GENÈVE (ANP/AFP) - Het Wereldvoedselprogramma meldt dat het de steun voor de inwoners van de Gazastrook drastisch moet verminderen. Dat komt door financieringsproblemen en raakt een half miljoen mensen in het gebied.
Stel: je betaalt in 2027 zelf voor een hulpmiddel en trekt die kosten af in je belastingaangifte. Een jaar later maakt je zorgverzekeraar alsnog geld over. Dan betaal je over dat bedrag toch belasting, ook als de aftrek voor zorgkosten dan al is afgeschaft. In september zag het er nog precies andersom uit.
Het kabinet wil de aftrek specifieke zorgkosten per 1 januari 2028 schrappen. Wat je over 2026 en 2027 nog wel kunt aftrekken, lees je in ons eerdere stuk over de afschaffing. Dit stuk gaat over iets anders: geld dat pas binnenkomt als de aftrek al verdwenen is.
De regel staat in de tweede nota van wijziging bij het Belastingplan 2027. Die ging volgens Cleverboek op 9 oktober naar de Tweede Kamer. AXP Adviseurs zette op 15 oktober op een rij wat erin staat. Krijg je na 31 december 2027 een teruggave of een nagekomen betaling voor zorgkosten die je vóór 1 januari 2028 hebt afgetrokken? Dan blijft daarop de zogeheten negatieve persoonsgebonden aftrek van toepassing.
Die term klinkt ingewikkeld, maar het idee is eenvoudig: je draait je eerdere aftrek terug. Volgens Taxlive tellen zulke bedragen mee in het jaar waarin je ze ontvangt. In de praktijk geef je de vergoeding in dat jaar op in box 1, onder het kopje voor een teruggekregen bedrag dat je in een eerdere aangifte hebt afgetrokken, legt Meerkosten.nl uit.
Wat je eerder aftrok en later terugkrijgt, telt ook na 2027 nog mee.
In de stukken van Prinsjesdag ontbrak deze regel. Volgens Rendement voorzag het kabinet toen niet in overgangsrecht voor de negatieve persoonsgebonden aftrek bij zorgkosten. Deloitte schreef in september wat dat betekende: een teruggave of nagekomen betaling na 1 januari 2028 voor eerder afgetrokken zorgkosten zou dan niet meer tot negatieve persoonsgebonden aftrek leiden.
Simpel gezegd: wie na de afschaffing alsnog geld terugkreeg, mocht de aftrek houden. Dat gat gaat nu dicht. Volgens Taxence wil het kabinet zo voorkomen dat achteraf een te hoge aftrek blijft staan. Vanhier zegt het zo: "Dit zorgt ervoor dat een te ruime aftrek alsnog wordt gecorrigeerd."
Een voorbeeld: je zorgverzekeraar wijst de vergoeding van een hulpmiddel af. Je betaalt het in 2027 zelf en trekt het af in je aangifte over 2027. In 2028 komt de verzekeraar terug op dat besluit en betaalt alsnog. Volgens de oorspronkelijke plannen had je daar niets meer mee hoeven doen. Met het overgangsrecht moet dat bedrag in je aangifte over 2028.
Hoe vaak komt dat voor? De Belastingdienst is streng: kosten die je vergoed kunt krijgen, mag je niet aftrekken. Toch komt een vergoeding soms pas na afloop van het belastingjaar binnen, bijvoorbeeld omdat een verzekeraar traag betaalt of een instantie de vergoeding over meerdere jaren uitsmeert, schrijft Meerkosten.nl.
Er is ook een geruststelling. Volgens dezelfde site is de bijtelling nooit hoger dan het bedrag dat je eerder echt als zorgkosten kon aftrekken, dus inclusief de drempel. Je betaalt dus nooit belasting over meer dan je eerder hebt afgetrokken.
Een nota van wijziging past een wetsvoorstel aan, maar is zelf geen wet, benadrukt Cleverboek. Zowel de afschaffing van de aftrek als dit overgangsrecht staan in het Belastingplan 2027. Pas na de stemming in de Tweede Kamer op 12 november, en daarna in de Eerste Kamer, weet je zeker wat er geldt. Of het plan een meerderheid haalt, is nog onzeker. Daarover schreven we eerder in SGP en JA21 dreigen af te haken: daarmee komt ruim €10 extra per volle tank benzine op 1 januari dichterbij.
