Pluralistic: Deplatform yourself (23 Feb 2026)

pluralist
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Originally published at: Pluralistic: Deplatform yourself (23 Feb 2026) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow



Today's links

  • Deplatform yourself: Copyright infringement is your least entertainment dollar.
  • Hey look at this: Delights to delectate.
  • Object permanence: "Lawer" threatens suit; Landmark metaphotos; 3DP v (c); Forced arbitration; Imperial Scott Walker; Keysigning ritual; Polyfingered robot dictaphone; DNS bug; Register of copyright damns term extension; How Anonymous decides; Christchurch quake people-finder; Minor HP disenshittification; US v developing world at WIPO; TfL v anagram tube-map; Disneyland waiting; Internet of Garbage.
  • 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.


The Muse Thalia, pictured brandishing a comedy mask and putting a laurel wreath on a bust of a bearded figure. It has been altered. The bust has an extra set of eyes and ears. Thalia has two extra sets of arms, one ending in lion's paws, the other in lobster's claws. She has one cyclopean eye. Her comedy mask is now a tragedy mask. The image has been tinted blue.

Deplatform yourself (permalink)

The first time I met William Gibson – to interview him for the Globe and Mail on the release of 1999's All Tomorrow's Parties – there was one question I knew I wanted to ask him: "What happens to the counterculture in the era of instantaneous commodification?"

https://craphound.com/nonfic/transcript.html

Gibson's answer stuck with me for decades:

What we're doing pop culturally is like burning the rain forest. The biodiversity of pop culture is really, really in danger. I didn't see it coming until a few years ago, but looking back it's very apparent.

I watched a sort of primitive form of the recommodification machine around my friends and myself in the sixties, and it took about two years for this clumsy mechanism to get and try to sell us The Monkees.

In 1977, it took about eight months for a slightly faster more refined mechanism to put punk in the window of Holt Renfrew. It's gotten faster ever since. The scene in Seattle that Nirvana came from: as soon as it had a label, it was on the runways of Paris.

There's no grace period, so that's a way in which I see us losing the interstitial.

This may seem like an odd thing to think about, but nearly all the art and culture that means something to me started as something that was transgressive and weird, and even if it was eventually metabolized by the mainstream, that was only after it had a chance to ferment and mutate in a tide-pool of Bohemian weirdness.

All this century, I've asked friends and weirdos about what can resist this commodification and co-option. Scott Westerfeld – author of Uglies – had a very on-brand answer: he told me that he thought that teenagers might deliberately start cultivating acne as a badge of rebellion. That hasn't happened yet, but if it does, it will be born co-opted, because there's already a luxury brand called "Acne":

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acne_Studios

One anti-commodification measure that's worked reasonably well over the years is to be ugly. Punk zines and early Myspace pages embraced an aesthetic that the existing cohort of trained designers available to work for would-be co-opters would rather break their fingers than imitate. Eventually, some punk zinesters and Myspacers became freelance designers and offered the aesthetic for sale, but after the "grace period" that Gibson was worried about in 1999. By contrast, after a brief period in which early AI image-gen snuck psychedelic fish-dogs into every output, AI became so mid and inoffensive that even when it was used to make transgressive images (Trump spraying protesters with liquid shit from an airplane), it looked incredibly, terminally normal:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/07/20/ransom-note-force-field/#antilibraries

There's more than one way to be ugly, of course. The "edgelords" that defined forums like SomethingAwful and /b/ made heavy use of slurs, rape "jokes" and other beyond-the-pale rhetoric. Whether this reflected sincerely felt beliefs or a mere desire to shock (or both), it had the effect of making these subcultures very difficult to commodify. If you and your friends barely utter a single sentence that can be quoted in a mainstream news forum or office email, it's going to be very hard to co-opt you. For a long time, edgelords festered in the "dark corners" of the internet. But that's changed. The Holocaust denier Nick Fuentes – who thinks that "every woman and girl" should be "sent to a gulag" – has had dinner at the White House:

https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/nick-fuentes-women-gulag/

Last week, Ryan Broderick wrote a short, striking article for his must-read Garbage Day newsletter about the way that the far right have become "cool" within Gen Z by being so outre that they were evicted from the major platforms (before Trump II, that is):

https://www.garbageday.email/p/the-only-taboo-left-is-copyright-infringement

As Broderick writes, "cool" isn't just "trends" ("hyperpop, brainrot, crowdwork comedy, Instagram collages, their weird post-COVID pop punk exploration"). For Broderick, cool things used to become trends after they were "begrudgingly canonized" by the likes of Time Magazine. But with Hollywood replaced by Youtube, magazines replaced by Tiktok, and radio replaced by Spotify, that looks very different today. Today's version of artist management teams is "hype houses." All forms of cultural activity have collapsed into a single, overriding imperative: "getting attention."

