BRUSSEL (ANP) - Demissionair minister David van Weel (Buitenlandse Zaken) gaat donderdag in Brussel pleiten voor sancties tegen Soedan. Dat gaat hij doen tijdens de vergadering van de EU-ministers van Buitenlandse Zaken. "Ik denk dat we het er wel over eens zijn dat we in ieder geval de hoofddaders van het gruwelijke geweld in Soedan moeten aanpakken", zei hij voor het begin van de vergadering in Brussel. Het opleggen van sancties tegen hen is "wel het minste wat we kunnen doen", zei Van Weel.

Het gaat volgens VVD'er Van Weel om persoonlijke sancties die op basis van mensenrechtenschendingen worden opgelegd. De mensen die op de sanctielijst komen, kunnen niet meer reizen en kunnen niet meer bij hun bezittingen, verduidelijkte de minister. "Dat zijn echt zaken die ze raken en die hopelijk impact hebben."

De sancties moeten worden opgelegd aan leden van de paramilitaire beweging Rapid Support Forces (RSF) in Soedan, wil Van Weel.

'Niet ongestraft blijven'

Het is voor het eerst dat de EU sancties wil opleggen aan Soedanezen, zei EU-buitenlandchef Kaja Kallas. Zo wil de EU "echt druk uitoefenen op degenen die de wreedheden in Soedan begaan".

Ook Frankrijk is voorstander van sancties tegen degenen die verantwoordelijk zijn voor de "gepleegde wreedheden", zei minister Jean-Noël Barrot (Buitenlandse Zaken) bij aankomst in Brussel. "Na de val van El Fasher hebben we alle partijen opgeroepen tot een staakt-het-vuren en het respecteren van het internationaal humanitair recht", zei Barrot. Ook moet dringend humanitaire hulp worden verleend.

"Maar dat is niet genoeg", zei hij. Sancties zijn nodig omdat "dergelijke wreedheden niet ongestraft kunnen blijven", aldus Barrot.

MÜNCHEN (ANP) - Vrachtwagen- en busfabrikant MAN wil in Duitsland ongeveer 2300 banen schrappen, meldt een woordvoerder aan persbureau dpa. De onderneming, die ook aan Nederlandse bedrijven levert, zegt te kampen met een aanhoudend zwakke markt voor trucks en de ingreep moet voor lagere kosten zorgen. Het geld dat MAN daarmee vrijspeelt, zou bedoeld zijn voor investeringen in nieuwe voertuigen zoals elektrische trucks.

Het Duitse dochterbedrijf van Traton wil de banenreductie over een periode van tien jaar doorvoeren. Gedwongen ontslagen sluit het truckbedrijf uit.

Naast een zwakke markt heeft MAN ook last van gestegen stroomprijzen en loonkosten. Daarnaast wordt de concurrentie van Aziatische fabrikanten heviger. Na de reorganisatie zal MAN rond de 13.000 medewerkers tellen.

Het ging tijdens de avondjurkenronde van Miss Universe in Thailand gruwelijk mis voor Miss Jamaica, Gabrielle Henry. Ze kwam op in een prachtige jurk en straalde van oor tot oor op het hoofdpodium, gekleed in een lange oranje jurk met glitters en hoge hakken. Maar toen dook ze ineens van het podium af.

De zaal was zichtbaar in shock. In video’s is te zien hoe omstanders naar haar toe rennen, waarna Henry uiteindelijk op een brancard van het podium wordt gedragen.

Kort daarna liet de Miss Universe Jamaica Organization weten dat ze onmiddellijk naar het Paolo Rangsit Hospital in Thailand was gebracht. Fans kregen gelukkig al te horen dat Henry geen levensbedreigende verwondingen heeft opgelopen, al voeren artsen nog aanvullende onderzoeken uit om er zeker van te zijn dat ze volledig herstelt.

Ook Miss Universe-president Raúl Rocha bezocht haar persoonlijk. Hij bevestigde dat ze geen botbreuken heeft en de juiste zorg ontvangt.

