In een woning aan de Prins Hendrikstraat in Hoek van Holland is maandagmiddag een steekpartij geweest. Daarbij zijn twee slachtoffers gewond geraakt.

Twee auto's zijn maandag met elkaar in botsing gekomen aan de Helling in Hardinxveld-Giessendam. Twee personen zijn daarna nagekeken door ambulancepersoneel. Aan beide voertuigen is flinke schade ontstaan.

AMSTERDAM (ANP) - De AEX-index is maandag toch nog met winst gesloten. Eerder op de dag ging de belangrijkste graadmeter aan het Damrak flink onderuit door de snel stijgende olieprijzen. Die normaliseerden iets gedurende de dag, wat een geruststellend effect had op beleggers.

Door de min van bijna 2 procent vlak na de opening noteerde de AEX-index op 963 punten de laagste stand sinds 2 januari. Aan het einde van de dag stond er een plus van 0,3 procent op de borden, met een stand van 983,00 punten. De MidKap verloor 1,2 procent tot 975,66 punten. Frankfurt, Londen en Parijs leverden tot 1 procent in.

Beleggers vrezen dat de hogere energieprijzen de inflatie weer aanwakkeren en dat de Europese Centrale Bank (ECB) de rente moet gaan verhogen om de inflatie onder controle te krijgen. Voor de Iranoorlog werd nog verwacht dat de rente in het eurogebied waarschijnlijk onveranderd zou blijven op 2 procent. Inmiddels wordt rekening gehouden met twee renteverhogingen van een kwart procentpunt dit jaar.

TER APEL (ANP) - Na aanhoudende berichten over overlastgevende asielzoekers in Emmen zet minister Bart van den Brink (Asiel, CDA) extra mensen in om het toezicht op straat te verscherpen. Tijdens zijn eerste bezoek als bewindsman aan het aanmeldcentrum in Ter Apel maakte hij bekend zes buitengewoon opsporingsambtenaren (boa's) en een teamleider in te zetten en bovendien de toezichtteams op straat met acht mensen te versterken.

"De gemeente Emmen heeft al langere tijd last van ongeregeldheden en dat is onverteerbaar voor bewoners", lichtte Van den Brink toe. Daarom zet hij extra mensen in voor de duur van een jaar. De gemeente krijgt de taak om deze boa's en toezichthouders aan te sturen. Het ministerie zal na acht maanden evalueren hoe het gaat en bekijken of 'bijsturing' nodig is.

De gemeente besloot eind vorig jaar het stationsgebied van Emmen aan te wijzen als veiligheidsrisicogebied. Daardoor mag de politie hier preventief fouilleren. Burgemeester Eric van Oosterhout (PvdA) schreef in zijn besluit over het stijgende aantal incidenten met asielzoekers die tijdelijk in Emmen verblijven of op doorreis zijn van of naar het nabijgelegen aanmeldcentrum in Ter Apel. De politicus wees erop dat boa's en buschauffeurs zijn uitgescholden en bespuugd. Daarnaast zorgen ook dak- en thuislozen en verwarde personen voor overlast.

Burgemeester Eric van Oosterhout van Emmen is tevreden met deze toezegging van extra mensen in zijn gemeente. "Dat maakt zeker wat uit. Ik ben ervan overtuigd dat je dat zeker gaat merken in het gebied", zei hij na het bezoek. Daar waren hij en de burgemeesters van Westerwolde en Groningen ook bij. "De echte oplossing ligt natuurlijk in de reductie van het aantal overlastgevende asielzoekers. En de minister heeft ook toegezegd dat hij daar hard aan wil gaan werken."

Multivitaminen zijn al jaren onderwerp van een fel wetenschappelijk debat. Zijn ze een eenvoudige manier om gezonder ouder te worden of vooral onderdeel van een miljardenindustrie zonder bewezen effect? Een nieuwe Amerikaanse studie levert nu aanwijzingen dat een dagelijkse multivitamine het biologische verouderingsproces mogelijk toch wel kan vertragen.

Onderzoekers van het Brigham and Women’s Hospital en Harvard Medical School analyseerden gegevens van bijna duizend deelnemers van gemiddeld ongeveer 70 jaar oud die twee jaar lang dagelijks een multivitamine of een placebo slikten.

