Cory Doctorow

By Cory Doctorow (GPG 0xBF3D9110957E5F4C)
@doctorow.

Archived at pluralistic.net

I post long threads. If you don't like these in your timeline but want to read them, I suggest unfollowing me here and subscribing to my RSS, or my newsletter, or any of my various long-form feeds. Links at https://pluralistic.net.

Tour schedule: https:/pluralistic.net/tour

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Last Notes

2026-02-07 08:41:31

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You can follow these posts as a daily blog at pluralistic.net: no ads, trackers, or data-collection!
Here's today's edition: https://pluralistic.net/2026/02/07/aimsters-revenge/
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eof/

2026-02-07 08:40:46

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My ebooks and audiobooks (from FSGxMCD, Tor Books, Head of Zeus, McSweeneys, Beacon, Verso and others) are for sale all over the net, but I sell 'em too, and when you buy 'em from me, I earn twice as much and you get books with no DRM and no license "agreements."
https://craphound.com/shop/
8/
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2026-02-07 08:40:28

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Yesterday's threads: Luxury Kafka; and more!
https://mamot.fr/@pluralistic/116022875122371139
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2026-02-07 08:21:30

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And here we are, more than a quarter-century later, living in the prison of lawmakers' reckless disregard for evidence and expertise, a world where criticism can be converted into a felony. It's long past time we get rid of this stupid, stupid law:
https://pluralistic.net/2026/01/01/39c3/#the-new-coalition
33/

2026-02-07 08:20:43

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Which means that you are allowed to rip a stream, but you're not allowed to use a stream-ripping service. If Youtube's rolling cipher is an "effective access control" then all of those stream-ripping services are wildly illegal, felonies carrying a five-year sentence and a $500k fine for a first offense under DMCA 1201.
28/

2026-02-07 08:20:04

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If the higher court upholds this magistrate judge's ruling, then *all* clipping becomes a crime, and the subjects of criticism will have a ready tool to silence any critic. This obliterates fair use, wipes it off the statute-book. It welds shut copyright's escape valve for free expression.
26/

2026-02-07 08:19:51

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Remember, DMCA 1201 applies *whether or not you infringe someone's copyright*. It is a blanket prohibition on the circumvention of *any* "effective access control" for *any* copyrighted work, even when no one's rights are being violated. It's a way to transform otherwise lawful conduct into a felony. It's what Jay Freeman calls "Felony contempt of business model."
25/

2026-02-07 08:18:51

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What else is fair use? Well, it's "fact intensive," which is a lawyer's way of saying, "it depends." One thing that is 100% true, though, is that fair use is *not* limited to the "four factors" enumerated in the statute and anyone who claims otherwise has no idea what they're talking about and can be safely ignored:
https://pluralistic.net/2024/06/27/nuke-first/#ask-questions-never
20/

2026-02-07 08:18:39

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As the Supreme Court stated in *Eldred*, the only way copyright (a government-backed restriction on who can say certain words) can be reconciled with the First Amendment (a ban on government restrictions on speech) is through fair use, the "escape valve" for free expression embedded in copyright:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eldred_v._Ashcroft
Which is to say that including clips from a video you're criticizing in your own video is canonical fair use.
19/

2026-02-07 08:18:28

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These kinds of videos are allowed under US copyright law. American copyright law has a broad set of limitation and exceptions, which include "fair use," an expansive set of affirmative rights to access and use copyrighted works, *even against the wishes of the copyright's proprietor*.
18/

2026-02-07 08:17:30

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They're not Willy Wonka's idea factory - they're Rich Uncle Pennybags, buying up other kids' toys:
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2023/02/google-ai-chatbots-microsoft-bing-chatgpt/673052/
Google operationalized Youtube and built it up to the world's most structurally important video platform. Along the way, Google added some javascript that was intended to block people from "downloading" its videos.
13/

2026-02-07 08:16:39

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Deep responded by "encoding" all of the track names on his network in pig-Latin. Then he claimed that by "decoding" the files (by moving the last letter of the track name to the first position), the record industry was "bypassing an effective access control for a copyrighted work" and thus violating DMCA 1201:
https://abcnews.go.com/Entertainment/story?id=108454&page=1
The court didn't buy this. The judge ruled that pig Latin isn't an "effective access control."
9/

2026-02-07 08:16:08

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As far as I know, there's just one case that addressed the issue, and boy was it a weird one. Back in 2000, a "colorful" guy named Johnny Deep founded a Napster-alike service that piggybacked on the AOL Instant Messenger network. He called his service "Aimster." When AOL threatened him with a trademark suit, he claimed that Aimster was his daughter Amiee's AOL handle, and that the service was named for her.
7/

2026-02-07 08:15:51

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Whenever the issue comes up, defendants settle, or fold, or disappear. Despite the fact that DMCA 1201 has been with us for more than a quarter of a century, and despite the fact that the activities it restricts are *so* far-reaching, there's precious little case law clarifying Congress's vague statutory language.
When it comes to "effectiveness" in access controls, the jurisprudence is especially thin.
6/

2026-02-07 08:15:14

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Let's unpack that: every digital product has a "copyrighted work" at its core, because software is copyrighted. Digital systems are intrinsically very flexible: just overwrite, augment, or delete part of the software that powers the device or product, and you change how the product works.
3/

2026-02-06 15:06:21

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@nprofile…2pyu Right you are - thanks!

