Pluralistic: Amazon Achieves Enshittification Inception  🔗 **Source:** [Pluralistic: Amazon Achieves Enshittification Inception](https://pluralistic.net/2026/09/04/cheating-at-fraud/) > [!note]+ Document Notes > --- > tags: [enshittification, amazon, platform-monopoly, antitrust, auction-design, marketplace-ranking] > author: Cory Doctorow > source: Pluralistic > reference: https://pluralistic.net/2026/09/04/cheating-at-fraud/ > date created: 2026-09-04 > --- > > [!info] Generated analysis — not the author's words. Sections below are machine-written > > from the captured source. Only text inside `> [!quote]` blocks is verbatim from the author. > > Do not quote or attribute any other line to the named author. > # 🏷️ Title: Amazon achieves enshittification inception > ## 🧭 Table of Contents > - [📝 Summary](#-summary) > - [📖 Main Content](#-main-content) > - [🗒️ Notes](#️-notes) > - [📚 References](#-references) > - [🗣️ Paraphrase](#️-paraphrase) > - [📰 Newsletter](#-newsletter) > - [✅ Action Items](#-action-items) > - [🧪 Hypotheses](#-hypotheses) > - [📊 Methodology](#-methodology) > - [❓ Questions](#-questions) > - [🔮 Future Research](#-future-research) > - [💡 Implications](#-implications) > - [🧠 Learning Styles Assessment](#-learning-styles-assessment) > - [📊 Accessibility Assessment](#-accessibility-assessment) > - [🌍 DEIB Assessment](#-deib-assessment) > - [✅ Logical Validity](#-logical-validity) > - [🛡️ DARVO Analysis](#-darvo-analysis) > - [🎯 Conclusion](#-conclusion) > ### 🔗 References > - Source: https://pluralistic.net/2026/09/04/cheating-at-fraud/ (~3,475 words, published 2026-09-04) > - [FTC and states sue Amazon over secret ad surcharge scheme](https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2026/08/ftc-states-sue-amazon-over-secret-ad-surcharge-scheme) — the primary document behind the piece > - [Ars Technica: FTC alleges Amazon illegally made $20 billion by rigging billions of ad auctions](https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2026/09/ftc-alleges-amazon-illegally-made-20-billion-by-rigging-billions-of-ad-auctions/) — source for Amazon's stated defense > - [Gizmodo: FTC sues Amazon for allegedly duping advertisers](https://gizmodo.com/ftc-sues-amazon-for-allegedly-duping-advertisers-2000805199) > - [Payola](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Payola) and [Vickrey auction](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vickrey_auction) and [auction theory](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Auction_theory) — the conceptual scaffolding > - Doctorow's own prior posts on [Most Favored Nation price-fixing](https://pluralistic.net/2026/02/25/most-favored-nation/#price-fixing) and [subprime attention rent](https://pluralistic.net/2023/11/03/subprime-attention-rent-crisis/#euthanize-rentiers) > - Tim Wu, *The Age of Extraction* — cited for the newspaper-advertising comparison > - Doctorow, *Enshittification* (Farrar, Straus and Giroux) — the source of the earlier payola figures > ## 📝 Summary > - **What happened.** The FTC and 22 state attorneys general sued Amazon in August 2026, alleging that for seven years it secretly overcharged winners of its search-advertising auctions — charging them their own maximum sealed bid rather than the second-highest bid plus a penny, which is what a second-price auction is defined to do. > - **The scale.** According to the suit as Doctorow reports it, Amazon did this roughly 80% of the time; Ars Technica's headline figure is $20 billion. > - **Why it matters more than a normal ad-fraud story.** Search placement is, on Doctorow's account, Amazon's single largest profit centre — larger than everything it sells directly and larger than AWS — on track to top $80 billion this year, up from the mid-$30 billions when he was researching *Enshittification*. > - **The structural argument.** Amazon has converted its two largest cost centres into profit centres funded by its own competitors: fulfillment is more than fully paid for by platform-seller fees, and AWS makes Amazon's own compute free and profitable. Payola is bigger than both. > - **The line the piece turns on.** Amazon's defense is that it could secretly charge the maximum when the closing price fell below "the true market value of the ad placement." Doctorow's rebuttal is that the closing price of an auction *is* the definition of true market value — which concedes the mechanism is not price discovery but willingness-to-pay extraction. > - **Bottom line.** A tight, well-sourced argument that the most profitable thing Amazon does is a bribery market for search results, and that it was caught cheating at its own bribery market. The economics are sound; the political prediction at the end is speculation and reads as such. > ## 📖 Main Content > - **The three-business framing does real analytical work.