Today's links

• Formalities: When it comes to AI, the Copyright Office is restoring copyright to its proper status, as something you have to work to get.
• Hey look at this: Delights to delectate.
• Object permanence: GWB x martial law; Li'l Sparky; Dueling Starbuckses; Microsoft buys Skype (does fuckery); Bieber v SOPA; SOPA is the worst; Snowden x rule of law; "Laserwriter II"; Russia v DST; Class war funnies; Minnesota's miracle; Icelandic women v sexism; Image analogies; Aussie DMCA ratfucked; "Authorised Domain"; Sales tax is regressive; Prince Charles's secret veto; Wells Fargo blackballed workers for refusing to crime; Poe read by Vincent Price and Basil Rathbone; Put it back!; The internet was made for privacy.
• Upcoming appearances: Kilkenny, Courtenay, Vancouver, Folkestone, Oxford, Sheffield, Virtual, Oxford, Montreal.
• 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.

Formalities (permalink)

It's not often that I find myself on the same side as the US Copyright Office. In fact, I think this is the first time in 25 years that I've found myself cheering on the office's official actions as good for art and good for free expression, taking the side of creative workers over our bosses.

The source of our miraculous accord: the US Copyright Office's position on AI. The CO has taken the (entirely correct) position that copyright law exists to incentivize human acts of creative expression, which means that only works of human authorship are eligible for copyright.

This isn't a controversial position within legal circles. But for media executives, this is shocking; absurd, even. This gap between the industrial and the legal understanding of copyright comes from a fundamental difference over the evocatively named legal doctrine of "sweat of the brow."

"Sweat of the brow" is fundamental to a correct legal understanding of copyright. Copyright rewards and protects creativity but it does not protect hard work. You can labor for ten years over a phone book listing the numbers of every person in a town and (as a collection of uncopyrightable facts) it will receive no protection at all. Zero. Zilch. Anyone can copy and sell that phone book:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feist_Publications,_Inc._v._Rural_Telephone_Service_Co.

Copyright law doesn't care if you slaved over that collection of facts, if you missed sleep and your kids' little league games to realize your grand vision. Copyright law doesn't care if you plowed every cent into it, remortgaging your home and cashing in your (already resentful) kids' college funds.

But: if you dash off a haiku in ten seconds while sitting on the toilet, shove it into your pocket and forget about it, and then your (still resentful) kids discover that crumpled haiku after your (highly suspicious) death, your kids will be able to claim a full 70 years' worth of copyright over that forgotten triviality (the term of copyright for works of human authorship is life plus 70 years).

This is the uncontroversial and universally accepted legal understanding of copyright: all the copyright in the world for creative acts, no copyright at all for mere acts of labor. The "sweat of the brow" has nothing to do with a work's eligibility for copyright.

But no media boss believes this. For media bosses, copyright is a pseudo-property† right, designed and operated to protect their bottom line. The point of copyright isn't to incentivize creativity, but rather investment.

† Or not-so-pseudo

There's obviously a relationship between creative acts and acts of investment, but it's possible to create without investment (see: your haiku) and it's possible to invest without creativity (see: your phone book).

And once again, the creativity that copyright protects is human creativity. This is a lesson that David Slater learned the hard way. Slater is a professional wildlife photographer and amateur monkey-trainer who combined his interests by teaching Celebes crested macaque monkeys to take selfies. But when Slater published a monkey's selfie others copied and distributed the image without his permission, on the (entirely legally correct) basis that monkeys are not humans, and that means that works created by monkeys don't get a copyright. This was also the Copyright Office's position, and the position of the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals:

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

This is the basis for the US Copyright Office's repeated decision to refuse to extend copyright to AI-generated works. An algorithm is even less human than a monkey, so if you can't get copyright over a monkey selfie, you definitely can't copyright your chatbot's slop. The US Copyright Office has successfully defended this position in multiple courts, triumphing over plaintiffs who were so persistent that they even got the Supreme Court to weigh in on the issue (the Supremes decided the case didn't warrant their attention):

https://pluralistic.net/2026/03/03/its-a-trap-2/#inheres-at-the-moment-of-fixation

AI slop isn't copyrightable, but there can be copyrightable elements in an AI-generated image. The most obvious element is the prompt. So long as your prompt contains some quantum of creativity (e.g. "Make me a beautiful flower whose loveliness is reminiscent of a newborn baby", but not "make me a beautiful flower"), that prompt is copyrightable. That means you can use copyright to challenge others' rights to present the same prompt to a chatbot. But while the prompt can be copyrighted, the image it gives rise to isn't. So you can spend a month iteratively refining your prompt, consuming all your town's water along with 200,000 gallons of diesel and that prompt will be yours for your life plus 70 years, but the image it generates is in the public domain, and anyone can copy it, sell it or give it away.

There are other ways that copyright can find its way into AI-generated material. You can make creative edits to it: if you output a slop novel and rewrite various sentences (providing those rewrites involve some creativity and not just mechanical corrections or word substitutions), then the edited sentences become copyrighted works, even though all the rest of the text remains uncopyrightable.

You can also get a "thin" copyright through selection. If you get your chatbot to output many images based on your prompt and choose your favorite, your selection can confer a tiny bit of copyright over that creative act of selection, but it will be harder to defend than even the other (attenuated and highly specific) forms of copyright.

Now, perhaps you've spotted an administrative problem lurking in this turn of events. How can someone else know what part of a work is AI-generated (and thus in the public domain) and which parts are human-edited/contributed (and thus copyrighted)? Just as importantly, how can you prove which parts of your work are not AI-generated and thus eligible for copyright protection.

This gets especially gnarly when you're dealing with complex media. In an animation, an AI might do the rigging and movement for a human-created sprite. The sprite is copyrightable, but its movements aren't. That would mean that I could remap your sprite's movements onto a different sprite without infringing your copyright. Or say the sprite and its movements are human created (and thus copyrighted), but the backgrounds are procedurally generated? I could take those backgrounds and put new animations overtop of them.

