Two decades ago, I was part of a group of nerds who got really interested in how each other managed to do what we did. The effort was kicked off by Danny O'Brien, who called it "Lifehacking" and I played a small role in getting that term popularized:
Pluralistic: Hold on for dear life (28 May 2026) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
From the earliest days of technopolitics, the role of technology in resisting authoritarianism was unclear. On the one hand, there's the indisputable fact that modern cryptography, properly implemented, can deliver a degree of privacy that is proof against all technological attacks.
Pluralistic: The games industry’s self-induced traumatic brain injury (17 Nov 2025) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
Words have power. In 1991, I read "The Wonderful Power of Storytelling," the transcript of Bruce Sterling's keynote speech for that year's Game Developers Conference in San Jose, CA, and within a year, I'd dropped out of university to become a programmer:
Pluralistic: The moral injury of having your work enshittified (25 Nov 2023) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
This week, I wrote about how the Great Enshittening – in which all the digital services we rely on become unusable, extractive piles of shit – did not result from the decay of the morals of tech company leadership, but rather, from the collapse of the forces that discipline corporate wrongdoing:
Pluralistic: Firing the refs doesn’t end the game (12 Mar 2025) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
Let me tell you how I became a proud science denier, and how it saved my life.
Pluralistic: The tedious power of storytelling (02 Jun 2026) must-we-pretend – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
Yesterday, I attended a Brian Eno talk about the nature of creativity and art based on What Art Does, the short book he published with Bette Adriaanse last year:
Pluralistic: Conspiratorialism as a material phenomenon (29 Oct 2024) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
I think it behooves us to be a little skeptical of stories about AI driving people to believe wrong things and commit ugly actions. Not that I like the AI slop that is filling up our social media, but when we look at the ways that AI is harming us, slop is pretty low on the list.
Pluralistic: Billionaire-proofing the internet; Picks and Shovels Chapter One (Part 5) (14 Jan 2025) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
During the Napster wars, the record labels seriously pissed off millions of internet users when they sued over 19,000 music fans, mostly kids, but also grannies, old people, and dead people.
Pluralistic: Billionaire-proofing the internet; Picks and Shovels Chapter One (Part 5) (14 Jan 2025) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
During the Napster wars, the record labels seriously pissed off millions of internet users when they sued over 19,000 music fans, mostly kids, but also grannies, old people, and dead people.
Cory Doctorow: How to Do Everything (Lifehacking Considered Harmful)
I was there when “lifehacking” was born. It was the 11th of February, 2004, at the O’Reilly Emerging Technology Conference, held in a giant conference hotel in San Diego. I was on…
Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow – No trackers, no ads. Black type, white background. Privacy policy: we don't collect or retain any data at all ever period.
Continue reading "Pluralistic: Bonta sold us out to Trump's oligarchs (22 Sep 2026)"
Pluralistic: Surveillance vs guillotines (11 Aug 2026) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
In the summer of 2013, two esoteric, technical, incredibly important texts were published within weeks of one another: the first is the Snowden leaks, which revealed a system of global, pervasive digital surveillance; the second was Thomas Piketty's Capital in the 21st Century, a book about the economic inevitability (and political instability) of oligarchy:
Pluralistic: Surveillance vs guillotines (11 Aug 2026) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
In the summer of 2013, two esoteric, technical, incredibly important texts were published within weeks of one another: the first is the Snowden leaks, which revealed a system of global, pervasive digital surveillance; the second was Thomas Piketty's Capital in the 21st Century, a book about the economic inevitability (and political instability) of oligarchy:
Pluralistic: They’re just trying to earn a buck (07 Oct 2025) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
Life as a prisoner of the neoliberal mind palace must suck: it's a world where every person who suffers under predatory business practices is a "consumer" who has "revealed a preference" for being screwed:
Pluralistic: Reverse engineers bust sleazy gig work platform (23 Nov 2024) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
Supposedly, these lines were included in a 1979 internal presentation at IBM; screenshots of them routinely go viral:
Pluralistic: No one wants to read your AI slop (02 Mar 2026) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
Everyone knows (or should know) that as fascinating as your dreams are to you, they are eye-glazingly dull to everyone else. Perhaps you have a friend or two who will tolerate you recounting your dreams at them (treasure those friends), but you should never, ever presume that other people want to hear about your dreams.
Pluralistic: Ad-tech is fascist tech (10 Mar 2026) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
A core tenet of the enshittification hypothesis is that all the terrible stuff we're subjected to in our digital lives today is the result of foreseeable (and foreseen) policy choices, which created the enshittogenic policy environment in which the worst people's worst ideas make the most money: