Cory Doctorow
As I go into my fifth year of writing Pluralistic (!), I find myself increasingly reflecting on the unexpected pleasures of creating the collages that head each post. I am by no means a visual artist - my drawing skills are sub-stick-figure, and my spatial sense overall is remarkable terrible. I can't solve jigsaws, I get lost in hotel corridors, and I can't find things that are *right* under my nose.
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Cory Doctorow
If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
https://pluralistic.net/2024/12/07/great-kepplers-ghost/art-adjacent
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Cory Doctorow
But addressing the challenge of illustrating *extremely* abstract ideas related to tech policy, corruption, monopoly and other hard-to-visualize ideas has awakened some kind of latent, heretofore unsuspected interest in visual communications in me. Relying exclusively on Creative Commons, public domain, and extremely solid fair use claims in selecting my source materials adds a spicy challenge that makes the whole thing even more engrossing.
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Cory Doctorow
I've written about my process in finding and preparing these sources before. Here's 2023's notes and highlights:
https://pluralistic.net/2023/12/21/collages-r-us/#ki-bosch
And here's 2022:
https://pluralistic.net/2022/12/25/a-year-in-illustration/
This year saw some new, exciting discovering and challenges. First and foremost is my switch to kagi.com as my preferred search-engine, which is like having access to a time machine that's connected to pre-enshittificated Google:
https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/04/teach-me-how-to-shruggie/#kagi
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Cory Doctorow
Kagi's image search is *amazing*, far better than Google's, and it has great copyright-based filters. When combined with tineye.com (for finding high-rez versions of images that might not be correctly tagged for rights status), it's even better. Even so, often Kagi will surface thumbnails of images Tineye can only find as high-rez on proprietary stock art sites like Alamy, covered in gross watermarks.
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Cory Doctorow
These images are still in the public domain, watermarks or no, but erasing the watermarks is a *lot* of work. However, Alamy is a pretty good source of bibliographic information about the original sources of these images, for example, which issue of a 19th century boxing magazine they came out of
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Cory Doctorow
Then Kagi can find me high-rez scans of these sources, at the @internetarchive and/or the Library of Congress. I snag those PDFs and import them into the GIMP (which I use for editing) and pull, clean and crop a new high-rez version of those images for my own use. This year, I got much better at saving and organizing all that work on my laptop, but next year I'm hoping to get into a rhythm of uploading my high-rezzes to Wikimedia Commons so everyone can use 'em.
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Cory Doctorow
Getting better at collaging isn't merely getting better at using search tools, of course. Knowing *what* to search for is even more important, especially given the constraints of only using public domain/CC sources. The Library of Congress is a wellspring of visual material, but its own search tool is sadly lacking; however, Kagi's image search comes to the rescue again, thanks to the "site:loc.gov" flag, which restricts results to the LoC.
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Cory Doctorow
It was through these searches that I realized how many of the source images I was pulling down were the work of Joseph Keller (1872-1956), an American political cartoonist who worked extensively for *Punch*:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Keppler
Keppler was called upon to illustrate many, many political issues that have parallels with the modern competition, corruption and geopolitical stories.
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Cory Doctorow
A scant few of these remain in the periphery of the public's imagination today, most notably "The Bosses of the Senate," quite possibly the most significant antitrust cartoon of all time:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Bosses_of_the_Senate
But Keppler is a *wellspring* of great public domain images, and I've been drawing on them heavily. It gives me great pleasure to do so, not just because they're so well-suited to the stories I write, but also because his posterity deserves it.
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Cory Doctorow
He should be in the American illustrator pantheon alongside the likes of Norman Rockwell!
Besides my search engine and my sources, 2024 saw one other *gigantic* change in my collage-making: I had cataracts removed from both my eyes in September, and my ophthalmologist implanted lenses that corrected my severe astigmatism and permanently focused one of my eyes at 23" and the other at 25' (this is called monovision).
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Cory Doctorow
My new eyeballs are still bedding in, and there's days when my vision is subpar, but there's continuous improvement, and I think this'll be a game-changer for 2025.