The simplest, most reliable way to ensure the works you invest in are fully and entirely eligible for copyright is to just use humans for the whole project. Declare a "no-AI policy," and hire human artists to produce the works you hope to sell. Monitor their activity to ensure they're not using AI. Keep good records.

Now, as much as I like the idea that we've arrived at a copyright law that insists that a company can only get exclusive rights to its products by paying human artists to make them from end-to-end, I don't think that's likely to be the way it shakes out, but that doesn't mean that this is a wash for artists.

The reality is that copyright claims are always "fact-intensive inquiries" that are expensive to litigate and difficult to adjudicate. It's completely normal for copyright lawsuits to turn on documentary evidence gleaned from fragmentary records. This is simply intrinsic to copyright, because copyright is a doctrine that requires judges to assess whether things are "creative" and "original" as though these were freestanding categories that everyone could agree upon.

Of course, the rules of copyright can make this harder or easier. One way in which the rules make deciding copyright cases much, much harder is copyright's broad prohibition on "formalities" ("formalities" is how copyright wonks refer to "red tape" or "paperwork"). For nearly all of American history, copyright ran on a key formality: deposit, registration and notice.

To secure a copyright for a new work, an artist (or their employer) had to send a copy of that work to the Library of Congress (deposit), along with paperwork detailing the claim of authorship (who made this, what parts of it did they make) (registration) and they had to display a copyright notice that told you who held the copyright to every work that was registered (notice). Both the filing and the notice required careful attention and precision, and screwing either one up could result in your losing your copyright. It's an open secret among copyright scholars that Walt Disney screwed this up with the first Mickey cartoons, meaning they've been in the public domain since their release:

https://web.archive.org/web/20080725055415/http:/homepages.law.asu.edu/~dkarjala/opposingcopyrightextension/publicdomain/HedenkampFreeMickeyMouseVaSp&E(2003).htm

This system of copyright formalities meant that you could always tell whether a work was copyrighted, you could always find out who claimed the copyright over it, and which parts of the work were claimed under copyright and under what basis. What's more, formalities created the Library of Congress, since the LoC acted as America's "copyright deposit" library, holding deposit copies of every work that had ever been issued a US copyright.

The US system of formalities was descended from the English system, in which the Stationers' Guild used a copyright registry to establish who had the rights to which books. But there were competing copyright systems, notably the "continental" system that was codified through the Berne Convention, a copyright treaty drafted by Victor Hugo (yes, that Victor Hugo).

Among other things, the Berne Convention abolished formalities. Much of the world adopted Berne, but the US held out until 1976. With the 1976 Copyright Act, Congress brought the US into compliance with Berne, abolishing formalities in the USA. As a compromise, the 1976 Act requires US authors to register their copyrights in order to obtain "statutory damages" (up to $150,000 per work). That's a pretty good incentive, but even with that incentive, the vast majority – far in excess of 99.999999999999999999999999999999999999999% – of all copyrighted works are not registered with the Copyright Office. They are born copyrighted from the moment they are "fixed in a tangible medium" until 70 years after their authors die. But without registration, you can't know when that copyright clock started ticking because you have no way to verify who the author of the work is. This not only makes it incredibly difficult to establish the copyright status of nearly every copyrighted work, but it also means that in nearly every case, you can't readily determine who you should approach if you want to pay them for a copyright license.

Abolishing formalities has created a universe of orphan works: everything from napkin doodles to kindergartners' finger paintings to message board posts. Within that universe is a kind of gaseous cloud that, if condensed, would come out to an infinitesimal planetoid, representing the entirety of commercial works whose authors give a damn about their copyright status. It's a bad, bad system.

This system doesn't do away with the need to keep careful records: like I said, copyright disputes usually require the close examination of documentary evidence. What formality abolition accomplished was the destruction of the regular system of record-keeping: rather than having a standard, universally agreed-upon way to determine the status and resolve disputes about a copyrighted work, now we have the scattershot, incoherent system that makes copyright disputes far more likely (because no one knows who to approach for copyright licenses) and far more difficult to resolve (because there's no registry of copyrighted works).

Which brings me back to the question of AI and copyright. If a firm uses some AI in its work, it's going to need to document that very carefully. Firms that don't keep very close track of the elements of their products that come from AI will have a far harder time defending their commercial interests.

Basically, we're about to recreate formalities, but managed by the private sector. To the extent that companies use AI in their work, they are going to have to track every pixel and every word and every note that is output by an AI system, and which parts were added or edited by humans after creation.

That means that companies that want to protect their commercial interests aren't just going to get more protection based on how much work they get humans to do; they're also going to have to treat copyright's government-enforceable monopoly over expressive speech with the gravitas it deserves: not something you get automatically, but something you have to do real administrative work for.

Hey look at this (permalink)

• Adam Conover: Big Divorce Energy https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CVB-SUX7zgk

• Voting machines left unattended, as usual https://blog.citp.princeton.edu/2026/10/27/voting-machines-left-unattended-as-usual/

• In China, the AI bubble has already burst https://www.reuters.com/world/china/china-ai-bubble-has-already-burst-2026-10-26/

• No one loves you more than Exxon https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yJyQXGynwsgz

• "The Bottle Imps" — new short fiction by Rudy Rucker and Bruce Sterling https://boingboing.net/2026/10/30/the-bottle-imps-rudy-rucker-bruce-sterling.html

Object permanence (permalink)

#25yrsago Slushpiles v anthrax https://memex.craphound.com/2001/10/29/some-publishers-have-instituted-new/

#25yrsago Image analogies https://mrl.cs.nyu.edu/projects/image-analogies/

#25yrsago Cleaning the Fucking Kitchen for Dummies https://web.archive.org/web/20011007082222/https://www.fridgemagnet.org.uk/kitchen.html

#20yrsago Last minute changes snuck into Aussie DMCA https://web.archive.org/web/20061104133320/https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/archives/004975.php

#20yrsago Creative Commons 3.0 license drafts published https://creativecommons.org/2006/10/30/version30revisedlicensedrafts/

