Cory Doctorow writes essays on tech policy, monopoly power, copyright, right to repair, and what he calls enshittification of platforms.
Commenters quote him on enshittification and tariffs; one says he is simply quoted for coining terms, and others link his posts on tech power.
This reminds me of "Radio Free Europe" and "Radio Liberty", which were basically bankrolled (and likely largely influenced) by the CIA. They wanted to distribute all kinds of programming into USSR that was banned there, same with Solzhenitsyn's books etc. Eventually the USSR fell apart.
Now they are treating Europe like they treated USSR. Musk and other big influencers on X have already been calling for the breakup of the EU, after the EU fined X $100M. I bet that was at least some of the reason behind this.
The irony is that the Trump admin has been deporting non-citizens for speech, his FCC has been intimidating media like ABC and CBS into firing people or canceling programs and interviews, his DOJ has been telling social networks to fork over the identities of citizens who criticized ICE online, and his CBP will begin demanding that tourists hand over 5 years of their social media history, as well as their biometrics, family's information and whatever else.
This is the administration who would lecture Europe about freedom of speech? Didn't they just get through 10 years of telling European countries to be "nationalist" and resist the influence of their own federal government in Brussels -- but I guess we can just ignore their laws and broadcast anything into their countries, tempting them to set up a "great firewall" like China.
Well, if freedom of speech means violating other countries' laws, in this case can European governments just start streaming copyrighted…
If I read that right, it's grant writing, patronage and kickstarter.
> When authors do get paid, a natural model is patronage. That is the model used by most scientists. Copyright is of no help whatsoever to mathematicians.
> “But, Daniel, you are delusional! Not every writer can find a patron.” Am I? I have funded several book projects myself. For example, a lady called Kio Stark got $38,928 from us to write a handbook on alternatives to schooling.
> Several authors get funded on kickstarter:
> ...
> In fact, if you think about it for a minute, whenever you buy a book or a movie, you are being a patron to this project. So all work is the result of patronage. Cory Doctorow makes all his novels available for free from his web site. He happens to be one of the most successful writer of his generation. You can be confident that he is doing well financially. It works for him because people are willing to support him: his paying readers are his patrons.
(Note https://wiki.creativecommons.org/wiki/Case_Studies/Cory_Doctorow )
> Cory Doctorow's literary works are released under Creative Commons Atrribution NonCommercial ShareAlike or Attribution NonCommercial NoDerivatives. His latest work, Little Brother, has spent 4 weeks on the NYTimes bestseller list and is released as BY-NC-SA.
Consider the question "without copyright, how could he enforce the NonCommercial NoDerivatives clauses? And related:…
> if a skilled human has to check everything it does then "AI" becomes worthless
Well, perhaps not worthless, but certainly not "a trillion-dollar revolution that will let me fire 90% of my workforce and then execute my Perfect Rich Guy Visionary Ideas without any more pesky back-talk."
That said, the "worth" is brings to the shareholders will likely be a downgrade for everybody else, both workers and consumers, because:
> The market’s bet on AI is that an AI salesman will visit the CEO of Kaiser and make this pitch: “Look, you fire 9/10s of your radiologists [...] and the remaining radiologists’ job will be to oversee the diagnoses the AI makes at superhuman speed, and somehow remain vigilant as they do so, despite the fact that the AI is usually right, except when it’s catastrophically wrong.
> “And if the AI misses a tumor, this will be the human radiologist’s fault, because they are the ‘human in the loop.’ It’s their signature on the diagnosis.”
> This is a reverse centaur, and it’s a specific kind of reverse-centaur: it’s what Dan Davies [calls] an “accountability sink.” The radiologist’s job isn’t really to oversee the AI’s work, it’s to take the blame for the AI’s mistakes.
-- https://doctorow.medium.com/https-pluralistic-net-2025-12-05-pop-that-bubble-u-washington-8b6b75abc28e
This is already deployed. My current employer (at least, my local branch) has some not-mandatory-but-actually-yes-mandatory "training" followed by tests where they do track your eyeball and you are penalised if you look away (they also disallow alt-tabbing, screenshots and many other basic operations). They are losing a lot of people (including me, very soon) and this is one of the main reasons, but I don't think they have any intention to stop, since this shit has probably been decided several levels above the line managers, who are the ones seeing the mess but don't have much decision power about it.
I'd like to think that this insanity will be stopped relatively soon, since tech workers are still in high demand, so people mostly don't put up with this shit. For the vast majority of workers, who don't have that luxury, I don't think they will be able to get rid of this kind of software.
Related link from two days ago: an article from Cory Doctorow describing workplace surveillance or "Bossware": https://doctorow.medium.com/workplace-surveillance-is-coming-for-you-8720f8d8109f.
There is no false dilemma. You're just arguing for the sake of arguing at this point.
"In the meantime, Google’s story that this move is motivated by security it obviously bullshit. First of all, the argument that preventing users from installing software of their choosing is the only way to safeguard their privacy and security is bullshit when Apple uses it, and it’s bullshit when Google trots it out:
https://www.eff.org/document/letter-bruce-schneier-senate-judiciary-regarding-app-store-security
But even if you stipulate that Google is doing this to keep you safe, the story falls apart. After all, Google isn’t certifying apps, they’re certifying developers. This implies that the company can somehow predict whether a developer will do something malicious in the future." - https://doctorow.medium.com/https-pluralistic-net-2025-09-01-fulu-i-am-altering-the-deal-5e41c63f563f
The reason is copyright law keeping the monopoly going
See https://doctorow.medium.com/https-pluralistic-net-2026-01-01-39c3-the-new-coalition-4a7a582ff5b7
Quote:
```
Anticircumvention law originates in the USA: Section 1201 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 1998 establishes a felony punishable by a five year prison sentence and a $500,000 fine for a first offense for bypassing an “access control” for a copyrighted work.
So practically speaking, if you design a device or service with even the flimsiest of systems to prevent modification of its application code or firmware, it’s a felony — a jailable felony — to modify that code or firmware. It’s also a felony to disclose information about how to bypass that access control, which means that pen-testers who even describe how they access a device or system face criminal liability.
```