DEN HAAG (ANP) - Bij de ANWB-alarmcentrale zijn door de bosbranden in Frankrijk en Spanje "tientallen meldingen" binnengekomen van Nederlandse vakantiegangers. Het gaat onder meer om geëvacueerde mensen die vragen hebben over de extra kosten die zij maken of over hun achtergelaten spullen. Volgens een woordvoerder zijn er nog geen meldingen van schade of letsel.
"De meeste meldingen komen uit de regio Bordeaux", zegt de woordvoerder. "Sommige mensen zijn op stel en sprong geëvacueerd en hebben alles achter moeten laten."
Ook bij alarmcentrale Eurocross zijn diverse meldingen binnengekomen. Volgens een woordvoerder ging het rond 11.00 uur om vijftien meldingen in totaal, waaronder "enkele mensen" die zijn geëvacueerd. Ook Eurocross heeft nog geen meldingen van schade of gewonden.
ANWB adviseert vakantiegangers zich goed voor te bereiden. "Maak een noodtas met spullen om je de eerste uren te kunnen redden. Bij een evacuatie heb je echt geen tijd om die te pakken. En volg vooral de lokale instructies op."
BERLIJN (ANP/DPA) - De Duitse bondskanselier Friedrich Merz heeft een aantal wijzigingen in zijn kabinet doorgevoerd, die voortkomen uit het opstappen van Jens Spahn als voorzitter van de regeringspartij CDU. Daardoor is een aantal mensen doorgeschoven. Hun posities moesten ook weer worden gevuld. Merz kondigde bovendien voor de komende dagen nog meer veranderingen aan in de samenstelling van het kabinet.
Spahn moest vorige week onder grote druk opstappen nadat bekend was geworden dat hij en zijn partner een kind hadden gekregen via een draagmoeder in de Verenigde Staten. In Duitsland is dat verboden en Spahn is zelf, net als zijn partij, tegen het legaliseren van het draagmoederschap.
Het partijvoorzitterschap is vervolgens overgenomen door Thorsten Frei, die eerst stafchef van de bondskanselarij was. Zijn positie wordt nu opgevuld door gezondheidsminister Nina Warken, maakte Merz vrijdag bekend. Hij zei ook dat Carsten Linnemann de nieuwe minister van Gezondheid wordt.
DEN HAAG (ANP) - De staat schendt niet zijn verplichtingen tegenover de omwonenden van Tata Steel. Dat heeft de rechtbank in Den Haag vrijdag besloten. Stichting Gezondheid op 1 had een kort geding aangespannen, omdat de staat tijdens het maken van klimaatafspraken met het bedrijf te weinig onderzoek zou doen naar de gezondheidseffecten voor omwonenden.
Het kabinet onderhandelt met Tata Steel over 2 miljard euro aan overheidssteun om onder andere de uitstoot van CO2 en andere schadelijke stoffen door de staalfabrikant te verlagen. De afspraken moeten uiterlijk 30 september gesloten worden.
Uit RIVM-onderzoek is gebleken dat omwonenden door de uitstoot van de Tata-fabriek korter leven.
Het is een bekend beeld: angstige middeleeuwse zeelieden die niet te ver de horizon op durfden te varen, uit angst van de rand van de aarde af te vallen. Scholieren leren het nog steeds op deze manier, maar het is compleet verzonnen. Vrijwel niemand in de middeleeuwen dacht dat de aarde plat was en de wetenschap wist dat al eeuwen daarvoor.
Een mythe die pas veel later is ontstaan
Historici zijn het erover eens: het idee dat middeleeuwse geleerden geloofden in een platte aarde, is een verzinsel uit de 19e eeuw. De Amerikaanse schrijver Washington Irving schreef in 1828 een biografie over Christoffel Columbus waarin hij het verhaal opdiste dat Columbus tegen kerkelijke geleerden moest vechten die dachten dat zijn schepen van de rand van de aarde zouden vallen. Dat verhaal was grotendeels fictie, maar het beeld bleef hangen en werd decennia later door schoolboeken klakkeloos overgenomen.
De Grieken wisten het al 2000 jaar eerder
Al in de klassieke oudheid was de bolvorm van de aarde algemeen bekende kennis. Griekse geleerden zoals Aristoteles beschreven al rond 350 voor Christus argumenten voor een ronde aarde, en de wiskundige Eratosthenes berekende zelfs, zonder satellieten of telescopen, heel nauwkeurig de omtrek van de aarde. Deze kennis raakte in de eeuwen daarna niet verloren — geleerden in de middeleeuwen bouwden er juist op voort.