Biologische leeftijd

Volgens de onderzoekers was er bij de deelnemers die een multivitamine namen sprake van een langzamere biologische veroudering. Dat werd gemeten met twee zogenoemde epigenetische 'verouderingsklokken', modellen die op basis van DNA-patronen in bloed voorspellen hoe snel het lichaam veroudert.

Bij deelnemers die multivitaminen gebruikten, nam de biologische leeftijd volgens deze modellen jaarlijks met ongeveer 0,11 tot 0,21 jaar minder toe dan bij de placebogroep. Eerder onderzoek suggereert dat zulke veranderingen kunnen samenhangen met een 3 tot 7 procent lager risico op kanker over een periode van tien jaar.

De studie testte naast multivitaminen ook een dagelijkse dosis van 500 milligram cacaoflavanolen, stoffen uit cacao die in eerdere studies gezondheidsvoordelen lieten zien. In deze analyse bleken ze echter geen effect te hebben op de onderzochte verouderingsklokken.

De onderzoekers noemen de resultaten “bemoedigend”, maar benadrukken dat grotere en langere studies nodig zijn om vast te stellen of de gemeten veranderingen ook leiden tot daadwerkelijk minder ziekte of een langere levensduur. Wel zagen deelnemers die multivitaminen slikten aanwijzingen voor verbeteringen in ontstekingswaarden en cognitieve functies.

Kanttekeningen

Opvallend is dat vooral deelnemers die aan het begin van het onderzoek relatief snel biologisch verouderden, het meeste baat leken te hebben bij de supplementen. Volgens de onderzoekers kan dat erop wijzen dat multivitaminen vooral helpen wanneer er sprake is van een voedingsdeficiëntie.

Onafhankelijke wetenschappers noemen de studie een belangrijke stap in supplementenonderzoek, maar plaatsen ook kanttekeningen. Of multivitaminen daadwerkelijk leiden tot een langere gezonde levensduur is volgens hen nog altijd een open vraag.

Bron: Science Alert

Zoet water is uiterst schaars in het Midden-Oosten. Om dat te produceren wordt het zout uit zeewater gehaald, zodat dat als drinkwater kan worden gebruikt. Kunnen die cruciale installaties een doel worden in de oorlog?

Mojtaba Khamenei has been chosen to replace his father Ayatollah Ali Khamenei as Iran’s supreme leader, while the country continues to be heavily bombarded by US and Israeli forces. There are concerns the move could lead to a further escalation of war in the Middle East, after Donald Trump warned that Khamenei was an ‘unacceptable’ choice. Lucy Hough speaks to diplomatic editor Patrick Wintour

Continue reading...

I should probably be fuming about the way that companies try to cash in on IWD. But there are so many vile opinions to worry about instead

Sunday was International Women’s Day, which you’ll know because every company you’ve ever shopped with will have emailed you, taking this fine opportunity to suggest things women might like to buy. Plants, clothes, spices … all are particularly female-friendly at this time of year, or maybe I’m revealing nothing but my algorithms. Is any of it emancipating? Would you have to balance the freedom of the woman wearing the midi-dress against the servitude of the woman who had to sew it? I don’t really want to set myself up as the arbiter of the spirit of IWD, being unable to remember a time before it meant mass-marketing mail-out.

On Women’s Day Eve, though – yes, that is a thing – I was attending evensong at a university college, maybe for the first time ever, and it was definitely the first time I’d heard an IWD sermon. The Rev Marcus Green had set himself the challenge of feministly reading a book, the Bible, in which almost none of the women have a name. There are a bunch called Mary, but so few other names that “Mary” was basically Bible-speak for “Karen”. There’s one who is the mother of the sons of Zebedee, but even though she has actual lines and he has none, he still gets this cracking name, while you have to piece her identity together by triangulating other accounts, like an investigator at a crime scene.

Continue reading...

Today's links

• Billionaires are a danger to themselves and (especially) us: A billionaire is a machine for producing policy failures at scale.
• Hey look at this: Delights to delectate.
• Object permanence: Librarians Against DRM; Copyright maximalist MP is a pirate; "The Monster"; The perversity of self-destructing ebooks; Space opera cliches; Social software politics; Game in a browser's location bar; Map of sf/f; Group chat sucks; Jeep hack; Gandersauce.
• 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.