2025 will also see the long-awaited Version 3.0 release of The GIMP, the free/open image editor I exclusively use. GIMP (Generic Image Manipulation Program) was first released a quarter-century ago, and it's been in version 2.x for *twenty years*, so this is a big milestone. I can't wait!
https://lwn.net/SubscriberLink/998793/6c8d00bd1b2a7948/
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Cory Doctorow
Well, enough forematter. Let's get into this year's best illustrations. If you want high-rezzes of these (or any of my other collages), you can get them at full rez from my Flickr gallery of Pluralistic collages:
https://www.flickr.com/photos/doctorow/albums/72177720316719208
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Cory Doctorow
Someday, we'll all take comfort in the internet's "dark corners"
This one combines three sources: a public domain image of the Las Vegas sign, a CC 0 image of a western ghost-town, and a fair use gank of Mark Zuckerberg's metaverse avatar. I spent a lot of time hand-cropping the blades of grass around the sign's footing to create the illusion that it was planted in the ground. I'm also pretty happy with the dirt effect I managed on the sign.
https://pluralistic.net/2024/03/23/evacuate-the-platforms/#let-the-platforms-burn
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Cory Doctorow
Vice surrenders
I got these cover images from a gallery of old Dutch government workplace safety poster; they're *delightfully* gory in a way that rests comfortably in the cannon of Dutch bluntness. I did a lot of futzing with the Perspective tool to get the alignments right, atop the actual magazine covers (I believe they were Italian fashion magazines).
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Cory Doctorow
How America's oligarchs lull us with the be-your-own-boss fairy tale
Man, I wish this one had a higher-rez original. The 19th century painting of a kid being read a bedtime story by her kindly granny was *perfect*, except it was only 804 pixels wide! The grinning Uncle Sam is from Keppler (Keppler's Uncle Sams are many, varied, and *great*). The grinning kid is from a 19th century collection of photos of child laborers, and I *love* his expression (he's a newsie).
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Cory Doctorow
I think I did a really good job blending the US $100 (works of federal authorship are all public domain) with the bed curtains. I was disappointed with how the gold brick that granny's foot rests upon game out. I even followed my friend Alistair Milne's tip of cropping the brick, desaturating it, and putting it atop the gold texture in overlay mode and tweaking the curves. It just wouldn't pop the way it did in my mind's eye.
https://pluralistic.net/2024/02/16/narrative-capitalism/#sell-job
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Cory Doctorow
How I got scammed
This one uses some public domains stock art of a hacker in a hoodie, an online make-a-custom-credit-card generator, and two of my favorite visual tropes. The first is the 'code waterfall' effect from the credit sequences of the Wachowskis' 'Matrix' movies, which I use whenever I'm trying to illustrate something with a nexus with the digital world. I have a folder full of these, generated with this code waterfall generator:
https://github.com/Rezmason/matrix
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Cory Doctorow
The other element, of course, is the eye of HAL 9000 from Kubrick's '2001: A Space Odyssey'; there's an SVG of this on Wikimedia Commons by a user called 'Cryteria,' licensed CC BY 3.0, which I use whenever I want to illustrate a harm caused by computers:
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:HAL9000.svg
https://pluralistic.net/2024/02/05/cyber-dunning-kruger/#swiss-cheese-security
--
Image:
Cryteria (modified)
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:HAL9000.svg
CC BY 3.0
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/deed.en
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Cory Doctorow
Solar is a market for (financial) lemons
I often write about scammers and hucksters, casting about for good visual representation. It wasn't until late January 2024 that I thought to look for an image of a carny barker and turned up this picture of WC Fields in full flight. He makes a lot of appearance after this point!
https://pluralistic.net/2024/01/27/here-comes-the-sun-king/#sign-here
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Cory Doctorow
Boeing, Spirit and Jetblue, a monopoly horror-story
I was really determined to get the right aircraft for this story about Boeing 737s, but that meant cropping out the plane from Vitaly Druchenok's photo and then painstakingly recreating the Spirit Airlines livery.
