By Frankie Mastrangelo
Punk & Post-Punk Journal

In This is a Message to Persons Unknown: The Story of Poison Girls, Rich Cross highlights a 1982 debate organized by Johnny Waller and Winston Smith, journalists from the 1970–91 weekly music magazine Sounds. Centred around the question of ‘Is Punk Dead?’, the panel brought together Poison Girls’ guiding force, guitarist and vocalist Vi Subversa, alongside Beki Bondage (Vice Squad), Colin Jerwood (Conflict) and others.

In many ways, Subversa’s response to this question captures the spirit of Rich Cross’s Poison Girls history by illuminating the complexities, integrity and legacy of a band foundational to anarcho-punk as a genre and ethic. Vi Subversa, born Frances Sokolov, responded to the Sounds journalists’ antagonistic question with the assured clarity and grounded wisdom of a woman refusing to entertain bullshit: ‘punk is about life; punk was about taking my life for myself. There’s no way I can say punk is dead, because while I’m still alive and kicking I need a word for it and “punk” will do’ (177). Poison Girls were not interested in getting caught up with petty genre debates, competitions for subcultural capital or the simplistic allure of nihilism. Poison Girls reminded us that punk is about life and all of the ugliness and beauty that comes with living. They showed us how we subvert power by asserting our own power and creating more possibilities for others to do the same.

Cross traces Poison Girls’ origins back to how Subversa established her creative life as a single mother in the days prior to punk’s emergence, discussing her role in radical cabaret The Body Show as well as anarchist and feminist political organizing. Poison Girls challenged the ‘year zero’ mentality of punk and drew vital connections to pre-existing countercultures that informed the punk ethos. Historicizing the band’s involvement in leftist movements showcases how Poison Girls were a rare entity within punk itself. The band’s Essex communal home, Burleigh House – located just a few blocks from Crass’s Dial House – became a hub for nurturing the parallel and ultimately convergent forces of Poison Girls and Crass through creative collaboration and radical dialogue. Vi Subversa and original drummer Lance d’Boyle – both of whom were years ahead of their Crass contemporaries – emerged as vital mentors to younger punks like Crass and Honey Bane (who was released to Subversa’s care from a group home). Poison Girls raised the consciousness of younger punks about motherhood, gendered divisions of labour and other pressing topics flying under the radar of boys singing familiar refrains about war.

Rich Cross’s book moves from meticulously charting the band’s early days into chapters organized around each of the band’s albums, considering Subversa’s lyricism, guitarist Richard Famous’s archival contextualization and formative creative partnerships that shaped Poison Girls’ evolving sound and aesthetics. He starts with the band’s 1979 debut album Hex, which asserted Poison Girls’ political perspective, conveying to audiences that the group had nuanced takes on topics such as non-violent resistance and the isolation of domesticity. Songs like ‘Crisis’ share how experiencing unfolding crises like economic downturn and geopolitical strife from the confines of the home is lonely and demoralizing in a way that only those responsible for feminized social reproduction can speak to. Subversa’s embodied resistance to social expectations within and outside punk as a 40-something-year-old woman steering a band made waves amongst journalists and punks alike. Male journalists like Phil Sutcliffe and Paul Morley of Sounds were intimidated by Poison Girls taking aim at topics like misogyny, as Richard Famous recounted Sutcliffe saying, ‘the men in the band must be masochists’ (74).

Funnily enough, while Paul Morley ultimately offered a positive review of Hex, that only happened after Subversa swung at him for taking cheap shots at her appearance in an earlier review of a gig, calling her ‘a middle aged woman stuffed in a red dress’ (46). Not only was Subversa unafraid of standing up to the ageism and sexism of male reporters, she was also insistent on not kicking young people out of shows who acted up and threw things at them. She recognized the band needed to earn respect as kids in the audience were rightly distrustful of authorities – of anyone over 30. From Burleigh House to the establishment of DIY space the Vault, to using each show to welcome rabble-rousers and supporters alike, Cross highlights a key thread of the Poison Girls ethos: cultivating space for anyone who
might benefit from their message, rather than creating echo chambers of like-minded punks.