---

Billionaires are a danger to themselves and (especially) us (permalink)

Even if rich people were no more likely to believe stupid shit than you or me, it would still be a problem. After all, I believe in my share of stupid shit (and if you think that none of the shit you believe in is stupid, then I'm afraid we've just identified at least one kind of stupid shit you believe in).

The problem isn't whether rich people believe stupid shit; it's the fact that when a rich person believes something stupid, that belief can turn into torment for dozens, thousands, or millions of people.

Here's a historical example that I think about a lot. In 1928, Henry Ford got worried about the rubber supply chain. All the world's rubber came from plantations in countries that he had limited leverage over and he was worried that these countries could kneecap his operation by cutting off the supply. So Ford decided he would start cultivating rubber in the Brazilian jungles, judging that Brazil's politicians were biddable, bribeable or bludgeonable and thus not a risk.

Ford took over a large area of old-growth jungle in Brazil and decreed that a town be built there. But not just any town: Ford decreed that the town of Fordlandia would be a replica of Dearborn, the company town he controlled in Michigan. Now, leaving aside the colonialism and other ethical considerations, there are plenty of practical reasons not to replicate Dearborn, MI on the banks of the Rio Tapajós.

For one thing, Brazil is in the southern hemisphere, and Dearborn is in the northern hemisphere. The prefab houses that Ford ordered for Fordlandia had windows optimized for southern exposure, which is the normal way of designing a dwelling in the northern hemisphere. In the southern hemisphere, you try and put your windows on the other side of the building.

Ford's architects told him this, and proposed having the factory flip the houses' orientation. But Ford was adamant: he'd had a vision for a replica of his beloved Dearborn plunked down smack in the middle of the Amazon jungle, and by God, that was what he would get:

https://memex.craphound.com/2010/06/02/fordlandia-novelistic-history-of-henry-fords-doomed-midwestern-town-in-the-amazon-jungle/

Fordlandia was a catastrophe for so many reasons, and the windows are just a little footnote, but it's a detail that really stuck with me because it's just so stupid. Ford was a vicious antisemite, a bigot, a union-buster and an all-round piece of shit, but also, he believed that his opinions trumped the axial tilt of the planet Earth.

In other words, Henry Ford wasn't merely evil – he was also periodically as thick as pigshit. Ford's cherished stupidities didn't just affect him, they also meant that a whole city full of people in the Amazon had windows facing the wrong direction. Like I said, I sometimes believe stupid things, but those stupid things aren't consequential the way that rich people's cherished stupidities are.

This would be bad enough if rich people were no more prone to stupid beliefs than the rest of us, but it's actually worse than that. When I believe something stupid, it tends to get me in trouble, which means that (at least some of the time), I get to learn from my mistakes. But if you're a rich person, you can surround yourself with people who will tell you that you are right even when you are so wrong, with the result that you get progressively more wrong, until you literally kill yourself:

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/alternative-medicine-extend-abbreviate-steve-jobs-life/

A rich person could surround themselves with people who tell them that they're being stupid, but in practice, this almost never happens. After all, the prime advantage to accumulating as much money as possible is freedom from having to listen to other people. The richer you are, the fewer people there are who can thwart your will. Get rich enough and you can be found guilty of 34 felonies and still become President of the United States of America.

But wait, it gets even worse! Hurting other people is often a great way to get even more rich. So the richer you get, the more insulated you are from consequences for hurting other people, and the more you hurt other people, the richer you get.

What a world! The people whose wrong beliefs have the widest blast-radius and inflict the most collateral damage also have the fewest sources of external discipline that help them improve their beliefs, and often, that collateral damage is a feature, not a bug.

Billionaires are a danger to themselves and (especially) to the rest of us. They are wronger than the median person, and the consequences of their wrongness are exponentially worse than the consequences of the median person's mistake.

This has been on my mind lately because of a very local phenomenon.

I live around the corner from Burbank airport, a great little regional airport on the edge of Hollywood. It was never brought up to code, so the gates are really close together, which means the planes park really close together, and there's no room for jetways, so they park right up against the terminal. The ground crews wheel staircase/ramps to both the front and back of the plane. That means that you can walk the entire length of the terminal in about five minutes, and boarding and debarking takes less than half the time of any other airport. Sure, if one of those planes ever catches fire, every other plane is gonna go boom, and everyone in the terminal is toast, but my sofa-to-gate time is like 15 minutes.