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Cory Doctorow
In the original version of the image, the airplane was sticking out of the roof of the Supreme Court, but my wife (wisely) vetoed that as suggesting a terrorist attack on the court (I wanted to imply that the court had caused the airline to crash).
https://pluralistic.net/2024/01/22/anything-that-cant-go-on-forever/#will-eventually-stop
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Cory Doctorow
Tech workers and gig workers need each other
I cropped out these two women strikers from an early 20th century photo of a picket line and superimposed them on a photo of a massive union rally from the same era at (I think?) Madison Square Gardens. I am *really* chuffed with how nicely the (public domain) hacker/hoodie stock image and livery of a gig bike-delivery rider (fair use, ganked from a gig company's promo materials) blended with the strikers.
https://pluralistic.net/2024/01/13/solidarity-forever/#tech-unions
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Cory Doctorow
cult-of-mac.jpg
This one is in the running to be my favorite illo of the year. I knew it was going to slay the minute I found the image of the U Illinois campus secret society (spears! fezzes!). There's a really good public domain SVG recreation of the "Think Different" wordmark on Wikimedia Commons that I used here, spending some time getting the overlays and textures right:
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Apple_logo_Think_Different_vectorized.svg
https://pluralistic.net/2024/01/12/youre-holding-it-wrong/#if-dishwashers-were-iphones
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Cory Doctorow
End of the line for corporate sovereignty
I use this ogrish rich-guy-in-a-top-hat image all the time to represent the thuggish application of wealth; he comes from a *delightful* Soviet editorial cartoon called "Capital Controls the Government":
https://craphound.com/images/ussr-capital.jpg
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Cory Doctorow
Putting him behind the podium in a UN plenary room with a UN crest in his hand worked really well, though in hindsight, the cropped version I used for the post's hero image is even better:
https://craphound.com/images/27Mar2024.jpg
https://pluralistic.net/2024/03/27/korporate-kangaroo-kourts/#corporate-sovereignty
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Cory Doctorow
Conspiratorialism and the epistemological crisis
Another "thing at the front of a big room" image; this one works better that the UN one, I think.
Both of the sources for this have weird CC characteristics. The hearing room image comes from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, a federal agency, and I am 99% certain that makes it public domain.
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Cory Doctorow
However, whoever managed the NRC's Flickr account in 2014 applied a CC BY license to it, so I did the whole attribution for it, even though I think it wasn't needed.
The crumbled cardboard box image comes from a British company that sells cardboard boxes; they upload product shots to Flickr under CC BY 2.0 and require that the attribution string include their store's URL (not necessarily the URL of the image), presumably to get SEO backlinks.
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Cory Doctorow
This is fine, but the CC BY 2.0 licenses have a serious defect in that a failure to correctly attribute them can give rise to serious ($150K!) copyright liability, something that a group of "copyleft trolls" have brutally exploited:
https://pluralistic.net/2023/04/02/commafuckers-versus-the-commons/
Which makes this kind of funky attribution a minefield. I try to touch all the bases by attributing to both the store's URL and the URL of the image.
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Cory Doctorow
The real solution to this is for Flickr to *finally* update its CC licensing to push all its images up to CC 4.0 and push a notice to all users with CC images telling them they either have to consent to upgrading to the latest licenses, or have the licensing on their images reverted to "All Rights Reserved" (maybe with an asterisk explaining that they still have irrevocable but dangerous CC 2.0 licenses attached to them).
https://pluralistic.net/2024/03/25/black-boxes/#when-you-know-you-know
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Cory Doctorow
Your car spies on you and rats you out to insurance companies
I had *so* much fun with this one! Check out all those gracenotes! Munch's (public domain) "Scream" reflected in the mirrors, the windscreen, and the dashboard. The 'You Wouldn't Download a Car' parody reflected in the blade of the giant knife sticking out of the steering wheel!
https://pluralistic.net/2024/03/12/market-failure/#car-wars
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Cory Doctorow
Wellness surveillance makes workers unwell
I love how this one turned out. The labcoated figure is actually a dentist from a gallery of images from the National Museum of Health and Medicine. The little flying guy in the back kills me.
https://pluralistic.net/2024/03/15/wellness-taylorism/#sick-of-spying
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Cory Doctorow
Amazon's financial shell game let it create an "impossible" monopoly
I *love* this one. First of all, Hieronymus Bosch's 'The Conjurer' is a *great* visual representation of a slickster pulling a fast one on gawping yokels. But once I added Doc Searls' great shot of Jeff Bezos in mid-crazy-laugh to it (from a 2010 Techonomy Summit) it became perfectly trenchant.