2026-02-06 11:18:16

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@nprofile…7uzt Because I live in the USA. Would you rather be a NON-citizen in the USA?

2026-02-06 11:18:00

1010 words (24701 total) on “The Post-American Internet,” a sequel to "Enshittification," about the better world the rest of us get to have now that Trump has torched America #DailyWords

2026-02-06 09:05:14

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Upcoming appearances:
* #SaltLakeCity: Enshittification at the Utah Museum of Fine Arts (Tanner Humanities Center), Feb 18
https://tanner.utah.edu/center-events/cory-doctorow/
* #Montreal (remote): Fedimtl, Feb 24
https://fedimtl.ca/
* #Victoria: 28th Annual Victoria International Privacy & Security Summit, Mar 3-5
https://www.rebootcommunications.com/event/vipss2026/
* #Berkeley: Bioneers keynote, Mar 27
https://conference.bioneers.org/
* #Berlin: Re:publica, May 18-20
https://re-publica.com/de/news/rp26-sprecher-cory-doctorow
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2026-02-06 09:05:04

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My ebooks and audiobooks (from FSGxMCD, Tor Books, Head of Zeus, McSweeneys, Beacon, Verso and others) are for sale all over the net, but I sell 'em too, and when you buy 'em from me, I earn twice as much and you get books with no DRM and no license "agreements."
https://craphound.com/shop/
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2026-02-06 09:04:55

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My latest novel is "Picks and Shovels," a historical technothriller set in the Weird Era of the PC, about Ponzi schemes, techbros, and the dawn of enshittification:
https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250865908/picksandshovels
--
My latest nonfiction book is the internationally bestselling "Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It," from MCD/Farrar, Straus and Giroux:
https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374619329/enshittification/
8/

2026-02-06 09:04:45

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Yesterday's threads: All laws are local; and more!
https://mamot.fr/@pluralistic/116018345665883141
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2026-02-06 09:04:25

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#10yrsago There’s a secret “black site” in New York where terrorism suspects are tortured for years at a time https://web.archive.org/web/20160205143012/https://theintercept.com/2016/02/05/mahdi-hashi-metropolitan-correctional-center-manhattan-guantanamo-pretrial-solitary-confinement/
#10yrsago Error 53: Apple remotely bricks phones to punish customers for getting independent repairs https://www.theguardian.com/money/2016/feb/05/error-53-apple-iphone-software-update-handset-worthless-third-party-repair?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other
#10yrsago Toronto City Council defies mayor, demands open, neutral municipal broadband https://www.michaelgeist.ca/2016/02/toronto-city-council-sides-with-crtc-in-rejecting-mayor-torys-support-of-bell-appeal/
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2026-02-06 09:03:43

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Hey look at this
* The Big Idea: Justin C. Key https://whatever.scalzi.com/2026/02/05/the-big-idea-justin-c-key/
* Jeff Bezos Just Taught Liberal Elites How Oligarchy Really Works https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/jeff-bezos-finally-pulls-the-mask
* Yes, Democrats should run on ICE https://www.gelliottmorris.com/p/yes-democrats-should-run-on-ice
* "ICE Out of Our Faces Act" would ban ICE and CBP use of facial recognition https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2026/02/ice-out-of-our-faces-act-would-ban-ice-and-cbp-use-of-facial-recognition/
* ‘Ripping’ Clips for YouTube Reaction Videos can Violate the DMCA, Court Rules https://torrentfreak.com/ripping-clips-for-youtube-reaction-videos-can-violate-the-dmca-court-rules/
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2026-02-06 09:02:57

Today's threads (a thread)
Inside: Luxury Kafka; and more!
Archived at: https://pluralistic.net/2026/02/06/doge-ball/
#Pluralistic
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2026-02-06 08:50:39

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One guy, Elon Musk, took the immigration system from "frustrating and inefficient" to "totally impossible." That same guy is an avowed white nationalist - and illegal US immigrant who *did* cheat the immigration system - who sadistically celebrates the unlimited cruelty the immigration system heaps on other immigrants:
https://www.congress.gov/119/meeting/house/118277/documents/HHRG-119-JU13-20250520-SD003.pdf
26/

