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Received — 18 June 2026 ⏭ Activism

Pluralistic: AI digital sovereignty risk doesn't exist (18 Jun 2026)

✇Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
By: Cory Doctorow
18 June 2026 at 17:22


Today's links


A 1989 black and white photo of the Berlin Wall; peering over the wall is Microsoft's 'Clippy' chatbot.

AI digital sovereignty risk doesn't exist (permalink)

Back at the height of the blockchain bubble, I made a hobby of pointing out that crypto weirdos were palming a card. I used this formulation:

if: problem + blockchain = problem – blockchain

then: blockchain = 0

https://pluralistic.net/2022/01/30/the-inevitability-of-trusted-third-parties/

You see, blockchain weirdos kept insisting that they could solve problems related to trust and institutional design with "smart contracts." Rather than having to trust a board of directors to steer an organization, you could just have a self-executing institution, the "distributed autonomous organization" or DAO.

So for example, if you want to buy a copy of the US Constitution at a Sotheby's auction, you could set up a DAO to raise and pool the funds, eliminating the need to find trustworthy people to receive, hold and deploy these funds:

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

However – and here's where the palmed card comes in – the DAO can't go to Sotheby's and place a bid on the Constitution. Instead, the members of the DAO have to elect a guy to receive all that cash, walk into Sotheby's, get one of those little ping-pong paddles last seen at the State of the Union in Chuck Schumer's withered claw (emblazoned with the brave slogan "You're hurting my fee-fees") and raise the paddle during the bidding.

That guy doesn't have to go to Sotheby's. That guy can simply walk away with all the money. Members of the DAO are trusting this guy with their entire collective treasury. Indeed, since the DAO has no corresponding legal entity, it might even be that members of the DAO can't sue this guy if he steals all their money – and even worse, without a limited liability structure, it might mean that everyone in the DAO can be sued for anything bad this guy does with the money.

Which raises the question: what's the point of building this insanely complex hairball of blockchain-based smart contracts to raise and hold the money if you're just going to hand it to this guy and trust him without limit? Why not just have that guy set up a Zelle account and a Whatsapp group? In other words: the problem that the DAO is trying to solve is the difficulty of trusting people with the keys to the kingdom, but no matter how much blockchain you sprinkle on this DAO, it ends with this one guy walking around with all your money, which he can steal with impunity if he so chooses.

Or, put more succinctly:

if: problem + blockchain = problem – blockchain

then: blockchain = 0

This turns out to be a really good way of assessing policy prescriptions for their soundness and foundation in reality, because – as the blockchain swindle shows us – it's possible to come up with entirely fictitious solutions to entirely real problems. The problem of designing a trustworthy institution that can't be betrayed by its leaders and whose operations don't consume all its resources is a real problem – it's quite possibly the real problem – but adding a DAO does nothing to solve the core problems of institutional design, and actually makes some of those problems worse.

There's another real problem with a fictitious solution that is – surprise! – tied to another tech bubble: digital sovereignty.

It's a genuine problem that everyone in the world (outside of China's sphere of influence) is glued to America's tech platforms. These platforms steal everyone's money and data, and every country has signed a trade deal with the USA promising not to let its own technologists and entrepreneurs go into business making add-ons and complementary goods that remediate the defects in America's tech exports:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/01/29/post-american-canada/#ottawa

What's more, Trump's response to finding himself in this poker game that's rigged entirely in his favor is to flip over the table because he resents having to pretend to play at all (as November Kelly so aptly put it). His incontinent belligerence on the world stage sees him making bids to steal whole countries and he's recruited American tech giants to help him in this chaotic program of lunatic imperialism. When other countries' public officials make decisions that Trump dislikes, he gets companies like Microsoft to disconnect whole institutions from the internet, deleting their files, email archives, calendars and address books, and depriving them of the ability to connect to any service tied to their Outlook accounts:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/04/20/praxis/#acceleration

Which means that if Trump wants to steal Greenland, he doesn't have to roll tanks into Nuuk – he can just brick the country of Denmark. He can shut down all their ministries, every large firm, every household. He can shut down their iPhones and Android devices. He can kill their smart-speakers. He can hormuz the world's supply of Ozempic, Lego and ferociously strong licorice:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/04/04/digital-subjugation/#greenlands-next

It doesn't stop there! Trump can also shut down every tractor!

https://pluralistic.net/2022/05/08/about-those-kill-switched-ukrainian-tractors/

This is the digital sovereignty risk. It's also the digital sovereignty opportunity. If countries repeal the laws that the US bullied them into accepting, laws that protect US tech giants from local competitors who block their plunder of data and money, they can turn America's tech trillions into their own tech billions. As Jeff Bezos likes to say, "your margin is my opportunity":

https://pluralistic.net/2026/01/30/zucksauce/#gandersauce

Meanwhile, repealing these US-protecting laws would enable countries to extract their data from US platforms so they can move it into domestic alternatives, and bypass the software locks that block them from updating phones, cars, tractors and ventilators to protect them from remote killswitches:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/01/01/39c3/#the-new-coalition

The digital sovereignty risk is having your country's government, businesses and industries terminated by Trump. The digital sovereignty opportunity is making billions of dollars by producing and exporting products that defend people from Big Tech plunder and Trumpian killswitches. That is the real world.

But many "digital sovereignty" advocates are living in an imaginary world, in which the digital sovereignty risk is that Trump will shut off their country's access to AI.

