The most selectively believed-in verse in the conservative catechism is the idea that "incentives matter."
Pluralistic: Goodhart’s Law (of AI) (11 Aug 2025) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
One way to think about AI's unwelcome intrusion into our lives can be summed up with Goodhart's Law: "When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure":
Pluralistic: Capital formation (14 Aug 2026) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
Funny thing about competition: there's both a pro-market and an anti-market case for a competitive system. https://pluralistic.net/2026/08/13/one-chokable-throat/#too-clever-by-half
Pluralistic: All (antitrust) politics are local (02 Sep 2025) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
The US government has abandoned antitrust. Today, companies facing antitrust jeopardy can just pay key Trumpland figures a million bucks, and they will make a discreet visit to the fifth floor of the DoJ building, have a little shoofty around the Antitrust Division and the whole thing will just…go away:
Pluralistic: All bets are off (29 Jan 2025) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
When unions are outlawed, only outlaws will have unions. Unions don't owe their existence to labor laws that protect organizing activities. Rather, labor laws exist because once-illegal unions were formed in the teeth of violent suppression, and those unions demanded – and got – labor law.
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: 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: Love of corporate bullshit is correlated with bad judgment (19 Mar 2026) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
I'm a writer, so of course I care about words! But I'm a writer, so I also think that words are improved by their malleability, duality and nuance.
Pluralistic: All laws are local (05 Feb 2026) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
About halfway through Thomas Piketty's 2013 barnstorming Capital in the 21st Century, Piketty tosses off a little insight that skewered me on the spot and never let me go: the notion that any societal condition that endures beyond a generation becomes "eternal" in the popular consciousness:
Pluralistic: How an AI moratorium can save AI bosses (16 Sep 2026) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
There's lots of reasons to believe the "hyperscaler" model of AI can never be profitable, and not just because of its gigantic expenditures and negative unit economics (the companies lose money with every new customer and every new use, and they lose more money with each generation of their products):
Pluralistic: IP can’t save you from AI (18 Aug 2026) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
You don't have to believe that AI "art" is any good (I don't), nor do you have to believe that AI "art" can be any good (I don't) to understand that the reason that the capital markets are putting trillions into AI is that they believe they can fire workers of every kind and replace them with AI:
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)"
Against Economics
Mainstream economists nowadays might not be particularly good at predicting financial crashes, facilitating general prosperity, or coming up with models for preventing climate change, but when it comes to establishing themselves in positions of intellectual authority, unaffected by such failings, their success is unparalleled. One would have to look at the history of religions to find anything like it. To this day, economics continues to be taught not as a story of arguments—not, like any other social science, as a welter of often warring theoretical perspectives—but rather as something more like physics, the gradual realization of universal, unimpeachable mathematical truths.
Pluralistic: Google’s AI pricing plan (21 Jan 2026) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
Google is spending a lot on AI, but what's not clear is how Google will make a lot from AI. Or, you know, even break even. Given, you know, that businesses are seeing zero return from AI:
Pluralistic: With Great Power Came No Responsibility (26 Feb 2025) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
Last night, I traveled to Toronto to deliver the annual Ursula Franklin Lecture at the University of Toronto's Innis College:
Pluralistic: America and “national capitalism” (18 Feb 2025) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
Thomas Piketty's 2013 unexpected bestseller (a 750 page economics book translated from French!) Capital in the 21st Century, offers a very convincing explanation of our political decay, and it continues to serve this purpose as the decay undergoes alarming acceleration:
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.