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Cory Doctorow
This was part of a short series of images that I added extra fingers and pupils to after someone scolded me online because they (incorrectly) believed I'd generated a collage with an AI image generator. Thankfully, that kind of absurd witch-hunting seems to have waned in popularity. What a ridiculous waste of everyone's time!
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Cory Doctorow
Live Nation/Ticketmaster is buying Congress
I had a lot of fun scouring Victorian woodcuts for cool tentacles to add to this image. The garish concert lights in the background were a fun find - I was halfway through using them when I realized that the image came from my old pal Matt Biddulph.
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Cory Doctorow
Matt has many claims to fame, but my favorite is that he once sarcastically called the area in Hackney where some tech startups were clustered "Silicon Roundabout" and then experienced the monkey's paw curse of having the government turn this into an official designation.
https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/30/nix-fix-the-tix/#something-must-be-done-there-we-did-something
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Cory Doctorow
The specific process by which Google enshittified its search
Around April, I realized I needed a visual signifier for "enshittified Google" - I created a cartoon mascot with the head of a poop emoji, colored in the original Google logo colors. I put him into "The Junior Partner Speaks," an old ad for Pacific Woolens and Worsteds, which I've since used several times:
https://craphound.com/images/juniorpartner.jpg
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Cory Doctorow
I'm very fond of using the homely old original Google logo as a way to differentiate pre-enshittificatory Google from modern, enshittocene Google.
https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/24/naming-names/#prabhakar-raghavan
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Cory Doctorow
Podcasting "Capitalists Hate Capitalism"
Real Gilded Age corruption-heads will instantly recognize the editorial cartoon image of Boss Tweed as a suited figure with a sack of money for a head; his body language is *impeccable*, conveying a sneering disregard for decency and others' wellbeing. He works very well inserted into this tapestry of feudal peasants threshing grain.
https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/18/in-extremis-veritas/#the-winnah
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Cory Doctorow
No, "convenience" isn't the problem
It's stupidly, unnecessarily hard to find hi-rez scans of Rube Goldberg cartoons online, but this one is perfect and it was a delight to lovingly crop out all its little details. Throw in Cryteria's HAL 9000 and a Matrix code waterfall and you've got a perfect image of the complex, hostile traps of digital systems.
https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/12/give-me-convenience/#or-give-me-death
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Cory Doctorow
The unexpected upside of global monopoly capitalism
This one's pretty subtle! I mostly just added the monocle, mustache and top-hat to the fallen head of Goliath in Bosse's 17th century engraving of the triumphant David. The planet Earth in David's sling is a NASA image and thus in the public domain.
https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/10/an-injury-to-one/#is-an-injury-to-all
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Cory Doctorow
How to shatter the class solidarity of the ruling class
Goodness, but "canceled" is a tedious cliche. If you *must* describe someone being ejected from polite society, please consider the far more delightful "defenestrated," not least because the many paintings and etchings of The Defenestration of Prague gives us a lot of public domain visual material to work with when illustrating such events.
https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/08/money-talks/#bullshit-walks
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Cory Doctorow
General Mills and cheaply bought "dietitians" co-opted the anti-diet movement
The minute I saw this unsourced midcentury commercial illustration of a scientist working in a chem lab, I knew I'd get a lot of mileage out of it; I spent a long flight productively slicing it onto layers so that I could replace his head and put arbitrary objects in his flask:
https://craphound.com/images/labflask.jpg
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Cory Doctorow
I've used him before, but putting the Trix rabbit's head on him and sticking a box of Cocoa Puffs in the flask worked *great*.
https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/05/corrupt-for-cocoa-puffs/#flood-the-zone-with-shit
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Cory Doctorow
Too big to care
I spent the whole flight to SXSW last year slicing up a *super* hi-rez (10,000px wide!) image of Hieronymus Bosch's "Garden of Earthly Delights," slicing out individual demons, with special attention to the hoof-footed, anus-baring demon in a hat with a whole secret demonic clubhouse in its rectal cavity. At the end of that flight, I had a very funny conversation with my perplexed seatmate, who was dying to know what the actual fuck I was working on.