Hoe wisten ze het, zonder ruimtevaart?
Middeleeuwse geleerden hadden helemaal geen satellietbeelden nodig om tot deze conclusie te komen. Ze observeerden bijvoorbeeld hoe schepen aan de horizon geleidelijk uit het zicht verdwenen, eerst de romp en dan pas de mast, een fenomeen dat alleen logisch te verklaren is op een gebogen oppervlak. Ook de ronde schaduw van de aarde tijdens een maansverduistering gold als bewijs. Deze inzichten waren onderdeel van het standaard lesprogramma aan middeleeuwse universiteiten.
Wat dachten geleerden dan écht?
In plaats van te twijfelen aan de vorm van de aarde, hielden middeleeuwse geleerden zich vooral bezig met andere vragen: hoe groot de aarde precies was, en of er nog onontdekte continenten bestonden. De bolvorm zelf stond niet ter discussie, dat was al eeuwenlang gevestigde kennis.
Waarom de mythe zo hardnekkig is
Het is een verleidelijk verhaal: onwetende mensen uit een duistere periode tegenover moderne, verlichte wetenschap. Maar de werkelijkheid is minder dramatisch en eigenlijk interessanter.
BRUSSEL (ANP) - De Chinese socialemediagigant TikTok doet te weinig om de accounts en posts van minderjarigen af te schermen, concludeert de Europese Commissie. Daarmee overtreedt het bedrijf opnieuw de Digital Services Act (DSA), aldus het dagelijks bestuur van de EU.
Op TikTok is er de optie voor minderjarigen om hun account openbaar te maken, waardoor iedereen hun accounts kan zien. Zelfs als kinderen hun accounts op privé zetten, zijn ze nog makkelijk te vinden en hun profielfoto's blijven voor iedereen openbaar. Dat maakt kinderen kwetsbaar voor ongewenst contact, cyberpesten of seksueel misbruik, aldus de Commissie.
Ook is de content van tieners van 16 en 17 jaar terug te vinden op de zogeheten 'for you-page', waarbij TikTok-gebruikers aanbevolen video's te zien krijgen. De content van kinderen mag niet op die pagina te zien zijn, ook niet als ze wat ouder zijn, concludeert de Commissie.
'Levenslange gevolgen'
Onder de regels van de DSA moeten socialemediabedrijven de privacy en veiligheid van minderjarigen op hun platform garanderen. De Commissie stelt echter dat TikTok de accounts en content van kinderen juist breed toegankelijk maakt. Dat heeft mogelijk "levenslange gevolgen", aldus de Commissie. "Wat minderjarigen posten, kan voor altijd online blijven staan en hen ook als volwassene blijven achtervolgen."
Het is al de derde keer dat Brussel concludeert dat TikTok de DSA overtreedt. In februari bleek dat het socialemediabedrijf zich niet hield aan EU-regels vanwege haar verslavende functies. In oktober concludeerde de Commissie dat TikTok de digitale regels overtreedt, omdat het gegevens niet makkelijk openbaar maakt voor onderzoekers.
Boete
Voor al deze overtredingen is nog geen sprake van een boete, omdat TikTok nog bezwaren kan indienen. Voor elke overtreding kan de Commissie een boete geven die maximaal op kan lopen tot 6 procent van de jaarlijkse wereldwijde omzet van het bedrijf.
Eerder gaf Brussel socialemediabedrijf X een boete van 120 miljoen euro voor overtreding van de DSA. Dat ging onder meer om misleiding rondom blauwe vinkjes, die moeten aantonen dat er een echt persoon achter een account zit.
Carmaker, which is pushing through cost-cutting programme, expects sales to fall by up to 3% this year
Volkswagen has reported a steep fall in profits and cut its revenue forecast amid a sales slump in China, as the German carmaker pushes through a brutal cost-cutting programme that includes slashing up to 100,000 jobs.
The world’s second-largest maker of vehicles said it expects sales to fall by up to 3% this year, a dramatic reversal on a previous forecast for a 3% increase on last year’s €321.9bn (£275.3bn), because of a sales slump in the highly competitive Chinese market.
