetics, nor is it a peevish obsession with "correctness." What matters is the way that language operates on the world (and vice versa).

Hey look at this (permalink)

• The public will pay https://www.citationneeded.news/issue-102/

• Enshittified UX https://www.awwwards.com/sites/enshittified-ux

• The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374621568/thereversecentaursguidetolifeafterai/

• Immutable https://www.pbs.org/video/immutable-lw8ctv/

• Why Are We Still Doing This? https://www.wheresyoured.at/why-are-we-still-doing-this/

Object permanence (permalink)

#20yrsago Eighth graders build giant awesome gymnasium rollercoaster https://web.archive.org/web/20060329110502/https://www.sgvtribune.com/news/ci_3606933

#20yrsago Bluetooth headset combined with headphones https://www.techdigest.tv/2006/03/itech_clip_m_1.html

#20yrsago HOWTO decode the sticker-numbers on fruit https://megnut.com/2006/03/14/read-the-numbers-on-your-fruit/

#20yrsago DRM shortens iPod battery life https://web.archive.org/web/20060319201837/http://www.mp3.com/features/stories/3646.html

#20yrsago McD’s employees’ secret recipes for improvised meals https://mcdonalds-talk.livejournal.com/158400.html

#20yrsago UK to US: we’ll only buy open-source fighter jets https://web.archive.org/web/20060420192203/https://www.vnunet.com/vnunet/news/2152035/joint-strike-fighter

#20yrsago Bruce Sterling’s SXSW keynote MP3 https://web.archive.org/web/20060330072143/https://server1.sxsw.com/2006/coverage/SXSW06.INT.20060314.BruceSterling.mp3

#20yrsago UK Open University opens its courseware https://web.archive.org/web/20060610125235/https://oci.open.ac.uk/

#20yrsago Europe seeking to make open mapping impossible – help! https://web.archive.org/web/20060503172457/https://publicgeodata.org/Open_Letter

#20yrsago MPAA rep gets slammed at SXSW https://www.powazek.com/2006/03/000571.html

#20yrsago Canadian recording industry: P2P isn’t bad for business https://web.archive.org/web/20060408232202/https://www.michaelgeist.ca/component/option,com_content/task,view/id,1168/Itemid,85/nsub,/

#15yrsago First-person account from surgeon who removed his own appendix https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2011/03/antarctica-1961-a-soviet-surgeon-has-to-remove-his-own-appendix/72445/

#15yrsago New York Times paywall: wishful thinking or just crazy? https://memex.craphound.com/2011/03/17/new-york-times-paywall-wishful-thinking-or-just-crazy/

#15rsago Android app pwns cardkey entry systems, opens all the locks https://web.archive.org/web/20110317132608/http://www.cybersecurityguy.com/caribou.html

#15yrsago Glenn Grant’s Burning Days: old school cyberpunk stories from the nostalgic contrafuture https://memex.craphound.com/2011/03/17/glenn-grants-burning-days-old-school-cyberpunk-stories-from-the-nostalgic-contrafuture/

#15yrsago World’s largest spam botnet goes down (for now?) https://krebsonsecurity.com/2011/03/rustock-botnet-flatlined-spam-volumes-plummet/

#15yrsago Piracy doesn’t fund the mob or terrorists https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2011/03/even-commercial-pirates-now-have-to-compete-with-free/

#15yrsago Tennessee to outlaw collective bargaining for teachers https://web.archive.org/web/20110320023746/https://nashvillecitypaper.com/content/city-news/protesters-arrested-following-disruption-committee-hearing

#15yrsago Four Color Fear: delightful horror comics from the pre-Code era https://memex.craphound.com/2011/03/16/four-color-fear-delightful-horror-comics-from-the-pre-code-era/

#10yrsago Screw optimism, we need hope instead https://web.archive.org/web/20160318215827/https://littleatoms.com/society/cory-doctorows-manifesto-hope