2026-02-06 08:50:16

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One woman plaintively called out, "Why does everything get worse all the time?" (Yes, I'm aware of the irony of someone saying that within my earshot):
https://pluralistic.net/2024/10/14/pearl-clutching/#this-toilet-has-no-central-nervous-system
24/

2026-02-06 08:49:39

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Can you recover the dates of every border crossing your parents made into the USA from the day they were born until the day they became citizens?
Anyone who says that "immigrants should just follow the rules" has missed the fact that *the rules are impossible to follow*.
20/

2026-02-06 08:48:41

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I tried to call the US immigration service's info line. It is now staffed exclusively by an AI chatbot (thanks, Elon). I tried a dozen times to get the chatbot to put me on the phone with a human who could confirm what I should do about visits to the US that I took more than 50 years ago, when I was two years old. But the chatbot would only offer to text me a link to the online form, which has no guidance on this subject.
15/

2026-02-06 08:48:34

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That includes, for example, the time when I was two years old and my parents took me to Fort Lauderdale to visit my retired grandparents. This question comes after a screen where you attest that you will not make any omissions or errors, and that any such omission or error will be treated as an attempt to defraud the US immigration system, with the most severe penalties imaginable.
14/

2026-02-06 08:47:04

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I found my own immigration lawyers through a friend's husband who worked in a fancy investment bank, and it quickly became apparent that immigration firms assume that their clients have extensive administrative support who can drop everything to produce mountains of obscure documents on demand.
6/

2026-02-06 08:46:34

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Let's be clear: I played the US immigration game on the easiest level. I am relatively affluent - rich enough to afford fancy immigration lawyers with offices on four continents - and I am a native English speaker. This made the immigration system ten thousand times (at a minimum) easier for me than it is for most US immigrants.
3/

2026-02-06 08:44:42

Having been through the US immigration process (I got my first work visa more than 25 years ago and became a citizen in 2022), it's obvious to me that Americans have *no idea* how weird and tortuous their immigration system is:
https://www.flickr.com/photos/doctorow/52177745821/
--
If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
https://pluralistic.net/2026/02/06/doge-ball/#n-600
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2026-02-05 13:56:20

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You can follow these posts as a daily blog at pluralistic.net: no ads, trackers, or data-collection!
Here's today's edition: https://pluralistic.net/2026/02/05/contingency/
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If you prefer a newsletter, subscribe to the plura-list, which is ad-/tracker-free, and is utterly unadorned save a single daily emoji. Today's is "🛌🏻". Suggestions solicited for future emojis!
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eof/

2026-02-04 04:17:15

1011 words (21655 total) on “The Post-American Internet,” a sequel to "Enshittification," about the better world the rest of us get to have now that Trump has torched America #DailyWords

2026-02-02 19:51:56

1053 words (20644 total) on “The Post-American Internet,” a sequel to "Enshittification," about the better world the rest of us get to have now that Trump has torched America #DailyWords

2026-02-02 17:07:44

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My ebooks and audiobooks (from FSGxMCD, Tor Books, Head of Zeus, McSweeneys, Beacon, Verso and others) are for sale all over the net, but I sell 'em too, and when you buy 'em from me, I earn twice as much and you get books with no DRM and no license "agreements."
https://craphound.com/shop/
10/
https://static.mamot.fr/media_attachments/files/116/002/132/025/800/570/original/b4c78868fdf5a5ad.jpg

2026-02-02 17:06:47

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#10yrsago A would-be clinic-bomber & friends are terrorizing a charter school for being too close to a future Planned Parenthood office https://web.archive.org/web/20160318235447/https://broadly.vice.com/en_us/article/inside-the-bizarre-war-anti-abortion-zealots-are-waging-against-school-kids
#10yrsago Ross and Carrie become Scientologists: an investigative report 5 years in the making https://ohnopodcast.com/investigations/2016/2/1/ross-and-carrie-audit-scientology-part-1-going-preclear
#10yrsago Exclusive: Snowden intelligence docs reveal UK spooks’ malware checklist https://memex.craphound.com/2016/02/02/exclusive-snowden-intelligence-docs-reveal-uk-spooks-malware-checklist/
#5yrsago The free market and rent-seeking https://pluralistic.net/2021/02/02/euthanize-rentiers/#poor-doors
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2026-02-02 17:06:37

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#10yrsago UK Snooper’s Charter is so broad, no one can figure out what it means https://web.archive.org/web/20160202092111/https://motherboard.vice.com/read/tech-firms-are-unclear-on-new-uk-surveillance-laws-warns-government-committee
#5yrsago The good news about vaccination bad news https://pluralistic.net/2021/02/01/dinos-and-rinos/#mixed-news
#5yrsago Unidirectional entryism https://pluralistic.net/2021/02/01/dinos-and-rinos/#entryism
#15yrsago Inside Sukey the anti-kettling mobile app https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2011/feb/02/inside-anti-kettling-hq
#10yrsago Swatting attempted against Congresswoman who introduced anti-swatting bill https://www.bostonglobe.com/metro/2016/02/01/cops-swarm-rep-katherine-clark-melrose-home-after-apparent-hoax/yqEpcpWmKtN6bOOAj8FZXJ/story.html
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2026-02-02 17:05:08

