Getting ready for a post-Trump web: You’d higher hope it is also a post-American web.
Hey have a look at this: Delights to delectate.
Object permanence: Barnum and Bailey v journalism; Wired’s Wikipedia article is a wiki; Singapore’s nationwide wifi; Twitter arguments.
Upcoming appearances: Dąbrowa Górnicza, Warsaw, Brighton, London, Budapest, Edmonton, South Bend, Hudson, Calgary, Winnipeg, Vancouver, Victoria, Ottawa.
Latest appearances: The place I have been.
Newest books: You retain readin’ em, I will preserve writin’ ’em.
Upcoming books: Like I mentioned, I will preserve writin’ ’em.
Colophon: All the remaining.
What if post-Trump America is even worse?
I do know, it is tempting to consider Trump as a trigger, somewhat than an impact – as an aberration who dragged America into fascism. Trump is phenomenal, however the factor that makes him distinctive is not his corruption, recklessness or cruelty. What makes Trump distinctive is his means to persuade, intimidate and flatter America’s most corrupt, reckless and merciless individuals right into a coalition.
These individuals hate one another. Nick Fuentes drifts off to sleep each night time furiously fantasizing about turning Stephen Miller right into a lampshade. Laura Loomer simply acquired ICE to intervene in a Twitter feud by having a man she dislikes violently arrested, shackled at wrist and ankle, perp-walked, after which shuffled from location to location in order that he could not meet together with his lawyer earlier than being deported:
https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2026/08/milo-yiannopoulos-deportation-trump-maga-laura-loomer-benny-johnson-raheem-kassmm/
They steal like loopy, get one another locked up, and gorge themselves on mind-altering dietary supplements and peptides they purchase from random podcast chuds. They’re fantastically paranoid, marinated in conspiracy theories, and perennially excessive on their very own provide: all that bullshit about “nice substitute,” “China is making America hate information facilities” and “antifa is a terrorist group”? A whole lot of them genuinely imagine it. It is not simply ghost tales they made as much as scare cognitively compromised tube-feeding Fox Information addicted rubes. Trumpland is stuffed with precise, functioning adults in positions of actual energy who periodically go into the toilet, flip off the lights, maintain a flashlight below their chins and scare themselves foolish by saying “Aaaaaaaaaantiiii-faaaaaaaaaa” into the mirror.
Donald Trump didn’t conjure these individuals out of skinny air. They have been lurking in America since its earliest days. They worship authoritarian criminals:
https://abc30.com/put up/roger-stones-tattoo-of-nixon-goes-viral/5107047
January 6 wasn’t the primary presidency they tried to steal, it is simply the primary one they acquired punished for:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brooks_Brothers_riot
They commit brazen crimes in workplace that might land them in jail for the remainder of their lives, and subsequently cannot afford to lose energy, ever:
https://www.propublica.org/collection/supreme-court-scotus
Trump did not invent these creeps, he simply emboldened them. If Reaganomics was capitalism with the gloves off, then Trumpismo is Reaganism with the masks off:
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/aug/16/reaganland-review-rick-perlstein-jimmy-carter-ronald-reagan
So what occurs when Trump strokes out whereas watching Child Rock wrestle a Hulk Hogan impersonator in a televised barbed-wire cage match on the White Home garden that one in all Trump’s cronies has unique pay-per-view rights to? I imply, it is potential that the Democratic management will step up and demand on some type of common order within the succession to Vance, however come on. These are the tiny “Down with this type of factor” ping-pong paddle individuals:
Extra probably is that Vance – a weak, unimportant charisma-vacuum who’s loathed by all of Trump’s factions – will find yourself presiding over a much more chaotic interval in American governance than something that occurred below Trump. That would imply ICE leaders ordering mass graves dug within the facilities of America’s largest cities, drunken generals invading random international locations, podcasters declaring “The Purge” with brackets sponsored by Kalshi.
This is not the primary time in residing reminiscence that this has occurred. In 1991 the Soviet Union collapsed, just about in a single day, and the delicate threads that sure its feuding, corrupt regional bosses all snapped, abandoning nuclear-tipped mafia states. This was a chaotic and horrifying time for the individuals whose governments had merely winked out of existence – however it was additionally terrifying for the remainder of the world, who scrambled to safe these nukes earlier than they might find yourself within the fingers of “non-state actors”:
https://www.hks.harvard.edu/publications/what-happened-soviet-superpowers-nuclear-arsenal-clues-nuclear-security-summit
The Soviet Union had some deeply dysfunctional management politics to make certain, however at the least the individuals concerned had been beholden to varied energy blocs who had an curiosity in protecting issues going. Because the geopolitics wonks say, “they had been taking part in an iterated recreation,” the place some losses needed to be tolerated in order that the losers may attempt to win the following time round.
