Hi friends! We’re on week three of my 12-week practice in writing one bite-sized topic per week — scoping it down, writing straight through, trying real hard to avoid over-writing or editing down to a pulp.

Week 1 — “On Writing, Social Media, and Finding the Line of Embarrassment”
Week 2 — “On Dropouts and Bootstraps”

Three points in a row makes a line, and three posts in a row called “On [Something or Other]” is officially a pattern.

It was an accidental repeat last week (move fast and break things! ), but I think I like it, so I’m sticking with it.

Next on the docket: pronouns and mandates

This week I would like to talk about pronouns (as in “my name is Charity, my pronouns are she/her or they/them”) and pronoun mandates, in the context of work.

Here’s where I stand, in brief:

• Making it safe to disclose the pronouns you use: GOOD
• Normalizing the practice of sharing your pronouns: GOOD
• Mandating that everyone share their pronouns: BAD

This includes soft mandates, like when a manager or HR asks everyone at work to share their pronouns when introducing themselves, or making pronouns a required field in email signatures or display names.

I absolutely understand that people who do this are acting in good faith, trying to be good allies. But I do not like it. And I think it can massively backfire!

Here are my reasons.

I resent being forced to pick a side in public

I have my own gender issues, y’all. Am I supposed to claim “she/her” or “they/them”? Ugh, I don’t know. I’ve never felt any affinity with feminine pronouns or identity, but I don’t care enough to correct anyone or assert a preference for they/them. Ultimately, the strongest feeling I have about my gender is apathy/discomfort/irritation. Maybe that will change someday, maybe it won’t, but I resent being forced to pick a side and make some kind of public declaration when I’m just trying to do my goddamn job. My gender doesn’t need to be anyone else’s business.

I totally acknowledge that it is valuable for cis people to help normalize the practice by sharing their pronouns. (It never fails to warm the cockles of my cold black heart when I see a graying straight white dude lead with “My pronouns are he/him” in his bio. Charmed! )

If I worked at a company where this was not commonly done, I would suck it up and take one for the team. But I don’t feel the need, because it is normalized here. We have loads of other queer folks, my cofounder shares her pronouns. I don’t feel like I’m hurting anyone by not doing it myself.

Priming people with gender cues can be…unwise

One of the engineering managers I work with, Hannah Henderson, once told me that she has always disliked pronoun mandates for a different reason. Research shows that priming someone to think of you as a woman first and foremost generally leads them to think of you as being less technical, less authoritative, even less competent.

Great, just what we need.

What about people who don’t know, or aren’t yet out?

Some people may be in a transitional phase, or may be in the process of coming out as trans or genderqueer or nonbinary, or maybe they don’t know yet. Gender is a deeply personal question, and it’s inappropriate to force people to take a stand or pick a side in public or at work.

If **I** feel this way about pronoun mandates (and keep in mind that I am queer, have lived in San Francisco for 20 years, and am married to a genderqueer trans person), I can’t imagine how offputting and irritating these mandates must be to someone who holds different values, or comes from a different cultural background.

You can’t force someone to be a good ally

As if that wasn’t enough, pronoun mandates also have a flattening effect, eliminating useful signal about who is willing to stand up and identify themselves as someone who is a queer ally, and/or is relatively informed about gender issues.

As a friend commented, when reviewing a draft of this post: “Mandating it means we can’t look around the room and determine who might be friendly or safe, while also escalating resentment that bigots hold towards us.”

A couple months back I wrote a long (LONG) essay detailing my mixed feelings about corporate DEI initiatives. One of the points I was trying to land is how much easier it is to make and enforce rules, if you’re in a position with the power to do so, than to win hearts and minds. Rules always have edge cases and unintended consequences, and the backlash effect is real. People don’t like being told what to do.

Pronoun mandates were at the top of my mind when I wrote that, and I’ve been meaning to follow up and unpack this ever since.

Til next week, when we’ll talk “On something or some other thing”,
~charity

(835 words! )

Welcome to Margin of Error, a politics column from Tom Scocca, editor of the Indignity newsletter.

What does a successful Democratic opposition—or a successful Democratic presidency—look like? Patrick Healy, the deputy opinion editor of the New York Times, convened a roundtable of experts to discuss what he thought was that question. "I caught some heat this winter from Democrats when I raised the idea that the party is in deeper trouble with voters than its leaders are admitting," Healy wrote. 

