More than a decade after Aaron Swartz’s death, the United States is still living inside the contradiction that destroyed him.

Swartz believed that knowledge, especially publicly funded knowledge, should be freely accessible. Acting on that, he downloaded thousands of academic articles from the JSTOR archive with the intention of making them publicly available. For this, the federal government charged him with a felony and threatened decades in prison. After two years of prosecutorial pressure, Swartz died by suicide on Jan. 11, 2013.

The still-unresolved questions raised by his case have resurfaced in today’s debates over artificial intelligence, copyright and the ultimate control of knowledge.

At the time of Swartz’s prosecution, vast amounts of research were funded by taxpayers, conducted at public institutions and intended to advance public understanding. But access to that research was, and still is, locked behind expensive paywalls. People are unable to read work they helped fund without paying private journals and research websites.

Swartz considered this hoarding of knowledge to be neither accidental nor inevitable. It was the result of legal, economic and political choices. His actions challenged those choices directly. And for that, the government treated him as a criminal.

Today’s AI arms race involves a far more expansive, profit-driven form of information appropriation. The tech giants ingest vast amounts of copyrighted material: books, journalism, academic papers, art, music and personal writing. This data is scraped at industrial scale, often without consent, compensation or transparency, and then used to train large AI models.

AI companies then sell their proprietary systems, built on public and private knowledge, back to the people who funded it. But this time, the government’s response has been markedly different. There are no criminal prosecutions, no threats of decades-long prison sentences. Lawsuits proceed slowly, enforcement remains uncertain and policymakers signal caution, given AI’s perceived economic and strategic importance. Copyright infringement is reframed as an unfortunate but necessary step toward “innovation.”

Recent developments underscore this imbalance. In 2025, Anthropic reached a settlement with publishers over allegations that its AI systems were trained on copyrighted books without authorization. The agreement reportedly valued infringement at roughly $3,000 per book across an estimated 500,000 works, coming at a cost of over $1.5 billion. Plagiarism disputes between artists and accused infringers routinely settle for hundreds of thousands, or even millions, of dollars when prominent works are involved. Scholars estimate Anthropic avoided over $1 trillion in liability costs. For well-capitalized AI firms, such settlements are likely being factored as a predictable cost of doing business.

As AI becomes a larger part of America’s economy, one can see the writing on the wall. Judges will twist themselves into knots to justify an innovative technology premised on literally stealing the works of artists, poets, musicians, all of academia and the internet, and vast expanses of literature. But if Swartz’s actions were criminal, it is worth asking: What standard are we now applying to AI companies?

The question is not simply whether copyright law applies to AI. It is why the law appears to operate so differently depending on who is doing the extracting and for what purpose.

The stakes extend beyond copyright law or past injustices. They concern who controls the infrastructure of knowledge going forward and what that control means for democratic participation, accountability and public trust.

Systems trained on vast bodies of publicly funded research are increasingly becoming the primary way people learn about science, law, medicine and public policy. As search, synthesis and explanation are mediated through AI models, control over training data and infrastructure translates into control over what questions can be asked, what answers are surfaced, and whose expertise is treated as authoritative. If public knowledge is absorbed into proprietary systems that the public cannot inspect, audit or meaningfully challenge, then access to information is no longer governed by democratic norms but by corporate priorities.

Like the early internet, AI is often described as a democratizing force. But also like the internet, AI’s current trajectory suggests something closer to consolidation. Control over data, models and computational infrastructure is concentrated in the hands of a small number of powerful tech companies. They will decide who gets access to knowledge, under what conditions and at what price.

Swartz’s fight was not simply about access, but about whether knowledge should be governed by openness or corporate capture, and who that knowledge is ultimately for. He understood that access to knowledge is a prerequisite for democracy. A society cannot meaningfully debate policy, science or justice if information is locked away behind paywalls or controlled by proprietary algorithms. If we allow AI companies to profit from mass appropriation while claiming immunity, we are choosing a future in which access to knowledge is governed by corporate power rather than democratic values.

How we treat knowledge—who may access it, who may profit from it and who is punished for sharing it—has become a test of our democratic commitments. We should be honest about what those choices say about us.

This essay was written with J. B. Branch, and originally appeared in the San Francisco Chronicle.

These photos by Chu Weimin show the mind-boggling scale of China’s green energy buildout.

Last year China installed more than half of all wind and solar added globally. In May alone, it added enough renewable energy to power Poland, installing solar panels at a rate of roughly 100 every second.

