Longtime Slashdot reader walterbyrd shares a report from Fuel Cells Works: China says the AEP100, a megawatt-class hydrogen-fueled turboprop engine developed by the Aero Engine Corporation of China, has completed its maiden flight on a 7.5-ton unmanned cargo aircraft in Zhuzhou, Hunan. The 16-minute test covered 36km at 220km/h and 300 meters altitude, with the aircraft returning safely after completing its planned maneuvers. State media described it as the world's first test flight of a megawatt-class hydrogen-fueled turboprop engine. [...] The Aero Engine Corporation of China (AECC) says the result shows China now has a full technical chain for hydrogen aviation engines, from core parts to system integration, which is the kind of capability needed before any industrial rollout can begin. You can watch a video of the test flight here.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: A federal appeals court ruled on Monday that New Jersey gaming regulators cannot prevent Kalshi from allowing people in the state to use its prediction market to place financial bets on the outcome of sporting events.
A three-judge panel of the Philadelphia-based 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled 2-1 (PDF) in finding that the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission has exclusive jurisdiction over the sports-related event contracts that Kalshi allows people to trade on its platform. The ruling marked the first time a federal appeals court has ruled on what has become the central issue in an escalating battle over the ability of state gaming regulators to police the activity of prediction market operators.

Kalshi and companies like it allow users to place trades and profit from predictions on events such as sports and elections. States argue that firms like Kalshi are operating without required state licenses, in violation of gaming laws, including bans on wagers by those under 21. Those states include New Jersey, which last year sent Kalshi a cease-and-desist letter stating that its listing of sports-related event contracts on its platform violated state gambling laws that prohibit betting on collegiate sports. Kalshi sued the state, arguing its event contracts qualify as "swaps," a type of derivative contract, that under the Commodity Exchange Act can only be regulated by the CFTC, which had granted the company a license to operate a designated contract market (DCM).

A lower-court judge had sided with New York-based Kalshi and issued a preliminary injunction, prompting New Jersey to appeal. But a majority of the judges on the 3rd Circuit panel concluded the Commodity Exchange Act likely preempted state law. "Kalshi's sports-related event contracts are swaps traded on a CFTC-licensed DCM, so the CFTC has exclusive jurisdiction," U.S. Circuit Judge David Porter wrote. The ruling was in line with the position advanced in other litigation by the CFTC under President Donald Trump's administration. The regulator last week sued Arizona, Connecticut and Illinois to prevent them from pursuing what it called unlawful efforts to regulate prediction markets.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

​'Net over de grens bij Gronau scheelt het een kwartje per liter kerosine'

De bemanning van de Amerikaanse maanmissie Artemis II is door de NASA geïnstrueerd om op de terugweg een kleine omweg te maken via Duitsland. Volgens de ruimtevaartorganisatie is de keuze 'puur pragmatisch': de brandstofprijzen liggen daar momenteel aanzienlijk lager dan in de Verenigde Staten.

“Ruimtevaart blijft duur, dus we kijken waar we kunnen besparen,” aldus een NASA-woordvoerder. “Een liter kerosine is aan de Duitse pomp bijna een kwartje goedkoper. Als je dan toch al onderweg bent, is een extra lusje boven Noordrijn-Westfalen zo gemaakt.” De capsule zal volgende week zaterdag kort boven de Duitse grensplaats Gronau zweven om bij te tanken, waarna de reis richting Stille Oceaan wordt voortgezet.

Aan boord zijn de astronauten enthousiast over het plan. “We hebben het even doorgerekend en het scheelt toch al gauw een paar miljoen dollar,” schat gezagvoerder Reid Wiseman. “Bovendien kunnen we meteen even plassen. En wat flyers voor AfD boven het land uitstrooien natuurlijk, dat wil onze president graag.”

Volgens experts gebeurt het wel vaker dat ruimtevaartorganisaties creatief omgaan met kosten om binnen budget te blijven. “Op schroefjes van de ruimtecapsule bezuinigen is gevaarlijk, maar wat je wel vaak ziet is dat astronauten hun eigen boterhammen meenemen om cateringkosten te drukken,” zegt ruimtevaartanalist Erik van der Plas.

In Duitsland zelf wordt de komst van Artemis II met gemengde gevoelens ontvangen. Tankstationhouder Klaus Dietrich uit Gronau kijkt ernaar uit: “Als ze hier ook nog even koffie en een bratwurst nemen, is mijn dag helemaal goed.” De Duitse overheid is echter argwanend over het idee dat Amerikaanse vertegenwoordigers 'Boots on the Ground' zetten in hun land.

