It's linkdump time, in which I skillfully weave together all the links that I was too busy to cram into the week's newsletter issues. Here's the previous 31 (!) installments:
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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:
pluralistic.net/2025/05/24/eri…
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Cory Doctorow
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This week's linkdump comes with a great excuse: I was off at the staff retreat for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, for intensive policy work (and a lot of team-bonding socializing - I karaoked "The Piano Has Been Drinking") with my colleagues on the front lines of the battle to disenshittify the internet. If you'd like to join that fight, here's a chance to do so: we're hiring a staff technologist!
paycomonline.net/v4/ats/web.ph…
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Job Opportunities
www.paycomonline.netCory Doctorow
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Of course, you don't have to work for EFF to make disenshittificatory tech. "Just a QR Code" is a new site that generates QR codes, operating entirely in your browser, without transmitting any data to a server or trying to cram ads into your eyeballs. The fact that it runs entirely in-browser means you can save this webpage and work with an offline copy to generate QR codes forever - even if the site goes down:
justaqrcode.com/
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Just a QR Code
justaqrcode.comCory Doctorow
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One of the best, longest-tenured gatherings of anti-enshittification technologists is HOPE, the Hackers On Planet Earth con spawned by *2600: The Hacker Quarterly*. After getting evicted from their traditional digs at the Hotel Pennsylvania (which was bought by a billionaire who turned it into a crater and then lost interest), HOPE had to find new digs.
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Cory Doctorow
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The new location, St John's U in Queens, is fantastic, and the last one was so great they decided to go from biennial to annual:
hope.net/
But then, Trump hit. HOPE draws a sizable cohort of global attendees and speakers, and most of these people have decided that attending a genuinely fantastic hacker con isn't worth risk being sent to a Salvadoran slave-labor camp by a surly border guard. As a result, HOPE's numbers are dangerously low:
404media.co/hacker-conference-…
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[HOPE_16] Welcome to Hackers On Planet Earth!
hope.net404 Media
2025-05-22 14:30:19
Cory Doctorow
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Please consider attending! HOPE is consistently one of the best events I've attended. The vibes are *impeccable* and the information is deep, gnarly and fantastic, and has a long, long track record of just being *great*.
Another beloved, long-running, print institution is *The Onion*, which got a new lease on life when former disinformation reporter Ben Collins bought the site after quitting NBC, which had censured him for being too mean to Elon Musk:
variety.com/2022/tv/news/nbc-n…
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NBC News Pulled Reporter Ben Collins Off Twitter Coverage Earlier This Month
Brian Steinberg (Variety)Cory Doctorow
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Having been burned by corporate journalistic cowardice, Collins decided to revive *The Onion*'s tradition of merciless, trenchant parody. He also revived *The Onion*'s tradition of showing up in the world as a printed artifact, spraying gallons of ink onto tons of vegetable pulp and shipping the result to mailboxes around the world (including mine):
membership.theonion.com/
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Cory Doctorow
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Collins sat down for a long interview with *Vanity Fair*'s Chris Murphy that is full of so many excellent moments and quips that I actually *cheered* aloud while reading it, more than once!
vanityfair.com/hollywood/story…
Collins believes he saved *The Onion* from "AI death," and I think he's right. Instead, he's produced a site that fights fascism using one of history's most reliable methods, satire: "There’s nothing fascists hate more than getting truly ripped on."
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The Onion’s Ben Collins Knows How to Save Media
Chris Murphy (Vanity Fair)Cory Doctorow
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Collins points out something interesting about Trump: "He never laughs...He’s funny in the sense that callous people can be particularly biting, but he’s not funny."
Here's his advice to other would-be media barons: "Kowtowing to power— your job is not that, nobody fucking wants that."
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Cory Doctorow
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Among other things, Collins used *The Onion* to acquire Alex Jones's *Infowars* in bankruptcy, only to have far-right legal shenanigans interrupt the takeover (it's still in court).
(Paywall-busting version:)
archive.is/aV2av
Another funny - but much angrier - independent media voice is Ed Zitron, one of the best ranters in technology. Ed's motto is "I hate them for what they did to the computer," a phrase I like so much I used it as the epigraph for my next book.
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Cory Doctorow
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Ed's just published the longest-ever post on his excellent "Where's Your Ed At?" newsletter, called "The Era of the Business Idiot":
wheresyoured.at/the-era-of-the…
In this post, Ed tried to answer the burning question, "Why are these objectively very stupid people given so much power over so much capital, and the lives of so many of us?" He lashes out at everyone - MBA programs, sociopathic Jack Welch-alikes, the supine press, and more.