Today's links

• Every complex ecosystem has parasites: The only way to eliminate fraud and waste is to become a trivial walled garden.
• Hey look at this: Delights to delectate.
• Object permanence: 2005, 2010, 2015, 2020, 2024
• 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.

Every complex ecosystem has parasites (permalink)

Patrick "patio11" McKenzie is a fantastic explainer, the kind of person who breaks topics down in ways that stay with you, and creep into your understanding of other subjects, too. Take his 2022 essay, "The optimal amount of fraud is non-zero":

https://www.bitsaboutmoney.com/archive/optimal-amount-of-fraud/

It's a very well-argued piece, and here's the nut of it:

The marginal return of permitting fraud against you is plausibly greater than zero, and therefore, you should welcome greater than zero fraud.

In other words, if you allow some fraud, you will also allow through a lot of non-fraudulent business that would otherwise trip your fraud meter. Or, put it another way, the only way to prevent all fraud is to chase away a large proportion of your customers, whose transactions are in some way abnormal or unexpected.

Another great explainer is Bruce Schneier, the security expert. In the wake of 9/11, lots of pundits (and senior government officials) ran around saying, "No price is too high to prevent another terrorist attack on our aviation system." Schneier had a foolproof way of shutting these fools up: "Fine, just ground all civilian aircraft, forever." Turns out, there is a price that's too high to pay for preventing air-terrorism.

Latent in these two statements is the idea that the most secure systems are simple, and while simplicity is a fine goal to strive for, we should always keep in mind the maxim attributed to Einstein, "Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler." That is to say, some things are just complicated.

20 years ago, my friend Kathryn Myronuk and I were talking about the spam wars, which were raging at the time. The spam wars were caused by the complexity of email: as a protocol (rather than a product), email is heterogenuous. There are lots of different kinds of email servers and clients, and many different ways of creating and rendering an email. All this flexibility makes email really popular, and it also means that users have a wide variety of use-cases for it. As a result, identifying spam is really hard. There's no reliable automated way of telling whether an email is spam or not – you can't just block a given server, or anyone using a kind of server software, or email client. You can't choose words or phrases to block and only block spam.

Many solutions were proposed to this at the height of the spam wars, and they all sucked, because they all assumed that the way the proposer used email was somehow typical, thus we could safely build a system to block things that were very different from this "typical" use and not catch too many dolphins in our tuna nets:

https://craphound.com/spamsolutions.txt

So Kathryn and I were talking about this, and she said, "Yeah, all complex ecosystems have parasites." I was thunderstruck. The phrase entered my head and never left. I even gave a major speech with that title later that year, at the O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference:

https://craphound.com/complexecosystems.txt

Truly, a certain degree of undesirable activity is the inevitable price you pay once you make something general purpose, generative, and open. Open systems – like the web, or email – succeed because they are so adaptable, which means that all kinds of different people with different needs find ways to make use of them. The undesirable activity in open systems is, well, undesirable, and it's valid and useful to try to minimize it. But minimization isn't the same as elimination. "The optimal amount of fraud is non-zero," because "everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler." Complexity is generative, but "all complex ecosystems have parasites."

America is a complex system. It has, for example, a Social Security apparatus that has to serve more than 65 million people. By definition, a cohort of 65 million people will experience 65 one-in-a-million outliers every day. Social Security has to accommodate 65 million variations on the (surprisingly complicated) concept of a "street address":

https://gist.github.com/almereyda/85fa289bfc668777fe3619298bbf0886

It will have to cope with 65 million variations on the absolutely, maddeningly complicated idea of a "name":

https://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/17/falsehoods-programmers-believe-about-names/

In cybernetics, we say that a means of regulating a system must be capable of representing as many states as the system itself – that is, if you're building a control box for a thing with five functions, the box needs at least five different settings:

http://pespmc1.vub.ac.be/REQVAR.html

So when we're talking about managing something as complicated as Social Security, we need to build a Social Security Administration that is just as complicated. Anything that complicated is gonna have parasites – once you make something capable of managing the glorious higgeldy piggeldy that is the human experience of names, dates of birth, and addresses, you will necessarily create exploitable failure modes that bad actors can use to steal Social Security. You can build good fraud detection systems (as the SSA has), and you can investigate fraud (as the SSA does), and you can keep this to a manageable number – in the case of the SSA, that number is well below one percent:

https://www.congress.gov/crs_external_products/IF/PDF/IF12948/IF12948.2.pdf

But if you want to reduce Social Security fraud from "a fraction of one percent" to "zero percent," you can either expend a gigantic amount of money (far more than you're losing to fraud) to get a little closer to zero – or you can make Social Security far simpler. For example, you could simply declare that anyone whose life and work history can't fit in a simple database schema is not eligible for Social Security, kick tens of millions of people off the SSI rolls, and cause them to lose their homes and starve on the streets. This isn't merely cruel, it's also very, very expensive, since homelessness costs the system far more than Social Security. The optimum amount of fraud is non-zero.