Bronnen: AXP Adviseurs, Taxlive, Taxence, Vanhier, Deloitte, Rendement, Cleverboek, Meerkosten.nl, Belastingdienst
"Technopolitics" are the politics embedded in technology. The Ur-text of technopolitics is "Do Artifacts Have Politics?" by the rock critic turned scholar Langdon Winner:
https://faculty.cc.gatech.edu/~beki/cs4001/Winner.pdf
With "Do Artifacts," Winner demands that we move beyond the idea of technologies having "intended consequences" and "unintended consequences" and towards a political economy of tech. In service to this, he divides the politics of artifacts into three categories:
I. Artifacts that have politics embedded in them by their creators, like Robert Moses's infamous bridges over the Long Island parkways. According to Moses biographer Robert Caro, Moses deliberately specified that these bridges must be too low for a city bus to pass under, in a bid to block Black people from traveling from New York City to the beaches he'd developed on Long Island.
Today those bridges are more than a century old, and they are still too low for city buses to pass under them, and this continues to mean that people who don't own private vehicles find it more difficult to get to the beach, and as it's still the case that race is a predictor of low incomes, those are still racist bridges.
II. Artifacts whose politics are accidental but unavoidable. Winner cites a kind of tomato harvester that vastly improved the efficiency of tomato pickers. These harvesters became very popular, which allowed tomato farmers to lay off large numbers of agricultural workers, and also allowed them to price the mechanically harvested tomatoes so cheaply that they crowded out other kinds of tomatoes.
Because these machines created a large pool of unemployed workers, they shifted power from labor to capital, and because these picking machines were too rough for all but the hardest varietals of tomato, they changed the flavor profile of tomatoes in America for the worse, towards a bland, tough tomato.
These picking machines were not designed to make workers poorer, nor were they designed to make tomatoes taste worse, but because of their technical characteristics, this was the unavoidable outcome, the inextricable politics of these machines.
III. Artifacts whose politics are intrinsic to their design. Here, Winner contrasts solar panels with nuclear reactors. Solar panels may require highly centralized industrial systems to produce, but once they are in the field, solar panels are compatible with looser, less coordinated political arrangements. A world of small anarchist communes is fully compatible with solar energy.
Contrast this with nuclear reactors: the prudent ongoing operation of a reactor requires a highly centralized state that is capable of fielding reliable, trustworthy independent inspectors. This state must also be capable of exercising the coercive power to shut down badly maintained or incompetently operated reactors.
The politics of nukes are the politics of a centralized, powerful state; the politics of solar are less determined. Solar is compatible with a wide variety of political systems, including (but not limited to) weak, decentralized states.
(For a further exploration of "Do Artifacts Have Politics?" I highly recommend Ginger Coons' reading guide:)
https://www.not-so-obvious.net/reading-do-artifacts-have-politics/
I really like Winner's framework for exploring technopolitics, but I have my own gloss on it. Winner's framework doesn't explicitly contemplate the idea of technological countermeasures. For example, what if someone were to design a city bus that was low enough to fit under Robert Moses's bridges? At that point, they'd cease to be "racist bridges," and merely become "bridges built by a racist":
https://locusmag.com/feature/commentary-cory-doctorow-technopolitics/
Which brings me to the technopolitics of ad-tech. Lots of people think that advertising is "the original sin of the internet," setting in motion the surveillance dystopia that is closing in on us from all sides today:
https://pluralistic.net/2026/10/17/mercenary-spyware/#discover-tech
I think this is wrong. I think that finding ways to communicate ideas and pitches to the general public is fine. Without some channel for reaching people with ideas and propositions they may not be familiar with, it would be infinitely harder to reach people for political causes. It would also be harder for new books, movies and music to find new audiences. It would be much harder to get people out to your independent craft fair, your zine show, or your No Kings march.
