This is a new kind of post for wreckage/salvage. For years, I’ve wanted a place to break down and promote research that can help us make/build/participate in more accessible, useful, and humane networks. I’m delighted to finally be doing it here. In each of these briefs, I’ll introduce a report or paper, provide some context about the people and/or organizations behind it, and summarize the points I found especially relevant for network work.

As always, huge gratitude to the people throwing in with me to make this kind of independent culture/connective tissue work possible. I couldn't do any of the fediverse and cross-network thinking and writing I do here without the community backing that lets me set aside time for it, and it's so heartening to have that backing. If you’d like to support this work, you can sign on here.

background

What it is: “Exploring a transition to alternative social media platforms for social justice organizations in the Majority World,” research findings coming out of a series of semi-structured interviews + a review of literature on alternative social networks and the platform needs of the global majority.

Who made it: Jeff Deutch, Denisse Albornoz, and Olivia Johnson for The Engine Room, an international non-profit organization focused on enabling social justice movements "to use technology and data in safe, responsible and strategic ways, while actively mitigating the vulnerabilities created by digital systems."

Who funded it: The Engine Room’s major funders in 2023 are the Ford Foundation, the Sigrid Rausing Trust, Luminate, and Open Society Foundations. (Full funding disclosures are available here.) The report's authors all have backgrounds in human rights and/or civil society research; the Engine Room itself publishes a lot of excellent work and is unusually transparent about its processes.

Disclosures: I participated in this research as in interview subject, explaining some of the things Darius Kazmi and I encountered in our concurrent research with Fediverse server teams, and my own sense of the alternative-platform landscape—but please don't let that dissuade you from reading it, since you can always just ignore my quotes. (I’m identified as Interviewee 4 and yes, the apocalypse quote in the introduction is mine.) My summary below will focus on the parts I didn’t talk about as an informant.

context

Earlier this year, the Engine Room conducted a substantial research project on the factors affecting Majority-World* social justice organizations' transitions to alternative social media platforms, and their findings are now available. I've been very keen to see what they learned from conversations with other people whose knowledge about Majority World network contexts goes much deeper than mine, and the report was worth the wait. In this post, I’ll point out a few things I found especially relevant to network-making, but I encourage network members and builders to read the full report—the quotes from interviewees working in global majority contexts will stay with you in ways that a summary never will, and I can only squeeze in a few here.

The research emerges from concerns about the effects of the concentration of social networks in the hands of a few mostly US-based corporations, none of which are willing or able to place the well-being of global populations over their commitment to extracting maximum profits and achieving market domination. As the report’s authors write:

While the impact of mainstream social media platforms has played a major role in digital activism around the world, civil society concerns have been growing, particularly around issues such as surveillance, censorship and privacy. Harassment and abuse are commonly reported on these platforms, while their content moderation policies and algorithmic recommendations contribute to the spread of disinformation, conspiracy theories and political propaganda, all of which disproportionately affect communities on the margins of society.

(The report itself is heavily footnoted—please see the full version for sources and citations.)

The report is broken into sections examining the way Majority World social justice organizations use "mainstream social media," the way they use alternative social media, and the factors that affect their possible transitions to greater reliance on alternative social media platforms—as well as a set of recommendations for facilitating a safe and productive transition away from centralized platforms run by giant US corporations.

So what's in it for network people?

the thing about mainstream social platforms

The Engine Room team found that their informants with deep experience in Majority World civil society and social justice work understand exactly what’s wrong with and dangerous about corporate mega-platforms. They also use them anyway, because as flawed as they are, they’re still the best way to reach people both inside and outside of their communities. As one interviewee explained:

What we hear in workshops is: “Listen, my community is going through a war now in Sudan,” “My community is going through a natural disaster in Syria and Turkey,” “My community is going through a genocide. I really don’t have the time to tell them about the fediverse and to migrate.”

