Pluralistic: Become unoptimizable (20 Aug 2025)

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Originally published at: Pluralistic: Become unoptimizable (20 Aug 2025) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow



Today's links


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Become unoptimizable (permalink)

Forget surveillance capitalism – let's talk about surveillance infantalism: the drive by the wealthy to spy on you in order to pursue the toddler's goals of getting everything they want from the people around them, without any reciprocal obligations.

After the Snowden revelations, I started to wonder about something fundamental: why spy at all?

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/mar/10/nsa-gchq-technology-create-social-mobility-spy-on-citizens

The answer I came up with at the time is that the ultra-rich (and the states they have suborned) have a fundamental understanding that the more unfair a society is, the less stable it is. The more unstable a state is, the more its ruling class have to expend on private security. No captain of industry wants to arise from his sarcophagus of a morning, only to discover a mob of hoi polloi building a guillotine on his lawn.

As Thomas Piketty argues, there comes a point where it's cheaper to make society more fair – say, by building hospitals and schools – than it is to pay for all the gaiter-wearing gun-thugs you'll need to weed out the guillotine-building projects that spontaneously erupt under conditions of gross unfairness:

https://memex.craphound.com/2014/06/24/thomas-pikettys-capital-in-the-21st-century/

Mass surveillance shifts the guillotine equilibrium in favor of being greedier, by making it cheaper to identify and neutralize incipient guillotine-builders, which means that you can raise the greediness floor without seeing a concomitant rise in your guard labor bill.

And there's lots of money to be made by raising the greediness floor, the corollary of which is that any time you fail to act with sufficiently shameless greed, you leave a ton of money on the table. That's the substance of the shareholder lawsuit against Unitedhealthcare, alleging that after Luigi Mangione allegedly murdered United CEO Brian Thompson‡, United failed to screw enough patients hard enough:

https://www.nbcnews.com/business/business-news/unitedhealthcare-sued-shareholders-reaction-ceos-killing-rcna205550

‡ Luigi didn't do it. I saw him playing pinochle in Los Angeles that night, and I'll swear to it in court.

But there's another way in which surveillance abets rampant billionaireism: when companies spy on us, they can change the rules of their services to increase how much we pay them, and decrease how much they pay us. When companies do this to their customers, they call it "personalized pricing" – but everyone else calls it what it is, surveillance pricing:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/06/24/price-discrimination/#algorithmic-pricing

When a company charges you more than someone else for the same service (say, Uber jacking up the price of a ride because your phone battery is about to die, or an airline charging you extra because they know you have a funeral to attend), they're effectively re-valuing the dollars in your bank account. The fact that the cab-ride that costs you $20 and costs someone else $15 means that your dollar is only worth $0.75.

But companies also do this to the workers they pay, something Veena Dubal calls "algorthmic wage discrimination":

https://pluralistic.net/2023/04/12/algorithmic-wage-discrimination/#fishers-of-men

For example, the apps that hospitals use to hire contract nurses first buy their recent financial information from an unregulated data-broker, checking to see whether the nurse has a lot of credit-card debt, because if you owe a lot on your Visa, the app can offer you a lower hourly wage and you'll still take the shift:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/12/18/loose-flapping-ends/#luigi-has-a-point

This is re-valuing your labor. If my credit-card debt means that I get $20/hour for a shift that would pay you $25/hour, the app is saying that my hours are only worth 80% of what yours are worth.

This kind of price-fixing is an example of a phenomenon I call "twiddling," which is when a company changes its underlying business logic (prices, costs, recommendations, search rankings) on a per-user, per-session basis to shift value from customers and suppliers to shareholders:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/02/19/twiddler/

There's lots of kinds of twiddling: the fact that apps generate so much fine-grained, up-to-the-second surveillance telemetry about our use of them means that zuckermuskian social media bosses can make pretty good guesses about how many ads and boosted posts they can enshittify into our feeds without us switching off the app:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/21/potemkin-ai/#hey-guys

If you were studying all this stuff in an MBA program, they'd call it "optimization." Mass surveillance allows the optimization of guard-labor, by identifying threats to the status quo for targeted enforcement, which is much cheaper and effective than indiscriminate enforcement. Commercial surveillance allows buyers to figure out the most an individual consumer will pay, and raise prices accordingly; and to calculate the lowest wage a worker will accept, and lower pay accordingly. Commercial surveillance allows companies to "optimize" their products to be nearly so enshtitified that we quit them, but not quite, maximizing the value they can shift from us to them.

