Very sorry to haunt your mailbox twice in one day, and sorry for any typos below, but you really might want to read this thread, in equal parts hilarious and horrible.

Basically, it turns out that Trump’s tariff rates derived from a simple formula that James Surowiecki inferred correctly:

It gets better (or worse, depending on your perspective). The White House denied it, and said Surowiecki was an idiot. And gave their own formula:

Oops! And it gets better:

And, wait for it, the whole thing was probably recommended to them by an LLM:

§

In Taming Silicon Valley, I warned that LLMs would be used for dumb things that would affect lots of people.

I rest my case.

Gary Marcus recently updated his bio on X. It now reads “Built two Al companies, wrote six books, tried to warn you about a lot of things.”

Subscribe now

President Trump has announced a sweeping plan of tariffs against dozens of nations, including the Antarctic Heard and McDonald Islands, which are uninhabited by humans but very much inhabited by penguins. The fake liberal media criticized this as a mistake, but Trump’s tariffs are actually a brilliant long-term strategy to help America win the war against birds.

Birds have taken advantage of America’s generosity for too long. Every year, millions of illegal and undocumented birds cross the border into American airspace. These birds come here to commit criminal acts (e.g., pooping on Teslas) and to take our jobs (e.g., pooping on Teslas). There are even reports that some birds fly in violent gangs called “murders,” probably to support Hamas.

Every day, good Americans face the dangerous threat of birds. Birds are not the cute, harmless animals depicted in the mainstream media. Birds have sharp beaks that can poke American eyes, talons that can stab American hearts, and feathers that can tickle American noses and cause American sneezes.

The war against birds is long overdue. This is especially true on the trade front. Since Trump came into office, American families have been suffering through the rising costs of consumer goods, including the price of eggs. You know who makes eggs? Birds! Trump is fighting for our rights by getting to the very source of the problem.

Trump’s tariffs against the penguins will revitalize the American economy. The Heard and McDonald Islands have exploited our nation’s economy for decades. Now, instead of paying exorbitantly high prices for penguin-made products, American consumers will revitalize the American ice and freshly vomited fish industries.

Now, some may say that birds are not our enemies and, in fact, could be considered our longtime allies. After all, what about the role of carrier pigeons in helping us fight fascism in World War II? Others may say that birds are not our enemies, but have been our victims—caged, killed, forced to labor, detained against their will, trafficked across state lines, deprived of legal representation. We’ve taken their lands, stolen their children, and destroyed the environmental factors they need to survive. Blah, blah, blah. These arguments are woke and DEI, and the United States has never betrayed its allies or victimized any populations ever.

The good news is President Trump and his administration are setting us on the right path in the War Against Birds. Under the leadership of Secretary of Health Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the bird flu no longer exists (or, at least, no research or vaccines for it exist anymore). Elon Musk’s DOGE has defunded national parks, well-known to be crime-ridden hellholes where birds congregate to plan anti-American activities. And the administration’s strong push to eliminate DEI will ensure that no birds will ever again get the unfair advantages (wings, hollow bones) that have literally elevated them above everyday Americans.

Fortunately for the American people, the president’s tariffs are hitting important enemies, like birds, and not important friends, like Russia. Sure, Trump’s indiscriminate tariffs were calculated based on essentially no logical basis and will likely cause trillions in economic loss for America. And, sure, the average consumer will bear the brunt of it, and we may very well be on the edge of the next Great Depression. But remember that birds are the enemy, Trump is always right, and anything bad that might happen will be Joe Biden’s fault.

Now, the president’s plan is brilliant, of course, but it isn’t perfect. We need to push harder. Tax all birds, not just penguins. Place a 25 percent tariff on all avian exports. Support mammalian manufacturing. Disband the Audubon Society.

Then, once victorious, we commence the war against reptiles.

A quick thank you to my readers. When I struck out on my own, I wasn’t sure if anyone would follow. But I just passed 300K subscribers. I’ll try to be worthy of your support.