For me, the internet's original sin isn't advertising, it's surveillance. Contrary to what you have been told – and pax Winner's framework – the internet is fully compatible with privacy:
https://pluralistic.net/2025/10/31/losing-the-crypto-wars/#surveillance-monopolism
It wasn't the internet's technopolitics that made it a surveillance nightmare. It was just plain politics. Specifically, our politicians decided to stop enacting and enforcing privacy laws. The last consumer privacy law we got in America was a bill that made it illegal for video store clerks to disclose your VHS rentals:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_Privacy_Protection_Act
(As I type these words, the Supreme Court is poised to eliminate even that dried-up old crumb of privacy protection:)
https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2026/10/supreme-court-privacy-rights-case-bork-kavanaugh.html
The widespread phenomenon of ad-tech companies spying on us is the result of the decision to allow them to do so. That decision has had innumerable negative downstream effects, such as skyrocketing "surveillance prices":
https://pluralistic.net/2025/12/11/nothing-personal/#instacartography
And collapsing "surveillance wages":
https://pluralistic.net/2024/12/18/loose-flapping-ends/#luigi-has-a-point
It's created vast surveillance databases that are critical to Trump's racist pogroms, providing dossiers and precise location data on the people ICE kidnaps to Salvadoran slave-labor camps:
https://pluralistic.net/2026/03/10/ice-tech/#foreseeable-outcomes
Surveillance also promotes oligarchy. Without surveillance, oligarchs must give up more of their fortunes to keep the public happy, because the alternative is spending even more money on guards to keep the public from building guillotines on their lawns. Surveillance lets oligarchs make targeted strikes on restive radicals, which is much cheaper than broad-spectrum policies that make us all better off and neutralize the case for guillotines:
https://pluralistic.net/2025/06/26/autostabilizer/#slicey-bois
These are the technopolitics of surveillance, not advertising. There is nothing about advertising that demands surveillance. For centuries, advertising was not meaningfully linked to surveillance. The decision to fuse surveillance with advertising was just that – a decision, not an inevitability.
Any time we forget this, we let spying tech bosses off the hook. After all, if advertising demands surveillance, then tech bosses are just the avatars of the great forces of history, prisoners of the imperative to spy in order to advertise. By remembering that surveillance advertising is a choice, we put the blame squarely where it belongs: on the guillotineable oligarchs who made that choice, and amassed spectacular fortunes thereby.
Surveillance is political, but surveillance advertising has its own distinct technopolitics, and to understand those technopolitics, we must contrast them with the technopolitics of contextual advertising. Up until a decade or two ago, contextual advertising was simply called "advertising." Contextual advertising is the practice of running refrigerator ads next to articles on cooking and kitchen remodeling; ads for roadside restaurants on highway billboards; ads for Disney vacations in parenting magazines.
Your intuition probably insists that context advertising is less effective than surveillance advertising. After all, surveillance advertising allows a running shoe company to target users who are training for a marathon no matter where they are and no matter what they're doing. Surely this translates into increased "conversions" (clicks and/or purchases, depending on who you're talking to)?
It does, but not by much. Advertisers get about 5% more value from surveillance ads than they do from context ads:
https://weis2019.econinfosec.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/6/2019/05/WEIS_2019_paper_38.pdf
Partly, that's because surveillance ad companies grossly overrate the efficacy of surveillance advertising:
https://peoples-things.ghost.io/youre-doing-it-wrong-notes-on-criticism-and-technology-hype/
But surveillance advertising's anemic returns to advertisers are down to another aspect of the system: its tendency towards monopolization:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Google_LLC_(2023)
Surveillance is a capital-intensive activity: spying on billions of people as they move through the digital and physical world is incredibly expensive. That is a good part of the reason that online advertising has collapsed into the Meta/Google duopoly, who control about 80% of display advertising.