#20yrsago Bush legalizes martial law https://politics.slashdot.org/story/06/10/28/1934208/bush-signs-bill-enabling-martial-law

#20yrsago No blogging allowed at “consumer generated media” conference https://web.archive.org/web/20061108055635/http://gregverdino.typepad.com/greg_verdinos_blog/2006/10/social_media_fi.html

#20yrsago Li'l Sparky: miniature 9V electric chair https://www.flickr.com/photos/84221353@N00/281833134/in/pool-make/

#20yrsago New Starbucks stores to open across the street from each other https://www.spokesman.com/stories/2006/oct/29/starbucks-buzzes-along-with-expansion/

#15yrsago HOWTO defend yourself against tear-gas https://web.archive.org/web/20111030230740/http://www.stumbleupon.com/su/5Fe8Ye/motherjones.com/mojo/2011/10/ows-flier-defending-against-tear-gas

#15yrsago How to make a computer that doesn’t lock out GNU/Linux https://web.archive.org/web/20120113141447/https://www.linuxfoundation.org/sites/main/files/lf_uefi_secure_boot_open_platforms.pdf

#15yrsago Microsoft buys Skype, attacks reverse engineer with bogus takedown notices and florid language https://www.phoronix.com/news/MTAwNzI

#15yrsago Justin Bieber: senator who sponsored anti-streaming bill should be “locked up — put away in cuffs” https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2011/10/justin-bieber-streaming-bill-author-should-be-locked-up/

#15yrsago SOPA in depth: the worst-ever copyright proposal in US legislative history? https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2011/10/sopa-hollywood-finally-gets-chance-break-internet

#15yrsago Fresh German police-malware uncovered; everything the police said in defense to date revealed as lies https://www.ccc.de/en/updates/2011/analysiert-aktueller-staatstrojaner

#15yrsago Russia dumps daylight savings https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-15512177

#15yrsago Class War funnies: 1935 Daily Worker comics https://philnel.com/2011/02/02/hoff_teeth/

#15yrsago Christian groups: we will bodily protect Occupy London from St Paul’s https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2011/oct/29/christians-defend-occupy-london-protest

#15yrsago Dean of St Paul’s resigns over plan to evict OccupyLondon https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2011/oct/31/dean-st-pauls-resigns-occupy

#15yrsago The future of the living room: Authorised Domain https://dn711102.ca.archive.org/0/items/Cory_Doctorow_Podcast_215/Cory_Doctorow_Podcast_215_Authorised_Domain.mp3

#15yrsago Sales tax is still regressive, gravity still sucks, and George Osborne is still a delusional ideologue https://www.bbc.com/news/business-15519727

#15yrsago Prince Charles exercises a secret veto over a wide swath of UK legislation https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2011/oct/30/prince-charles-offered-veto-legislation

#15yrsago London cops recording movements & association with mobile tracking device: “blanket & indiscriminate” https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2011/oct/30/metropolitan-police-mobile-phone-surveillance

#10yrsago The Shadow Brokers dump more intel from the NSA’s elite Equation Group https://medium.com/@shadowbrokerss/message-5-trick-or-treat-e43f946f93e6#.x2c36nsfq

#10yrsago Wells Fargo blackballed employees who refused to commit fraud, forcing them out of the industry forever https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2016/10/28/499805238/episode-732-bad-form-wells-fargo

#10yrsago Listen: free recordings of Edgar Allen Poe stories, read by Vincent Price and Basil Rathbone https://open.spotify.com/album/6xDmRcD6sgsGbDvBRpyH5H?play=true&utm_source=open.spotify.com&utm_medium=open

#10yrsago How Minnesota’s governor performed an economic miracle by raising tax on the rich and increasing minimum wage https://www.huffpost.com/entry/mark-dayton-minnesota-economy_b_6737786

#10yrsago Icelandic women walk off the job 14% early to protest 14% pay-gap https://www.teenvogue.com/story/women-iceland-protest-gender-wage-gap

#10yrsago Snowden to journalists: your best defense is legal limits on spying, not cryptography https://medium.com/global-editors-network/e-snowden-against-surveillance-journalists-engagement-more-efficient-than-encryption-dbfbacdf9463#.jd6u431fo

#10yrsago After North Carolina Republicans banned cities selling internet, a town decided to give it away instead https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2016/10/city-isp-makes-broadband-free-because-state-law-prohibits-selling-access/

#5yrsago LaserWriter II https://pluralistic.net/2021/10/29/norwegian-potato-flour-enchiladas/#r2r

#5yrsago Now, Put It Back! https://pluralistic.net/2021/10/31/now-put-it-back/

#1yrago The internet was made for privacy https://pluralistic.net/2025/10/31/losing-the-crypto-wars/#surveillance-monopolism

#1yrago When AI prophecy fails https://pluralistic.net/2025/10/29/worker-frightening-machines/#robots-stole-your-jerb-kinda

Upcoming appearances (permalink)

• Kilkenny (Kilkenomics), Nov 6-8
  https://kilkenomics.com/

• Courtenay: Enshittification (Sid Williams Theatre Society), Nov 10
  https://www.sidwilliamstheatre.com/events/cory-doctorow-talks-enshittification/

• Vancouver: BC Policy Solutions Gala, Nov 12
  https://bcpolicy.ca/gala/

• Folkestone Writers Festival, Nov 16
  https://www.creativefolkestone.org.uk/whats-on/cory-doctorow-the-internet-is-broken-now-what/

• Oxford: Ministry of the Future, Nov 23
  https://ministryforthefuture.co.uk/events.html

• Sheffield: Reverse Centaur at Juno Books, Nov 25
  https://www.outsavvy.com/event/40274/cory-doctorow-in-conversation

• Virtual: Enshittification, AI, and the Future of Technology (UBC Master of Educational Technology), Nov 28
  https://met.ubc.ca/2026/09/met-speaker-series-cory-doctorow-enshittification-ai-and-the-future-of-technology/

• Oxford: Bennett Oxford Symposium on Open Code in Science, Dec 9
  https://www.bennett.ox.ac.uk/events/2026-bennett-institute-symposium/

