If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
Last year, I ran a wildly successful Kickstarter campaign to pre-sell my ebooks, audiobooks and hardcovers of my book Enshittification, which went on to be an international bestseller, selling out 10 printings in the first 11 weeks:
I've done many of these Kickstarter campaigns now, and I always try to come up with something special for backers – some limited edition book or tchotchke that lets me scratch my own itch for making beautiful physical things, and also lets a few backers splash out on a truly special item. I've come up with some doozies, like:
A hand-copied manuscript for the original, never-before-seen ending for my novel Little Brother
A leather bound, extremely limited edition copy of Red Team Blues, with a secret miniature bound copy of the unedited manuscript for The Bezzle in a hidden cavity:
And, for Enshittification, Canny Valley, a limited edition book of my collage illustrations from Pluralistic, made from Creative Commons and public domain sources, with an introduction by Bruce Sterling:
I put 100 copies of Canny Valley up for sale in the Enshittification Kickstarter and all of them sold out in a matter of days. However, as promised at the time, there is a second chance to get a copy of the book, through the Creative Commons 25th anniversary fundraiser, which has just kicked off:
The whole print run for Canny Valley was limited to 500 copies, and it is the only run I will do for the book. 100 copies were sold to Kickstarter backers, I kept 25 for myself, and the remaining 375 are now available as a thank-you gift for people who make tax-deductible gifts to CC.
I have been a great supporter of Creative Commons since its inception – literally, I was around when Aaron Swartz, Matt Haughey and Lisa Rein worked with Larry Lessig to design the data scheme and user interface to create, use and re-use Creative Commons licenses. My debut novel, Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, was the first book ever released under a CC license:
https://craphound.com/down/download
Creative Commons arose out of the copyright wars of the early 2000s, in which the severe deficiencies of using copyright as the primary form of internet regulation were becoming ever clearer. Then – as now – the internet was filling up with material that everyday people produced together, incorporating one another's work, as well as popular works that had meaning to them. Virtually all of this material violated copyright law, and bringing it into compliance would cost hundreds of billions of dollars in billable lawyer hours to draft, negotiate and sign all the licenses needed to avoid both criminal and civil liability.
That's where CC came in: a team of international lawyers standardized a set of legal licenses that did something new and necessary: facilitated sharing and remix, rather than restricting them. Simply apply a CC license to your work – say, a Wikipedia contribution, a Flickr photo, or a story on AO3 – and others would be able to reproduce, adapt and recombine that work with other CC licensed works. What's more, thanks to the heroic efforts of the international CC team, these licenses were able to span borders, languages and legal systems, meaning that a Japanese animator can create a short based on a French story, using Australian 3D assets and a Croatian soundtrack:
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/list.en
It's hard to overstate what a heroic feat of lawyering this is. Making a set of documents that allows creativity to spread freely across 45+ (often very different) legal systems is arguably the most ambitious piece of applied IP legal research ever undertaken. Today, tens of billions of works are CC licensed, including (to name just one example), all of Wikipedia.
I rely heavily on CC licensed works to make the images that run over my posts on Pluralistic, my CC-licensed newsletter. I combine these with public domain images in the GIMP (a powerful free/open Photoshop replacement that runs GNU/Linux, MacOS and Windows) to make my collages, which you can download in high-rez (and freely re-use, thanks to the CC licenses I apply to each of them) from this Flickr set of 350+ items:
Canny Valley collects 80 of my favorite collages in a beautiful book that was printed on 100lb Mohawk paper on an Indigo digital offset printer and bound with PVA glue that will last a century, at Pasadena's Typecraft, a family-owned print shop that's been in business for more than 100 years:
https://www.typecraft.com/live2/who-we-are.html
It was designed by the type legend John D Berry:
https://johndberry.com/
And the introduction was written by my friend and mentor, the cyberpunk pioneer and digital art impresario Bruce Sterling:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bruce_Sterling
I published a long post that explained my creative process last year, including Bruce's intro (which is also CC licensed). I'm going to reproduce Bruce's intro below, but you can read the whole post here:
I love these little books and I love that there's a chance for a few more people to lay hands on their own – and I especially love that this will support Creative Commons, an organization that produces digital public goods for a new, good internet:
In 1970 a robotics professor named Masahiro Mori discovered a new problem in aesthetics. He called this "bukimi no tani genshō."