Today's threads (a thread)
Inside: Stock swindles; and more!
Archived at: https://pluralistic.net/2026/02/02/corprophagia/
#Pluralistic
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2026-02-02 15:38:14

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Trump's right: the system *is* rigged. If you're going to pull the people you love back from the nihilistic descent into fascism, you have to be able to understand and explain how the rigging works. We can't insist - as Hillary Clinton did - that "America is already great":
https://www.politico.com/blogs/2016-dem-primary-live-updates-and-results/2016/03/clinton-america-is-already-great-220078
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2026-02-02 15:38:07

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The Heritage Foundation (who created Project 2025) was founded and funded by the founders of Amway, a destructive Ponzi scheme that was rescued from criminal prosecution when Gerald Ford (Congressman to Amway's founders) became president and ordered the FTC to let them off the hook:
https://pluralistic.net/2025/05/05/free-enterprise-system/#amway-or-the-highway
32/

2026-02-02 15:36:30

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What's more, if you own any stock you almost certainly own it through a retirement plan like a 401(k), and when you cash out that 401(k), *that* is treated as "ordinary income" at nearly twice the rate that our plutocrat overlords pay.
Buybacks, then, are part of a system whereby rich people get *much* richer every time a company that makes something good and employs ordinary people guts itself and sets itself on the path to bankruptcy.
28/

2026-02-02 15:35:47

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Meanwhile, if you sell your shares after a stock buyback juices the price, the profits are treated as "capital gains," whose tax rate caps out at about half that (20%). This means that shareholders pay *half the tax* on money that comes from strip-mining a company than they would get from money derived from managing a company for sustainable growth.
It's worse than that, though, because capital gains can be offset by capital *losses*.
24/

2026-02-02 15:35:04

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That dividend would *not* send investors chasing the company's stock. Why would you bet on a stock whose management had just doomed the company to a bad season, and maybe an unrecoverable death-spiral? Without new books to sell, the company won't have any cash to pay dividends, and when it stops paying dividends, its stock price will fall, leaving shareholders with a hole in their own balance-sheets.
20/

2026-02-02 15:34:58

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But imagine if a company parted with a dividend so large that it meant that the firm would struggle to keep its doors open in the coming year. Imagine a publisher, say, whose dividend was so large that it couldn't afford to pay advances for any more books in the next season, meaning it could only make money from the backlist titles it already had in the warehouse, but was entirely out of the running when it came to publishing next year's blockbuster book.
19/

2026-02-02 15:34:51

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This is categorically untrue. Dividends *do* take money from a company coffers and distribute it to its shareholders, sure - but a dividend is a bet on the company's future *success*. That's why a company's shares rise after declaring a dividend. Investors observe a company that's so well-run that it can afford to drain some of its cash reserves in favor of its shareholders, so they buy the company's stock in anticipation of more dividends derived from more skilled operations.
18/

2026-02-02 15:33:59

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This is just stock manipulation, which is why it was illegal until 1982. But apologists for this system will tell you that a stock buyback is just a dividend by another name - just another way for a company to return value to its shareholders, who, after all, are the owners of the company and entitled to extract those profits.
17/

2026-02-02 15:33:22

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That's a reliable estimate, because we know exactly how much one billion dollars cash is worth: it's worth one billion dollars.
Now, let that company piss that billion dollars up the wall with a stock buyback. The company is relieved of its billion dollars cash on hand, leaving it with no cash, only its physical capital, IP and human capital, which are worth $9b. The company is now worth less than it was before the stock buyback.
14/

2026-02-02 15:33:05

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This is the whole argument for the new crop of rigged casinos we call "prediction markets" that are grooming the next generation of fascist footsoldiers by robbing them blind and then insisting that the whole process was not only legitimate, but *scientific*, a way to retrieve the "encoded information" about the world around us.
In a market system, stock prices are supposed to reflect the aggregated information about the health and prospects of a company.
12/

2026-02-02 15:32:01

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Which is all to say, if you want to understand the origins of the surge of suckers for fascists who are desperate for a strong man to cheat on their behalf in a rigged system, it helps to look beyond racism and xenophobia, to the ways in which the system is, indeed, rigged. Racism and misogyny alone aren't enough to bring about fascism. To groom a nation of fascist patsies, you first need a crooked system:
https://pluralistic.net/2025/07/22/all-day-suckers/#i-love-the-poorly-educated
7/