To be free people, we don't merely need to be ungovernable.

We need to become unoptomizable.

How do we do that? Well, there are lots of policies that would make it harder for the ultra-rich to "optimize" us so that we are easier to fleece and abuse, but every "optimization" starts with surveillance. After all, you treasure what you measure, and if you can't observe a worker or a customer – or a citizen getting ready to build a guillotine – you can't optimize them.

That's where "privacy first" comes in. There are a lot of people angry about a lot of problems that are all rooted in the unregulated, unrestricted practice of mass surveillance by governments and their corporate partners:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/12/06/privacy-first/#but-not-just-privacy

Pulling together people angry about being turned into deepfake porn, people angry about parents who've gone Maga or kids who've become anorexic; Fox News cultists angry about the use of reverse warrants to identify Jan 6 rioters or Tiktok millennials quoting Osama Bin Laden; immigrants angry about ICE plundering commercial databases to locate their next victim; and people angry about online racial financial, hiring and housing discrimination makes for a hell of a coalition.

If we make it illegal to spy, we make end the conditions for rampant billionaireism. We become unoptimizable.

Billionaires are overgrown toddlers, after all. They don't acknowledge the humanity of others – indeed, they probably don't even believe that the rest of us are really real (we're "NPCs"):

https://pluralistic.net/2025/08/18/seeing-like-a-billionaire/#npcs

The point of billionaireism is to escape: to escape any mutual obligations to others, any duty to give moral consideration to your workers or your customers or the voters you're trying to hoodwink with a torrent of manipulative, dishonest media messages. It's to do whatever you want, to move fast and break things, from rocketships to the night sky. It's being able to shout down anyone who says "NO!"

That's the drive behind "libertarian exit" projects, where people dying of terminal billionaireism attempt to colonize some "empty place" where they owe nothing to anyone:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/06/14/this-way-to-the-egress/#terra-nullius

It's why billionaires are obsessed with tunnels and skycars (escaping the inescapable geometric reality that the only way to move a lot of people through a city is on public transit):

https://pluralistic.net/2025/07/24/geometry-hates-cars/#dogshit-unit-economics

It's why they build luxury bunkers, so they can wait out "the Event" in comfort while the not-quite-real people on the outside rebuild civilization, whereupon they can emerge with their AR-15s, bomb-collared mercenaries, and thumb-drives full of bitcoin and assume their rightful place as Frazetta warlords with a harem in every fortress:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/09/13/collapse-porn/#collapse-porn

It's a life without friction, because all of that friction has been offloaded onto us, through the process of optimization. The gig economy lets a billionaireist enjoy the pleasures of round-the-clock staff without having to pay workers to sit idle. You just summon a worker whenever you want a burrito or a massage or a blunt, and they only get paid while they're "on the clock" for your task. The fact that this means that an ever-larger fraction of the world has to scramble in mounting desperation to stay clothed, fed and housed is a hell of a lot of friction, but it's not your friction. They've been optimized – to your purposes.

Become unoptimizable.

In a fair society, we'd have transparency for the powerful and privacy for everyone else: we'd know every time Elon Musk's jet took off and where it was going so we could surround the landing strip with angry protesters – and Musk wouldn't know a single thing about his workers, his users, or anyone else. He would experience us through the same veil of total ignorance through which he experiences his children.

Hey look at this (permalink)


A shelf of leatherbound history books with a gilt-stamped series title, 'The World's Famous Events.'

Object permanence (permalink)

#20yrsago Penguin-suited activists crash Microsoft’s Berlin parliament presentation https://netzpolitik.org/2005/microsoft-im-parlament/

#10yrsago LA artists who earn their livings through the Internet https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2015/08/18/magazine/23mag-culturesidebar.html?smid=tw-share&_r=0

#10yrsago MPAA loves fair use so much they don’t want to share it with the rest of the world https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2015/08/will-hollywoods-whining-thwart-better-tpp-copyright-rules

#10yrsago Chastity belts were a joke, then a metaphor, then a hoax https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/everything-youve-heard-about-chastity-belts-is-a-lie

#10yrsago Jeb Bush: the NSA isn’t spying on us enough https://web.archive.org/web/20150819062605/http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/jeb-bush-nsa_55d39f5fe4b055a6dab1d777?utm_hp_ref=tw&kvcommref=mostpopular