&

Today's links

• Switzerland's Goldilocks fiber: Public provision is a layered question.
• Hey look at this: Delights to delectate.
• Object permanence: EU appoints henhouse fox (copyright); Emacs x Tron: Legacy; Spammer v dead man's AOL account; Scott Walker's pork fountain; "No toilets, try Amazon"; Iceland falls (x Panama Papers); Rooms in Milanese sewers; China bans Panama Papers; "Parent Hacks"; "The Nameless City"; Phishing the world's top breach expert.
• Upcoming appearances: Toronto, Montreal, Toronto, San Francisco, London, Berlin, NYC, Hay-on-Wye, London.
• 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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Switzerland's Goldilocks fiber (permalink)

If you live in Switzerland you can get a 25Gbit fiber link to your home. That's 25Gbit symmetrical – upload and download. On a dedicated connection that's yours and yours alone. From multiple providers. And you can switch providers with the click of a mouse. It's the ne plus ultra, magnifico, wunderschön:

https://www.init7.net/de/internet/fiber7/

In a fascinating blog post, Stefan Schüller unpacks how this came to pass, in Switzerland, a country known for its impassable mountains and its impossible national telco (Swisscom):

https://sschueller.github.io/posts/the-free-market-lie/

Schüller describes the Swiss system as a kind of Goldilocks approach that's midway between two failed systems: the American "free market" system and the German state provision system.

Most people in the US can't get fiber at all, and if you can get it, it's probably 1Gbit, and available from a single provider (that's nearly my situation in Los Angeles, where I can buy 2Gbit symmetrical fiber from AT&T, who run a shared connection on old Worldcom fiber they've lit up). Some (very foolish) people say that Starlink represents a competitive alternative to fiber. This is nonsense – first, because Starlink is another natural monopoly (how many competing satellite constellations can we cram into stable orbits before they start smashing into each other?), and second, because satellite is millions of times slower than fiber:

https://www.somebits.com/weblog/tech/bad/starlink-nov-2022-data-caps.html

In Germany, most people also have a single fiber provider, and the connection they get is shared, and caps out at 1-2Gbit.

Meanwhile, the Swiss can get connections that are far faster, and cheaper. How did they do it?

For starters, the Swiss recognized what any Simcity player knows: fiber is a "natural monopoly." It doesn't make any sense to build multiple, competing fiber networks – any more than it would make sense to build multiple, competing sewer systems or electric grids.

In the US, private fiber providers get city permits to dig up the roads and lay their network. If you have two competing networks, they dig up the road twice.

You'd think that the (more regulated) Germans would lay a single network, but they, too, have multiple, competing networks. German regulators have a complex set of priorities and constraints: to encourage competition, they promote the idea of competing networks in competing trenches, often just meters apart (rather than on competing services running over the same fiber and/or fiber run through the same conduit – pipe – laid in a single trench).

This makes setting up fiber extremely capital-intensive, so Germany backstops this system with "essential facilities sharing" – a rule that requires the incumbent (formerly state-owned, now partially state-owned) Deutsche Telekom to offer space in its conduit to smaller ISPs that want to thread their own fiber from their data-centers to their customers' homes. This is a good idea in theory – but in practice, DT has largely captured its regulators and so it is free to place all kinds of administrative hurdles in the paths of competitors seeking to use its lines.

The result is that Germans can get fiber from multiple, heavily capitalized network providers who overbuilt redundant systems under the city streets, squandering capital digging trenches that they could have spent on providing faster and/or cheaper connections.

Meanwhile, in the US, they leave this all up to "the market" (though, of course, there's no way "the market" could get fiber laid down without public participation, because the clearing price for privately negotiated licenses to dig up every street in town is "infinity"). The US is dominated by a cartel of massive incumbents: there's AT&T (formerly a regulated monopoly that was so entangled with the US government that it was effectively a for-profit state enterprise) and the cable giants, Comcast and Charter, who divide up the country into exclusive territories like the Pope dividing up the "New World."

These companies generally enjoy regional monopolies, which means they're less interested in making profits (money you get by mobilizing capital) than they are from extracting rent (money you get from sweating assets). For example, when Frontier went bankrupt in 2020, we got to look at its internal bookkeeping system, and learned that the company treated 1m customers who had no alternative carriers as special assets because it could charge them more for worse service and poor maintenance:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/12/15/useful-idiotsuseful-idiots/

This means that US fiber networks tend to be underbuilt (the opposite of Germany's overbuilt networks), meaning that even if you're buying "gigabit" fiber, you're probably sharing that one gig connection with your whole block or neighborhood, so you only get your nominal throughput at weird hours when all the other subscribers aren't streaming Netflix.

(Note that there are cities in the US with a better situation; particularly cities served by Ting, which is owned by Hover, the amazing domain registry. Ting operates an excellent mobile carrier and a fiber networks in many cities. If you are lucky enough to have Ting as an option, then you should treasure that option.)

So, that's Germany and America. What did they do in Switzerland?

For starters, they ran a four-strand, dedicated line (an insulated wire with four separate strands of fiber in it) to every house. That wire terminates at your wall with a "neutral, open hub." Any carrier can provide service over those four strands: Swisscom (the incumbent, majority state-owned carrier); Init7 or Salt (national, commercial carriers); or a local ISP.

Each of the strands in your neutral hub operate independently. That means that you can switch from one carrier to another with a click. You can also run two or more carriers' signal through your hub, meaning that you can try out a new carrier before canceling your old one. The carriers compete on price, speed and customer service – but they don't compete on who can actually connect your home to the internet.

The origins of this excellent system are in 2008, when Switzerland's Federal Communications Commission convened a roundtable to determine the future of the country's broadband. Incredibly, it was Swisscom that pushed for the multi-strand, dedicated fiber system, on the grounds that anything less would lead to monopolization.

