![[syndicated profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/feed.png){kind=small}
universal_hub_feed Jan. 17th, 2026 03:55 pm)Wolf Next Door Coffee, 142 Derby St. in Salem, has a new drink: Fuck ICE cold brew:
The cold brew special is $6.66 for sixteen ounces of cold brew with NO ICE. Half of the proceeds from this drink special will be donated to LUCE, the immigrant justice network of massachusetts.
They add it would pair well with a hot blueberry muffin.
Via Gravel Influencer.
universal_hub_feed Jan. 17th, 2026 03:44 pm)So she's screwed - although the judge did hold open the possibility of a civil-contempt charge should the regime insist it won't let her back in the country, from which it admits it wrongly deported her from.
In a ruling yesterday, US District Court Richard Stearns first concluded he has no direct authority over the habeas-corpus request for freedom from Any Lucia Lopez Belloza, because her lawyer goofed and filed her habeas-corpus motion after she was already in Texas. But he then gave the regime a chance to rectify its mistake in deporting her by letting Any Lucia Lopez Belloza at least come back with a student visa to complete her studies at the Wellesley school.
Lopez Belloza was born in Honduras but brought here by her mother when she was 8. She was grabbed by ICE agents Nov. 20 at Logan Airport, where she was about to fly to Texas for Thanksgiving with her family after her first semester on a full scholarship.
In his ruling, Stearns wrote he has no authority over Lopez Belloza's habeas-corpus request for freedom while she fights to stay in the US, because habeas-corpus motions are supposed to be filed in the judicial district where a person is being held, and by the time Lopez Belloza's lawyer filed in Boston district court, ICE had already flown her on a chartered jet out of Hanscom to a gulag in Port Isabel, Texas - from which they quickly stuck her on a flight to Tegucigalpa.
Quickly shipping immigrants out of Massachusetts to places with potentially more conservative judges has become an ICE specialty, but Stearns wrote that her lawyer compounded the problem because while her family hired him while she was still in the basement of ICE's Burlington garrison, he did not file the motion until the next day - after she'd been flown to Texas.
On Tuesday, a regime attorney actually admitted shipping her to Honduras was a mistake; that she should have been allowed to stay in, at least, Texas, to fight her imminent deportation, but refused to say the regime would do anything to recitfy its mistake, like bring her back or even to allow her to return on her own.
In his ruling yesterday, Stearns wrote this is all awful, "an ill-starred marriage of a lawyer's behindhand filing and a bureaucratic fumble ignited a perfect storm that swept up an innocent and unsuspecting teenage college student."
But with no jurisdiction over the motion before him, what can he do? He continued:
There is happily no one-size-fits-all solution for seeing that justice be done in what all agree was an amalgam of errors that ended badly for Any. Rather there is a salmagundi of options. As the court suggested at the hearing, the simplest solution would be for the Secretary of State to exercise his considerable discretion under [immigration law], to grant Any a non-immigrant student visa that would allow her to continue her studies at Babson College while her immigration status plays out in due course in the appropriate courts of law.
And so:
To this end, the court directs the Department of Justice to convey this decision to the Secretary of State, with the court's recommendation that a student visa (or other comparable visa status) be extended to Any in the Secretary's discretion.
He gave the regime three weeks to let him know when this request was submitted and what the Secretary of State's answer is.
This is not the first immigration case in which the regime admitted getting rid of somebody without property authority. However, in the most prominent of the cases, that of Maryland's Kilmar Abrego Garcia, who was handed over to El Salvador and stuck in its notorious CECOT concentration camp, the regime's response to rectify its error was essentially: Tough. Although he was ultimately brought back to the US, immigration officials promptly grabbed him again, said he was a human trafficker and that they would ship him to Uganda. His case is currently under advisement by a federal judge in Maryland.
Stearns added that should the regime try to turn its back on Lopez Belloza, he would consider a civil-contempt case against it.
At this moment in time, there is nothing for the court to coerce, as it would prefer to give the government an opportunity to rectify the mistake it acknowledges having made in Any’s case before contemplating the issuance of any further order.
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
thatjustwontbreak posting in ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png){kind=small}
snowflake_challenge Jan. 17th, 2026 08:01 am)
I dreamed of a pharaoh, awaking after death and arranging to his liking the various precious items buried with him.
