Pluralistic: The Post-American Internet (01 Jan 2026)

Pluralistic: The Post-American Internet (01 Jan 2026)

On December 28th, I delivered a speech entitled "A post-American, enshittification-resistant internet" for 39C3, the 39th Chaos Communications Congress in Hamburg, Germany. This is the transcript of that speech.

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: The web is bearable with RSS (07 Mar 2026) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow

Never let them tell you that enshittification was a mystery. Enshittification isn't downstream of the "iron laws of economics" or an unrealistic demand by "consumers" to get stuff for free.

Pluralistic: The enshittification multiverse (27 Apr 2026) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow

It's official: you have my consent and enthusiastic blessing to apply "enshittification" to things that aren't digital platforms! Semantic drift is good, actually:

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: Social media without socializing (19 Jan 2026) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow

From the earliest days of social media, social media bosses have been at war with sociability. To create a social media service is to demarcate legitimate and illegitimate forms of sociability. It's a monumental act of hubris, really.

Pluralistic: Deplatform yourself (23 Feb 2026) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow

The first time I met William Gibson – to interview him for the Globe and Mail on the release of 1999's All Tomorrow's Parties – there was one question I knew I wanted to ask him: "What happens to the counterculture in the era of instantaneous commodification?"

Pluralistic: The online community trilemma (16 Feb 2026) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow

The digital humanities are one of the true delights of this era. Anthropologists are counting things like sociologists, sociologists are grappling with qualitative data like ethnographers, computational linguists are scraping and making sense of vast corpora of informal speech:

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.

Pluralistic: Post-political (09 Jul 2026) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow

There's plenty of reasons to be skeptical of centrists who bemoan "political polarization" and call for a politics that abandons the "tribalism of left and right."

Social Media and Anti-Social Pluralism - Aaron Ross Powell

Communities are different online and off, and pluralism that thrives in the real world can turn toxic in the digital world.

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.

Enshittification Arises from Enclosure: Open Protocols refuse both - Identity Woman

I am posting this on the first full day of Decentralized Web Camp on July 9th, 2026. TLDR: Infographic! Doctorow named what we’re all feeling Cory Doctorow gave us the word: enshittification and a description of a pattern that keeps happening. His original framing, from his January 2023 Pluralistic post: “First, they are good to […]