The massive buildout is happening across the country, from crowded eastern cities increasingly topped by rooftop solar panels to remote western deserts where colossal wind farms sprawl across the landscape.

Tags: China · Chu Weimin · energy · photography

Yesterday, Mayor Jacob Frey basically took a Fox “News” host down, pointing out that Trump’s own federal prosecutors just quit their jobs rather than investigate and prosecute Renee Good’s wife for “domestic terrorism.”

Which raises the question: what is ICE really doing in Minneapolis?

Well over a decade ago, the very anglo daughter of a friend of mine fell in love with a Hispanic fellow who owned a Mexican restaurant he’d started in her little northern midwestern town. They got married, she got pregnant, and everybody in the family was delighted. Until the feds visited the restaurant and discovered her new husband wasn’t a US citizen and had no legal permission to be here in the country.

This was during the Obama administration. The feds were unfailingly polite. They told him he had a certain amount of time to get his affairs in order but within that period of time he must leave the country, return to Mexico, and apply for asylum or a visa from there. Those were the rules.

Nobody showed up to kick in the front door of their home. Nobody from the government was wearing a mask. No swearing, no threats, no guns, no tear gas, no pepper spray, no hitting his car with theirs or beating either of them to the ground. They merely told him he had to leave and served him with the appropriate paperwork, just like they do in most other democratic countries.

At that time, Senator Bernie Sanders had been a guest on my radio/TV show every Friday for about a decade, and we got his office involved, trying to intervene in their case, but the feds were emphatic: he wasn’t here legally and he had to leave. So, after a short time to organize their things and finances, the two of them got on a commercial plane and flew to Mexico, where they both live to this day.

We’ve been enforcing immigration laws since the 1920s in America, and never before have we needed an armed force with a larger budget than the FBI or the Marine Corps to pull it off. And we’ve deported a hell of a lot of people:

Syracuse University’s TRAC data attribute more than 3.1 million deportations over Obama’s eight years, with a peak of over 407,000 removals in FY 2012.​
  By comparison, the first Trump administration (2017–2020) carried out fewer than about 932,000 deportations total, peaking at roughly 269,000 removals in 2019.​
After Trump’s return to office last year, ICE reported about 290,000 removals through late 2025 and mid‑FY 2026, which is still far below Obama’s cumulative total.​

In other words, Obama deported more “illegals” than Trump in any year, including last year with ICE going full force, and he did it with courtesy and the law. No masks or guns, no people being shot, no cars being chased and rammed.

As you can see, today’s ICE violence is not primarily about enforcing the immigration laws or ridding the country of undocumented persons.

Similarly, never before have we had immigration agents “investigating fraud” as a bullshit premise for terrorizing an entire community. The way they convicted Donald Trump of 34 counts of criminal felony fraud wasn’t with guys with masks and guns; it was a small army of accountants pouring through his financial records.

Never before in modern history have we had a president and vice president characterize an ethnic community in such terms as “eating your dogs and cats,” as “criminals,” as “garbage,” as an “other.”

Never before — other than the Klan in the post-Reconstruction era — have we had agents of the state deputized and authorized to use deadly force who conceal their identities and then ran amok to terrorize entire American cities.

That last point is the key to understanding what’s going on. ICE isn’t in Minneapolis, Portland, Chicago, Los Angeles, San Francisco, or any other Blue city to merely enforce our immigration laws. We already know how to do that, as we’ve been doing it successfully for 101 years and never before needed violent masked thugs to make it happen.

No, these people are in these cities for a singular purpose: to spread terror. This is Donald Trump’s own personal Schutzstaffel (SS), a police force answerable only to him who’s principal job is to terrify communities and crush dissent.

Trump, JD Vance, and Stephen Miller have all made it clear that they believe the key to running our country isn’t via the approval of the populace, “the consent of the governed,” but, rather, is to have and use raw, naked power. Violence. Tear gas, tasers, and pepper bullets. The threat of death or imprisonment.

Back in October, Miller said Trump has “plenary authority,” meaning “authority without restrictions.” Ultimate power. Final power. The only real power in the country, at the end of the day.

A few weeks ago, he doubled down, telling us:

“We live in a world in which you can talk all you want about international niceties and everything else, but we live in a world, in the real world, Jake, that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power. These are the iron laws of the world since the beginning of time.”

John Adams referred to us a “a nation of laws, not men.” The Supreme Court building has “Equal Justice Under Law” carved into its front by the Roosevelt administration in October of 1935. Our founding documents refer to America as a nation where our politicians and police “derive their just powers from the consent of the governed.”

That’s the opposite of what’s happening right now in Minneapolis.

When demagogues and wannabe autocrats set out to seize absolute power in a nation — the way we’ve seen it done, for example, in Russia — they don’t start by rolling tanks down the street or throwing dissidents or writers like me in prison. That comes much later.

Instead, they start by telling the people who they need to fear.

For Putin, it was the Chechens. For Orbán, it was Syrian refugees. For Joe McCarthy, it was communists and socialists. And for Trump, et al, it’s brown and Black people, particularly if they were born in another country.

Once the populace is sufficiently terrified of the “other,” they’ll accept increasing levels of repression in the name of stemming the danger to themselves and their families. Armed agents of the state begin to show up in public places to “enforce law and order,” but their real goal is to terrify people into submission.

This is why Noem and Bondi are refusing to investigate Renee Good’s murder and instead demanding their federal prosecutors go after her grieving wife. They want not only ICE thugs but everybody in America who may think of challenging them to know that smashing windows, dragging people out of their cars, kicking in their doors, beating them to the ground, and even killing them — all without any legal basis, without a single warrant — are what we can all expect to happen to us if we defy their power.

If ICE’s real mission was to find people in the country without authorization, they wouldn’t be going about it this way; they’d go after undocumented people the way my friend’s daughter’s husband was cornered and deported. Firmly, but politely. With paperwork instead of guns.

It’s becoming increasingly obvious to Americans that when Trump issued National Security Presidential Memorandum-7 (NSPM-7) two months ago, this is what they had in mind. That Memorandum orders the federal police agencies to go after anybody who presents the following “indicia” of potential domestic terrorism:

“[A]nti-Americanism, anti-capitalism, anti-Christianity, … extremism on migration, extremism on race, extremism on gender, hostility towards those who hold traditional American views on family, hostility towards those who hold traditional American views on religion, and hostility towards those who hold traditional American views on morality.”

ICE is here to remind us of the awesome power Trump and his lickspittles have to enforce that. Question or, as with Renee Good, taunt a masked ICE thug and it’s clear you’re expressing “extremism.” Your penalty will be violence visited upon you, even death, and when you’re dead, they’ll next come after your family.

This is pure Putin, Orbán, Erdoğon, Xi, and every other tinpot dictator across the planet and throughout history.

It’s why ICE shot a young man in the face, blinding him for the rest of his life, in Santa Ana this week and the feds are refusing to give any information — including the name of the thug who shot 21-year-old Kaden Rummler — to the Santa Ana city or California state police.

It’s why goons in Minneapolis dragged a disabled woman driving to her doctor’s appointment out of her car and assaulted her.

It’s why they deploy tear gas and fire “less lethal” weapons at the slightest provocation.

Yesterday afternoon, doubling down on untouchable state power that lives well above the rule of law, DHS posted the following tweet from Reichsminister für Volksaufklärung und Propaganda Stephen Miller:

“REMINDER. ‘To all ICE officers: You have federal immunity in the conduct of your duties. Anybody who lays a hand on you or tries to stop you or tries to obstruct you is committing a felony. You have immunity to perform your duties, and no one—no city official, no state official, no illegal alien, no leftist agitator or domestic insurrectionist—can prevent you from fulfilling your legal obligations and duties. The Department of Justice has made clear that if officials cross that line into obstruction, into criminal conspiracy against the United States or against ICE officers, then they will face justice.’ @StephenM” (emphasis added)

That message — which is filled with naked lies — is very, very simple: “We have the power. We will use that power. And there’s nothing ‘the little people’ or anybody else can do to stop us. In fact, if you try to stop us, we’ll use that power against you, next.”

Donald Trump is now openly threatening the state of Minnesota with the Insurrection Act, a law that allows a president to deploy the full force of the entire US military directly against the American people.

After a night of confrontations sparked by violent ICE raids in Minneapolis and St. Paul, Trump took to his Nazi-infested social media site to warn that if state and local officials don’t crush protests against his masked federal agents, he will step in with force.

This isn’t bluster or rhetoric. It’s a direct threat to use wartime powers inside the United States to override local government, suppress dissent, and place raw federal violence above the rule of law, something he appears to want so badly he can taste it.

That kind of threat doesn’t belong in a democracy, and it tells us exactly what this administration believes power is for.

This is nothing more or less than state-sponsored terror. And it’s damn well high time that it stop.