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The Era Of The Business Idiot
Edward Zitron (Ed Zitron's Where's Your Ed At)Cory Doctorow
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And he coins a truly excellent epithet for one of our most cherished business idiots, Open AI CEO Sam Altman:
*SLOPPENHEIMER.*
I love Ed's work, which focuses extensively on the internal ideological and personal traits of business leaders.
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Cory Doctorow
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But I think that any study of the enshittocene - and any effective opposition to enshittification - needs to start with *policy*, the legal arrangements that create an *enshittogenic* environment that allow the business idiots to wreak havoc without the constraints of competition, regulation, an empowered workforce or technological countermeasures.
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Cory Doctorow
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In the EU, the epicenter of enshittogenesis is Ireland, a tax haven that has attracted the largest and worst American tech companies who maintain the fiction that they are based in Eire. But these companies are hardly loyal to Dublin: any company footloose enough to pretend that it's Irish this week can pretend to be Maltese, Luxembourgeois, Cypriot or Dutch next week.
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Cory Doctorow
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To keep those companies from upping sticks, Ireland must not only offer them criminally favorable tax treatment, they have to slow walk or ignore *all* regulations that discipline the enshittificatory impulses of Big Tech:
pluralistic.net/2023/05/15/fin…
Writing in *Politico*, Eoin Drea lays out the ways that Ireland is serving Trump's agenda to protect US Big Tech from EU regulators:
politico.eu/article/ireland-do…
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Ireland is Trump’s Trojan horse
Eoin Drea (POLITICO)Cory Doctorow
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In particular, Drea identifies the risk that Ireland will shelter US companies from enforcement of the Digital Markets Act, the EU's "crowning legislative jewel." Ireland's PM has been carrying water for Trump, pressuring the EU to "considered and measured" in its response to Trump's aggression; he's also vowed to "resist" the EU's digital taxes.
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Cory Doctorow
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Drea argues that centralizing enforcement of EU tech regulation in Brussels and the federal courts will relieve Ireland of the pressure to defend Trump's policies, since they will no longer be in a position to protect tech companies from Europe's rules.
When it comes to flaunting EU rules, of the most egregious "Irish" tech offenders is Meta.
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Cory Doctorow
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In a long article for *Ars Technica*, Ashley Belanger looks at Zuckerberg's recent statements about Facebook's future as a place where lonely people, having been alienated from their actual friends and families by a system that downranks posts from your social network to create space for ads and boosted posts, befriend AI chatbots instead:
arstechnica.com/tech-policy/20…
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Meta hypes AI friends as social media’s future, but users want real connections
Ashley Belanger (Ars Technica)Cory Doctorow
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I contributed a little to Belanger's excellent reporting, discussing my work with EFF on what an interoperable Facebook might look like, and how it might set Facebook's prisoners free:
eff.org/interoperablefacebook
Mark Zuckerberg's transformation from a historically awful person to a historically monstrous person has been really something to see.
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Interoperable Facebook
Electronic Frontier FoundationZZ Bottom reshared this.
Cory Doctorow
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In this week's Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal webtoon, Zach Wienersmith scores a body-blow on Zuck that was so perfect it made me *bark* with laughter:
smbc-comics.com/comic/gently
I firmly believe that Zuckerberg's transformation isn't due to the decay of his character. I think Zuck was always a creep, as any reader of Sarah Wynn-Williams's tell-all Facebook memoir *Careless People* can attest:
pluralistic.net/2025/04/23/zuc…
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Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal
www.smbc-comics.comCory Doctorow
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Rather, I think the collapse of the internet into what Tom Eastman calls "five giant websites filled with screenshots of the other four" relieved Zuck of his nagging fear of a competitor poaching his users if he overabused them. This is the enshittogenic environment at work - when we let firms form cartels, their owners become oligarchs.
Tech is hardly the only cartel. In publishing, we only have five major publishers left, and the largest, Bertelsmann, dwarfs the other four.
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Cory Doctorow
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It's hard to overstate how gigantic Bertelsmann is, but here's a trenchant example: Bertelsmann owns Penguin-Random House, and PRH has publishing deals with *five* sitting Supreme Court justices. This meant that a majority of the court had to recuse itself from hearing a plagiarism case involving a Ta-Nehisi Coates book.
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Cory Doctorow
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It's the first time a mass-recusal has scuppered a Supreme Court case since 1945, when the majority of justices disclosed that they were stockholders in the Alcoa, a monopolist:
newsweek.com/five-supreme-cour…
Oligarchs are intrinsically enshittogenic. Oligarchs use their money and power to support strongmen who will trade money for government action, like Donald Trump.