#10yrsago Four sets of identical twins pull an epic NYC subway car time-machine prank https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z1Gq7Q3B9xU

#10yrsago Hack-attacks with stolen certs tell you the future of FBI vs Apple https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2016/03/to-bypass-code-signing-checks-malware-gang-steals-lots-of-certificates/

#10yrsago Captured: a book of prison inmate drawings of CEOs and other too-big-to-jail criminals https://thecapturedproject.com/

#10yrsago From dingo babysitter to net neutrality hero: Tom Wheeler’s legacy https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2016/03/how-a-former-lobbyist-became-the-broadband-industrys-worst-nightmare/

#10yrsago Poet/bureaucrat’s moving report of the 1921 demise of America’s most notorious wolf https://web.archive.org/web/20160327105045/https://www.fws.gov/news/Historic/NewsReleases/1921/19210103.pdf

#10yrsago Barnes & Noble wipes out Nook ebook, replaces it with off-brand “study guide” https://web.archive.org/web/20160316120232/https://www.teleread.com/barnes-noble-stole-first-e-book-ever-bought/

#10yrsago Scarfolk’s lost 1970s budget announcement lays bare the modern Tory strategy https://scarfolk.blogspot.com/2016/03/scarfolks-annual-budget-announcement.html

#10yrsago Junkbots from Madrid, recycled from iconic Spanish packaging https://web.archive.org/web/20160321103729/http://www.pitarquerobots.es/

#10yrsago First-ever Tor node in a Canadian library https://web.archive.org/web/20160319035440/https://motherboard.vice.com/read/canadian-librarians-must-be-ready-to-fight-the-feds-on-running-a-tor-node-western-library-freedom-project

#10yrsago How to do impromptu magic tricks without being a dork https://www.thejerx.com/blog/2016/3/14/project-slay-them

#10yrsago Sheriff says rape kits are irrelevant because most rape accusations are false https://www.oregonlive.com/pacific-northwest-news/2016/03/rape_kit_system_unnecessary_si.html

#10yrsago Redaction fail: U.S. government admits it went after Lavabit looking for Snowden https://www.wired.com/2016/03/government-error-just-revealed-snowden-target-lavabit-case/

#10yrsago McAfee shovelware emits tracking beacons https://web.archive.org/web/20160909030152/https://duo.com/blog/bring-your-own-dilemma-oem-laptops-and-windows-10-security

#10yrsago Cops in small MA town warn about roving rap-battle challengers https://www.kron4.com/news/cops-warn-residents-of-men-challenging-others-to-rap-battles/

#10yrsago Rather than banning “lobbying” by academics, UK government should encourage it https://web.archive.org/web/20160310100844/https://www.timeshighereducation.com/comment/ban-academics-talking-to-ministers-we-should-train-them-to-do-it

#10yrsago Russia’s military uses gigantic wooden comedy props for punishment https://semperannoying.tumblr.com/post/122390977886/semperannoying-russian-army-punishments-1

#10yrsago Study: people who believe in innate intelligence overestimate their own https://arstechnica.com/science/2016/03/think-intelligence-is-fixed-youre-more-likely-to-overestimate-your-own/

#5yrsago SNAPDRAGON https://pluralistic.net/2021/03/17/there-once-was-a-union-maid/#coming-out

#5yrsago How unions de-risk work https://pluralistic.net/2021/03/17/there-once-was-a-union-maid/#solidarity-forever

#5yrsago Meet the new music boss, same as the old music boss https://pluralistic.net/2021/03/16/wage-theft/#excessive-buyer-power

#5yrsago The People's Parity Project https://pluralistic.net/2021/03/16/wage-theft/#ppp

#5yrsago SMS security is flaming garbage https://pluralistic.net/2021/03/16/wage-theft/#override-service-registry

#1yrago David Enrich's "Murder the Truth" https://pluralistic.net/2025/03/17/actual-malice/#happy-slapping