The Japanese robots he built were functional, so the "bukimi no tani" situation was not an engineering problem. It was a deep and basic problem in the human perception of humanlike androids.
Humble assembly robots, with their claws and swivels, those looked okay to most people. Dolls, puppets and mannequins, those also looked okay.
Living people had always aesthetically looked okay to people. Especially, the pretty ones.
However, between these two realms that the late Dr Mori was gamely attempting to weld together — the world of living mankind and of the pseudo-man-like machine– there was an artistic crevasse. Anything in this "Uncanny Valley" looked, and felt, severely not-okay. These overdressed robots looked and felt so eerie that their creator's skills became actively disgusting. The robots got prettier, but only up to a steep verge. Then they slid down the precipice and became zombie doppelgangers.
That's also the issue with the aptly-titled "Canny Valley" art collection here. People already know how to react aesthetically to traditional graphic images. Diagrams are okay. Hand-drawn sketches and cartoons are also okay. Brush-made paintings are mostly fine. Photographs, those can get kind of dodgy.
Digital collages that slice up and weld highly disparate elements like diagrams, cartoons, sketches and also photos and paintings, those trend toward the uncanny.
The pixel-juggling means of digital image-manipulation are not art-traditional pencils or brushes. They do not involve the human hand, or maybe not even the human eye, or the human will. They're not fixed on paper or canvas; they're a Frankenstein mash-up landscape of tiny colored screen-dots where images can become so fried that they look and feel "cursed." They're conceptually gooey congelations, stuck in the valley mire of that which is and must be neither this-nor-that.
A modern digital artist has billions of jpegs in files, folders, clouds and buckets. He's never gonna run out of weightless grist from that mill.
Why would Cory Doctorow — novelist, journalist, activist, opinion columnist and so on — want to lift his typing fingers from his lettered keyboard, so as to create graphics with cut-and-paste and "lasso tools"?
Cory Doctorow also has some remarkably tangled, scandalous and precarious issues to contemplate, summarize and discuss. They're not his scandalous private intrigues, though. Instead, they're scandalous public intrigues. Or, at least Cory struggles to rouse some public indignation about these intrigues, because his core topics are the tangled penthouse/slash/underground machinations of billionaire web moguls.
Cory really knows really a deep dank lot about this uncanny nexus of arcane situations. He explains the shameful disasters there, but they're difficult to capture without torrents of unwieldy tech jargon.
I think there are two basic reasons for this.
The important motivation is his own need to express himself by some method other than words.
I'm reminded here of the example of H. G. Wells, another science fiction writer turned internationally famous political pundit. HG Wells was quite a tireless and ambitious writer — so much so that he almost matched the torrential output of Cory Doctorow.
But HG Wells nevertheless felt a compelling need to hand-draw cartoons. He called them "picshuas." These hundreds of "picshuas" were rarely made public. They were usually sketched in the margins of his hand-written letters. Commonly the picshuas were aimed at his second wife, the woman he had renamed "Jane." These picshuas were caricatures, or maybe rapid pen-and-ink conceptual outlines, of passing conflicts, events and situations in the life of Wells. They seemed to carry tender messages to Jane that the writer was unable or unwilling to speak aloud to her. Wells being Wells, there were always issues in his private life that might well pose a challenge to bluntly state aloud: "Oh by the way, darling, I've built a second house in the South of France where I spend my summers with a comely KGB asset, the Baroness Budberg." Even a famously glib and charming writer might feel the need to finesse that.
Cory Doctorow also has some remarkably tangled, scandalous and precarious issues to contemplate, summarize and discuss. They're not his scandalous private intrigues, though. Instead, they're scandalous public intrigues. Or, at least Cory struggles to rouse some public indignation about these intrigues, because his core topics are the tangled penthouse/slash/underground machinations of billionaire web moguls.
Cory really knows really a deep dank lot about this uncanny nexus of arcane situations. He explains the shameful disasters there, but they're difficult to capture without torrents of unwieldy tech jargon.
So instead, he diligently clips, cuts, pastes, lassos, collages and pastiches. He might, plausibly, hire a professional artist to design his editorial cartoons for him. However, then Cory would have to verbally explain all his political analysis to this innocent graphics guy. Then Cory would also have to double-check the results of the artist and fix the inevitable newbie errors and grave misunderstandings. That effort would be three times the labor for a dogged crusader who is already working like sixty.
