
Today's links
- Everybody pees: Even Jeff Bezos.
- Hey look at this: Delights to delectate.
- Object permanence: Zune won't play Microsoft files; Papercraft 1:1 Mustang; Third gender for Aussie passports; France hacked Canada; EC v links; Welcome to Night Vale; University spends librarian's bequest on football scoreboard; Everything is always broken.
- Upcoming appearances: Budapest, Edmonton, Boston, South Bend, Hudson, Calgary, Winnipeg, Vancouver, Victoria, Ottawa.
- 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.

Jeff Bezos and I are very different people. For one thing, he is a sociopathic billionaire who built his fortune by monopolizing bookselling while I am a penniless author of books. He was born in 1964 and is 62; I was born in 1971 and am 55.
We've met a few times and even corresponded some in Amazon's early years, though I haven't had contact with him in decades. Despite that very minor acquaintanceship and that long gap in our message history, I can tell you one thing I know for sure about Jeffrey Preston Bezos: he needs to pee all the time.
How do I know? Because peeing all the time is an inescapable feature of aging, and Bezos has eight years on me, and I have to pee all the time. Jeff Bezos, like all older people, must contend with a progressively weakening bladder. Honestly, it's a small price to pay in exchange for the everyday miracle of growing older (as opposed to perishing).
The only reason I mention Jeff Bezos's increasingly insistent bladder here is because of how hard it is to reconcile the very different circumstances of Bezos's bladder with the bladders of the hundreds of thousands of Amazon delivery and warehouse workers who are not allowed to pee at all. Amazon's warehouse and delivery workers are "reverse centaurs," monitored by a constellation of apps and cameras, and they are severely punished for falling behind in the cadence set by Amazon's software, and that robot timekeeper does not make allowances for pee breaks:
https://pluralistic.net/2025/10/23/traveling-salesman-solution/
This isn't a secret, and Amazon's come in for a lot of flack over it. But Amazon's "solution" is to add more penalties for peeing. Drivers who return to the depot with urine-filled bottles in their vans are punished as severely as they would be if they stopped to find a toilet. Thing is, the mere fact that your boss's robot says you're not allowed to pee does not matter to your bladder or kidneys, and when you gotta go, you gotta go.
That's why the roads leading to Amazon's warehouses are lined with pee bottles that drivers have hucked out of their windows before arriving at the loading dock. There are so many of these that the British media activist Oobah Butler was able to harvest them and offer a line of "bitter lemon energy drinks" on Amazon made from bottled driver piss. The drink was an Amazon bestseller and the company even asked Butler if he wanted them to help him scale up his deliveries:
https://pluralistic.net/2023/10/20/release-energy/#the-bitterest-lemon
The fact that Bezos needs to piss and also the fact that he commands an army of hundreds of thousands of workers who are prohibited from pissing really supports my hypothesis that billionaires don't really believe that other people are real. If Jeff Bezos believed that when his drivers needed to pee that it felt the same as when he needed to pee, Jeff Bezos would let those drivers pee:
https://pluralistic.net/2026/05/13/vibe-governance/#k-hole
"Needing to pee" is a bedrock of the shared condition of existence itself, extending beyond humans to our "horizontal brothers and sisters" (John Muir's delightful name for the other animals we share this planet with). Anyone who's ever had a dog understands this. I'm not really a dog person, but when I meet a dog that really needs to be let out of the house, my bladder twinges in sympathy. When I contemplate the kidneys and bladders of Bezos's drivers and packers, I get a sharp, persistent ache that starts about an inch below my navel.
I think billionaire solipsism is inevitable. The mere fact of dealing with people as mass statistical abstractions – hundreds of thousands of Amazon workers, billions of social media users and Google searchers – turns the majority of the world's other humans into phantasms, defective bots whose bothaviors are maddeningly non-deterministic and sub-optimal.
Add to that the fact that harvesting billions of dollars requires you to inflict pain on thousands or even millions of those phantasms whose money, privacy and labor you've extracted, and it's easy to see how you'd end up in a world where you can't bear to contemplate the fact that other people's pain is as real as your own. Solipsism is a deadly, conscience-eroding occupational hazard of the rich and powerful. No visitor to Epstein Island could have made the visit if the pain of those young women was as real to them as the pain of their own daughters and friends.
There's a short line from this solipsism to billionaires' enthusiasm for AI. When you don't think other people are really real, it's easy to believe that they can be swapped out for chatbots. Mark Zuckerberg's quest to replace your friends with chatbots makes sense once you realize that for Mark Zuckerberg, you and your friends are already just balky, shitty chatbots:
https://pluralistic.net/2026/08/06/sin-is-when/#you-treat-people-as-things
The belief that bots can teach your kids or counsel you through your psychological problems or look after your health concerns is perfectly consistent with the belief that you're more-or-less a bot, and also that the teachers, doctors and shrinks you rely on are also basically bots:
https://pluralistic.net/2026/07/28/hitl-ers/#ai-ai-oh
The great crisis of oligarchy is not merely that it transfers power from democratically accountable public servants and elected representatives to oligarchs. The real crisis is that attaining oligarch status is incompatible with viewing other people as real. That's how we ended up with the richest man on earth slaughtering hundreds of thousands of the world's poorest children for the lulz:
https://hsph.harvard.edu/news/usaid-shutdown-has-led-to-hundreds-of-thousands-of-deaths/
Everybody pees. When I die, when Jeff Bezos dies, and when you die, our bladders will give way and we will pee ourselves. A declaration of war on other people's right to pee is a declaration of war on humanity itself.
Hey look at this (permalink)