De organisatie bedankte het publiek hartelijk voor de massale steun en vroeg iedereen om te bidden voor de wulpse Jamaicaanse. De val komt op een ongelukkig moment: de finale van Miss Universe vindt al over enkele dagen plaats. Of Henry kan deelnemen aan de eindronde, is nog onduidelijk.

Bekijk hieronder de beelden van de spetterende opkomst en onfortuinlijke val:

Bron: meekiimodez – Instagram

BRUSSEL (ANP/RTR) - Hongarije vindt dat de Europese Unie geen geld meer aan de Oekraïense regering moet geven na berichten over corruptie in dat land. De anticorruptiediensten onderzoeken de verduistering van mogelijk 100 miljoen dollar in de energiesector.

De Hongaarse buitenlandminister Péter Szijjártó sprak voor een overleg met EU-ambtgenoten in Brussel over een "corrupt systeem" in Oekraïne. Ook haalde hij uit naar Europese Commissievoorzitter Ursula von der Leyen. "In plaats van de betalingen stop te zetten en onmiddellijke financiële duidelijkheid te eisen, wil ze nog eens 100 miljard naar Oekraïne sturen. Dat is krankzinnig", zei hij.

In het corruptieschandaal komen bekende namen langs. Twee ministers die worden genoemd, zijn inmiddels ontslagen. De hoofdverdachte is een bekende van president Volodymyr Zelensky, die in zijn verkiezingscampagne beloofde de corruptie in Oekraïne aan te pakken. Oekraïne moet bovendien corruptie tegengaan als het lid wil worden van de Europese Unie.

BERLIJN (ANP) - Duitsland moet in de toekomst het commando over de NAVO-verdediging van Europa van de VS overnemen, vindt de Amerikaanse NAVO-ambassadeur. Dat gaat volgens hem wel nog een tijd duren.

De hoogste commandant van de NAVO in Europa is vanouds een Amerikaan. Dat symboliseert de voortrekkersrol van supermacht VS, de verreweg belangrijkste lidstaat van het bondgenootschap. Maar de regering-Trump wil de verdediging van Europa tegen bijvoorbeeld een Russische aanval in het vervolg aan Europa zelf gaan overlaten. Dit voorjaar klonk tot grote schrik van Europese bondgenoten al dat de VS geen opvolger voor de afzwaaiende 'Supreme Allied Commander Europe' (SACEUR) wilden leveren. Dat het toch weer een Amerikaan werd, haalt de NAVO steevast aan als bewijs dat de VS nog altijd pal staan voor de alliantie.

Maar de Amerikaanse NAVO-gezant Matt Whitaker kijkt "uit naar de dag dat Duitsland naar de VS toe komt en zegt: we zijn klaar om de SACEUR-post over te nemen", zei hij volgens Britse krant The Telegraph op een veiligheidsconferentie.

Today's links

• The long game: Breaking up Big Tech is a long-run project.
• Hey look at this: Delights to delectate.
• Object permanence: ARRRRR!; Watching paint dry; CEOs are tall, lucky, men; Harpercollins demands authors' AI rights; Victorian bumwipe; Ted Koppel's stupid book; Alan Moore to unpublished authors; Anne Frank's US visa application was rejected; Google breakup.
• 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 long game (permalink)

Well, this fucking sucks. A federal judge has decided that Meta is not a monopolist, and that its acquisitions of Instagram and Whatsapp were not an illegal bid to secure and maintain a monopoly:

https://gizmodo.com/meta-learns-that-nothing-is-a-monopoly-if-you-just-wait-long-enough-2000687691

This is particularly galling because Mark Zuckerberg repeatedly, explicitly declared that these mergers were undertaken to reduce competition, which is the only circumstance in which pro-monopoly economists and lawyers say that mergers should be blocked.