The report’s authors write that another interviewee expressed surprise at how low a priority privacy concerns were among the activists they worked with, compared with tools for communicating quickly and widely:

We’re talking about activist movements documenting protests and human rights violations which are heavily censored by despotic and/or occupying regimes and would otherwise most likely not make it at all to mainstream media. The live feature on, for instance, Facebook or Instagram is really vital for so many activists there. And that is not something available on Mastodon and other tools on the fediverse. These features are actually really important from a journalistic and documentation point of view.

There’s also a section on the complexity of communicating without corporate platform tools when those tools are the ones optimized for low connectivity, which is an issue I’d like to see more widely understood in social internet conversations. The whole section on why activists and others working in Majority World contexts still use corporate platforms is very much worth reading. It’s what I’m going to point advocates of other networks to when I see them chiding global-majority writers and activists for using Facebook or Twitter or Instagram.

Crucially, the report doesn’t include a long section on attempting to transform corporate megaplatforms through regulatory pressure—or anything else. I found that pragmatism so refreshing. (Instead of making recommendations tech companies will ignore, the report has a section on how Majority World communities can mitigate some of the risks and dangers inherent to mega-platforms.)

alternative networks & the global majority

The second section of the report outlines the value of alternative platforms to Majority World communities, as expressed by the interviewees, and these are worth taking notes on. Interviewees highlighted:

• The possibility of building systems tailored for—and ideally co-designed with—their communities, with emphasis on user controls and security
• The reality of interoperability and the potential for full account portability, though this is reduced to some extent by the patchy reality of portable identity
• A lack of centralized surveillance, though this is reduced by concerns about ecosystem sustainability and the gap between real and apparent privacy
• “Community-centered” governance models that give users control and decisionmaking power
• The potential for building small, interconnected communities

And on the flipside, they also pointed out challenges their communities identify with using alternative platforms:

• Economic barriers for community leaders and members (including data plans)
• Software usability and tech literacy barriers
• The fact that alt networks aren’t a 1:1 replacement for mega-platforms, and promoting them in that way results in confusion and bad experiences
• Much, much smaller userbases, which sharply limit reach for activist work
• The downsides of a lack of centralized moderation/trust and safety work—a sense of fewer guardrails against the open internet’s worst actors and content, including hate speech targeting Majority World communities

how to make things better

The remainder of the report synthesizes factors related to a desired future set of networks and then offers a set of recommendations for people working in the network world.

The factors/characteristics include a call for alternative platforms to be both designed "from the margins" to ensure a sturdy understanding of the needs of their most vulnerable users and designed "around the needs and capabilities of non-technical communities" to make a transition to alternative networks possible. If you've been reading my work for very long, you know that both of these points are at the heart of what I'm trying to do. They're also at the heart of most disagreements I get into with other advocates of alt networks—few of whom would publicly argue against design from the margins, but even fewer of whom actually practice it, and some of whom are markedly resistant to designing for people who lack deep technical expertise and whose networking needs are shaped by a shortage of time, attention, data, and financial resources.

On to the recommendations: The first set focuses on helping communities be as safe and healthy as possible while still relying on extractive, mainstream social platforms. In the second set, the authors lay out ways for organizations to ease the transition into the bumpy world of alternative platforms, including awareness raising and technical education.

The third set of recommendations dives into issues of immediate relevance to alternative network makers and advocates, and I think suggests a very rich set of research questions, potential projects, and ways of evaluating next moves for alternative networks:

• Diversify funding: Support the development and scaling of diverse projects, with a focus on technology designed by and for communities advancing social justice agendas, such as those focused on women, LGBTQ+ communities, or human rights defenders.
• Prioritize community-centered design: Support developers to carry out user research, develop more intuitive user interfaces, and ensure the needs of marginalized communities are at the center of the design process.
• Address technological barriers: Support non-technical communities to use publicly available tools and open source technologies to build their own digital spaces and communities.
• Address economic and environmental costs: Explore solutions to reduce the financial and environmental costs of maintaining the infrastructures required to run alternative social media platforms.
• Build capacity for trust and safety work: Support capacity to conduct safety assessments (e.g. threat modeling, penetration testing, etc.) and implement effective content moderation in smaller and emerging platforms.
• Strengthen local and regional support: Support the formation of regional communities of practice or institutions that promote knowledge exchange across regions, and support the participation of Majority World developers in multistakeholder forums.