Best of all, Burbank is a Southwest hub. When we moved here a decade ago, this was great. Southwest, after all, has free bag-check, open seating, a great app, friendly crews, and a generous policy for canceling or changing reservations.

If you fly in the US, you know what's coming next. In 2024, a hedge fund called Elliott Investment Management acquired an 11% stake in SWA, forced a boardroom coup that saw it replace five of the company's six directors, and then instituted a top to bottom change in airline policies. The company eliminated literally everything that Southwest fliers loved about the airline, from the free bags to the open seating:

https://www.reddit.com/r/SouthwestAirlines/comments/1ji79zt/elliott_management_is_dismantling_everything/

The airline went from being the least enshittified airline in America to the most. Southwest is now worse than Spirit airlines – no, really. Southwest doesn't just merely charge for seat selection, but if you refuse to pay for seat selection, they preferentially place you in a middle seat even on a half-empty flight, as a way of pressuring you to pay the sky-high junk fee for seat selection:

https://www.reddit.com/r/SouthwestAirlines/comments/1rd2g0k/ngl_thought_yall_were_joking/

Obviously, passengers who are given middle seats (and the passengers around them, who paid for window or aisle seats) don't like this, so they try to change seats. So SWA now makes its flight attendants order passengers not to switch seats, and they've resorted to making up nonsense about "weight balancing":

https://www.reddit.com/r/SouthwestAirlines/comments/1roz1bg/you_can_change_to_an_empty_seatbut_only_until_we/

Even without junk fees, Southwest's fares are now higher than their rivals. I'm flying to San Francisco tomorrow to host EFF executive director Cindy Cohn's book launch at City Lights:

https://citylights.com/events/cindy-cohn-launch-party-for-privacys-defender/

Normally, I would have just booked a SWA flight from Burbank to SFO or Oakland (which gets less fog and is more reliable). But the SWA fare – even without junk fees – was higher than a United ticket out of the same airport, even including a checked bag, seat selection, etc. Southwest is genuinely worse than Spirit now: not only does it have worse policies (forcing occupancy of middle seats!), and more frustrated, angrier flight crew (flight attendants are palpably sick of arguing with passengers), but SWA is now more expensive than United!

All of this is the fault of one billionaire: Elliott Investment Management CEO Peter Singer, one of America's most guillotineable plutes. This one guy personally enshittified Southwest Airlines, along with many other businesses in America and abroad. Because of this one guy, millions of people are made miserable every single day. Singer flogged off his shares and made a tidy profit. He's long gone. But SWA will never recover, and every day until its collapse, millions of passengers and flight attendants will have a shitty day because of this one guy:

https://www.wfaa.com/article/money/business/southwest-airlines-activist-investor-elliott-lower-ownership-stake/287-470b5131-ef1a-4648-a8ec-4cc017f7914c

Even if Peter Singer were no more prone to ethical missteps than you or me, the fact that he is morbidly wealthy means that his ethical blind spots leave behind a trail of wreckage that rivals a comet. And of course, being as rich as Peter Singer inflicts a lasting neurological injury that makes you incapable of understanding how wrong you are, which means that Peter Singer is doubly dangerous.

Billionaires aren't just a danger when they're trying to make money, either. One of the arguments in favor of billionaires is that sometimes, the "good" billionaires take up charitable causes. But even here, billionaires can cause sweeping harm. Take Bill Gates, whose charitable projects include waging war on the public education system, seeking to replace public schools with charter schools.