"You've got quite an ego," I snapped at him (dream-me is apparently rude to people's faces), "having this massive pyramid built just so people would remember you."
"That's not why I had it built. It's for all the stories that collect around it. Adventures, time travel, curses, beings from the stars--I hear them all, and they entertain me," he replied.
doctorow_feed Jan. 17th, 2026 03:18 pm)
Ireland is a tax haven. In the 1970s and 1980s, life in the civil-war wracked country was hard – between poverty, scarce employment and civil unrest, the country hemorrhaged its best and brightest. As the saying went, "Ireland's top export is the Irish."
In desperation, Ireland's political class hit on a wild gambit: they would weaponize Ireland's sovereignty in service to corporate tax evasion. Companies that pretended to establish their headquarters in Ireland would be able to hoard their profits, evading their tax obligations to every other country in the world:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ireland_as_a_tax_haven
A single country – poor, small, at the literal periphery of a continent – was able to foundationally transform the global order. Any company that has enough money to pretend to be Irish can avoid 25-35% in tax, giving it an unbeatable edge against competitors that lack the multinational's superpower of magicking all its profits into a state of untaxable grace somewhere over the Irish Sea.
The effect this had on Ireland is…mixed. The Irish state is thoroughly captured by the corporations that pretend to call Ireland home. Anything those corporations want, Ireland must deliver, lest the footloose companies up sticks and start pretending to be Cypriot, Luxembourgeois, Maltese or Dutch. This is why Europe's landmark privacy law, the GDPR, has had no effect on America's tech giants. They pretend to be Irish, and Ireland lets them get away with breaking European law. The Irish state even hires these companies' executives to regulate their erstwhile employers:
https://pluralistic.net/2025/12/01/erin-go-blagged/#big-tech-omerta
But there is no denying that Ireland has managed to turn the world's taxable trillions into its own domestic billions. The fact that Ireland is cashing out less than 1% of what it's costing everyone else is terrible for the world's tax systems and competitive markets, but it's been a massive windfall for Ireland, and has lifted the country out of its centuries of colonial poverty and privation.
There are many lessons to be learned from Ireland's experiment with regulatory arbitrage, but one is unequivocal: even a small, poor, disintegrating nation can change the world system by offering a site where you can do things that you can't do anywhere else, and if it does, that poor nation can grow wealthy and comfortable.
What's more, there are plenty of "things that you can't do anywhere else" that are very good. It's not just corporate tax evasion.
First among these things that you can't do anywhere else: it's a crime in virtually every country on earth to modify America's defective, enshittified, privacy-invading, money-stealing technology exports. That's because the US trade representative has spent the past 25 years using the threat of tariffs to bully all of America's trading partners into adopting "anti-circumvention" laws:
https://pluralistic.net/2026/01/15/how-the-light-gets-in/#theories-of-change
There is nothing good about this. The fact that local businesses can't sell you a privacy blocker, an alternative client, a diagnostic tool, a spare part, a consumable, or even software for your American-made devices leaves you defenseless before US tech's remorseless campaign of monetary and informational plunder – and it means that your economy is denied the benefits of creating and exporting these incredibly desirable, profitable products.
Incredibly, Trump deliberately blew up this multi-trillion dollar system of US commercial advantage. By chaotically imposing and rescinding and re-imposing tariffs on the world, he has neutralized the US trade rep's tariff threats. Foreign firms just can't count on exporting to America anymore, so the threat of (more) tariffs grows less intimidating by the minute:
https://pluralistic.net/2025/12/16/k-shaped-recovery/#disenshittification-nations
The time is ripe for the founding of a disenshittification nation, an Ireland for disenshittification. I have no doubt that eventually, most or all of the countries in the world will drop their anti-circumvention laws (the laws that ban the modification of US tech exports). Once one country starts making these disenshittifying tools, there'll be no way to prevent their export, since all it takes to buy one of these tools from a circumvention haven is an internet connection and a payment method.