Upcoming appearances (permalink)

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

• Berkeley: Bioneers keynote, Mar 27
  https://conference.bioneers.org/

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

• Montreal: Drawn and Quarterly, Apr 10
  https://mtl.drawnandquarterly.com/events/4863920260410

• London: Resisting Big Tech Empires (LSBU), Apr 25
  https://www.tickettailor.com/events/globaljusticenow/2042691

• 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)

• Do you feel screwed over by big tech? (Ontario Today)
  https://www.cbc.ca/listen/live-radio/1-45-ontario-today/clip/16203024-do-feel-screwed-big-tech

• Launch for Cindy's Cohn's "Privacy's Defender" (City Lights)
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WuVCm2PUalU

• Chicken Mating Harnesses (This Week in Tech)
  https://twit.tv/shows/this-week-in-tech/episodes/1074

• The Virtual Jewel Box (U Utah)
  https://tanner.utah.edu/podcast/enshittification-cory-doctorow-matthew-potolsky/

• Tanner Humanities Lecture (U Utah)
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i6Yf1nSyekI

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

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

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

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

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

Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources:

Currently writing: "The Post-American Internet," a sequel to "Enshittification," about the better world the rest of us get to have now that Trump has torched America (1002 words today, 52553 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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This is maybe the best baseball catch you’ll ever see. Or the most fun one anyway.

Power outages have become an unfortunate recurring event across much of the country. Last month, for example, a powerful winter storm in the Northeast caused an outage for over 600,000 homes and businesses.

I’ve written before about how you or someone you know needs clean backup power (read: not from a fossil fueled generator). The recent winter storm may just be one of those times, or it may be the next event, whether a winter storm, public safety power shut off for wildfire prevention, hurricane, or another emergency. At that time, I also wrote about how electric vehicles can be a solution in times of power outages, acting like a quiet generator with no direct air pollution emissions through vehicle-to-home (V2H) power flow. Short of V2H, the more limited vehicle-to-load (V2L) functionality that many electric vehicles have can also help in a pinch to power a critical devices, such as a refrigerator or fan. V2L is also great for powering tools at a job site or gear on your next camping trip.

In principle, electric vehicles can do more than backup power V2H and off-grid V2L.  Drivers with a properly equipped electric vehicle and home set-up have the option to use their vehicles routinely in coordination with electricity grid needs to lower their electricity bills through bill credits or incentives. Drivers can do this through managed charging (grid-to-vehicle aka V1G) or bidirectional charging (vehicle-to-grid aka V2G).  

V1G and V2G involve charging up vehicles at times when renewable generation is abundant or when demands on the grid are low. In the case of V2G, vehicles also discharge when the grid needs some extra juice. In so doing, V1G and V2G lower costs for the grid by better utilizing grid resources, including cheaper sources of energy, and by deferring or avoiding grid upgrades that would otherwise need to be made to meet the demand for energy on the grid. Lower grid costs mean relatively lower bills over the long term for all electricity customers. UCS analysis has demonstrated the potential magnitude of V1G and V2G grid savings into the future. (spoiler: it’s in the billions per year!)

I’ll come back to V1G and V2G a little later. First, we need to know, what is the market currently delivering in terms of vehicle functionality and what else may you need to use that functionality?  

Bidirectional charging includes a range of capabilities

To do any kind of bidirectional charging, the vehicle must have both the hardware and software to enable that capability. A key component is a battery management system that allows for discharging the battery for a purpose other than running the electric motors that move the vehicle.

Many new electric vehicles can do V2L bidirectional charging. My Hyundai Ioniq 5, for example, has USB outlets in the cabin, and I have the option of using an adapter for the charging port through which a power cord or extension cord can be plugged in. Some Ioniq 5 trim levels also have a regular wall outlet type receptacle under the back seat. My Ioniq 5 is not, unfortunately, equipped for V2H, but many new vehicles are.