Gates has no background in education, but he spent millions on this project. He is one of the main reasons that poor communities around the country have been pressured to shutter their public schools and replace them with weakly regulated, extractive charters:

https://apnews.com/article/92dc914dd97c487a9b9aa4b006909a8c

This was a catastrophe. A single billionaire dilettante's cherished stupidity wrecked the educational chances of a generation of kids:

https://dissidentvoice.org/2026/03/free-market-charter-schools-wreak-havoc-in-michigan/

Gates was a prep-school kid, so it's weird for him to have forceful views about a public education system he never experienced. In reality, it's not so much that Gates has forceful views about schools – rather, he has forceful views about teachers' unions, which he wishes to see abolished. Gates is one of America's most vicious union-busters:

https://teamster.org/2019/10/teamsters-union-and-allies-protest-bill-gates-and-cambridge-union-society/

Gates's ideology permeates all of his charitable work. We all know about Gates's work on public health, but less well known is the role that Gates has played in blocking poor countries from exercising their rights under the WTO to override drug patents in times of emergency. In the 2000s, the Gates Foundation blocked South Africa from procuring the anti-retroviral AIDS drugs it was entitled to under the WTO's TRIPS agreement. The Gates Foundation blocked the Access to Medicines WIPO treaty, which would have vastly expanded the Global South's ability to manufacture life-saving drugs. And during the acute phase of the covid pandemic, Gates personally intervened to kill the WHO Covid-19 Technology Access Pool and to get Oxford to renege on its promise to make an open-source vaccine:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/04/13/public-interest-pharma/#gates-foundation

It's not that Gates is insincere in his desire to improve public health outcomes – it's that his desire to improve public health conflicts with his extreme ideology of maximum intellectual property regimes. Gates simply opposes open science and compulsory licenses on scientific patents, even when that kills millions of people (as it did in South Africa). Gates's morbid wealth magnifies his cherished stupidities into weapons of mass destruction.

Gates is back in the news these days because of his membership in the Epstein class. Epstein is the poster child for the ways that wealth is a force-multiplier for bad ideas. We can't separate Epstein's sexual predation from his wealth. Epstein spun elaborate junk-science theories to justify raping children, becoming mired in that most rich-guy coded of quagmires, eugenics:

https://www.statnews.com/2026/02/24/epstein-cell-line-george-church-harvard-personal-genome-project/

Epstein openly discussed his plans to seed the planet with his DNA, reportedly telling one scientist that he planned to fill his ranch with young trafficked girls and to keep 20 of them pregnant with his children at all times:

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/31/business/jeffrey-epstein-eugenics.html

We still don't know where Epstein's wealth came from, but we know that he was a central node in a network of vast riches, much of which he directed to his weird scientific projects. That network also protected him from consequences for his prolific child-rape project, which had more than 1,000 survivors.

In embracing eugenics junk science, Epstein was ahead of the curve. Today, eugenics is all the rage, reviving an idea that went out of fashion shortly after the Fordlandia era. After all, Henry Ford didn't just build a private city where his word was law – he also bought up media companies to promote his ideas of racial superiority:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Dearborn_Independent

Despite being too cringe to make it onto Epstein island, Elon Musk is the standard bearer for the dangers of billionaireism:

https://people.com/emails-reveal-that-elon-musk-asked-jeffrey-epstein-about-visiting-his-island-11896842

Like Henry Ford, he craves company towns where his word is law:

https://www.texasmonthly.com/news-politics/inside-starbase-spacex-elon-musk-company-town/

Like Ford, he buys up media companies and then uses them to push his batshit ideas about racial superiority:

https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2025/01/eugenics-isnt-dead-its-thriving-in-tech/

Like Peter Singer, he is a master enshittifier who never met a junk fee he didn't fall in love with:

https://edition.cnn.com/2022/11/01/tech/musk-twitter-verification-price

And like Epstein, he wants to seed the human race with his babies, and has built a secret compound in the desert he plans to fill with women he has impregnated:

https://www.realtor.com/news/celebrity-real-estate/elon-musk-compound-austin-children/

Billionaires and their lickspittles will tell you that all of this is wrong: the market selects "capital allocators" by executing a vast, distributed computer program whose logic gates are every producer and consumer in The Economy (TM), and whose data are trillions of otherwise uncomputable buy and sell decisions.

This is a tautology: the argument goes that only good people are made rich, and therefore all the rich people are good. If rich people had as many cherished stupidities as I claim, The Economy (TM) would relieve them of their wealth, and thus their power to allocate capital, and thus their potential to hurt people by being wrong, which means that they must be right.

This is the stupidest (and most destructive) of all of billionaireism's cherished stupidities: that we live in a meritocracy, which means that whatever the richest people want must be right. It's a modern update to the doctrine of divine providence, which held that we can discern god's favor through wealth. The more god loves you, the richer he makes you.

