What can you build with a 3D printer? Starbucks just printed itself a new store — a drive-through location in the southern tip of Texas.

Fast Company says it's a store that "looks more like the future of construction than your average café."

Built with layers of concrete piped out by a giant robotic printer, the 1,400-square-foot structure is part of the company's ongoing effort to modernize operations and trim costs... Peri-3D, a German company, used a giant 3D printer to pump out layers of concrete mixture to create the structure. According to the Texas Department of Licensing and Regulation, the cost for building the small scale coffee shop was about $1.2 million...

Of course, the new method is a first for the brand. And builders say, the more they use the technology, the more efficient they are at it. In Georgetown, Texas, an entire community of 100 homes was recently built using 3D-printing. The company who built the community, Lennar, says they're seeing costs drop with each build. Stuart Miller, chairman and co-CEO of Lennar, told CNBC earlier this year that the construction company says their costs and cycle time go down "by half" by adopting 3D-printing. "This is significant improvement in evolving a housing market that has the ability to change over time and being more adaptable and more functional in providing affordable and attainable housing for a broader swath of the market," said Miller...

3D-printing is also much faster, meaning that projects can be completed in a fraction of the time, potentially drastically cutting labor costs. According to the World Economic Forum, 3D-printing can cost just 30% of what building structures the old-fashioned way costs.

The article offers more examples of 3D-printed buildings. ("in Japan, a 3D-printed train station was just erected. And Peri-3D, itself, has completed at least 15 construction projects, including residential buildings in Europe and Germany.")
3D-printing has even been incorporated into some restaurants for customizing food, the article notes, "but building restaurants with the technology is a brand-new development."

Although not everyone seems convinced. Instagram comments on a picture of Starbucks' new 3D-printed drive-through characterized its aesthetic as "dirty", "fugly", "violently hideous", and "like hot garbage".

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Microsoft Copilot "isn't doing as well as the company would like," reports XDA-Developers.com (citing a report from startup/VC industry site Newcomer).

The Redmond giant has invested billions of dollars and a lot of manpower into making it happen, but as a recent report claims, people just don't care. In fact, if the report is to be believed, Microsoft's rise in the AI scene has already come to a screeching halt:



At Microsoft's annual executive huddle last month, the company's chief financial officer, Amy Hood, put up a slide that charted the number of users for its Copilot consumer AI tool over the past year. It was essentially a flat line, showing around 20 million weekly users. On the same slide was another line showing ChatGPT's growth over the same period, arching ever upward toward 400 million weekly users. OpenAI's iconic chatbot was soaring, while Microsoft's best hope for a mass-adoption AI tool was idling. It was a sobering chart for Microsoft's consumer AI team...
That's right; Microsoft Copilot's weekly user base is only 5% of the number of people who use ChatGPT, and it's not increasing. It's also worth noting that there are approximately 1.5 billion Windows users worldwide, which means just over 1% of them are using Copilot, a tool that's now a Windows default app....
It's not a huge surprise that Copilot is faltering. Despite Microsoft's CEO claiming that Copilot will become "the next Start button", the company has had to backtrack on the Copilot key and allow people to customise it to do something else, including giving back its original feature of the Menu key.
They also note earlier reports that Intel's AI PC chips aren't selling well.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"Google's DeepMind UK team reportedly seeks to unionize," reports TechCrunch:



Around 300 London-based members of Google's AI-focused DeepMind team are seeking to unionize with the Communication Workers Union, according to a Financial Times report that cites three people involved with the unionization effort.

These DeepMind employees are reportedly unhappy about Google's decision to remove a pledge not to use AI for weapons or surveillance from its website. They're also concerned about the company's work with the Israeli military, including a $1.2 billion cloud computing contract that has prompted protests elsewhere at Google.
At least five DeepMind employees quit, according to the report (out of a 2,000 total U.K. staff members).

