Pluralistic: Blowtorching the frog (05 Mar 2026) executive-dysfunction

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Originally published at: Pluralistic: Blowtorching the frog (05 Mar 2026) executive-dysfunction – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow



Today's links


Elon Musk wielding a flamethrower; he is roasting the snout of a giant frog

Blowtorching the frog (permalink)

Back in 2018, the Singletrack blog published a widely read article explaining the lethal trigonometry of a UK intersection where drivers kept hitting cyclists:

https://singletrackworld.com/2018/01/collision-course-why-this-type-of-road-junction-will-keep-killing-cyclists/

There are lots of intersections that are dangerous for cyclists, of course, but what made Ipsley Cross so lethal was a kind of eldritch geometry that let the cyclist and the car see each other a long time before the collision, while also providing the illusion that they were not going to collide, until an instant before the crash.

This intersection is an illustration of a phenomenon called "constant bearing, decreasing range," which (the article notes) had long been understood by sailors as a reason that ships often collide. I'm not going to get into the trigonometry here (the Singletrack article does a great job of laying it out).

I am, however, going to use this as a metaphor: there is a kind of collision that is almost always fatal because its severity isn't apparent until it is too late to avert the crash. Anyone who's been filled with existential horror at the looming climate emergency can certainly relate.

The metaphor isn't exact. "Constant bearing, decreasing range" is the result of an optical illusion that makes it seem like things are fine right up until they aren't. Our failure to come to grips with the climate emergency is (partly‡) caused by a different cognitive flaw: the fact that we struggle to perceive the absolute magnitude of a series of slow, small changes.

‡The other part being the corrupting influence of corporate money in politics, obviously)

This is the phenomenon that's invoked in the parable of "boiling a frog." Supposedly, if you put a frog in a pot of water at a comfortable temperature and then slowly warm the water to boiling, the frog will happily swim about even as it is cooked alive. In this metaphor, the frog can only perceive relative changes, so all that it senses is that the water has gotten a little warmer, and a small change in temperature isn't anything to worry about, right? The fact that the absolute change to the water is lethal does not register for our (hypothetical) frog.

Now, as it happens, frogs will totally leap clear of a pot of warming water when it reaches a certain temperature, irrespective of how slowly the temperature rises. But the metaphor persists, because while it does not describe the behavior of frogs in a gradually worsening situation, it absolutely describes how humans respond to small, adverse changes in our environment.

Take moral compromises: most of us set out to be good people, but reality demands small compromises to our ethics. So we make a small ethical compromise, and then before long, circumstances demand another compromise, and then another, and another, and another. Taken in toto, these compromises represent a severe fall from our personal standards, but so long as they are dripped out in slow and small increments, too often we rationalize our way into them: each one is only a small compromise, after all:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/02/19/pluralist-19-feb-2020/#thinkdifferent

Back to the climate emergency: for the first 25 years after NASA's James Hansen testified before Congress about "global heating," the changes to our world were mostly incremental: droughts got a little worse, as did floods. We had a few more hurricanes. Ski seasons got shorter. Heat waves got longer. Taken individually, each of these changes was small enough for our collective consciousness to absorb as within the bounds of normalcy, or, at worst, just a small worsening. Sure, there could be a collision on the horizon, but it wasn't anything urgent enough to justify the massive effort of decarbonizing our energy and transportation:

https://locusmag.com/feature/cory-doctorow-the-swerve/

It's not that we're deliberately committing civilizational suicide, it's just that slow-moving problems are hard to confront, especially in a world replete with fast-moving, urgent problems.

But crises precipitate change:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FrEdbKwivCI

Before 2022, Europe was doing no better than the rest of the world when it came to confronting the climate emergency. Its energy mix was still dominated by fossil fuels, despite the increasing tempo of wildfires and floods and the rolling political crises touched off by waves of climate refugees. These were all dire and terrifying, but they were incremental, a drip-drip-drip of bad and worsening news.

Then Putin invaded Ukraine, and the EU turned its back on Russian gas and oil. Overnight, Europe was plunged into an urgent energy crisis, confronted with the very real possibility that millions of Europeans would shortly find themselves shivering in the dark – and not just for a few nights, but for the long-foreseeable future.

At that moment, the slow-moving crisis of the climate became the Putin emergency. The fossil fuel industry – one of the most powerful and corrupting influences in Brussels and around the world – was sidelined. Europe raced to solarize. In three short years, the continent went from decades behind on its climate goals to a decade ahead on them:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/10/11/cyber-rights-now/#better-late-than-never

Putin could have continued to stage minor incursions on Ukraine, none of them crossing any hard geopolitical red lines, and Europe would likely have continued to rationalize its way into continuing its reliance on Russia's hydrocarbon exports. But Putin lacked the patience to continue nibbling away at Ukraine. He tried to gobble it all down at once, and then everything changed.