Continue reading...‘Intense and highly unpredictable’ blaze forces more than 40,000 people to flee popular holiday spot
Authorities in south-western France have ordered the total evacuation of the Cap Ferret peninsula on the Atlantic coast by land and sea as an “intense and highly unpredictable” wildfire advances on one of the country’s best-known holiday spots.
Spain’s government has also taken the exceptional step of declaring a national emergency as a series of out-of-control wildfires threatened areas near Madrid, as extreme climate crisis-driven heat and drought persist in much of southern Europe.
Continue reading...Our cartoonist looks back at the big stories and headline-generating characters at the biggest World Cup ever
Continue reading...From being abused by staff and other travellers to being denied access to toilets, flying is an increasingly distressing and frustrating experience for many wheelchair users. Here, they share their stories
When Hannah Babalola boarded KLM flight 598 on 26 May, she was tired. A Paralympic athlete, she had been competing at an event in South Africa’s Cape Town, and was hoping there would be no hold ups on her journey back home to Chicago.
Babalola, 37, is well-travelled. A former wheelchair racer, she now competes in marathons and has flown to dozens of countries over the years without big problems.
Continue reading...Wendy Faith and Alesi Diana Denise freed after five months in prison over allegations of engaging in same-sex activity
For five months, Wendy Faith and Alesi Diana Denise shared a small prison cell knowing that there was a possibility they might spend the rest of their lives there. Accused of engaging in same-sex activity, an offence under Uganda’s anti-LGBTQ+ laws, the two young women faced a life sentence.
Faith, a 22-year-old musician known as Torrero Bae, and Denise, 21, say they have been left “traumatised” by their arrest and detention, an ordeal that began with a police raid on their single rented room in Arua City, north-west Uganda, in February.
Continue reading...Journalists urge attenders to confront president over media attacks, while Melanie Trump and JD Vance to be absent
Donald Trump will address a rescheduled White House Correspondents’ Association (WCHA) dinner on Friday three months after the original event was abruptly halted after an armed assailant tried to storm it, with the alleged aim of assassinating him.
The rearranged dinner has been condemned as “hypocritical” by retired journalists and press freedom groups, who are urging the association to use it to confront Trump over his administration’s intensified attacks on the media.
Continue reading...
Cooking, whether in a British household in 1829 or in my home today, entangles you in a larger web. Making the recipes in this book has reminded me of this web and my own place in it. Though this recipe book was initially a surprising find in the archives of British colonial officers, it now makes sense why it was there. Food is central to our lives, and the exposure to new food, along with the violent means used to introduce them to the British, is a core part of the story of British colonialism.
Fujitsu claims its addition to a UK government framework worth up to £14.9 billion, including tax, is consistent with its policy of freezing bids for new public sector work in the wake of the Post Office Horizon IT scandal. The Japanese tech services supplier has been named on the Digital Outcomes and Specialists 7 framework, which was amended this week. The Register understands Fujitsu's name was absent when the details of the contract were first published in February. Horizon is an EPOS and back-end finance system that was first implemented in the 1990s by ICL, a UK tech firm majority-owned by Fujitsu at the time and fully acquired in 1998. It has since undergone two upgrades. Between 1999 and 2015, the Post Office prosecuted 700 subpostmasters in cases in which Horizon evidence may have featured, while almost 300 more cases were brought by other bodies. Hundreds were wrongfully convicted, devastating lives in the process. A statutory inquiry into the scandal launched in 2021 and remains ongoing Its early findings suggest 13 suicides may be linked to the prosecutions. Frameworks are procurement vehicles that let public bodies buy from pre-approved suppliers under agreed terms, although a place on one does not guarantee any work. The Government Commercial Agency (GCA) – which replaced the Crown Commercial Service – is the Cabinet Office agency that manages the framework and receives a 1 percent levy on sales made through it. The Digital Outcomes and Specialists 7 agreement is split into four lots: digital, data, and technology services; outcome-based digital projects; support for long-term digital transformation delivery; and individual digital specialists. It is available to government departments and the wider public sector, including local authorities, police, and health services. In January and February 2024, Fujitsu wrote to the government's commercial arm, committing not to bid for contracts with new government customers until the Horizon inquiry reports. In a letter to the Cabinet Office dated February 6, 2024, Dave Riley, Fujitsu's head of UK public sector, confirmed: "There is no limitation or caveat on our intention to pause bidding for work with new government customers until the inquiry has reported... We would only bid for work with a new government customer if asked to do so." A Fujitsu spokesperson said the company's inclusion on the supplier list for Digital Outcomes and Specialists 7 allows it to bid for work from existing customers, in line with its voluntary pause, which only applies to "new government customers." "We continue to work with the UK Government to ensure we adhere to the restrictions we put in place regarding new contracts while the Post Office Inquiry is ongoing," the spokesperson said. The Cabinet Office has yet to respond to The Register's request for comment. Fujitsu has won places on two other frameworks in recent months, including Technology Services 4, worth up to £19.08 billion, and Transport Technology, worth around £2.3 billion. Both figures include tax. ®
Today's links
- AI solipsists and AI cynics: You don't have to believe that AI "works" to believe that it's a good investment.