I say "incredibly," because in all my travels over the past three decades, a single encounter with Swisscom stands out as the most absurd and backwards run-in I ever experienced with a telco.

It was while I was working as EFF's delegate to the United Nations in Geneva, as part of an infinitesimal coalition of digital rights group convened by James Love and Manon Ress of Knowledge Ecology International. Geneva is not a forgiving city for someone working for a cash-strapped NGO: it's a city where everyone (except you) is on a lavish expense account courtesy of a national government, or (better still) an industry body that lobbies the UN.

My usual daggy two-star hotel (which cost as much as a four-star in London) didn't have its own wifi: instead, you signed on through Swisscom, which did not offer its own payment processing. To get onto the Swisscom wifi, you had to buy a scratch-off prepaid card that was good for a certain number of hours or minutes. The hotel was always sold out of these cards.

So my normal ritual upon my arrival in Geneva was to scour the tobacco shops around the train station for scratch-off cards. Normally, this would take four or five tries – the shops would either be completely sold out, or would only have the two-hour cards (needless to say, these were a lot more expensive on a per-hour basis than the one-day and multi-day cards).

On one trip, though, all the shops were sold out of these cards, so I skipped breakfast the next morning to wait outside the doors of the Swisscom offices, which opened five minutes late (the only business in Switzerland that wasn't achingly prompt!). The clerk let me in eventually, but when I approached his counter, he made me trudge to the opposite end of the room to take a number (I was the only person in the shop).

After an ostentatious delay, the clerk called out "Numero un!" and I went up to his counter and asked for a three-day card. No dice, he was sold out. Two-day cards? Nope. One-day? Uh-uh. He only had two-hour cards, too. Literally, the Swiss national telco had run out of integers.

This incident stuck with me so durably that I wrote it into my third novel, Someone Comes To Town, Someone Leaves Town. You can hear me read that passage here:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/08/17/aura-of-benevolence/#sctt-slt

So it's frankly amazing to me to learn that Swisscom – who will forever be synonymous in my mind with the most catastrophically stupid internet delivery system imaginable – demanded this anti-monopoly fiber rollout.

But – as Schüller points out – Swisscom's foray into uncharacteristic reasonableness was short-lived. By 2020, the company had regressed to its mean, and was demanding an end to the neutral, four-strand, point-to-point system, petitioning for regulatory permission to switch to a cheaper, slower, shared hub-and-spoke system. This system wouldn't just be slower – it would also require all of Swisscom's rivals to rent access to its fiber, with Swisscom having the final say over who could compete with it and how.

This went all the way to the Swiss federal courts, who ruled that Swisscom had failed to demonstrate "sufficient technological or economic grounds" for the change and fined the company CHF18m for wasting everyone's time with this stupid idea (that is, "violating Swiss competition law"). And so it is that, in 2026, you can get 25Gbit symmetrical fiber throughout Switzerland. Wunderschön!

Schüller closes out his piece with a set of recommendations for countries hoping to replicate Switzerland's broadband miracle: open access to physical infrastructure; point-to-point service; neutral fiber standards; municipal fiber; and strong antitrust enforcement to keep the incumbent carriers in line.

These are great recommendations; they address the contradiction of regulated monopoly telcoms provision. On the one hand, these networks are natural monopolies, and they can only exist with extensive government intervention (at a minimum, to clear the way for poles, trenches and conduit for the physical fiber).

On the other hand, telcoms (especially broadband) play an important role in the political realm, because broadband connections are essential to civic and political engagement. You can't turn people out for a protest, or run an election campaign, a referendum, a ballot initiative, a regulatory notice-and-comment campaign, or even a campaign to get people to a public meeting or listening session without broadband.

This means that state-provided broadband is an incredibly tempting target for political corruption and regulatory capture. Think of all the terrible things that governments are doing with broadband regulation today, like Trump demanding that service providers turn over the identities and locations of his political enemies so that ICE can hunt them down and kidnap or murder them; or "age verification" systems that accumulate mountains of easily raided personal information on adults and children.

Do you want Trump's FCC chairman Brendan Carr setting content moderation policies for your internet connection? The guy who wants to pull TV and radio stations' broadcast licenses if they criticize Trump and Israel's catastrophic Iran war?

https://www.techdirt.com/2026/03/17/brendan-carr-pretends-to-be-tough-demands-broadcasters-support-disastrous-war/

Do you want your local ISP being run by your mayor? I mean, sure, there are some reasonable mayors out there, but imagine if your ISP was managed by Eric Adams, Boris Johnson…or Rob Ford:

https://www.patreon.com/posts/rob-ford-part-1-111985831

Saying that broadband should be run "like a utility," raises more questions than it answers. I, too, want broadband run "like a utility," but that doesn't mean that I want the whole show to be provided solely by my federal or municipal government. A "utility" model for broadband should mean running conduit to every home in town, with point-to-point connections that deliver broadband via a municipally owned network – but not just that.