2026-02-02 15:31:41

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Want to convince people elections are corrupt? Legalize unlimited dark money spending and fill our poll with defective, unauditable voting machines made by Beltway Bandits selling into no-bid contracts:
https://web.archive.org/web/20210203113531/https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2021/02/03/voting-machines-election-steal-conspiracy-flaws/
Want to convince people there's a shadowy cabal of rich pedophiles hiding children in a pizza parlor basement? It helps if there's an actual cabal of rich pedophiles hanging out on a private island, abusing more than a thousand children (and counting).
5/

2026-02-02 15:31:14

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Someone like Trump *has* to convince people that they can't rely on institutions or their neighbors. His path to power lies through convincing people that the system is rigged and that he - as a man who is an expert at cheating - knows how to rig it in *your* favor:
https://www.factcheck.org/2016/07/trumps-rigged-claim/
But merely claiming "the system is rigged" doesn't actually win the day. If you want to convince people that the system is rigged, it really helps if the system is *actually* rigged.
4/

2026-02-02 15:31:00

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Like so many crooked officials, Trump's brand is "He steals, but he works" (except of course that he doesn't - at any given moment, odds are that he's either taking a nap, watching Fox News, or playing golf):
https://www.reddit.com/r/AskBalkans/comments/utui8s/in_romania_we_have_a_saying_about_corrupt/
Remember: the right is the movement that says that governments are inefficient and corrupt, so right wing elected leaders make their own case by being incompetent and corrupt.
3/

2026-02-02 15:30:41

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We call Trump a "reality TV star" and it's true, as far as it goes. Trump did play a billionaire on TV long before he grifted actual billions, using his status as the poor man's idea of a rich man to secure liar loans and rip off creditors, contractors, business partners, workers, and governments - local, state and federal.
He rose to power on this, boasting on stage that cheating "makes me smart":
https://pluralistic.net/2024/12/04/its-not-a-lie/#its-a-premature-truth
2/

2026-02-02 15:30:16

There's lots of US historical antecedents of Trumpism - fascist movements like Jim Crow, McCarthyism, the gleeful genocide of indigenous people. But when you're thinking about the rise of Trumpism, never forget that America isn't just a nation of cruel bigots; it's also a nation of rich swindlers.
--
If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
https://pluralistic.net/2026/02/02/corprophagia/#that-makes-me-smart
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2026-01-30 21:53:10

1007 words (19588 total) on “The Post-American Internet,” a sequel to "Enshittification," about the better world the rest of us get to have now that Trump has torched America #DailyWords

2026-01-30 14:37:20

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I'll be in #TORONTO TONIGHT (Jan 30) with Tim Wu:
https://nowtoronto.com/event/cory-doctorow-and-tim-wu-enshittification-and-extraction/
eof/

2026-01-30 14:37:10

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You can follow these posts as a daily blog at pluralistic.net: no ads, trackers, or data-collection!
Here's today's edition: https://pluralistic.net/2026/01/30/zucksauce/
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2026-01-30 14:37:01

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Recent appearances:
* How the Internet Got Worse (Masters in Business)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=auXlkuVhxMo
* Enshittification (Jon Favreau/Offline):
https://crooked.com/podcast/the-enshittification-of-the-internet-with-cory-doctorow/
* Why Big Tech is a Trap for Independent Creators (Stripper News)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nmYDyz8AMZ0
* Enshittification (Creative Nonfiction podcast)
https://brendanomeara.com/episode-507-enshittification-author-cory-doctorow-believes-in-a-new-good-internet/
* Enshittification with Plutopia
https://plutopia.io/cory-doctorow-enshittification/
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2026-01-30 14:36:51

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Upcoming appearances (cont'd):
* #Berlin: Re:publica, May 18-20
https://re-publica.com/de/news/rp26-sprecher-cory-doctorow
* #Berlin: Enshittification at Otherland Books, May 19
https://www.otherland-berlin.de/de/event-details/cory-doctorow.html
* #HayOnWye: HowTheLightGetsIn, May 22-25
https://howthelightgetsin.org/festivals/hay/big-ideas-2
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2026-01-30 14:36:40

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Upcoming appearances:
* #Toronto: Enshittification and the Age of Extraction with Tim Wu, Jan 30
https://nowtoronto.com/event/cory-doctorow-and-tim-wu-enshittification-and-extraction/
* #SaltLakeCity: Enshittification at the Utah Museum of Fine Arts (Tanner Humanities Center), Feb 18
https://tanner.utah.edu/center-events/cory-doctorow/
* #Victoria: 28th Annual Victoria International Privacy & Security Summit, Mar 3-5
https://www.rebootcommunications.com/event/vipss2026/
* #Berkeley: Bioneers keynote, Mar 27
https://conference.bioneers.org/
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2026-01-30 14:36:33

