The first time I met William Gibson – to interview him for the Globe and Mail on the release of 1999's All Tomorrow's Parties – there was one question I knew I wanted to ask him: "What happens to the counterculture in the era of instantaneous commodification?"
Pluralistic: The Post-American Internet (01 Jan 2026) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
On December 28th, I delivered a speech entitled "A post-American, enshittification-resistant internet" for 39C3, the 39th Chaos Communications Congress in Hamburg, Germany. This is the transcript of that speech.
Pluralistic: Model collapse (12 Aug 2026) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
One of my favorite rhetorical and analytical moves is joining things together (showing that two different, seemingly unrelated ideas are aspects of the same phenomenon) and taking them apart (resolving a paradox by demonstrating that what appears to be one, contradictory thing is actually two different things that have been lumped together).
Pluralistic: Digital sewer socialism (08 Aug 2026) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
Hardly a day goes by without my getting an email from someone looking for a way to do good with technology. From computer science students thinking about post-grad careers to seasoned coders with decades of experience, there's an army of hackers looking for a way to turn their expertise into public goods.
i am going to solve the cyberpunk discourse forever, part 2: the punks.
“Cyberpunk 2077,” they said, “isn’t really Punk. It’s a Corporate Product, made out of Corporate Greed. It completely Misses The Point of…
i am going to solve the cyberpunk discourse forever. part 1: the pigs.
A while back, I replayed Mass Effect; my politics have shifted more towards the left since I last played it about four years prior, and I…
Enshittification Arises from Enclosure: Open Protocols refuse both - Identity Woman
I am posting this on the first full day of Decentralized Web Camp on July 9th, 2026. TLDR: Infographic! Doctorow named what we’re all feeling Cory Doctorow gave us the word: enshittification and a description of a pattern that keeps happening. His original framing, from his January 2023 Pluralistic post: “First, they are good to […]
Pluralistic: How Canada can help Americans and defeat America (23 Aug 2026) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
As Canada is learning (the hard way), the "art" of all of Trump's deals can be summed up in a single word: "renege":
I Hate The Way We Talk Online
Jason Toney on algorithm-speak, main character energy, and why a simple question about music charts revealed how badly we've forgotten how to talk to each other online."
Governable Stacks against Digital Colonialism
Critics have been converging around the logic of colonialism to describe the Internet economy. If we are serious about the laden language of the colonial, we should be ready to learn from struggles against pre-digital empires and colonial regimes. Although acts of insurrection may attract more attention, one thing leaders and theorists of anticolonial resistance have stressed persistently is the centrality of self-governance in everyday life as both a means and end of their movements. But the dominant platforms for online communities are not well-suited for durable self-governing. Resistance often relies on the same colonial firms it opposes. What would community-governed technologies look like? This paper introduces the concept of “governable stacks”, a framework for self-governing as resistance to digital colonialism.
Humanists Have Done Nothing Wrong | Defector
For many years, I’ve held a pet theory that cultural consumers can be grouped into two broad categories: Primary Source People and Secondary Source People. The former are the book lovers, cinephiles, archive perusers, and history buffs who grew to love their areas of study because of the specific objects that constitute the field: the…
How Markdown took over the world - Anil Dash
A blog about making culture. Since 1999.
Linguistic aporia - The Cynefin Co
My post of the day before yesterday expressed concern about the general dumbing down of discourse and I explicitly linked the desire for simple recipes and undemanding explanations in the sphere of management to the growth of unthinking populism in the political sphere. I ended it with three simple things to do if you don’t […]
Assumed Audiences
Naming your invisible audiences to free yourself from unspoken obligations
A programmer's loss of identity - ratfactor
This is the follow-up to last year’s I’m an American software developer and the "broligarchs" don’t speak for me. In that essay, I tried to express why I was so agonized by the leaders in my industry doing a speedrun towards dystopia and how it all felt so divorced from what technology could, and should be. Everything I wrote there is still true, but amplified.
How to fight hate: New Humanist’s Autumn 2026 issue is out now
With race riots on the rise and the populist right gaining traction, we ask how the UK can push back
Liberalism in Dark Times: The Liberal Ethos in the Twen…
A timely defense of liberalism that draws vital lessons…