The municipal network should also offer "essential facilities sharing" in two forms: first, they should allow anyone to set up an ISP by renting shelf-space in the municipal data-center and installing their own switches that can provide internet to anyone in town. This would let large and small companies set up ISPs, as well as co-ops and nonprofits, or even tinkerers wanting to provide access to a group of friends. Beyond that, the city should rent space in the conduit itself, to support point-to-point links beyond those offered by the city – for example, between a university campus and an offsite supercomputing center, or two buildings owned by the same company, or even as a parallel set of fiber connections run by someone who's fed up with getting their internet service from Eric Adams.

This is a "pluralized" utility model: one that involves the city in providing infrastructure at several layers, as well as a "public option" – but which doesn't allow a city that's in thrall to Moms For Liberty to decide what you can say on the internet.

This principle generalizes beyond internet provision, too. Many people have observed that social media, with its strong "network effects" (meaning its value increases as more people use it), could be a "natural monopoly" and want a social media "utility." I can see the reasoning there, but if there's one thing we've learned from zuckermuskian legacy social media, it's that centralized control over speech forums is a moral hazard and an attractive nuisance. It's a political prize beyond measure, and it attracts all sorts of skullduggerous bids to suborn it and harness it to some political faction.

But there's a pluralized utility model for social media, too, thanks to modern, federated social media systems like Mastodon and Bluesky. These are open platforms that can support multiple, interconnected servers that all talk to one another. Unlike, say, Twitter, where you can only talk to other Twitter users, federated social media allows you to talk with anyone on any server, provided they want to talk with you.

As with fiber, a "utility" model for federated social media would feature public intervention at multiple layers of the system. Governments could (should!) run their own servers, providing the canonical source of government information. They can also provide turnkey cloud services for people who want to start their own services – and they can spin out the code that goes into these services into free/open source projects that others can use (and contribute to). Governments could support people who are trying to migrate off of legacy social media (for example, through library workshops and helplines), and pay to label and tag media (for example, media that is compliant with the public education curriculum). Governments could also offer public servers where you could sign up to get online – and because federated social media makes it easy to move your account from one server to another, it would be easy to move from that server to one run by a nonprofit, a co-op or a business:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/06/25/eurostack/#viktor-orbans-isp

Think of this pluralized utility model as being something like your city's roads. It's great for your city to provide roads, and great for them to run buses on those roads, and to create bike lanes and bike parking spots and other infrastructure. For roads to be "public," it does not follow that everything on them be licensed and operated by the municipal government: we can still have private bikes, bikeshares, regulated taxis and licensed private motor vehicles. The roads are still "public" but Boris Johnson doesn't get to decide where you can go.

A utility model needn't be all-or-nothing. As the Swiss have demonstrated, public provision of various layers of the system, combined with strong regulation, combined with a public option, can deliver a best-of-all-worlds solution.

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Hey look at this (permalink)

• Nick Chater on the Nudge Movement and Blaming The Individual for Corporate Wrongdoing https://www.corporatecrimereporter.com/news/200/nick-chater-on-the-nudge-movement-and-blaming-the-individual-for-corporate-wrongdoing

• Why We’re Removing Our Programmatic Ads https://prospect.org/2026/04/06/why-were-removing-our-programmatic-ads/

• Actually, people love to work hard https://www.anildash.com/2026/04/06/people-love-to-work-hard/

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Object permanence (permalink)

#15yrsago Recording industry lobbyist appointed head of copyright for European Commission https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2011/04/top-music-industry-lawyer-now-eu-copyright-chief/

#15yrsago How emacs got into Tron: Legacy https://web.archive.org/web/20110407224426/http://jtnimoy.net/workviewer.php?q=178

#15yrsago Dead man’s AOL account hijacked by spammer https://ip.topicbox.com/groups/ip/T274c51b2ba843fb0-Mb6bf8853b1ed34a26b07ce44/deceasesd-father-in-law-spamming-friends-and-family-two-years-on

#15yrsago Scarring Party: megaphone songs, sea chanteys and dark vaudeville tunes https://web.archive.org/web/20110406044523/http://www.avclub.com/milwaukee/articles/the-scarring-party-losing-teeth%2C43871/

#15yrsago Snaggly table made out of computer junk https://web.archive.org/web/20110406044521/http://brcdesigns.com/furniture/binary-low-table

#15yrsago Scott Walker gives cushy $85.5K/year government job to major donor’s young, underqualified son https://web.archive.org/web/20110406040138/https://thinkprogress.org/2011/04/04/scott-walker-hires-dropout/

#15yrsago Closing down Borders sign: “No toilets, try Amazon” https://web.archive.org/web/20110406044522/https://consumerist.com/2011/04/sign-at-borders-store-closing-in-chicago-tells-customers-where-to-find-a-restroom.html

#15yrsago What is legitimate “newsgathering” and what is “piracy”? https://zunguzungu.wordpress.com/2011/04/05/why-arianna-huffington-is-bill-kellers-somali-pirate/

#10yrsago Iceland’s Prime Minister asks to dissolve Parliament https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-35966412

#10yrsago Artist installs rooms beneath Milan’s sewer entrances https://web.archive.org/web/20160406132425/https://www.biancoshock.com/borderlife.html

#10yrsago Banned on China’s Internet: all discussion of the Panama Papers https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-china-35957235