This is where the "if problem + blockchain" formulation comes in handy. If Trump shut off Canada's access to Chatgpt, Claude and Grok tomorrow, nothing would happen. No significant business, no federal or provincial ministry, no municipal government depends on these products for anything essential. And if Canada were to build their own local AI to sub in for Chatgpt, Claude and Grok, it would loose tens, if not hundreds of billions of dollars. Worst of all, a national AI strategy does nothing – not one solitary thing – to protect Canada from Trump shutting down our ministries, our companies, or our tractors.

In other words:

If: digital sovereignty + AI = digital sovereignty – AI

Then: AI = 0

If you think AI tools are nifty and want Canada to invest in AI, then first, please stop pretending that this has anything to do with "digital sovereignty." Not only is this a transparent bit of nonsense, it's a dangerous one, because digital sovereignty is a real problem, and AI does nothing to solve it.

If you want a good "national AI strategy," try this: save your money until the bubble bursts, and then buy your GPUs and hire your talent at 10 cents on the dollar and put them to work refining open source models:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/12/05/pop-that-bubble/#u-washington

Buying AI at the top of the market is nuts. That would be like shopping for Aeron chairs and foosball tables in March 2000. If you just sit tight for a couple months, you'll be able to find bankrupt dotcom entrepreneurs selling these at knock-down prices out front of their formerly overpriced office space in the Mission, in the time-honored tradition of former Wall Street millionaires selling apples out of their Rolls Royces:

https://digicoll.lib.berkeley.edu/record/323794

(Literally: I bought a "dining room set" of six $1500 Steelcase Leap chairs in the summer of 2000 from a failed dotcom CEO on Van Ness for $25 a piece – still in the original plastic!)

And in the meantime, please let's stop pretending that digital sovereignty has anything to do with "national AI." If Trump takes away your AI, everything is fine. If Trump takes away your iPhones, Office 365 and tractors, your country grinds to a halt. This is just not that complicated:

If: digital sovereignty + AI = digital sovereignty – AI

Then: AI = 0

(Image: Armin Kübelbeck, CC BY-SA 4.0, modified)

Hey look at this (permalink)


A shelf of leatherbound history books with a gilt-stamped series title, 'The World's Famous Events.'

Object permanence (permalink)

#25yrsago Napster boss's American Library Association keynote https://web.archive.org/web/20010623201456/https://www.salon.com/tech/wire/2001/06/17/napster/index.html

#20yrsago Flickr: we’ll give full access to competitors – if they reciprocate https://www.flickr.com/groups/central/discuss/72157594165399644/#comment72157594167782546

#20yrsago Report from a concert by a Serbian war-criminal https://web.archive.org/web/20060613081324/http://blog.b92.net/blog/22

#20yrsago European podcasters to WIPO: Stay away from us! https://web.archive.org/web/20060619224538/https://www.bloggernews.net/2006/06/european-podcasters-team-up-to-lobby.html

#15yrsago KFC: support diabetes research by buying an 800 calorie, 56 spoonful of sugar “Mega Jug” https://web.archive.org/web/20110619031415/https://theweek.com/article/index/216462/irony-alert-buy-kfcs-800-calorie-soda-to-support-diabetes-research

#10yrsago Terrorist who murdered Jo Cox shouts: “Death to traitors” in court https://www.csmonitor.com/World/2016/0618/Accused-killer-of-MP-Jo-Cox-makes-defiant-court-statement

#10yrsago Judge orders release of man convicted while his public defender was handcuffed https://web.archive.org/web/20160617172242/http://www.reviewjournal.com/crime/judge-releases-man-who-received-jail-sentence-while-lawyer-was-handcuffs-video

#10yrsago Hambone virtuoso https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YMJeaZtgwng

#10yrsago Google Fiber now forces subscribers into binding arbitration; days left to opt out https://web.archive.org/web/20160617141759/https://consumerist.com/2016/06/16/google-fiber-copies-comcast-att-forces-users-to-give-up-their-legal-right-to-sue/

#1yrago The Immortal Choir Holds Every Voice https://pluralistic.net/2025/06/18/anarcho-cryptid/#decameron-and-on

Upcoming appearances (permalink)

A photo of me onstage, giving a speech, pounding the podium.


A screenshot of me at my desk, doing a livecast.

Recent appearances (permalink)


A grid of my books with Will Stahle covers..

Latest books (permalink)


A cardboard book box with the Macmillan logo.

Upcoming 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/)

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

  • "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

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


Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources:

Currently writing: "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. Third draft completed. Submitted to editor.

  • "The Reverse Centaur's Guide to AI," a short book for Farrar, Straus and Giroux about being an effective AI critic. LEGAL REVIEW AND COPYEDIT COMPLETE.

  • "The Post-American Internet," a short book about internet policy in the age of Trumpism. PLANNING.

  • 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.

https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Quotations and images are not included in this license; they are included either under a limitation or exception to copyright, or on the basis of a separate license. Please exercise caution.

How to get Pluralistic:

Blog (no ads, tracking, or data-collection):

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

Received — 17 June 2026 ⏭ Activism

Pluralistic: The (real) dead economy theory (17 Jun 2026)

✇Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
By: Cory Doctorow
17 June 2026 at 20:27


Today's links

  • The (real) dead economy theory: Vibes and memestocks, all the way down.
  • Hey look at this: Delights to delectate.
  • Object permanence: Jim Baen has had a stroke; Blame Apple for iTunes DRM; France v the internet; "Rotters"; 1901 undersea cables; Washington Post wants Trump coverage blackout; Taxes are for the little people; Gamer lifecycle; Ghanian postal song; "What Lies Beneath the Clock Tower": Murder of Jo Cox; 12 year old doxed by anti-vaxers; Hong Kong bookseller recants forced confession.
  • Upcoming appearances: LA, Menlo Park, Toronto, NYC, Philadelphia, Chicago, London, Edinburgh, Brighton, South Bend.
  • 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.


The Federal Reserve building, tilted at an eldrirtch angle, wreathed in mist. In the foreground looms an abandoned cemetery. Overhead flies a blood-red moon in a cloudy, ominous sky.

The (real) dead economy theory (permalink)

Here's a fun fact about Elon Musk: in 2020, his (nominal) net worth was $20b, and today it's $1t (nominally). But that's not the fun fact; this is: everything he's done since 2020 was a flop.

As John Quiggin writes, the pre-2020 Musk was the Musk of Tesla, batteries and Starlink. The post-2020 Musk is the Musk of Starship, robotaxis, Cybertrucks and Twitter – a string of commercial flops and assets that literally exploded. I would add that post-2020 Musk created the world's hungriest money-furnace, an automated child-porn production tool called "XAI":

https://crookedtimber.org/2026/06/15/one-big-grift/

Quiggin declares that this is the era in which "financial markets fail in the task of valuing assets accurately," and "the institutional structures that are supposed to make them work have given up trying." Nor did this start with the Spacex IPO. As Quiggin writes, Bitcoin and other cryptos were once shunned by nominally sober financial institutions like Goldman Sachs, but today, not only do all the big banks offer crypto services, people have largely stopped calling it cryptocurrency because no one is even pretending that it's a form of money. It's a tradeable collectible, not even particularly useful for paying for crimes or laundering money.

Spacex is just a continuation of the logic of crypto, in which something is valuable because some people think other people will pay more for it in the future, and not because it does useful things:

https://johnquiggin.com/2018/02/09/bitcoin-kills-the-efficient-market-hypothesis/

That's the logic of the whole market today. AI – the world's money-losingest technology – attracts investment at the expense of everything else. When horrified NIH lifers begged the DOGE boys not to shut down long-running medical research projects, Musk's broccoli-haired brownshirts laughed in their faces, saying we don't need cancer research because "GAI" is almost here and it will cure cancer. You could hardly ask for a better example of investing in vibes over value than shutting down real cancer research to free up money for teaching more words to the word-guessing machine because it's about to become God and cure cancer.

Today, Goldman Sachs isn't merely all-in on crypto – it's all-in on the Spacex IPO. As Quiggin writes, the bank has signed off on Musk's claim that "Musk's ragbag of assets" will grow one hundredfold in the next 40 months.

Quiggin's short essay has been rolling around in my mind since I read it a couple days ago. Then, yesterday, I spotted this essay by Owen McGrann entitled "The Dead Economy Theory":

https://www.owenmcgrann.com/p/the-dead-economy-theory

The perfect name for this phenomenon! Or so I thought. Then I read McGrann's article, and discovered that it's yet another piece asking how the economy will work after AI takes all of our jobs because AI is absolutely going to do that and there's no point in even questioning whether that will happen.

Look, thought experiments about how to deal equitably with labor displacement in the face of automation are all well and good. I'm a science fiction writer, that stuff is my bread and butter.

But applying "dead economy theory" to the blithe acceptance of the claims of AI pitchmen is a terrible waste of a killer coinage. The true risk of AI to your job isn't: "an AI will do your job." It's: "an AI salesman will exploit your boss's infinite horniness for replacing mouthy workers with pliable machines to sell him a chatbot that can't do your job, and then your boss will fire you and replace you with that inept, defective chatbot."

By the same token: the real "dead economy" risk isn't that all the productive labor will be done by chatbots owned by a habitual liar and eminently guillotineable billionaire like Sam Altman. The actual dead economy risk is that our institutions and markets will continue to move capital from productive activity into memestocks, vibes, and bubbles.

We could do "AI cancer research" by producing tools that automate gnarly multivariant analysis problems for cancer researchers. But what we're actually doing is defunding cancer research (especially any research into "systemic" cancer because studying systemic things is "woke") to free up fiscal space so we can build data-centers and make Musk into a trillionaire.

That's not just a dead economy – it's one that'll kill everyone you love and everything that matters.

Hey look at this (permalink)


A shelf of leatherbound history books with a gilt-stamped series title, 'The World's Famous Events.'

Object permanence (permalink)

#20yrsago Jim Baen, science fiction publisher, has had a serious stroke https://nielsenhayden.com/makinglight/archives/007658.html#007658

#20yrsago Why Apple is to blame for iTunes DRM https://web.archive.org/web/20060620004534/http://vitanuova.loyalty.org/NewsBruiser-2.6.1/nb.cgi/view/vitanuova/2006/06/15/1

#20yrsago Lifecycle of a gamer https://www.raphkoster.com/2006/06/16/the-lifecycles-of-a-player/

#20yrsago Spammer: I’ll buy MySpace profiles with more than 20k contacts https://web.archive.org/web/20060619062837/http://skibrooklyn.blogspot.com/2006/06/easy-money-sell-your-friends.html

#20yrsago Psychology of bad probability estimation: why lottos and terrorists matter https://web.archive.org/web/20060627174933/https://server1.sxsw.com/2006/coverage/SXSW06.INT.20060311.DanielGilbert.mp3

#15yrsago Copyright complaint kills Peanutweeter https://web.archive.org/web/20110620093750/https://www.wired.com/underwire/2011/06/peanutweeter-dmca-takedown/

#15yrsago Work song of Ghanian postal workers cancelling stamps https://blogfiles.wfmu.org/KF/0512/Ghana_Post_Office.mp3

#15yrsago What Lies Beneath the Clock Tower: steampunk choose-your-own-adventure https://memex.craphound.com/2011/06/17/what-lies-beneath-the-clock-tower-steampunk-choose-your-own-adventure/

#15yrsago French proposal: any URL to be arbitrarily blacklisted without due process https://www.laquadrature.net/en/2011/06/15/the-entire-internet-under-governmental-censorship-in-france/

#15yrsago Rotters: YA horror novel about grave-robbing chills, thrills, delights https://memex.craphound.com/2011/06/15/rotters-ya-horror-novel-about-grave-robbing-chills-thrills-delights/

#15yrsago Map of undersea cables from 1901 https://web.archive.org/web/20110220121138/http://www.dephx.com/2010/11/map-of-undersea-cables-from-1901.html

#15yrsago Copyright complaint kills Peanutweeter https://web.archive.org/web/20110620093750/https://www.wired.com/underwire/2011/06/peanutweeter-dmca-takedown/

#15yrsago Work song of Ghanian postal workers cancelling stamps https://blogfiles.wfmu.org/KF/0512/Ghana_Post_Office.mp3

#15yrsago What Lies Beneath the Clock Tower: steampunk choose-your-own-adventure https://memex.craphound.com/2011/06/17/what-lies-beneath-the-clock-tower-steampunk-choose-your-own-adventure/

#10yrsago Supreme Court ruling is a blow to copyright trolling business-model https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2016/06/attorneys-in-copyright-case-on-resold-textbooks-inch-closer-to-2m-payday/

#10yrsago The Orlando shooting, according to the Congressmen who took the most money from the NRA https://web.archive.org/web/20160617143716/https://theslot.jezebel.com/heres-how-the-congressmen-who-have-gotten-the-most-cash-1782083985

#10yrsago British Pro-EU MP murdered in the street by man shouting “Britain first!” https://web.archive.org/web/20160616212235/https://theintercept.com/2016/06/16/british-referendum-campaign-suspended-killing-pro-europe-lawmaker-jo-cox/

#10yrsago 12 year old makes devastating video about anti-vaxxers, gets doxxed https://skepchick.org/2016/06/anti-vaxxers-dox-a-child-critic/

#10yrsago Report from the prison-industrial complex’s leading trade show https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/jun/16/us-prisons-jail-private-healthcare-companies-profit

#10yrsago Your cable operator is spying on you and selling the data from your set-top box https://publicknowledge.org/public-knowledge-defends-consumer-privacy-in-set-top-box-data-complaint-to-fcc-ftc/

#10yrsago Not robots: youth unemployment caused by late retirement, driven by pension precarity https://thebaffler.com/salvos/exit-planning-geoghegan

#10yrsago Oakland mayor denies firing police chief over officers who statutorily raped teen sex-worker https://eastbayexpress.com/badge-of-dishonor-top-oakland-police-department-officials-looked-away-as-east-bay-cops-sexually-exploited-and-trafficked-a-teenager-2-1/

#10yrsago Paramount tells judge that they’re still suing over Star Trek fan-film https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/business/business-news/paramount-says-star-trek-fan-903497/

#10yrsago $40,000/year private school sues school for low-income kids for $2M over “Commonwealth” https://www.bostonglobe.com/metro/2016/06/16/can-school-lay-claim-commonwealth-its-name-back-bay-institution-believes-can/WHwiaaPEn04cIY6uxXjoiO/story.html

#10yrsago Wisconsin Congresswoman: mandatory drug tests for anyone claiming $150K in itemized tax-deductions https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/jun/16/gwen-moore-drug-test-rich-for-tax-deductions

#10yrsago Hong Kong bookseller: I was forced to confess on China TV https://www.bbc.com/news/av/world-asia-china-36552672#5yrsago

#10yrsago Washington Post calls for “blackout” on Trump coverage, appeals to RNC https://web.archive.org/web/20160615113350/https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/the-right-response-to-donald-trump-a-media-blackout/2016/06/14/2868a0e0-3256-11e6-8758-d58e76e11b12_story.html

#10yrsago Security economics: black market price of hacked servers drops to $6 https://www.wired.com/2016/06/xdedic-server-trading-forum-kaspersky/

#10yrsago Lower-case “x” as a gender-neutral typographic convention https://kottke.org/16/06/x-marks-gender-neutral

#5yrsago Taxes are for the little people https://pluralistic.net/2021/06/15/guillotines-and-taxes/#carried-interest

Upcoming appearances (permalink)

A photo of me onstage, giving a speech, pounding the podium.


A screenshot of me at my desk, doing a livecast.

Recent appearances (permalink)


A grid of my books with Will Stahle covers..

Latest books (permalink)


A cardboard book box with the Macmillan logo.

Upcoming 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/)

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

  • "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

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


Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources:

Currently writing: "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. Third draft completed. Submitted to editor.

  • "The Reverse Centaur's Guide to AI," a short book for Farrar, Straus and Giroux about being an effective AI critic. LEGAL REVIEW AND COPYEDIT COMPLETE.

  • "The Post-American Internet," a short book about internet policy in the age of Trumpism. PLANNING.

  • 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.

https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Quotations and images are not included in this license; they are included either under a limitation or exception to copyright, or on the basis of a separate license. Please exercise caution.

How to get Pluralistic:

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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

Received — 15 June 2026 ⏭ Activism

Pluralistic: AI and amateurism (15 Jun 2026)

✇Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
By: Cory Doctorow
15 June 2026 at 17:40


Today's links


A man's head made out of contorted bodies. Set into the middle of his brain is a Radio Shack 150-in-1 electronic experimentation kit.

AI and amateurism (permalink)

Over the weekend, I did an interview about my forthcoming book The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI (a book about being a better AI critic), and the interviewer said she was surprised that I wasn't an AI booster, based on my demographics and work history:

https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374621568/thereversecentaursguidetolifeafterai/

I could see where she was coming from. I encountered computers in the mid-seventies, as a small child. My first computer was a CARDIAC, a working, Turing-complete, mechanical computer made entirely of cardboard, that I spent endless hours with:

https://www.instructables.com/CARDIAC-CARDboard-Illustrative-Aid-to-Computation-/

Then I graduated to a teletype terminal and acoustic coupler connected to a minicomputer at the University of Toronto. My mom, a kindergarten teacher, used to smuggle home 1,000' rolls of paper towel from the kids' bathroom. I'd get 1,000' feet of computing up one side, then another 1,000' down the other side, then I'd carefully re-roll the paper towel so she could put it back in the bathroom for the kids to dry their hands on.

After that, I got an Apple ][+ in 1979, and shortly thereafter acquired a modem, and that was it: I was hooked for life. I became an amateur programmer, then a professional programmer. I hosted forums on dial-up BBSes where I distributed software and offered support to strangers who wanted to connect their computers to the internet. I got a job as a gopher developer, then a web developer, then a CIO-for-hire, helping wire up small businesses and connect them to the net. Eventually, I co-founded a free/open source software startup, before transitioning to 25 years as a digital rights activist with the Electronic Frontier Foundation. And for most of that time, I was energetically writing science fiction, eventually becoming associated with a school sometimes called "post-cyberpunk":

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rewired:_The_Post-Cyberpunk_Anthology

The force that energized all this work was a dialectical one, the contradiction that powered cyberpunk literature itself. For all that cyberpunk was undeniably enamored with the coolness and combustibility of new technology, it was also terrified of how technology could be a force for oppression, surveillance and control. As William Gibson says, "cyberpunk was a warning, not a suggestion."

Gibson's more famous quote, of course, is "the street finds its own use for things." In Gibson's novels (and in my own life in technology) all the most interesting things happen when users of technology (often without formal training or credentials) find ways to adapt the technology they use to suit their needs:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/03/17/technopolitics/#original-sin

This is why I remain an ardent fan of Hypercard, Scratch and other meta-tools that are designed to allow non-programmers to write software that exactly conforms to their desires. Whatever the apps produced by these tools lack in sophistication and efficiency is more than offset by the fact that they give everyday people the power to directly control the tools they rely upon.

If "epistemic humility" means anything, it means acknowledging that no amount of "requirements gathering" can capture the needs of people totally unlike yourself as faithfully as those users can capture their own needs. Giving people the tools to produce their own software is always going to make tools – vernacular, idiosyncratic, homespun – that are more suited to their own hands and minds than anything a technologist working on their behalf could make.

The ancient dictum of "nothing about us without us" – born in 16th century Poland and taken up by the modern disability rights movement – asserts the right of people to control their own living conditions, and also the unique capacity of people to understand their own needs. You know what's even better than being consulted on the design of the technology you use? Having direct control over that technology!

This is why I was so suspicious of the iPad. The iPad's much-lauded "ease of use" was entirely about how easy it was to use an iPad to consume technology. But the iPad remains the single most user-innovation-hostile technology in modern history, a device designed to make it impossible to produce technology without permission from a remorseless multinational corporation. This is cyberpunk as a demand, not a warning:

https://memex.craphound.com/2010/04/01/why-i-wont-buy-an-ipad-and-think-you-shouldnt-either/

The technology I've championed all my life is technology that gives more control to its users. One of my immutable precepts is that people who are different from me know things I can't know, and the only way I can get the benefit of their unique knowledge and perspective is if they are free to make and share things that matter to them. As Dan Gillmor said, back when he was inventing the study of citizen journalism, "My readers know more than I do":

https://www.oreilly.com/openbook/wemedia/book/ch00.pdf

And while I am broadly very skeptical of AI, and deeply alarmed by the proliferation of "vibe coded" software in production environments, vibe coding for personal projects is a useful and exciting addition to the lineage of tools that let computer users decide how their computers will work. For people making personal projects, vibe coding extends the power of shell scripting, cron jobs, Applescript, and other desktop automation tools to a wider audience.

One of the journalists I spoke to last week about my book described how he had vibe coded an app that showed him an alert every time a plane flew over his house, giving the tail number and other details of the flight. This is information that I have no need for and no interest in, and that I'm therefore excited to learn about, because its very existence affirms that the world is full of people who are delightfully, irreducibly, amazingly different from me, and moreover, that their unique needs can be directly met using their imaginations and their personal computers.

I recently sat down with my colleague Naomi Novik, a brilliant author who also co-founded Archive of Our Own. Naomi demoed her followup to AO3 for me: Wreccer, a system to help you find small groups of people with taste similar to your own, in order to facilitate media recommendations within that group – a kind of personal, relationship-driven alternative to massive, centralized, monolithic algorithmic recommendation systems:

https://github.com/wreccer

Naomi told me that Wreccer was being built using the same design ethos that the original Twitter embraced. When Twitter launched, it was an API first, and the official Twitter front end was built on that API – but anyone could build their own front end for Twitter that worked in the way they wanted it to. Now, the word "anyone" is doing a lot of work in that sentence, because most people don't even know what an API is, and of the people who do, most of them were not capable of writing their own software front end for Twitter.

But Wreccer is being designed for the age of vibe coding, and the API will really allow anyone who uses the service to design their own interface to the system, one that elevates and centers the features they find useful and tucks away the ones they're not interested in. Your personal, custom front end could also bring in other data-sources – pulling in your Mastodon messages, for example, or even showing you an alert with the tail-number of any plane flying over your home.

This is the part of vibe coding that I'm quite excited about, but it's not the part the industry focuses on. Instead of hearing about how personal, homemade software utilities can be an end unto themselves, we hear about vibe coded projects as prototypes for commercial production code. We hear about clueless bosses vibe coding software products and services that run fine for one user on a siloed desktop computer, and then demanding to know why it takes 50 engineers a year to make the same thing work for millions of users on the public internet. We hear about people who vibe code and submit patches to free/open-source software projects with millions of users, overwhelming project maintainers with slop code that is riddled with security vulnerabilities.

Of course, there's an obvious reason why the industry wants to focus on the potential for vibe coded software to replace production code. The AI bubble has burned up $1.4t to date, while bringing in mere tens of billions of dollars per year, even as its unit economics grow steadily worse:

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2026/06/04/ai-is-the-greatest-money-wasting-scheme-humanity-has-ever-i/

To keep the bubble inflated, AI hucksters must promise massive economic returns to the technology. They want investors to believe that vibe code is about to replace working programmers, who are skilled, high-waged, high-demand workers. Their pitch is that for every million dollars' worth of programmers that an AI salesman and a boss conspire to fire, half a million dollars will go to the AI company whose bots shit out that vibe code.

That's par for the course with the AI bubble, whose focus is entirely on how AI can centralize, control and homogenize our lives. Whereas early desktop publishing, web publishing and social media gave us a glorious higgledy-piggledy of chaotic, weird and transgressive hobbyist media and retina-searing designs, AI art and design are instantly recognizable at a thousand yards, and it all looks the same, boring, and washed:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/07/20/ransom-note-force-field/#antilibraries

AI companies have released open weight/open source models that can run on your own computer, but these are treated as side-shows and toys and demos. The real action, we're told, is in "frontier models," which is industry-speak for "a piece of software whose running costs exceed the GDP of most countries":

https://pluralistic.net/2026/02/19/now-we-are-six/#stock-buyback

Perhaps this is why the dynamics of AI are so different from the early dynamics of the web. Early web users were workers, who demanded that their bosses allow them to use the web and so devolve more power to people doing their jobs. By contrast, today's most ardent AI boosters are bosses, who threaten workers who don't use AI enough in the course of their duties:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/05/26/the-ai-will-continue/#until-morale-improves

Where we do see idiosyncrasy emerging from AI usage, it's often terrible. AI can help you create a folie-a-un in which you and a chatbot team up to reinforce your delusions and drive you deeper into a world of dangerous mirage:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/06/03/mission-space/#gsd

There's a (false) story that's told about people who championed the early internet: that we were blithely certain that technology could only be a force for good, and negligently disinterested in the possibility that technology could control, extract and harm. That's demonstrably untrue: recall cyberpunk's dualism of "the street finds its own use for things" and "cyberpunk is a warning, not a suggestion."

More true is to say that early internet champions were alive to the importance of the internet, and therefore both excited about the possibilities of the internet to deliver a world of connection, idiosyncrasy, love and solidarity; and about the danger of the internet as a dystopian system of surveillance and manipulation:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/02/13/digital-rights/#are-human-rights

History isn't finished. Long after the AI bubble pops, there will be local models and people vibe coding homemade software that respond directly to their needs. The stuff we make on our own computers, for ourselves, is deplatformed from its inception. It's part of the life we can build in technology's "shadowy corners" that we used to just call "technology." The fact that this stuff is utterly unsuited to be production code makes it inherently unmonetizable. It's how the street finds its own use for things:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/02/23/goodharts-lawbreaker/#no-metrics-no-targets

Hey look at this (permalink)


A shelf of leatherbound history books with a gilt-stamped series title, 'The World's Famous Events.'