This can't be true, because every single economic cataclysm in the history of the world was the fault of rich people. Rich people gave us the 19th century's bank panics. They gave us the South Seas bubble. They gave us the Great Depression, and the S&L Crisis, and the Great Financial Crisis. They invented greedflation and created the cost of living crisis. Today, they are teeing up an AI crash that will make 2008 look like the best day of your life:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/12/05/pop-that-bubble/#u-washington

The old left aphorism has it that "every billionaire is a policy failure." That's true, but it's incomplete. Every billionaire is a machine for producing policy failures at scale.

(Image: Aude, CC BY 4.0, modified)

---

Hey look at this (permalink)

• How Live Nation allegedly terrorized the concert industry https://www.theverge.com/report/891241/live-nation-ticketmaster-week-one-jury-trial

• Canada's One-Man Air Force – and His Calculated Airline Crusade https://www.donotpassgo.ca/p/canadas-one-man-air-force-and-his

• Cloud Sovereignty Framework Self Assessment https://www.suse.com/cloud-sovereignty-framework-assessment/

• EFF, Ubuntu and Other Distros Discuss How to Respond to Age-Verification Laws https://linux.slashdot.org/story/26/03/09/0544224/eff-ubuntu-and-other-distros-discuss-how-to-respond-to-age-verification-laws

• Reading “The Ethnography of Infrastructure” https://www.not-so-obvious.net/reading-the-ethnography-of-infrastructure/

---

Object permanence (permalink)

#20yrsago Indie label uses heartfelt note instead of copy-restriction http://blog.resonancefm.com/archives/48

#20yrsago Clay Shirky’s ETECH presentation on the politics of social software https://craphound.com/youshutupetech2006.txt

#20yrsago Judge quotes Adam Sandler movie in decision blasting defendant https://www.thesmokinggun.com/documents/crime/motion-denied-because-youre-idiot

#15yrsago Video game in your browser’s location bar web.archive.org/web/20110309212313/http://probablyinteractive.com/url-hunter

#15yrsago Wondrous, detailed map of the history of science fiction https://web.archive.org/web/20110310152548/http://scimaps.org/submissions/7-digital_libraries/maps/thumbs/024_LG.jpg

#15yrsago American Library Association task forces to take on ebook lending https://web.archive.org/web/20110310085634/https://www.wo.ala.org/districtdispatch/?p=5749

#15yrsago Wisconsin capitol bans recording, flags, reading, balloons, chairs, bags, backpacks, photography, etc etc etc https://captimes.com/news/local/govt-and-politics/more-rules-released-for-state-capitol-visitors/article_f044044f-6183-5128-b718-d5dffbfdb573.html

#15yrsago Librarians Against DRM logo https://web.archive.org/web/20110308170030/https://readersbillofrights.info/librariansagainstDRM

#15yrsago Extinct invertebrates caught in a 40 million year old sex act https://web.archive.org/web/20110303234001/http://news.discovery.com/animals/40-million-year-old-sex-act-captured-in-amber.html

#15yrsago Improvised toilets of earthquake-struck Christchurch https://web.archive.org/web/20110310044912/https://www.showusyourlongdrop.co.nz/

#15yrsago Canadian MP who shills for the record industry is an enthusiastic pirate https://web.archive.org/web/20110310163136/https://www.michaelgeist.ca/content/view/5673/125/

#15yrsago The Monster: the fraud and depraved indifference that caused the subprime meltdown https://memex.craphound.com/2011/03/07/the-monster-the-fraud-and-depraved-indifference-that-caused-the-subprime-meltdown/

#15yrsago Self-destructing ebooks: paper’s fragility is a bug, not a feature https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2011/mar/08/ebooks-harpercollins-26-times

#10yrsago Senior U.S. immigration judge says 3 and 4 year old children can represent themselves in court https://web.archive.org/web/20160304201631/http://www.thestar.com/news/world/2016/03/04/us-judge-says-3-and-4-year-olds-can-represent-themselves-in-immigration-court.html

#10yrsago Crimefighting for fun and profit: data-mining Medicare fraud and likely whistleblowers https://www.wired.com/2016/03/john-mininno-medicare/

#10yrsago Extensive list of space opera cliches https://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2016/03/towards-a-taxonomy-of-cliches-.html