Cross shifts into discussing the background of the 1979 Bloody Revolutions/ Persons Unknown split with Crass, noting how the title’s inspiration came from the May 1978 anarchist trials. Six defendants faced the extremely serious charge of ‘conspiracy, with person or persons unknown, at places unknown, to cause explosions’ (66). The benefit gigs for the six anarchist defendants surrounding this release garnered controversy, with National Front members attacking the bands at an infamous 1979 Conway Hall show. The Persons Unknown campaign era saw both Poison Girls and Crass jointly critiquing both the National Front and anarchist organizers alike for ‘colonizing the energy of gigs and attempting to turn young fresh blood into soldiers for various causes’ (69). Poison Girls were critical of anyone grappling for power and control across the political spectrum, and that same resistance to power and control ultimately took shape in their artistic collaboration with Crass. Poison Girls grew weary of the strictures imposed on them with the omnipresent Crass logo format integrated in all aesthetic output, and how their secondary status to Crass overshadowed their creative output.

1980’s Chappaquiddick Bridge built upon Hex by engaging their debut album’s sonic structure but kicking up their playfulness via the experimentation of style and pacing. Named after the 1969 ‘Chappaquiddick Incident’ when 37-year-old Ted Kennedy left his campaign worker Mary Jo Kopechne to die at the bridge following a drunken car crash, the album recuperated the woman’s lost memory while undermining blind reverence to political dynasties. With Chappaquiddick Bridge, we see Poison Girls beginning to distinguish themselves more from Crass’s aesthetic imprint by foregoing inclusion of the Crass logo and featuring tracks such as ‘Good Time Sartre’s’ refusal to give up some playful hedonism. While the focus for many anarchists was a serious attitude towards expanding struggle against the status quo, Poison Girls engaged parody and humour in Chappaquiddick Bridge’s lyrics and musical experimentation – as well as through Lance d’Boyle’s Poison Girls magazine Impossible Dream. Cross includes extensive visual references of the magazine (as well as vast collections of show flyers and band memorabilia) highlighting how the evolution of Poison Girls’ artistic point of view went hand in hand with their musical development – each wing of their expression keeping an eye towards how strategies like pastiche and comedy can be vehicles for commentary on sobering political subjects.

The often overlooked 1981 Total Exposure live album solidified their creative independence from Crass and crystallized a turning point for the band as an autonomous musical, artistic and activist force. Their live shows of this early 1980s era harkened back to their early interest in cabaret by integrating more theatrical and film elements, such as screening bassist Nils’s short films and agit-prop slides projected on canvas. ‘King of alternative comedy’ and Young Ones actor Tony Allen joined them on tour as an opener as the band struck out touring to different crowds than the usual Crass contingent. Recollections of memorable shows during this era of renewed independence, such as the 1981 Anarchy Club gigs in Belfast, Ireland, convey the band’s impact as they stepped into their creative power. Peter Jones of Paranoid Visions and DIY punk labels FOAD Records and Rotator Records said that when attending these shows at 15 years old, ‘the warmth of the artists, the amaraderie of the audience and the sense of belonging changed me forever’ (152).

1982’s Where’s the Pleasure continued Poison Girls’ independent path, exploring both the strengths and drawbacks of remaining autonomous from Crass and the musical mainstream. Poison Girls explored the utility of sharing punk with a wider audience as Where’s the Pleasure adopted a more polished and alluring sound. The same themes established during the Hex era run throughout the album – critiques of capitalist alienation and exploitation, pursuing pleasure alongside political struggle and connecting the personal and political through astute gender analysis – but Where’s the Pleasure is smoother, textured and complicated. Not only did this evidence an evolved confidence and self-assuredness, but this was also a stark contrast to the rough bluntness of Total Exposure. On the 1983–84 Singles collaboration with Illuminated Records, Poison Girls made an even more intentional effort to break into the cultural mainstream with ‘radio-friendly’ songs such as ‘One Good Reason’. Poison Girls were both broke and interested in sharing capitalist critique in broader commercial venues, yet the singles failed to capture public attention and chart.