It's more practical for him to mash-up images that resemble editorial cartoons.
He can't draw. Also, although he definitely has a pronounced sense of aesthetics, it's not a aesthetic most people would consider tasteful. Cory Doctorow, from his very youth, has always had a "craphound" aesthetic. As an aesthete, Cory is the kind of guy who would collect rain-drenched punk-band flyers that had fallen off telephone poles and store them inside a 1950s cardboard kid-cereal box. I am not scolding him for this. He's always been like that.
As Wells used to say about his unique "picshuas," they seemed like eccentric scribblings, but over the years, when massed-up as an oeuvre, they formed a comic burlesque of an actual life. Similarly, one isolated Doctorow collage can seem rather what-the-hell. It's trying to be "canny." If you get it, you get it. If you don't get the first one, then you can page through all of these, and at the end you will probably get it. En masse, it forms the comic burlesque of a digital left-wing cyberspatial world-of-hell. A monster-teeming Silicon Uncanny Valley of extensively raked muck.
There are a lot of web-comix people who like to make comic fun of the Internet, and to mock "the Industry." However, there's no other social and analytical record quite like this one. It has something of the dark affect of the hundred-year-old satirical Dada collages of Georg Schultz or Hannah Hoch. Those Dada collages look dank and horrible because they're "Dada" and pulling a stunt. These images look dank and horrible because they're analytical, revelatory and make sense.
If you do not enjoy contemporary electronic politics, and instead you have somehow obtained an art degree, I might still be able to help you with my learned and well-meaning intro here. I can recommend a swell art-critical book titled "Memesthetics" by Valentina Tanni. I happen to know Dr. Tanni personally, and her book is the cat's pyjamas when it comes to semi-digital, semi-collage, appropriated, Situationiste-detournement, net.art "meme aesthetics." I promise that I could robotically mimic her, and write uncannily like her, if I somehow had to do that. I could even firmly link the graphic works of Cory Doctorow to the digital avant-garde and/or digital folk-art traditions that Valentina Tanni is eruditely and humanely discussing. Like with a lot of robots, the hard part would be getting me to stop.
Cory works with care on his political meme-cartoons — because he is using them to further his own personal analysis, and to personally convince himself. They're not merely sharp and partisan memes, there to rouse one distinct viewer-emotion and make one single point. They're like digital jigsaw-puzzle landscape-sketches — unstable, semi-stolen and digital, because the realm he portrays is itself also unstable, semi-stolen and digital. The cartoons are dirty and messy because the situations he tackles are so dirty and messy. That's the grain of his lampoon material, like the damaged amps in a punk song. A punk song that was licensed by some billionaire and then used to spy on hapless fans with surveillance-capitalism.
Since that's how it goes, that's also what you're in for. You have been warned, and these collages will warn you a whole lot more.
If you want to aesthetically experience some elegant, time-tested collage art that was created by a major world artist, then you should gaze in wonder at the Max Ernst masterpiece, "Une semaine de bonté" ("A Week of Kindness"). This indefinable "collage novel" aka "artist's book" was created in the troubled time of 1934. It's very uncanny rather than "canny, "and it's also capital-A great Art. As an art critic, I could balloon this essay to dreadful robotic proportions while I explain to you in detail why this weirdo mess is a lasting monument to the expressive power of collage. However, Cory Doctorow is not doing Max Ernst's dreamy, oneiric, enchanting Surrealist art. He would never do that and it wouldn't make any sense if he did.
Cory did this instead. It is art, though. It is what it is, and there's nothing else like it. It's artistic expression as Cory Doctorow has a sincere need to perform that, and in twenty years it will be even more rare and interesting. It's journalism ahead of its time (a little) and with a passage of time, it will become testimonial.
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So, my sister will be having hip replacement surgery the first week of November, and if everything goes as planned, I'll be staying with her during her recovery, which we expect to last 6-8 weeks. I'll be taking state-paid leave (60% of normal pay) in order to care for her, as she lives about 90 minutes away from where I work. Hopefully afterwards, she'll let me stay permanently (paying rent) and I'll be able to transfer to a Walmart locally.