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My ebooks and audiobooks (from FSGxMCD, Tor Books, Head of Zeus, McSweeneys, Beacon, Verso and others) are for sale all over the net, but I sell 'em too, and when you buy 'em from me, I earn twice as much and you get books with no DRM and no license "agreements."
https://craphound.com/shop/
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2026-01-30 14:36:15

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2026-01-30 14:36:02

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Yesterday's threads: Disenshittification Nation; and more!
https://mamot.fr/@pluralistic/115978684526476830
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2026-01-30 14:35:53

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#5yrsago Know Nothings, conspiratorialism and Pastel Q https://pluralistic.net/2021/01/31/rhymes-with-pastel-q/#paranoid-style
#5yrsago Mashing the Bernie meme https://pluralistic.net/2021/01/31/rhymes-with-pastel-q/#bernie-3d
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2026-01-30 14:35:38

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#15yrsago Another copyright troll throws in the towel https://www.eff.org/press/archives/2011/01/31
#10yrsago Ten hard truths about the Flint water atrocity https://www.ecowatch.com/michael-moore-10-things-they-wont-tell-you-about-the-flint-water-trage-1882162388.html
#10yrsago Watch: AMAZING slam poem about policing women’s speech habits https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=me4_QwmaNoQ
#10yrsago Congress wants to know if agencies were compromised by the backdoor in Juniper gear (and where it came from) https://www.reuters.com/article/us-juniper-networks-congress-idUSKCN0V708P/
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2026-01-30 14:35:27

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#20yrsago US-VISIT immigration system spent $15 million per crook caught https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2006/01/the_failure_of_1.html
#20yrsago Law firm fires clerk for personal opposition to DRM https://web.archive.org/web/20060203030500/http://www.freeculturenyu.org/2006/01/31/drm-fired/
#15yrsago Free excerpt from Jo Walton’s brilliant Among Others https://web.archive.org/web/20110204214337/http://www.tor.com/stories/2011/01/excerpt-among-others
#15yrsago Debunking yet another bought-and-paid-for report on the need for non-neutral net https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2011/01/huge-isps-want-per-gb-payments-from-netflix-youtube/
#15yrsago Batman: billionaire plutocrat vigilante https://reactormag.com/batman-plutocrat/
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2026-01-30 14:35:14

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#25yrsago Frank Chu explainer http://www.12galaxies.20m.com
#20yrsago Kerouac curator invents copyright laws to keep photographers away https://thomashawk.com/2006/01/open-letter-to-myra-borshoff-cook-tour.html
#20yrsago EFF suing AT&T for helping NSA illegally spy on Americans https://www.eff.org/cases/nsa-multi-district-litigation
#20yrsago CD DRM software players are amateurish and easy to trick https://blog.citp.princeton.edu/2006/01/31/cd-drm-attacks-player/
#20yrsago MPAA puts TSA goon in charge of enforcement https://web.archive.org/web/20060209035921/http://www.mpaa.org/press_releases/2006_01_31.pdf
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2026-01-30 14:35:02

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Hey look at this
* EFF to Close Friday in Solidarity with National Shutdown https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2026/01/eff-close-friday-solidarity-national-shutdown
* Let's Make Hope Normal Again https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qxt4HCjd7VA
* Detecting Dementia Using Lexical Analysis: Terry Pratchett’s Discworld Tells a More Personal Story https://www.mdpi.com/2076-3425/16/1/94 (h/t Boing Boing)
* How is Inventing the Renaissance an SFF-Related Work? https://www.exurbe.com/how-is-inventing-the-renaissance-an-sff-related-work/
* The Good, the Pretty, and Fear Itself https://catvalente.substack.com/p/the-good-the-pretty-and-fear-itself
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2026-01-30 14:34:43

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Threads' margin is the Eurostack's opportunity: Move fast and break kings.
https://mamot.fr/@pluralistic/115984473041355489
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2026-01-30 14:34:27

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I'll be in #TORONTO TONIGHT (Jan 30) with Tim Wu:
https://nowtoronto.com/event/cory-doctorow-and-tim-wu-enshittification-and-extraction/
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2026-01-30 14:33:55

Today's threads (a thread)
Inside: Threads' margin is the Eurostack's opportunity; and more!
Archived at: https://pluralistic.net/2026/01/30/zucksauce/
#Pluralistic
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2026-01-30 14:23:01

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I'll be in #Toronto TONIGHT (Jan 30) for an event with Tim Wu:
https://nowtoronto.com/event/cory-doctorow-and-tim-wu-enshittification-and-extraction/
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2026-01-30 14:22:56