Let me take a step back here. During the Reagan years, a new economic orthodoxy took hold, a weird combination of economic theory and conspiracy theory that held that:

a) It was bad economic policy to try and prevent monopolization, since monopolies are "efficient" and arise because companies are so totally amazing that we all voluntarily buy their products and pay for their services and;

b) The anti-monopoly laws on the books are actually pro-monopoly laws, and if you look at them just right, you'll find that what Congress really intended was for monopolies to be nurtured and protected:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/02/20/we-should-not-endure-a-king/

The one exception these monsters of history were willing to make to their pro-monopoly posture was this: if a corporation undertakes a merger because they are seeking a monopoly, then the government should step in and stop them. This is a great standard to come up with if what you really want to do is nothing, because how can you know why a company truly wants to buy another company? Who can ever claim to know what is in another person's heart?

This is a great wheeze if you want to allow as many monopolies as possible, unless the guy who's trying to get that monopoly is Mark Zuckerberg, because Zuck is a man who has never had a criminal intention he did not immediately put to writing and email to someone else.

This is the guy who put in writing the immortal words, "It is better to buy than to compete," and "what we’re really buying is time," and who described his plans to clone a competitor's features as intended to get there "before anyone can get close to their scale again":

https://www.theverge.com/2020/7/29/21345723/facebook-instagram-documents-emails-mark-zuckerberg-kevin-systrom-hearing

Basically, Zuck is the guy who works until 2:30 every night, and then, before turning in, sends some key executive a fully discoverable, immortally backed-up digital message that reads, "Hey Bob, you know that guy we were thinking about killing? Well, I've decided we should do it. And for avoidance of doubt, it's 100% a murder, and right now, at this moment, I am premeditating it."

And despite this wealth of evidence as to Zuckerberg's intention at the time, US regulators at the FTC and EU regulators at the Commission both waved through those mergers, as well as many other before and since. Because it turns out that in the pro-monopoly world, there are no bright lines, no mergers so nakedly corrupt that they should be prevented. All that stuff about using state power to prevent deliberate monopolization was always and forever just bullshit. In the pro-monopoly camp, all monopolies are warmly welcome.

It wasn't always this way. In the trustbusting era, enforcers joined with organized labor and activists for all kinds of human rights, from universal sufferage to ending Jim Crow, to smash corporate power. Foundational to this fight was the understanding that concentrated corporate power presented a serious danger: first, because of the way that it could corrupt our political process, and second, because of the difficulty of dislodging corporate power once it had been established.

In other words, trustbusters sought to prevent monopolies, not merely to break up monopolies once they were formed. They understood that a company that was too big to fail would also be too big to jail, and that impunity rotted societies from within.

Then came the project to dismantle antitrust and revive the monopolies. Corporatists from the University of Chicago School of Economics and their ultra-wealthy backers launched a multipronged attack on economics, law, and precedent. It was a successful bid to bring back oligarchy and establish a new class of modern aristocracy, whose dynastic fortunes would ensure their rule and the rule of their descendants for generations to come.

A key part of this was an attack on the judiciary. Like other professionals, federal judges are expected to undergo regular "ongoing education" to ensure they're current on the best practices in their field. Wealthy pro-monopolists bankrolled a series of junkets for judges called the "Manne Seminars," all-expenses-paid family trips to luxury resorts, where judges could be indoctrinated with the theory of "efficient monopolies":

https://pluralistic.net/2021/08/13/post-bork-era/#manne-down

40% of all federal judges attended a Manne Seminar, and empirical studies show that after graduating, these judges changed the way they ruled, to favor monopolies:

https://academic.oup.com/qje/advance-article/doi/10.1093/qje/qjaf042/8241352?login=false

The terrible beauty of this strategy is that you don't need to get all the judges into a Manne Seminar – you just need to get enough judges to attend that they will create a wall of precedent that every other judge will feel hemmed in by when they rule on antitrust cases. Those judgments further shore-up the pro-monopoly precedent, setting the stage for the next pro-monopoly judgment, and the next, and the next.

So here we are, a couple generations into the project to brainwash judges, monopolize the economy and establish a new aristocracy, and a judge just ruled that Meta isn't an illegal monopoly, even though Mark Zuckerberg literally put his explicit criminal intent in writing.

What are we to do? Should we despair? Does this mean it's all over?