"A small group of around 200 employees of Google and its parent company Alphabet previously announced that they were unionizing," the article adds, "though as a union representing just a tiny slice of the total Google workforce, it lacked the ability to collectively bargain."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Today's links

• The enshittification of tech jobs: Our last line of defense has fallen.
• Hey look at this: Delights to delectate.
• Object permanence: 2005, 2010, 2015, 2020, 2024
• Upcoming appearances: Where to find me.
• Recent appearances: Where I've been.
• Latest books: You keep readin' em, I'll keep writin' 'em.
• Upcoming books: Like I said, I'll keep writin' 'em.
• Colophon: All the rest.

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The enshittification of tech jobs (permalink)

Tech workers are a weird choice for "princes of labor," but for decades they've enjoyed unparalleled labor power, expressed in high wages, lavish stock grants, and whimsical campuses with free laundry and dry-cleaning, gourmet cafeterias, and kombucha on tap:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nhUtdgVZ7MY

All of this, despite the fact that tech union density is so low it can barely be charted. Tech workers' power didn't come from solidarity, it came from scarcity. When you're getting five new recruiter emails every day, you don't need a shop steward to tell your boss to go fuck themselves at the morning scrum. You can do it yourself, secure in the knowledge that there's a company across the road who'll give you a better job by lunchtime.

Tech bosses sucked up to their workers because tech workers are insanely productive. Even with sky-high salaries, every hour a tech worker puts in on the job translates into massive profits. Which created a conundrum for tech bosses: if tech workers produce incalculable value for the company every time they touch their keyboards, and if there aren't enough tech workers to go around, how do you get whichever tech workers you can hire to put in as many hours as possible?

The answer is a tactic that Fobazi Ettarh called "vocational awe":

https://www.inthelibrarywiththeleadpipe.org/2018/vocational-awe/

"Vocational awe" describes the feeling that your work matters so much that you should accept all manner of tradeoffs and calamities to get the job done. Ettarh uses the term to describe the pathology of librarians, teachers, nurses and other underpaid, easily exploited workers in "caring professions." Tech workers are weird candidates for vocational awe, given how well-paid they are, but never let it be said that tech bosses don't know how to innovate – they successfully transposed an exploitation tactic from the most precarious professionals to the least precarious.

As farcical as all the engineer-pampering tech bosses got up to for the first couple decades of this century was, it certainly paid off. Tech workers stayed at the office for every hour that god sent, skipping their parents' funerals and their kids' graduations to ship on time. Snark all you like about empty platitudes like "organize the world's information and make it useful" or "bring the world closer together," but you can't argue with results: workers who could – and did – bargain for anything from their bosses…except a 40-hour work-week.

But for tech bosses, this vocational awe wheeze had a fatal flaw: if you convince your workforce that they are monk-warriors engaged in the holy labor of bringing forth a new, better technological age, they aren't going to be very happy when you order them to enshittify the products they ruined their lives to ship. "I fight for the user" has been lurking in the hindbrains of so many tech workers since the Tron years, somehow nestling comfortably alongside of the idea that "I don't need a union, I'm a temporarily embarrassed founder."

Tech bosses don't actually like workers. You can tell by the way they treat the workers they don't fear. Sure, Tim Cook's engineers get beer-fattened, chestnut finished and massaged like Kobe cows, but Cook's factory workers in China are so maltreated that Foxconn (the cutout Apple uses to run "iPhone City" where Apple's products are made) had to install suicide nets to reduce the amount of spatter from workers who would rather die than put in another hour at Tim Apple's funtime distraction rectangle factory:

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/jun/18/foxconn-life-death-forbidden-city-longhua-suicide-apple-iphone-brian-merchant-one-device-extract

Jeff Bezos's engineers get soft-play areas, one imported Australian barista for each mini-kitchen, and the kind of Japanese toilet that doesn't just wash you after but also offers you a trim and dye-job, but Amazon delivery drivers are monitored by AIs that narc them out for driving with their mouths open (singing is prohibited in Uncle Jeff's delivery pods!) and have to piss in bottles; meanwhile, Amazon warehouse workers are injured at three times the rate of other warehouse workers.

This is how tech bosses would treat tech workers…if they could.

And now? They can.