• Montreal: World Science Fiction Convention, Sep 2-6
  https://montreal2027.ca/en

Recent appearances (permalink)

• Clint Eastwood (No Gods No Mayors)
  https://www.patreon.com/NoGodsNoMayors/posts/clint-eastwood-173008088

• Life After AI (Brain Bar)
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IPPa43-n0vI

• Terms of Service with Clare Duffy (CNN)
  https://www.cnn.com/audio/podcasts/terms-of-service-with-clare-duffy/episodes/458ce968-af5d-11f0-b539-13ed2afe25f8

• AI, Work, and Power (Software Engineering Daily)
  AI, Work, and Power https://softwareengineeringdaily.com/podcasts/cory-doctorow-on-ai-work-and-power/

• AI, Corporate Power, and the Fight for Worker Control (Plutopia)
  https://plutopia.io/cory-doctorow-ai-corporate-power-and-the-fight-for-worker-control/

Latest books (permalink)

• "The Reverse-Centaur's Guide to AI," a short book about being a better AI critic, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, June 2026
  https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374621568/thereversecentaursguidetolifeafterai/

• "Canny Valley": A limited edition collection of the collages I create for Pluralistic, self-published, September 2025 https://pluralistic.net/2025/09/04/illustrious/#chairman-bruce

• "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

Upcoming books (permalink)

• "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, April 20, 2027

• "Enshittification, Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It" (the graphic novel), Firstsecond, 2027

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

Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources:

Currently writing:

• “Once Is Enemy Action,” a science fiction novel about the origins of modern technofascism. Today's words: 504 (31359 total).

• "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. Fourth draft completed. Submitted to editor.

• 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.

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ISSN: 3066-764X

Today's links

• Critique and writing: The most important part of a writing workshop is trying to fix other people's stories.
• Hey look at this: Delights to delectate.
• Object permanence: USPS nukes the mail; Enron Explorer; "Scored"; UAE's international hacker legion; NZ provides hacking tools to torturers; Truecrypt insecure; The Traitorous Eight.
• Upcoming appearances: Vancouver, Ottawa, Vienna, Kilkenny, Courtenay, Vancouver, Oxford, Sheffield, Virtual, Oxford, Montreal.
• 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.

Critique and writing (permalink)

Through my own writing life, nothing has done more to improve my writing than diligent participation in peer-based workshops; that's where a group of writers, all at about the same stage in their artistic development, gather to read one another's work and offer feedback specifically aimed at improving each other's stories.

This is a deceptively simple exercise, and the reasons it works so well are quite counter-intuitive. The most obvious benefit is the way that a workshop encourages you to write at all. When you're at the start of your writing career, you are almost totally reliant upon your own internal self-discipline to keep producing.

Acquiring that self-discipline is infinitely valuable, but it's also incredibly hard. Being part of a group of writers who expect you to regularly turn in new work adds a very useful bit of external motivation that augments your still nascent self-discipline. Knowing you have to turn in a story for the group by Friday can get you in gear when you feel discouraged or blocked.

Before you're getting published regularly (or at all), your critiquing circle might be the only source of validation you get for your work, so the knowledge that you're in for that validation if you get that story in on time is a great motivator. But this is where the counter-intuitive part comes in: as great as it feels to be the center of your peers' attention and to get close feedback on the work you sweated over, that's not the real value you get from a writing workshop, at least not at the start of your career.

Your peers' critiques can help you fix weaknesses in your story, and even teach you a little about how to avoid those weaknesses in future work. You might get feedback that turns an unpublishable story into a published one. But the point of a writing workshop isn't merely to make your stories better – it's to make you better at writing stories.

That's where critiquing other writers' stories comes in. The process of reading and re-reading someone else's imperfect work and devoting real mental energy to figuring out what's not working in it and how to fix it is how you develop the creative instincts that allow you to automatically and unconsciously avoid pitfalls and make breakthroughs in your own work.

Even if none of the feedback you offer is ever incorporated into the story you're critiquing, the act of preparing and delivering that critique is the most reliable fast-track to becoming a better writer yourself. There's something very valuable in the combination of thinking critically, being exposed to other workshop members' ideas about the story under discussion, and working with source material that you can look at with more objectivity because it didn't come out of your own head.

I bring all this up because I've now heard from a few beginning writers who tell me that they're finding LLMs to be good editorial feedback generators. They value the editorial suggestions they get from a chatbot after they finish their work, and use it to help them with a new draft. Without commenting on whether I think LLM feedback is editorially useful (I certainly wouldn't ever ask a chatbot for that kind of feedback), I want to point out that when it comes to improving your writing, getting editorial notes on your work is distinctly inferior to offering criticism of other writers' work.

The reality is that when you're starting out as a writer, the vast majority of work you produce will be artistically unsalvageable. The much-vaunted "million words of crap" you write on the way to becoming a publishable writer are about learning to marry technique to artistic vision and to sharpen both. Getting editorial feedback that helps you shore up the weakest spots in a story that is ultimately never published and constitutes a learning exercise has value, but it has far less value than applying the things you've learned from making and fixing those mistakes to your next story.

With vanishingly few exceptions, a commercially and artistically successful writer isn't someone who writes one great story or novel: a writing career is defined by a body of work, which means that you have to do more than rewrite. You have to write the next thing, and the next thing, and the next.

Having an editor-on-demand of highly variable (and often dubious) quality might help you improve your writing, but it's no substitute for participating in a peer workshop. The idea that an LLM might be able to stand in for a workshop is grounded in the fallacy that the point of a workshop is to have people tell you how to fix your story, rather than analyzing other people's writing in order to develop your own critical skills.

Look: it's a cliche to say "every writer is different," but I really believe that every writer is different, and that's down to the legibility of the writing process to other writers. If you're a painter or sculptor or other visual artist, you've likely spent many hours in a studio with many other practitioners while all of you work from the same life model or still life. If you're a musician, you've almost certainly played music with other musicians. If you're a dancer, you've definitely danced with other dancers.