Not hardly. Reversing 40+ years of pro-monopoly policy was always going to be a slog, with many setbacks on the way. That's why antitrust has historically sought to prevent monopolies. Once monopolies have conquered your economy, getting rid of them is far harder, or, as the joke from eastern Canada goes, "If you wanted to get there, I wouldn't start from here."

But you have to play the ball where it lies. The fact that Meta can deliberately set out to create a monopoly and still evade judgment is more reason to fight monopolies, not less – it's (more) evidence of how just corrupted and illegitimate our judicial system has become.

We've been here before. The first antitrust laws were passed to do the hard work of smashing existing monopolies, not the relatively easy task of preventing monopolization. Of course: before there is a law, there has to be a crime. Antitrust law was passed because of a monopoly problem, not as a pro-active measure to prevent the problem from arising.

Our forbears smashed monopolies that were, if anything, far more ferocious than Big Tech. They vanquished oligarchs whose perfidy and ruthlessness put today's ketamine-addled zuckermuskian mediocrities in the shade. How they did it is not a mystery: they just put in the hard yards of building coalitions and winning public sentiment.

They did it before and we can do it again. We know how it's done. We remember their names and what they did. Take Ida Tarbell, the slayer of John D Rockefeller and Standard Oil. Tarbell was a brilliant, fierce writer and orator, fearless and brilliant. She was the first woman in America to get a science degree, and a key driver of the movement for universal suffrage. But in addition to all that, she was an anti-monopolist.

Tarbell's father was a Pennsylvania oil man who'd been ruined by Rockefeller and Standard Oil. Determined to see him avenged, Tarbell researched the many tendrils of Rockefeller's empire and his devious tactics, and laid them bare in a pair of wildly successful serialized books, The History of the Standard Oil Company, Volumes I & II (published first in the popular national magazine Collier's):

https://pluralistic.net/2021/06/13/a-monopoly-isnt-the-same-as-legitimate-greatness/

Tarbell's History changed the way the country saw Rockefeller. She punctured his myth of brilliance and competence, and showed how he owed his fortune to swindling and cheating. She cut him down to size. She was a key figure in the American trustbusting movement, a catalyst for the revolution that saw Rockefeller and his fellow oligarchs overthrown.

This took a hell of a long time. The Sherman Act (which was used to break up Standard Oil) was passed in 1890, but Standard Oil wasn't broken up until 1912. It took perseverance through setback after setback, it took the compounding tragedies that drove people to question the order and demand change, and it took unglamorous organizing and dramatic street-fights to escape from oligarchy's powerful gravity well.

Today, we are back at square one, but we have advantages that Tarbell and the other trustbusters lacked. For one thing, we have them, the lessons of their fight and the inspiration of their victory. For another, we have the political wind at our back. All over the world, from China to Canada, from the EU to the USA, politicians have felt emboldened (or forced) to launch anti-monopoly efforts the likes of which have not been seen since the Carter administration:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/08/09/elite-disunity/#awoken-giants

What's more, these enforcers aren't alone – they can and do collaborate. Because these tech companies run the same swindles in every country in the world, enforcers can collaborate on building cases against them. After all the facts of Big Tech's crimes are virtually identical, whether you're in the UK, Singapore, South Korea, Canada or Germany:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/01/22/autocrats-of-trade/#dingo-babysitter

This is an advantage that the trustbusters who took down Rockefeller could only dream of. Like Big Tech, Rockefeller had a global empire, but unlike Big Tech, Rockefeller abused each of the nations of the world in distinct ways. In America, Rockefeller ran the refineries and pipelines; in Germany, he had a stranglehold on the ports.

Even if the Rockefeller-era trustbusters wanted to collaborate, sending memos back and forth across the Atlantic by zeppelin, all they could offer each other was warm wishes. US pipeline investigations had nothing to add to German port investigations.

Today's tech monopolists may be bigger than any one government, but they're not bigger than all the governments whose people they're abusing.

The trustbusters who brought down Rockefeller did something knowable and repeatable. Their work did not arise out of the lost arts of a fallen civilization. The work of taking down today's monopolists requires only that we recover our ancestors' moral fire and perseverance. No one needs to figure out how to build a pyramid without power tools or embalm a Pharaoh.