Object permanence (permalink)

#25yrsago Disney characters win right to clean underwear https://web.archive.org/web/20010707023727/https://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/news/archive/2001/06/07/state1339EDT0171.DTL

#20yrsago Lampooning the American dismissal of Gitmo suicides https://fafblog.blogspot.com/2006/06/610-changed-everything-run-for-your.html

#20yrsago LA’s South Central Farm under police siege right now https://web.archive.org/web/20060616085732/http://www.southcentralfarmers.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=160&Itemid=2

#15yrsago Transparent Pontiac for sale https://web.archive.org/web/20110610113919/http://blog.hemmings.com/index.php/2011/06/07/the-tin-indian-that-wasnt-rm-to-offer-see-through-pontiac/

#15yrsago Pulp Fiction edited down to just the cussing https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5PcAQbhnGNs

#15yrsago New York State to pet cemeteries: no pet owners’ ashes allowed https://web.archive.org/web/20110614133359/https://www.foxnews.com/us/2011/06/11/new-york-tells-pet-cemeteries-to-stop-taking-in-humans/#ixzz1PAZoGS6l

#15yrsago A dog with persistence-of-vision LEDs in her shirt writes my novel Makers in the park at night https://web.archive.org/web/20110618011346/https://i.document.m05.de/?p=970

#15yrsago Head of UN copyright agency says fair use is a “negative agenda,” wants to get rid of discussions on rights for blind people and go back to giving privileges to giant companies https://memex.craphound.com/2011/06/14/head-of-un-copyright-agency-says-fair-use-is-a-negative-agenda-wants-to-get-rid-of-discussions-on-rights-for-blind-people-and-go-back-to-giving-privileges-to-giant-companies/

#10yrsago Air Force loses access to database tracking fraud investigations to 2004 https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2016/06/database-corruption-erases-100000-air-force-investigation-records/

#10yrsago Peter Thiel’s lawyer threatens Gawker for talking about Donald Trump’s “hair” https://web.archive.org/web/20160615022004/https://gawker.com/now-peter-thiels-lawyer-wants-to-silence-reporting-on-t-1781918385

#10yrsago Samantha Bee on Orlando shooting: angry and uncompromising https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t88X1pYQu-I

#10yrsago Goldman Sachs bribed Libyan officials with sex workers, private jet rides, then lost all their money https://www.theguardian.com/business/2016/jun/13/goldman-sachs-hired-prostitutes-to-win-libyan-business-court-told

#10yrsago Net Neutrality Wins: Federal Court Upholds FCC Open Internet Rules https://www.techdirt.com/2016/06/14/cable-industry-proclaims-more-competition-hurts-consumers-damages-economic-efficiency/

#10yrsago Microsoft will buy Linkedin for $26.2B https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2016/06/microsoft-will-acquire-linkedin-for-18-5b/

#10yrsago Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Tony Awards sonnet for the Orlando shooting victims https://www.rollingstone.com/tv-movies/tv-movie-news/see-lin-manuel-mirandas-stirring-tribute-to-orlando-victims-103131/

#10yrsago China’s online astroturf is mostly produced by government workers as “extra duty” https://web.archive.org/web/20160613194153/http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2016/06/red-astroturf-chinese-government-makes-millions-of-fake-social-media-posts/

#10yrsago Rio: your quadrennial reminder that the Olympics colonize host-states with Orwellian surveillance and human rights abuses https://web.archive.org/web/20160614122124/https://motherboard.vice.com/read/the-olympics-are-turning-rio-into-a-military-state

#5yrsago A Monopoly Isn’t the Same as Legitimate Greatness https://pluralistic.net/2021/06/13/a-monopoly-isnt-the-same-as-legitimate-greatness/

Upcoming appearances (permalink)

A photo of me onstage, giving a speech, pounding the podium.


A screenshot of me at my desk, doing a livecast.

Recent appearances (permalink)


A grid of my books with Will Stahle covers..

Latest books (permalink)


A cardboard book box with the Macmillan logo.

Upcoming 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/)

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

  • "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

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


Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources:

Currently writing: "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. Third draft completed. Submitted to editor.

  • "The Reverse Centaur's Guide to AI," a short book for Farrar, Straus and Giroux about being an effective AI critic. LEGAL REVIEW AND COPYEDIT COMPLETE.

  • "The Post-American Internet," a short book about internet policy in the age of Trumpism. PLANNING.

  • 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.

https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Quotations and images are not included in this license; they are included either under a limitation or exception to copyright, or on the basis of a separate license. Please exercise caution.

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Received — 6 June 2026 ⏭ Activism

Pluralistic: Criticizing the everything machine (06 Jun 2026)

✇Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
By: Cory Doctorow
6 June 2026 at 20:00


Today's links


A medieval one-man band standing on a crate; his head has been replaced with the head of a killer robot. Observing him are a cluster of critics, who are variously gesticulating wildly, peering disapprovingly, looking on in amusement, etc. The background is a phantasmagoric cloudscape.

Criticizing the everything machine (permalink)

"Gish Gallop" is the debating term for an opponent who makes so many claims that "it's impossible to address them in the time available" (it's named for Creationist Duane Gish, who was notorious for this tactic):

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

I think about the Gish Gallop whenever I'm asked to comment on AI.

Here's a recent example: last week, I had a pre-interview call with a radio producer who wanted me to come on a 13-minute segment to discusses "whether there's a problem with AI governance?"

I asked what the show meant by that: was it whether regulation of AI in commercial or public sector decision-making needed more oversight? Was it that the siting and provisioning of data-centers needed more democratic accountability? Was it that workers deserved more of a say in AI's impact on labor markets? Was it that customers and/or audiences should be able to opt out of AI customer service and AI slop? Was it about whether we needed some kind of system to prevent "runaway AI," in the event that we teach so many words to the word-guessing program that it wakes up, becomes God, and turns us all into paperclips?