- Hey look at this: Delights to delectate.
- Object permanence: Malware v stolen computer; Industrial material made from old coffee and melted cups; Austro-Germany's weird tunnels; Health data v Silicon Valley; Amusement parks v load-balancing.
- Upcoming appearances: Edinburgh, Sydney, Melbourne, Brighton, London, South Bend.
- 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.
AI solipsists and AI cynics (permalink)
As a technology, AI isn't exceptional. It's not exceptionally wicked. It's not exceptionally good. Take away the accompanying, galactic-scale stock-swindle, and we'd call AI's applications "plug-ins" and we'd use them and abuse them in the same way that we've used every other technology:
As a destructive economic pathology, AI is extraordinary. AI boosters have spent a baffling and terrifying sum of money – over $1.4T, most of that in the past year – on the promise of making as many workers unemployed as possible, while lowering the wages of the meager survivors of this jobspocalypse. To make things worse, AI can't do the jobs it's replacing: AI is predicated on the premise that the monopolies, duopolies and cartels that control the global economy can deliberately worsen their products without suffering economic or regulatory consequences, because they're the only game in town.
In service to this bubble, AI companies have suborned regional governments into running roughshod over environmental and planning review in order to build endless acres of data centers, many of which will likely end up casualties of the imminent bubble-pop, never to be switched on or even completed. What an indignity to have your farm or house seized through eminent domain, only to see it razed and replaced by a weed-choked empty field, a lonely foundation slab, or an abandoned empty building that could only ever be repurposed for laser-tag or an ICE concentration-camp:
https://gizmodo.com/trump-on-data-centers-you-cant-fight-it-you-have-to-go-with-it-2000790014
This is just one of the many negative effects of AI that can be traced to the scale of the bubble. Were it not for the imperative to turn more than a trillion dollars of losses into a profit, we would not have the aggressive, site-destroying scraping epidemic. Nor would we see AI crammed into every part of every product and service we use. And of course, in the absence of the investment bubble, businesses wouldn't be firing productive workers and replacing them with defective chatbots.
The single most salient fact about AI is the investment bubble, not the technical characteristics of chatbots or recent advances in statistical inference. AI's investor story is an incoherent tangle of predictions about AI's future, ranging from the outlandish ("Once we spend enough money, AI will become God and solve all our problems, including our profitability crisis") to the dystopian ("The majority of jobs in the economy will be done by our chatbots, and the employers who previously employed those workers will split the wage savings with us").
None of these stories are plausible, which raises an urgent question: why have the world's wealthiest investors been so eager to hand over trillions to finance this bubble?
I have previously written about one reason that billionaires find the AI story so compelling: at root, many billionaires just don't believe most other people are actually, fully real. How could they? Achieving billionairehood requires that you inflict pain on vast numbers of people. If you truly believed that those people were as real as you are, you'd never be able to look yourself in the mirror. Whether it's Leona Helmsley's claim that "only the little people pay taxes," or Elon Musk's habit of calling people who disagree with him "NPCs," the whole ideological project of billionaireism is shot through with a kind of solipsism:
https://pluralistic.net/2026/01/05/fisher-price-steering-wheel/#billionaire-solipsism
This is true even in one-on-one encounters: for the Epstein Class, the children raped on his island weren't fully real – certainly not as real as their own children. It's even more true for the people that billionaires experience as statistical artifacts, such as Jeff Bezos's vast army of drivers and warehouse workers, with their sky-high on-the-job injury rates and the everyday indignity of their piss-bottles. It gets worse for social media bosses like Mark Zuckerberg, for whom AI's principal appeal is the prospect of ending socializing on social media, swapping your mulish friends for pliable chatbots who will organize their interactions with you to maximize your platform usage and thus the number of ads you see:
https://pluralistic.net/2026/01/19/billionaire-solipsism/#sirius-cybernetics
I think billionaire solipsism can account for much of the malinvestment in this obvious bubble, but I don't think it's the whole story. Rather, I think there's a whole cohort of investors who don't believe in AI, but believe that other people will believe in AI.