I really like these, and I think they offer so many ways in or handles on the problem of building networks that are better for more people.

You can read the whole thing here in English, and the executive summary is available on the same page in English and Spanish.

notes

(*) The term "Majority World," which the Engine Room uses in their work, descends from "Global Majority" and "Global South," "the developing world," and other attempts to refer places and populations that have historically been colonized and underdeveloped by the ruling classes of the "Global North." Not incidentally, these are also the places and populations from which the Global North extracts both the raw materials and the crushing physical and cognitive labor that our networks and increasingly voracious software systems require. It's easier to change the terms we use than the systems they name, but reminders that most of the world's people live outside the protection of the wealthy world's fortresses seem useful to me.

The featured image is an anemometer and dial from the collection of the Oceanographic Museum of Monaco, which has a superb collection of oceanographic measuring instruments, and is available via NOAA's scattered but wonderful digital collections. Photo credit, Y. Berard.

The original catalogue from which this and many other NOAA-cleared images I use are drawn is "Catalogue des appareils d'océanographie en collection au Musée océanographique de Monaco" by Christian Carpine, which appeared as an eight-part in issues 73, no. 1437; 74, no. 1438; 75, no. 1440 and 1441; 76, no. 1442, 1443, and 1444 of the Bulletin de l'Institut océanographique de Monaco, none of which are available online because they're in copyright.

Today's links

• You should be using an RSS reader: The one thing you can choose to do that will make your internet life better and make the internet better for everyone else, too.
• Hey look at this: Delights to delectate.
• This day in history: 2004, 2009, 2014, 2019, 2023
• Upcoming appearances: Where to find me.
• 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.

You should be using an RSS reader (permalink)

No matter how hard we all wish it were otherwise, the sad fact is that there aren't really individual solutions to systemic problems. For example: your personal diligence in recycling will have no meaningful impact on the climate emergency.

I get it. People write to me all the time, they say, "What can I change about my life to fight enshittification, or, at the very least, to reduce the amount of enshittification that I, personally, experience?"

It's frustrating, but my general answer is, "Join a movement. Get involved with a union, with EFF, with the FSF. Tell your Congressional candidate to defend Lina Khan from billionaire Dem donors who want her fired. Do something systemic."

There's very little you can do as a consumer. You're not going to shop your way out of monopoly capitalism. Now that Amazon has destroyed most of the brick-and-mortar and driven digital stores out of business, boycotting Amazon often just means doing without. The collective action problem of leaving Twitter or Facebook is so insurmountable that you end up stuck there, with a bunch of people you love and rely on, who all love each other, all hate the platform, but can't agree on a day and time to leave or a destination to leave for and so end up stuck there.

I've been experiencing some challenging stuff in my personal life lately, and yesterday, I just found myself unable to deal with my usual podcast fare so I tuned into the videos from the very last XOXO, in search of uplifting fare:

https://www.youtube.com/@xoxofest

I found it. Talks by Dan Olson, Cabel Sasser, Ed Yong and many others, especially Molly White:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MTaeVVAvk-c

Molly's talk was so, so good, but when I got to her call to action, I found myself pulling a bit of a face:

But the platforms do not exist without the people, and there are a lot more of us than there are of them. The platforms have installed themselves in a position of power, but they are also vulnerable…

Are the platforms really that vulnerable? The collective action problem is so hard, the switching costs are so high – maybe the fact that "there's a lot more of us than there are of them" is a bug, not a feature. The more of us there are, the thornier our collective action problem and the higher the switching costs, after all.