--30--

Written by Thom Hartmann. Cross-posted from his Substack site.

Today's links

• A winning trade war strategy for Canada: Tech giants are also the enemy of American businesses.
• Hey look at this: Delights to delectate.
• Object permanence: Wikipedia v The Register; Jeff Koons v balloon dogs; Brewster Kahle on aaronsw; Chelsea Manning on aaronsw; Why diet research sucks; Bloomberg loves Bernie.
• 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.

A winning trade war strategy for Canada (permalink)

As the great Canadian philosopher Keanu Reeves averred in the 1994 public transportation documentary Speed, sometimes the winning move is to shoot the hostage.

That is: when your adversary has trapped you in a deadlock situation where neither of you can win, the winning move is to stop playing the game – rather, change the rules, and a bouquet of new moves will bloom.

Trump thinks he has Canada cornered, but we have a hell of a winning move. Unfortunately, we're not making it (yet).

Thus far, Canada's response to Trump's tariffs has been tit for tat: retaliatory tariffs. America smacked Canada's exports with tariffs, so Canada smacked the goods we import from the US with tariffs, too. This means that everything we buy in Canada is more expensive, which is certainly one way to punish Trump! It's like punching yourself in the face as hard as you can and waiting for the downstairs neighbour to say "ouch!"

https://pluralistic.net/2025/01/15/beauty-eh/#its-the-only-war-the-yankees-lost-except-for-vietnam-and-also-the-alamo-and-the-bay-of-ham

Not only are retaliatory tariffs bad for Canadians, they're also bad for the Americans who are also suffering under Trump. Rather than fostering an alliance with Americans against our common enemy – America's oligarchs and their god-king Trump – Canadians have declared war on all of our American cousins.

Take the decision to eschew delicious American bourbon and switch to Wayne Gretzky's undrinkable rye. Somewhere in a state that begins and ends with a vowel, there is a corn farmer who never did anything to hurt Canada who's suffering as a result of this decision. We get shitty booze, and he can't afford to make payments on his tractor. Everyone loses!

Now, it's a funny thing about that tractor. Chances are, it's made by John Deere, a rapacious ag-tech monopolist that bought out all its competitors and now screws farmers in every imaginable way. One particularly galling scam is how John Deere handles repair. Farmers typically repair their own tractors. After all, a tractor is a business-critical machine with a lot of moving parts that can fail in a million ways.

But after the farmer fixes their tractor, it will not work until they pay John Deere to send a technician to their farm to type an unlock code in the tractor's keyboard. This is a totally superfluous step, inserted solely to allow Deere to rip off their customers. Farmers have been fixing their own farm implements since the first plow – after all, when you need to bring the crops in and the storm is coming, you can't wait for a service call at the end of your lonely country road – but John Deere has declared the end of history. In John Deere's world, farmers can only use their tractors when an ag-tech monopolist says they can:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/08/15/deere-in-headlights/#doh-a-deere

No farmer wants this anti-feature in their tractor. In a normal world, someone would go into business selling farmers a kit to disable it. After all, this is all accomplished with software, and software is infinitely flexible. Every computable program can be executed on every computer. John Deere installed a 10-foot pile of shit in its tractor software, so someone else could go into business shipping 11-foot ladders made out of software that can be delivered instantaneously to anyone in the world with an internet connection and a payment method.

But we don't live in a normal world. We live in a fundamentally broken world. It's been broken since 1998, when Bill Clinton signed a law called the "Digital Millennium Copyright Act" (DMCA). Section 1201 of the DMCA establishes a felony, punishable by a 5-year sentence and a $500k fine, for anyone who "bypasses an access control" on a digital system. This means that if John Deere designs its tractors to ensure that incoming instructions were authorized by the company (say, a manufacturer's password that needs to be entered before you can update the software), then it is a felony to bypass that check. When John Deere puts one of these access controls in its tractor, it conjures up a new felony out of thin air, making it a literal crime for a farmer to modify their own tractor to work the way they want it to. It's what Jay Freeman calls "felony contempt of business model."

The US isn't the only country with a law like this – far from it! At the very instant Bill Clinton signed the DMCA, the US Trade Rep sent officials all over the world to bully America's trading partners into enacting their own version of this law, threatening them with tariffs unless they changed their national laws to make it a crime to fix the broken technology America shipped around the globe.

Which brings me back to Canada's retaliatory tariffs, those self-punishing, indiscriminate, ally-alienating tits-for-tat.