#10yrsago Google reaches into customers’ homes and bricks their gadgets https://arlogilbert.com/the-time-that-tony-fadell-sold-me-a-container-of-hummus-cb0941c762c1#.srp9ym34a

#10yrsago Middle class housing projects are the Bay Area’s future https://www.newyorker.com/culture/cultural-comment/welcome-to-the-future-middle-class-housing-projects

#10yrsago Pollster explains how Chamber of Commerce can steamroller empathetic execs into opposing progressive policies https://web.archive.org/web/20160406190524/https://gawker.com/business-execs-support-progressive-policies-but-the-ch-1768898477

#10yrsago How to write about scientists who are women https://www.doublexscience.org/the-finkbeiner-test/

#10yrsago Garden: XKCD’s latest maddening, relaxing webtoy https://xkcd.com/1663/#3978da67-1ead-45e1-a293-9c8e4918a147

#10yrsago Parent Hacks: illustrated guide is the best kind of parenting book https://memex.craphound.com/2016/04/05/parent-hacks-illustrated-guide-is-the-best-kind-of-parenting-book/

#10yrsago The Nameless City: YA graphic novel about diplomacy, hard and soft power, colonialism, bravery, and parkour https://memex.craphound.com/2016/04/05/the-nameless-city-ya-graphic-novel-about-diplomacy-hard-and-soft-power-colonialism-bravery-and-parkour/

#5yrsago How Facebook will benefit from its massive breach https://pluralistic.net/2021/04/05/zucks-oily-rags/#into-the-breach

#1yrago How the world's leading breach expert got phished https://pluralistic.net/2025/04/05/troy-hunt/#teach-a-man-to-phish

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Upcoming appearances (permalink)

• Toronto: Humber Polytechnic President's Lecture Series, Apr 8
  https://liberalarts.humber.ca/current-students/resources/conferences-and-lectures/presidents-lecture-series.html

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

• Montreal: Drawn and Quarterly, Apr 10
  https://mtl.drawnandquarterly.com/events/4863920260410

• Toronto: DemocracyXchange, Apr 16
  https://www.democracyxchange.org/news/cory-doctorow-to-open-dxc26-on-april-16

• San Francisco: 2026 Berkeley Spring Forum on M&A and the Boardroom, Apr 23
  https://www.theberkeleyforum.com/#agenda

• London: Resisting Big Tech Empires (LSBU), Apr 25
  https://www.tickettailor.com/events/globaljusticenow/2042691

• NYC: Enshittification at Commonweal Ventures, Apr 29
  https://luma.com/ssgfvqz8

• NYC: Techidemic with Sarah Jeong, Tochi Onyibuchi and Alia Dastagir (PEN World Voices), Apr 30
  https://worldvoices.pen.org/event/techidemic/

• 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

• SXSW London, Jun 2
  https://www.sxswlondon.com/session/how-big-tech-broke-the-internet-b3c4a901

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Recent appearances (permalink)

• The internet is getting worse (CBC The National)
  https://youtu.be/dCVUCdg3Uqc?si=FMcA0EI_Mi13Lw-P

• Do you feel screwed over by big tech? (Ontario Today)
  https://www.cbc.ca/listen/live-radio/1-45-ontario-today/clip/16203024-do-feel-screwed-big-tech

• Launch for Cindy's Cohn's "Privacy's Defender" (City Lights)
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WuVCm2PUalU

• 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/

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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

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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 (https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374621568/thereversecentaursguidetolifeafterai/)

• "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

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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. First draft complete. Second draft underway.

• "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

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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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Bijna 20.000 zeelieden zitten vast op schepen in de Perzische Golf. Hun positie wordt steeds benarder, ondanks de mooie woorden vorige week van de Hormuz-coalitie.

One of the most infuriating tropes that I see repeated in media is executives (usually from boring old companies) insisting that their employees don’t want to work hard. Media outlets dutifully repeat this pernicious lie, despite there being no evidence to back it up, and then cultural commentators either credulously amplify it, or actively take part in advancing the narrative as part of their agenda, even though they know it’s false. There is an apparently infinite attention appetite for commentators who troll for attention by saying how “kids these days” don’t want to work hard.

As has often been documented, the hoary chestnut of saying “nobody wants to work anymore” dates back decades, if not centuries, and it’s never been true in all those years of deletion. It is, firstly, a tactic that bosses use for negging workers in a vain attempt to try to drive down wages (and to successfully get media to blame people for their own underemployment), but it also serves as an effective demonstration of just how little society understand about what actually motivates people.

I’ve helped found six companies in my life, and been involved in the start of a handful of other startups and nonprofits, and literally every single one was full of people who love to work hard. The simple reason for that shared trait is that all of those teams were comprised of groups of people with a few key things in common:

• A clearly understood goal
• A common set of values in pursuit of that goal
• Permission to follow their own ideas to achieve their goal
• Trust and responsibility to be accountable to one another

If people have these things, and believe in what they’re doing together, they will joyfully work their asses off.

It is genuinely one of the best feelings in life to be completely exhausted while sitting next to someone who’s been right beside you, shoulder to shoulder, fighting to accomplish the same goal. I’ve known that to be true whether we were launching a new company into the world, campaigning to get a candidate we believed in elected, organizing to rally people around an issue, raising funds for an important cause, or even just trying to get people together for a big event or party.