And then I had a realization: the conduit through which I experience Molly's excellent work is totally enshittification-proof, and the more I use it, the easier it is for everyone to be less enshittified.

This conduit is anti-lock-in, it works for nearly the whole internet. It is surveillance-resistant, far more accessible than the web or any mobile app interface. It is my secret super-power.

It's RSS.

RSS (one of those ancient internet acronyms with multiple definitions, including, but not limited to, "Really Simple Syndication") is an invisible, automatic way for internet-connected systems to publish "feeds." For example, rather than reloading the Wired homepage every day and trying to figure out which stories are new (their layout makes this very hard to do!), you can just sign up for Wired's RSS feed, and use an RSS reader to monitor the site and preview new stories the moment they're published. Wired pushes about 600 words from each article into that feed, stripped of the usual stuff that makes Wired nearly impossible to read: no 20-second delay subscription pop-up, text in a font and size of your choosing. You can follow Wired's feed without any cookies, and Wired gets no information about which of its stories you read. Wired doesn't even get to know that you're monitoring its feed.

I don't mean to pick on Wired here. This goes for every news source I follow – from CNN to the New York Times. But RSS isn't just good for the news! It's good for everything. Your friends' blogs? Every blogging platform emits an RSS feed by default. You can follow every one of them in your reader.

Not just blogs. Do you follow a bunch of substackers or other newsletters? They've all got RSS feeds. You can read those newsletters without ever registering in the analytics of the platforms that host them. The text shows up in black and white (not the sadistic, 8-point, 80% grey-on-white type these things all default to). It is always delivered, without any risk of your email provider misclassifying an update as spam:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/10/10/dead-letters/

Did you know that, by default, your email sends information to mailing list platforms about your reading activity? The platform gets to know if you opened the message, and often how far along you've read in it. On top of that, they get all the private information your browser or app leaks about you, including your location. This is unbelievably gross, and you get to bypass all of it, just by reading in RSS.

Are your friends too pithy for a newsletter, preferring to quip on social media? Unfortunately, it's pretty hard to get an RSS feed from Insta/FB/Twitter, but all those new ones that have popped up? They all have feeds. You can follow any Mastodon account (which means you can follow any Threads account) via RSS. Same for Bluesky. That also goes for older platforms, like Tumblr and Medium. There's RSS for Hacker News, and there's a sub-feed for the comments on every story. You can get RSS feeds for the Fedex, UPS and USPS parcels you're awaiting, too.

Your local politician's website probably has an RSS feed. Ditto your state and national reps. There's an RSS feed for each federal agency (the FCC has a great blog!).

Your RSS reader lets you put all these feeds into folders if you want. You can even create automatic folders, based on keywords, or even things like "infrequently updated sites" (I follow a bunch of people via RSS who only update a couple times per year – cough, Danny O'Brien, cough – and never miss a post).

Your RSS reader doesn't (necessarily) have an algorithm. By default, you'll get everything as it appears, in reverse-chronological order.

Does that remind you of anything? Right: this is how social media used to work, before it was enshittified. You can single-handedly disenshittify your experience of virtually the entire web, just by switching to RSS, traveling back in time to the days when Facebook and Twitter were more interested in showing you the things you asked to see, rather than the ads and boosted content someone else would pay to cram into your eyeballs.

Now, you sign up to so many feeds that you're feeling overwhelmed and you want an algorithm to prioritize posts – or recommend content. Lots of RSS readers have some kind of algorithm and recommendation system (I use News, which offers both, though I don't use them – I like the glorious higgeldey-piggeldey of the undifferentiated firehose feed).

But you control the algorithm, you control the recommendations. And if a new RSS reader pops up with an algorithm you're dying to try, you can export all the feeds you follow with a single click, which will generate an OPML file. Then, with one click, you can import that OPML file into any other RSS reader in existence and all your feeds will be seamlessly migrated there. You can delete your old account, or you can even use different readers for different purposes.