Conservatives hate complexity. That's why the Trump administration banned all research grants for proposals that contained the word "systemic" (as a person with so-far-local cancer, I sure worry about what happens when and if my lymphoma become systemic). I once described the conservative yearning for "simpler times," as a desire to be a child again. After all, the thing that made your childhood "simpler" wasn't that the world was less complicated – it's that your parents managed that complexity and shielded you from it. There's always been partner abuse, divorce, gender minorities, mental illness, disability, racial discrimination, geopolitical crises, refugees, and class struggle. The only people who don't have to deal with this stuff are (lucky) children.

Complexity is an unavoidable attribute of all complicated processes. Evolution is complicated, so it produces complexity. It's convenient to think about a simplified model of genes in which individual genes produce specific traits, but it turns out genes all influence each other, are influenced in turn by epigenetics, and that developmental factors play a critical role in our outcomes. From eye-color to gender, evolution produces spectra, not binaries. It's ineluctably (and rather gloriously) complicated.

The conservative project to insist that things can be neatly categorized – animal or plant, man or woman, planet or comet – tries to take graceful bimodal curves and simplify them into a few simple straight lines – one or zero (except even the values of the miniature transistors on your computer's many chips are never at "one" or "zero" – they're "one-ish" and "mostly zero").

Like Social Security, fraud in the immigration system is a negligible rounding error. The US immigration system is a baroque, ramified, many-tendriled thing (I have the receipts from the immigration lawyers who helped me get a US visa, a green card, and citizenship to prove it). It is already so overweighted with pitfalls and traps for the unwary that a good immigration lawyer might send you to apply for a visa with 600 pages of documentation (the most I ever presented) just to make sure that every possible requirement is met:

https://www.flickr.com/photos/doctorow/2242342898/in/photolist-zp6PxJ-4q9Aqs-2nVHTZK-2pFKHyf

After my decades of experience with the US immigration system, I am prepared to say that the system is now at a stage where it is experiencing sharply diminishing returns from its anti-fraud systems. The cost of administering all this complexity is high, and the marginal amount of fraud caught by any new hoop the system gins up for migrants to jump through will round to zero.

Which poses a problem for Trump and trumpists: having whipped up a national panic about out of control immigration and open borders, the only way to make the system better at catching the infinitesimal amount of fraud it currently endures is to make the rules simpler, through the blunt-force tactic of simply excluding people who should be allowed in the country. For example, you could ban college kids planning to spend the summer in the US on the grounds that they didn't book all their hotels in advance, because they're planning to go from city to city and wing it:

https://www.newsweek.com/germany-tourists-deported-hotel-maria-lepere-charlotte-pohl-hawaii-2062046

Or you could ban the only research scientist in the world who knows how to interpret the results of the most promising new cancer imaging technology because a border guard was confused about the frog embryos she was transporting (she's been locked up for two months now):

https://www.msn.com/en-us/health/other/horrified-harvard-scientists-ice-arrest-leaves-cancer-researchers-scrambling/ar-AA1DlUt8

Of course, the US has long operated a policy of "anything that confuses a border guard is grounds for being refused entry" but the Trump administration has turned the odd, rare outrage into business-as-usual.

But they can lock up or turn away as many people as they want, and they still won't get the amount of fraud to zero. The US is a complicated place. People have complicated reasons for entering the USA – work, family reunion, leisure, research, study, and more. The only immigration system that doesn't leak a little at the seams is an immigration system that is so simple that it has no seams – a toy immigration system for a trivial country in which so little is going on that everything is going on.

The only garden without weeds is a monoculture under a dome. The only email system without spam is a closed system managed by one company that only allows a carefully vetted cluster of subscribers to communicate with one another. The only species with just two genders is one wherein members who fit somewhere else on the spectrum are banished or killed, a charnel process that never ends because there are always newborns that are outside of the first sigma of the two peaks in the bimodal distribution.