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Cory Doctorow
The background here is made up of desaturated, magnified brushstrokes from Van Gogh's "Starry Night."
https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/04/teach-me-how-to-shruggie/#kagi
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Cory Doctorow
Red Lobster was killed by private equity, not Endless Shrimp
I inserted a rogue's gallery of "evil boss types" from various editorial cartoons into this vintage Red Lobster ad, including Boss Tweed, an impatient guy from a midcentury John Falter commercial illustration, possibly for a radio station (?) and a William Gropper sketch for a cartoon making fun of the business lobby's opposition to the New Deal.
https://pluralistic.net/2024/05/23/spineless/#invertebrates
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Cory Doctorow
You were promised a jetpack by liars
The newsie with the great grin makes a reappearance in this one, beneath a jetpack flyer taken from a 1928 *Amazing Stories* cover by R Frank Paul. The control panel is one of several midcentury electronics consoles I've spent idle hours cropping out (this one comes from a Schlitz ad depicting a HAM radio enthusiast). The hypnotic head is from the October, 1953 cover of *Doll-Man*, likely by Reed Crandall.
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Cory Doctorow
I started playing around with halftoning with this one, on the background, as a way of hiding the JPEG artifacts that emerged when I uprezzed small source images. It worked really well.
https://pluralistic.net/2024/05/17/fake-it-until-you-dont-make-it/#twenty-one-seconds
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Cory Doctorow
AI "art" and uncanniness
I was *so* happy with how the extra fingers on this Victorian woodcut of a hand on a Oujia board planchette came out. And the green tinting worked *perfectly* with the Code Waterfall background.
https://pluralistic.net/2024/05/13/spooky-action-at-a-close-up/#invisible-hand
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Cory Doctorow
I confess that the kind of music that people make with modular synths leaves me totally, absolutely flat. However, the *look* of modular synths is *perfect* for conjuring up the idea of "twiddling" - a key part of my theory of enshittification (doubly so after I painstakingly put a HAL 9000 eye on every dial and knob).
https://pluralistic.net/2024/05/11/for-you/#the-algorithm-tm
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Cory Doctorow
CDA 230 bans Facebook from blocking interoperable tools
"Interoperability" is one of those abstractions I *really* struggle to visually represent, but sticking a giant, scuffed, USB-C port (courtesy of D-Kuru's great CC BY 4.0 macrofocus image) on the Facebook sign worked great.
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Cory Doctorow
Cleantech has an enshittification problem
Illustrating "cleantech" being bricked seemed pretty straightforward, but it took a lot of doing to find a good picture of a brick. Eventually, I found a brick and took a picture of it! I think the solar panels on the brick are pretty nicely matted in.
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Cory Doctorow
How to design a tech regulation
Cutting out those balance scales took a long-ass time, but I've found a lot of uses for them, illustrating the concept of "making trade-offs." The tradeoff here is between a rigid, planned approach and a more improvisational one, so I used an Air Force guy at rigid attention and a guerrilla fighter on the scales. The "impatient guy" from the maybe-a-radio-ad stands in this time for a government regulator.
https://pluralistic.net/2024/06/20/scalesplaining/#administratability
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Cory Doctorow
Microsoft pinky swears that THIS TIME they'll make security a priority
Look, I'll stipulate that using "Clippy" as a symbol for Microsoft personified is a bit antiquated, but I like to think that for those who know, they *really* know. The Uncle Sam is Keppler again. With apologies to Skippy Shulz, natch.
https://pluralistic.net/2024/06/14/patch-tuesday/
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Cory Doctorow
An end to the climate emergency is in our grasp
Virgil Finlay's demon head is sinister, sure, but the unintentional, undeniable sinisterness of the body language of this guy puts him in the shade. He comes from an unsourced image that looks like an ad for a built-in stereo.