America created the modern world trading system. The rules governing tariffs and the negotiating process that brought those tariffs down over time grew out of the Reciprocal Trade Agreements Act, devised by FDR in 1934. The growth in international trade under that system had some negative aspects but was on balance very good for America and the world. It was, in fact, one of our greatest policy achievements.

Yesterday Donald Trump burned it all down. Here’s what just happened to the average U.S. tariff rate:

Source: USITC and Yale Budget Lab

The tariffs Trump announced were higher than almost anyone expected. This is a much bigger shock to the economy than the infamous Smoot-Hawley tariff of 1930, especially when you bear in mind that international trade is about three times as important now as it was then.

The size of the tariffs, however, wasn’t the only shocking thing about the Rose Garden announcement. Arguably what we learned about how the Trump team arrived at those tariff rates — the sheer malignant stupidity of the whole thing — was even worse.

You might be tempted to dismiss complaints about the policy process as elitist snobbery. But credibility is a crucial part of policymaking. Businesses can’t plan if they have no idea what to expect next. Foreign governments won’t make policies that help America if they don’t expect us to respond rationally.

So what do we know about how the Trumpists arrived at their tariff plan? Trump claimed that the tariff rates imposed on different countries reflected their policies, but James Surowiecki soon noted that the tariffs applied to each country appeared to be derived from a crude formula based on the U.S. trade deficit with that country. Trump officials denied this, while at the same time the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative released a note confirming Surowiecki’s guess. Here’s their explanation:

Source: USTR

Ignore the Greek letters, which cancel each other out. This says that the assumed level of a country’s protectionism is equal to its trade surplus with America divided by its exports to America.

Trump also set minimum tariffs of 10 percent on everyone, which means among other things imposing tariffs on uninhabited islands.

There’s so much wrong with this approach that it’s hard to know where to start. But one easy thing to point out is that the Trump calculation only considers trade in goods, while ignoring trade in services. This is a big omission. Notably, the European Union runs a substantial surplus with us if you only look at trade in goods — but this is largely offset by an EU deficit in services trade:

Source: European Commission

So if Trump’s people had plugged all trade with the EU, not just trade in physical goods, into their formula they would have concluded that Europe is hardly protectionist at all.

Where is this stuff coming from? One of these days we’ll probably get the full story, but it looks to me like something thrown together by a junior staffer with only a couple of hours’ notice. That USTR note, in particular, reads like something written by a student who hasn’t done the reading and is trying to bullshit their way through an exam.

But it may be even worse than that. The Trump formula is apparently what you get if you ask ChatGPT and other AI models to make tariff policy:

In my post immediately following the Trump announcement I speculated that Elon Musk’s Dunning-Kruger kids might be responsible for those tariff numbers. That now looks like a distinct possibility.

Who makes policy this way? The key point is that Trump isn’t really trying to accomplish economic goals. This should all be seen as a dominance display, intended to shock and awe people and make them grovel, rather than policy in the normal sense.

Again, I’m not being snobbish here. When the fate of the world economy is on the line, the malignant stupidity of the policy process is arguably as important as the policies themselves. How can anyone, whether they’re businesspeople or foreign governments, trust anything coming out of an administration that behaves like this?

Next thing you’ll be telling me that Trump’s people are planning military actions over insecure channels and accidentally sharing those plans with journalists. Oh, wait.

I’d like to imagine that Trump will admit that he messed up, cancel the whole thing, and start over. But he won’t, because that would spoil the dominance display. Ignorant irresponsibility is part of the message.

MUSICAL CODA

Since the beginning of 2024, the demand for the content created by the Wikimedia volunteer community – especially for the 144 million images, videos, and other files on Wikimedia Commons – has grown significantly. In this post, we’ll discuss the reasons for this trend and its impact.