** Doctorow sets up Amazon as fulfillment, AWS, and payola, and the sequencing matters. Fulfillment is described as more than fully subsidized by platform-seller fees, so shipping costs Amazon nothing — with the cost noted in passing as falling on workers' "labor rights, bodies and bathroom breaks." AWS turned Amazon's own compute from a cost centre into a profit centre funded partly by competitors renting the same servers. The rhetorical setup is that both are extraordinary, and then payola is bigger than either. > - **The payola analogy is the piece's central move and it is earned rather than decorative.** He spends four paragraphs on the 1950s radio scandal before applying it, and the details he selects are the load-bearing ones: radio stations held a genuinely scarce public resource (spectrum) under an expectation of serving the public, the selection process was opaque, and the opacity plus the stakes made corruption inevitable. The harms he enumerates are notably not limited to listeners — musicians lost royalties because labels charged the bribes to "promotions" and deducted them from artist statements, stations degraded, and the labels themselves bid away their own margins. > - **His framing of why it persisted is the transferable part.** "Concentrated gains and diffuse losses" is offered as the reason payola ran for decades before anyone acted, and he applies the same phrase to Amazon later. That is a general mechanism for why extractive arrangements survive: the beneficiary has enormous incentive to defend it and each victim has too little at stake to fight. > - **The mechanism, laid out.** Amazon search results are auctioned rather than ranked by match quality. Sellers raise prices to fund the bribes. A Most Favored Nation clause requires them to match or beat their Amazon price everywhere else — so the increase propagates to Target, Walmart, and the corner shop. Doctorow's conclusion is that Amazon therefore levies an economy-wide tax on nearly every product, and he supports the inescapability claim with Prime's capture of most of the richest decile of American households. > - **The AI detail is small and genuinely new.** He notes that AI made Most Favored Nation *enforceable* in a way it previously was not — parsing competitors' websites at scale to detect discounting, with instant punishment by burial in search results. That is a concrete example of AI strengthening an existing anticompetitive mechanism rather than creating a new one, and it is the kind of specificity this genre usually lacks. > - **The numbers he offers on ranking quality.** The first item on a typical results page is 29% more expensive than the best match; the top row averages 25% more; the best result sits around position 17, on the second screen. These are sourced to his own earlier writing rather than to a study within this piece, which is worth noting before repeating them. > - **The per-unit pricing observation is the best small argument in the piece.** Amazon has many comparison tools and conspicuously lacks per-unit pricing. His evidence that this is deliberate rather than an oversight is elegant: Amazon-owned Whole Foods puts per-unit pricing on its shelf tags, so the company demonstrably understands why shoppers want it. And the mechanism is clear — top bidders package in irregular quantities, so sorting by price does not reveal the cheapest per item. A per-unit sort would let searchers route around the auction entirely. > - **The revenue trajectory.** Mid-$30 billions during the research for *Enshittification*, more than $50 billion a year later when touring with Tim Wu, and on track to top $80 billion this year. He is explicit that these are figures he learned at different times rather than a singl [](https://pluralistic.net/2026/09/04/cheating-at-fraud/) * [Object permanence](https://pluralistic.net/2026/09/04/cheating-at-fraud/#retro): Electrolite is back; Mafia rules; Aaronsw on Wikipedia; Proctorio's memory hole. * [Upcoming appearances](https://pluralistic.net/2026/09/04/cheating-at-fraud/#upcoming): Dąbrowa Górnicza, Warsaw, Brighton, London, Budapest, Edmonton, South Bend, Hudson, Calgary, Winnipeg, Vancouver, Victoria, Ottawa. * [Recent appearances](https://pluralistic.net/2026/09/04/cheating-at-fraud/#recent): Where I've been. * [Latest books](https://pluralistic.net/2026/09/04/cheating-at-fraud/#latest): You keep readin' em, I'll keep writin' 'em. * [Upcoming books](https://pluralistic.net/2026/09/04/cheating-at-fraud/#upcoming-books): Like I said, I'll keep writin' 'em. * [Colophon](https://pluralistic.net/2026/09/04/cheating-at-fraud/#bragsheet): All the rest. Hieronymus Bosch's 'The Conjuror,' a painting depicting a medieval con artist playing a shell game for an audience of astonished peasant rubes. The image has been altered: the conman now has Jeff Bezos's grinning head, and the mouths of all the peasants have