Which brings Broderick to his main question:

If everything is just attention now, and attention is completely commodified by algorithmic tech platforms, how can you push back against that?

His answer: "You have to essentially pre-deplatform yourself."

For young people, "the only things that have the level of scarcity and danger required to be seen as cool" are "whatever is unacceptable on those platforms." In other words, anything (and maybe only things) that're blocked or banned are a candidate to be cool. Cool people walk away from the places where you'd expect to find them and hang out in places that are culturally viewed as less important.

Broderick argues that this is the source of far-right influencers' influence: the fact that manosphere weirdos and trolls are hanging out in "shadowy corners" like Kick makes them feel authentic and outside of the norm and thus intrinsically interesting. And (Broderick continues) the fact that these manosphere types are now totally reliant on Discord clip-farmers has made them feel more mainstream and thus potentially less interesting.

This is where it gets cool. Broderick argues that there's nothing intrinsically reactionary about this kind of self-deplatforming is a parallel evolution taking place in progressive media. When Stephen Colbert's Trump-colonized network bans him from airing an interview with a Democratic politician, he puts it on Youtube instead, where it gets far more attention than it would have if the network had just left him alone.

But by and large it's not Democratic politicians who are too dangerous for the platforms – it's copyright infringement. The law makes it very easy to get things removed via unproven accusations of copyright infringement, and the platforms make it even easier:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/06/27/nuke-first/#ask-questions-never

Copyright is a doctrine that, by design, has very fuzzy edges where things may or may not be prohibited. But in the digital world, those edges are often erased, even as the zone of lawful activity they enclose contracts. This means that media that can be accused of infringing copyright is the most unwelcome content on platforms.

Broderick's theory predicts that the "coolest" media – the stuff that makes taste – is the stuff that fits in this zone of copyright infringement. He cites some compelling case studies, like Vera Drew's "The People's Joker," an amazing, unauthorized Batman mashup/trans allegory. Warner shut down multiple screenings of The People's Joker (including at TIFF), and this increased the coolness and prominence of the movie, driving people to underground screenings:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_People%27s_Joker

A more contemporary version is Nirvanna The Band The Show The Movie, which Broderick describes as "a copyright rats nest" based on a web series that is "completely illegal to watch on streaming platforms":

https://pagesix.com/2026/02/14/hollywood/how-nirvanna-the-band-the-show-the-movie-skirted-copyright-law/

Despite this/because of this, NTBTSTM just had "the biggest opening ever for a live-action Canadian film":

https://x.com/hertzbarry/status/2023521583923663342

Broderick's conclusion is that "as platforms police speech less and less, edgelords lose their sheen," but that this material, at or beyond the edge of copyright, unwelcome on platforms, is the future face of cool.

And here's where Broderick really got me: "the most dangerous thing for platforms is not racist garbage. It’s unmonetizeable content."

I make a lot of "unmonetizable content," starting with this blog, which has no metrics, no analytics, and (of course) no ads. I refuse to add social media cards, and hide obscure jokes in incredibly long URLs that get truncated on social media. I labor for hours over the weird illustrations that go at the top of the posts, which I release (along with the text they accompany) under Creative Commons licenses that let pretty much anyone do pretty much anything with them, without asking me, telling me, or paying me (it's always very funny when someone accuses me of publishing this work as clickbait – clickbait for what? To increase bandwidth consumption at my server?).

I do this to "woo the muse of the odd," a phrase I lifted from Bruce Sterling's 1991 keynote for the Game Developers' Conference, a talk that struck me so hard that I dropped out of university to make weird multimedia shortly after reading it:

https://lib.ru/STERLINGB/story.txt

It's a great talk, but the best parts are where Sterling grapples with this question of coolness, counterculture, and commodification:

In the immortal words of Lafcadio Hearn, a geek of incredible obscurity whose work is still in print after a hundred years, "woo the muse of the odd." A good science fiction story is not a "good story" with a polite whiff of rocket fuel in it. A good science fiction story is something that knows it is science fiction and plunges through that and comes roaring out of the other side. Computer entertainment should not be more like movies, it shouldn't be more like books, it should be more like computer entertainment, SO MUCH MORE LIKE COMPUTER ENTERTAINMENT THAT IT RIPS THROUGH THE LIMITS AND IS SIMPLY IMPOSSIBLE TO IGNORE!