You can access RSS in a browser or in an app on your phone (most RSS readers have an app), and they'll sync up, so a story you mark to read later on your phone will be waiting for you the next time you load up your reader in a browser tab, and you won't see the same stories twice (unless you want to, in which case you can mark them as unread).

RSS basically works like social media should work. Using RSS is a chance to visit a utopian future in which the platforms have no power, and all power is vested in publishers, who get to decide what to publish, and in readers, who have total control over what they read and how, without leaking any personal information through the simple act of reading.

And here's the best part: every time you use RSS, you bring that world closer into being! The collective action problem that the publishers and friends and politicians and businesses you care about is caused by the fact that everyone they want to reach is on a platform, so if they leave the platform, they'll lose that community. But the more people who use RSS to follow them, the less they'll depend on the platform.

Unlike those largely useless, performative boycotts of widely used platforms, switching to RSS doesn't require that you give anything up. Not only does switching to RSS let you continue to follow all the newsletters, webpages and social media accounts you're following now, it makes doing so better: more private, more accessible, and less enshittified.

Switching to RSS lets you experience just the good parts of the enshitternet, but that experience is delivered in manner that the new, good internet we're all dying for.

My own newsletter is delivered in fulltext via RSS. If you're reading this as a Mastodon or Twitter thread, on Tumblr or on Medium, or via email, you can get it by RSS instead:

https://pluralistic.net/feed/

Don't worry about which RSS reader you start with. It literally doesn't matter. Remember, you can switch readers with two clicks and take all the feeds you've subscribed to with you! If you want a recommendation, I have nothing but praise for Newsblur, which I've been paying $2/month for since 2011 (!):

https://newsblur.com/

Subscribing to feeds is super-easy, too: the links for RSS feeds are invisibly embedded in web-pages. Just paste the URL of a web-page into your RSS reader's "add feed" box and it'll automagically figure out where the feed lives and add it to your subscriptions.

It's still true that the new, good internet will require a movement to overcome the collective action problems and the legal barriers to disenshittifying things. Almost nothing you do as an individual is going to make a difference.

But using RSS will! Using RSS to follow the stuff that matters to you will have an immediate, profoundly beneficial impact on your own digital life – and it will appreciably, irreversibly nudge the whole internet towards a better state.

Hey look at this (permalink)

* You Can't Make Friends With The Rockstars https://www.wheresyoured.at/rockstars/

• Tom Lehrer Discovers Australia (And Vice Versa) https://taylorjessen.blogspot.com/2024/10/tom-lehrer-tom-lehrer-discovers.html

• Conceptual models of space colonization https://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2024/10/conceptual-models-of-space-col.html

This day in history (permalink)

#20yrsago Sony bullies Retropod off the net https://web.archive.org/web/20041018040446/http://www.retropod.com/

#15yrsago This Side of Jordan – Violent jazz age novel by Charles M Schulz’s son Monte https://memex.craphound.com/2009/10/16/this-side-of-jordan-violent-jazz-age-novel-by-charles-m-schulzs-son-monte/

#10yrsago FBI chief demands an end to cellphone security https://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/17/us/politics/fbi-director-in-policy-speech-calls-dark-devices-hindrance-to-crime-solving.html

#10yrsago Please, Disney: put back John’s grandad’s Haunted Mansion tombstone https://thedisneyblog.com/2014/10/16/petition-to-return-a-lost-tombstone-to-the-haunted-mansion/

#10yrsago How Microsoft hacked trademark law to let it secretly seize whole businesses https://www.wired.com/2014/10/microsoft-pinkerton/

#10yrsago If you think you’ve anonymized a data set, you’re probably wrong https://web.archive.org/web/20141014172827/http://research.neustar.biz/2014/09/15/riding-with-the-stars-passenger-privacy-in-the-nyc-taxicab-dataset/