We merely have to build and sustain a global movement to destroy oligarchy.

(Merely!)

Yes, that's a hell of a big lift. But we're not alone. There are billions of people who suffer under oligarchy and an infinite variety of ways to erode its power, as a prelude to smashing that power. Our allies in antitrust include the voters who put Zohran Mamdani into office, going from less than 1% in the polls to a commanding majority in a three-way race, running on an anti-oligarch platform:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/06/28/mamdani/#trustbusting

(No coincidence that one of our most effective fighters is now co-leading Mamdani's transition team):

https://pluralistic.net/2025/11/15/unconscionability/#standalone-authority

Trustbusting alone will not end oligarchy and trustbusters alone cannot break up the monopolies. As with the original trustbusters, the modern trustbusting movement is but a part of a coalition that wants a world organized around the needs of the many, not the few.

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Hey look at this (permalink)

• Your Smartphone, Their Rules: How App Stores Enable Corporate-Government Censorship https://www.aclu.org/news/free-speech/app-store-oligopoly

• The Age of Extraction https://the-antimonopolist.ghost.io/the-age-of-extraction/

• HOPE Hacking Conference Banned From University Venue Over Apparent ‘Anti-Police Agenda’ https://www.404media.co/hope-hacking-conference-banned-from-university-venue-over-apparent-anti-police-agenda/

• HOPE CONFERENCE BANNED BY ST. JOHN'S UNIVERSITY https://www.2600.com/content/hope-conference-banned-st-johns-university

• unshittified.club https://unshittified.club/

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Object permanence (permalink)

#20yrsago Brit backpackers take Indian call-centre jobs https://web.archive.org/web/20051210103452/http://wiredblogs.tripod.com/sterling/index.blog?entry_id=1284171

#20yrsago Laser etching doesn’t necessarily void your warranty https://web.archive.org/web/20051126194823/http://www.makezine.com/blog/archive/2005/11/will_laser_etching_apple_gear.html

#20yrsago UCLA to MPAA shill: ARRRRRRR! https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2005-nov-18-fi-glickman18-story.html

#20yrsago RIAA prez: Lots of companies secretly install rootkits! It’s no biggie! https://web.archive.org/web/20051125041201/http://www.malbela.com/blog/archives/000375.html

#20yrsago Sony offers MP3s in replacement for rootkit CDs https://web.archive.org/web/20051124233458/https://www.upsrow.com/sonybmg/

#15yrsago TSA forces cancer survivor to remove prosthetic breast https://web.archive.org/web/20101120213044/http://www.wbtv.com/Global/story.asp?S=13534628

#15yrsago How the Victorians wiped their bums https://web.archive.org/web/20101123191021/http://wellcomelibrary.blogspot.com/2010/11/item-of-month-november-2010-victorian.html

#15yrsago Understanding the “microcredit crisis” in Andhra Pradesh https://web.archive.org/web/20101119012652/https://blogs.reuters.com/felix-salmon/2010/11/18/the-lessons-of-andhra-pradesh/

#15yrsago Canadian Heritage Minister inadvertently damns his own copyright bill https://web.archive.org/web/20101121054805/https://www.michaelgeist.ca/content/view/5456/125/

#15yrsago TSA confiscates heavily-armed soldiers’ nail-clippers https://redstate.com/erick/2010/11/18/another-tsa-outrage-n37064

#15yrsago Chris McKitterick pirates his own book https://mckitterick.livejournal.com/653743.html

#15yrsago Chinese woman kidnapped to labor camp on her wedding day over sarcastic re-Tweet https://web.archive.org/web/20120609051421/http://voices.washingtonpost.com/blog-post/2010/11/chinese_twitter_sentence_a_yea.html

#15yrsago RuneScape devs refuse to cave in to patent trolls https://web.archive.org/web/20101119012943/http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/31597/UKBased_RuneScape_Dev_Jagex_Wins_Patent_Infringement_Lawsuit.php

