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 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 public "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 higgeldy-piggeldy 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

When you look behind the headlines, you'll find unfulfilled commitments

Opinion  I live in Asheville, North Carolina. You may have seen my hometown in the news over the last few weeks after Hurricane Helene wrecked the place.…

DMA gatekeeper status denied, meaning X can carry on without extra compliance chores

The EU has said it won't classify Elon Musk’s X as “gatekeeper” – the bloc’s designation for the most significant digital platforms- because it doesn’t think the social network is that big a deal.…

If you just ignore the political news and Wall Street, Elon Musk had an incredible week.

His company SpaceX pulled off an engineering marvel on Sunday when it launched the largest, most powerful rocket in the world — and on the first try, caught the 23-story-tall booster in midair using chopstick-like mechanical arms. The feat was unique in the history of spaceflight and duly impressed both government officials and aerospace experts.

“To manage to be that successful on your first attempt, I think it’s just remarkable,” said Jonathan McDowell, an astronomer and astrophysicist at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, who had not expected the catch to work.

Just a few days before, during a theatrical corporate unveiling at a Hollywood studio, Tesla showed off its prototype for the robotaxi Musk has been promising for years and trotted out a squad of bartending robot entertainers that he forecasted will be the “biggest product ever of any kind.” The flashy launch earned Musk a wave of social media adoration for the car’s sleek, futuristic design and the humanoid robots’ stunts.

But at the same time, an entirely separate set of dramas was swirling around Musk. On Oct. 5, he appeared at a Trump rally, leaping around the stage and proclaiming himself “Dark MAGA,” with a hat to match. In the wake of hurricanes Helene and Milton, he used his platform X to promote a torrent of misinformation around the federal response, evidently tailored to hurt Democrats.

A clear problem has emerged for a man who became rich, famous and increasingly powerful by retailing himself to Americans as a tribune of the human future: It’s now more difficult than ever to separate Musk the businessman from Musk the political figure.

This first appeared in Digital Future Daily, POLITICO’s afternoon newsletter about how tech and power are shaping our world. Subscribe here.

To see what that might be costing him, look at Musk’s brewing arguments with California and Washington.

Last Thursday, the California Coastal Commission rejected plans that would allow SpaceX to launch rockets more frequently from Vandenberg Air Force Base. In doing so, the agency cited his political antics: “Elon Musk is hopping about the country, spewing and tweeting political falsehoods and attacking FEMA while claiming his desire to help the hurricane victims with free Starlink access to the internet,” Commissioner Gretchen Newsom said at a Thursday meeting.

The Starship launch — SpaceX’s biggest test of the year — was also nearly derailed this weekend due to Musk’s clashes with regulators. In recent months, SpaceX has butted heads with the Federal Aviation Administration over license requirements, with the agency slapping the company with hefty fines for allegedly failing to follow them before launches, and Musk openly threatening to sue for “regulatory overreach.” Even as Musk promoted the Starship test and targeted Sunday for its flight, it remained unclear if he would get the green light from the FAA until the day before.

Musk’s recklessness in the public sphere isn’t necessarily hurting his federal contracting business, at least for now. Jerry McGinn, an expert on government contracting at George Mason University, said that government officials buying capabilities from SpaceX “are not looking at his kind of tweets or whatever … they’re focused on their thing, their rockets, their launch capabilities and how SpaceX can meet that or not.”

And in the extremely long term, he has some goals that transcend politics, like getting humans off Earth and onto other planets. Musk has massive ambitions for Starship, including using it to eventually return American astronauts to the moon. (The moon is, in fact, a shared priority for both presidential campaigns.) Even further out into the future, he wants to send people to Mars. Those off-planet missions would launch from the East Coast , or possibly Texas, and are not expected to be affected if his arguments with California hamper SpaceX’s ability to launch on the West Coast.

But in the shorter term, his interest in electing Trump seems to have eclipsed some of those other priorities. Musk has funded a super PAC with tens of millions of dollars to turn out the vote for the former president, proposed going on a campaign bus tour across Pennsylvania and even suggested he would be thrown in prison under a Harris administration. Trump has promised Musk a role in the administration if he wins. Musk’s sudden, full-scale insertion into the presidential campaign has fed his appetite for attention, but may not be doing much to advance his bottom line.

That part of his future depends on one other constituency Musk will need to worry about: Wall Street. He’s the world’s richest man mostly by virtue of Tesla’s off-the-charts valuation as a company, and the robotaxi — despite the cool factor — left investors underwhelmed.

Without a clear path to go from reality to Musk’s lavish business promises, the stock took a bath, losing $68 billion in value almost overnight — suggesting that there is still at least one force that can pull the tycoon back toward Earth.

That’s a problem for SpaceX as well. While Starship would change the economics of spaceflight enormously, McDowell said “there’s a whole bunch of different steps before we’re ready to go to the moon.”

“What’s not clear is how deep his pockets really are at the moment, and can he get it working reliably before the money runs out?” he said of Musk. “If Starlink is making enough profit, it’s not a problem, but it’s hard to tell.”

Daniella Cheslow contributed to this report.

The PM’s time in office will be defined by how he responds to global economic challenges and political instability, not least in the US

There is plenty of action in British politics but not a lot of movement. The government’s unsteady start in office and a Tory leadership contest have kept the Westminster news machine spinning on the only setting it has: frantic lather. Labour’s poll ratings have tanked but that reflects bleak continuity more than change. Voters who were unhappy before the election are no happier. Old blame is unfairly carried over to the new regime.

The story of whether the government can lift that mood only really begins with the budget on 30 October. In the absence of a settled tax and spending programme, Keir Starmer’s talk of missions and tough choices is all preamble. But that isn’t the only reason politics is in a state of suspended animation. A week after the budget comes the US presidential election. If Donald Trump wins, no one will still be talking about Rachel Reeves tweaking her borrowing rules.

Rafael Behr is a Guardian columnist

Labour has to stand up to toxic Tory posturing, or it will be pulled in the same direction as Jenrick and Badenoch

Last Wednesday, the announcement that Conservative MPs had decided on a conclusive leadership battle between Kemi Badenoch and Robert Jenrick was greeted in non-Tory circles by an outpouring of mirth. One Labour parliamentarian texted the Guardian’s political editor to jokily wonder whether the result needed to be declared as yet another gift. Rumours that the shock outcome was the consequence of James Cleverly’s supporters assuming he had an unassailable lead and cynically backing Robert Jenrick as his most beatable opponent were the clincher: here was yet another instalment of the Tory pantomime that has now been running for nearly a decade. “A lot of very serious analysis awaits,” said the LBC presenter James O’Brien, “but this is all objectively hilarious.”

In so far as Badenoch and Jenrick seemingly have no interest in the reasons why their party so comprehensively lost the election, all the amusement is understandable. Talk of whoever wins perhaps lasting only a couple of years only increases the sense of hilarity. But it is surely not that difficult to take a slightly different view, and look at the future of Tory politics with more than a pang of anxiety.