#10yrsago The lost cyber-crayolas of the mid-1990s https://memex.craphound.com/2014/10/16/the-lost-cyber-crayolas-of-the-mid-1990s/

#5yrsago “The People’s Money”: A crisp, simple, thorough explanation of how government spending is paid for https://neweconomicperspectives.org/2019/10/the-peoples-money-part-1.html

#5yrsago What it’s like to have Apple rip off your successful Mac app https://memex.craphound.com/2019/10/16/what-its-like-to-have-apple-rip-off-your-successful-mac-app/

#5yrsago Blizzard suspends college gamers from competitive play after they display “Free Hong Kong” poster https://www.vice.com/en/article/three-college-hearthstone-protesters-banned-for-six-months/

#5yrsago Terrified of bad press after its China capitulation, Blizzard cancels NYC Overwatch event https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-10-15/blizzard-cancels-overwatch-event-as-it-tries-to-contain-backlash

#5yrsago A San Diego Republican operator ran a massive, multimillion-dollar Facebook scam that targeted boomers https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/craigsilverman/facebook-subscription-trap-free-trial-scam-ads-inc

#5yrsago Britain’s unbelievably stupid, dangerous porn “age verification” scheme is totally dead https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2019/10/uk-government-abandons-planned-porn-age-verification-scheme/

#5yrsago Not only is Google’s auto-delete good for privacy, it’s also good news for competition https://memex.craphound.com/2019/10/16/not-only-is-googles-auto-delete-good-for-privacy-its-also-good-news-for-competition/

#5yrsago Edward Snowden on the global war on encryption: “This is our new battleground” https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/oct/15/encryption-lose-privacy-us-uk-australia-facebook

#5yrsago In Kansas’s poor, sick places, hospitals and debt collectors send the ailing to debtor’s prison https://features.propublica.org/medical-debt/when-medical-debt-collectors-decide-who-gets-arrested-coffeyville-kansas

#5yrsago Want a ride in a Lyft? Just sign away your right to sue if they kill, maim, rape or cheat you https://memex.craphound.com/2019/10/16/want-a-ride-in-a-lyft-just-sign-away-your-right-to-sue-if-they-kill-maim-rape-or-cheat-you/

#5yrsago #RedForEd rebooted: Chicago’s teachers are back on strike https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/union-strike-chicago-teachers/

#1yrago One of America's most corporate-crime-friendly bankruptcy judges forced to recuse himself https://pluralistic.net/2023/10/16/texas-two-step/#david-jones

Upcoming appearances (permalink)

• OKFN Tech We Want Online Summit (Remote), Oct 18
  https://okfn.org/en/events/the-tech-we-want-online-summit/

• SOSS Fusion (Atlanta), Oct 22
  https://sossfusion2024.sched.com/speaker/cory_doctorow.1qm5qfgn

• Eagle Eye Books (Decatur), Oct 23
  https://eagleeyebooks.com/event/2024-10-23/cory-doctorow

• TusCon (Tucson), Nov 8-10
  https://tusconscificon.com/

• International Cooperative Alliance (New Delhi), Nov 24
  https://icanewdelhi2024.coop/welcome/pages/Programme

• ISSA-LA Holiday Celebration keynote (Los Angeles), Dec 18
  https://issala.org/event/issa-la-december-18-dinner-meeting/

Recent appearances (permalink)

• Speciale intervista a Cory Doctorow (Digitalia)
  https://digitalia.fm/744/

• Was There Ever An Old, Good Internet? (David Graeber Institute)
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T6Jlxx5TboE

• Go Fact Yourself
  https://maximumfun.org/episodes/go-fact-yourself/ep-158-aida-rodriguez-cory-doctorow/

Latest books (permalink)

• The Bezzle: a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about prison-tech and other grifts, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), February 2024 (the-bezzle.org). Signed, personalized copies at Dark Delicacies (https://www.darkdel.com/store/p3062/Available_Feb_20th%3A_The_Bezzle_HB.html#/).