been replaced with inverted Amazon 'Smile' logos, so they are now frowning. Amazon's own balance sheet presents the most compelling evidence that we are stuck in the Enshittocene, the era in which everything is turning into a pile of shit, because the worst ideas of the worst people now make the most money. Amazon is a many-tentacled monster, with several prominent lines of business wrapped around the world. There's its logistics and fulfillment business, which is so successful (at the expense of its workers' labor rights, bodies and bathroom breaks) that it is more than fully subsidized by Amazon's platform sellers, the independent merchants who depend on Amazon to sell and deliver their goods. This means that it costs Amazon itself *nothing* to get the merchandise *it* sells to your door: *more than 100%* of the cost of operating the fulfillment side of Amazon covered by the fees it extracts from its independent sellers (who *compete with Amazon* in many instances, and for whom delivery is a cost center, not a source of profit). Then there's AWS, Amazon's cloud business. This is another extraordinary success story: every company needs servers, and that's especially true of an e-commerce company like Amazon. By building *more* servers than it needs, Amazon transformed its own data infrastructure from a cost center into another profit center. Amazon's customers – many of whom are *also* its competitors – pay Amazon so much to rent space on its servers that Amazon gets its own (prodigious) computing *for free*, and realizes a profit on top of that. Taken on their own, these two facts constitute an extraordinary business story: one of the largest corporations in the history of the world has converted its two largest cost centers into profit centers, and those profits are substantially generated by extracting payments from the company's own competitors! Amazon's logistics and cloud computing are extraordinary, but they are eclipsed by the company's *most* profitable line of business, which is *payola*. "Payola" is a word that old people like me just barely have context for and for anyone under fifty the word is likely a mystery, so a brief explanation is in order. "Payola" comes from a massive 1950s scandal over bribes that record labels paid to radio DJs and station managers to play their music. Radio stations were given the use of a scarce and precious resource – exclusive control over slices of the only electromagnetic spectrum in the universe – and were expected to program material that the American public would find enjoyable, edifying and educational. In this system, radio stations were expected to make shrewd guesses about the music the public would enjoy the most, and play that. Because the selection process for the music that DJs played on the American public's spectrum was completely opaque, and because those selections could make fortunes for record labels, the system was ripe for corruption. Labels slipped literal envelopes full of cash and drugs ("payola") into the hands of DJs, station managers and owners, bribing them to turn songs into "hits" by cramming them into Americans' ears. The biggest predictor of a radio hit wasn't whether people liked the song so much that the stations rushed to play it, but rather, how much the labels were willing to spend in bribes to get their song played: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Payola> This was a bad system all around. The American public got worse music. Musicians' own royalties were eroded by the label accountants' practice of charging off bribes to "promotions" they deducted from artists' royalty statements. Radio stations sucked. Labels bid away each other's margins, depriving themselves of operating capital to find and record new music and starving them of free cash flow to pay to musicians, employees and shareholders. As with every instance of corruption, this was a system of concentrated gains and diffuse losses, which is why it continued for so long (decades!) and got so bad before anyone took action to end it. Amazon's payola isn't about radio play – it's about *search*. When you search Amazon, the top results do not represent Amazon's best guess about what product will best match your query: rather, Amazon *auctions off* those top results to its platform sellers. Amazon's search results reflect who paid the biggest bribe, not who has the best product. To pay for those bribes, platform sellers have to raise prices. Amazon helps them do this, by imposing a "most favored nation" clause on its sellers that requires them to sell on Amazon at a price that matches or beats the price charged everywhere else (Target, Walmart, a mom-n-pop, or the factory store): <https://pluralistic.net/2026/02/25/most-favored-nation/#price-fixing> Thus, Amazon imposes an *economy-wide* tax on nearly every product you buy. Amazon's