However there are many individuals who weren’t (and are not) taking part in iterated video games – people who find themselves much more unhinged, extra reckless, extra short-termist than the maniacs who stuffed the world with nuclear weapons. These individuals do not essentially care if civilization and even the human race persists if they can not get their method. The considered them working round with these “weapons of mass destruction” ratcheted up the half-century of stark nuclear terror that had preceded the USSR’s collapse to new heights.
Which brings me to the post-Trump web. Trump is not the primary president to determine that the web may very well be weaponized for geopolitical ends. Because the Snowden disclosures confirmed, there was a longstanding bipartisan consensus that the web is a good software for American surveillance, carried out in opposition to pal and foe alike.
However Trump is the primary president to brazenly, immediately recruit American tech corporations to easily brick international officers who displease him, beginning with the Chief Prosecutor of the Worldwide Felony Courtroom, who misplaced his Workplace 365 and Outlook accounts in retaliation for swearing out a genocide warrant for Netanyahu:
https://www.justiceinfo.web/en/156691-how-sanctions-can-weaponize-us-tech-against-the-icc.html
After which Microsoft obliged Trump once more, attacking the Brazilian choose who sentenced Jair Bolsonaro to jail over his unsuccessful coup.
America’s tech giants have totally, irrevocably fused with Trump. They donated to his marketing campaign. Their CEOs every paid $1m out of their very own pockets to sit down behind him on the inauguration dais. Google offers location information for Trump’s racist pogroms. Microsoft offers the executive instruments to hold them out. Oracle offers the databases. Apple blocks apps that warn its clients once they’re about to be snatched:
https://pluralistic.web/2025/10/06/rogue-capitalism/#orphaned-syrian-refugees-need-not-apply
In alternate, Trump acquired Canada and the UK to ditch their plans to levy a 3% tax on American tech giants; he acquired the EU to intestine its privateness legal guidelines; he sanctioned EU officers who tried to control social media; and he is advised the tech corporations to undergo EU officers’ personal messages, in search of anti-Huge Tech partisans whom he’ll ban from ever getting into the USA:
https://judiciary.home.gov/media/in-the-news/us-committee-demands-big-tech-share-private-comms-eu-officials
Huge Tech has proved that its solely rules aren’t paying taxes, invading your privateness, and never being damaged up by antitrust enforcers:
https://arstechnica.com/devices/2026/09/us-court-rules-google-will-not-have-to-sell-ad-exchange-after-losing-antitrust-case/
Tech corporations will do something for any chief who can assure these outcomes. There isn’t any capitulation too petty and silly for Huge Tech:
https://individuals.com/apple-maps-joins-google-approving-trump-lake-america-change-12074262
America now not has allies or buying and selling companions. America has rivals and enemies. Trump’s coalition needs him to steal Iran, steal Venezuela, steal Cuba, steal Alberta, steal Canada, steal Greenland. They need him to assist Israel steal Palestine and Lebanon. And as Trump considers this program of imperial conquest, he has began to tinker with one of the vital devastating geopolitical weapons the world has ever seen: tech shutdowns.
If Trump needs Greenland, he can simply order Microsoft to change off Workplace 365 for the nation and each ministry and important agency will probably be shuttered immediately, together with many households:
https://pluralistic.web/2026/04/04/digital-subjugation/#greenlands-next
He can order Apple and Google to close off all of Denmark’s telephones. He can order John Deere to close off all their tractors:
https://pluralistic.web/2022/05/08/about-those-kill-switched-ukrainian-tractors/
(One factor we needn’t fear about is Trump ordering OpenAI and Anthropic to change off all of Europe’s chatbots – positive, he may try this, but when he did, nothing essential would break:)
https://pluralistic.web/2026/06/18/their-trillions-our-billions/#eyes-on-the-prize
As weapons of mass destruction go, nukes are fairly silly. The massive ones destroy the territory you are making an attempt to beat and go away behind an uninhabitable radioactive wasteland. They ship clouds of nuclear fallout swirling across the globe, doubtlessly killing you or your allies. 80 years into the Nuclear Age, one of the best anybody’s give you is a neutron bomb, which solely kinda renders territory uninhabitable whereas nonetheless killing everybody with huge radiation blasts.
In comparison with nukes, tech shutdowns are wonderful. Due to Huge Tech, America – and solely America – can brick virtually any nation on earth, shutting down its administration, agriculture and business with out firing a single shot. The one factor that prevented this from taking place was an American elite bloc that was taking part in an iterated recreation and noticed extra profit from sharing in Huge Tech income as they looted and spied on the world, versus grabbing territory whereas scaring the world into breaking all land-speed information to ditch American tech and pursue significant digital sovereignty.