• "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). Signed, personalized copies at Dark Delicacies (https://www.darkdel.com/store/p3007/Pre-Order_Signed_Copies%3A_The_Lost_Cause_HB.html#/)

• "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. Signed copies at Dark Delicacies (US): and Forbidden Planet (UK): https://forbiddenplanet.com/385004-red-team-blues-signed-edition-hardcover/.

• "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

• "Attack Surface": The third Little Brother novel, a standalone technothriller for adults. The Washington Post called it "a political cyberthriller, vigorous, bold and savvy about the limits of revolution and resistance." Order signed, personalized copies from Dark Delicacies https://www.darkdel.com/store/p1840/Available_Now%3A_Attack_Surface.html

• "How to Destroy Surveillance Capitalism": an anti-monopoly pamphlet analyzing the true harms of surveillance capitalism and proposing a solution. https://onezero.medium.com/how-to-destroy-surveillance-capitalism-8135e6744d59?sk=f6cd10e54e20a07d4c6d0f3ac011af6b) (signed copies: https://www.darkdel.com/store/p2024/Available_Now%3A__How_to_Destroy_Surveillance_Capitalism.html)

• "Little Brother/Homeland": A reissue omnibus edition with a new introduction by Edward Snowden: https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250774583; personalized/signed copies here: https://www.darkdel.com/store/p1750/July%3A__Little_Brother_%26_Homeland.html

• "Poesy the Monster Slayer" a picture book about monsters, bedtime, gender, and kicking ass. Order here: https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781626723627. Get a personalized, signed copy here: https://www.darkdel.com/store/p2682/Corey_Doctorow%3A_Poesy_the_Monster_Slayer_HB.html#/.

Upcoming books (permalink)

• Picks and Shovels: a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about the heroic era of the PC, Tor Books, February 2025

• Unauthorized Bread: a middle-grades graphic novel adapted from my novella about refugees, toasters and DRM, FirstSecond, 2025

Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources:

Currently writing:

• Enshittification: a nonfiction book about platform decay for Farrar, Straus, Giroux. Today's progress: 818 words (64779 words total).

• A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING

• Picks and Shovels, a Martin Hench noir thriller about the heroic era of the PC. FORTHCOMING TOR BOOKS FEB 2025

Latest podcast: Spill, part one (a Little Brother story) https://craphound.com/littlebrother/2024/10/06/spill-part-one-a-little-brother-story/

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.

https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Quotations and images are not included in this license; they are included either under a limitation or exception to copyright, or on the basis of a separate license. Please exercise caution.

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"When life gives you SARS, you make sarsaparilla" -Joey "Accordion Guy" DeVilla

First Came ‘Spam.’ Now, With A.I., We’ve Got ‘Slop’

I got the closing quote in this one:

Society needs concise ways to talk about modern A.I. — both the positives and the negatives. ‘Ignore that email, it’s spam,’ and ‘Ignore that article, it’s slop,’ are both useful lessons.

Biographies of great people, interviews with successful entrepreneurs, and podcast episodes with famous creators. The world doesn’t lack celebrations of greatness. It should be inspiring to hear from someone successful, it should motivate you to do more, to work harder, and to strive for greatness. But like many other good things in life, too much of it can be detrimental. You can ingest only so many success stories before starting to feel bad for not being one of them. It’s partly why social media mostly sucks. It’s performative. Everyone is showing the best parts of their lives while the shitty moments are kept private, away from public eyes.

Failure should be shared. Trying and failing at something should be celebrated. Not because of the failure itself but because that’s the only way to achieve something worthwhile. Failing is inevitable. Everyone has to go through it and confront it one way or another. It’s part of the process and it’s something we should be more upfront and open about it. And again, it should be celebrated.

Does anyone make a podcast with interviews with people who didn’t have success? To people who tried hard but ultimately failed? I’d love to listen to those stories.

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