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Five Supreme Court Justices Sit Out Case in Rare Move
Jenna Sundel (Newsweek)Cory Doctorow
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Trump offered a private dinner for major holders of his TRUMP shitcoin. The announcement prompted a ferocious bidding war among foreign agents and convicted criminals to buy up Trumpcoins and get a seat at the table:
citationneeded.news/trump-meme…
Trump defenders claimed that the president was just rewarding people who understood the value of his coin, and not selling influence at all.
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Meet Trump’s memecoin dinner guests
Molly White (Citation Needed)ZZ Bottom reshared this.
Cory Doctorow
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Apparently, the attendees didn't get the memo, with many of them dumping their Trumpcoins the instant they were added to the guest-list:
protos.com/trump-token-15-sinc…
Joke's on them, though: Trump stiffed them!
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TRUMP token -15% since dinner as 40% of guests dump by dessert
Aaron Wise (Protos)Cory Doctorow
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Trump showed up, gave a 15 minute speech (practically a haiku by Trump's normal standard of bloviation), then climbed into a helicopter and flew away, hundreds of millions of dollars richer thanks to the suckers left to their rubber chicken banquet:
link.nymag.com/view/640f640416…
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Cory Doctorow
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Those specific oligarchs didn't get a chance to petition Trump to enact their favored policies, but Trump is still delivering for oligarchs. The "Big Beautiful Bill" that was passed in the dead of night last week included a whole raft of "sleeper" provisions, each worse than the last, as enumerated by *The American Prospect*'s Robert Kuttner:
prospect.org/blogs-and-newslet…
Among these:
* taking away the courts' ability to use federal funds to hold government officials in contempt;
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Ten Sneaky Sleeper Provisions in Trump’s Big Beautiful Bill
Robert Kuttner (The American Prospect)Cory Doctorow
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* $45 billion for immigration gulags, to be built by Trump's favorite beltway bandits;
* a nonprofit killer that lets the president cancel the nonprofit status of any org that challenges him (this died earlier last week and was revived in the "Big Beautiful Bill");
* doubling the threshold for estate taxes, so a couple can leave $30m to their heirs tax-free, meaning that only 0.8% of US households will face *any* estate tax;
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Cory Doctorow
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* gutting the child tax credit, taking away support from 4.5m children of taxpaying parents who lack a Social Security Number and making millions more ineligible;
* cutting health coverage for millions of people dependent on Obamacare; and
* getting rid of the excise tax on gun silencers.
We're heading into some dark times indeed.
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Cory Doctorow
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It can be hard to imagine things ever getting better, but there was one author who consistently imagined bold, utopian, audacious far futures: Iain M. Banks, whose "Culture" series remain one of the greatest science fiction visions ever published:
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Culture_…
Banks's books are available in cheap paperbacks, and there's no shortage of used copies.
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1987–2012 series of ten books by Iain Banks
Contributors to Wikimedia projects (Wikimedia Foundation, Inc.)Cory Doctorow
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But if you're looking to get a truly *gorgeous* Banks volume, the Folio Society has you covered, with a new, slipcased edition of *Use of Weapons*:
foliosociety.com/usa/use-of-we…
I *love* Folio books and often give them as Christmas gifts to the people who matter most to me on my list. This one comes with seven full-page illustrations by Dániel Taylor.
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Use of Weapons
The Folio SocietyCory Doctorow
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In other publishing news, I got a care-package from my publisher this week: a box of advance review copies of my next book, *Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It*, which Farrar, Straus and Giroux will publish next October:
us.macmillan.com/books/9780374…
I'm very proud of how this one came out as a *book*, but I'm just as excited by how gorgeous this book is as an *artifact*:
flickr.com/photos/doctorow/545…
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Enshittification ARC, home, Burbank, California, USA
FlickrCory Doctorow
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I'm going into the studio to record the audiobook in August, and there's a graphic novel and documentary in the offing.
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Cory Doctorow
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I'm on a 20+ city book tour for my new novel *Picks and Shovels*.
Catch me in #PDX with BUNNIE HUANG at Barnes and Noble on Jun 20:
stores.barnesandnoble.com/even…
More tour dates (#London, #Manchester) here:
martinhench.com
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Author Signing with Cory Doctorow
stores.barnesandnoble.comGrant 🇺🇦ArmUkraine🇺🇦
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Cory Doctorow
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My camera shoots fascists
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😂😂😂😂
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AnneH
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ideaPDish
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Tony Fisk
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