junk fees average 51-60% of the purchase price of the things you buy there, and because Amazon has captured a supermajority of the richest 10% of Americans (who have almost all pre-paid for a year's shipping through Prime), every seller *must* sell on Amazon, or forego any hope of selling to most of the country's most prolific shoppers. Any seller who signs up for Amazon is agreeing to turn over *the majority* of their sales income to Amazon, and any seller who raises prices to recoup those sums, *must* raise prices everywhere, at every retail outlet in the country. AI has made Amazon *much better* at enforcing Most Favored Nation terms, because AI is actually pretty good at parsing competitors' websites and finding instances of discounting, which Amazon instantaneously punishes by relegating the sellers' product listings to page umpty-billion of Amazon's search results. There are plenty of junk fees that go into Amazon's 51-60% rake. A large slice comes from fees Amazon charges for access to its (very profitable) logistics system. Failure to use Amazon's fulfillment system *also* relegates your listings to the dregs of Amazon search results, so sellers pay a massive premium to have their parcels delivered by Amazon, to the exclusion of cheaper alternatives that are just as fast and reliable. *That's* why Amazon fulfillment is so profitable! While the Amazon tax is extracted through several types of junk fee, the most *profitable* junk fee of them all is Amazon's search payola. In fact, search payola *is the most profitable business that Amazon operates, full stop*. Payola accounts for more of Amazon's profits than *anything else* the company does. It's more profitable than *all* the things Amazon sells directly. It's more profitable than AWS, Amazon's industry-leading cloud service. Amazon has created a system where the most sales go to the companies that pay the highest bribes, and those companies pass the cost of those bribes onto their customers. The first item on a typical Amazon search results page is 29% more expensive than the best match for your search. The top row is 25% more expensive. The best result is usually on the second screen, somewhere around the 17th position: <https://pluralistic.net/2023/11/03/subprime-attention-rent-crisis/#euthanize-rentiers> Amazon actively helps its biggest bribers close the sale. Amazon has *lots* of "comparison shopping" systems built into the service, but one comparison tool is conspicuous by its absence: an "apples to apples" tool that lets you compare *unit* prices. Amazon's most prolific bribe-payers package their goods in weird quantities, selling everything from batteries to t-shirts to shampoo in larger or smaller quantities than their competitors. Sorting your search results by price doesn't actually tell you who's got the cheapest price *per item*, because the company with the cheapest AA batteries might be selling a smaller *quantity* of batteries at a higher price *per battery*. Per-unit pricing is standard in retail. Indeed, if you go into a(n Amazon-owned) Whole Foods, you'll find per-unit pricing on the shelf tags, telling you how much the product costs per ounce or fluid ounce. Amazon *clearly* understands why shoppers would want to compare unit pricing, but offering a per-unit sort option to its search would make the bribery racket a lot less effective, because searchers could just sort by *unit* price and find the best bargain. Let me remind you: *payola is Amazon's single largest source of profits*. When I was researching *Enshittification*, Amazon's take from payola was in the mid-$30 billion. A year later, when I did tour stops with Tim Wu (who was promoting his excellent book *The Age of Extraction*), I learned that this number had climbed to more than *$50 billion*. This year, it's on track to top *$80 billion*. Amazon calls this bribery system an "advertising" product, but it's not "advertising" in the sense of the ads that Amazon's platform sellers might have once placed in the local newspaper. It's *payola*, more akin to the practice of packaged goods companies buying end-caps and whole shelves in the grocery store (a practice that is, in its own way, every bit as corrosive, though no grocery store has Amazon's economy-wide chokehold). But there *is* a way in which this payola can be compared to advertising: it *competes* with advertising. Back in the old days, before a series of K-shaped recoveries created a vast chasm between America's haves and have-nots; before Amazon captured the majority of well-off American households with Prime; people shopped in *lots* of places, and in those days, companies advertised in *publications*, not on Amazon. Websites, newspapers, and newspaper websites made billions from those ads. Amazon's payola scheme (along with Google, Facebook and other tech monopolists) have captured almost all