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Threads' inexorable enshittification is an opportunity: an opportunity to make the case for the Eurostack, an opportunity to improve the lives of millions of Europeans, and an opportunity to break through the walled gardens that keep the people we love stuck on legacy social media platforms.
When they did it to us, that wasn't progress. When we do it to them, it's not piracy.
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2026-01-30 14:22:50

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Every time Donald Trump threatens the EU, he makes the case for the Eurostack, but still, he can't help himself. Likewise, every time Zuckerberg enshittifies his services, he makes the case for repealing Article 6 of the Copyright Directive, and he can't help himself either.
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2026-01-30 14:22:40

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Adblocking isn't stealing. Adblocking is *bargaining*. Without adblocking, the companies don't sell us services in exchange for our privacy - they plunder all the private data they can get, and dribble out services at whatever level they think we deserve. If ad-supported media was a restaurant, it'd be one where you got thrown up against a wall, relieved of your wallet, fed a handful of gruel, and then got kicked in the ass and sent on your way:
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/07/adblocking-how-about-nah
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2026-01-30 14:22:33

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Meta will squawk. They'll say Europe is legalizing the violation of its corporate rights. But Meta violates Europeans' rights at scale, and the "rights" that I'm talking about taking away from Meta are rights the EU gave it in the first place, in exchange for a broken promise of tariff-free access to the USA.
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2026-01-30 14:22:21

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Legalize jailbreaking in the EU and you'll make it possible to do "on-device bridging" - where a new social media app is able to break open the data storage of the Threads app on the same device and move that data into its own feeds. And because the EU has the GDPR, they have the privacy framework needed to police the privacy violations that breaking into other apps' data storage can lead to.
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2026-01-30 14:22:11

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They've got the same problem Zuck had when he tried to compete with Myspace: users love their friends more than they hate being spied on, so merely offering a better service is insufficient.
To get users off the old platforms, you have to lower their switching costs - you have to let them bring their friends to the new network, even if those friends are still stuck on the old network.
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2026-01-30 14:21:57

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Remember, Threads was able to achieve instant scale by moving Instagram users onto Threads wholesale, maintaining their Insta follows and followers when they created their Threads accounts.
Europe - like everywhere else - is full of entrepreneurs who are trying to get national, independent social media platforms off the ground, hoping to woo users by promising them a more privacy-respecting alternative.
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2026-01-30 14:21:47

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It's a way of improving the lives of Europeans in immediate, concrete ways, rather than asking them to be grateful that some ministry has changed cloud providers - an important change, sure, but one that has no real impact on their daily lives.
What's more, legalizing jailbreaking for the purpose of making Threads alt-clients wouldn't just give Europeans a better social media experience - it could bootstrap European social media services.
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2026-01-30 14:21:37

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Procedurally, this is a great moment for it, as the EU is finalizing the Digital Fairness Act, which could include an exemption to EUCD 6 for privacy-enhancing technologies:
https://www.europarl.europa.eu/legislative-train/theme-protecting-our-democracy-upholding-our-values/file-digital-fairness-act
Giving Europeans an effective way to push back against Meta's wholesale violation of their rights is a way that the Eurostack can score popular support *right now* - not in five years when the new data centers come online.
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2026-01-30 14:21:28

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As a result, tech companies - especially US giants, who can violate EU law with impunity - love to enshittify their apps, because they know that no one can do unto them as they did unto their own rivals (like Myspace).
Meta's new ad strategy for Threads is the perfect cue for a European repeal of Article 6 of the Copyright Directive.
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2026-01-30 14:21:16

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People *hate* ads. More than half of all web users have installed an adblocker (which also protects their privacy). It's the largest consumer boycott in human history:
https://doc.searls.com/2023/11/11/how-is-the-worlds-biggest-boycott-doing/
But no one has ever installed an adblocker for an app, because reverse-engineering apps and the mobile platforms they run on is illegal under laws like Article 6 of the Copyright Directive.
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2026-01-30 14:21:06

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This represents a hell of an opportunity for the EU and Eurostack. Meta's ads are wildly illegal in the EU, violating Europe's landmark privacy law, the GDPR. The only reason Meta gets away with its flagrant lawbreaking is that it has captured the Irish state, and uses legal tricks to force all GDPR enforcement into Irish jurisdiction:
https://pluralistic.net/2025/12/01/erin-go-blagged/#big-tech-omerta
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2026-01-30 14:20:54

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They exploit these switching costs to figure out just how much pain they can inflict on users without risking their departure:
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2021/08/facebooks-secret-war-switching-costs
So now they've started to turn the screws on Threads users. They just announced a global program of Threads enshittification, with a promise to cram ads into the eyeballs of every Threads account:
https://www.contentgrip.com/meta-threads-ads-go-global/
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2026-01-30 14:20:46