Writing for the Wall Street Journal, Katherine Bindley describes the new labor dynamics at Big Tech:

https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/companies/tech-workers-are-just-like-the-rest-of-us-miserable-at-work/ar-AA1DDKjh

It starts with Meta, who just announced a 5% across-the-board layoff – on the same day that it doubled executive bonuses. But it's not just the workers who get shown the door who suffer in this new tech reality – the workers on the job are having to do two or three jobs, for worse pay, and without all those lovely perks.

Take Google, where founder Sergey Brin just told his workers that they should be aiming for a "sweet spot" of 60 hours/week. Brin returned to Google to oversee its sweaty and desperate "pivot to AI," and like so many tech execs, he's been trumpeting the increased productivity that chatbots will deliver for coders. But a coder who picks up their fired colleagues' work load by pulling 60-hour work-weeks isn't "more productive," they're more exploited.

Amazon is another firm whose top exec, Andy Jassy, has boasted about the productivity gains of AI, but an Amazon Web Services manager who spoke to Bindley says that he's lost so many coders that he's now writing code for the first time in a decade.

Then there's a Meta recruiter who got fired and then immediately re-hired, but as a "short term employee" with no merit pay, stock grants, or promotions. She has to continuously reapply for her job, and has picked up the workload of several fired colleagues who weren't re-hired. Meta managers (the ones whose bonuses were just doubled) call this initiative "agility." Amazon is famous for spying on its warehouse workers and drivers – and now its tech staff report getting popups warning them that their keystrokes are being monitored and analyzed, and their screens are being recorded.

Bindley spoke to David Markley, an Amazon veteran turned executive coach, who attributed the worsening conditions (for example, managers being given 30 direct reports) to the "narrative" of AI. Not, you'll note, the actual reality of AI, but rather, the story that AI lets you "collapse the organization," slash headcount and salaries, and pauperize the (former) princes of labor.

The point of AI isn't to make workers more productive, it's to make them weaker when they bargain with their bosses. Another of Bindley's sources went through eight rounds of interviews with a company, received an offer, countered with a request for 12% more than the offer, and had the job withdrawn, because "the company didn’t want to move ahead anymore based on the way the compensation conversation had gone."

For decades, tech workers were able to flatter themselves that they were peers with their bosses – that "temporarily embarrassed founder" syndrome again. The Google founders and Zuck held regular "town hall" meetings where the rank-and-file engineers could ask impertinent questions. At Google, these have been replaced with "tightly scripted events." Zuckerberg has discontinued his participation in company-wide Q&As, because they are "no longer a good use of his time."

Companies are scaling back perks in both meaningful ways (Netflix hacking away at parental leave), and petty ones (Netflix and Google cutting back on free branded swag for workers). Google's hacked back its "fun budget" for offsite team-building activities and replacement laptops for workers needing faster machines (so much for prioritizing "increasing worker productivity").

Trump's new gangster capitalism pits immiserated blue collar workers against the "professional and managerial class," attacking universities and other institutions that promised social mobility to the children of working families. Trump has a point when he lionized factory work as a source of excellent wages and benefits for working people without degrees, but he conspicuously fails to mention that factory work was deadly, low-waged and miserable – until factory workers formed unions:

https://www.laborpolitics.com/p/unions-not-just-factories-will-make

Re-shoring industrial jobs to the USA is a perfectly reasonable goal. Between uncertain geopolitics, climate chaos, monopolization and the lurking spectre of the next pandemic, we should assume that supply-chains will be repeatedly and cataclysmicly shocked over the next century or more. And yes, re-shoring product could provide good jobs to working people – but only if they're unionized.

But Trump has gutted the National Labor Relations Board and stacked his administration with bloodsucking scabs like Elon Musk. Trump doesn't want to bring good jobs back to America – he wants to bring bad jobs back to America. He wants to reshore manufacturing jobs from territories with terrible wages, deadly labor conditions, and no environment controls by taking away Americans' wages, labor rights and environmental protections. He doesn't just want to bring home iPhone production, he wants to import the suicide nets of iPhone City, too.

