When you think of a legal loophole, you probably imagine a drafting error (or perhaps a sneaky insertion) that creates an advantage for a specific person or group of people.
Pluralistic: Model collapse (12 Aug 2026) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
One of my favorite rhetorical and analytical moves is joining things together (showing that two different, seemingly unrelated ideas are aspects of the same phenomenon) and taking them apart (resolving a paradox by demonstrating that what appears to be one, contradictory thing is actually two different things that have been lumped together).
Pluralistic: The difference between “today’s task” and “accretive work” (02 Jul 2026) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
One thing I've learned about paradoxes: often the answer to the riddle of "how can this one thing have such a contradictory set of features and effects?" is "it's not one thing, it's two things*."
Pluralistic: The difference between “today’s task” and “accretive work” (02 Jul 2026) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
One thing I've learned about paradoxes: often the answer to the riddle of "how can this one thing have such a contradictory set of features and effects?" is "it's not one thing, it's two things*."
Pluralistic: The (other) problem with automatic conversion of free software to proprietary software (23 Apr 2026) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
Here's an interesting stunt: a project called Malus.sh will take your money, and in exchange, it will ingest any free/open source code you want, refactor that code using an LLM, and spit out a "clean room" version that is freed from all the obligations imposed by the original project's software license:
Convivial Computing
In 1973, Ivan Illich published Tools for Conviviality, a book about man's relation to tools 1. Illich pleaded for a pluralism of responsibly limited tools that guarantee an individual’s right to work with independent efficiency, the development of which is "as unpredictable, creative and lively as the people who use them" (Illich, 1973) 2. He pointed to overgrowth and overproduction threatening the right to a liveable environment, which unfortunately led him to ideas on gender and population control that are highly problematic 3. His ideas are included in the Catalog because of their influence on other practices, that picked up on his ideas about limited tools and turned a blind eye to the less appealing parts of his writing.
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: 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.
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: AI solipsists and AI cynics (24 Jul 2026) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
As a technology, AI isn't exceptional. It's not exceptionally wicked. It's not exceptionally good. Take away the accompanying, galactic-scale stock-swindle, and we'd call AI's applications "plug-ins" and we'd use them and abuse them in the same way that we've used every other technology:
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: It’s extremely good that Claude’s source-code leaked (02 Apr 2026) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
Anthropic's developers made an extremely basic configuration error, and as a result, the source-code for Claude Code – the company's flagship coding assistant product – has leaked and is being eagerly analyzed by many parties:
Pluralistic: Process knowledge (08 Apr 2026) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
"Intellectual property" was once an obscure legal backwater. Today, it is the dominant area of political economy, the organizing regime for almost all of our tech regulation, and the most valuable – and most controversial – aspect of global trade policy:
Pluralistic: Six Years of Pluralistic (19 Feb 2026) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
Six years ago today, after 19 years with Boing Boing, during which time I wrote tens of thousands of blog posts, I started a new, solo blog, with the semi-ironic name "Pluralistic." I didn't know what Pluralistic was going to be, but I wasn't writing Boing Boing anymore, and I knew I wanted to keep writing the web in some fashion.
Tools – The Markup
Our tools hold institutions accountable for the way they use technology, pulling back the curtain so readers can see for themselves how technology affects them.