The Wikimedia projects are the largest collection of open knowledge in the world. Our sites are an invaluable destination for humans searching for information, and for all kinds of businesses that access our content automatically as a core input to their products. Most notably, the content has been a critical component of search engine results, which in turn has brought users back to our sites. But with the rise of AI, the dynamic is changing: We are observing a significant increase in request volume, with most of this traffic being driven by scraping bots collecting training data for large language models (LLMs) and other use cases. Automated requests for our content have grown exponentially, alongside the broader technology economy, via mechanisms including scraping, APIs, and bulk downloads. This expansion happened largely without sufficient attribution, which is key to drive new users to participate in the movement, and is causing a significant load on the underlying infrastructure that keeps our sites available for everyone. 

A view behind the scenes: The Jimmy Carter case

When Jimmy Carter died in December 2024, his page on English Wikipedia saw more than 2.8 million views over the course of a day. This was relatively high, but manageable. At the same time, quite a few users played a 1.5 hour long video of Carter’s 1980 presidential debate with Ronald Reagan. This caused a surge in the network traffic, doubling its normal rate. As a consequence, for about one hour a small number of Wikimedia’s connections to the Internet filled up entirely, causing slow page load times for some users. The sudden traffic surge alerted our Site Reliability team, who were swiftly able to address this by changing the paths our internet connections go through to reduce the congestion. But still, this should not have caused any issues, as the Foundation is well equipped to handle high traffic spikes during exceptional events. So what happened?

Since January 2024, we have seen the bandwidth used for downloading multimedia content grow by 50%. This increase is not coming from human readers, but largely from automated programs that scrape the Wikimedia Commons image catalog of openly licensed images to feed images to AI models. Our infrastructure is built to sustain sudden traffic spikes from humans during high-interest events, but the amount of traffic generated by scraper bots is unprecedented and presents growing risks and costs. 

The graph below shows that the base bandwidth demand for multimedia content has been growing steadily since early 2024 – and there’s no sign of this slowing down. This increase in baseline usage means that we have less room to accommodate exceptional events when a traffic surge might occur: a significant amount of our time and resources go into responding to non-human traffic.

65% of our most expensive traffic comes from bots

The Wikimedia Foundation serves content to its users through a global network of datacenters. This enables us to provide a faster, more seamless experience for readers around the world. When an article is requested multiple times, we memorize – or cache – its content in the datacenter closest to the user. If an article hasn’t been requested in a while, its content needs to be served from the core data center. The request then “travels” all the way from the user’s location to the core datacenter, looks up the requested page and serves it back to the user, while also caching it in the regional datacenter for any subsequent user. 

While human readers tend to focus on specific – often similar – topics, crawler bots tend to “bulk read” larger numbers of pages and visit also the less popular pages. This means these types of requests are more likely to get forwarded to the core datacenter, which makes it much more expensive in terms of consumption of our resources. 

While undergoing a migration of our systems, we noticed that only a fraction of the expensive traffic hitting our core datacenters was behaving how web browsers would usually do, interpreting javascript code. When we took a closer look, we found out that at least 65% of this resource-consuming traffic we get for the website is coming from bots, a disproportionate amount given the overall pageviews from bots are about 35% of the total. This high usage is also causing constant disruption for our Site Reliability team, who has to block overwhelming traffic from such crawlers before it causes issues for our readers.

Wikimedia is not alone with this challenge. As noted in our 2025 global trends report, technology companies are racing to scrape websites for human-created and verified information. Content publishers, open source projects, and websites of all kinds report similar issues. Moreover, crawlers tend to access any URL. Within the Wikimedia infrastructure, we are observing scraping not only of the Wikimedia projects, but also of key systems in our developer infrastructure, such as our code review platform or our bug tracker. All of that consumes time and resources that we need to support the Wikimedia projects, contributors, and readers. 

Our content is free, our infrastructure is not: Establishing responsible use of infrastructure

Delivering trustworthy content also means supporting a “knowledge as a service” model, where we acknowledge that the whole internet draws on Wikimedia content. But this has to happen in ways that are sustainable for us: How can we continue to enable our community, while also putting boundaries around automatic content consumption? How might we funnel developers and reusers into preferred, supported channels of access? What guidance do we need to incentivise responsible content reuse? 

We have started to work towards addressing these questions systemically, and have set a major focus on establishing sustainable ways for developers and reusers to access knowledge content in the Foundation’s upcoming fiscal year. You can read more in our draft annual plan: WE5: Responsible Use of Infrastructure. Our content is free, our infrastructure is not: We need to act now to re-establish a healthy balance, so we can dedicate our engineering resources to supporting and prioritizing the Wikimedia projects, our contributors and human access to knowledge.

Today's links

• Private-sector Trumpism: Monopoly, facial recognition and property rights all add up to a private system of government.
• Hey look at this: Delights to delectate.
• Object permanence: 2010, 2020, 2024
• Upcoming appearances: Where to find me.
• 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.

Private-sector Trumpism (permalink)

Trumpism is a mixture of grievance, surveillance, and pettiness: "I will never forgive your mockery, I have records of you doing it, and I will punish you and everyone who associates with you for it." Think of how he's going after the (cowardly) BigLaw firms:

https://abovethelaw.com/2025/03/skadden-makes-100-million-settlement-with-trump-in-pro-bono-payola/

Trump is the realization of decades of warning about ubiquitous private and public surveillance – that someday, all of this surveillance would be turned to the systematic dismantling of human rights and punishing of dissent.

23 years ago, I was staying in London with some friends, scouting for a flat to live in. After at day in town, I came back and we ordered a curry and had a nice chat. I mentioned how discomfited I'd been by all the CCTV cameras that had sprouted at the front of every private building, to say nothing of all the public cameras installed by local councils and the police. My friend dismissed this as a kind of American, hyper-individualistic privacy purism, explaining that these cameras were there for public safety – to catch flytippers, vandals, muggers, boy racers tearing unsafely through the streets. My fear about having my face captured by all these cameras was little more than superstitious dread. It's not like they were capturing my soul.

Now, I knew that my friend had recently marched in one of the massive demonstrations against Bush and Blair's illegal invasion plans for Iraq. "Look," I said, "you marched in the street to stand up and be counted. But even so, how would you have felt if – as a condition of protesting – you were forced to first record your identity in a government record-book?" My friend had signed petitions, he'd marched in the street, but even so, he had to admit that there would be some kind of chilling effect if your identity had to be captured as a condition of participating in public political events.

Trump has divided the country into two groups of people: "citizens" (who are sometimes only semi-citizens) and immigrants (who have no rights):

https://crookedtimber.org/2025/03/29/trumps-war-on-immigrants-is-the-cancellation-of-free-society/#fn-53926-1

Trump has asserted that he can arrest and deport immigrants (and some semi-citizens) for saying things he doesn't like, or even liking social media posts he disapproves of. He's argued that he can condemn people to life in an offshore slave-labor camp if he doesn't like their tattoos. It is tyranny, built on ubiquitous surveillance, fueled by spite and grievance.

One of Trumpism's most important tenets is that private institutions should have the legal right to discriminate against minorities that he doesn't like. For example, he's trying to end the CFPB's enforcement action against Townstone, a mortgage broker that practiced rampant racial discrimination:

https://prospect.org/justice/2025-03-28-trump-scrambles-pardon-corporate-criminals-townstone-boeing-cfpb/

By contrast, Trump abhors the idea that private institutions should be allowed to discriminate against the people he likes, hence his holy war against "DEI":

https://www.cnbc.com/2025/03/29/trump-administration-warns-european-companies-to-comply-with-anti-dei-order.html

This is the crux of Wilhoit's Law, an important and true definition of "conservativism":

Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition, to wit: There must be in-groups whom the law protectes but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect.

https://crookedtimber.org/2018/03/21/liberals-against-progressives/#comment-729288

Wilhoit's definition is an important way of framing how conservatives view the role of the state. But there's another definition I like, one that's more about how we relate to one-another, which I heard from Steven Brust: "Ask, 'What's more important: human rights or property rights?' Anyone who answers 'property rights are human rights' is a conservative."

Thus the idea that a mortgage broker or an employer or a banker or a landlord should be able to discriminate against you because of the color of your skin, your sexual orientation, your gender, or your beliefs. If "property rights are human rights," then the human right not to rent to a same-sex couple is co-equal with the couple's human right to shelter.