In the meantime, I will have to continue staying week-to-week at various motels, as eligibility for the low-income housing list remains closed. Over the next couple of weeks, I need to try to raise money to help cover that cost. I know it's an uphill struggle and I hate even resorting to it again, but I can only pray and hope there are those reading this still able to help. My immediate goal is to raise $265 over the remainder of July.
goal: $0/$265
Any donations would be greatly appreciated, along with reblogs of this post...and of course, your prayers. I will be reblogging this post daily, so if you don't want to keep seeing it, you can block the tag #coping with homelessness.
Become a supporter of sobeautifullyobsessed today!
As ever, thank you most sincerely for any help, in any form, that anyone can give! 🫶🫶
Hi! Im not really sure if this post will get traction in here since this account is simply for leisure and does not have followers but there's no harm in trying, right?
I'm trying to help my friend to get some funds for her university/college tuition, her family is trying the best they can to afford her fees but as she nears her internship year, the cost of her education is getting more expensive.
So, here we are, humbly asking for your help so that they can get enough money to pay for her current semester and hopefully for her internship. All of the help is deeply appreciated, whether its big or small. If you know some individual who might give help, please extend this post to them, every help is appreciated. Thank you!
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Hey Sam, I remember reading a post or response from you about how to give to charities anonymously, but now that I’m searching, I’m finding a few different responses but still have questions. Any chance you could do a round up post? Wondering about the following:
1. How to give cash
2. How to give small amounts anonymously (e.g., if you can’t set up a DAF)
3. How to opt out of being sent branded junk if you can’t give anonymously, because it will end up in the garbage (seriously, no more pens, stickers or magnets please)
4. In giving anonymously, how important is the tax receipt? I only take the standard deduction on my taxes… is there a reason to bother with tracking the receipts?
Appreciate your help!
Ah yeah, it's rough knowing how to do some of these things. I've written about some of them, probably most of them, but disparately over several posts, so let me see if I can answer succinctly and all in one place.
How to give cash: You are pretty much confined to two options, giving cash to a staffer in person or mailing cash in an envelope. If you have access to the office of the nonprofit you may be able to swing by and drop the cash off, but it's not super convenient and often not possible. If you're at an event you can hand it in an envelope to a staffer, and that's really the only way my organization gets cash donations, but that requires you to be at the event. And technically I can't recommend mailing cash since the risk of theft is a real one. Giving cash is fine legally, but nonprofits often aren't thrilled with it because it can put their staff at risk and also there's, well, there's no way to track that donation to a person. But yeah, throw them dollars between two thick sheets of paper and mail that in with a note saying "This is for the XYZ organization" so they know they can accept it.
2. Giving small amounts anonymously: It depends on how you're defining 'small'; I have a DAF (for the readers: a Donor Advised Fund -- I talk a little about them here but I've never gone indepth) which has no minimum deposit or minimum monthly contribution, but they do have a minimum donation amount of $20. To me that's not especially large, but I know to many people it can be. Pretty much the only way to give an amount smaller than $20 anonymously is to give online through the nonprofit's website using a cash giftcard (like a Visa gift debit card), and just not give an address. If you custom-order checks you can sometimes order checks without a home address, or with the bank's address, and pay with one of those, but I've never tried that.
If you do use a DAF (and I can recommend Charityvest, they've been mine for several years now) you can always set up to pay small amounts into it and just have them send all that money in a lump sum once or twice a year. I pay in $75/mo and from that they pay out three $20 donations a month, and at the end of the year the extra $180 that has just sat there becomes a nice extra donation. Always bearing in mind of course that once you pay into a DAF that money is gone, you can't claw it back even if you haven't "donated" it yet -- just putting money in a DAF is considered a donation. Readers, if you're curious about DAFs I recommend googling, lots of banks have "what is a DAF" pages, but if you're not finding what you want to know do feel free to come ask me.
3. Opting out of swag when not giving anonymously: I'm tempted to just say "Ya can't" because it's hard, especially with larger orgs. Even if you opt out, often you'll still get mailings that are considered "stewardship" (maintaining a relationship) rather than "solicitation" (asking for giving) and swag counts as stewardship. You can always start with sending the org a letter saying "Please put me on a Do Not Contact list, I will continue to give but don't want to get your swag". If that doesn't work, start returning mailings -- if you get something from the org don't even open it, just write "return to sender -- no longer resident" and drop it in the mail. This is not guaranteed effective; some places will either just change the name to 'resident' or retry every so often just in case. You can call the org and ask to speak to "records" or "data", and then just be super up front: "I want to keep supporting you but I really don't want the swag, how do I get that turned off?" They can help, but if you give to another similar org, a lot of times orgs will do "list exchanges" where they swap mailing lists, and if the org does that and you're on the other org's list, you get put right back on the "ok to mail" list for the first org.