Indeed, the good news is that the market is beginning to deliver V2H capability for home backup power in a growing number of electric vehicle models. And drivers are buying those models: V2H-capable models have grown as a share of electric vehicle sales, reaching over 18 percent in the U.S. in 2025. News from Hyundai outlines plans to start full V2H for home backup power with the Ioniq 9, and meanwhile, Hyundai subsidiary Kia rolled out V2H in 2025 for the Kia EV9. Other available models include Chevy’s Equinox, Balzer,  Silverado, and upcoming 2027 Bolt, as well as the Ford F150 Lightning units that made it off the line before production stopped (over 100,000 of them). There’s the Tesla Cybertruck, Volvo E90, and Polestar 3, too. V2H-capable models from Rivian and BMW are anticipated in the near future.

The most sophisticated end of the bidirectional charging capability range V2G. It allows an EV to discharge power to a driver’s house while the house is actively connected with the grid. Grid-coordinated EV discharge may involve offsetting the house’s electricity needs or exporting power through the house and beyond the electricity meter back to the grid.  This is different from V2H that is set up for backup power purposes only, which you may also see referred to as V2H. (It’s confusing, I know!) The main difference is the kind of connection to the electricity grid you pursue with your local utility. There may also be software to update in the vehicle.

Providing consumers with more options for affordable models with V2H is important. Notably the V2H-capable models mentioned above span a range of price points, including the forthcoming 2027 Bolt on the more affordable end (advertised at around $30,000). However, that V2H capability (and V2G capability for that matter) is not universal in new vehicles is a problem. The majority of drivers purchase on the used market, and consequently are subject to the preferences of new car buyers. If new car buyers choose V2H capable models, then more V2H options will be available on the used market. If they don’t, V2H capability on the used market will remain limited, preventing many drivers from having this important option for clean backup power and other bidirectional charging opportunities. That’s where policy can help by ensuring V2H capability (and better yet, V2G) is offered across all electric vehicle models: if all new models have V2H, the more and more vehicles on the used market will have it over time.

So your electric vehicle is configured for bidirectional charging. What else do you need?

For V2L, you may need the charging port adapter. Some models come with it (check the spec sheet posted in the window!), or it may have to be purchased separately.  

V2H, even just for home backup power, takes a bit more external hardware, including a bidirectional capable charger, control system, and other electronics. This is where additional setup cost comes in, though most of the extra cost would be the same as that of a whole house generator or stationary battery system. Currently, most automakers have only OK’ed their vehicles to push power through their own proprietary system or a single, specific third-party provider. Take, for examples, the General Motors V2H kit (also requires their PowerShift Charger) or the Sunrun system for the Ford F-150 Lightning (requires Ford’s Charge Station Pro and a V2H activation fee for some trim levels).

It’s encouraging to see automakers going beyond vehicle capability to ensure their customers have all the components needed to set up V2H at their homes. At the same time, the walled gardens each automaker has created limits driver choice and prevents them from shopping around for the best price and functionality for a V2H rig. This is another instance in which policy can help by requiring interoperability. And I mean implementation of interoperability, not just capability to adhere to the relevant standards.

If V2H isn’t feasible for you, you still have options

When my household first acquired an electric vehicle, I lived in a rented apartment. Even if my Ioniq 5 was equipped with V2H backup capability, I wouldn’t have been able to install the home setup because I didn’t have access or authority to make changes to my electrical panel. Multiunit housing is a tough nut that needs cracking to unlock V2H for back-up power, as well as vehicle-to-grid opportunities for those who would like to participate. There’s much work to be done to develop solutions for V2H in multiunit housing where access to charging can be a challenge in the first place.

Without a full V2H setup, V2L can still be a lifeline in power outages. As I noted before, V2L can power critical devices to help you through an outage. Aside from the ability to plug in a device, an electric vehicle can be a place to escape from very hot or cold weather while the power is out. I contemplated sleeping in the car with the AC running in a post-hurricane power outage in order to cope with the sweltering weather. That’s not something you can do in a gasoline car parked in a garage due to the tailpipe emissions. Luckily for me, that power outage didn’t last long enough for me and my household to have to camp in the car in order to rest at a safe temperature.