The property rights/human rights distinction isn't just a way to cleave right from left – it's also a way to distinguish the left from liberals. Liberals will tell you that 'it's not censorship if it's done privately' – on the grounds that private property owners have the absolute right to decide which speech they will or won't permit. Charitably, we can say that some of these people are simply drawing a false equivalence between "violating the First Amendment" and "censorship":

https://pluralistic.net/2022/12/04/yes-its-censorship/

But while private censorship is often less consequential than state censorship, that isn't always true, and even when it is, that doesn't mean that private censorship poses no danger to free expression.

Consider a thought experiment in which a restaurant chain called "No Politics At the Dinner Table Cafe" buys up every eatery in town, and then maintains its monopoly by sewing up exclusive deals with local food producers, and then expands into babershops, taxis and workplace cafeterias, enforcing a rule in all these spaces that bans discussions of politics:

https://locusmag.com/2020/01/cory-doctorow-inaction-is-a-form-of-action/

Here we see how monopoly, combined with property rights, creates a system of censorship that is every bit as consequential as a government rule. And if all of those facilities were to add AI-backed cameras and mics that automatically monitored all our conversations for forbidden political speech, then surveillance would complete the package, yielding private censorship that is effectively indistinguishable from government censorship – with the main difference being that the First Amendment permits the former and prohibits the latter.

The fear that private wealth could lead to a system of private rule has been in America since its founding, when Benjamin Franklin tried (unsuccessfully) to put a ban on monopolies into the US Constitution. A century later, Senator John Sherman wrote the Sherman Act, the first antitrust bill, defending it on the Senate floor by saying:

If we would not submit to an emperor we should not submit to an autocrat of trade.

https://pluralistic.net/2022/02/20/we-should-not-endure-a-king/

40 years ago, neoliberal economists ended America's century-long war on monopolies, declaring monopolies to be "efficient" and convincing Carter, then Reagan, then all their successors (except Biden) to encourage monopolies to form. The US government all but totally suspended enforcement of its antitrust laws, permitting anticompetitive mergers, predatory pricing, and illegal price discrimination. In so doing, they transformed America into a monopolist's playground, where versions of the No Politics At the Dinner Table Cafe have conquered every sector of our economy:

https://www.openmarketsinstitute.org/learn/monopoly-by-the-numbers

This is especially true of our speech forums – the vast online platforms that have become the primary means by which we engage in politics, civics, family life, and more. These platforms are able to decide who may speak, what they may say, and what we may hear:

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

These platforms are optimized for mass surveillance, and, when coupled with private sector facial recognition databases, it is now possible to realize the nightmare scenario I mooted in London 23 years ago. As you move through both the virtual and physical world, you can be identified, your political speech can be attributed to you, and it can be used as a basis for discrimination against you:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/09/20/steal-your-face/#hoan-ton-that

This is how things work at the US border, of course, where border guards are turning away academics for having anti-Trump views:

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/20/world/europe/us-france-scientist-entry-trump-messages.html

It's not just borders, though. Large, private enterprises own large swathes of our world. They have the unlimited property right to exclude people from their properties. And they can spy on us as much as they want, because it's not just antitrust law that withered over the past four decades, it's also privacy law. The last consumer privacy law Congress bestirred itself to pass was 1988's "Video Privacy Protection Act," which bans video-store clerks from disclosing your VHS rentals. The failure to act on privacy – like the failure to act on monopoly – has created a vacuum that has been filled up with private power. Today, it's normal for your every action – every utterance, every movement, every purchase – to be captured, stored, combined, analyzed, and, of course sold.

With vast property holdings, total property rights, and no privacy law, companies have become the autocrats of trade, able to regulate our speech and association in ways that can no longer be readily distinguished state conduct that is at least theoretically prohibited by the First Amendment.