Trump’s chuds and freaks aren’t sure by these constraints. They’re completely pleased to do Gunboat Diplomacy 2.0: Cloud Diplomacy, the place every little thing out of your smartphones to your payroll information will be seized on the click on of a mouse, and your nation had higher fall in line. And Trump is a sick, frail outdated man, who shouldn’t be lengthy for this world. When he goes, all bets are off: America will probably be on the mercy of warring factions who will deploy the coercion and bribery that turned Huge Tech into Trump’s geopolitical weapon as a way to obtain their very own functions – which could nicely be even stupider, crueler and extra unhinged than Trump’s.
There’s just one method out of this mess: the speedy disassembly of the American web and the speedy creation of a post-American web, one constructed on open, auditable, sovereign digital public items, internationally constructed and maintained:
https://pluralistic.web/2026/01/01/39c3/#the-new-coalition
In its personal method, the creation of this post-American web is as pressing and as international as was the creation of the covid vaccines. However at any time when I converse to highly effective individuals about this, they ask the identical query: “What if this makes Trump mad?”
This represents a grave failure to take this disaster critically. Trump would not must be “mad” to assault your nation. Trump attacked Canada over its wildfires, accusing Canada of polluting America’s air:
https://www.cbc.ca/information/politics/us-complaints-trump-widlfire-smoke-9.7274466
However even when Trump by no means will get mad at you, that is no assure of security. Trump shouldn’t be lengthy for this world, and his loss of life or incapacity isn’t any assure of the restoration of a “regular” America. And even when America finds its strategy to “regular” after Trump, that is no assure that it’ll keep regular. The armed, organized maniacs who’ve seized energy in America and who’re cheering him on as he rampages everywhere in the world, kidnapping leaders and dropping bombs on schoolchildren aren’t going to dig a gap, crawl inside it, and pull the dust down on high of themselves.
However to illustrate that we discover ourselves in one of the best of worlds, the place American fascism is comprehensively defeated and the nation embarks on a years-long program of denazification:
https://pluralistic.web/2026/02/10/miller-in-the-dock/#denazification
Even in that incredible future, the world ought to nonetheless race to construct a post-American web. The world ought to have constructed that web after the Snowden revelations. That ghastly failure created the Trumpian web. If the post-Trump web is not a post-American web, then it will solely be a matter of time till the following disaster comes alongside, and the approaching years will give Huge Tech much more probabilities to worm its tendrils into the world’s governments, corporations and households, making that disaster be even tougher to outlive. One of the best time to behave was 13 years in the past, after Snowden. The second finest time is now.
#25yrsago Barnum & Bailey employed an ex-CIA spook to destroy a vital journalist https://internet.archive.org/internet/20010913192931/http://www.salon.com/information/function/2001/08/30/circus/print.html
#20yrsago Wired article about Wikipedia is on a editable wiki https://internet.archive.org/internet/20060901030941/http://www.socialtext.web/wired/index.cgi
#20yrsago Singapore could have nationwide WiFi by 2007 https://internet.archive.org/internet/20060901191656/http://information.com.com/2100-1039_3-6110189.html
#5yrsago Twitter Arguments https://pluralistic.web/2021/08/29/twitter-arguments/
Dąbrowa Górnicza, Kongres Regeneracja! to interdyscyplinarna, Sep 5https://regeneracja.plse.org.pl/
Warsaw: Romana i Jana Podoskich, Sep 6https://wydarzenia.phub.pl/occasions/0ee0e198-f843-423a-890f-c84ff50a46c0
Brighton: The Reverse Centaur’s Information to Life After AI with Carole Cadwalladr (Brighton Dome), Sep 8https://brightondome.org/whats-on/LSC-cory-doctorow-the-reverse-centaurs-guide-to-life-after-ai/
London: The Reverse Centaur’s Information to Life After AI with Riley Quinn (Foyle’s Picadilly), Sep 9https://www.foyles.co.uk/occasions/enshittification-cory-doctorow-riley-quinn
Budapest: Mind Bar, Sep 17https://brainbar.com/munkatars/cory-doctorow
Edmonton: Elbows Up (Edmonton Public Library), Sep 28https://www.epl.ca/blogs/put up/elbows-up-with-cory-doctorow/
South Bend: An Night With Cory Doctorow (Notre Dame), Oct 6https://franco.nd.edu/occasions/2026/10/06/an-evening-with-cory-doctorow/
Hudson, OH: Hudson Library, Oct 7https://engagedpatrons.org/EventsExtended.cfm?SiteID=3850&EventID=596952&PK=
Calgary: Wordfest, Oct 8https://wordfest.com/2026/present/wordfest-presents-cory-doctorow-2026/
Winnipeg: McNally Robinson, Oct 9https://www.mcnallyrobinson.com/event-18991/An-Night-with-Cory-Doctorow