of that money. As Tim Wu points out, the money Amazon makes from payola exceeds the advertising revenue received by *all the newspapers in the world* by *300%*. Alongside that number and its implication for the news media, Jeff Bezos buying the *Washington Post* and turning its editorial page into a sewer of shitty Ayn Rand fanfic barely registers. This is *pure* enshittification. Of all the ingenious, innovative ways that Amazon came up with to make money, the *most* successful is a scam that makes everything you buy more expensive *even as* it reduces the profits of the companies you're buying from. It's another example of corruption: a system of concentrated gains and diffuse losses – and once again, it's *the most profitable thing Amazon does*. And then…Amazon *made it worse*. You know how people like to say, "If you're not paying for the product, you're the product?" It's *bullshit*. The "advertisers" who bribe Amazon for top search placement are the customers here, they're "paying for the product," and they are getting *reamed*. I don't just mean they're getting screwed by being forced to shell out payola – I mean that Amazon is *cheating them* on that payola! Remember: Amazon doesn't just *sell* search placement; they *auction* it. Every time you run an Amazon search, the company conducts a special kind of auction called a "sealed-bid second-price auction" (SBSPA): <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vickrey_auction> Under an SBSPA, bidders secretly tell the auctioneer the *very highest price* they're willing to pay. The auctioneer then charges the highest bidder a price equal to the *second-highest* bid, plus one cent. This may seem unnecessarily complicated, but it's actually a clever solution to one of the major problems with traditional, "open call" auctions (where bidders call out the prices they're willing to pay until one bid emerges victorious). Say you're at an open call auction where the top bid is $10. You can call out $11, and then the other person will call out $12, and so on and so on. It's tedious and time-consuming. That's bad enough when you're at an estate auction that's unloading hundreds of items, but it's untenable for an eyeblink auction meant to determine search results that the user expects to get in an instant. In physical auctions the top bidder often clobbers other bidders with a *big* increase – going from $10 to $50, say. This can end the auction quickly, but it means that the high bidder often overpays for their purchase. In an SBSPA, every bidder enters their highest price, but none of the other bidders know what that price is. This encourages everyone to name their *true* highest price, *but* it protects the top bidder in the instance in which they are willing to pay a *much* higher price than anyone else. Say you're that person who raises the bidding from $10 to $50 – you have no way of knowing whether the other bidders would have dropped out at $15 or at $45. If you were the only person who was willing to pay more than $15 for the item, you've just vastly overpaid (by $34.99). But in an SBSPA, you name your true price, but you only pay the price you *would have paid* if you'd gone through the tedious, expensive, time-consuming process of an open call auction. Amazon's search auctions are SBSPAs. A merchant tells Amazon the *maximum* they're willing to pay to be at the top of the search results for a given query, but they *pay* a price equal to the *second-highest* bid, plus one cent. This lets auctions run so quickly that they can be used as the basis for ordering a search results page. That's how it's *supposed* to work, anyway. The FTC and 22 states just filed a suit against Amazon because Amazon was *cheating on its own SBSPA process*: <https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2026/08/ftc-states-sue-amazon-over-secret-ad-surcharge-scheme> Over the past 7 years, Amazon has been secretly charging the winning bidder an amount equal to *their own* sealed bid, *not* the amount that the next-highest bidder was willing to pay (plus a penny): <https://gizmodo.com/ftc-sues-amazon-for-allegedly-duping-advertisers-2000805199> According to the suit, Amazon did this *80%* of the time. That is *tens* of *billions* of dollars Amazon extracted from platform sellers, who passed those costs onto you, *and* onto *every other retailer* in the country (thanks to AI-enforced Most Favored Nation policies). Amazon's defense is that this is all a big misunderstanding. Platform sellers just didn't understand how a SBSPA worked. Amazon has a *special* kind of SBSPA where they could unilaterally and secretly charge the winning bidder the maximum price they'd pledged, if, in Amazon's judgment, the closing price for the auction was below "the true market value of the ad