#10yrsago Manhattan DA calls for backdoors in all mobile operating systems https://web.archive.org/web/20151120003032/https://manhattanda.org/sites/default/files/11.18.15

#10yrsago Watching paint dry: epic crowfunded troll of the UK film censorship board https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/charlielyne/make-the-censors-watch-paint-drying?ref=video

#10yrsago CEOs are lucky, tall men https://hbr.org/2015/11/are-successful-ceos-just-lucky

#10yrsago America’s CEOs and hedge funds are starving the nation’s corporations to death https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/usa-buybacks-cannibalized/

#10yrsago EU official: all identified Paris attackers were from the EU https://web.archive.org/web/20151116223023/https://thinkprogress.org/world/2015/11/16/3722838/all-paris-attackers-identified-so-far-are-european-nationals-according-to-top-eu-official/

#10yrsago The Web is pretty great with Javascript turned off https://www.wired.com/2015/11/i-turned-off-javascript-for-a-whole-week-and-it-was-glorious/

#10yrsago If the Paris attackers weren’t using cryptography, the next ones will, and so should you https://insidesources.com/new-york-times-article-blaming-encryption-paris-attacks/

#10yrsago Zero: the number of security experts Ted Koppel consulted for hysterical cyberwar book https://www.techdirt.com/2015/11/19/ted-koppel-writes-entire-book-about-how-hackers-will-take-down-our-electric-grid-never-spoke-to-any-experts/

#10yrsago How a paid FBI informant created a terror plot that sent an activist to jail for 9 years https://theintercept.com/2015/11/19/an-fbi-informant-seduced-eric-mcdavid-into-a-bomb-plot-then-the-government-lied-about-it/

#10yrsago Google steps up to defend fair use, will fund Youtubers’ legal defenses https://publicpolicy.googleblog.com/2015/11/a-step-toward-protecting-fair-use-on.html?m=1

#10yrsago Alan Moore’s advice to unpublished authors https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CuaWu2uhmRQ

#10yrsago Private funding of public services is bankrupting the UK https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/nhs/11748960/The-PFI-hospitals-costing-NHS-2bn-every-year.html

#10yrsago The US government turned down Anne Frank’s visa application https://www.reuters.com/article/2007/02/14/us-annefrank-letters-idUSN1430569220070214/#HmyajvjLmsX2tVYf.97

#10yrsago Seriously, try “view source” on google.com https://xkcd.com/1605/#10yrsago

#5yrsago Tyson execs bet on covid spread in unsafe plant https://pluralistic.net/2020/11/19/disneymustpay/#you-bet-your-life

#5yrsago Disney stiffs writer https://pluralistic.net/2020/11/19/disneymustpay/#disneymustpay

#5yrsago Cyberpunk and Post-Cyberpunk https://pluralistic.net/2020/11/19/disneymustpay/#asl

#5yrsago Canada's GDPR https://pluralistic.net/2020/11/18/always-get-their-rationalisation/#consent

#5yrsago Telehealth chickenizes docs https://pluralistic.net/2020/11/18/always-get-their-rationalisation/#telehealth

#5yrsago The Mounties lied about social surveillance https://pluralistic.net/2020/11/18/always-get-their-rationalisation/#rcmp

#5yrsago Race, surveillance and tech https://pluralistic.net/2020/11/18/always-get-their-rationalisation/#asl

#1yrago Harpercollins wants authors to sign away AI training rights https://pluralistic.net/2024/11/18/rights-without-power/#careful-what-you-wish-for

#1yrago Forcing Google to spin off Chrome (and Android?) https://pluralistic.net/2024/11/19/breaking-up-is-hard-to-do/#shiny-and-chrome

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Upcoming appearances (permalink)

• Virtual: Enshittification at the Internet Archive, Nov 21
  https://www.eventbrite.com/e/book-talk-enshittification-tickets-1839608451399

• Virtual: Enshittification with Vass Bednar (Vancouver Public Library), Nov 21
  https://www.crowdcast.io/@bclibraries-present

• Toronto: Jailbreaking Canada (OCAD U), Nov 27
  https://www.ocadu.ca/events-and-exhibitions/jailbreaking-canada

