Pluralistic: Capital formation (14 Aug 2026) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow

Pluralistic: Market participation is exhausting (30 Mar 2026) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow

We're a diverse species, cognitively speaking – different ways of thinking come more easily to some of us than others. I'm good at a lot of things, but I have terrible spatial sense. I can't parallel park or catch a ball, and I get lost so easily it's almost comical (it's a running joke in my family).

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: 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 worst possible antitrust outcome (03 Sep 2025) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow

Last year, Google lost an antitrust case to Biden's DoJ. The DoJ lawyers beat Google like a drum, proving beyond a shadow of a doubt that Google had deliberately sought to create and maintain a monopoly over search, and that they'd used that monopoly to make search materially worse, while locking competitors out of the market.

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: Goodhart’s Law vs “prediction markets” (24 Mar 2026) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow

The most selectively believed-in verse in the conservative catechism is the idea that "incentives matter."

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: 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: 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: 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: 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: AI and the fatfinger economy (02 May 2025) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow

Have you noticed that all the buttons you click most frequently to invoke routine, useful functions in your device have been moved, and their former place is now taken up by a curiously butthole-esque icon that summons an unwanted AI?

Capital and CHI: Technological Capture and How It Structures CHI Research

This paper advances a theoretical argument about the role capital plays in structuring CHI research. We introduce the concept of technological capture to theorize the mechanism by which this happens. Using this concept, we decompose the effect on CHI into four broad forms: technological capture creates market-creating, market-expanding, market-aligned, and externality-reducing CHI research. We place different CHI subcommunities into these forms -- arguing that many of their values are inherited from capital underlying the field. Rather than a disciplinary- or conference-oriented conceptualization of the field, this work theorizes CHI as tightly-coupled with capital via technological capture. The paper concludes by discussing some implications for CHI.

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: Billionaire-proofing the internet; Picks and Shovels Chapter One (Part 5) (14 Jan 2025) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow

During the Napster wars, the record labels seriously pissed off millions of internet users when they sued over 19,000 music fans, mostly kids, but also grannies, old people, and dead people.

Pluralistic: Enshittification isn’t caused by venture capital (20 Jan 2025) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow

Many of us have left the big social media platforms; far more of us wish we could leave them; and even those of us who've escaped from Facebook/Insta and Twitter still spend a lot of time trying to figure out how to get the people we care about off of them, too.