Tech workers are workers, and they once held the line against enshittification, refusing to breaak the things they'd built for their bosses in meaningless all-nighters motivated by vocational awe. Long after tech bosses were able to buy all their competitors, capture their regulators, and expand IP law to neutralize the threat of innovative, interoperable products like alternative app stores, ad-blockers and jailbreaking kits, tech workers held the line.

There've been half a million US tech layoff since 2023. Tech workers' scarcity-derived power has been vaporized. Tech workers can avoid the fate of the factory, warehouse and delivery workers their bosses literally work to death – but only by unionizing.

In other words, the workers in re-shored factories and tech workers need the same thing. They are class allies – and tech bosses are their class enemies. This is class war.

---

Hey look at this (permalink)

• Perplexity CEO says its browser will track everything users do online to sell 'hyper personalized' ads https://techcrunch.com/2025/04/24/perplexity-ceo-says-its-browser-will-track-everything-users-do-online-to-sell-hyper-personalized-ads/ (h/t Slashdot)

• Runaway Tren https://prospect.org/justice/2025-04-24-runaway-tren-de-aragua-colorado-housing-gangs/

• How Monopolies Could Exploit the Tariff Shock https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/how-monopolies-could-exploit-the

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Object permanence (permalink)

#20yrsago Architectures of Control: DRM in hardware https://web.archive.org/web/20050425184527/http://www.danlockton.co.uk/research/architectures.html

#20yrsago Insect photos in naturalistic http://macro-focus https://bugdreams.com

#20yrsago BBC: DRM makes music customers mad https://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/4474143.stm

#20yrsago Guckert was at the White House even when there were no press briefings https://web.archive.org/web/20050428034248/https://www.rawstory.com/exclusives/byrne/secret_service_gannon_424.htm

#20yrsago FBI warnings ruin CD art & art is the reason for buying CDs http://www.yarnivore.com/francis/archives/001102.html

#20yrsago US govt admits RFID passports are danger to Americans https://www.nytimes.com/2005/04/27/politics/bowing-to-critics-us-to-alter-design-of-electronic-passports.html

#15yrsago Considering cities as “dense meshes of active, communicating public objects” https://speedbird.wordpress.com/2010/04/24/frameworks-for-citizen-responsiveness-enhanced-toward-a-readwrite-urbanism/

#15yrsago Peter Watts won’t go to jail https://memex.craphound.com/2010/04/26/peter-watts-wont-go-to-jail/

#15yrsago Canada’s Heritage Minister ready to bring back DMCA-style copyright, throwing out results of copyright consultation https://web.archive.org/web/20100428113301/http://www.michaelgeist.ca/content/view/4979/135/

#15yrsago In praise of SFWA’s Grievance Committee https://memex.craphound.com/2010/04/25/in-praise-of-sfwas-grievance-committee/

#15yrsago UK’s super-rich get even richer https://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/8642021.stm

#15yrsago Protect your copyrights, boycott DRM-locked platforms https://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/digital/devices/article/42869-can-you-survive-a-benevolent-dictatorship.html

#15yrsago Why I won’t buy an iPad, the podcast edition https://web.archive.org/web/20110114222040/https://podcasts.tvo.org/searchengine/audio/800832_48k.mp3

#15yrsago On Peter Watts’s sentencing hearing https://web.archive.org/web/20100429105210/http://www.tor.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=blog&id=59215

#15yrsago The “fair use economy” is enormous, growing, and endangered by the relatively tiny entertainment industry https://web.archive.org/web/20110128152731/https://www.wired.com/images_blogs/threatlevel/2010/04/fairuseeconomy.pdf

#15yrsago UK election: ask your candidates if they’ll repeal the Digital Economy Act https://web.archive.org/web/20100430090624/http://action.openrightsgroup.org/ea-campaign/clientcampaign.do?ea.client.id=1422&ea.campaign.id=6449

#10yrsago Town will cut off power to families of kids who commit vandalism https://web.archive.org/web/20150419053210/https://www.illinoishomepage.net/story/d/story/cutting-vandalism-off-at-the-source/26297/gSM2PYl6P0CRIttIu_95BQ