Once everyone in your country is buying and using jailbreaking tools from abroad, there'll be no point in keeping these laws on your own books. But the first country to get there stands a chance of establishing a durable first-mover advantage – of reaping hundreds of billions selling disenshittifying products around the world. That country could be to enshittification-resistant technology what Finland was to mobile phones during the Nokia decade (and wouldn't you know it, the EU's newly minted "Tech Sovereignty" czar is a Finn!):
https://commission.europa.eu/about/organisation/college-commissioners/henna-virkkunen_en
The world has experimented with many kinds of havens over the centuries. In the early 18th century, Madagascar became a haven for British naval deserters, who were adopted into the island's matriarchal clans. Together, they founded an anarchist pirate utopia:
https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/24/zana-malata/#libertalia
The global system of trade has allowed America's tech companies to steal and hoard trillions, and to put every country at risk of being bricked when their IT systems are switched off at a single word from Trump:
https://pluralistic.net/2026/01/01/39c3/#the-new-coalition
There are more than 200 countries in the world. There's also an ever-expanding cohort of brilliant international technologists whose Silicon Valley dreams have turned into a nightmare of being shot in the face by an ICE goon, or being kidnapped, separated from their families and being locked up in a Salvadoran slave-labor prison. These techies are looking for the next place to put down roots and "make a dent in the universe." Lots of countries could be that place.
The Ireland for disenshittification wouldn't just have their pick of international technologists – they'd have plenty of Americans hungering for a better life. Two-thirds of young Americans "are considering leaving the US":
Ireland pulled off its tax-haven gambit by making influential people very rich, so that they would go to bat for Ireland. The Ireland for disenshittification will have the same chance. The new tech companies that unlock US Big Tech's trillions and turn them into their own billions (with the remainder being shared by us, tech users, in the form of lower prices and better products) will be a powerful bloc in support of this project.
Ireland showed us: it just takes one country to defect from this global prisoner's dilemma, and then everything is up for grabs.
(Image: Stuart Caie, CC BY 2.0; Sourabh.biswas003; CC BY-SA 3.0; modified)
https://github.com/Pankajtanwarbanna/stfu
Libro.fm is hiring a Technical Product Manager https://blog.libro.fm/open-positions/technical-product-manager-content-systems/
The Harm to Consumers and Sellers from Universal Commerce Protocol, in Google’s Own Words https://www.thesling.org/the-harm-to-consumers-and-sellers-from-universal-commerce-protocol-in-googles-own-words/
‘Anything that can’t go on forever eventually stops’: ‘Enshittification’ author issues stark warning … https://www.hilltimes.com/story/2026/01/15/anything-that-cant-go-on-forever-eventually-stops-enshittification-author-issues-stark-warning-to-ottawa-over-ai-policy/488014/
88% of all songs on Spotify have been demonetized https://musically.com/2026/01/15/5-1tn-annual-music-streams-but-120-5m-tracks-had-10-or-fewer/
#20yrago Hollywood’s Member of Parliament makes national news https://web.archive.org/web/20060213161019/http://www.macleans.ca/topstories/politics/article.jsp?content=20060123_120006_120006
#20yrsago Skip $250/plate dinner for dirty MP, eat with copyfighters https://web.archive.org/web/20060118062522/http://www.onlinerights.ca/
#20yrago Octavia Butler’s “Fledgling”: subtle, thrilling vampire novel https://memex.craphound.com/2006/01/17/octavia-butlers-fledgling-subtle-thrilling-vampire-novel/
#10yrsago Revealed: the hidden web of big-business money backing Europe and America’s pro-TTIP “think tanks” https://thecorrespondent.com/3884/Big-business-orders-its-pro-TTIP-arguments-from-these-think-tanks/855725233704-2febf71a
#10yrsago The bizarre magnetic forest rings of northern Ontario https://www.bldgblog.com/2016/01/rings/
#10yrsago 2016 is the year of the telepathic election, and it’s not pretty http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2016/01/some-american-political-marker.html
#10yrsago Trump Casinos lost millions every single year that Donald Trump ran it (but he’s still rich) https://memex.craphound.com/2016/01/17/trump-casinos-lost-millions-every-single-year-that-donald-trump-ran-it-but-hes-still-rich/
#10yrsago Oregon domestic terrorists now destroying public property in earnest https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/jan/16/oregon-militias-behavior-increasingly-brazen-as-public-property-destroyed?CMP=edit_2221