There is a sense, then, in which Putin's impatient aggression was a feature, not a bug. But for Putin's lack of executive function, Ukraine might still be in danger of being devoured by Russia, but without Europe taking any meaningful steps to come to its aid – and Europe's solar transition would still be decades behind schedule.

Enshittification is one of those drip-drip-drip phenomena, too. Platform bosses have a keen appreciation of how much value we deliver to one another – community, support, mutual aid, care – and they know that so long as we love each other more than we hate the people who own the platforms, we'll likely stay glued to them. Mark Zuckerberg is a master of "twiddling" the knobs on the back-ends of his platforms, announcing big, enshittifying changes, and then backing off on them to a level that's shittier than it used to be, but not as shitty as he'd threatened:

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

Zuck is a colossal asshole, a man who founded his empire in a Harvard dorm room to nonconsensually rate the fuckability of his fellow undergrads, a man who knowingly abetted a genocide, a man who cheats at Settlers of Catan:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/04/23/zuckerstreisand/#zdgaf

But despite all these disqualifying personality defects, Mark Zuckerberg has one virtue that puts him ahead of his social media competitor Elon Musk: Zuck has a rudimentary executive function, and so he is capable of backing down (sometimes, temporarily) from his shittiest ideas.

Contrast that with Musk's management of Twitter. Musk invaded Twitter the same year Putin invaded Ukraine, and embarked upon a string of absolutely unhinged and incontinent enshittificatory gambits that lacked any subtlety or discretion. Musk didn't boil the frog – he took one of his flamethrowers to it.

Millions of people were motivated to hop out of Musk's Twitter pot. But millions more – including me – found ourselves mired there. It wasn't that we liked Musk's Twitter, but we had more reasons to stay than we had to go. For me, the fact that I'd amassed half a million followers since some old pals messaged me to say they'd started a new service called "Twitter" meant that leaving would come at a high price to my activism and my publishing career.

But Musk kept giving me reasons to reassess my decision to stay. Very early into the Musk regime, I asked my sysadmin Ken Snider to investigate setting up a Bluesky server that I could move to. I was already very active on Mastodon, which is designed to be impossible to enshittify the way Musk had done to Twitter, because you can always move from one Fediverse server to another if the management turns shitty:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/12/23/semipermeable-membranes/

But for years, Bluesky's promise of federation remained just that – a promise. Technically, its architecture dangled the promise of multiple, independent Bluesky servers, but practically, there was no way to set this up:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/08/06/fool-me-twice-we-dont-get-fooled-again/

But – to Bluesky's credit – they eventually figured it out, and published the tools and instructions to set up your own Bluesky servers. Ken checked into it, and told me that it was all do-able, but not until a planned hardware upgrade to the Linux box he keeps in a colo cage in Toronto was complete. That upgrade happened a couple months ago, and yesterday, Ken let me know that he'd finished setting up a Bluesky server, just for me. So now I'm on Bluesky, at @doctorow.pluralistic.net:

https://bsky.app/profile/doctorow.pluralistic.net

I am on Bluesky, the service, but I am not a user of Bluesky, the company. That means that I'm able to interact with Bluesky users without clicking through Bluesky's abominable terms of service, through which you permanently surrender your right to sue the company (even if you later quit Bluesky and join another server!):

https://pluralistic.net/2025/08/15/dogs-breakfast/#by-clicking-this-you-agree-on-behalf-of-your-employer-to-release-me-from-all-obligations-and-waivers-arising-from-any-and-all-NON-NEGOTIATED-agreements

Remember: I knew and trusted the Twitter founders and I still got screwed. It's not enough for the people who run a service to be good people – they also have to take steps to insulate themselves (and their successors) from the kind of drip-drip-drip rationalizations that turn a series of small ethical waivers into a cumulative avalanche of pure wickedness:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/12/14/fire-exits/#graceful-failure-modes

Bluesky's "binding arbitration waiver" does the exact opposite: rather than insulating Bluesky's management from their own future selves' impulse to do wrong, a binding arbitration waiver permanently insulates Bluesky from consequences if (when) they yield the temptation to harm their users.

But Bluesky's technical architecture offers a way to eat my cake and have it, too. By setting up a Bluesky (the service) account on a non-Bluesky (the company) server, I can join a social space that has lots of people I like, and lots of interesting technical innovations, like composable moderation, without submitting to the company's unacceptable terms of service:

https://bsky.social/about/blog/4-13-2023-moderation

If Twitter was on the same slow enshittification drip-drip-drip of the pre-Musk years, I might have set up on Bluesky and stayed on Twitter. But thanks to Musk and his frog blowtorch, I'm able to make a break. For years now, I have posted this notice to Twitter nearly every day:

Twitter gets worse every single day. Someday it will degrade beyond the point of usability. The Fediverse is our best hope for an enshittification-resistant alternative. I'm @pluralistic@mamot.fr.

Today, I am posting a modified version, which adds:

If you'd like to follow me on Bluesky, I'm @doctorow.pluralistic.net. This is the last thread I will post to Twitter.