Regardless of whether you personally have an electric vehicle, you may still be able to go to a place where one is providing backup power. A growing area of emergency planning is incorporating electric school buses as a source of backup power for schools, shelters, and other community gathering locations. Check out these examples from Illinois and Oklahoma.

Beyond backup: vehicle-grid integration for bargain bills and a better grid for all

V2H for backup will get many drivers thinking about and using their electric vehicles for more than just getting around. That’s a huge mental shift that was once unthinkable for the hundred or so years that fossil fueled vehicles ruled the road. Once you’ve made the shift in thinking, you might be wondering how else you can leverage your vehicle’s capabilities.

That’s where vehicle-grid integration comes in. If you’re set up for V2H backup, the next step to grid-coordinated bidirectional charging. Whether you stick to offsetting some of your energy use from the grid or go all the way to pushing power to the grid, you could earn you some incentives while supporting the operation of the grid. And don’t forget (one directional) managed charging! The UCS analysis mentioned above shows that actively managed charging, which delays or advances charging based on grid conditions, can create significant benefits all on its own.

The availability of grid-coordinated managed charging and V2H/V2G programs depends on what your local electric utility or third party aggregators offer in your area. I’ll cover more on that another time. For now, I’ll assure you that UCS is working with stakeholders in the vehicle-grid integration space to make sure bidirectional capable vehicles and opportunities to use those vehicles are available to more drivers.

How to enjoy bad but not worse weather

Dig the webcam at Poipu beach, on the south side of Kauai, near where I'll be for a week, starting tomorrow. Also, the turtles, in calmer weather.

I love me a water matrix printer

This fountain in Moravian Square (Moravské náměstí), in the Czechian city of Brno, prints the time in falling water.

Two stories, one slo-mo tragedy

Radio World: How AM and FM station totals have changed in ten years. And Cord Cutter News' story about it.

I dunno why, but I did give it an image

This was my most-visited blog post yesterday.

Until the Iran war, the main political pressure on President Donald Trump was high prices, particularly on housing and food. So earlier this year, he announced an executive order on a popular policy - banning Wall Street investors from controlling housing. “I am immediately taking steps to ban large institutional investors from buying more single-family homes,” he said, “and I will be calling on Congress to codify it.” I didn’t believe Trump was serious, because he’s generally talked a big game on constraining Wall Street, but hasn’t followed through.

However, something unusual happened. Trump’s pledge meshed with a set of vibrant debates about housing happening in both parties, and it may end up turning into law.

To understand why, we have to start with how Trump’s arguments were received in Congress. After Biden lost in 2024, people on both sides of the aisle blamed high housing costs, particularly the spiraling prices and rents in the post-pandemic period, for the collapse of the Democratic Party. Trump inherited the problem, and hasn’t solved it.

The housing story was dominated by two different factions. One group, the “Abundance movement,” argued that zoning prohibitions prevented more housing supply, and thus kept prices high and unaffordable. This group generally blamed homeowners and bureaucrats for refusing to allow more multi-family housing.

The second group, anti-monopolists, argued the predominant problem was financial. After the Great Financial Crisis, went this argument, the number of builders fell by 60%, because smaller builders couldn’t get a loan while large ones could borrow cheaply from the capital markets. Moreover, large institutional buyers were taking existing supply off the market and engaging in various forms of soft monopolization to drive up rents. And big builders were engaged in land-hoarding to keep supply off the market.

On BIG, we got into a fight with Abundance co-author Derek Thompson, over the specific case of housing in Dallas. The passion is real, and exists for a reason. Here’s Thompson in 2021 calling allegations of private equity control of housing leading to higher prices something close to a conspiracy theory.