#10yrsago Jeremy Corbyn proposes ban on dividends from companies that don’t pay living wages https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2016/jan/16/jeremy-corbyn-to-confront-big-business-over-living-wage
#10yrsago The Electable Mr Sanders https://web.archive.org/web/20160119083607/http://robertreich.org/post/137454417985
#10yrsago Suspicious, photo-taking “Middle Eastern” men were visually impaired tourists https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/vancouver-mall-video-men-1.3406619
#5yrsago Fighting fiber was the right's dumbest self-own https://pluralistic.net/2021/01/17/turner-diaries-fanfic/#1a-fiber
Colorado Springs: Guest of Honor at COSine, Jan 23-25
https://www.firstfridayfandom.org/cosine/
Ottawa: Enshittification at Perfect Books, Jan 28
https://www.instagram.com/p/DS2nGiHiNUh/
Toronto: Enshittification and the Age of Extraction with Tim Wu, Jan 30
https://nowtoronto.com/event/cory-doctorow-and-tim-wu-enshittification-and-extraction/
Victoria: 28th Annual Victoria International Privacy & Security Summit, Mar 3-5
https://www.rebootcommunications.com/event/vipss2026/
Berlin: Re:publical, May 18-20
https://re-publica.com/de/news/rp26-sprecher-cory-doctorow
Hay-on-Wye: HowTheLightGetsIn, May 22-25
https://howthelightgetsin.org/festivals/hay/big-ideas-2
Why Big Tech is a Trap for Independent Creators (Stripper News)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nmYDyz8AMZ0
Enshittification (Creative Nonfiction podcast)
https://brendanomeara.com/episode-507-enshittification-author-cory-doctorow-believes-in-a-new-good-internet/
A post-American, enshittification-resistant internet (39c3)
https://media.ccc.de/v/39c3-a-post-american-enshittification-resistant-internet
Enshittification with Plutopia
https://plutopia.io/cory-doctorow-enshittification/
"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).
"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
"Enshittification, Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It" (the graphic novel), Firstsecond, 2026
"The Memex Method," Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2026
"The Reverse-Centaur's Guide to AI," a short book about being a better AI critic, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, June 2026
Today's top sources:
Currently writing: "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 (1045 words today, 9348 total)
"The Post-American Internet," a short book about internet policy in the age of Trumpism. PLANNING.
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):
Newsletter (no ads, tracking, or data-collection):
https://pluralistic.net/plura-list
Mastodon (no ads, tracking, or data-collection):
Medium (no ads, paywalled):
Twitter (mass-scale, unrestricted, third-party surveillance and advertising):
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
Which of these look interesting?
Invincible – Superhero Roleplaying (Alpha) by Adam Bradford & Tomas Härenstam (July 2026)
1 (33.3%)
Fabula Ultima Bestiary by Emanuele Galletto (May 2026)
2 (66.7%)
Arkand: City of Wave and Flames by Johan Sjöberg (April 2026)
0 (0.0%)
Some other option (see comments)
0 (0.0%)
Cats!
3 (100.0%)
01
02
03
04
05
06
07
08
09
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
2930
31
32
33
34
35
36
37
38
39
40
41
42
43
4445
46
47
48
49
50
51
52
5354
55
56
57
58
59
60
61
62
63
64
65
66
67
68friending_memes, and maybe time without internet was a good thing there. Came to the conclusion that actually, my circle is pretty damn great and I don't feel I get around to commenting as often as I'd like. So skipping the meme, but since I fiddled with the response a bit I'm copying it over here. ( Read more... )retro_icontest to see the results of the icon battle me, naushika, and narnialover7 had. 
universal_hub_feed - Salem coffeehouse pours new offering for these timesuniversal_hub_feed - Judge appeals to Marco Rubio's sense of decency to let wrongfully deported Babson student back in thmabiana - (no subject)nanila - The Friday Five on a Saturdaythatjustwontbreak in snowflake_challenge - Fandom Snowflake Challenge #9psocoptera - The Martian Contingencyasakiyume - placeholder microfictiondoctorow_feed - Pluralistic: The world needs an Ireland for disenshittification (17 Jan 2026)james_davis_nicoll - Today I Learnedfeurioo in tv_talk - Speak Up Saturdayjames_davis_nicoll - Books Received, January 10 to January 16purplecat - Random Doctor Who Picturemabiana - (no subject)magnavox_23 in fandom_icons - Multi Fandom Iconsmagnavox_23 - The One With All The Icons From All The Fandoms...jjhunter - How Are You? (in Haiku)lilisonna_tumblr_feed - LABYRINTH (1986) dir. Jim Hensongoodbyebird - Not great, Bob.oursin - (no subject)andrewducker - Interesting Links for 17-01-2026