https://craphound.com/images/guygestures.jpg
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Cory Doctorow
The audience in the front comes from a Victorian daugerrotype of a crowd watching some kind of unknown spectacle. I cropped 'em out by hand and use them as a visual stand-in for "this is a thing that the world is, or should be, watching."
https://pluralistic.net/2024/06/12/s-curve/#anything-that-cant-go-on-forever-eventually-stops
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Cory Doctorow
Surveillance pricing
I don't make a lot of animations, but this one is super-sweet. The idea of things switching slowly via crossfades is a great way to illustrate how tech lets companies change things when you aren't paying attention. Thanks as ever to ezgif.com for help assembling and optimizing it.
https://pluralistic.net/2024/06/05/your-price-named/#privacy-first-again
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Cory Doctorow
"Carbon neutral" Bitcoin operation founded by coal plant operator wasn't actually carbon neutral
Thomas Hawk is an amazing photographer who also posts all kinds of amazing found photos (more than 23,000 of them!) to his Flickr stream, at very high rez:
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Cory Doctorow
The guys in the foreground appear in one of these, proudly displaying an award for - I kid you not - "canned bacon." The kids in the background come from a gallery of photos of early 20th C. child laborers.
https://pluralistic.net/2024/08/09/terawulf/#hunterbrook
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Cory Doctorow
The Google antitrust remedy should extinguish surveillance, not democratize it
If Keppler's "Capital Controls the Senate" is *one* of the most important antitrust images of all time, then his "Next!" (depicting Standard Oil as a rapacious, world-strangling octopus) is *the* most important antitrust illustration.
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Cory Doctorow
The Uncle Sam-as-a-cop figure is another Keppler (natch), and he's a regular in my collages - I can make him stand in for any federal agency by putting its logo on his chest, where a badge would go.
It took me a *long* time to cut up that Next! image for easy modding. Here's a GIMP XCF file for your pleasure:
https://craphound.com/images/standard-oil-kraken.xcf
And a PSD:
https://craphound.com/images/standard-oil-kraken.psd
https://pluralistic.net/2024/08/07/revealed-preferences/#extinguish-v-improve
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Cory Doctorow
crypto-campaign-finance.jpg
The largest campaign finance violation in US history
The giant figure looking at something in his palm through a looking-glass is yet another Keppler Uncle Sam illo (in the original, Sam is peering at a taxpayer who's shouting back up at him). I love the sad little donkey.
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Cory Doctorow
I spent a bunch of time this election year finding public domain images of mules and elephants and dressing them in the livery of the mascots of the Democratic and Republican parties to have a bunch of visual signifiers with different emotional valences for each.
Note the halftoned background (a Maricopa County ballot); I'm increasingly fond of halftoning as a way to create a nice looking, scale-independent background.
https://pluralistic.net/2024/07/31/greater-fools/#coinbased
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Cory Doctorow
AI's productivity theater
"Technofeudalism" was a theme in my work even before Yanis Varoufakis's excellent book on the subject. Putting a HAL Eye on the reeve in this medieval tapestry depicting him lording it over his groveling serfs really caught the subject, especially after I faded in some Matrix code waterfall for the background.
https://pluralistic.net/2024/07/25/accountability-sinks/#work-harder-not-smarter
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Cory Doctorow
Return to office and dying on the job
This medieval torture chamber was really brightened up by the LATE AGAIN! workplace poster on the wall and the impatient guy posed before the Manhattan skyline through the window bars. Cutting out all the window-panes took *forever*.
https://pluralistic.net/2024/09/27/sharpen-your-blades-boys/#disciplinary-technology
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Cory Doctorow
Thinking the unthinkable
Bosch's anus-demon (from the Garden of Earthly Delights) returns, this time to illustrate the problems of radium suppositories as a metaphor for commercial surveillance (yes, a visual metaphor for a textual metaphor - whew, it's getting *abstract* in here). It took some fiddling to get the right green radioactive glow in the anal cavity, and to match it for each of the suppositories in the Museum of Health Sciences' picture of a box of suppositories.