• San Diego: Enshittification at the Mission Hills Branch Library, Dec 1
  https://libraryfoundationsd.org/events/doctorow

• Seattle: Neuroscience, AI and Society (University of Washington), Dec 4
  https://www.eventbrite.com/e/neuroscience-ai-and-society-cory-doctorow-tickets-1735371255139

• Madison, CT: Enshittification at RJ Julia, Dec 8
  https://rjjulia.com/event/2025-12-08/cory-doctorow-enshittification

• Hamburg: Chaos Communications Congress, Dec 27-30
  https://events.ccc.de/congress/2025/infos/index.html

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Recent appearances (permalink)

• It’s not your job to fix the internet (Vergecast)
  https://www.theverge.com/podcast/822822/enshittification-cory-doctorow-interview-vergecast

• Enshittification with danah boyd and Lee Vinsel (Peoples & Things)
  https://newbooksnetwork.com/cory-doctorow-on-enshittification-why-everything-suddenly-got-worse-and-what-to-do-about-it

• Enshittification and Extraction: The Internet Sucks Now, with Tim Wu (Oxford Internet Institute)
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CkYxMQJ9c94

• Working it out: Job security in the AI era (Web Summit)
  https://websummit.com/summaries/lis25/working-it-out-job-security-in-the-ai-era/

• How to dis-Enshittify the world (Blood In the Machine)
  https://www.bloodinthemachine.com/p/how-to-dis-enshittify-the-world-with

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Latest books (permalink)

• "Canny Valley": A limited edition collection of the collages I create for Pluralistic, self-published, September 2025

• "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 (the-bezzle.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

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Upcoming books (permalink)

• "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

• "The Reverse-Centaur's Guide to AI," a short book about being a better AI critic, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2026

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Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources:

Currently writing:

• "The Reverse Centaur's Guide to AI," a short book for Farrar, Straus and Giroux about being an effective AI critic. FIRST DRAFT COMPLETE AND SUBMITTED.

• A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING

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ISSN: 3066-764X

More than 16,000 residents in the border areas of the Kursk region were left without electricity after several substations were hit.

Togo has been among a number of African countries moving closer to Moscow, having signed a military cooperation agreement with Russia earlier this year.

Toshi_Tokyo has added a photo to the pool:

Ueda City, Japan

Much of the conversation about video and content over the last few weeks has been about the silencing of Jimmy Kimmels's show and the fact that we're seeing a shockingly rapid move towards the type of censorious media control typical of most authoritarian regimes.

But there's a broader trend that poses a looming threat to online video creators that I think is going a bit under the radar, so I took a minute to pull together a quick short-form video on the topic:

The key things that have shifted can be summarized with three points:

1. TikTok Takeover: The cronyism exploited to hand TikTok to Larry Ellison for a fraction of its worth, setting up the danger of its platform amplifying content controlled by the administration, and silencing dissenting voices.
2. Vimeo Vulnerability: The consolidation of a number of the major streaming video infrastructure providers (including Vimeo, one of the most important) under Bending Spoons, the notorious conglomerate which not only tends to enshittify its products, but which will now also present a unified target for the same censors who went after voices like Jimmy Kimmel and Stephen Colbert.
3. Creator Capture: The lack of available and accessible open alternatives to major distribution platforms like YouTube and TikTok — there's no "BlueSky for video" or "Mastodon for video", meaning there isn't the same opportunity for video creators to make themselves resilient to a platform takeover.

All of this is trying to make clear to video creators that they need to embrace the same radical control that podcasters have always had.

Separately, I'm also (obviously!) using this as a chance to start sharing a bit more of the videos I've been making lately. It's still very early, and I'm not quite sure what direction they're headed, so please do share any feedback you've got.

In general, I'm going to try to complement my writing here with some videos from time to time, just to make some of these concepts more accessible to different audiences. If you're inclined, please do take a look, and share them with people who might find them interesting. (I'm expecting to use both quick vertical formats and more substantive traditional horizontal videos, and to post across most of the major social networks so as to not be overly dependent on any one platform.)