The harms of surveillance monopolies have a severely distorting effect on policy debates. For example, it's led some anti-monopolists to call for government-issued surveillance identifiers that follow us from birth to death in order to facilitate commercial spying to foster more competition in surveillance:
https://www.thesling.org/what-to-do-about-googles-dominance-of-online-advertising/
Here's the thing about monopolists: they cheat. Google and Meta have an illegal, collusive arrangement to rig the advertising market, overcharging advertisers and underpaying publishers:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jedi_Blue
The ad-tech giants have taken in hundreds of billions that they simply can't account for. It's disappeared down a fraud-hole:
https://pluralistic.net/2026/05/25/lying-spies/#spying-liars
All of this has driven the majority of web users to install a privacy-blocker (like EFF's Privacybadger.org), meaning that surveillance ads are disproportionately likely to not even show up in a reader's browser:
https://doc.searls.com/2023/11/11/how-is-the-worlds-biggest-boycott-doing/
So while it's possible that, in a state of nature, a surveillance ad would outperform a context ad, delivering more sales for advertisers and more revenue for publishers, the monopolistic tendency of ad-tech means that publishers earn less from surveillance ads (because more users block them, and because monopolistic ad-tech platforms extract higher commissions), and advertisers see fewer sales from them (because more users block them, and because monopolistic ad-tech platforms extract higher prices).
Context ads, meanwhile, are always going to give power to publishers, because publishers will always understand the materials they publish better than any ad-tech platform could. Commissioning, editing and publishing an article, podcast or video gives a publisher unique and inalienable insight into that material.
Surveillance data about audiences is a kind of ambient vapor floating around websites and places and payments that has to be condensed through a heroic and expensive effort that gives power to whichever company can muster the capital and infrastructure to do so. Meanwhile, information about the content of publishers' offerings is already refined into ingots that are already in publishers' own possession.
It's possible to run "programmatic ads" without surveillance. Rather than building an ad-tech stack through which publishers transmit sensitive information about their audiences ("Who will pay me to advertise to this 18-34 year old man-child from the outer boroughs who owns an Xbox and has recently researched gonorrhea symptoms?"), we can build systems through which publishers transmit information about their own materials ("Who will advertise to a user with a New York IP address who is reading an article comparing running shoe brands?").
Not only is this possible, but it actually generates more revenues for publishers than the surveillance-based ad-tech stack:
On top of that, publishers who don't gather personal information about users also don't need to show their users those awful pop-up ads asking their permission to gather their data. Everyone hates those notices, and they are yet another negative aspect of surveillance advertising that disappears with the switch to context ads.
An ad-tech stack for context ads is far less prone to monopolization. Such a stack can be "federated," with multiple "demand-side platforms" (the part of the system that advertisers use to place bids for the right to show their ads) all communicating with the same "supply-side platform" (the part of the system publishers use to transmit opportunities to place ads).
This is also in the technopolitics of context ads: they do not tend toward the "efficiencies of scale" that lead to abusive monopolistic middlemen who steal from publishers and advertisers and sell out the public to fascists who want to arrest them and deport them to Salvadoran slave-labor camps.
When the ad-tech sector is composed of smaller companies that are more competitive with one another, it is much harder for any of them to collude to rig the market. That fierce competition also means it's harder to create a cozy conspiracy to lobby together to block privacy laws, and it leaves the companies with lower margins and less retained earnings to spend on those lobbying efforts.
Surveillance ads also promote all kinds of parasitic businesses. The fact that a publisher can serve ads related to users rather than the subject of their media means that sensationalistic and deceptive websites can sell ads that run against content that's totally unrelated to advertisers' products and services. And because it's cheaper to produce lies and garbage, these publishers can undercut the ad prices demanded by high quality outlets and let advertisers reach the same users. This is the whole reason that "chumboxes" exist:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chumbox
Just as nuclear power favors a centralized state, surveillance advertising:
tends toward monopoly;
favors low-quality media over high-quality production;
impedes the passage of privacy laws;
provides authoritarian states with an off-the-books, warrantless source of surveillance data.
And just as solar allows for decentralized, anti-authoritarian societies, context advertising:
tends towards pluralism and diversity of voices;
favors high-quality media by reserving the lion's share of the rewards to the producers;
does not rely on a weak privacy environment;
does not militate for "democratizing spying" by issuing every person with a permanent advertising identifier.
There's nothing (necessarily) wrong with building systems to tell people about things you want them to know. There's nothing (necessarily) wrong with paying for media with ads. It's possible for both of these things to go awry, but they are not in and of themselves bad. They have contingent technopolitics.
