My theory of the "shitty technology adoption curve" holds that you can predict the future impact of abusive technologies on you by observing the way these are deployed against people who have less social power than you:
Pluralistic: AI turns Amazon coders into Amazon warehouse workers (27 May 2025) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
Now, it's true that eventually, the machines improved and the fabric they turned out matched and exceeded the quality of the fabric that
Pluralistic: AI turns Amazon coders into Amazon warehouse workers (27 May 2025) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
On a recent This Machine Kills episode, guest Hagen Blix described the ultimate form of "AI therapy" with a "human in the loop":
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:
Amazon and Walmart’s rivalry is reshaping how we’ll buy everything in the future
The retail war is expanding to cloud computing, grocery delivery, and streaming video
Google and Amazon: Acknowledged Risks, and Ignored Responsibilities
In late 2024, we urged Google and Amazon to honor their human rights commitments. Since then, a stream of additional reporting has reinforced that our concerns were well-founded. Yet despite mounting
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:
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:
Pluralistic: Post-American compute for a post-American Internet (04 Aug 2026) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
Obviously, the non-American world has a digital sovereignty problem – Trump has means, motive and opportunity to order his tech companies to shut down any public official, large corporation, or individual who displeases him:
Pluralistic: Digital sewer socialism (08 Aug 2026) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
Hardly a day goes by without my getting an email from someone looking for a way to do good with technology. From computer science students thinking about post-grad careers to seasoned coders with decades of experience, there's an army of hackers looking for a way to turn their expertise into public goods.
Pluralistic: Digital sewer socialism (08 Aug 2026) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
Hardly a day goes by without my getting an email from someone looking for a way to do good with technology. From computer science students thinking about post-grad careers to seasoned coders with decades of experience, there's an army of hackers looking for a way to turn their expertise into public goods.
Leave big tech behind! How to replace Amazon, Google, X, Meta, Apple – and more
A handful of companies monopolise the web, with unprecedented access to our data. But there are many more ethical – and often distinctively European – alternatives
Pluralistic: When AI prophecy fails (29 Oct 2025) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
Amazon made $35 billion in profit last year, so they're celebrating by laying off 14,000 workers (a number they say will rise to 30,000). This is the kind of thing that Wall Street loves, and this layoff comes after a string of pronouncements from Amazon CEO Andy Jassy about how AI is going to let them fire tons of workers.
The tech industry is about to get a lot worse
Whether you live in the United States or not, this week’s election is going to have rippling effects on the tech industry for years to come. Under the incoming administration, I expect a massive erosion in privacy, an increase in surveillance capitalism, a massive rollback of environmental protections, and the widespread destruction of inclusive norms. Keep your eyes open. At work, right now, a lot of the people you work with are going to be hurting badly (you might be one of them.
Why Amazon Has No Profits (And Why It Works) | Andreessen Horowitz
Amazon has a tendency to polarize people. On one hand, there is the ruthless, relentless, ferociously efficient company that’s building the Sears Roebuck of the 21st Century. But on the other, there is the fact that almost 20 years after it was launched, it has yet to report a meaningful profit. This chart captures the...
How tech workers are feeling in 2026: a workforce splitting in two
Results from our second annual tech worker sentiment survey
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: