Notices by Cory Doctorow (pluralistic@mamot.fr)

Some good ones here.

@codinghorror @kudra @bugwhisperer @gruber @siracusa

Apple spies on its users in exactly the way Facebook does (and lies about it), and while it blocks FB spying, it doesn't even disclose its own surveillance:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/11/14/luxury-surveillance/#liar-liar

@codinghorror @kudra @bugwhisperer @gruber @siracusa

Meanwhile, Tim Cook's elevation to CEO followed his success at setting up reliable contract manufacturing in China, under working conditions so horrible the manufacturer had to install suicide nets to catch workers who would rather die than spend another day in "iPhone City."

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/jun/18/foxconn-life-death-forbidden-city-longhua-suicide-apple-iphone-brian-merchant-one-device-extract

End of an era.

Tfw you get the advance review copy of your next book and it's fucking GORGEOUS

https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374619329/enshittification/

"Understood: Who Broke the Internet?" is my new podcast for CBC about the enshittogenic policy decisions that gave rise to enshittification. Episode two just dropped: "ctrl-ctrl-ctrl":

https://www.cbc.ca/listen/cbc-podcasts/1353-the-naked-emperor/episode/16145640-ctrl-ctrl-ctrl

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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/2025/05/13/ctrl-ctrl-ctrl/#free-dmitry

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One of the things I’ve learned from studying Steve Bannon is he takes the task of peeling away parts of the Democrats’ coalition very seriously, and he’s done it very successfully again and again. So why wouldn’t we try to do it back to him?

-Naomi Klein
https://prospect.org/culture/2025-05-13-moment-of-unparalleled-peril-interview-naomi-klein/

"Similarly, a private equity firm can invest a hundred million dollars to build a steel plant and potentially earn a 7% profit starting in two years, or it can borrow a hundred million dollars and buy an existing company and sell that firm’s real estate immediately and lease it back to the company it just bought while shedding labor contracts in bankruptcy. Which one is a better return on investment?"

-Matt Stoller, explaining how America consciously decided to create an environment hostile to making things; instead, we take things apart for profit, leaving ashes behind. Wall Street, not China, stole America's productive capacity.

https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/monopoly-round-up-china-is-not-why

@evan thank you!

"Who Broke the Internet?" is a new podcast from CBC Understood that I host and co-wrote - it's a four-part series that explains how the enshitternet came about, and, more importantly, what we can do about it. Episode one is out this week:

https://www.cbc.ca/listen/cbc-podcasts/1353-the-naked-emperor/episode/16144078-dont-be-evil

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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/2025/05/08/who-broke-the-internet/#bruce-lehman

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The fact that JD Vance was fulfilled by the Star Wars Universe's doomed pivot to racist caricatures and parliamentary procedure is completely, totally unsurprising.

I've long maintained that the threat from AI to workers isn't that AI can do your job - it's that an AI salesman can convince your boss to fire you and replace you with an AI that *can't* do your job:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/03/18/asbestos-in-the-walls/#government-by-spicy-autocomplete

The corollary here is that it doesn't matter if AI can design ads that work, not so long as an AI ad salesman can sell this proposition to an advertisers, and not so long as a tech CEO can sell it to investors.

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Every ad-tech sales-bro who takes a meeting with an advertising executive finds himself pushing on an open door. Advertisers *desperately* wants to believe in mind-control rays. Think of the department story magnate John Wannamaker, who said, "half my advertising spending is wasted - I just don't know which half." Imagine: some advertising exec convinced John Wannamaker that he was only wasting *half* of his advertising spending!

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Either they were lying to themselves, or to everyone else. Or both.

But many of tech's critics helped sell this narrative (and thus helped Meta sell ads). Many critics have fallen prey to the sin of "criti-hype," Lee Vinsel's term for critiquing the claims of your adversary without bothering to ask whether they are true:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/02/02/euthanize-rentiers/#dont-believe-the-hype

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The project of convincing investors that tech's "dopamine hackers" had perfected mind-control with warmed over, non-replicable Skinnerian behavior-mod and mass surveillance sold a *hell* of a lot of ads. After all, if there's one kind of person the advertising sector has *always* been able to sell to, it's advertising executives, who are the easiest of marks for a story about how easy it is to trick the public into buying whatever you're selling:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/10/05/florida-man/#wannamakers-ghost

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Here, Zuck is fulfilling the fundamental duty of every CEO of every high-growth tech company: explaining how his company will *continue* to grow. These growth stories are key, because growth stocks trade at a huge premium relative to the stocks of "mature" companies. Every dollar Meta brings in boosts their share price to a *much* greater degree than the dollars earned by companies with similar rates of profit, but slower rates of growth.

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This premium represents a bet by investors that Meta will continue to grow, which means that the instant Meta *stops* growing, the value of its shares will plummet, to reflect the fact that it is a "mature" company, not a "growth" company.

So Zuck needs to do everything he can to keep investors believing that Meta will continue to grow.

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After all, Zuck's key employees and top managers all take much (or even most!) of their compensation in Meta stock, which means that the instant the company stops growing, those workers' pay will plummet and they will seek employment elsewhere, depriving Meta of the workers it needs to successfully create or conquer a new market and once again become a growth stock.

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This is why Zuck keeps telling stories. The most important story Zuck tells is about himself, the boy genius who converted a tool for nonconsensually rating the fuckability of Harvard undergrads into a social media monopoly with four billion users. Zuck's cult of personality isn't the product of mere narcissism - it's a tool for creating the material conditions for ongoing investor confidence:

https://www.businessinsider.com/mark-zuckerberg-shirt-latin-what-does-it-say-explained-words-2024-9

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