Crises precipitate change. All things being equal, the world would be a better place without Vladimir Putin or Elon Musk or Donald Trump in it. But these incontinent, impatient, terrible men do have a use: they transform slow-moving crises that are too gradual to galvanize action into emergencies that can't be ignored. Putin pushed the EU to break with fossil fuels. Musk pushed millions into federated social media. Trump is ushering in a post-American internet:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/01/01/39c3/#the-new-coalition

If you're reading this on Twitter, this is the long-promised notice that I'm done here. See you on the Fediverse, see you on Bluesky – see you in a world of enshittification-resistant social media.

It's been fun, until it wasn't.

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 Waxy threatened with a lawsuit by Bill Cosby over “House of Cosbys” vids https://waxy.org/2006/03/litigation_cosb/

#15yrsago Proposed TX law would criminalize TSA screening procedures https://blog.tenthamendmentcenter.com/2011/03/texas-legislation-proposes-felony-charges-for-tsa-agents/

#15yrsago Rodney King: 20 years of citizen photojournalism https://mediactive.com/2011/03/02/rodney-king-and-the-rise-of-the-citizen-photojournalist/

#15yrsago Mobile “bandwidth hogs” are just ahead of the curve https://tech.slashdot.org/story/11/03/02/2027209/High-Bandwidth-Users-Are-Just-Early-Adopters

#15yrsago Peter Watts blogs from near-death experience with flesh-eating bacteria https://www.rifters.com/crawl/?category_name=flesh-eating-fest-11

#15yrsago How a HarperCollins library book looks after 26 checkouts (pretty good!) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Je90XRRrruM

#15yrsago Banksy bails out Russian graffiti artists https://memex.craphound.com/2011/03/04/banksy-bails-out-russian-graffiti-artists/

#15yrsago TSA wants hand-luggage fee to pay for extra screening due to checked luggage fees https://web.archive.org/web/20110308142316/https://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/U/US_TSA_BAGGAGE_FEES?SITE=AP&SECTION=HOME&TEMPLATE=DEFAULT&CTIME=2011-03-03-16-50-03

#15yrsago US house prices fall to 1890s levels (where they usually are) https://www.csmonitor.com/Business/Paper-Economy/2011/0303/Home-prices-falling-to-level-of-1890s

#10yrsago Whuffie would be a terrible currency https://locusmag.com/feature/cory-doctorow-wealth-inequality-is-even-worse-in-reputation-economies/

#10yrsago Ditch your overpriced Sodastream canisters in favor of refillable CO2 tanks https://www.wired.com/2016/03/sodamod/

#10yrsago Why the First Amendment means that the FBI can’t force Apple to write and sign code https://www.eff.org/files/2016/03/03/16cm10sp_eff_apple_v_fbi_amicus_court_stamped.pdf

#10yrsago Apple vs FBI: The privacy disaster is inevitable, but we can prevent the catastrophe https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/mar/04/privacy-apple-fbi-encryption-surveillance

#10yrsago The 2010 election was the most important one in American history https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fw41BDhI_K8

#10yrsago As Apple fights the FBI tooth and nail, Amazon drops Kindle encryption https://web.archive.org/web/20160304055204/https://motherboard.vice.com/read/amazon-removes-device-encryption-fire-os-kindle-phones-and-tablets

#10yrsago Understanding American authoritarianism https://web.archive.org/web/20160301224922/https://www.vox.com/2016/3/1/11127424/trump-authoritarianism

#10yrsago Proposal: replace Algebra II and Calculus with “Statistics for Citizenship” https://web.archive.org/web/20190310081625/https://slate.com/human-interest/2016/03/algebra-ii-has-to-go.html

#10yrsago Panorama: the largest photo ever made of NYC https://360gigapixels.com/nyc-skyline-photo-panorama/

#1yrago Ideas Lying Around https://pluralistic.net/2025/03/03/friedmanite/#oil-crisis-two-point-oh

#1yrago There Were Always Enshittifiers https://pluralistic.net/2025/03/04/object-permanence/#picks-and-shovels

Upcoming appearances (permalink)

A photo of me onstage, giving a speech, pounding the podium.


A screenshot of me at my desk, doing a livecast.

Recent appearances (permalink)


A grid of my books with Will Stahle covers..

Latest books (permalink)


A cardboard book box with the Macmillan logo.

Upcoming books (permalink)

  • "The Reverse-Centaur's Guide to AI," a short book about being a better AI critic, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, June 2026

  • "Enshittification, Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It" (the graphic novel), Firstsecond, 2026

  • "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, 2027

  • "The Memex Method," Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2027


Colophon (permalink)

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 (1066 words today, 43341 total)

  • "The Reverse Centaur's Guide to AI," a short book for Farrar, Straus and Giroux about being an effective AI critic. LEGAL REVIEW AND COPYEDIT COMPLETE.

  • "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

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