Take Madison Square Garden, a corporate octopus that owns theaters, venues and sport stadiums and teams around the country. The company is notoriously vindictive, thanks to a spate of incidents in which the company used facial recognition cameras to bar anyone who worked at a law-firm that was suing the company from entering any of its premises:

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/12/22/nyregion/madison-square-garden-facial-recognition.html

This practice was upheld by the courts, on the grounds that the property rights of MSG trumped the human rights of random low-level personnel at giant law firms where one lawyer out of thousands happened to be suing the company:

https://www.nbcnewyork.com/news/local/madison-square-gardens-ban-on-lawyers-suing-them-can-remain-in-place-court-rules/4194985/

Take your kid's Girl Scout troop on an outing to Radio City Music Hall? Sure, just quit your job and go work for another firm.

But that was just for starters. Now, MSG has started combing social media to identify random individuals who have criticized the company, and has added their faces to the database of people who can't enter their premises. For example, a New Yorker named Frank Miller has been banned for life from all MSG properties because, 20 years ago, he designed a t-shirt making fun of MSG CEO James Dolan:

https://www.theverge.com/news/637228/madison-square-garden-james-dolan-facial-recognition-fan-ban

This is private-sector Trumpism, and it's just getting started.

Take hotels: the entire hotel industry has collapsed into two gigachains: Marriott and Hilton. Both companies are notoriously bad employers and at constant war with their unions (and with nonunion employees hoping to unionize in the face of flagrant, illegal union-busting). If you post criticism online of both hotel chains for hiring scabs, say, and they add you to a facial recognition blocklist, will you be able to get a hotel room?

After more than a decade of Uber and Lyft's illegal predatory pricing, many cities have lost their private taxi fleets and massively disinvested in their public transit. If Uber and Lyft start compiling dossiers of online critics, could you lose the ability to get from anywhere to anywhere, in dozens of cities?

Private equity has rolled up pet groomers, funeral parlors, and dialysis centers. What happens if the PE barons running those massive conglomerates decide to exclude their critics from any business in their portfolio? How would it feel to be shut out of your mother's funeral because you shit-talked the CEO of Foundation Partners Group?

https://kffhealthnews.org/news/article/funeral-homes-private-equity-death-care/

More to the point: once this stuff starts happening, who will dare to criticize corporate criminals online, where their speech can be captured and used against them, by private-sector Trumps armed with facial recognition and the absurd notion that property rights aren't just human rights – they're the ultimate human rights?

The old fears of Benjamin Franklin and John Sherman have come to pass. We live among autocrats of trade, and don't even pretend the Constitution controls what these private sector governments can do to us.

(Image: Cryteria, CC BY 3.0, modified)

Hey look at this (permalink)

• Aint Been Doin Nothin if You Aint Been Called a Red https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UCedPmK4E4I h/t r/LateStageCapitalism

• Know Your Rights – City of Burbank https://www.burbankca.gov/know_your_rights

• The Tech Fantasy That Powers A.I. Is Running on Fumes https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/29/opinion/ai-tech-innovation.html (h/t Nelson Minar)

Object permanence (permalink)

#15yrsago Why I won’t buy an iPad (and think you shouldn’t, either) https://memex.craphound.com/2010/04/01/why-i-wont-buy-an-ipad-and-think-you-shouldnt-either/

#5yrsago Solar as a beneficial fad https://pluralistic.net/2020/04/01/pluralistic:-01-apr-2020/#pv-or-bust

#5yrsago American employment exceptionalism https://pluralistic.net/2020/04/01/pluralistic:-01-apr-2020/#usausausa

#5yrsago Tiktok Kremlinology https://pluralistic.net/2020/04/01/pluralistic:-01-apr-2020/#going-pandemic

#5yrsago Alteon cuts covid-fighters' pay https://pluralistic.net/2020/04/01/pluralistic:-01-apr-2020/#private-equity

#5yrsago Snowden's Box https://pluralistic.net/2020/04/01/pluralistic:-01-apr-2020/#94-1054-Eleu-St

#1yrago Humans are not perfectly vigilant https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/01/human-in-the-loop/#monkey-in-the-middle