What’s going on is a debate over the nature of American society. For much of the 20th century, government support for homeownership was a foundational method of U.S. statecraft. As the founder of the post-WWII suburb, William Levitt, once said, “No man who owns his own house and lot can be a Communist. He has too much to do.” Every President supported homeownership, we anchor our schools and communities around it, and homeownership is associated with pretty much every socially beneficial health trend.

Wall Street was linked to Main Street through the housing finance channel, first through thrift loans, and then eventually through securitization. But from the 1980s onward, as wage growth flattened, Wall Street started lending too much to Americans, and the home became a financial asset as much and eventually even more than a place to live. This dynamic ultimately led to the great crisis of 2008, which snapped the spine of the American system.

In the post-crisis era, Obama decided that renting, not ownership, was a more suitable option for Americans. And he had his administration sell off large swaths of single family homes in foreclosure to large investors to turn them into rental properties. As Morgan Stanley put it, “[e]ach distressed single-family liquidation creates [not only] a potential renter household” but also “a potential single-family rental unit. That meant, for “the first time in history,” there was “an opportunity for institutions to own single-family rental properties as part of a larger asset allocation strategy.”

In other words, the rise of institutional ownership of single family housing is new, a result of Obama-era changes to try and move America from a society with high homeownership to one where people rent. This shift hasn’t been wholesale, a majority of Americans still owns their own home. But the age of the average homebuyer moved from 39 years old to 59 years old in the last 15 years.

Everyone else rents, and increasingly from corporate landlords. Institutional ownership is regionally concentrated, with investors buying up properties in particular cities. In Atlanta, for instance, large institutional investors have dominant shares of the market.

As homebuilding consolidated, and an institutional asset ownership class emerged, the big builders started working with Wall Street to craft single family homes from scratch that would never go on the market. This “Build to Rent” sector took off, doubling in market share from 2021-2024. Giants builders Lennar likely have market power, and may also be hoarding land as part of their strategy to work with big institutional investors to keep home prices up. After all, one way to keep supply off the market for normal buyers, and thus control prices, is to build housing for large institutional owners.

For a long time, most housing analysts and think tank types dismissed private equity buying up homes as some sort of conspiracy theory, even though it was a pretty common story to hear someone talk about how they couldn’t buy a home because of the all-cash purchase by some sort of investor. But over time, serious policymakers started to notice that the frustration was more than just a few dissatisfied anecdote tellers.

In 2024, the Federal Trade Commission under Lina Khan found that Invitation Homes, a spinoff of Blackstone, had engaged in rampant misbehavior. The CEO told one of his subordinates to “juice this hog” and they did so by deceiving renters, unfairly evicting people, charging junk fees, and so forth. Her successor, Trump FTC Chair Andrew Ferguson, is continuing her legacy in this area. Last year, Senator Jon Ossoff investigated and found that institutional purchases make it harder for Americans to buy homes.

Congressional documents showed that “renters in institutionally-owned SFR homes often experience higher rent increases, inflated fees, and diminishing quality of housing over time.” And Federal Reserve economists wrote a paper observing that such investors “raise rents at 60 percent higher rates than the average increase when first acquiring the property,” and that rents overall go up.

This information, and increasing frustration of Americans on high housing costs, led to Congressional action.

In July, Republican Senator Tim Scott and Democratic Senator Elizabeth Warren passed a bill out of the Senate Banking Committee doing meshing the Abundance and anti-monopoly framework. It encouraged more manufactured housing to lower costs, facilitated faster zoning approval, and loosened standards for financing for multi-family apartment construction, among other changes. There was more public money for homebuilding, and support for cities trying to speed up processes. It promised to be some of the most important housing legislation passed out of Congress in decades. It didn’t include anything on institutional bans, but drew support from both anti-monopolists and Abundance groups.