Every time, the feeling of being soul-tired next to folks who you know you can trust because they showed up and worked their asses off just like you did, is among the most motivating and inspiring things you can experience. Nobody who’s ever been lucky enough to have had a moment like that could ever think that people “don’t want to work”.

When work doesn’t work

What people face too often is being ground down by systems, institutions, and unjust leaders who insist on creating roles where people are forced to do dehumanizing, isolated, meaningless work, while not being given the agency to make smart and empowered decisions about how the work gets done. Or worse, they’re forced to do work in service of goals that are actively harmful and destructive, and contrary to their own values, or just contrary to basic human decency. It’s not that people are unwilling to work, it is that they are working — to balance their own humanity with the crushing burdens of having to provide for themselves and their families. It is exhausting for a good person to have to do bad work or harmful work or pointless work, just to pay the bills. Being less “productive” in those situations isn’t a shortcoming, it’s a measure of still having an immune system that’s resistant to these moral injuries.

Preserving your soul and sanity in an organization with no morals is very hard work. If you think your workers aren’t working hard, maybe you’re ignoring the toughest part of their job.

And even in more moderate organizations, where things aren’t overtly evil so much as frequently frustrating and burdensome and stressful, there are still plenty of reasons that people aren’t as “productive” (as defined by bosses). Many of these reasons could be addressed by leadership taking accountability for the context and communication provided to workers for their responsibilities. Empowered workers who are given high levels of trust and autonomy tend to be extremely productive, and don’t need babysitting from management. If you treat adults like idiots, they will respond in kind.

There’s also the issue of what people are provided beyond their paychecks. Ideally, everyone on a team will have enough resources to do the job properly, but in a mission-aligned organization even that can be optional at first, because scrappy teams are pretty adept at making something out of nothing if they really have to. There just needs to be a point where they’re not starved of appropriate resources anymore, and it’s a leader’s ethical responsibility to provide everything people need to thrive and be healthy and happy in the long term. The key point here is that people are not driven by greedy, selfish motivations in organizations that accomplish meaningful things; if there’s trust that they’ll be taken care of, and that leaders are worthy of that trust, people will over-deliver in service of the common goal.

But in many organizations, people are given crappy tools, miserable working environments, overbearing surveillance of their workplaces and digital workspaces, meaningless and abstract metrics to achieve, and all of these are delivered with corporate communications that don’t sound like any human being ever. The executives who inflict all of this on the workers hope that they don’t notice that none of the execs are expected to endure any of this.

Finally, fundamentally, there is pay. Compensation and real-world wages have been plummeting for decades; the growing chasm of wealth inequality has been well-documented for many years. But the quiet indignities around that degradation in standard of living have increased, as well, with the chipping away at leisure time through always-accessible digital tools making people have to be on call for their jobs during every waking hour.

The erosion of social norms around employment has been so complete over the last few decades that people born in this century don’t even believe that there was a time when it was not only routine for Americans to be union members, but for private sector companies to provide, and honor, pensions for their employees to benefit from in retirement. The mere suggestion of the idea would get a public company CEO fired in the current era.

Who do we work for?

Why would someone work for an institution that is actively working to undermine their well-being? Most large companies are spending more time strategizing against their employees than against their competitors. Too many nonprofits and other ostensibly non-corporate institutions have gotten the same idea. But it is management that does not want those workers to work — or they would act like it. If your workers aren’t massively motivated to do great work, it’s your fault. Because all you have to do is provide a worthy mission and get the fuck out of the way.

How do I know? Because I’ve gotten it right, and I’ve gotten it wrong. When I’ve taken my eye off the ball, either for unavoidable business reasons, or because I made mistakes due to inexperience or ego or distraction or competition or bad luck or whatever else, the people on my team showed it. Work stopped, quality dropped, frustration and tension increased, and all of a sudden my managers were telling me that “these folks don’t want to work”. Eventually I learned: the right thing to do is to tell those managers that we should be asking, “How are we failing?” Because, short of personal emergencies or life situations that keep them from being able to do their best work, people want to feel proud about the work they’re doing, and to feel like they’re not wasting their time every day when they go into the office. They don’t want to resent their bosses or be annoyed at their coworkers.

The few times I’ve been lucky enough to get it right have been the most satisfying times in my career. Once or twice, I’ve gotten to work for great bosses. They really inspired me to do great work, and taught me a lot that I didn’t know how to do before, or motivated me to want to learn on my own. But more importantly, they made an environment where I could collaborate with my coworkers to do more than I thought was possible, both by myself and especially together with others. I hope that at my best, the teams I’ve led have had a bit of that same feeling; I know I’ve been so proud of what I’ve seen them create and accomplish that they certainly have inspired me over the years.

But perhaps the most important lesson I’ve learned from watching great teams work is that the cynical, toxic view of people’s intrinsic motivations and work ethic that we hear so often is a damnable lie. Most people are tireless and brave and brilliant in the work they do, when it’s work that has purpose and passion. Anyone who tells you otherwise is telling on themselves, and revealing their own lack of imagination and vision about what it’s possible for people to create together.