#5yrsago Austerity breeds Nazis https://pluralistic.net/2020/08/19/a-band-apart/#austerity

#5yrsago Yale admin: "Prepare for death" https://pluralistic.net/2020/08/19/a-band-apart/#boola-boola

#5yrsago Hedge fund won't return Citi's accidental $175m deposit https://pluralistic.net/2020/08/19/a-band-apart/#keepsies

#5yrsago Spikey https://pluralistic.net/2020/08/19/a-band-apart/#listen-up

#5yrsago Orwell prize winner trapped in orwellian nightmare https://pluralistic.net/2020/08/19/a-band-apart/#fuck-the-algorithm

#5yrsago Thomas Hawk's Talking Heads https://pluralistic.net/2020/08/19/a-band-apart/#talkingheads

#5yrsago Amazon's Monopoly Tollbooth https://pluralistic.net/2020/08/19/a-band-apart/#amazon-tollbooth

#1yrago Corporate Bullshit https://pluralistic.net/2024/08/19/apologetics-spotters-guide/#narratives

Upcoming appearances (permalink)

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Recent appearances (permalink)


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Latest books (permalink)


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Upcoming books (permalink)

  • "Canny Valley": A limited edition collection of the collages I create for Pluralistic, self-published, September 2025

  • "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/

  • "Unauthorized Bread": a middle-grades graphic novel adapted from my novella about refugees, toasters and DRM, FirstSecond, 2026

  • "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, 2026


Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources:

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  • "The Reverse Centaur's Guide to AI," a short book for Farrar, Straus and Giroux about being an effective AI critic. (1043 words yesterday, 37083 words total).

  • A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING

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Where you playing with EFF’s card deck?

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Unoptimizable sounds good. The propaganda argument against it will be two-pronged… Convenience and Security. These are the typical standbys used to defeat so many of the ideas that would make for a better society and world. Why? Because they work.

Who doesn’t want to be safe, especially in a world where the [corporate-owned] media presents a constant stream of terrifying stories?

And we, Americans especially, are addicted to convenience. We’ve been conditioned to trade almost anything for it. The very promise, without proof, if potential time/effort/money savings is often enough to seal the deal.

How do we get past these effective propaganda messages, especially when any competing, anti-“optimization” messages will be censored away by the mainstream media? How do we actually get to critical mass in the existing media/communication environment? This, to me, this is the question.

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Watching the movie Mountainhead made me wonder why we don’t have a word for the philosophical movement the movie is portraying - so I adore the desperately needed neologism “billionairism.” My only tiny quibble is that the internal “e” in your spelling is distractingly superfluous. It elicited “billionaire reism” in my mind. I don’t need a term denoting the existence of billionaires, I need a term denoting their toxic philosophy.

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«The gig economy lets a billionaireist enjoy the pleasures of round-the-clock staff without having to pay workers to sit idle. You just summon a worker whenever you want a burrito or a massage or a blunt, and they only get paid while they’re “on the clock” for your task.»

Here we go again: Cory Doctorow keep insisting on his focus on billionaires when the political mass for “optimization” is provided by affluent (D-voting usually) middle class voters.

Consider the “summon a worker whenever you want a burrito” example: a real billionaire would have a dedicated full-time burrito-making servant, and that such a servant would be idle most of the time would be simply a display of conspicuous consumption. Billionaires are the sort of people who own a dozen mansions in different places, all fully staffed year long, in case their owner wants to stay there for some time (they do not use AirBnb…); a demonstration of the billionaire’s wealth and power.

The people who most want to optimize down the wages of burrito deliverers and other time-shared servants are instead those who cannot afford full-time servants, that is affluent middle-class voters.

The billionaires are in the picture because they get and organize the votes of a large mass of those affluent middle-class voters for their own purposes, and make a profit from intermediating those time-shared servants to middle class voters, but the political big deal is that huge mass of reaganista middle-class voters demanding lower wages for everybody else and higher property and 401k gains for themselves.

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«Convenience and Security. Who doesn’t want to be safe, especially in a world where the [corporate-owned] media presents a constant stream of terrifying stories? And we, Americans especially, are addicted to convenience.»

But that applies only to middle-class and upper-class americans… Working-class and under-class americans have no security and little to no convenience.

Many if not most middle-class americans are very eager to gain more security and convenience by pushing insecurity and inconvenience down to the lower classes. The political problem is how to persuade them that there are better ways to be secure and have some convenience.

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