But writers get precious little exposure to other writers' process. At best we might look at each other's drafts. A musician can listen to every note another musician produces while riffing or composing a new work or interpreting a work. Writers don't get to watch words emerge from each other's fingertips. Being observed that closely while you write would be ghastly and paralyzingly invasive.

I've taught a lot of writers over the years and I've had many discussions with my peers about their writing process, and I'm here to tell you that pretty much every writer finds every other writer's process baffling. We each of us invent an idiosyncratic process for ourselves that will never fully work for anyone else.

So if you value editorial feedback from a chatbot (ideally, a local one running on your computer and not one of the "foundation models" that are torching the planet and elevating the worst people on earth to positions of political, technical and commercial prominence), that's fine, you do you.

But even if that's the case, I still want you to know that whatever you're getting out of the chatbot is fundamentally different, and (I believe) much less useful than participating in a peer workshop.

That's what I wanted to say today, but I predict that an appreciable number of readers are about to email me to ask how these "peer workshops" work. There's a ton of variability in how these are conducted, but the basic shape of them is that in advance of each session, one or more writers submits a finished work to the other writers, who then read through the manuscript at least twice, making notes that include both minor copyedits and broader, thematic notes. They may write a brief editorial response as well, ranging from a paragraph to a couple of pages.

Then the workshop convenes. Each writer briefly expresses their views about the story under consideration, focusing on those thematic and structural notes on what worked and didn't work in the story, with suggestions for improving the latter. You don't need to point out every typo – they're noted on the manuscript. Critiquers don't need to repeat one another. If another workshop member says the thing you were planning to say, you can just say "Ditto what so-and-so said about whatever." If you have nothing to add when your turn comes about, it's fine to pass.

Those are pretty much universal characteristics of a peer workshop. Here are some variations that I am dogmatically committed to, but which other workshoppers might disagree with:

• Every writer should submit regularly to the workshop. There is a serious risk that attending a workshop can become a substitute for actually writing. It is no kindness to your workshopmates to let them stay in the circle if it leads them to stop writing.

• The subject of each session must not speak during the critiques, except to answer direct questions that are not related to the writing itself (e.g., "I couldn't figure out what word this was supposed to be – can you clarify?"). The subject can speak after all the other writers have spoken.

• Each person in the critiquing circle speaks once, in turn, without being interrupted. No cross-talk allowed. It is useful to set a time-limit for critiques.

• No partial manuscripts. It's not really possible to critique a story unless you have the complete tale. Novels can be workshopped as three chapters and an outline.

• Stories should be distributed in advance and read in advance. Don't have writers read their work aloud for critique, as this can lead to critiquing the delivery rather than the material.

• Critique the story, not the writer. It's fine to be offended by something in the story, but not OK to accuse your workshopmates of being bad people for having offended you.

• Discourage resubmission of revised stories. Workshopping produces sharply diminishing returns. If you really want feedback on a rewrite, approach people individually and ask if they'll read the new draft.

Any group of three or more writers can start a workshop. You'll need to locate writers who are at about the same stage in their artistic and professional lives as you, and find a physical place (or a videoconference service) where you can meet. Library meeting rooms are a favorite, and so is rotating between workshop members' homes. Set a regular schedule – weekly, fortnightly, monthly, possibly quarterly – and stick to it.

If you write genre fiction and you are interested in attending a peer workshop that also has an instructor to guide the sessions, lecture, set exercises, etc, I can recommend the three workshops I've taught:

• Clarion (UC San Diego, six weeks):

https://clarion.ucsd.edu/ (I'm also a 1992 Clarion grad)

• Clarion West (Seattle, six weeks):

https://www.clarionwest.org/

• Viable Paradise (Martha's Vineyard, one week):

https://viableparadise.com/

Hey look at this (permalink)

• Terrible AI-generated Disney guidebooks on Amazon, Part 2 https://touringplans.com/blog/terrible-ai-generated-disney-guidebooks-on-amazon-part-2/

• Online Privacy for Parents and Youth https://ssd.eff.org/module/online-privacy-for-parents-and-youth

• the mirage of Thatcherfuturism https://backofmind.substack.com/p/the-mirage-of-thatcherfuturism

• The New Canadian Canon https://macleans.ca/culture/the-new-canadian-canon/

• Victory! Court Rules OPM Data Disclosure to DOGE Is Unlawful https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2026/10/victory-court-rules-opms-disclosure-personal-records-doge-unlawful

Object permanence (permalink)

#25yrsago UK anti-terror laws could bankrupt ISPs https://web.archive.org/web/20011118143634/http://www.vnunet.com/News/1126338

#25yrsago What's an "iPod?" https://web.archive.org/web/20011024015856/http://www.apple.com/ipod/

#25yrsago Bible, Koran or Mein Kampf? https://web.archive.org/web/20011109123124/http://www.salon.com/people/feature/2001/10/24/book_quiz/index.html

#25yrsago Tongan court jester scam costs king millions https://web.archive.org/web/20011224034152/http://pidp.eastwestcenter.org/pireport/2001/October/10-23-01.htm

#25yrsago USPS irradiating the mail to fight anthrax attacks https://web.archive.org/web/20011109100316/http://www.newscientist.com/news/news.jsp?id=ns99991468

#20yrsago Enron Explorer mines Enron’s emails https://web.archive.org/web/20061106204850/http://enron.trampolinesystems.com/

#20yrsago Investigative journal: “Fair use is not applicable” https://archive.blogs.harvard.edu/shlep/2006/10/23/whaddayaknow-about-fair-use-and-copyright/

#20yrsago Warners stiffs African amputee film extras on prosthetics promise https://web.archive.org/web/20061105004400/http://www.nypost.com/seven/10232006/gossip/pagesix/pagesix.htm

#20yrsago Former FCC Chairman shills against Net Neutrality https://web.archive.org/web/20061028043416/http://www.lessig.org/blog/archives/003577.shtml

#15yrsago Plotting advice for fiction writers http://nielsenhayden.com/makinglight/archives/013243.html