But surveillance ads have completely unavoidable, absolutely ghastly technopolitics. Surveillance ads are bad for publishers, for advertisers, and for democracy. We should ban surveillance ads:
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2023/05/save-news-we-must-ban-surveillance-advertising
(Image: Jess, CC BY-SA 4.0, modified).
US Rep proposes bill to give video game buyers “ownership,” not “a license” https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2026/10/us-rep-proposes-bill-to-give-video-game-buyers-ownership-not-a-license/
Saviour or Scoundrel? https://scholarsphere.psu.edu/resources/14308c3b-4f2a-4f39-a365-192c0206f886
Tiny Little Office https://tinylittleoffice.com/
Future? No Thanks! – an ecosocialist game https://futurenothanks.com/
#25yrsago Patrick Nielsen Hayden interviews Mike Ford https://user.well.com/engaged.cgi?c=inkwell.vue&f=0&t=126
#20yrsago Singapore bans Far East Economic Review https://web.archive.org/web/20061010002951/https://www.feer.com/articles1/2006/0610/free/p006.html
#20yrsago Publishing isn’t bestseller-driven https://www.nielsenhayden.com/makinglight/conventional_un/
#20yrsago Why architecture and security don’t mix https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2006/10/architecture_an.html
#20yrsago Vista licence: Microsoft’s abusive relationship with you https://wendy.seltzer.org/blog/archives/2006/10/19/forbidding_vistas_windows_licensing_disserves_the_user.html
#20yrsago Boy Scouts of America Concerned About Copyright https://web.archive.org/web/20061110065012/http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi%3Ffile%3D/news/archive/2006/10/20/entertainment/e110452D84.DTL
#15yrsago Canadian Tories admit that Canadians don’t want DRM rules, push for them anyway https://web.archive.org/web/20111022210131/http://www.michaelgeist.ca/content/view/6071/125
#15yrsago Visualizing Herman Cain’s 9-9-9 plan to redistribute wealth from the poor to the rich https://web.archive.org/web/20111021103517/http://jaredbernsteinblog.com/9-9-9-in-one-really-long-graph/
#15yrsago Free Bieber: campaign to kill proposed law that would send you to prison for 5 years for singing copyrighted music on YouTube https://web.archive.org/web/20111020145336/http://freebieber.org/
#15yrsago Belarusian central bank auctions off its sugar bowls https://www.theguardian.com/world/2011/oct/19/belarus-central-bank-sells-office-furniture
#15yrsago Dataviz as defacement: OCCUPY GEORGE https://web.archive.org/web/20111022022046/http://www.occupygeorge.com/
#15yrsago HOWTO avoid a copyright shakedown legal threat: be famous, a politician, a cop, a soldier or a corpse https://torrentfreak.com/undercover-cops-and-politicians-escape-bittorrent-lawsuit-111013/
#10yrsago Popular design guides are responsible for plague of grey type https://web.archive.org/web/20170914051800/https://www.wired.com/2016/10/how-the-web-became-unreadable/
#10yrsago Digital Defenders: a free open-licensed booklet for kids about privacy and cryptography https://edri.org/files/privacy4kids_booklet_web.pdf
#10yrsago Public universities and even the US Navy have sold hundreds of patents to America’s most notorious troll https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2016/10/inside-intellectual-ventures-portfolio-nearly-500-university-patents
#10yrsago Airportraits: composite photos of all the daily takeoffs from the world’s airports https://mikekelley.art/?category=airportraits
#10yrsago Rich people can afford to buy more sleep than poor people https://arstechnica.com/science/2016/10/the-rich-can-sleep-in-thanks-to-better-transit/
#10yrsago Harry Shearer sues studio over Spinal Tap, says he’s received $98 in royalties over 30 years https://web.archive.org/web/20161224224142/https://www.yahoo.com/movies/harry-shearer-files-125-million-spinal-tap-fraud-suit-copyright-termination-150031664.html
#10yrsago ACLU asks court to reveal 23 secret surveillance laws https://web.archive.org/web/20161019224447/https://theintercept.com/2016/10/19/aclu-wants-secret-surveillance-laws-made-public/
#10yrsago Montana judge unrepentant after sentencing man to 60 days for repeatedly raping his own 12 year old daughter https://edition.cnn.com/2016/10/19/us/montana-judge-incest-case-trnd/index.html
#10yrago Turkish court fines bystander/tourist who sued police for shooting out his eye https://www.hurriyetdailynews.com/kyrgyz-tourist-wounded-in-gezi-protests-ordered-to-pay-debt-to-turkish-state–104964
#10yrsago By stealing from innocents, Chicago PD amassed tens of millions in a secret black budget for surveillance gear https://web.archive.org/web/20160929143255/https://chicagoreader.com/chicago/police-department-civil-forfeiture-investigation/Content?oid=23728922
#10yrsago Turing’s law: UK to retroactively pardon thousands of men prosecuted for having sex with men https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-37711518
#5yrsago The monopoly strategy behind the Google/Microsoft mobile patent wars https://pluralistic.net/2021/10/20/vizio-vs-the-world/#capital-as-power
#5yrsago Copyleft lawsuit against Vizio will allow anyone to defend the commons https://pluralistic.net/2021/10/20/vizio-vs-the-world/#dumbcast
#5yrsago The true, Terry Pratchett-esque origins of the trillion-dollar coin https://pluralistic.net/2021/10/19/moist-von-lipwig/#gimmick-v-gimmick
#1yrago The mad king's digital killswitch https://pluralistic.net/2025/10/20/post-american-internet/#huawei-with-american-characteristics
Victoria: Munro's Books, Oct 20
https://www.munrobooks.com/events/6113620261020
Vancouver: Life After AI (Vancouver Writers Festival), Oct 22
https://writersfest.bc.ca/festival-event-2026/46
Ottawa: Life After AI (Ottawa Writers Festival), Oct 24
https://writersfestival.org/event/life-after-ai
Vienna: TED AI, Oct 28-30
https://tedai-vienna.ted.com/
Kilkenny (Kilkenomics), Nov 6-8
https://kilkenomics.com/
Vancouver: Enshittification (Sid Williams Theatre Society), Nov 10
https://www.sidwilliamstheatre.com/events/cory-doctorow-talks-enshittification/
Vancouver: BC Policy Solutions Gala, Nov 12
https://bcpolicy.ca/gala/
Oxford: Ministry of the Future, Nov 23
https://ministryforthefuture.co.uk/events.html
Sheffield: Reverse Centaur at Juno Books, Nov 25
https://www.outsavvy.com/event/40274/cory-doctorow-in-conversation
Virtual: Enshittification, AI, and the Future of Technology (UBC Master of Educational Technology), Nov 28
https://met.ubc.ca/2026/09/met-speaker-series-cory-doctorow-enshittification-ai-and-the-future-of-technology/
Oxford: Bennett Oxford Symposium on Open Code in Science, Dec 9
https://www.bennett.ox.ac.uk/events/2026-bennett-institute-symposium/
Montreal: World Science Fiction Convention, Sep 2-6
https://montreal2027.ca/en
Terms of Service with Clare Duffy (CNN)
https://www.cnn.com/audio/podcasts/terms-of-service-with-clare-duffy/episodes/458ce968-af5d-11f0-b539-13ed2afe25f8
AI, Work, and Power (Software Engineering Daily)
AI, Work, and Power https://softwareengineeringdaily.com/podcasts/cory-doctorow-on-ai-work-and-power/
AI, Corporate Power, and the Fight for Worker Control (Plutopia)
https://plutopia.io/cory-doctorow-ai-corporate-power-and-the-fight-for-worker-control/
How to Think About AI—Before It’s Too Late (Daniel Solove)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_0xR3uEgGcc
"Canny Valley": A limited edition collection of the collages I create for Pluralistic, self-published, September 2025 https://pluralistic.net/2025/09/04/illustrious/#chairman-bruce
"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/
"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 (thebezzle.org).
"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).
"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.