#10yrsago Verizon pays $1.35M FCC settlement for using “supercookies” https://web.archive.org/web/20160308111653/https://motherboard.vice.com/read/verizon-settles-over-supercookies

#10yrsago Group chat: “an all-day meeting with random participants and no agenda” https://signalvnoise.com/svn3/is-group-chat-making-you-sweat/#.1chnl7hf4

#10yrsago Less than a year on, America has all but forgotten the epic Jeep hack https://www.wired.com/2016/03/survey-finds-one-4-americans-remembers-jeep-hack/

#10yrsago Racial justice organizers to FBI vs Apple judge: crypto matters to #blacklivesmatter https://theintercept.com/2016/03/08/the-fbi-vs-apple-debate-just-got-less-white/

#1yrago Gandersauce https://pluralistic.net/2025/03/08/turnabout/#is-fair-play

---

Upcoming appearances (permalink)

• San Francisco: Launch for Cindy Cohn's "Privacy's Defender" (City Lights), Mar 10
  https://citylights.com/events/cindy-cohn-launch-party-for-privacys-defender/

• Barcelona: Enshittification with Simona Levi/Xnet (Llibreria Finestres), Mar 20
  https://www.llibreriafinestres.com/evento/cory-doctorow/

• Berkeley: Bioneers keynote, Mar 27
  https://conference.bioneers.org/

• Montreal: Bronfman Lecture (McGill) Apr 10
  https://www.eventbrite.ca/e/artificial-intelligence-the-ultimate-disrupter-tickets-1982706623885

• London: Resisting Big Tech Empires (LSBU)
  https://www.tickettailor.com/events/globaljusticenow/2042691

• Berlin: Re:publica, May 18-20
  https://re-publica.com/de/news/rp26-sprecher-cory-doctorow

• Berlin: Enshittification at Otherland Books, May 19
  https://www.otherland-berlin.de/de/event-details/cory-doctorow.html

• Hay-on-Wye: HowTheLightGetsIn, May 22-25
  https://howthelightgetsin.org/festivals/hay/big-ideas-2

---

Recent appearances (permalink)

• Chicken Mating Harnesses (This Week in Tech)
  https://twit.tv/shows/this-week-in-tech/episodes/1074

• The Virtual Jewel Box (U Utah)
  https://tanner.utah.edu/podcast/enshittification-cory-doctorow-matthew-potolsky/

• Tanner Humanities Lecture (U Utah)
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i6Yf1nSyekI

• The Lost Cause
  https://streets.mn/2026/03/02/book-club-the-lost-cause/

• Should Democrats Make A Nuremberg Caucus? (Make It Make Sense)
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MWxKrnNfrlo

---

Latest books (permalink)

• "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

---

Upcoming books (permalink)

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

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

• "The Post-American Internet," a geopolitical sequel of sorts to Enshittification, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2027

• "Unauthorized Bread": a middle-grades graphic novel adapted from my novella about refugees, toasters and DRM, FirstSecond, 2027

• "The Memex Method," Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2027

---

Colophon (permalink)

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 ( words today, total)

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

• "The Post-American Internet," a short book about internet policy in the age of Trumpism. PLANNING.

• 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.

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.

---

How to get Pluralistic:

Blog (no ads, tracking, or data-collection):

Pluralistic.net

Newsletter (no ads, tracking, or data-collection):

https://pluralistic.net/plura-list

Mastodon (no ads, tracking, or data-collection):

https://mamot.fr/@pluralistic

Bluesky (no ads, possible tracking and data-collection):

https://bsky.app/profile/doctorow.pluralistic.net

Medium (no ads, paywalled):

https://doctorow.medium.com/
https://twitter.com/doctorow

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

READ CAREFULLY: By reading this, you agree, on behalf of your employer, to release me from all obligations and waivers arising from any and all NON-NEGOTIATED agreements, licenses, terms-of-service, shrinkwrap, clickwrap, browsewrap, confidentiality, non-disclosure, non-compete and acceptable use policies ("BOGUS AGREEMENTS") that I have entered into with your employer, its partners, licensors, agents and assigns, in perpetuity, without prejudice to my ongoing rights and privileges. You further represent that you have the authority to release me from any BOGUS AGREEMENTS on behalf of your employer.

ISSN: 3066-764X