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Mark Zuckerberg's users don't like him - they just hate him less than they love the people they are in community with on Zuckerberg's platforms.
So Threads never *really* joined the Fediverse. You can't quite follow and be followed by Mastodon users, and you can't quite migrate your account off Meta's servers and onto a better one. Zuck and his lieutenants are keenly attuned to any design that drives high "switching costs" for leaving their services.
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2026-01-30 14:20:32

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Meta was clearly excited by the prospect of enclosing and conquering this open upstart, but also nervous at the prospect that its users would find, in federation, an easy path to escape from Meta's clutches.
After all, if you can leave Threads and join a non-Meta Mastodon server without losing contact with the people you followed and were followed by on Threads, then why wouldn't you leave?
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2026-01-30 14:20:20

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Which brings me to Threads, Meta's latest social media network. Threads is built on Activitypub and Mastodon, these being open/free, auditable and trustworthy protocols, designed to support "federated" social media. That's social media that runs on servers managed by lots of different entities, whose users can all connect to one another no matter which server they use.
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2026-01-30 14:20:07

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So long as Europe continues to hold up its end of this one-sided bargain, it will not be able to create the reverse-engineering based tools to let EU companies, governments and households get their data out of US tech silos, let alone let them build and enjoy successors to OG App, which will make it easy for them to leave US social media without sacrificing contact with the people who matter to them.
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2026-01-30 14:19:59

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But Eurostack is about to run into a wall: Article 6 of the EU's own Copyright Directive, which prohibits reverse-engineering and modification of tech products. It's a law that the US Trade Rep lobbied hard for, winning the day by promising tariff-free access to the US for Europe's exports (a promise Trump has now broken):
https://pluralistic.net/2025/10/15/freedom-of-movement/#data-dieselgate
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2026-01-30 14:19:52

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EU member-states are minting new "digital sovereignty" ministries as fast as they can print up new business cards, the EU itself has just appointed its first "Tech Sovereignty, Security and Democracy" czar:
https://commission.europa.eu/about/organisation/college-commissioners/henna-virkkunen_en
They're building the "Eurostack," a fleet of EU-based data centers that will host free, open, auditable, trustworthy equivalents to the US tech giants' offerings:
https://pluralistic.net/2025/06/25/eurostack/#viktor-orbans-isp
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2026-01-30 14:19:45

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Obviously, that is *dead* now. Donald Trump, debilitated by white matter disease and his endemic incontinent belligerence, has flipped the table over in a poker game that was rigged in his favor because he resented having to pretend to play (TM November Kelly):
https://pluralistic.net/2026/01/26/i-dont-want/#your-greenback-dollar
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2026-01-30 14:19:33

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For decades, this system was immovable. The world couldn't afford tariffs on its exports to the USA, and it was able to maintain the pretense that America's platforms were trustworthy neutral parties, that would not be weaponized against their own national interest at the behest of the American state.
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2026-01-30 14:19:22

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What's more, they took advantage of a metastasizing blob of IP laws that the US Trade Representative spread around the world (with threats of tariffs for noncompliance). Soon, nearly every country had enacted laws that made it a literal crime for their entrepreneurs and technologists to fix America's defective tech exports by adding privacy tools, bridging old services into new ones, or reading and writing America's ubiquitous proprietary file-formats:
https://pluralistic.net/2026/01/01/39c3/#the-new-coalition
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2026-01-30 14:19:08

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It's what Apple did when they cloned the MS Office file formats and released iWork, whose Pages, Numbers and Keynote let Microsoft users escape from the prison of Windows and bring their documents with them:
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/06/adversarial-interoperability-reviving-elegant-weapon-more-civilized-age-slay
But like every pirate, the tech companies dreamed of being admirals. Once they'd attained the admiralty, they announced that when they did this stuff, it was progress, but if anyone does it to *them*, it would be piracy.
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2026-01-30 14:18:57

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This was very successful! Users didn't have to choose between their friends on Myspace and the superior design and privacy policies of Facebook. They got to eat their cake and have it, too.
This is actually a very old and important pattern in tech. It's what "move fast and break things" looks like when it's actually disrupting sclerotic and decaying companies that lock us in, take us for granted, and treat us like shit.
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2026-01-30 14:18:45

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You gave that bot your Myspace login credentials (just as OG App did with your Insta credentials) and the bot impersonated you to Myspace (just as OG App did with Insta), and it grabbed everything queued up for you on Myspace (just as OG App did with Insta), and then flowed those messages into your Facebook feed (just as OG App did with Insta).
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2026-01-30 14:18:31

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When Facebook opened up to the general public in 2006, it had the problem that everyone who wanted social media already had an account on Myspace, and all of Facebook's improvements on Myspace (Zuck made a promise *never* to spy on his users!) didn't matter, because Myspace had something Facebook could not match: Myspace had all your friends.
Facebook came up with an ingenious solution to this problem: they offered Myspace users a bot.
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