For generations, the American empire was the most powerful force on earth, and so we tended to assume that it was the most durable force on earth – surely anything so powerful must also be eternal?
Pluralistic: Preparing for a post-Trump internet (03 Sep 2026) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
I know, it's tempting to think of Trump as a cause, rather than an effect – as an aberration who dragged America into fascism. Trump is exceptional, but the thing that makes him exceptional isn't his corruption, recklessness or cruelty. What makes Trump exceptional is his ability to cajole, intimidate and flatter America's most corrupt, reckless and cruel people into a coalition.
Pluralistic: Comrade Trump (20 Apr 2026) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
There aren't a lot of things I agree with Mark Carney about, but there's one area where he and I are in total accord: the old, US-dominated, "rules-based international order" was total bullshit:
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: 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: 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: EU ready to cave to Trump on tech (04 Apr 2026) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
Crises precipitate change. That's no reason to induce a crisis, but you'd be a fool to let a crisis go to waste. Donald Trump is the greatest crisis of our young century, and the EU looks set to squander the opportunity, to its own terrible detriment.
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: Firing the refs doesn’t end the game (12 Mar 2025) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
Let me tell you how I became a proud science denier, and how it saved my life.
Pluralistic: How Canada can help Americans and defeat America (23 Aug 2026) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
As Canada is learning (the hard way), the "art" of all of Trump's deals can be summed up in a single word: "renege":
Pluralistic: Defense (of the internet) (from billionaires) in depth (23 Jan 2025) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
The only way to truly billionaire-proof the internet is to a) abolish billionaires and b) abolish the system that allows people to become billionaires. Short of that, any levees we build will need constant tending, reinforcement, and re-evaluation.
An American Tragedy
The electorate has, in its plurality, decided to live in Trump’s world of vanity, hate, arrogance, untruth, and recklessness.
Pluralistic: Trump’s CFPB kills data broker rule (15 May 2025) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
Something amazing happened from 2020-2024: even as parts of the Biden administration were encouraging genocide and covering up the president's senescence, a small collection of little-regarded agencies were taking a wrecking ball to corporate power, approaching antitrust and consumer protection with a vigor not seen in generations.
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: 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: 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: A disenshittification moment from the land of mass storage (10 Oct 2025) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
Sometimes, you really can vote with your wallet. I know, I'm generally pretty down on this kind of thing, but sometimes, it works!