I don't think you can last by meeting the contemporary public taste, the taste from the last quarterly report. I don't think you can last by following demographics and carefully meeting expectations. I don't know many works of art that last that are condescending. I don't know many works of art that last that are deliberately stupid… Get weird. Get way weird. Get dangerously weird. Get sophisticatedly, thoroughly weird and don't do it halfway, put every ounce of horsepower you have behind it.

It's been more than 30 years since I read that essay, more than a quarter century since I asked William Gibson whether Madison Avenue "finds its own use for things." Over the ensuing decades, media has become ever-better at "following demographics and carefully meeting expectations," thanks to vast troves of behavioral data correlated with media analytics. That process has only accelerated the "recommodification machine" that Gibson worried about in 1999, but as Broderick points out, there's one thing that is even harder to co-op than acne – "unmonetizable content," the Kryptonite of the platforms.

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 Mysterious “lawer” threatens to sue me over Bad Samaritan story https://memex.craphound.com/2006/02/20/mysterious-lawer-threatens-to-sue-over-bad-samaritan-story/

#20yrsago Flickr set documents locations in Neal Stephenson trilogy https://www.flickr.com/photos/notlikecalvin/sets/72057594068198516/

#20yrsago How the US is boning the developing world at WIPO https://web.archive.org/web/20060501000000*/https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/archives/004434.php

#20yrsago Why kids are on MySpace https://www.danah.org/papers/AAAS2006.html

#20yrsago Transport for London censors anagram Tube map https://web.archive.org/web/20060222021226/https://www.unfortu.net/anagrammap/

#20yrsago More clues to identity of author of EFF-sliming article in The Reg https://memex.craphound.com/2006/02/22/more-clues-to-identity-of-author-of-eff-sliming-article-in-the-reg/

#20yrsago US copyright head: world “totally rejects” webcasting restrictions https://memex.craphound.com/2006/02/21/us-copyright-head-world-totally-rejects-webcasting-restrictions/

#20yrsago Copyright office head denounces “big mistake” of extending copyright https://web.archive.org/web/20060329162217/https://www.ibiblio.org/yugen/video/too_long.mp4

#20yrsago Artists paint Detroit’s derelict buildings Tiggeriffic Orange https://web.archive.org/web/20060411143941/http://www.thedetroiter.com/nov05/disneydemolition.php

#20yrsago Canadian Uni bans WiFi because its safety can’t be proved https://web.archive.org/web/20060307004018/http://www.itbusiness.ca/it/client/en/home/News.asp?id=38093&PageMem=1

#15yrsago Overcome information overload by trusting redundancy https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2011/feb/22/information-overload-probabilistic

#15yrsago Embattled PS3 hacker raises big bank to fight Sony https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2011/02/george-hotz-secures-enough-donations-to-fight-sony-rap-battle-begins/

#15yrsago How Anonymous decides: inside the lulz-sausage factory https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2011/02/empty-suit-the-chaotic-way-that-anonymous-makes-decisions/

#15yrsago America’s Chief Apocalypse Officer, a Fed job ad from 1956 https://web.archive.org/web/20110210020542/http://longstreet.typepad.com/thesciencebookstore/2011/02/nuclear-weapons-post-attack-job-description-1956.html

#15yrsago What happens when you stick your head in a particle accelerator https://www.todayifoundout.com/index.php/2010/03/what-happens-when-you-stick-your-head-into-a-particle-accelerator/

#15yrsago Saif Gadaffhi, plagiarist https://web.archive.org/web/20110225114903/https://saifalislamgaddafithesis.wikia.com/wiki/Main_Page

#15yrsago Google App to help locate people in Christchurch quake https://web.archive.org/web/20110222091007/http://christchurch-2011.person-finder.appspot.com/

#15yrsago Photos of kids waiting at Disneyland https://web.archive.org/web/20110301045827/https://arinfishkin.com/fishkin_delayed_gratification.html