Then came Trump’s comments and executive order. And if anything, his rhetoric was even more heated than the policy he suggested; he criticized the big homebuilders for land hoarding and attacked them as similar to the oil cartel OPEC. As Dave Dayen notes, the White House pushed hard for Congress to bar institutional ownership, going so far as to criticize the House version of the bill for not including such a ban. So Senate Republicans, led by Scott, decided to negotiate one with Warren and add it to their July bill. And they did, which Trump approved in his statement of administrative policy on the Senate bill.

That part of the bill bans large institutional investors from buying up single-family homes, setting a limit of owning 350 homes. They can still build new construction, but must sell it after seven years, unless the renter wants to stay, in which case that gets extended by another three. There are a few other loopholes, such as allowing for institutional ownership of manufactured housing, which is designed to reduce costs. But it’s a pretty good package.

Yesterday, it passed by an overwhelming margin of 89-10. And the administration is encouraging the House of Representatives to pass it.

But if you’re thinking this story sounds too good to be true, well, you’re right. Now it heads to the House of Representatives, where there is opposition from the Republican head of the Financial Services Committee, French Hill. And his goal is to force the Senate to sit down and negotiate something different, likely remove the institutional ownership caps, and then jam a bunch of bank and crypto deregulatory policy in there to make the whole thing unpalatable to Democrats.

There are a couple of dangerous signals that Wall Street is rousing to back Hill’s opposition strategy. The first is that Senator Brian Schatz, who is set to take over as the Democratic Senate leader in a few years, opposed it to signal to private equity that he’s going to be a reliable ally. He gave an assertive speech against the provision preventing Build to Rent from owning large swaths of housing for more than seven years. Here’s Dayen.

Schatz called [the Build to Rent] particular measure “positively Soviet,” described it as “an effort to demonize people who want to build rental housing for folks,” and claimed it was a “drafting error,” presumably to embarrass its authors into a fix. “There is literally no reason to do it this way, and it would take like a two-line fix. But what we were told last week was, I’m sorry, the bill is closed,” he said.

The peroration got a lot of attaboys from the abundance folks, who have decided to magnify what Schatz even admits is a small part of the overall housing construction market and claim that this poisons the entire bill. But Schatz was, frankly, lying to his own supporters. He never filed an amendment to deal with this part of the bill, according to Senate aides, even though first-order amendments were open until this Monday and second-order amendments until this Wednesday. There was never an attempt to make that two-line fix or rally support around it. (Schatz’s office was asked about this and did not respond.)

Another signal is that, according to conservative Mike Cernovich, “a massive influencer contract to block this went out.” He continued, “Keep an eye out for ‘MAGA’ people who suddenly try derailing Trump’s plan to make home ownership more affordable. BIG MONEY is trying to stop this in the House.” So we’re going to see chatter online, especially among MAGA opinion leaders, on this legislation.

And finally, when Speaker Mike Johnson asked the President about whether he should push to pass the law in the House, sources claim that the President said “no one gives a fuck about housing.” I don’t know if that’s true. Trump may have said it, he also changes his mind a lot.

One interesting point is that a lot of the people who argue that supply constraints are the main factor limiting housing went aggressively to bat for Wall Street’s right to own homes, saying that such a limit overrides everything else that’s good in the bill. If that’s true, then much of the argument from the Abundance world isn’t credible. After all, the problem then can’t be zoning, it’s just a financing issue. But not all of the people in that world agree, many are sincere and wanted to see it pass. This bill split the Abundance types in a useful way.

So what happens now? I don’t know. It may move through the House, it may not. Trump is unpredictable, and the Iran situation has thrown all calculations out the window. Regardless, this legislation to make housing something ordinary families own, instead of an asset class for Wall Street, has moved further than I imagined possible.

That’s good news, in some dark times.

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

While media coverage of Iran’s closure of the Strait of Hormuz has focused on oil prices, the implications for global food supplies are no less alarming. A prolonged closure could disrupt agriculture worldwide and place more than 100 million people at risk of a humanitarian catastrophe.