placement": <https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2026/09/ftc-alleges-amazon-illegally-made-20-billion-by-rigging-billions-of-ad-auctions/> This is darkly hilarious. The whole *point* of an auction is to determine "true market value." That's why neoclassical economists *worship* auctions as the world's best form of "price discovery" and why economics Nobels are awarded for "auction design": <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Auction_theory> The *definition* of "true market value" is "the closing price in an auction." Amazon claiming that it secretly jacked people because the auction generated a price that was "below the true market value" of an ad tells you that the whole business is a sham. The point of Amazon's payola scheme is only and ever a way to parasitically extract the maximum amount a platform seller is willing to part with, and by running a fake SBSPA, Amazon was able to trick its customers into revealing those maximum prices. Cheating on a bribery scheme is a *mood*. This isn't just enshittification, it's enshittification *inception*. Amazon managed to enshittify their own enshittification! This case was brought by Trump's FTC, which means that Amazon can get out of it by paying a chud podcaster to tweet at the president and he'll order them to drop it, just like he did with Ticketmaster: <https://pluralistic.net/2026/02/13/khanservatives/#kid-rock-eats-shit> But – just as with Ticketmaster – the feds aren't the only parties to the suit. With 22 AGs ("Aspiring Governors") on the suit, there's a chance this will go to trial. We might even learn the identity of the inventor of this enshittification-squared gambit, a veritable Louis Pasteur of enshittification. Assuming that person doesn't go to prison, the Sveriges riksbanks pris i ekonomisk vetenskap till Alfred Nobels minne can give that sloshing, ambulatory pile of hot liquid garbage a Nobel Prize in Economics. (*Image: [Steve Jurvetson](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Jeff_Bezos%27_iconic_laugh_crop.jpg), [CC BY 2.0](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/deed.en), modified*)  * Gridfinity <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gridfinity> * US court rules Google will not have to sell ad exchange after losing antitrust case <https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2026/09/us-court-rules-google-will-not-have-to-sell-ad-exchange-after-losing-antitrust-case/> * Minding the Gaps in Surveillance Pricing Reform <https://economicpopulist.substack.com/p/minding-the-gaps-in-surveillance> * Zack Polanski seeks to stand for by-election in former PM Starmer's seat <https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cge41ee40vwo> * What Are We Supposed to Call This? <https://www.usermag.co/p/what-are-we-supposed-to-call-this> A shelf of leatherbound history books with a gilt-stamped series title, 'The World's Famous Events.' #25yrsago Electrolite relaunches <https://web.archive.org/web/20010927195348/http://www.panix.com/~pnh/electrolite.html> #25yrsago How to play Mafia <https://web.archive.org/web/20011113011546/http://www.stud.ntnu.no/studorg/mafia/> #20yrsago How Wikipedia entries get written <http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/whowriteswikipedia> #5yrsago Proctorio's awful reviews disappear down the memory hole <https://pluralistic.net/2021/09/04/hypervigilance/#radical-transparency> A photo of me onstage, giving a speech, pounding the podium. * Dąbrowa Górnicza, Kongres Regeneracja! to interdyscyplinarna, Sep 5 <https://regeneracja.plse.org.pl/> * Warsaw: Romana i Jana Podoskich, Sep 6 <https://wydarzenia.phub.pl/events/0ee0e198-f843-423a-890f-c84ff50a46c0> * Brighton: The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI with Carole Cadwalladr (Brighton Dome), Sep 8 <https://brightondome.org/whats-on/LSC-cory-doctorow-the-reverse-centaurs-guide-to-life-after-ai/> * London: The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI with Riley Quinn (Foyle's Picadilly), Sep 9 <https://www.foyles.co.uk/events/enshittification-cory-doctorow-riley-quinn> * Budapest: Brain Bar, Sep 17 <https://brainbar.com/munkatars/cory-doctorow> * Edmonton: Elbows Up (Edmonton Public Library), Sep 28 <https://www.epl.ca/blogs/post/elbows-up-with-cory-doctorow/> * South Bend: An Evening With Cory Doctorow (Notre Dame), Oct 6 <https://franco.nd.edu/events/2026/10/06/an-evening-with-cory-doctorow/> * Hudson, OH: Hudson Library, Oct 7 [https://engagedpatrons.org/EventsExtended.cfm?SiteID=3850&amp;EventID=596952&amp;PK=](https://engagedpatrons.org/EventsExtended.cfm?SiteID=3850&EventID=596952&PK=) * Calgary: Wordfest, Oct 8 <https://wordfest.com/2026/show/wordfest-presents-cory-doctorow-2026/> * Winnipeg: McNally Robinson, Oct 9 <https://www.mcnallyrobinson.com/event-18991/An-Evening-with-Cory-Doctorow> * Vancouver: Read, Resist, Repair, Rejoice (Vancouver Writers Festival), Oct 19 <https://writersfest.bc.ca/festival-event-2026/01> * Victoria: Munro's Books, Oct 20 <https://www.munrobooks.com/events/6113620261020> * Vancouver: Life After AI (Vancouver Writers Festival), Oct 22 <https://writersfest.bc.ca/festival-event-2026/46> * Ottawa: Life After AI (Ottawa Writers Festival), Oct 24 <https://writersfestival.org/event/life-after-ai> * Vancouver: BC Policy Solutions Gala, Nov 12 <https://bcpolicy.ca/gala/> A screenshot of me at my desk, doing a livecast. * The future of the tech crisis (How the Light Gets In) <https://iai.tv/video/the-future-of-the-tech-crisis?