#10yrsago Portraits of e-waste pickers in Ghana https://www.wired.com/2015/04/kevin-mcelvaney-agbogbloshie/

#10yrsago In the 21st century, only corporations get to own property and we’re their tenants https://web.archive.org/web/20150428173001/https://www.theglobeandmail.com/technology/how-digital-rights-management-keeps-value-in-hands-of-the-manufacturer/article24130876/

#10yrsago Obituary for an amazing history teacher https://web.archive.org/web/20150426235723/https://thescientificparent.org/teachers-be-like-robin-barker-james/

#10yrsago What the UK Greens actually believe about copyright http://tomchance.org/2015/04/24/making-copyright-work-for-creatives/

#10yrsago School bus driver bans little girl from reading https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/montreal/quebec-girl-told-to-stop-reading-book-by-school-bus-driver-1.3043652?cmp=rss

#10yrsago Variations on the Trolley Problem https://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/lesser-known-trolley-problem-variations

#10yrsago Senators announce “Aaron Swartz Should Have Faced More Jail Time” bill https://www.techdirt.com/2015/04/23/senators-introduce-anti-aarons-law-to-increase-jail-terms-unauthorized-access-to-computers/

#10yrsago Kansas kid corrects anti-drug teacher, cops raid his house https://web.archive.org/web/20150423174017/http://benswann.com/exclusive-cops-raid-cannabis-oil-activist-because-her-son-discussed-medical-pot-facts-at-school/

#5yrsago Makers in a time of pandemic https://pluralistic.net/2020/04/25/send-pics/#makers

#5yrsago A deflationary pandemic https://pluralistic.net/2020/04/25/send-pics/#fiscal-dominance

#5yrsago The vernacular signage of the pandemic https://pluralistic.net/2020/04/25/send-pics/#frankfurt

#5yrsago California Adventure, Minecraft edition https://pluralistic.net/2020/04/24/slicey-boi/#minecraft

#5yrsago Security expert conned out of $10,000 https://pluralistic.net/2020/04/24/slicey-boi/#overconfidence

#5yrsago Facebook let advertisers target "pseudoscience" and "conspiracy" https://pluralistic.net/2020/04/24/slicey-boi/#upton-sinclair-disease

#5yrsago Amazon uses its sellers' data to figure out which products to clone https://pluralistic.net/2020/04/24/slicey-boi/#moral-hazard

#5yrsago US telcoms sector isn't doing better than Europe's https://pluralistic.net/2020/04/24/slicey-boi/#opportunists

#5yrsago Masks work https://pluralistic.net/2020/04/24/slicey-boi/#pewpew

#5yrsago US healthcare fails insured people too https://pluralistic.net/2020/04/24/slicey-boi/#m4a

#5yrsago "Inject disinfectant" vs both sides-ism https://pluralistic.net/2020/04/24/slicey-boi/#both-sides-ism

#5yrsago A labradoodle breeder is in charge of America's vaccines https://pluralistic.net/2020/04/24/slicey-boi/#labradoodles

#5yrsago Which guillotine is right for you https://pluralistic.net/2020/04/24/slicey-boi/#slicey-boi

#5yrsago Hospital cuts healthcare workers' pay, pays six-figure exec bonuses https://pluralistic.net/2020/04/27/in-this-together/#all-in-this-together

#5yrsago Pandemic proves ISP data-caps were always a pretense https://pluralistic.net/2020/04/27/in-this-together/#concast

#5yrsago Billionaires thriving on our pandemic losses https://pluralistic.net/2020/04/27/in-this-together/#socialized-losses

#5yrsago Podcasting Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town https://pluralistic.net/2020/04/27/in-this-together/#alan-abel-andrew

#5yrsago Indie booksellers during the pandemic https://pluralistic.net/2020/04/27/in-this-together/#glimmers-of-hope

#1yrago The tax sharks are back and they're coming for your home https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/27/for-the-little-people/#alden-capital

#1yrago The specific process by which Google enshittified its search https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/24/naming-names/#prabhakar-raghavan