Mr Mikage (ミスター御影） posted a photo:

Thomas Hawk posted a photo:

Thomas Hawk posted a photo:

RITTHEM (ANP) - Bij het Zeeuwse dorp Ritthem is dinsdagmorgen een sportvliegtuig neergestort. Dat meldt de veiligheidsregio. Het vliegtuigje zou naast de snelweg A58 zijn gecrasht.

AMSTERDAM (ANP) - ING heeft de verkoopovereenkomst van zijn activiteiten in Rusland verbroken. De bank was van plan deze onderdelen te verkopen aan Global Development, omdat ING na de Russische inval in Oekraïne geen toekomst meer ziet in het land. Maar ING stelt nu dat het niet verwacht dat de koper de benodigde goedkeuringen zal krijgen.

ISLAMABAD (ANP/RTR/AFP) - De Pakistaanse inspanningen om de oorlog in het Midden-Oosten te beëindigen, bereiken een "kritieke" fase. Dat schreef de Iraanse ambassadeur in Pakistan in een bericht op sociale media.

"Pakistans positieve en productieve inspanningen in goede wil en bemiddeling om de oorlog te stoppen naderen een kritieke, gevoelige fase", aldus de diplomaat Reza ​Amiri Moghadam. Die trad daar verder niet over in detail.

Pakistan heeft zich tijdens het conflict opgeworpen als bemiddelaar. Iraanse bronnen zeggen tegen The New York Times dat Iran garanties wil dat het niet opnieuw wordt aangevallen en dat ook de Israëlische aanvallen op Hezbollah in Libanon moeten stoppen.

De tijd dringt om tot een diplomatieke doorbraak te komen. De Amerikaanse president Donald Trump heeft gedreigd Iraanse (civiele) infrastructuur in puin te leggen als Iran tegen dinsdagavond niet heeft ingestemd met zijn eisen, zoals de heropening van de Straat van Hormuz.

SHANGHAI (ANP/AFP) - De belangrijkste Taiwanese oppositiepoliticus, Cheng Li-wun, is aangekomen in Shanghai. Het zeldzame bezoek van de ooit separatistische Li-wun moet de banden met China aanhalen. Li-wun geldt als zeer pro-Chinees, wat haar ook binnen haar eigen partij, KMT, soms op kritiek komt te staan.

De landen staan op zijn zachtst gezegd op gespannen voet, vanwege de Chinese ambities om Taiwan in te lijven. Beijing beschouwt Taiwan, dat ondanks zijn relatief kleine omvang geldt als 's werelds belangrijkste leverancier van hoogtechnologische microchips en halfgeleiders, als een afvallige provincie. Het land zinspeelt al jaren op een overname en stoot daarbij herhaaldelijk op weerzin van de internationale gemeenschap.

Recentelijk nog met Japan, toen de premier van dat land, Sanae Takaichi, zei militair ingrijpen niet uit te sluiten als China over zou gaan tot inname van Taiwan. Dat leidde tot diplomatieke en economische maatregelen die met name Japan hard raakten.

NEW YORK (ANP) - Investeringsfonds Pershing Square Holdings van miljardair Bill Ackman heeft een overnamebod gedaan op Universal Music Group, het concern van platenlabels achter artiesten als Taylor Swift en Billie Eilish. Pershing biedt 9,4 miljard euro in contanten en aandelen in een nieuw op te richten fusiebedrijf.

SEOUL (ANP) - Samsung heeft in het afgelopen kwartaal fors geprofiteerd van de grote vraag naar geheugenchips die de ontwikkeling van kunstmatige intelligentie ondersteunen. De operationele winst was ruim acht keer zo hoog als in dezelfde periode vorig jaar, meldde het Zuid-Koreaanse tech- en elektronicaconcern bij zijn voorlopige kwartaalcijfers.

Het resultaat van ongeveer 57 biljoen won (32,8 miljard euro) was ook veel hoger dan analisten in doorsnee hadden verwacht. In het eerste kwartaal boekte Samsung bovendien een hogere operationele winst dan in heel 2025.

Samsung profiteert van de vraag naar chips die helpen bij het opslaan van de grote hoeveelheden data die verwerkt worden binnen AI-modellen. Het gaat om zogeheten High-Bandwidth Memory (HBM)-chips, die in samenhang werken met de grafische processoren die al het rekenwerk doen. De prijzen voor dit soort geheugenchips zijn hard gestegen door de grote vraag van techconcerns die nieuwe datacenters bouwen. Dit heeft ook voor schaarste van 'gewonere' geheugenchips voor pc's of telefoons gezorgd.

Donald Trump waarschuwde Iran dat het "in één nacht uitgeschakeld" zou kunnen worden. Hij voert zijn dreigementen op als Iran niet doet wat hij zegt.

De Amerikaanse president deed deze uitspraken maandag in het Witte Huis, in de aanloop naar zijn eigen deadline van dinsdag 20.00 uur (Amerikaanse rijd) waarbinnen Iran een akkoord met Washington moet sluiten of geconfronteerd wordt met aanvallen op civiele infrastructuur, waaronder bruggen en elektriciteitscentrales.