Canada presented no more of a challenge for the bullying US Trade Rep than any of those other countries. In 2012, two of Stephen Harper's ministers, James Moore and Tony Clement, rammed a carbon copy of DMCA 1201 through Parliament: Bill C-11, the Copyright Modernization Act:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/05/08/who-broke-the-internet/#bruce-lehman

C-11 was incredibly unpopular. Three earlier attempts to pass a law like this had failed, and in the end, Clement and Moore had to ignore their own consultation results and dismiss the thousands of respondents who wrote in to object to the bill as "babyish…radical extremists."

Harper, Clement and Moore whipped C-11 through Parliament because the US trade rep threatened them with tariffs unless the did so, and promised them tariff-free access to the US if they toed the line. Now that Trump has whacked Canada with tariffs, Canada should wipe this law off its books.

There's so many good domestic reasons to do this. Without C-11, Canadian companies could defend their fellow Canadians from American data-theft and cash ripoffs by making alternative clients, jailbreaks, and other add-ons that disenshittified America's defective tech:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/01/10/markets-are-regulations/#carney-found-a-spine

But today, I want to focus on how repealing C-11 would benefit America. You see, America's businesses – large and small – are victims of Big Tech's extraction. The Big Five publishers get screwed by Amazon, as do all the little indie publishers. Every games company gets screwed by Apple and Google, who suck 30 cents out of every dollar their customers spend in an app. Same goes for console games companies, who pay a 30% tax on every dollar they make on Xbox, Nintendo or Playstations (the exception, of course, is the games companies owned by Microsoft, Sony and Nintendo, who don't pay the 30% tax and can therefore always outcompete the independents).

Merchants who sell on Amazon pay a 50-60% junk fee tax. Businesses large and small are locked into cloud products from Microsoft, Oracle, and Google who are training their AIs on their corporate customers' proprietary data. Health providers are locked into Epic, the giant electronic health record monopolist, whose abuses are the stuff of legend:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/10/02/upcoded-to-death/#thanks-obama

Many (if not all) of these scams could be mitigated with new code. For example, anyone stuck paying the app taxes could offer mobile phone and console owners jailbreaks that install third-party app stores, and then offer discounts to anyone who uses them – if you're saving 30% on every payment, you can split those savings with your customers.

Merchants could list their products for sale directly on Amazon through app and website plugins, and get paid and fulfill them themselves:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/07/10/view-a-sku/

Performers and content creators could encourage their audiences to escape the platforms' inscrutable algorithms and install jailbroken apps that let users control their recommendations:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2022/05/tracking-exposed-demanding-gods-explain-themselves

Social media startups could offer alt clients that let users who sign up see the messages posted by their friends on legacy platforms like Twitter and Facebook, and push replies to them:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/12/10/e2e/#the-censors-pen

Mechanics, farmers and repair depots who are locked out of diagnostics, who can't use generic parts, and can't initialize OEM parts without paying for a license could jailbreak their customers' devices for them and offer independent repair:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/09/22/vin-locking/#thought-differently

So think back to that corn farmer, currently wondering how to make tractor payments because Canadians are drinking Gretzky's shitty rye instead of delicious bourbon. Rather than pauperizing that blameless farmer, Canada could go into business selling him the tools to escape John Deere's rent-collecting repair racket, to extract all the soil condition data needed for precision agriculture, and to make use of competitors' front-ends (accessories that turn a tractor into a thresher or some other machine).

That farmer is getting screwed by Trump, just like Canadians. He's not a shareholder in Big Tech. He's not gonna be pissed off when Canada turns Big Tech's trillions into Canadian billions – not if he gets lower prices and more reliable technology as a result.

When I talk to Canadians about retaliating against the Trump tariffs by repealing our anti-jailbreaking law, they often express concern that this will make Trump even angrier at us. I mean, of course it will: literally anything that works will make Trump angry. I don't think that means we should only respond to the Trump tariffs with useless gestures.

If Canada goes into business rescuing Americans from their own tech companies, they will become our allies. If those companies depend on selling to the Canadian market to remain profitable, they will become our allies.

Trump is an autocrat, but he's not omnipotent. He's an old, sick man with white matter disease dementia who can't stay awake through a 10-minute briefing or remember what he was talking about from minute to minute. To pursue his agenda, he needs to hold his coalition together, and that's something he's getting progressively worse at as he slides towards his incipient death/permanent incapacity.