Upcoming appearances (permalink)

Upcoming appearances (permalink)

• Chicago: Picks and Shovels with Peter Sagal, Apr 2
  https://exileinbookville.com/events/44853

• Chicago: ABA Techshow, Apr 3
  https://www.techshow.com/

• Bloomington: Picks and Shovels at Morgenstern, Apr 4
  https://morgensternbooks.com/event/2025-04-04/author-event-cory-doctorow

• Bloomington: Ostrom Center, Apr 4
  https://events.iu.edu/ostromworkshop/event/1843316-hls-beyond-the-web-cory-doctorow

• Pittsburgh: Picks and Shovels at White Whale Books, May 15
  https://whitewhalebookstore.com/events/20250515

• Pittsburgh: PyCon, May 16
  https://us.pycon.org/2025/schedule/

• PDX: Teardown 2025, Jun 20-22
  https://www.crowdsupply.com/teardown/portland-2025

• PDX: Picks and Shovels at Barnes and Noble, Jun 20
  https://stores.barnesandnoble.com/event/9780062183697-0

• New Orleans: DeepSouthCon63, Oct 10-12, 2025
  http://www.contraflowscifi.org/

Recent appearances (permalink)

• Fire the unelected social media dictators (Al Jazeera Upfront)
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KXa4DzhkUZ8

• Capitalists Hate Capitalism (MMT Podcast)
  https://pileusmmt.libsyn.com/195-capitalists-hate-capitalism-with-cory-doctorow

• How to Destroy Our Tech Overlords (Homeless Romantic)
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=epma2B0wjzU

Latest books (permalink)

• • 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 (the-bezzle.org). Signed, personalized copies at Dark Delicacies (https://www.darkdel.com/store/p3062/Available_Feb_20th%3A_The_Bezzle_HB.html#/).

• "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). Signed, personalized copies at Dark Delicacies (https://www.darkdel.com/store/p3007/Pre-Order_Signed_Copies%3A_The_Lost_Cause_HB.html#/)

• "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. Signed copies at Dark Delicacies (US): and Forbidden Planet (UK): https://forbiddenplanet.com/385004-red-team-blues-signed-edition-hardcover/.

• "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

• "Attack Surface": The third Little Brother novel, a standalone technothriller for adults. The Washington Post called it "a political cyberthriller, vigorous, bold and savvy about the limits of revolution and resistance." Order signed, personalized copies from Dark Delicacies https://www.darkdel.com/store/p1840/Available_Now%3A_Attack_Surface.html

• "How to Destroy Surveillance Capitalism": an anti-monopoly pamphlet analyzing the true harms of surveillance capitalism and proposing a solution. https://onezero.medium.com/how-to-destroy-surveillance-capitalism-8135e6744d59?sk=f6cd10e54e20a07d4c6d0f3ac011af6b) (signed copies: https://www.darkdel.com/store/p2024/Available_Now%3A__How_to_Destroy_Surveillance_Capitalism.html)

• "Little Brother/Homeland": A reissue omnibus edition with a new introduction by Edward Snowden: https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250774583; personalized/signed copies here: https://www.darkdel.com/store/p1750/July%3A__Little_Brother_%26_Homeland.html

• "Poesy the Monster Slayer" a picture book about monsters, bedtime, gender, and kicking ass. Order here: https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781626723627. Get a personalized, signed copy here: https://www.darkdel.com/store/p2682/Corey_Doctorow%3A_Poesy_the_Monster_Slayer_HB.html#/.

Upcoming books (permalink)

• 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/

• 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

Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources: Slashdot (https://slashdot.org/).

Currently writing:

• Enshittification: a nonfiction book about platform decay for Farrar, Straus, Giroux. Status: second pass edit underway (readaloud)

• A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING

• Picks and Shovels, a Martin Hench noir thriller about the heroic era of the PC. FORTHCOMING TOR BOOKS FEB 2025

Latest podcast: Why I don't like AI art https://craphound.com/news/2025/03/30/why-i-dont-like-ai-art/

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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