Cross takes us into the 1985 Songs of Praise time period by emphasizing Poison Girls’ reassertion of an anarchist viewpoint through collaborating with acclaimed anarchist illustrator Clifford Harper and integrating reaffirmed commitments to organized movements, such as the ongoing Miners’ Strike of this era. The Thatcher era initiated a new class war against workers by gutting labour protections and increasing militarization of the national police force. Miners faced massive job loss through mine closures as well as rampant unaddressed safety concerns. The Miners’ Strike brought anarchist punk culture’s strong anti-work stance into view as bands like Chumbawamba, Flux of Pink Indians and Poison Girls held multiple truths at the same time. They encouraged other anarcho-punk bands to see that you can simultaneously reject wage slavery while fighting to make workers’ lives better through supporting the strike. This time period also celebrated Subversa turning 50 with a huge birthday gig that Chumbawamba, Toxic Shock and many others played and attended at the Ritzy in Brixton. Richard Famous noted that the apex of the band’s arc could be seen in this birthday show – it seemed to reaffirm the community the band fostered over the years, while reflecting back the band’s influence on various performers like Toxic Shock’s Heather Joyce and Nightingales frontman Robert Lloyd (243).

While a press release in 1986 noted that material for a new studio album tentatively titled Demonstration was in the works, that never progressed and Poison Girls wound down by 1989. Subversa and Famous dedicated creative energy to working on AIDS: The Musical in the late 1980s: a rekindling of their love for radical theatre established a decade earlier with The Body Show. Various reunion gigs came up throughout the 2000s, until Subversa passed away on 19 February 2016 at the age of 80, and Lance d’Boyle passed away at 76 on 16 January 2017. Cross urges us to see how Poison Girls’ legacy keeps their memory alive by closing his history with the reminder of how the band urged those in isolation, suffering from feelings of powerlessness and disconnection imposed on them by authority figures, to come out from hiding (281). ‘Invisible people, show yourselves’, they urged. Similar to Cross’s previous work on the band (see Cross 2014), the author’s history brings Poison Girls’
story into view, shedding generous light on the unconventional path of a band who paved the way for so many future radicals to make art about the structures, norms and expectations that confine us, but do not need to define us. After all, old people can be rebels too.

REFERENCE
Cross, Rich (2014), ‘“Take the toys from the boys”: Gender, generation and
anarchist intent in the work of Poison Girls’, Punk & Post-Punk, 3:2, pp.
117–45, https://doi.org/10.1386/punk.3.2.117_1.
CONTRIBUTOR DETAILS

Dr Frankie Mastrangelo is associate chair of the sociology department and assistant professor at Virginia Commonwealth University. She received her Ph.D. in interdisciplinary studies (media, art and text) from Virginia Commonwealth University and her master’s degree in media, cinema and digital studies from the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee. Her teaching and research examine how racialized gender and subcultures are mediated in digital and physical spaces. Her work has been featured in publications such as Gender and Society, Social Media + Society, Ephemera and Teaching Resistance. Contact: Virginia Commonwealth University, 827 W. Franklin St. Founders Hall, 2nd Floor Richmond, VA 23284, USA

Order from: PM Press (UK) | PM Press (US)

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The Big Easy

by Stephen Duplantier
Fifth Estate

The Big Easy is the Isle of Orleans, an archipelago of a long and narrow, always unsure island in a surregional stream. The Isle is a meandering Möbius half-twist in a topologically peculiar place connecting the inside and outside. If you start on one side and move along the strip, you will eventually reach the other side, which is supposed to be land but may not be, without crossing an edge. It goes by “Big Easy.”

In French, Max translates it as La Grande Indulgente. There are more words to describe indulgence: it is also yielding, desiring, transgressing, pleasing, forgiving, merciful, leniency, and permissive. And, what would the Mississippi River be without its excesses and crevasses, or breaks in the levee. The Isle of Orleans is also the type site of an astonishing anarchist geography.

Max Cafard and Vulpes in a succinct text and with the spare black-line graphic style of a comix book, Anarchy in the Big Easy: A History of Revolt, Rebellion and Resurgence, presents a mostly unknown litany of anarchist vignettes connected to this unusually storied isle. Cafard and Vulpes explore both the deep past and current events as well as short-term political changes.