"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
"Unauthorized Bread": a middle-grades graphic novel adapted from my novella about refugees, toasters and DRM, FirstSecond, April 20, 2027
"Enshittification, Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It" (the graphic novel), Firstsecond, 2027
"The Memex Method," Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2027
Today's top sources:
Currently writing:
"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. Fourth draft completed. Submitted to editor.
A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING
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.
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ISSN: 3066-764X
OPINIE - Niet boeren, maar Nederlandse supermarkten zijn verantwoordelijk voor het vergiftigen van mens en natuur
Ik ben een beetje boos. Eigenlijk best heel erg boos. En wel op de grote Nederlandse supermarkten. Supermarkten zouden een deel kunnen zijn van de oplossing, maar ze zijn het probleem. Door hun keuzes krijgen mensen onnodig veel nare ziekten zoals die van Parkinson, en ze zijn ook verantwoordelijk voor de achteruitgang van onze natuur.
Want we zijn onszelf en elkaar aan het vergiftigen met landbouwgif. Zelfs voor Yvon Jaspers is de onschuld er inmiddels een beetje vanaf, sinds haar broer de diagnose Parkinson kreeg. We dachten voor een dubbeltje op de eerste rij te zitten, maar eindigen voor dat dubbeltje op de polikliniek. Maar dan is het te laat. Control-Z doet het dan niet meer.
En voor alle duidelijkheid: de meeste boeren zijn niet de schuldigen, maar zitten in overlevingsmodus gevangen in dit moreel failliete systeem. Een systeem dat er trouwens helemaal niet op gericht is om mensen te voeden, maar vooral om dieren te voeden. Wereldwijd voeden we bijna 100 miljard landbouwdieren. Met de ruimte voor dat voedsel zouden we een veelvoud van de menselijke wereldbevolking kunnen voeden. Dit deel van het systeem wordt fanatiek beschermd door dominante conservatieve politiek, met leugens over voedselzekerheid die niet de boer maar de veevoer-importeurs en hun lobby bedienen.
Maar voor het kleine percentage landbouwgrond dat we daadwerkelijk gebruiken om mensen gericht van voedsel te voorzien gaat het ook fout. En daar ligt het niet alleen aan de politiek, maar juist in grote mate aan de dominante macht van de supermarkten. Want de wetenschap is er al lang uit: mens en natuur zijn extreem gebaat bij meer biologische tuin- en akkerbouw in plaats van de grote hoeveelheden landbouwgif die nu gespoten worden. Alle boeren zouden biologisch moeten kunnen telen, en alle consumenten zouden het moeten kunnen betalen.
Tegenargumenten over efficiëntie zijn kul: zolang we meer dan 75% van onze landbouwgrond kunnen verspillen om dieren te voeden in plaats van mensen, kunnen we op die minder dan een kwart voor mensenvoer best een paar procent inleveren voor meer gezondheid en natuur. Met nieuwe technieken wordt het verschil in efficiëntie bovendien steeds kleiner. Dan resteert het argument van de betaalbaarheid, en dit is waar de kwaadaardigheid van supermarkten in het spel komt. Supermarkten laten ons veel teveel betalen voor biologische producten. Hierbij moeten twee misverstanden over hoe deze markt werkt worden opgehelderd:
1) Wat een consument voor een product betaalt, wordt bij een op winst gerichte organisatie niet bepaald door wat het moet kosten om het product te verkopen, maar door op welke manier deze organisatie er zoveel mogelijk winst op kan maken. Natuurlijk is dát afhankelijk van de kostprijs, want als die erg laag is dan kan een concurrent het product voor veel minder aanbieden. Maar dát mechanisme werkt steeds minder goed in een sterk gemonopoliserende markt zoals de onze. Er is in onze wereld maar plek voor een handvol grote supermarktketens, omdat de schaalgrootte waarmee zij werken hen in staat stelt voor de hele boodschappenwagen de prijs laag te houden op een breed assortiment. Distributiecentra. Logistiek. Inkoopcontracten. Marketing. Op de schaal die daar voor nodig is, is er binnen de huidige marktregels maar plek voor een beperkt aantal spelers. En deze spelers zijn stuk voor stuk nauwelijks begaan met onze gezondheid of die van boeren, en de natuur. Ondanks alle mooie praatjes.