"Het hele land kan in één nacht worden uitgeschakeld, en die nacht zou morgenavond kunnen zijn", zei Trump tegen verslaggevers in het Witte Huis.

De president waarschuwde dat de VS een plan hebben "waarbij elke brug in Iran zal worden verwoest" en "elke elektriciteitscentrale in Iran buiten gebruik zal raken, in brand zal vliegen, zal ontploffen en nooit meer zal worden gebruikt" binnen enkele uren nadat zijn deadline is verstreken.

Het opzettelijk vernietigen van voorzieningen voor burgers van een land is een oorlogsmisdaad. En dan een week later logeren?

Hij voegde eraan toe dat de VS verwachtten na de oorlog de Iraanse oliesector te controleren. "De buit komt de winnaar toe."

Het opzettelijk vernietigen van voorzieningen voor burgers van een land is een oorlogsmisdaad

Het bezoek van het Koninklijk Huis aan de VS, van volgende week maandag tot woensdag, is om te vieren dat Nederland 250 jaar geleden een van de eerste landen was die de VS erkende.

Onderdeel van dat bezoek is een diner met Trump, diens vrouw en Jetten. Het koninklijk paar mag daarna blijven slapen in het Witte Huis.

De Tweede Kamer vindt het allemaal best.De vraag is: is het dat ook? Na de Congresverkiezingen van november is het vermoedelijk uit het Trump. De rest van zijn leven zal bestaan uit rechtszaken. Mogelijk ook wegens oorlogsmisdaden. Wil je dat een van de laatsten zijn die mochten blijven slapen?

Tijdlijn per dag

• Dag 1 (ma. 13 april) — Philadelphia: Independence Hall & Liberty Bell, CEO Round Table, wijk Fishtown, Kensington CAPA High School, Philadelphia Eagles trainingscomplex; avond in Washington D.C. met diner en overnachting in het Witte Huis
• Dag 2 (di. 14 april) — Miami: Henry Mack School, ontmoeting met Secretary of State Cord Byrd bij Pérez Art Museum, CEO Round Table Caribische betrekkingen, Little Havana dominopark, Rosenstiel School (SUSTAIN wave tank, koraallab)
• Dag 3 (wo. 15 april) — Miami: maritieme industrie pitch sessies, Shake-a-Leg marina, Miami Cardiac & Vascular Institute, Freedom Tower ('Libertad'), afsluitende netwerkreceptie

JERUZALEM (ANP/RTR) - Israël heeft Iraniërs gewaarschuwd geen treinen te gebruiken en uit de buurt te blijven van spoorwegen. Wie daar geen gehoor aan geeft, riskeert volgens de krijgsmacht zijn of haar eigen leven.

"Voor uw veiligheid verzoeken wij u vriendelijk om vanaf dit moment tot 21.00 uur Iraanse tijd geen gebruik te maken van treinen en niet per trein te reizen door Iran", staat in een verklaring op X.

Israël voert samen met de Verenigde Staten sinds eind februari aanvallen uit op Iran. Onduidelijk is wat Israël nu precies van plan is. "Uw aanwezigheid in treinen en nabij spoorlijnen brengt uw leven in gevaar", aldus de waarschuwing.

In Spijkenisse wordt een nest met zwanen geterroriseerd. Jongeren smijten met stenen en stokken naar de dieren, ondanks de hekken die om het nest heen staan. Als allerlaatste redmiddel besloten hulpverleners het nest een paar dagen geleden te verplaatsen, maar dat wilde mama zwaan niet.

geoffrey.oliver83 has added a photo to the pool:

Een chatbot die ten onrechte beweert dat het bedrijf geen telefonische klantenservice aanbiedt, is een misleidende handelspraktijk. Dat berichtte het Zweedse advocatenkantoor Delphi onlangs. De Zweedse mededingingsrechtbank legde een verbod op inzet van deze bot op tot het euvel was gefixt, op straffe van een boete van ongeveer 45.000 euro.

De zaak was aangespannen door de Zweedse consumentenombudsman (wat goed dat die bestaat) op basis van klachten. De kern:

De AI-chatbot van mobiele operator Hallon vertelde klanten die naar contactmogelijkheden vroegen dat Hallon “geen telefonische klantenservice aanbiedt” – hoewel het telefoonnummer wel in de algemene voorwaarden stond vermeld.

De rechtbank is het met de ombudsman eens dat dit misleidend is, omdat je als consument redelijkerwijs mag geloven dat dit klopt. Dan ga je minder snel je abonnement opzeggen of in discussie over een factuur. En bovendien: dat mág helemaal niet van het Europees consumentenrecht, geen telefoonnummer hebben.

Op zich allemaal heel logisch, maar kennelijk is het toch iets vernieuwends omdat het nu een chatbot is in plaats van een stagiair. De achterliggende regel zou toch simpel genoeg moeten zijn: jij bent aansprakelijk voor elke uiting die vanuit je organisatie wordt gedaan. Dat je technologie inzet die dat niet foutloos kan, komt voor jouw risico.

Arnoud

Het bericht Hallucinante klantenservice-chatbots kunnen je op een boete wegens misleiding komen te staan verscheen eerst op Ius Mentis.