#15yrsago Westboro Baptist Church attempts to lure Anonymous into attacking it? https://www.siliconrepublic.com/life/were-not-attacking-westboro-baptist-church-anonymous

#15yrsago Egyptian orders a pizza for the Wisconsin demonstrators https://www.politico.com/story/2011/02/from-cairo-to-madison-some-pizza-049888#ixzz1EXkqdxcu

#15yrsago Metaphotos of landmarks made from hundreds of superimposed tourist snaps https://web.archive.org/web/20110219193205/http://www.mymodernmet.com/profiles/blogs/hundreds-of-tourist-photos

#15yrsago Armed Services Edition books: abridgements and pocket-editions for doughboys https://www.artofmanliness.com/character/military/literature-on-the-frontlines-the-history-of-armed-services-edition-books/?doing_wp_cron=1771432700.1463210582733154296875

#15yrsago 3D printing’s first copyright complaint goes away, but things are just getting started https://memex.craphound.com/2011/02/20/3d-printings-first-copyright-complaint-goes-away-but-things-are-just-getting-started/

#15yrsago Imperial Scott Walker, the worker-hating AT-AT Destroyer https://web.archive.org/web/20110224024111/https://simulacrumb.tumblr.com/#3388763986

#10yrsago Forced arbitration clauses are a form of wealth transfer to the rich https://web.archive.org/web/20160322142114/https://www.acslaw.org/sites/default/files/Arbitration_as_Wealth_Transfer_1.pdf

#10yrsago Eleven years and counting: EFF scores a major victory in its NSA mass surveillance suit https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2016/02/big-victory-judge-pushes-jewel-v-nsa-forward

#10yrsago What a serious keysigning ceremony looks like https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b9j-sfP9GUU

#10yrsago Pseudoscientific terror ended fluoridation in Calgary, now kids’ teeth are rotting https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/cdoe.12215

#10yrsago Manual typewriter + servos = polyfingered robot dictaphone https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rNSCL4YOd5E

#10yrsago Sarah Jeong’s Harvard lecture: “The Internet of Garbage” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pUSctMLLNUE

#10yrsago Citing copyright, Army blocks Chelsea Manning from receiving printouts from EFF’s website https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2016/02/military-prison-blocks-chelsea-manning-reading-eff-blog-posts

#10yrsago Improve your laptop stickering technique https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=juRDql6wBIQ

#10yrsago Photo of Bernie Sanders being arrested in 1963 Chicago protest https://web.archive.org/web/20160220024814/https://www.chicagotribune.com/news/local/breaking/ct-bernie-sanders-1963-chicago-arrest-20160219-story.html

#10yrsago Uber uses customer service reps to push anti-union message to drivers https://qz.com/619601/uber-is-using-its-us-customer-service-reps-to-deliver-its-anti-union-message

#10yrsago The latest DNS bug is terrifying, widespread, and reveals deep flaws in Internet security https://web.archive.org/web/20160222231840/http://dankaminsky.com/2016/02/20/skeleton/

#10yrsago 19th century spam came by post, prefigured modern spam in so many ways https://web.archive.org/web/20160915000000*/http://www.ephemerasociety.org/blog/

#10yrsago Republican Congressmen backed by airline money kill research on legroom and passenger safety https://web.archive.org/web/20160221163010/https://theintercept.com/2016/02/21/backed-by-airline-dollars-congress-rejects-effort-to-address-shrinking-legroom/

#5yrsago The Paltrow-Industrial Complex https://pluralistic.net/2021/02/21/paltrow-industrial-complex/#goopy

#5yrsago Facebook vs Australia https://pluralistic.net/2021/02/21/paltrow-industrial-complex/#facecrook

#5yrsago K-shaped recovery vs wealth taxes https://pluralistic.net/2021/02/21/paltrow-industrial-complex/#wealth-tax

#5yrsago What Democrats need to do https://pluralistic.net/2021/02/22/sorcerers-apprentice/#do-something

#5yrsago Tech trustbusting's moment has arrived https://pluralistic.net/2021/02/20/escape-velocity/#trustbusting-time

#1yrago Ad-tech targeting is an existential threat https://pluralistic.net/2025/02/20/privacy-first-second-third/#malvertising

#1yrago We bullied HP into a minor act of disenshittification https://pluralistic.net/2025/02/22/ink-spattered-pitchforks/#racehorse-semen

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 (1035 words today, 351334 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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