2) Supermarkten maximaliseren hun winst door gebruik te maken van ‘marge-mixen’. Ieder product dat ze verkopen levert een bepaalde winst (en soms zelfs verlies) op, en het is aan de supermarkt om de totale winst zo hoog mogelijk te maken. Die winst maken ze niet op een kilo zout of op een pak tarwebloem van een budgetmerk. Die winst maken ze in grote mate op producten zoals biologisch voedsel, waar de winstmarges een veelvoud zijn van die op reguliere landbouwgifproducten.
En wat doen die stomme Nederlandse supermarkten dan collectief? Ze verhogen de marges op biologisch eten, zodat ze andere producten goedkoper kunnen maken, en opgeteld zoveel mogelijk winst maken. Supermarkten maken de inschatting dat biologische producten vooral gekocht worden door klandizi met een vollere portemonnee. En dat moet ook wel, want de prijsverschillen zijn enorm! Het is de ultieme cirkelredenering: alleen rijke klanten kopen biologisch, daarom zijn die producten extra duur, daarom kopen alleen rijke klanten ze.
Gemiddeld betaal je voor een biologisch product 66% meer, zo berekende de Consumentenbond. Maar uitschieters tot 300% zijn ook niet ongewoon, zo blijkt uit de uitzending “Biologische prijzen” van de Keuringsdienst van Waarde van vrijdag 16 oktober. Het bizarre is dat de biologische boer over het algemeen maar zo’n 30% tot 40% meer vergoeding krijgt voor zijn product (en volgens de bio-boeren uit de KvW-uitzending krijgen zij nu zelfs minder vergoeding voor hun biologische boontjes dan 3 jaar geleden). En de vulploegmedewerker, de koeling, de kassa, distributiecentra, vrachtverkeer, etc. zijn allemaal precies even duur als het giftigere alternatief.
Het zou daarom prima te verdedigen zijn dat biologische producten hooguit 25% meer kosten dan hun minder verantwoorde tegenhangers. Op die manier wordt het voor een veel grotere groep consumenten een aantrekkelijk alternatief en kunnen meer boeren overstappen op productie die voor hen, de volksgezondheid én de natuur werkt.
Sinds mijn inkomen het toestaat koop ik zoveel mogelijk biologisch voedsel. Dat doe ik niet alleen voor mijn gezondheid, die van de boer en voor de natuur. Er zit ook echt meer smaak aan, iedereen proeft met gemak het verschil tussen een smaakrijke biologische komkommer en het labelloze alternatief. Maar ik zie het vooral als maatschappelijk leergeld waarvan ik me realiseer dat niet iedereen het kan opbrengen. Door met de portemonnee te stemmen hoop ik dat duurzame landbouw steeds meer mainstream kan worden.
Maar de motivatie gaat er wel een beetje vanaf als ik zie hoe die transitie actief wordt tegengewerkt door de Jumbo’s en Albert Heijns van deze wereld. De Nederlandse overheid heeft zich als doel gesteld dat in 2030 15% van onze landbouw biologisch is. We zitten nu op zo’n 6%. Misschien moeten er iets meer mensen samen met mij boos worden op de Nederlandse supermarkten, want zij hebben de sleutel in handen. Hier is geen magie voor nodig. Alle ingrediënten zijn aanwezig, behalve nuchter duurzaam beleid van de Nederlandse supermarkten.
The singing, dancing and sheer joy in the face of police brutality at the protests led by the Cockroach Janta party show people no longer fear India’s regime
In July, as supporters of the Cockroach movement took to Jantar Mantar, the designated protest site in Delhi, incensed over exam-paper leaks and demanding the resignation of India’s education minister, the rest of the nation realised that for the first time since the Bharatiya Janata party (BJP) came to power in 2014, the curse of inertia and the grip of fear had been smashed irrevocably. Prime minister Narendra Modi’s image of invincibility has been punctured.
People in India have been conditioned to believe in an idea of intense slow-burn protests that eventually bring change – but the Cockroaches have shown us that the revolution can be fast-tracked.
Meena Kandasamy is a poet and writer based in Chennai
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