This is a well-established investment principle. As Keynes wrote, the point of investing isn't necessarily to pick the most beautiful contestant to win the beauty contest – it's to pick the contestant that the other judges will hand the crown to:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keynesian_beauty_contest
In other words, you don't get rich from stock speculation by identifying the businesses whose profitability will grow the most – you get rich by identifying the businesses that other investors will pile into, pushing the price up. All you need to do is sell your shares after the price spike, but before anyone else figures out that the business is a turkey. It's like that old joke: "I don't need to run faster than the bear (market), I just have to run faster than you."
From the perspective of a cynical AI investor, the question isn't, "Can AI do your job?" The question is, "Can an AI salesman convince your boss that an AI can do your job?" So long as enough bosses are convinced to fire workers and replace them with AI, AI valuation will continue to climb, and if they time the market right, they can get out before those valuations crash. This proposition gets even sweeter if the CEO of the AI company is in bed with financial regulators and stock exchanges, and can force your financial advisor to buy his worthless AI stock with "little people's" retirement savings:
https://fortune.com/2026/06/13/spacex-stock-index-funds-passive-investing-401k-nasdaq-100-russell/
A bet that bosses will fire workers and replace them with AI is a good wager. Bosses are absolute suckers for this scam. Bosses hate the fact that they can't translate their plans into action without first having a series of ego-shattering confrontations with workers who actually know how to do things, who insist that those plans are illegal, stupid, impossible or will kill people:
https://pluralistic.net/2026/03/12/normal-technology/#bubble-exceptionalism
For these bosses, AI is the chance to wire the toy steering wheel they play with all day directly into the corporate drive-train. With enough AI slaves, the boss can run the company all on their own:
https://pluralistic.net/2026/07/10/posthuman-as-in-no-humans/#hell-is-other-people
In other words, you don't need to be a solipsist to bet on AI. It is sufficient to believe that bosses are solipsists, who can be relied upon to empty the corporate coffers in exchange for worker-replacing magic beans.
This is true in many scam sectors. I'm sure that most of the people who finance the supplements that Andrew Tate and Joe Rogan hawk understand that they're just a way to give yourself very expensive piss. They don't have to believe supplements work to believe that there is an army of desperate and credulous young men who will give anything for the promise they dangle.
Likewise, you don't have to believe that Gwyneth Paltrow can help women "regulate their periods" and "correct their hormonal imbalances" by selling them rocks to stuff in their vaginas. You just have to believe that between patriarchy-induced body shame and patriarchy-driven medical neglect, there's an army of desperate women out there who will buy those rocks and risk their lives by sticking them inside their bodies:
AI is even worse than vagina-rocks, of course. When the bubble bursts, when the seven AI companies that make up 35% of the S&P 500 tank, when a third of the US stock market is vaporized overnight, our governments will reflexively turn to austerity, the go-to response to every financial crisis. Austerity is fascism's best recruiting tool:
https://pluralistic.net/2026/04/12/always-great/#our-nhs
When the AI bubble bursts, the defective chatbots that replaced skilled workers will disappear with it, leaving us scrambling to get that work done after the workers who understood it have retrained, retired, or exited the workforce. AI is the asbestos we're shoveling into the walls of our civilization and our descendants will be digging it out for generations:
https://pluralistic.net/2026/04/08/process-knowledge-vs-bosses/#wash-dishes-cut-wood
Long after the AI bubble bursts, we'll be dealing with its catastrophic carbon emissions. The Second Law of Thermodynamics isn't up for debate. Once we sink enough therms into the sea, we are losing the ice-caps.