_auid=2020> * How Tech Platforms Took Over the Economy (Dystopia Now) <https://sites.libsyn.com/566555/enshittification-and-reverse-centaurs-cory-doctorow-on-how-tech-platforms-took-over-the-economy> * Hope, AI, Fixing the Internet and the Reverse Centaur of it all (Wilosophy) <https://podcastaddict.com/everyone-relax/episode/231414816> * Deflating the AI Bubble (Do Not Pass Go) <https://www.donotpassgo.ca/p/deflating-the-ai-bubble-with-cory> * Technofeudal Enshittification (Fucking Cancelled) <https://www.fuckingcancelled.com/p/technofeudal-enshittification-with> A grid of my books with Will Stahle covers.. * "The Reverse-Centaur's Guide to AI," a short book about being a better AI critic, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, June 2026 <https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374621568/thereversecentaursguidetolifeafterai/> * "Canny Valley": A limited edition collection of the collages I create for Pluralistic, self-published, September 2025 <https://pluralistic.net/2025/09/04/illustrious/#chairman-bruce> * "Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It," Farrar, Straus, Giroux, October 7 2025 <https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374619329/enshittification/> * "Picks and Shovels": a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about the heroic era of the PC, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), February 2025 (<https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250865908/picksandshovels>). * "The Bezzle": a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about prison-tech and other grifts, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), February 2024 ([thebezzle.org](http://thebezzle.org)). * "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>). * "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>. * "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> A cardboard book box with the Macmillan logo. * "The Post-American Internet," a geopolitical sequel of sorts to *Enshittification*, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2027 * "Unauthorized Bread": a middle-grades graphic novel adapted from my novella about refugees, toasters and DRM, FirstSecond, April 20, 2027 * "Enshittification, Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It" (the graphic novel), Firstsecond, 2027 * "The Memex Method," Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2027  Today's top sources: **Currently writing:** *** “Once Is Enemy Action,” a science fiction novel about the origins of modern technofascism. Today's words: 513 (11893 total).** * **"The Post-American Internet," a sequel to "Enshittification," about the better world the rest of us get to have now that Trump has torched America. Fourth draft completed. Submitted to editor.** * A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING  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. Blog (no ads, tracking, or data-collection): [Pluralistic.net](http://pluralistic.net) Newsletter (no ads, tracking, or data-collection): <https://pluralistic.net/plura-list> Mastodon (no ads, tracking, or data-collection): <https://mamot.fr/@pluralistic> Bluesky (no ads, possible tracking and data-collection): <https://bsky.app/profile/doctorow.pluralistic.net> Medium (no ads, paywalled): <https://doctorow.medium.com/> Tumblr (mass-scale, unrestricted, third-party surveillance and advertising): <https://mostlysignssomeportents.tumblr.com/tagged/pluralistic> "*When life gives you SARS, you make sarsaparilla*" -Joey "Accordion Guy" DeVilla READ CAREFULLY: By reading this, you agree, on behalf of your employer, to release me from all obligations and waivers arising from any and all NON-NEGOTIATED agreements, licenses, terms-of-service, shrinkwrap, clickwrap, browsewrap, confidentiality, non-disclosure, non-compete and acceptable use policies ("BOGUS AGREEMENTS") that I have entered into with your employer, its partners, licensors, agents and assigns, in perpetuity, without prejudice to my ongoing rights and privileges. You further represent that you have the authority to release me from any BOGUS AGREEMENTS on behalf of your employer. ISSN: 3066-764X, Pluralistic: Amazon Achieves Enshittification Inception, Cory Doctorow, 01m1p91drqx0nmc63pdtkjrm2b.