Vancouver: Learn, Resist, Restore, Rejoice (Vancouver Writers Competition), Oct 19https://writersfest.bc.ca/festival-event-2026/01
Victoria: Munro’s Books, Oct 20https://www.munrobooks.com/occasions/6113620261020
Vancouver: Life After AI (Vancouver Writers Competition), Oct 22https://writersfest.bc.ca/festival-event-2026/46
Ottawa: Life After AI (Ottawa Writers Competition), Oct 24https://writersfestival.org/occasion/life-after-ai
Vancouver: BC Coverage Options Gala, Nov 12https://bcpolicy.ca/gala/
“The Reverse-Centaur’s Information to AI,” a brief ebook about being a greater AI critic, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, June 2026https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374621568/thereversecentaursguidetolifeafterai/
“Canny Valley”: A restricted version assortment of the collages I create for Pluralistic, self-published, September 2025 https://pluralistic.web/2025/09/04/illustrious/#chairman-bruce
“Enshittification: Why The whole lot Out of the blue Bought Worse and What to Do About It,” Farrar, Straus, Giroux, October 7 2025https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374619329/enshittification/
“Picks and Shovels”: a sequel to “Purple Group Blues,” in regards to the heroic period of the PC, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), February 2025 (https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250865908/picksandshovels).
“The Bezzle”: a sequel to “Purple Group Blues,” about prison-tech and different grifts, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), February 2024 (thebezzle.org).
“The Misplaced Trigger:” a solarpunk novel of hope within the local weather emergency, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), November 2023 (http://lost-cause.org).
“The Web Con”: A nonfiction ebook about interoperability and Huge Tech (Verso) September 2023 (http://seizethemeansofcomputation.org). Signed copies at Guide Soup (https://www.booksoup.com/ebook/9781804291245).
“Purple Group Blues”: “A grabby, compulsive thriller that can go away you realizing extra about how the world works than you probably did earlier than.” Tor Books http://redteamblues.com.
“Chokepoint Capitalism: The way to Beat Huge Tech, Tame Huge Content material, and Get Artists Paid, with Rebecca Giblin”, on how you can unrig the markets for artistic labor, Beacon Press/Scribe 2022 https://chokepointcapitalism.com
“The Submit-American Web,” a geopolitical sequel of types to Enshittification, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2027
“Unauthorized Bread”: a middle-grades graphic novel tailored from my novella about refugees, toasters and DRM, FirstSecond, April 20, 2027
“Enshittification, Why The whole lot Out of the blue Bought Worse and What to Do About It” (the graphic novel), Firstsecond, 2027
“The Memex Technique,” Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2027
In the present day’s high sources:
At present writing:
“As soon as Is Enemy Motion,” a science fiction novel in regards to the origins of recent technofascism. In the present day’s phrases: 574 (7730 complete).
“The Submit-American Web,” a sequel to “Enshittification,” in regards to the higher world the remainder of us get to have now that Trump has torched America. Fourth draft accomplished. Submitted to editor.
A Little Brother quick story about DIY insulin PLANNING
This work – excluding any serialized fiction – is licensed below a Inventive Commons Attribution 4.0 license. Which means you should use it any method you want, together with commercially, supplied that you simply attribute it to me, Cory Doctorow, and embody a hyperlink to pluralistic.web.
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
Quotations and pictures aren’t included on this license; they’re included both below a limitation or exception to copyright, or on the premise of a separate license. Please train warning.
Weblog (no advertisements, monitoring, or data-collection):
Pluralistic.web
E-newsletter (no advertisements, monitoring, or data-collection):
https://pluralistic.web/plura-list
Mastodon (no advertisements, monitoring, or data-collection):
https://mamot.fr/@pluralistic
Bluesky (no advertisements, potential monitoring and data-collection):
https://bsky.app/profile/doctorow.pluralistic.web
Medium (no advertisements, paywalled):
https://doctorow.medium.com/
Tumblr (mass-scale, unrestricted, third-party surveillance and promoting):
https://mostlysignssomeportents.tumblr.com/tagged/pluralistic
“When life offers you SARS, you make sarsaparilla” -Joey “Accordion Man” DeVilla
READ CAREFULLY: By studying this, you agree, on behalf of your employer, to launch 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 insurance policies (“BOGUS AGREEMENTS”) that I’ve entered into together with your employer, its companions, licensors, brokers and assigns, in perpetuity, with out prejudice to my ongoing rights and privileges. You additional characterize that you’ve got the authority to launch me from any BOGUS AGREEMENTS on behalf of your employer.
ISSN: 3066-764X