5,000 Years of Anarchy

The Mississippi drains 32 U.S. states and part of Canada and, in the process, is continually deconstructing most of North America and somewhat hilariously, seems intent on trying to put it into the Gulf of Mexico—a most surregional carnivalesque endeavor! The first two ancient protagonists in this long story are a 5000-year-old egalitarian mystery culture, the builders of the Watson Brake mounds upriver on the Isle, and the younger 3000-year-old and solidly egalitarian Poverty Point people.

We know little about Watson Brake and its easy indulgences. But we do know that the Poverty Point people were quite enthusiastic about building a huge earthen mound with the outstretched wings of an enormous flying bird. The people completed this important whimsy of their own free will and with rapid, yet unforced labor. They likely completed their project in three joyous months.

These were the archetypal easy ancients of the Big Easy. We might add that they were tolerant, permissive, accommodating, forgiving, and generous as their peaceable archaeological record reveals. They were, in a way, the first Social Aid and Pleasure Clubs, a New Orleans institution to this day.

Next came the importation of Black captives to the Isle. The arriving Africans immediately began meeting under the cover of night to make plans to outsmart and destroy their captors. The captured Africans joined forces with the native tribes near Bayou St. John to plot their escape strategies and to overcome their captors. The resistance by the always rebellious Africans against their colonial slavery overlords never stopped and included armed revolution and countless guerrilla actions.

The anarchist geographer, Elisée Reclus, was an eyewitness to the Africans’ plight when he worked on the Isle in Louisiana in the mid-19th century. Those years were the worst of the peak horrors of the slave trade and the cruelty against Black people. Reclus’ writings and texts about racism and slavery contributed to informing and persuading a politically and socially awakening Europe. A bit later, another European intellectual, Joseph Déjacque, developed anarcho-communist feminist antiracist ideas during his time in the city, envisioning a cosmic, utopian “Humanisphere” project.

By now, we are in the late 19th century and within the era of anarcho-syndicalist trade unions and the labor movement’s awakening activism. Massive strikes uniting races, ethnicities, and classes were bellwethers of change.

Crossing into the 20th century, Creolized New Orleans folk in the complexity-driven Big Easy archipelago powered the 20th-century African Creole diaspora’s cultural resurgence in jazz, blues, and expressive culture. This cultural explosion changed global music and is still the primary fount of style and expressiveness.

Another half-twist of the Möbius band shows the racist and early fascist violence of the federal, state, and police forces and their aggression against African diaspora communitarian struggles. These were also part of the violence of segregated river flooding decisions and the engineered cruelties of pre- and post-Katrina hurricane catastrophes.

In our time, Anarchy in the Big Easy tells about the extraordinary revanchist recapturings of their lives and fortunes by anarchists and community members in devastated neighborhoods in the post-Katrina days. The communitarian anarchists spontaneously solved problems that the state and organized bureaucracy, with their blundering and dangerous incompetence, simply could not. There are yet even more episodes in this anarchist comix that I have not mentioned.

Anarchogenesis

In the body, the biological side of the epiphany of this general system principle I call anarchogenesis is the process of angiogenesis (growing new small blood vessels to go around a blockage in a blood vessel.) Anarchogenesis can be applied analogously and with sufficient practical correspondence to the physical facts of flow, as well as to the dynamics of rivers meandering and breaking through on their own to relieve pressure.

Anarchogenesis extends to the artificial levees built to constrain flow, to the strikes and work stoppages of workers that force management to break through their exploitative practices and discover other solutions. The process helps describe the energetic communitarian anarchists who, like a delta forming at the mouth of the powerful Mississippi, expand into a thousand channels of action and know-how, and come up with solutions that have stumped incompetent officials.

However, a blockage on a production line provoked by a strike may be just the opportunity that aggrieved workers in a union need to persuade management. A natural river levee can break open and splay out onto the land, nourishing streams and rivulets and preventing even more catastrophic breaks. In addition to smaller rivulets bypassing the levee, the process might begin to create another meander curve in the river’s flow. Such an action is a desirable revolutionary gambit.

Unwanted levee breaks that are both deadly and disruptive, such as the work of the archvillain Katrina, can be turned by smart and practical anarchists into opportunities for a thousand homegrown and effective solutions that a state or corporate bureaucracy cannot solve. Whether a crevasse is a necessary break in an energetic flowing river system or an unasked-for crevasse which disrupts a community, the anarchogenetic drive spreads out in generous loving “deltas of Venus” birthing a 1000 flow patterns.