I will say, swag is very, very cheap and gets results, so you can also look at this as "well, it was wasted on me, but the five cents this pen cost will get them $1 from someone, so in accepting it, I am still helping them to gain donations." This depends on your tolerance for waste, of course, which I'll talk more about in a minute.
(I personally like getting magnets, because I put stickers over top of whatever's printed on the magnet, cut it out to the shape of the sticker, and behold! I have a cool magnet!)
4. Tax receipting: I'm not a CPA or a tax lawyer and I fucked this up the last time I talked about it, so take this with a grain of salt, but there is an "above and beyond" deduction -- after the standard deduction I believe you can deduct an additional up-to-$300 for charitable giving, and if you were to be audited you'd need receipts to prove that. (As I said, if you're planning on this, fact-check first, I am not a strong source for this information.) (Edited to add: comments informed me this is no longer the case, so I'm glad I added in the disclaimer :D) If you give via a DAF, no problem; the DAF tracks where and when and how much you gave, so I could use my DAF's records as "receipts". You can also, if you lost or didn't get a receipt, contact the org and ask them for your giving record for the year. Here's the problem -- if you are giving in a way that allows you to avoid giving your address, there may be no way to get those receipts, since you can't prove their record with your name on it is you. So if you want receipts but want to give semi-anonymously definitely make sure they have your email address. If you're giving $300 a year, you probably want to take that deduction; if you're giving $20 a year, probably it isn't worth it. But yeah, to get a receipt you generally have to give them enough information for them to identify you, but you don't need giving receipts if all you take is the standard deduction.
All in all, the options are -- give cash and get no receipt, give via DAF or using a giftcard and get receipts to your email, give with your address attached and just hope they honor your request to be removed from swag mailing, or give however you want, put up with the swag, and bear in mind that them sending you the pen or magnet or keychain wasn't much of a problem or cost for them and will get them money from someone.
Honestly, option four isn't the least irritating, but it's probably the least labor-intensive for you. But it really is a question of what you want from your relationship to the nonprofits you support, and how passionately you feel about the "waste" status of swag they send. Only you can determine where your tolerance point is between "having to put in so much effort not to get this stuff" and "having to throw this stuff in a landfill". It's a regrettable part of being a donor and building a relationship with a nonprofit, but we in the nonprofit field do appreciate your giving and your tolerance :) While there are some outlier bad-actors in the space, trust me, for most nonprofits, nothing we do is gratuitous. Almost all of us are on such a thin wire that if something costs us money and doesn't get us more money, it gets binned very quickly.
Our June 2025 Pride Bundles for Charity sale, selling bundles of short stories and art to raise money for Rainbow Railroad, has officially concluded, and we’ve already made the donation!
Duck Prints Press has donated $225.07 to Rainbow Railroad; the Press also kicked in another $5.63 to cover the processing fee.
A huge THANK YOU to everyone who boosted and liked the bundle campaign, and of course to everyone who bought one or more of the bundles! We couldn’t have done this without you.
What follows are screen captures showing our sales and proof of donation, for transparency purposes. The percentages donated for each bundle vary because authors and artists had the option to donate shares of their royalties; some did so, some did not. Which chose to do that impacted the total amount we could donate from each bundle. The Press donated $46.98 of our total share of the proceeds, plus the $5.63 for the fee; the rest of our donation comes from the generosity of the contributing creators. Note: small discrepancies in the dollar amounts in the “Net Sales” column of the first screen cap and the “Gross Sales” row of the third screen cap are caused by currency conversions; the differences were reflected when the total fees were calculated.
Some words from Tim in honor of Willie and Mozzie Mania.
(And thanks to Penny for getting him talking!)
And if you'd like to honor Willie's memory by helping out a fantastic organization he was devoted to, the folks at You Gotta Believe would welcome any amount of donation to the Willie Garson Fund.
Well, we're sad to report that apparently within the past few days, You Gotta Believe has ended direct contributions to Willie's fund. Still, Willie was a tireless advocate for them and their mission of finding every child a permanent home. You can donate to the organization's general fund here.