#1yrago Antitrust is a labor issue https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/25/capri-v-tapestry/#aiming-at-dollars-not-men

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Upcoming appearances (permalink)

• Auckland: Unity Books, May 2, 6PM
  https://www.eventbrite.co.nz/e/an-evening-with-cory-doctorow-tickets-1320740102199

• Wellingon: Unity Books, May 3, 3PM
  https://www.unitybooks.co.nz/news-and-events/author-talk-picks-and-shovels-by-cory-doctorow

• Pittsburgh: Picks and Shovels at White Whale Books, May 15
  https://whitewhalebookstore.com/events/20250515

• Pittsburgh: PyCon, May 16
  https://us.pycon.org/2025/schedule/

• Virtual: Writing to Resist (California Writers Club Berkeley):
  https://cwc-berkeley.org/writing-to-resist-5-18-25/

• PDX: Teardown 2025, Jun 20-22
  https://www.crowdsupply.com/teardown/portland-2025

• PDX: Picks and Shovels with bunnie Huang at Barnes and Noble, Jun 20
  https://stores.barnesandnoble.com/event/9780062183697-0

• London: How To Academy with Riley Quinn, Jul 1
  https://howtoacademy.com/events/cory-doctorow-the-fight-against-the-big-tech-oligarchy/

• Manchester: Picks and Shovels at Blackwell's Bookshop, Jul 2
  https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/an-evening-with-cory-doctorow-tickets-1308451968059

• Manchester: Co-operatives UK Co-op Congress keynote, Jul 3
  https://www.uk.coop/events-and-training/events-calendar/co-op-congress-2025-book-your-place

• New Orleans: DeepSouthCon63, Oct 10-12, 2025
  http://www.contraflowscifi.org/

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Recent appearances (permalink)

• Move Fast and Break Kings
  https://flipboard.video/w/2aH2AFNTPjcdWCMqjPB5N3?start=2s

• Beyond the Web (Ostrom Workshop)
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-WfO-9G4EgQ

• Can we use the Internet for Democracy?
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zh_HON6iql8

---

Latest books (permalink)

• • Picks and Shovels: a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about the heroic era of the PC, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), February 2025 (https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250865908/picksandshovels).
• The Bezzle: a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about prison-tech and other grifts, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), February 2024 (the-bezzle.org). Signed, personalized copies at Dark Delicacies (https://www.darkdel.com/store/p3062/Available_Feb_20th%3A_The_Bezzle_HB.html#/).

• "The Lost Cause:" a solarpunk novel of hope in the climate emergency, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), November 2023 (http://lost-cause.org). Signed, personalized copies at Dark Delicacies (https://www.darkdel.com/store/p3007/Pre-Order_Signed_Copies%3A_The_Lost_Cause_HB.html#/)

• "The Internet Con": A nonfiction book about interoperability and Big Tech (Verso) September 2023 (http://seizethemeansofcomputation.org). Signed copies at Book Soup (https://www.booksoup.com/book/9781804291245).

• "Red Team Blues": "A grabby, compulsive thriller that will leave you knowing more about how the world works than you did before." Tor Books http://redteamblues.com. Signed copies at Dark Delicacies (US): and Forbidden Planet (UK): https://forbiddenplanet.com/385004-red-team-blues-signed-edition-hardcover/.

• "Chokepoint Capitalism: How to Beat Big Tech, Tame Big Content, and Get Artists Paid, with Rebecca Giblin", on how to unrig the markets for creative labor, Beacon Press/Scribe 2022 https://chokepointcapitalism.com

• "Attack Surface": The third Little Brother novel, a standalone technothriller for adults. The Washington Post called it "a political cyberthriller, vigorous, bold and savvy about the limits of revolution and resistance." Order signed, personalized copies from Dark Delicacies https://www.darkdel.com/store/p1840/Available_Now%3A_Attack_Surface.html

