Pluralistic: Preparing for a post-Trump internet (03 Sep 2026) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow

Pluralistic: Making sense of Trump’s unscheduled sudden midair disassembly of the American empire (16 May 2026) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow

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: 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.

An American Tragedy

The electorate has, in its plurality, decided to live in Trump’s world of vanity, hate, arrogance, untruth, and recklessness.

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: 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: 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.

The Predatory Hegemon

Ever since Donald Trump first became U.S. president, in 2017, commentators have searched for an adequate label to describe his approach to U.S. foreign relations. Writing in these pages, the political scientist Barry Posen suggested in 2018 that Trump’s grand strategy was “illiberal hegemony,” and the analyst Oren Cass argued last fall that its defining essence was a demand for “reciprocity.” Trump has been called a realist, a nationalist, an old-fashioned mercantilist, an imperialist, and an isolationist.

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: 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: 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: 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: 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: By all means, tread on those people (26 Aug 2025) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow

Just as Martin Niemöller's "First They Came" has become our framework for understanding the rise of fascism in Nazi Germany, so, too is Wilhoit's Law the best way to understand America's decline into fascism:

Regime Change: Inside the Imperial Presidency of Donald Trump

INSTANT #1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER “Regime Change is exceptional. It transcends its genre...the book is packed with news that will stay news...This is reporting of consequence.” —David Remnick, The New Yorker “A flabbergasting feat of political reporting.” —Tina Brown “Riveting and richly textured...What the authors add is the vivid detail that makes these events feel actual. They wrest reality itself back from the distorted world of entertainment, illusion, fantasy, and denial that Trump has generated around himself. It is this flood of provocation, atrocity, self-dealing, and fabrication that makes Haberman and Swan’s counternarrative so vital.” —Fintan O’Toole, The New York Times A riveting, intimate, and revelatory account of the most radical and consequential presidency of our time.From the two reporters who have covered him more closely than perhaps anyone else over the past decade comes this definitive portrait of Donald Trump in the White House. Regime Change covers the first year of Trump’s second presidency—a term liberated from every constraint that defined his first. The generals who once told him “no” are gone, and the lawyers who remain have learned to pick their battles. His administration has flouted court orders and he has claimed powers that Congress once checked. What remains is a President willing to take enormous risks that have upended global markets and toppled heads of state; an imperial President operating almost entirely on instinct alone. Based on hundreds of interviews and unprecedented reporting from deep within the administration’s most closely guarded rooms, Regime Change takes the reader inside the Situation Room and into the secret Oval Office deliberations that have launched a new war in the Middle East and seen Trump seal the border, surge National Guard troops into cities, and send immigration agents into deadly clashes with protestors. Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan bring us behind the scenes of a presidency that has transformed the culture, turned the Justice Department into an agent of retribution against the President’s enemies and the office itself into a brazen vehicle for profit. They reveal a second term propelled by a historical irony that Trump himself has come to understand: that the indictments, the convictions, the assassination attempts, and four years of exile made him not weaker but far more powerful, more vengeful, and more willing to gamble than any President in modern history. This is the story of how Trump has used that power, who has tried to stop him, and why nearly all of them have failed. It is also the story of something American journalists are more accustomed to chronicling in distant capitals than in their own: a President who has fundamentally altered the nature of the office he holds—and, with it, how the rest of the world understands American power. It is an account of Regime Change right here in America—a landmark real-time history of a modern presidency like no other.

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: 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":