Today's threads (a thread)

[pluralistic@mamot.fr]

#1yrago Two weak spots in Big Tech economics https://pluralistic.net/2025/03/06/privacy-last/#exceptionally-american

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[pluralistic@mamot.fr]

Thursday's threads: Blowtorching the frog; and more!

Cory Doctorow (@pluralistic@mamot.fr)

Attached: 1 image Today's threads (a thread) Inside: Blowtorching the frog; and more! Archived at: https://pluralistic.net/2026/03/05/executive-dysfunction/ #Pluralistic 1/

Mamot - Le Mastodon de La Quadrature du Net (mamot.fr)

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[pluralistic@mamot.fr]

My latest novel is "Picks and Shovels," a historical technothriller set in the Weird Era of the PC, about Ponzi schemes, techbros, and the dawn of enshittification:

Just a moment...

(us.macmillan.com)

--

My latest nonfiction book is the internationally bestselling "Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It," from MCD/Farrar, Straus and Giroux:

Just a moment...

(us.macmillan.com)

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[pluralistic@mamot.fr]

My ebooks and audiobooks (from FSGxMCD, Tor Books, Head of Zeus, McSweeneys, Beacon, Verso and others) are for sale all over the net, but I sell 'em too, and when you buy 'em from me, I earn twice as much and you get books with no DRM and no license "agreements."

https://craphound.com/shop/

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[pluralistic@mamot.fr]

Upcoming appearances:

* #SanFrancisco: Launch for Cindy Cohn's "Privacy's Defender" (City Lights), Mar 10
https://citylights.com/events/cindy-cohn-launch-party-for-privacys-defender/

* #Barcelona: Enshittification with Simona Levi/Xnet (Llibreria Finestres), Mar 20
https://www.llibreriafinestres.com/evento/cory-doctorow/

* #Berkeley: Bioneers keynote, Mar 27
https://conference.bioneers.org/

* #Montreal: Bronfman Lecture (McGill) Apr 10
https://www.eventbrite.ca/e/artificial-intelligence-the-ultimate-disrupter-tickets-1982706623885

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[pluralistic@mamot.fr]

Upcoming appearances (cont'd):

* #London: Resisting Big Tech Empires (LSBU)
https://www.tickettailor.com/events/globaljusticenow/2042691

* #Berlin: Re:publica, May 18-20
https://re-publica.com/de/news/rp26-sprecher-cory-doctorow

* #Berlin: Enshittification at Otherland Books, May 19
https://www.otherland-berlin.de/de/event-details/cory-doctorow.html

* #HayOnWye: HowTheLightGetsIn, May 22-25
https://howthelightgetsin.org/festivals/hay/big-ideas-2

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[pluralistic@mamot.fr]

Recent appearances:

* The Virtual Jewel Box (U Utah)
https://tanner.utah.edu/podcast/enshittification-cory-doctorow-matthew-potolsky/

* Tanner Humanities Lecture (U Utah)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i6Yf1nSyekI

* The Lost Cause
https://streets.mn/2026/03/02/book-club-the-lost-cause/

* Should Democrats Make A Nuremberg Caucus? (Make It Make Sense)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MWxKrnNfrlo

* Making The Internet Suck Less (Thinking With Mitch Joel)
https://www.sixpixels.com/podcast/archives/making-the-internet-suck-less-with-cory-doctorow-twmj-1024/

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[pluralistic@mamot.fr]

You can follow these posts as a daily blog at pluralistic.net: no ads, trackers, or data-collection!

Here's today's edition: https://pluralistic.net/2026/03/07/reader-mode/

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[pluralistic@mamot.fr]

I'm also on Bluesky. Read today's thread there at:

By Cory Doctorow (GPG 0xBF3D9110957E5F4C) (@doctorow.pluralistic.net)

Never let them tell you that enshittification was a mystery. Enshittification isn't downstream of the "iron laws of economics" or an unrealistic demand by "consumers" to get stuff for free. 1/

Bluesky Social (bsky.app)

eof/

[hellomiakoda@pdx.social]

@pluralistic I fucking love RSS!

[alchomik@social.vivaldi.net]

@pluralistic interesting. And the most often I read your pieces through the Inoreader app

[nocturnalnessa@infosec.exchange]

@hellomiakoda as someone who had a smartphone in middle school newsboat has been my main "social media app" since starting college because its fucking ZEN and the "normal way" is chaos

[strange_new_words@tenforward.social]

@pluralistic These are great recommendations, and I can't wait to try them!

It's interesting how, as web search fails, word of mouth has been taking its place. In that spirit, I'd like to add that I use uBlock Origin rules to block parts of specific websites that I don't like. For example, these two custom rules will banish the New York Times Opinion section:

www.nytimes.com##div.css-1w1paqe:has(section#large-opinion-label)

www.nytimes.com##li[data-testid="nav-item-Opinion"]

[dex77@chaos.social]

@pluralistic

using self-hosted selfoss for.. I dont know, whenever goole reader was killed.

#Pluralistic

[mpaluchowski@mastodon.online]

@pluralistic some RSS readers, like FreshRSS I'm using, also support feeds from parsed HTML with content selected by XPath (or other means). This way I can have feeds for websites that don't publish RSS.

[ploum@mamot.fr]

@mpaluchowski @pluralistic : this approach is automatized and crowdsourced to extract the real content from enhshitified webpages.

ftr-site-config is a communautary project to create xpath rules for websites (more than 2000 websites supported currently)

unmerdify is a python library using those rules to parse a webpage.

#Offpunk is a command-line browser using unmerdify by default when available to read a website.

Say goodbye to the enshitified Web!

Splitting the Web

Splitting the Web par Ploum - Lionel Dricot.

(ploum.net)

[raffkarva@sunny.garden]

@pluralistic

Open source RSS readers I highly recommend are 'NetNewsWire' on iOS and MacOS (my favourite so far) and 'Capy Reader' or 'Read You' on Android.

[scottymace@infosec.exchange]

@RaffKarva @pluralistic How about a decent Linux reader? Any thoughts?

[dalstroka@snabelen.no]

@pluralistic RSS are also avaliable at Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/vivaldibrowser.rss and Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?channel_id=UCHkYOD-3fZbuGhwsADBd9ZQ

[pteryx@dice.camp]

@ploum @mpaluchowski @pluralistic
Though it's striking that the blog post here mentions phone calls saving time, when IME phone calls are increasingly staffed by chatbots that take several minutes of effort to shove aside to get to a human...