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: 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: 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: Austerity creates fascism (13 Apr 2026) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
I'm worried about AI psychosis. Specifically, I'm worried about the psychosis that makes our "capital allocators" spend $1.4T on the money-losingest technology in the history of the human race, in pursuit of a bizarre fantasy that if we teach the word-guessing program enough words, it will take all the jobs. That's some next-level underpants-gnomery:
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: Tiktok’s enshittification (21 Jan 2023) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
Here is how platforms die: first, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die.
Pluralistic: The Post-American Internet (01 Jan 2026) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
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: Understaffing as a form of enshittification (23 Mar 2026) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
At root, enshittification can only take place when companies can move value around. Digital tools make it easier than ever to do this, for example, by changing prices on a per-user, per-session basis, using commercial surveillance data to predict the highest price or lowest wage a user will accept:
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:
Techno-solutionism
“techno-solutionism,” the simplification of complex societal problems into apps and algorithms. Ed-Tech’s Inequalities “Technological solutionism” is the related tendency to identify simple answers — in all domains, not just the tech sector — “before the questions have been fully asked” or the problems fully articulated. Take, for example: “the Internet has changed everything about how […]
Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology
A witty, often terrifying that chronicles our transform…
Major Tech Investor Calls Architect of Fascism a 'Saint' in Unhinged Manifesto
Silicon Valley's 'techno-optimism' cult believes we should let rich tech guys do whatever they want.
TESCREAL
TESCREAL is a neologism proposed by computer scientist Timnit Gebru and philosopher Émile P. Torres. An acronym, it stands for Transhumanism, Extropianism, Singularitarianism, (modern) Cosmism, Rationalists (the internet community, not to be confused with other uses of the term), Effective Altruism, and Longtermism.[1][2] Gebru and Torres argue that these ideologies should be treated as an "interconnected and overlapping" group with shared origins.[1] They claim these constitute a movement that allows its proponents to use the threat of human extinction to justify expensive or detrimental projects and consider it pervasive in social and academic circles in Silicon Valley centered on artificial intelligence.[3] As such, the acronym is sometimes used to criticize a perceived belief system associated with Big Tech.[3][4][5]
Pluralistic: A fascist paradigm (12 May 2026) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
Yesterday, I attended a workshop on systems thinking and political change, which included a presentation on the work of Donella Meadows, whose Thinking in Systems is a canonical work on the subject:
Pluralistic: The ordinariness of evil (19 Aug 2026) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
Maybe it seems weird that AI bosses won't stop publicly rending their garments about the terrible potential of their products, from the jobspocalypse that will ensue when AI can do our jobs better than us, to the impending moment when the word-guessing programs learn too many words, wake up and turn us all into paperclips.