The physics of all these actions is explained by Belgian physical chemist Ilya Prigogine as order out of chaos. Prigogine views the Mississippi Delta as a vast dissipative structure of flows of unbalanced energy gradients. Such a scenario generates order through irreversible processes: chaos enables adaptation and shapes paths and solutions to community problems which evolve to maximize the spread of a blockage. In short, an unbalanced system becomes a source of order driven by self-organization and complexity.

The Mississippi River is flowing water, but also the movement of water’s kinetic energy with plenty of mud and silt along for the ride. It all is carried to the Gulf and deposited as a delta. The delta’s lateral fanning-out shape emerges from the interplay of channels splitting up and creating fractal-like patterns. Order arises from the chaos, resulting in fluctuating dispersal shapes. Prigogine’s theory states that such systems maintain an overall order because they are open to energy and matter flows, not despite them.

Multiple channels are explored, and community work and organization are spread out into different channel bifurcations. Some are unstable and don’t work, so shifting around leads to more functional and optimized dispersal of energy, intention and work. The system continually tests multiple unstable configurations, such as changing distributaries, until it settles into a state that optimizes sediment dispersal and energy dissipation.

Chaos serves as the stabilizing force in a river or community, challenging typical criticisms of anarchy. Chaos and anarchy are precisely the things that stabilize. If an instability or a break arises, spontaneous order from the failing levees or faltering societies can self-organize critically and indulgently, which is to say easily, in feedback loops of mercy and forbearance, clemency and absolution.

Broken levees and unkept promises revascularize the flows that precede new river and social channels of permanent indulgence. There is a thirst and craving to forgive and care.

Chaos creates order when it cravenly desires, meanders and dissipates extravagantly. Anarchy is big and easy.

Stephen Duplantier is a former resident of the Ile d’Orleans; retired academic living in Costa Rica. Independent publisher and designer (Neotropica, Mesechabe, Psychic Swamp). Interests: plasma anarchy; electric cosmology; natural philosophy; complexity sciences; Orphic poetry; surregionalism. independent.academia.edu/StephenDuplantier

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A digital clock where the numbers are made from dozens of analog clock hands. Hard to describe…just go take a look.

Today's links

• The (real) dead economy theory: Vibes and memestocks, all the way down.
• Hey look at this: Delights to delectate.
• Object permanence: Jim Baen has had a stroke; Blame Apple for iTunes DRM; France v the internet; "Rotters"; 1901 undersea cables; Washington Post wants Trump coverage blackout; Taxes are for the little people; Gamer lifecycle; Ghanian postal song; "What Lies Beneath the Clock Tower": Murder of Jo Cox; 12 year old doxed by anti-vaxers; Hong Kong bookseller recants forced confession.
• Upcoming appearances: LA, Menlo Park, Toronto, NYC, Philadelphia, Chicago, London, Edinburgh, Brighton, South Bend.
• Recent appearances: Where I've been.
• Latest books: You keep readin' em, I'll keep writin' 'em.
• Upcoming books: Like I said, I'll keep writin' 'em.
• Colophon: All the rest.

The (real) dead economy theory (permalink)

Here's a fun fact about Elon Musk: in 2020, his (nominal) net worth was $20b, and today it's $1t (nominally). But that's not the fun fact; this is: everything he's done since 2020 was a flop.

As John Quiggin writes, the pre-2020 Musk was the Musk of Tesla, batteries and Starlink. The post-2020 Musk is the Musk of Starship, robotaxis, Cybertrucks and Twitter – a string of commercial flops and assets that literally exploded. I would add that post-2020 Musk created the world's hungriest money-furnace, an automated child-porn production tool called "XAI":

https://crookedtimber.org/2026/06/15/one-big-grift/

Quiggin declares that this is the era in which "financial markets fail in the task of valuing assets accurately," and "the institutional structures that are supposed to make them work have given up trying." Nor did this start with the Spacex IPO. As Quiggin writes, Bitcoin and other cryptos were once shunned by nominally sober financial institutions like Goldman Sachs, but today, not only do all the big banks offer crypto services, people have largely stopped calling it cryptocurrency because no one is even pretending that it's a form of money. It's a tradeable collectible, not even particularly useful for paying for crimes or laundering money.

Spacex is just a continuation of the logic of crypto, in which something is valuable because some people think other people will pay more for it in the future, and not because it does useful things:

https://johnquiggin.com/2018/02/09/bitcoin-kills-the-efficient-market-hypothesis/

That's the logic of the whole market today. AI – the world's money-losingest technology – attracts investment at the expense of everything else. When horrified NIH lifers begged the DOGE boys not to shut down long-running medical research projects, Musk's broccoli-haired brownshirts laughed in their faces, saying we don't need cancer research because "GAI" is almost here and it will cure cancer. You could hardly ask for a better example of investing in vibes over value than shutting down real cancer research to free up money for teaching more words to the word-guessing machine because it's about to become God and cure cancer.

Today, Goldman Sachs isn't merely all-in on crypto – it's all-in on the Spacex IPO. As Quiggin writes, the bank has signed off on Musk's claim that "Musk's ragbag of assets" will grow one hundredfold in the next 40 months.

Quiggin's short essay has been rolling around in my mind since I read it a couple days ago. Then, yesterday, I spotted this essay by Owen McGrann entitled "The Dead Economy Theory":

https://www.owenmcgrann.com/p/the-dead-economy-theory

The perfect name for this phenomenon! Or so I thought. Then I read McGrann's article, and discovered that it's yet another piece asking how the economy will work after AI takes all of our jobs because AI is absolutely going to do that and there's no point in even questioning whether that will happen.

Look, thought experiments about how to deal equitably with labor displacement in the face of automation are all well and good. I'm a science fiction writer, that stuff is my bread and butter.

But applying "dead economy theory" to the blithe acceptance of the claims of AI pitchmen is a terrible waste of a killer coinage. The true risk of AI to your job isn't: "an AI will do your job." It's: "an AI salesman will exploit your boss's infinite horniness for replacing mouthy workers with pliable machines to sell him a chatbot that can't do your job, and then your boss will fire you and replace you with that inept, defective chatbot."

By the same token: the real "dead economy" risk isn't that all the productive labor will be done by chatbots owned by a habitual liar and eminently guillotineable billionaire like Sam Altman. The actual dead economy risk is that our institutions and markets will continue to move capital from productive activity into memestocks, vibes, and bubbles.

We could do "AI cancer research" by producing tools that automate gnarly multivariant analysis problems for cancer researchers. But what we're actually doing is defunding cancer research (especially any research into "systemic" cancer because studying systemic things is "woke") to free up fiscal space so we can build data-centers and make Musk into a trillionaire.

That's not just a dead economy – it's one that'll kill everyone you love and everything that matters.

Hey look at this (permalink)

• Onward, Friends https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2026/06/farewell-now-friends

• The 40 Most Rage-Inducing Problems in Tech https://www.theringer.com/2026/05/28/tech/pope-leo-xiv-ai-encyclical-tech-industry-problems

• THE GUILLOTINE EMOJI PROPOSAL https://www.carrozo.com/guillotine-emoji

• Corporations Repurchase $4.8 TRILLION of Stock Since 2017 Trump-GOP Tax Law https://4taxfairness.substack.com/p/corporations-repurchase-48-trillion

• US approval of Paramount/Warner Bros. deal surprised DOJ lawyers, report says https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2026/06/us-approval-of-paramount-warner-bros-deal-surprised-doj-lawyers-report-says/

Object permanence (permalink)

#20yrsago Jim Baen, science fiction publisher, has had a serious stroke https://nielsenhayden.com/makinglight/archives/007658.html#007658

#20yrsago Why Apple is to blame for iTunes DRM https://web.archive.org/web/20060620004534/http://vitanuova.loyalty.org/NewsBruiser-2.6.1/nb.cgi/view/vitanuova/2006/06/15/1

#20yrsago Lifecycle of a gamer https://www.raphkoster.com/2006/06/16/the-lifecycles-of-a-player/

#20yrsago Spammer: I’ll buy MySpace profiles with more than 20k contacts https://web.archive.org/web/20060619062837/http://skibrooklyn.blogspot.com/2006/06/easy-money-sell-your-friends.html