#15yrsago DARPA wants vampire satellites to harvest parts from dead sats prior to decommissioning https://web.archive.org/web/20111022223128/http://www.darpa.mil/NewsEvents/Releases/2011/10/20.aspx

#15yrsago Understanding the hyperrich through the lens of tomorrow’s history http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2011/10/a-cultural-experiment.html

#15yrsago Scored: pulse-pounding/thought-provoking YA novel about surveillance https://memex.craphound.com/2011/10/24/scored-pulse-pounding-thought-provoking-ya-novel-about-surveillance/

#10yrsago UAE surveillance contractor is recruiting an army of foreign hackers to break into its citizens’ devices https://web.archive.org/web/20161024141138/https://theintercept.com/2016/10/24/darkmatter-united-arab-emirates-spies-for-hire/

#10yrsago Publicly-funded NZ company sold mass surveillance tech to torturers and GCHQ https://web.archive.org/web/20161023101410/https://theintercept.com/2016/10/23/endace-mass-surveillance-gchq-governments/

#10yrsago RIP, Tom Hayden: Yippie, radical, politician, author https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-37749127

#10yrsago Audit reveals significant vulnerabilities in Truecrypt and its successors https://www.helpnetsecurity.com/2016/10/18/veracrypt-security-audit/

#5yrsago Cyber-mercenaries helped Saudis hack an NYT reporter https://pluralistic.net/2021/10/24/breaking-the-news/#kingdom

#5yrsago The Traitorous Eight and the Battle of Germanium Valley https://pluralistic.net/2021/10/24/the-traitorous-eight-and-the-battle-of-germanium-valley/

#1yrago Checking in on the state of Amazon's chickenized reverse-centaurs https://pluralistic.net/2025/10/23/traveling-salesman-solution/#pee-bottles

Upcoming appearances (permalink)

• Ottawa: Life After AI (Ottawa Writers Festival), Oct 24
  https://writersfestival.org/event/life-after-ai

• Vienna: TED AI, Oct 28-30
  https://tedai-vienna.ted.com/

• Kilkenny (Kilkenomics), Nov 6-8
  https://kilkenomics.com/

• Courtenay: Enshittification (Sid Williams Theatre Society), Nov 10
  https://www.sidwilliamstheatre.com/events/cory-doctorow-talks-enshittification/

• Vancouver: BC Policy Solutions Gala, Nov 12
  https://bcpolicy.ca/gala/

• Oxford: Ministry of the Future, Nov 23
  https://ministryforthefuture.co.uk/events.html

• Sheffield: Reverse Centaur at Juno Books, Nov 25
  https://www.outsavvy.com/event/40274/cory-doctorow-in-conversation

• Virtual: Enshittification, AI, and the Future of Technology (UBC Master of Educational Technology), Nov 28
  https://met.ubc.ca/2026/09/met-speaker-series-cory-doctorow-enshittification-ai-and-the-future-of-technology/

• Oxford: Bennett Oxford Symposium on Open Code in Science, Dec 9
  https://www.bennett.ox.ac.uk/events/2026-bennett-institute-symposium/

• Montreal: World Science Fiction Convention, Sep 2-6
  https://montreal2027.ca/en

Recent appearances (permalink)

• Clint Eastwood (No Gods No Mayors)
  https://www.patreon.com/NoGodsNoMayors/posts/clint-eastwood-173008088

• Life After AI (Brain Bar)
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IPPa43-n0vI

• Terms of Service with Clare Duffy (CNN)
  https://www.cnn.com/audio/podcasts/terms-of-service-with-clare-duffy/episodes/458ce968-af5d-11f0-b539-13ed2afe25f8

• AI, Work, and Power (Software Engineering Daily)
  AI, Work, and Power https://softwareengineeringdaily.com/podcasts/cory-doctorow-on-ai-work-and-power/

• AI, Corporate Power, and the Fight for Worker Control (Plutopia)
  https://plutopia.io/cory-doctorow-ai-corporate-power-and-the-fight-for-worker-control/

Latest books (permalink)

• "The Reverse-Centaur's Guide to AI," a short book about being a better AI critic, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, June 2026
  https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374621568/thereversecentaursguidetolifeafterai/

• "Canny Valley": A limited edition collection of the collages I create for Pluralistic, self-published, September 2025 https://pluralistic.net/2025/09/04/illustrious/#chairman-bruce

• "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

Upcoming books (permalink)

• "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, April 20, 2027

• "Enshittification, Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It" (the graphic novel), Firstsecond, 2027

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

Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources:

Currently writing:

• “Once Is Enemy Action,” a science fiction novel about the origins of modern technofascism. Today's words: 550 (28730 total).

• "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. Fourth draft completed. Submitted to editor.

• 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.

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"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

This summer, I took up the call from the Pittsburgh Review of Books to comb through the digital stacks of the Posner Collection at Carnegie-Mellon University to see if there was something interesting to write about. I found what I thought was little medieval manuscript, which is one of my many areas of interest, so I thought I’d look into it. Well. Once I started, I could not stop. This little book was not exactly what it seemed, and neither was the book of hours it was discussing. Read on!

Often, I don’t notice it: the nameless narrator. Because I write nonfiction, I rarely include my own name. Why would I? It’s right there. It’s only when I finish a novel and try to Google a question that I realize I don’t know how to search it. I’ve spent hundreds of pages with this character. I might know what sex they have and what sex they wished they had. More often than I’d like, I know their defecation habits. I might know things about them that no one in their life knows, but I don’t know the one thing about them that everyone knows. I have no idea what to call them.

If you, like me, enjoy plot-light, vibe-heavy novels, you’ve probably spent a lot of time with unnamed narrators. In 2015, the phenomenon was widespread enough for Sam Sacks to label it an “epidemic” when he traced its history in the New Yorker. And it hasn’t slowed down in the years since. Nameless narrators show up in some of the most discussed literary fiction of the past few years: Audition by Katie Kitamura, Transcription by Ben Lerner, My Year in Paris with Gertrude Stein by Deborah Levy, and, most recently, Life of M by Rachel Cusk.

