Coiner of ‘Enshittification’ Endorses ‘Dickover’

Speaking of dickovers, here’s Cory Doctorow, writing this week at Pluralistic:

Seizing the means of computation isn’t theft, it’s bargaining. Commercial surveillance companies will tell you that by spying on you, they are simply engaged in a marketplace exchange in which you swap your privacy for access to online services. But they are running a very curious sort of market: it’s a “market” where as soon as you stop to browse someone’s wares, the stallholder gets to reach into your pocket and clean out your wallet. In “markets,” prices are announced and bargained over, not set unilaterally and extracted from anyone unwise enough to cross the threshold.

Adblocking, dickover blocking and other customizations are a way for you to bargain back, to answer the opening bid of “How about you give me all of your data forever and let me do anything I want with it?” with “How about ‘nah?’”

Doctorow’s specific advice is to switch to Firefox for your browser and Linux as your desktop OS. You’re probably not going to do either of those things. But the spirit of his advice is that you should avail yourself of bookmarklets and browser extensions that fight back against shitty ads and dickovers. There are some great options for Safari. StopTheMadness Pro is great for creating custom rules to permanently block specific page elements. uBlock Origin Lite is a free-of-charge content blocker that is incredibly effective, and very configurable (but complicated). Magic Lasso is a paid content blocker — $30/year — which includes synced blocking on iOS, MacOS, and even Apple TV. Magic Lasso offers a much more approachable configuration interface, and includes a “just turn it on” easy-to-use private VPN feature that allows for blocking ads in all apps, including Apple News.

Bargaining back is exactly what using content blockers is. There’s no reason to feel guilty about it.

(Magic Lasso has previously been a DF sponsor, but not since May 2021. I’m recommending Magic Lasso here only as a happy paying user.)

★ Friday, 24 July 2026