Object permanence (permalink)
#20yrsago Microsoft Zune won’t play purchased Microsoft media files https://web.archive.org/web/20061014104638/https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/archives/004910.php
#15yrsago Papercraft 1:1 model of a 1969 Mustang, accurate to the smallest component https://web.archive.org/web/20110923151701/http://www.jonathanbrand.com/images/in_progress/paper_car/motor/pages/motor01.htm
#15yrsago Third gender option added to Australian passports https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-pacific-14926598
#10yrsago French spy boss admits France cyberattacked Iran, Canada, Spain, Greece, Norway, Ivory Coast, Algeria, and others https://medium.com/@msuiche/nsa-hacked-france-in-2012-414d8de4bdcf#.e4hnvyj6s
#10yrsago Elizabeth Warren to FBI director: now that investigations are fair game, what about banksters? https://s3.documentcloud.org/documents/3107565/EMBARGOED-Warren-FBI-FCIC-Letter.pdf
#10yrsago European Commission wants to break the web, give publishers the right to charge for inbound links https://felixreda.eu/2016/09/attack-on-link/
#10yrsago Machine learning system can descramble pixelated/blurred redactions 83% of the time https://arxiv.org/pdf/1609.00408v2
#10yrsago Welcome to Night Vale: scripts and notes from podcasting’s eeriest drama https://memex.craphound.com/2016/09/15/welcome-to-night-vale-scripts-and-notes-from-podcastings-eeriest-drama/
#10yrsago UNH will spend $1M of librarian’s bequest on a football scoreboard https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2016/09/15/critics-question-spending-librarians-donation-scoreboard
#5yrsago Everything is Always Broken, and That’s Okay https://pluralistic.net/2021/09/15/everything-is-always-broken-and-thats-okay/
Upcoming appearances (permalink)

- Budapest: Brain Bar, Sep 17
https://brainbar.com/munkatars/cory-doctorow
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Edmonton: Elbows Up (Edmonton Public Library), Sep 28
https://www.epl.ca/blogs/post/elbows-up-with-cory-doctorow/
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Boston: The Post-American Internet: Possibilities for a new internet created by an American Hermit Kingdom (MIT Media Lab), Sep 30
https://www.media.mit.edu/events/the-post-american-internet-possibilities-for-a-new-internet-created-by-an-american-hermit-kingdom/
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Boston: The Paradox of Enshittification and Reverse Centaurs (Harvard Berkman Klein), Sep 30
https://cyber.harvard.edu/events/running-harder-falling-faster-paradox-enshittification-and-reverse-centaurs
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South Bend: An Evening With Cory Doctorow (Notre Dame), Oct 6
https://franco.nd.edu/events/2026/10/06/an-evening-with-cory-doctorow/
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Hudson, OH: Hudson Library, Oct 7
https://engagedpatrons.org/EventsExtended.cfm?SiteID=3850&EventID=596952&PK=
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Calgary: Wordfest, Oct 8
https://wordfest.com/2026/show/wordfest-presents-cory-doctorow-2026/
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Winnipeg: McNally Robinson, Oct 9
https://www.mcnallyrobinson.com/event-18991/An-Evening-with-Cory-Doctorow
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Vancouver: Read, Resist, Repair, Rejoice (Vancouver Writers Festival), Oct 19
https://writersfest.bc.ca/festival-event-2026/01
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Victoria: Munro's Books, Oct 20
https://www.munrobooks.com/events/6113620261020
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Vancouver: Life After AI (Vancouver Writers Festival), Oct 22
https://writersfest.bc.ca/festival-event-2026/46
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Ottawa: Life After AI (Ottawa Writers Festival), Oct 24
https://writersfestival.org/event/life-after-ai
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Vancouver: BC Policy Solutions Gala, Nov 12
https://bcpolicy.ca/gala/

Recent appearances (permalink)

- "The Reverse-Centaur's Guide to AI," a short book about being a better AI critic, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, June 2026
https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374621568/thereversecentaursguidetolifeafterai/
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"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
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"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/
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"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).
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"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).
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"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).
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"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).
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"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.
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"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

- "The Post-American Internet," a geopolitical sequel of sorts to Enshittification, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2027
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"Unauthorized Bread": a middle-grades graphic novel adapted from my novella about refugees, toasters and DRM, FirstSecond, April 20, 2027
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"Enshittification, Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It" (the graphic novel), Firstsecond, 2027
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"The Memex Method," Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2027

Today's top sources:
Currently writing:
- “Once Is Enemy Action,” a science fiction novel about the origins of modern technofascism. Today's words: 513 (14905 total).
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"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.
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A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING

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