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Cory Doctorow
The damask-esque background comes from a gallery of antique marbled endpapers that I often use when I need a texture, tweaking the curves and colors until they look cool.
https://pluralistic.net/2024/09/19/just-stop-putting-that-up-your-ass/#harm-reduction
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Cory Doctorow
There's no such thing as "shareholder supremacy"
Boy I love this one. The background is a late 1800s photo of the Temple of Pluto. The golden calf on the idol comes from an early 20th century illustrated bible. Add Milton Friedman's head, the lettering from the original U Chicago School of Business, and a tiny golden top-hat for the calf, and voila! Idol-worship! Alistair Milne's tip for making gold textures work went down a treat here.
https://pluralistic.net/2024/09/18/falsifiability/#figleaves-not-rubrics
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Cory Doctorow
America's best-paid CEOs have the worst-paid employees
The heads of the millionaires are more Keppler illos, while the bodies and sofas come from another Thomas Hawk found industrial photo. You'll remember the child coal miners from ""Carbon neutral" Bitcoin operation founded by coal plant operator wasn't actually carbon neutral." I have a vivid memory of carefully cutting out the guillotine and its Jacobins during a boring conference presentation.
https://pluralistic.net/2024/09/09/low-wage-100/#executive-excess
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Cory Doctorow
Conspiratorialism as a material phenomenon
The superstitious belief that Big Tech built a mind-control ray is a common theme for me, and I've got a few prized, sliced up "mind control ray" themed images from old pulps in my stock art folder. This one is augmented with Cryteria's HAL 9000 eye, and a Keppler cavorting vaudevallian with Zuck's metaverse head. The midcentury family comes from a midcentury ad for Mason Masterpieces's bronzed baby-shoes.
https://pluralistic.net/2024/10/29/hobbesian-slop/#cui-bono
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Cory Doctorow
The US Copyright Office frees the McFlurry
Figuring out how to illustrate the problems of DRM in McFlurry machines took some doing, but I'm super happy with how the HAL 9000-eyed poop emoji inside a spattered McFlurry cup (fair use of a McDonald's promo image) worked out.
https://pluralistic.net/2024/10/28/mcbroken/#my-milkshake-brings-all-the-lawyers-to-the-yard
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Cory Doctorow
Keeping a suspense file gives you superpowers
Another Keppler classic: originally, this was FDR being offered a helping hand to cut through his paperwork. I added in one of the elephant heads I'd cropped out for election illustrations, and used it to represent "not forgetting."
https://pluralistic.net/2024/10/26/one-weird-trick/#todo
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Cory Doctorow
The housing crisis considered as an income crisis
The underlying image is another Keppler, showing death flamboyantly dicing with a millionaire. I added in an official (hence public domain) Reagan portrait, some monopoly houses, and a vintage aerial photo of Levittown, halftoned to disguise scaling artifacts.
https://pluralistic.net/2024/10/24/i-dream-of-gini/#mean-ole-mr-median
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Cory Doctorow
Retiring the US debt would retire the US dollar
More of Keppler's outstanding Uncle Sams! Add in a super-rezzed-up US $100 (all that intanglio looks *great* at high mag) and you've got an instantly arresting image.
https://pluralistic.net/2024/10/21/we-can-have-nice-things/#public-funds-not-taxpayer-dollars
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Cory Doctorow
Penguin Random House, AI, and writers' rights
The impatient guy makes another appearance in this WPA image of an adult literacy class; he's joined by another "business man" type, this one from a midcentury ad for a multi-level marketing scheme selling...business suits! The pupils' heads are all HAL 9000 eyes, natch, but don't miss all the little Easter Eggs, like the reeve and peasants in the frames on the walls.
75/
Cory Doctorow
You should be using an RSS reader
The guerrilla fighter is back, this time standing atop some mainframe equipment ganked from a Univac ad. The halftoned RSS logo in the background really works, especially with a partially blended GIMP "supernova" effect behind the rebel.