• "How to Destroy Surveillance Capitalism": an anti-monopoly pamphlet analyzing the true harms of surveillance capitalism and proposing a solution. https://onezero.medium.com/how-to-destroy-surveillance-capitalism-8135e6744d59?sk=f6cd10e54e20a07d4c6d0f3ac011af6b) (signed copies: https://www.darkdel.com/store/p2024/Available_Now%3A__How_to_Destroy_Surveillance_Capitalism.html)

• "Little Brother/Homeland": A reissue omnibus edition with a new introduction by Edward Snowden: https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250774583; personalized/signed copies here: https://www.darkdel.com/store/p1750/July%3A__Little_Brother_%26_Homeland.html

• "Poesy the Monster Slayer" a picture book about monsters, bedtime, gender, and kicking ass. Order here: https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781626723627. Get a personalized, signed copy here: https://www.darkdel.com/store/p2682/Corey_Doctorow%3A_Poesy_the_Monster_Slayer_HB.html#/.

---

Upcoming books (permalink)

• Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It, Farrar, Straus, Giroux, October 7 2025
  https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374619329/enshittification/

• Unauthorized Bread: a middle-grades graphic novel adapted from my novella about refugees, toasters and DRM, FirstSecond, 2026

• Enshittification, Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It (the graphic novel), Firstsecond, 2026

• The Memex Method, Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2026

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Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources: Slashdot (https://slashdot.org).

Currently writing:

• Enshittification: a nonfiction book about platform decay for Farrar, Straus, Giroux. Status: second pass edit underway (readaloud)

• A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING

• Picks and Shovels, a Martin Hench noir thriller about the heroic era of the PC. FORTHCOMING TOR BOOKS FEB 2025

Latest podcast: Nimby and the D-Hoppers CONCLUSION https://craphound.com/stories/2025/04/13/nimby-and-the-d-hoppers-conclusion/

---

This work – excluding any serialized fiction – is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license. That means you can use it any way you like, including commercially, provided that you attribute it to me, Cory Doctorow, and include a link to pluralistic.net.

https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Quotations and images are not included in this license; they are included either under a limitation or exception to copyright, or on the basis of a separate license. Please exercise caution.

---

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Tumblr (mass-scale, unrestricted, third-party surveillance and advertising):

https://mostlysignssomeportents.tumblr.com/tagged/pluralistic

"When life gives you SARS, you make sarsaparilla" -Joey "Accordion Guy" DeVilla

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ISSN: 3066-764X

Jia Rong Low hopes to make registries interesting again

Interview  Before you get to know Jia Rong Low, the recently appointed director general of the Asia Pacific Network Information Center (APNIC), you might want to check your definition of "the internet."…

Thomas Hawk posted a photo:

Thomas Hawk posted a photo:

MHKBB posted a photo:

Finally back on the road bike after a long injury break 🚴😃 Is there anything better than riding almost silently through a blossoming spring landscape on the saddle of a road bike?

We moeten praten. Allemaal leuk en aardig die Paus en die Koning. Maar het gaat in dit land om U, de burger (hahaha, nee natuurlijk, maar dat is een heel ander topic, andere keer.) Dus gaan we praten. Over waarom de PVV niet meer de grootste is (bron). Over waarom Frans bypass Timmermans nu wel de grootste is. HOE DAN???? Komt het door de VVD-korvee van mensenhandelaar Marjolein Faber? Komt het door het gerommel en gezeik bij PvdA/GroenLinks? Is het het allemaal de schuld van Ingrid Coenradie? Kan Habtamu schaatsen nu het alweer kouder wordt? Moet NSC niet opgeheven worden? Waar zijn die smeerkezen van het CDA mee bezig? Wordt JA21 de nieuwe LPF, en zo nee? En natuurlijk de Hamvraag aller Hamvragen: zijn we nu een radicaal extreemlinks antisemitisch land geworden dat vieze bondjes met de islam aan het maken is? Zegt u het maar. Oant moarn.

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AFTERPARTY

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De verkiezingen in Wenen gelden als eerste test voor de nieuwe coalitie van Oostenrijk. De sociaaldemocraten SPÖ blijven de grootse partij in de stad. De conservatieve regeringspartij ÖVP verliest fors.