A living system – a real country – is complicated. It's a system, where people do things you'll never understand for perfectly good reasons (and vice versa). To accommodate all that complexity, we need complex systems, and all complex ecosystems have parasites. Yes, you can burn the rainforest to the ground and plant monocrops in straight rows, but then what you have is a farm, not a forest, vulnerable to pests and plagues and fire and flood. Complex systems have parasites, sure, but complex systems are resilient. The optimal level of fraud is never zero, because a system that has been simplified to the point where no fraud can take place within it is a system that is so trivial and brittle as to be useless.

Hey look at this (permalink)

• DIY Book Lamp https://www.voltpaperscissors.com/diybooklamp

• Your primary source for news https://primarynewssource.org

• "A Lot of Emotion": The Rocky Marriage of Instagram and Facebook https://www.bigtechontrial.com/p/a-lot-of-emotion-the-rocky-marriage

Object permanence (permalink)

#20yrsago French court bans DRM for DVDs https://web.archive.org/web/20050424023258/https://www.01net.com/editorial/274752/droit/la-justice-interdit-de-proteger-les-dvd-contre-la-copie/

#20yrsago Why governments make stupid copyrights https://www.ft.com/content/39b697dc-b25e-11d9-bcc6-00000e2511c8

#20yrsago London Review of Books’s personals are really dirty and funny https://web.archive.org/web/20050426005000/http://www.lrb.co.uk/classified/index.php#PERSONALS

#20yrsago German crooner’s megaphone-style covers of modern rock https://www.palast-orchester.de/en

#15yrsago British Airways leaves stranded passengers all over world, jacks up prices on tickets home https://www.theguardian.com/news/blog/2010/apr/23/iceland-volcano-thousands-passengers-stranded

#15yrsago Google highlights fair use defense to YouTube takedowns https://publicpolicy.googleblog.com/2010/04/content-id-and-fair-use.html

#15yrsago Microsoft wins its $100M tax-break and amnesty from broke-ass Washington State https://web.archive.org/web/20100429061500/http://microsofttaxdodge.com/2010/04/microsoft-gets-nevada-royalty-tax-cut-and-tax-amnesty.html?all

#10yrsago Privilege: you’re probably not the one percent https://jacobin.com/2015/04/1-99-percent-class-inequality

#10yrsago Marissa Mayer makes 1,100 Yahooers jobless, calls it a “remix” https://web.archive.org/web/20150425183847/http://news.dice.com/2015/04/22/yahoo-called-its-layoffs-a-remix-dont-do-that/?CMPID=AF_SD_UP_JS_AV_OG_DNA_

#10yrsago Canadian Big Content spokesjerk says the public domain is against the public interest https://www.michaelgeist.ca/2015/04/canadian-recording-industry-works-entering-the-public-domain-are-not-in-the-public-interest/

#5yrsago Riot Baby https://pluralistic.net/2020/04/23/riot-baby/#Tochi-Onyebuchi

#5yrsago Mayor of Las Vegas says the "free market" will decide what's safe https://pluralistic.net/2020/04/23/riot-baby/#carolyn-goodman

#1yrago "Humans in the loop" must detect the hardest-to-spot errors, at superhuman speed https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/23/maximal-plausibility/#reverse-centaurs

Upcoming appearances (permalink)

• Auckland: Unity Books, May 2, 6PM
  https://www.eventbrite.co.nz/e/an-evening-with-cory-doctorow-tickets-1320740102199

• Wellingon: Unity Books, May 3, 3PM
  https://www.unitybooks.co.nz/news-and-events/author-talk-picks-and-shovels-by-cory-doctorow

• Pittsburgh: Picks and Shovels at White Whale Books, May 15
  https://whitewhalebookstore.com/events/20250515

• Pittsburgh: PyCon, May 16
  https://us.pycon.org/2025/schedule/

• Virtual: Writing to Resist (California Writers Club Berkeley):
  https://cwc-berkeley.org/writing-to-resist-5-18-25/

• PDX: Teardown 2025, Jun 20-22
  https://www.crowdsupply.com/teardown/portland-2025

• PDX: Picks and Shovels with bunnie Huang at Barnes and Noble, Jun 20
  https://stores.barnesandnoble.com/event/9780062183697-0