76/
Cory Doctorow
Dirty words are politically potent
I spent a bunch of time experimenting with different ways of making emphatic speech bubbles and it paid off here; that poop emoji's gawlix is in a good home. Halftoning the foreground element (the poop) works surprising well here. I should do more of that.
https://pluralistic.net/2024/10/14/pearl-clutching/#this-toilet-has-no-central-nervous-system
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Cory Doctorow
Lina Khan's future is the future of the Democratic Party – and America
Keppler's Uncle Sam Cop is back, along with another Keppler - a carpetbagger flying through the air after getting a kick in the pants. I got good use out of one of my Democratic Party donkeys here. The background is a half-tones WPA travel poster for Montana.
https://pluralistic.net/2024/10/11/democracys-antitrust-paradox/#there-will-be-an-out-and-out-brawl
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Cory Doctorow
Cars bricked by bankrupt EV company will stay bricked
I actually made this brick by hand: first I rescaled a box image until it had the right proportions, then I found a public domain texture that was the right kind of brick and used the perspective tool to put it over each face of the box. I told you public domain bricks are hard to find.
It was very satisfying overlaying all the elements of the Fisker car I cropped out onto the brick.
https://pluralistic.net/2024/10/10/software-based-car/#based
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Cory Doctorow
Prime's enshittified advertising
Nothing exceeds like excess! The flayed face with eyeballs comes from a 19th century book of French anatomical drawings. The calipers' handles just didn't look right (I referred to stills from Clockwork Orange to try and get 'em to work), but then I hit on the idea of using the "As Seen on TV" logo, which worked perfectly. The halftoned K-Tel ad-card background doesn't quite work, I think.
https://pluralistic.net/2024/10/03/mother-may-i/#minmax
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Cory Doctorow
"That Makes Me Smart"
This is actually *two* Kepplers; the original guy in the leg-hold trap is some lost-to-history politician embroiled in a lost-to-history scandal. But once I added (yet another!) of Keppler's Uncle Sam heads to his body (recoloring his coat and converting his trousers to red stripes), it became a perfect visual representation of America, trapped. The halftoned US flag is my favorite background yet.
https://pluralistic.net/2024/12/04/its-not-a-lie/#its-a-premature-truth
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Cory Doctorow
The far right grows through "disaster fantasies"
When it came to finding heavily armored and armed weirdos, I was spoilt for choice; same goes for grainy photos of vintage malls that look good after halftoning. Add in the goofy, grinning newsie's head and overlay his hat in camou, and it's *perfect*.
https://pluralistic.net/2024/11/24/mall-ninja-prophecy/#mano-a-mano
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Cory Doctorow
Boss politics antitrust
Finally, I got a chance to use Keppler's "Capital Controls the Senate!" I agonized over which corporate logos to use. Boss Tweed is back, with a Trump wig and MAGA hat.
https://pluralistic.net/2024/11/12/the-enemy-of-your-enemy/#is-your-enemy
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Cory Doctorow
Antiusurpation and the road to disenshittification
A diptych! Both sides' backgrounds come from Bosch's "Garden of Earthly Delights" - hell on the left, heaven on the right. The happy gas-jockey's old-fashioned ethyl pump divides the scene. The head-devouring dragon (with HAL 9000's eye) is a delightfully gory detail from Goltzius's 1183 painting of a couple guys having a hard time indeed.
https://pluralistic.net/2024/11/07/usurpers-helpmeets/#disreintermediation
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Cory Doctorow
Bluesky and enshittification
I know, canonically the sirens who tempted Ulysses were merfolk, not half-woman/half-birds, but all the merwoman versions have a *ton* of naked breasts in them, and frankly, Waterhouses's 1891 "Ulysses and the Sirens" *rips*. It took a some fiddling with the perspective and clone tools to swap their bodies for the Bluesky butterfly wings, but it still looked weird until I mapped in a kind of scaly, butterfly wing texture.
https://pluralistic.net/2024/11/02/ulysses-pact/#tie-yourself-to-a-federated-mast
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Cory Doctorow
Shifting $677m from the banks to the people, every year, forever
I replaced Moses parting the Red Sea with Keppler's Uncle Sam Cop, but something still wasn't right. Then I figured out how to turn the Red Sea into a giant, aquatic US $100 bill (loooove that intaglio!) and it was awesome.
https://pluralistic.net/2024/11/01/bankshot/#personal-financial-data-rights
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