#20yrsago Psychology of bad probability estimation: why lottos and terrorists matter https://web.archive.org/web/20060627174933/https://server1.sxsw.com/2006/coverage/SXSW06.INT.20060311.DanielGilbert.mp3

#15yrsago Copyright complaint kills Peanutweeter https://web.archive.org/web/20110620093750/https://www.wired.com/underwire/2011/06/peanutweeter-dmca-takedown/

#15yrsago Work song of Ghanian postal workers cancelling stamps https://blogfiles.wfmu.org/KF/0512/Ghana_Post_Office.mp3

#15yrsago What Lies Beneath the Clock Tower: steampunk choose-your-own-adventure https://memex.craphound.com/2011/06/17/what-lies-beneath-the-clock-tower-steampunk-choose-your-own-adventure/

#15yrsago French proposal: any URL to be arbitrarily blacklisted without due process https://www.laquadrature.net/en/2011/06/15/the-entire-internet-under-governmental-censorship-in-france/

#15yrsago Rotters: YA horror novel about grave-robbing chills, thrills, delights https://memex.craphound.com/2011/06/15/rotters-ya-horror-novel-about-grave-robbing-chills-thrills-delights/

#15yrsago Map of undersea cables from 1901 https://web.archive.org/web/20110220121138/http://www.dephx.com/2010/11/map-of-undersea-cables-from-1901.html

#15yrsago Copyright complaint kills Peanutweeter https://web.archive.org/web/20110620093750/https://www.wired.com/underwire/2011/06/peanutweeter-dmca-takedown/

#15yrsago Work song of Ghanian postal workers cancelling stamps https://blogfiles.wfmu.org/KF/0512/Ghana_Post_Office.mp3

#15yrsago What Lies Beneath the Clock Tower: steampunk choose-your-own-adventure https://memex.craphound.com/2011/06/17/what-lies-beneath-the-clock-tower-steampunk-choose-your-own-adventure/

#10yrsago Supreme Court ruling is a blow to copyright trolling business-model https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2016/06/attorneys-in-copyright-case-on-resold-textbooks-inch-closer-to-2m-payday/

#10yrsago The Orlando shooting, according to the Congressmen who took the most money from the NRA https://web.archive.org/web/20160617143716/https://theslot.jezebel.com/heres-how-the-congressmen-who-have-gotten-the-most-cash-1782083985

#10yrsago British Pro-EU MP murdered in the street by man shouting “Britain first!” https://web.archive.org/web/20160616212235/https://theintercept.com/2016/06/16/british-referendum-campaign-suspended-killing-pro-europe-lawmaker-jo-cox/

#10yrsago 12 year old makes devastating video about anti-vaxxers, gets doxxed https://skepchick.org/2016/06/anti-vaxxers-dox-a-child-critic/

#10yrsago Report from the prison-industrial complex’s leading trade show https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/jun/16/us-prisons-jail-private-healthcare-companies-profit

#10yrsago Your cable operator is spying on you and selling the data from your set-top box https://publicknowledge.org/public-knowledge-defends-consumer-privacy-in-set-top-box-data-complaint-to-fcc-ftc/

#10yrsago Not robots: youth unemployment caused by late retirement, driven by pension precarity https://thebaffler.com/salvos/exit-planning-geoghegan

#10yrsago Oakland mayor denies firing police chief over officers who statutorily raped teen sex-worker https://eastbayexpress.com/badge-of-dishonor-top-oakland-police-department-officials-looked-away-as-east-bay-cops-sexually-exploited-and-trafficked-a-teenager-2-1/

#10yrsago Paramount tells judge that they’re still suing over Star Trek fan-film https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/business/business-news/paramount-says-star-trek-fan-903497/

#10yrsago $40,000/year private school sues school for low-income kids for $2M over “Commonwealth” https://www.bostonglobe.com/metro/2016/06/16/can-school-lay-claim-commonwealth-its-name-back-bay-institution-believes-can/WHwiaaPEn04cIY6uxXjoiO/story.html

#10yrsago Wisconsin Congresswoman: mandatory drug tests for anyone claiming $150K in itemized tax-deductions https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/jun/16/gwen-moore-drug-test-rich-for-tax-deductions