Of course, these only represent one species of nameless narrator. The convention is also popular in apocalypse novels, where social systems that make names useful have collapsed; in Christian allegory, where all of humanity is implicated; and in thrillers, where withholding a name can set up a plot twist. But I see these as separate lineages from the ones I keep running into: narrators wandering around a city, isolated not by the fall of society, but their own ruminations. To be clear, I enjoy these books, and I think brooding on the subway is cool and fun. I don’t mind the nameless narrator as a convention. I just don’t know what they want from me, or what they’re asking me to notice.

*

Names are often proxies for identity, and the same can be said for their absence. In Rebecca, one of the most famous examples, the second Mrs. de Winter is unnamed, and her lack of a fixed self is arguably the novel’s central wound. She imagines herself mostly as a replacement for the first Mrs. de Winter, Rebecca—a woman who, by contrast, has a name and agency so overwhelming that she titles the book. Audition, too, explores the instability of self, narrated by an unnamed actor who seems to experience two consciousnesses at once: “Not a splitting of personality or psyche, but the natural superimposition of one mind on top of another mind.”

I don’t mind the nameless narrator as a convention. I just don’t know what they want from me, or what they’re asking me to notice.

One common reading is that anonymity serves as a vessel the reader can step into—an idea sometimes linked to Everyman, the Christian allegory, and, more recently, to Everyman, the Philip Roth novel. But I’m not sure how effective that is. For me, at least, it isn’t the presence or absence of a name that keeps me from identifying with the narrator of Fight Club, so much as the fact that I don’t want to be punched in the face.

I think of a friend who once said he struggles writing fiction because he always gets stuck on the names. As soon as you choose one, he said, you implicitly lock in all this other information: age, ethnicity, gender. Our other friends teased him about this: surely he’d have to know something about his own characters. Did he expect to write a person outside of time, with no race, background, or relationship to gender, and expect that to resonate with anyone? This is, of course, the paradox: leaving out specificity creates a sense of vagueness, while universality is built in detail. If anything, a withheld name collapses the distance between narrator and author—not narrator and reader. When a text is plausibly autofiction, the name often serves as a dial the author sets for how autobiographically we’re meant to identify the character with the writer.

But then maybe I’m getting off track. Maybe I’ve been distracted by the question of how namelessness reshapes the narrator’s identity, and forgotten the other half of it.

*

Here’s something that matters: these nameless narrators actually do have names.

The narrator of Rebecca, for example, has one that we’re told is “lovely and unusual.” Maxim knows it. The staff at Manderley know it. It’s only the reader who is left in the dark, unable to see the narrator through the eyes of another person. A name is, after all, the simplest way someone exists for others.

The withheld name, then, marks a shift in narrative position as much as it does identity. It’s not that the character is “everyone” or “no one,” or even “the author,” but that their external form isn’t revealed to us. The story is shot from a camera mounted on the narrator’s chest.

It’s probably relevant that I started reading a run of contemporary nameless-narrator novels right after I finished Mrs Dalloway, and then listened to a bunch of podcasts about modernism.

Mrs Dalloway is in many ways the quintessential modernist text, using free indirect discourse to approximate the movement of thought. But before modernism emerged, the nineteenth-century realist novel dominated. These books were told by an omniscient narrator who observed characters from the vantage point of God. It was a stable intelligence surveying a world that could, at least in theory, be comprehensively known. But secularization, industrialization, and the horror of World War I interrupted old ways of thought. Freud was stoking enthusiasm about the subconscious and interior realities. An objective God’s-eye-view no longer seemed quite right, and so, modernism’s inward turn began, and the novel’s world was filtered through the individual. More and more, the camera moved inside the character.

All this—modernism, names, the visual scope of a novel—was already on my mind when I started reading Transcription, and so I saw it everywhere. The unnamed narrator’s 90-year-old mentor gestures toward the possibility that the self is created, at least in part, when it’s seen by someone else: “Did you know all melanin is brown,” the mentor asks, “It is how the light strikes the iris, how it is reflected to the eyes of the other, that gives them color.” If a name is the tool by which we conceptualize the other, removing it obstructs that external vantage point. Should the narrator’s eyes be blue, they will never be blue for us.

It seems like the question—are we looking or being looked at?—has a fraught cultural valence right now, at the same time as our narrators are losing their names.

If the modernist novel lets readers inside consciousness, the unnamed narrator continues this project by refusing to let the reader step back outside of it. Conveniently, my next book, My Year in Paris with Gertrude Stein, was a novel in which an unnamed narrator researches modernist pioneer Gertrude Stein. When the narrator writes about Stein, the desire to escape the vantage point of the others seemed core to Stein’s mission:  “If we create ourselves with and through language, it seems to me that Gertrude Stein’s project was to dismantle herself and a whole century through language, to uncreate herself as she had been created by her father, by her sneering professor at Johns Hopkins, by her brother, to undo the manner of the nineteenth century.” What faster way to shed the self someone else chose for you than by shedding a name?

But today’s authors aren’t twentieth century modernists. In My Year in Paris with Gertrude Stein, Levy writes about the limitations of trying to describe a new era with an older century’s vocabulary: “Every century needs an artist to dismantle coherence as we have been taught it and make a space for something new to happen.” As Stein’s work was shaped by her own changing century, the nameless “epidemic” is borne of this one.

What is it about our world that inspires novelists to write this way? Transcription is largely a book about the way that technology “structures experience even when quiet.” And there’s something to be said about that—the way that smartphones and social media make us conscious of the distance between the person we experience ourselves as being and the person others see. There’s also the fact that as work and daily life become less communal, the self becomes something we define privately. I’ve seen a million cat memes screaming “PLEASE DO NOT PERCEIVE ME!!!” It does seem like the question—are we looking or being looked at?—has a fraught cultural valence right now, at the same time as our narrators are losing their names.

The unnamed narrator is inherently mysterious, resistant to being fully known. But I know what happens when I read them, or rather, when I realize after the fact that I never learned their name: my eye is drawn off the page, and the narrative walls become visible. I become more aware of what was held back, that there is always something held back from me.