• London: How To Academy with Riley Quinn, Jul 1
  https://howtoacademy.com/events/cory-doctorow-the-fight-against-the-big-tech-oligarchy/

• Manchester: Picks and Shovels at Blackwell's Bookshop, Jul 2
  https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/an-evening-with-cory-doctorow-tickets-1308451968059

• Manchester: Co-operatives UK Co-op Congress keynote, Jul 3
  https://www.uk.coop/events-and-training/events-calendar/co-op-congress-2025-book-your-place

• New Orleans: DeepSouthCon63, Oct 10-12, 2025
  http://www.contraflowscifi.org/

Recent appearances (permalink)

• Beyond the Web (Ostrom Workshop)
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-WfO-9G4EgQ

• Can we use the Internet for Democracy?
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zh_HON6iql8

• Fightback Against Trump's Tariff Attack (Avi Lewis)
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P9sgIAc6z_o

Latest books (permalink)

• • 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 (the-bezzle.org). Signed, personalized copies at Dark Delicacies (https://www.darkdel.com/store/p3062/Available_Feb_20th%3A_The_Bezzle_HB.html#/).

• "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). Signed, personalized copies at Dark Delicacies (https://www.darkdel.com/store/p3007/Pre-Order_Signed_Copies%3A_The_Lost_Cause_HB.html#/)

• "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. Signed copies at Dark Delicacies (US): and Forbidden Planet (UK): https://forbiddenplanet.com/385004-red-team-blues-signed-edition-hardcover/.

• "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

• "Attack Surface": The third Little Brother novel, a standalone technothriller for adults. The Washington Post called it "a political cyberthriller, vigorous, bold and savvy about the limits of revolution and resistance." Order signed, personalized copies from Dark Delicacies https://www.darkdel.com/store/p1840/Available_Now%3A_Attack_Surface.html

• "How to Destroy Surveillance Capitalism": an anti-monopoly pamphlet analyzing the true harms of surveillance capitalism and proposing a solution. https://onezero.medium.com/how-to-destroy-surveillance-capitalism-8135e6744d59?sk=f6cd10e54e20a07d4c6d0f3ac011af6b) (signed copies: https://www.darkdel.com/store/p2024/Available_Now%3A__How_to_Destroy_Surveillance_Capitalism.html)

• "Little Brother/Homeland": A reissue omnibus edition with a new introduction by Edward Snowden: https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250774583; personalized/signed copies here: https://www.darkdel.com/store/p1750/July%3A__Little_Brother_%26_Homeland.html

• "Poesy the Monster Slayer" a picture book about monsters, bedtime, gender, and kicking ass. Order here: https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781626723627. Get a personalized, signed copy here: https://www.darkdel.com/store/p2682/Corey_Doctorow%3A_Poesy_the_Monster_Slayer_HB.html#/.

Upcoming books (permalink)

• Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It, Farrar, Straus, Giroux, October 7 2025
  https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374619329/enshittification/

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

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

• The Memex Method, Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2026

Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources:

Currently writing:

• Enshittification: a nonfiction book about platform decay for Farrar, Straus, Giroux. Status: second pass edit underway (readaloud)

• A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING

• Picks and Shovels, a Martin Hench noir thriller about the heroic era of the PC. FORTHCOMING TOR BOOKS FEB 2025

Latest podcast: Nimby and the D-Hoppers CONCLUSION https://craphound.com/stories/2025/04/13/nimby-and-the-d-hoppers-conclusion/

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One of the pro wrestlers is starstruck. I was not expecting this. It’s 2015, and I’m in the Mid-Atlantic Sportatorium, a small room in a North Carolina strip mall that’s entirely dedicated to independent wrestling shows. This particular one is being held by Chikara, a cartoonish American lucha libre company that will later shut down amidst abuse allegations against its owner. Some of the wrestlers on this card tonight will later make it to WWE or AEW. Most will not. One of the ones who will not is Argus, a rookie masked wrestler with a lizard-man character. On this night, Argus will lose to Hallowicked, a more experienced masked wrestler with a pumpkin-man character. But Argus wins something because he gets to meet John Darnielle. In the audience, Argus shyly approaches Darnielle, introduces himself, and then zips back to the locker room to grab his mask so that he can take a picture with the man. Even on this level, the lucha mask is sacrosanct. If Argus is going to get a photo with Darnielle, he will need the mask.