AI is an ordinary technology, but the AI bubble is extraordinary: extraordinarily toxic and extraordinarily dangerous. The source of that danger is financiers, and they are motivated by a mix of solipsism and a belief in other people's solipsism. For them, the most exciting investment hypothesis is that "hell is other people":
https://locusmag.com/feature/commentary-cory-doctorow-hell-is-other-people/
(Image: Cryteria, CC BY 3.0, modified)
Hey look at this (permalink)
- Writing by Hand is Good for your Brain – Here's how to do it https://nealstephenson.substack.com/p/writing-by-hand-is-good-for-your
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Trump BBC Defamation Lawsuit Backfires Big-Time—With Subpoenas Coming https://newrepublic.com/post/213372/trump-bbc-defamation-lawsuit-backfires-subpoenas-financial-info
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Google burning through cash with spiralling AI costs https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c235n47g8g8o
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A laid-off journalist started his own news site. Facebook AI decided he was fake https://eu.indystar.com/story/news/local/2026/07/21/a-blow-to-local-news-facebook-ai-calls-real-indiana-journalist-fake/90983530007/
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Washington Still Ignores Airline Monopolies https://economicpopulist.substack.com/p/washington-still-ignores-airline
Object permanence (permalink)
#25yrsago Stolen, infected computer transmits its location by virus spamming owner's address book https://slashdot.org/story/01/07/25/1510213/tracking-a-thief-via-the-sircam-virusa
#15yrsago Çurface: an industrial surface made from compressed coffee and melted coffee cup https://memex.craphound.com/2011/07/25/curface-an-industrial-surface-made-from-compressed-coffee-and-melted-coffee-cups/
#15yrsago Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1: Android iPad-killer is a poorly thought-through disappointment https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2011/jul/25/why-samsung-galaxy-tab-is-meh
#15yrsago Strange tunnels of Austro-Germany https://web.archive.org/web/20120621155245/https://www.spiegel.de/international/zeitgeist/hideouts-or-sacred-spaces-experts-baffled-by-mysterious-underground-chambers-a-775348.html
#15yrsago BitCoin alternative: distributed, but not decentralized cash https://www.links.org/files/distributed-currency.pdf
#10yrsago Bruce Schneier on the coming IoT security dumpster-fire https://web.archive.org/web/20160725221959/https://motherboard.vice.com/read/the-internet-of-things-will-cause-the-first-ever-large-scale-internet-disaster
#10yrsago Our public health data is being ingested into Silicon Valley’s gaping, proprietary maw https://web.archive.org/web/20170917070322/http://www.nature.com/news/stop-the-privatization-of-health-data-1.20268
#5yrsago Amusement parks, crowd control and load-balancing https://pluralistic.net/2021/07/25/now-youve-got-two-problems-part-iii/
Upcoming appearances (permalink)
- Edinburgh International Book Festival with Jimmy Wales, Aug 17
https://www.edbookfest.co.uk/events/the-front-list-cory-doctorow-and-jimmy-wales -
Sydney: The Festival of Dangerous Ideas, Aug 23-24
https://festivalofdangerousideas.com/program/ -
Melbourne: Enshittification at the Wheeler Centre, Aug 25
https://www.wheelercentre.com/events-tickets/season-2026/cory-doctorow-enshittification -
Brighton: The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI with Carole Cadwalladr (Brighton Dome), Sep 8
https://brightondome.org/whats-on/LSC-cory-doctorow-the-reverse-centaurs-guide-to-life-after-ai/ -
London: The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI with Riley Quinn (Foyle's Picadilly), Sep 9
https://www.foyles.co.uk/events/enshittification-cory-doctorow-riley-quinn -
South Bend: An Evening With Cory Doctorow (Notre Dame), Oct 6
https://franco.nd.edu/events/2026/10/06/an-evening-with-cory-doctorow/
Recent appearances (permalink)
- Will AI ever come alive, and what happens if it does? (BBC News)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lzk4o3fPZZE -
Waarom jij straks het hulpje van AI bent (VPRO)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tOnvR2fs8CA -
Talk Tech Bock (Vera Linß)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3PFjGvQoBgc -
How To Think About AI Before It’s Too Late (This Is Hell)
https://thisishell.com/episodes/1919 -
AI Won't Replace You… But This Might (Deep Focus)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oorWq_m48AQ
Latest 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/ -
"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/ -
"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
Upcoming books (permalink)
- "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
Colophon (permalink)
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Currently writing: "The Post-American Internet," a sequel to "Enshittification," about the better world the rest of us get to have now that Trump has torched America. Fourth draft completed. Submitted to editor.
- A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING
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NRC-columnist Floor Rusman kreeg in september te horen dat ze eierstokkanker had. Deze zomer schrijft ze wekelijks over wat er in haar hoofd gebeurde toen haar lichaam een bedreiging werd.
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