People are fed up with the U.S. health care system, and rightfully so. Medical premiums and debt are rising, clinicians are burned out, and patients have less access to care. As another election approaches, these conditions are building up, just waiting to ignite change like wildfire.

Is the solution Medicare for All? It remains a bumper-sticker topic in several local congressional races. This is somewhat unsurprising, given that many Democrats think it’s the answer and even some Republicans support it. But when it comes to politics, slogans tend to leave out nuances.

So I called Hayden Rooke-Ley, a professor of health policy and lawyer, to join me and weigh in on the practicalities of what could be the biggest change in health care since the passage of Medicare and Medicaid in 1965.

Can we actually afford Medicare for All?

This is the first question everyone asks. And the answer is yes.

The U.S. currently spends more on health care than any other country, with private insurance driving the highest costs. That’s why most experts think Medicare for All would lower overall healthcare spending.

But what society can afford differs from government financing. Fully funding this without going into debt requires significant new taxes. Convincing Americans to send more money to the IRS is a hard sell, even if the argument is that they’d stop sending money to insurance companies.

That said, when you tally it all up, roughly 70% of the U.S. health care system is already financed by taxpayer money. So the real question is less about whether we want taxpayers financing the health care system. We largely already do that. It’s more about how we want to do it.

Would it even look like “Medicare”?

Since the early 2000s, Medicare has been divided into the traditional government program (Original Medicare) and Medicare Advantage. Advantage plans offer the same benefits as Original Medicare plus extras like drug, dental, or vision coverage, but this privatization is known to cost taxpayers an additional $100 billion (!) a year. Meanwhile, seniors on Original Medicare need to buy a separate private plan for any extra coverage.

Medicare has other issues. It leads to overpaying specialists, subsidizing large corporate hospital systems, and leaving drug price negotiation to private plans and pharmacy benefit managers (PBMs).

Medicare for All advocates envision a single, all-inclusive plan with no extra fees or private insurance. This would replace all current programs and set new federal rules for taxes and coverage, making it a way bigger change than just expanding Medicare as it is now.

Would it fix the “broken” fee-for-service system?

U.S. health policy has long viewed high health care costs as the result of overutilization due to the fee-for-service model, where clinicians are paid per test or procedure. This has led to cost-containment measures that reduce use of services, like high deductibles, hospital and insurer consolidations, and prior authorization requirements.

But Americans don’t generally use more health care than people in other wealthy countries. In areas such as primary care, they may even use too little. The bigger reasons U.S. health care costs so much are higher prices for care, high billing and insurance overhead, and spending on costly drugs and treatments that offer little added benefit.

So rather than identifying the problem as fee-for-service and trying to manage utilization, Medicare for All would attack the core drivers of high costs head-on—mainly the prices and the administrative bloat. It’s a very different approach to cost containment.

Could it help small doctors’ offices?

It could.

This part doesn’t get talked about much. Big hospital chains and private equity rollups can charge insurers more than small medical practices can. That’s due to their negotiating power, not the delivery of better care, which forces small clinics to sell to larger chains.

If everyone had the same government insurance with the same set prices, that advantage would disappear. Small, independent clinics could survive without needing to merge into giant systems. Providers would compete instead on quality of care.

This doesn’t mean that corporate health care goes away overnight. Some Medicare for All proposals ban for-profit facilities like hospitals, but many nonprofits have become corporate. This means we need policies to regulate their governance and accountability, regardless of future reforms.

What about rationing and waiting in line for care?

People often say, “if we get government health care, we’ll have to wait forever for treatment, like in other countries.”

Is that true? Not really. U.S. wait times for primary care are longer than in peer countries, on average. While specialty care may take longer elsewhere, access also varies. U.S. access to specialists is quicker than in Canada, but Germany and France have shorter wait times for elective surgery and specialty care. Overall, Americans have the worst access to care among 10 peer nations.

Medicare for All could improve access to care, depending on its goals. Wait times are policy decisions.

But more so, Medicare for All tries to address rationing of access that already exists within the system. Medicaid pays providers much less than private insurance, so fewer doctors accept it, and 27 million Americans remain uninsured. In rural areas, sparse or spread-out populations can make hospitals and clinics financially difficult to sustain, leaving residents with fewer local care options.

High deductibles and copays can lead even insured people to skip unaffordable care. This gets worse every time employer health care costs go up: rising premiums are a flat, regressive tax, eating disproportionately into the wages of lower-income workers.

Medicare for All tries to address these access problems by covering everyone, making care free (or very cheap), and making everyone “worth” the same to providers.

It’s still only a piece of the puzzle.

Medicare for All would certainly be transformative, but changing insurance financing by itself won’t address many of the system’s issues, such as primary care shortages, medical school debt, financialization throughout the system, and much, much more.

And those are just the concerns in the medical system. We know that most of what affects health actually occurs outside of the exam room. That gets into the realm of public health and how our society tackles issues like poverty, education, and access to resources.

But here, Medicare for All plays an underappreciated role because it provides a mechanism for weighing priorities democratically. It allows us to decide whether to allocate more funds to health care versus social programs, for example, and creates a unified budget that we can titrate accordingly.

Bottom line

The U.S. needs solutions to its ridiculous health care costs. No solution will be easy, and no solution will fix it all. Whether the current health care landscape will reach a breaking point that makes Medicare for All a politically viable option at the federal level remains to be seen.

But it does feel like this country is at its tipping point. About time.

Love, YLE and HR-L

Hayden Rooke-Ley, JD, is Assistant Professor at the Brown University School of Public Health. His scholarship focuses on corporate consolidation in health care, Medicare and Medicaid financing, and labor and workforce issues in the health sector. He has published in leading journals, including the New England Journal of Medicine and Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA), and he advises state and federal policymakers, enforcement agencies, and other health care stakeholders. He is a licensed attorney in Oregon and earned his JD from Stanford Law. His work can be found on X and LinkedIn.

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