All Canada will get if it sticks with its current response to the tariffs is Gretzky's undrinkable novelty booze and the permanent enmity of American businesses. On the other hand, if Canada repeals its anti-circumvention law, we can make billions of dollars, destroy the profits of America's most important technological allies, liberate ourselves from America's defective technology, and forge a durable, powerful anti-Trump alliance with American firms who are preyed upon just as surely as Canadians are.

Let's shoot the hostage. Let's change the rules of the game. Let's break the deadlock. It's what Keanu would tell us to do.

Hey look at this (permalink)

• Zohran Mamdani Has Quickly Gotten Down to Business https://jacobin.com/2026/01/mamdani-executive-orders-housing-childcare/

• Nichols & May: Monitor Radio 1962-1967 https://taylorjessen.blogspot.com/2026/01/nichols-may-monitor-radio-1962-1967.html

• State of the World 2026 with Bruce Sterling and Jon Lebkowsky https://user.well.com/engaged.cgi?t=561&c=inkwell.vue&f=0

• How Hackers Are Fighting Back Against ICE https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2026/01/how-hackers-are-fighting-back-against-ice

• Scenes from O’Reilly ETCon 2002 https://www.globalnerdy.com/2026/01/11/scenes-from-oreilly-etcon-2002/

Object permanence (permalink)

#20yrsago Indie labels give free MP3s to customers who buy vinyl https://web.archive.org/web/20060111215100/https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/archives/004313.php

#20yrsago Hollywood’s Canadian politico lies about her approach to lawmaking https://web.archive.org/web/20110425163053/http://www.michaelgeist.ca/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=1071

#20yrsago Correcting the Record: Wikipedia vs The Register https://memex.craphound.com/2006/01/11/correcting-the-record-wikipedia-vs-the-register/

#20yrsago Hollywood’s MP denounces “users,” “EFF members” — video https://web.archive.org/web/20060323035434/http://accordionguy.blogware.com/blog/_archives/2006/1/12/1659162.html

#20yrsago My short-short story “Printcrime” in this week’s Nature magazine https://craphound.com/stories/2006/01/12/printcrime/#more

#15yrsago HOWTO teach your small children to swordfight https://reactormag.com/spec-fic-parenting-this-my-son-is-a-sword/

#15yrsago HOWTO make a secure, decentralized, human-readable name system http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/squarezooko

#15yrsago Demon rug https://www.flickr.com/photos/missmonstermel/5346690831/in/photostream/

#15yrsago Jeff Koons claims to own all balloon dogs https://www.designboom.com/art/jeff-koons-can-one-copyright-a-balloon-animal/

#10yrsago Brewster Kahle remembers Aaron Swartz: “an open source life” https://www.aaronswartzday.org/brewster-sf-memorial/

#10yrsago Sympathetic Bernie Sanders profile in Bloomberg Businessweek https://www.bloomberg.com/features/2016-bernie-sanders-fundraising/

#10yrsago Internal documents from breathalyzer company Lifesaver dumped online https://web.archive.org/web/20160113075611/https://motherboard.vice.com/read/car-breathalyzer-company-gets-hacked-internal-docs-dumped-on-dark-web

#10yrsago How fraudsters’ call centers work https://krebsonsecurity.com/2016/01/a-look-inside-cybercriminal-call-centers/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+KrebsOnSecurity+(Krebs+on+Security)

#10yrsago Why all scientific diet research turns out to be bullshit https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/you-cant-trust-what-you-read-about-nutrition/?ex_cid=story-facebook

#10yrsago NSA says it will take four years to answer questions about its kids’ coloring book https://web.archive.org/web/20160114074709/https://motherboard.vice.com/read/the-nsa-told-me-it-needs-4-years-to-answer-a-foia-about-a-coloring-book

#10yrsago Bowie, Eno and serendipity https://www.ted.com/talks/tim_harford_how_frustration_can_make_us_more_creative

#10yrsago Chelsea Manning reviews book of Aaron Swartz’s writing https://medium.com/@xychelsea/remembering-aaron-swartz-94d204b9e190#.5fcfs5mby

#10yrsago WATCH: documentary on Walt Disney, the futurist https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pwLznNpJz2I

#10yrsago Guns filled with guts: Anatomy of War https://www.noahscalin.com/#/anatomyofwar1/

#10yrsago Book says Daddy Koch built Nazi oil refinery & hired a Nazi nanny for his boys, who blackmailed their gay brother https://web.archive.org/web/20160114081716/https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-politics/wp/2016/01/11/new-book-father-of-politically-active-koch-brothers-built-a-refinery-for-the-nazis/