#10yrsago Hong Kong bookseller: I was forced to confess on China TV https://www.bbc.com/news/av/world-asia-china-36552672#5yrsago

#10yrsago Washington Post calls for “blackout” on Trump coverage, appeals to RNC https://web.archive.org/web/20160615113350/https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/the-right-response-to-donald-trump-a-media-blackout/2016/06/14/2868a0e0-3256-11e6-8758-d58e76e11b12_story.html

#10yrsago Security economics: black market price of hacked servers drops to $6 https://www.wired.com/2016/06/xdedic-server-trading-forum-kaspersky/

#10yrsago Lower-case “x” as a gender-neutral typographic convention https://kottke.org/16/06/x-marks-gender-neutral

#5yrsago Taxes are for the little people https://pluralistic.net/2021/06/15/guillotines-and-taxes/#carried-interest

Upcoming appearances (permalink)

• Virtual: The future of world governance, with Kim Stanley Robinson (UN Independent Expert on International Order), Jun 19
  https://www.youtube.com/live/wJvBvYdaAMY

• LA: The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI with Brian Merchant (Skylight Books), Jun 19
  https://www.skylightbooks.com/event/skylight-cory-doctorow-presents-reverse-centaurs-guide-life-after-ai-w-brian-merchant

• Menlo Park: The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI with Angie Coiro (Kepler's), Jun 21
  https://www.keplers.org/upcoming-events-internal/cory-doctorow-2026

• Toronto: The Sovereignty Debate (IAB Canada's State of the Nation), Jun 23
  https://iabcanada.com/state-of-the-nation-2026

• Toronto: The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI (Osler Records/Type Books), Jun 23
  https://www.eventbrite.com/e/cory-doctorow-book-launch-and-talk-tickets-1991501299998

• NYC: The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI with Jonathan Coulton (The Strand), Jun 24
  https://www.strandbooks.com/cory-doctorow-the-reverse-centaur-s-guide-to-life-after-ai.html

• Philadelphia: The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI with David Williams (Fitler Club/Philadelphia Citizen), Jun 25
  https://www.eventbrite.com/e/cory-doctorow-book-event-tickets-1990110326559

• Chicago: The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI with Rick Perlstein (Exile in Bookville), Jun 26
  https://exileinbookville.com/events/50628

• London: Idler Festival, Jul 11
  https://www.idler.co.uk/festival/

• Edinburgh International Book Festival with Jimmy Wales, Aug 17
  https://www.edbookfest.co.uk/events/the-front-list-cory-doctorow-and-jimmy-wales

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

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

Recent appearances (permalink)

• The Enshittification of Life, the Universe, & Everything (Luke Savage)
  https://www.lukewsavage.com/p/the-enshittification-of-life-the

• Cory Doctorow's digital jail-break (DW In Focus)
  https://www.dw.com/en/cory-doctorows-digital-jail-break/audio-77414035

• Why the Internet Got Worse and What to Do About It (Jim Rutt) (RIP)
  https://www.jimruttshow.com/cory-doctorow-3/

• On Enshittification – and what can be done about it (Re:publica)
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KhINQgPMVSI

• EFFecting Change: How to Disenshittify the Internet (EFF, with Wendy Liu)
  https://archive.org/details/effecting-change-enshittification

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, April 20, 2027

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

Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources:

Currently writing: "The Post-American Internet," a sequel to "Enshittification," about the better world the rest of us get to have now that Trump has torched America. Third draft completed. Submitted to editor.

• "The Reverse Centaur's Guide to AI," a short book for Farrar, Straus and Giroux about being an effective AI critic. LEGAL REVIEW AND COPYEDIT COMPLETE.

• "The Post-American Internet," a short book about internet policy in the age of Trumpism. PLANNING.

• A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING

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ISSN: 3066-764X

Artist Claire Salvo has painted the starting five of the world champion NY Knicks on a set of US one dollar bills. If you’re in NYC, you may have seen these cheekily pasted up around the city.

She’s selling a print of all five bills but is also auctioning off the hand-painted originals. The auction ends in a bit more than 4 days and the top bid currently stands at $3200.

See also: The Harriet Tubman $20 Stamp and a discussion of whether such modification of US currency is legal or not.

Tags: art · Claire Salvo · NY Knicks · sports