#10yrsago Rich Americans are embarrassed by Donald Trump https://web.archive.org/web/20160115052314/https://gawker.com/donald-trumps-personal-brand-is-slowly-excruciatingly-1752374812?utm_source=recirculation&utm_medium=recirculation&utm_campaign=tuesdayAM

#10yrsago New US law says kids can walk to school by themselves https://www.fastcompany.com/3055107/federal-law-now-says-kids-can-walk-to-school-alone

#10yrsago Toronto’s mayor demands an end to competition for fast, affordable broadband https://www.michaelgeist.ca/2016/01/why-mayors-john-tory-and-jim-watson-are-against-competition-for-access-to-affordable-fast-broadband/

#10yrsago Your smartwatch knows your ATM and phone PIN https://arxiv.org/pdf/1512.05616v1

#10yrsago Keep your scythe, the real green future is high-tech, democratic, and radical https://memex.craphound.com/2016/01/12/keep-your-scythe-the-real-green-future-is-high-tech-democratic-and-radical/

#10yrsago Will the W3C strike a bargain to save the Web from DRM? https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2016/01/you-cant-destroy-village-save-it-w3c-vs-drm-round-two

#5yrsago Bunkered, infectious, maskless Republicans infected Congress https://pluralistic.net/2021/01/12/maskholio/#maskholes

#5yrsago Awful voting-machine demands silence https://pluralistic.net/2021/01/11/seeing-things/#ess

#5yrsago Weaponing and monetizing apophenia https://pluralistic.net/2021/01/11/seeing-things/#woo

#5yrsago DC's security theater panned https://pluralistic.net/2021/01/11/seeing-things/#curtain-call

Upcoming appearances (permalink)

• Denver: Enshittification at Tattered Cover Colfax, Jan 22
  https://www.eventbrite.com/e/cory-doctorow-live-at-tattered-cover-colfax-tickets-1976644174937

• Colorado Springs: Guest of Honor at COSine, Jan 23-25
  https://www.firstfridayfandom.org/cosine/

• Ottawa: Enshittification at Perfect Books, Jan 28
  https://www.instagram.com/p/DS2nGiHiNUh/

• Toronto: Enshittification and the Age of Extraction with Tim Wu, Jan 30
  https://nowtoronto.com/event/cory-doctorow-and-tim-wu-enshittification-and-extraction/

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

• Berlin: Re:publical, May 18-20
  https://re-publica.com/de/news/rp26-sprecher-cory-doctorow

• Hay-on-Wye: HowTheLightGetsIn, May 22-25
  https://howthelightgetsin.org/festivals/hay/big-ideas-2

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Recent appearances (permalink)

• Enshittification (Creative Nonfiction podcast)
  https://brendanomeara.com/episode-507-enshittification-author-cory-doctorow-believes-in-a-new-good-internet/

• A post-American, enshittification-resistant internet (39c3)
  https://media.ccc.de/v/39c3-a-post-american-enshittification-resistant-internet

• Enshittification with Plutopia
  https://plutopia.io/cory-doctorow-enshittification/

• "can't make Big Tech better; make them less powerful" (Get Subversive)
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X1EzM9_6eLE

• The Enshitification Life Cycle with David Dayen (Organized Money)
  https://www.buzzsprout.com/2412334/episodes/18399894

Latest books (permalink)

• "Canny Valley": A limited edition collection of the collages I create for Pluralistic, self-published, September 2025

• "Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It," Farrar, Straus, Giroux, October 7 2025
  https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374619329/enshittification/

• "Picks and Shovels": a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about the heroic era of the PC, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), February 2025 (https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250865908/picksandshovels).

• "The Bezzle": a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about prison-tech and other grifts, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), February 2024 (thebezzle.org).

• "The Lost Cause:" a solarpunk novel of hope in the climate emergency, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), November 2023 (http://lost-cause.org).

• "The Internet Con": A nonfiction book about interoperability and Big Tech (Verso) September 2023 (http://seizethemeansofcomputation.org). Signed copies at Book Soup (https://www.booksoup.com/book/9781804291245).

• "Red Team Blues": "A grabby, compulsive thriller that will leave you knowing more about how the world works than you did before." Tor Books http://redteamblues.com.

• "Chokepoint Capitalism: How to Beat Big Tech, Tame Big Content, and Get Artists Paid, with Rebecca Giblin", on how to unrig the markets for creative labor, Beacon Press/Scribe 2022 https://chokepointcapitalism.com

Upcoming books (permalink)

• "Unauthorized Bread": a middle-grades graphic novel adapted from my novella about refugees, toasters and DRM, FirstSecond, 2026

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

• "The Memex Method," Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2026

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

Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources:

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

This work – excluding any serialized fiction – is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license. That means you can use it any way you like, including commercially, provided that you attribute it to me, Cory Doctorow, and include a link to pluralistic.net.

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ISSN: 3066-764X

The boy grew up in a happy neighborhood, among good friends. People shared what they had, and looked after one another. When a neighbor needed a hand with a chore, others

were there to help. If someone wanted to borrow a tool, or anything else, it was readily provided. The boy never knew anything else.

The boy liked to greet the mailman, and he took an interest in stamps. One of his neighbors, a teenager, invited the boy to come look at his own collection. The boy was delighted. “Here,” said the teenager, handing the boy the album, “borrow for it as long as you like.” And so the boy took it home. He kept it for years, for decades. As the boy and the teenager grew into manhood, the borrowed stamp collection was a sign of friendship.

As the boy aged, however, his interest in stamps grew into an obsession. He ceased to enjoy the stamps, to think about their beauty and their history. He simply wanted to possess them. He began to say puzzling things to the neighbor about the collection. Rather than seeing the loan as a sign of friendship, he seemed resent that the neighbor had any claim on the stamps at all.

One night he broke into his neighbor’s house with a gun. When the neighbor awoke, he pointed the gun and said: “You see that I can invade your house. If the stamp collection had been here instead of in my house, I could have stolen it. From now on that stamp collection is mine, and you have to admit it.”

What had the mad stamp collector done? He has the stamp collection, but of course he had it before. He wants everyone to say that now it is his possession, but no one does, least of all his neighbor. He has lost the neighborhood, and all the more important forms of cooperation. He sits at home and turns pages of the album. He writes his name in big letters on its cover.

Though the stamp collector is too mad to see it, he has destroyed the foundations of his own life. Until the night of the break-in, he could have borrowed anything he wanted from that neighbor, or from anyone on the block. Now every house is closed to him, and he no longer has friends, nor will ever have any. He has nothing except for his madness.

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•••

The fable of the mad stamp collector is the story of American foreign policy. It expresses the president’s approach to Greenland, Denmark, and our allies in general. There is nothing in Greenland, or for that matter on the territory of other American allies, that we could not have, if we asked. That is the nature of old, trusting relationships, and the order represented by the NATO alliance.

As matters stand right now, the United States has the use of the territory of Greenland. We have had a military base at Pituffik for decades. We now station about two hundred troops there; if we wanted to station thousands instead of hundreds, we could do so. We did during the cold war. If American companies are interested in the Greenland’s natural resources, they can sign contracts.

If we believe, as the president and vice-president keep saying, that there is a Russian or Chinese threat to the island, then we could station more troops there, or invite the Danes or any other ally to do so. Or we could ask the Danes to build another base on another part of the island. Or we could do something meaningful about Arctic security, instead of denying global warming and letting Russia build all the icebreakers.

The Danes have been among the closest allies of the United States for three quarters of a century. The base at Pituffik is a sign of that friendship. When the Americans realized in 1951 that they had urgent need of that site of Greenland for nuclear defense, the Danes readily agreed. This was one of the crucial moments in the history of NATO, the alliance that both nations had helped to found two years before.

It is the NATO alliance that enables the American presence on Greenland, and it is the NATO alliance that the United States threatens when it threatens its ally Denmark. So long as the United States and Denmark are promised to defend one another from attack, Greenland is defended by both of them, and indeed by all of the other NATO allies. If the NATO alliance ceases to exist, then Greenland immediately becomes much less secure -- and, for that matter, so does every other member of the alliance, including the United States. Nothing could strengthen Russia and China more than the end of NATO.

Trump, the mad stamp collector, has everything he could possibly want, except the ability to appreciate any of it, or be appreciative of the work that others do to create it. He can gain nothing for the United States by insisting on owning Greenland, but he can lose everything which has helped to make Americans safer and more prosperous. He can lose the neighborhood.

It might seem odd to describe all of this as a fable -- and I am sorry to Greenlanders for having compared their island to stamp collection. But the fabular form is far more honest than pretending that Trump has a notion of the United States and its interests. He just wants to see a flag in the snow. He just wants his name on the album. There is nothing more than the madness, and that is where we must begin.

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On resistance see On Tyranny

For positive solutions see On Freedom