"Oh," the producer said, "all of that."

In 13 minutes.

You see the problem, right? The AI industry has made so many claims about its past, present and future that it's almost impossible to have a reasonable critical conversation about it:

https://bsky.app/profile/petermiles.eurosky.social/post/3mnffjqczjs2t

Shortly after I did the radio show, a newspaper editor who'd heard my segment got in touch to ask me if I'd write an 800-word op-ed about the subject, and also, could I address claims that "AI is the next Industrial Revolution?"

In 800 words:

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2026/06/04/ai-is-the-greatest-money-wasting-scheme-humanity-has-ever-i/

I keep finding myself on stages or panels where an AI-struck person says something like, "AI is the next industrial revolution. It will change everything we do. It will let anyone create important works of art. It will cure cancer. It will take us to space. It will solve the climate crisis."

Or sometimes it's an AI critic, but that person's criticism is really more "criti-hype," which is when you accept tech industry hype claims at face value, and then criticize them rather than questioning them:

https://peoples-things.ghost.io/youre-doing-it-wrong-notes-on-criticism-and-technology-hype/

AI criti-hype might ask what we'll do once AI takes all our jobs, or what we'll do when AI replaces the government or teachers or doctors, or what we'll do when AI can bypass our critical faculties and brainwash us or drive us all mad.

What do you say to that? I usually start by talking about whether there's any economic basis for keeping the AI servers running. AI is – by far – the money-losingest venture in human history, and it's practically impossible to overstate just how bad the AI business is. Not only does AI have terrible unit economics, those unit economics are getting worse over time:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/05/26/the-ai-will-continue/#until-morale-improves

AI's happiest customers cite cost-benefit calculations that depend on truly unimaginable subsidies from the AI companies, who are basically selling $100 bills for $5 apiece. It would be pretty amazing if you couldn't find people who'd extol the virtues of this arrangement. But when AI companies try to raise the price of those $100 bills to, say, $20 apiece, those ecstatic customers fly into a rage and start loudly proclaiming that AI is so inefficient that they will lose money on this arrangement:

https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/markets/uber-ceo-says-other-execs-are-lying-about-ai-they-say-it-ll-be-fine-publicly-but-privately-admit-millions-of-jobs-are-gone/ar-AA1Z9QMv

Now, it shouldn't fall to me, a card-carrying member of the Democratic Socialists of America, to point out that capitalist enterprises require profits to be sustainable. You can't keep a business afloat by selling $100 bills for $5, nor for $20. You can't even make a profit selling $100 bills for $100 apiece! For a company to succeed, it needs to take in more than it expends.

AI is a money-furnace, and AI hustlers are clearly on the hunt for a way to force all of us to feed every dime we've got to it. Elon Musk's (now scuttled) gambit to make every pension saver in America bail out Grok (and Twitter, but at a mere $44b, the losses from Twitter are dwarfed by the titanic losses from Grok) was the most ambitious and shameless population-scale bag-holder scheme, but it's not the only one:

https://www.reuters.com/business/finance/sp-global-keeps-fast-entry-proposal-unchanged-spacex-listing-looms-2026-06-04/

So before we ask about the capabilities AI will acquire in the future, we should at least give some consideration to the question of whether anyone will be willing to fund the development of those capabilities, and if so, where the money would come from? Likewise, before we ask whether AI can perform adequately in a job, we should at least consider the possibility that the company that sells that AI tool will be bankrupt in a year or two. When we fight about data-center buildout, we mostly talk about the (considerable) environmental downsides to them – but what about the question of what we will do with these data-centers after their owners go bankrupt, possibly even before they can be provisioned with electricity? How many laser-tag arenas do we actually need?

This is just one example of the questions that you could spend days unpacking, which make many of the other questions about AI a little silly. Like, even if you think there are limitless returns to scale for creating new AI capabilities, which means that if we keep the money-furnace burning it's only a matter of time until it powers a cure for cancer and the end of the climate emergency, how much money do we need to shovel into the furnace before that happens, and where will it come from? There are plenty of cancer researchers who have promising approaches they haven't been able to pursue due to funding shortfalls.

Unless there's some way to estimate how much money we have to give to AI companies before they cure cancer, we should at least consider the possibility that the true sum is "more money than exists now and that will ever exist." We should also consider that whatever benefits to cancer research that AI might deliver could come with a higher price-tag than the promising cancer research we're dropping because we can't find far more modest sums.

Likewise, it may be that the amount of CO2 that AI will generate before it "solves climate change" will render Earth permanently unfit for humans, consuming the only habitable planet capable of sustaining human life in the known universe. I mean, I suppose that's one way to "solve" climate change, but it's a pretty drastic solution.

My next book (out later this month) is The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI. I wrote it because I was frustrated by other people demanding that I talk to them about AI, and then offering me 800 words or 13 minutes to address fifty nebulous, poorly supported claims about AI:

https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374621568/thereversecentaursguidetolifeafterai/

Shortly after writing the book, I turned it into a lecture:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/12/05/pop-that-bubble/#u-washington

Now that I'm about to go out on the road with the book, I find myself frustrated anew by the need to try and pull together a compact way to address the broad, incoherent claims the industry uses to keep its bubble inflated and the money furnaces roaring. The series of essays I've developed here on Pluralistic are part of that effort:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/05/27/unnecessariat/#rubbuts-stole-my-jerb

But it occurred to me that this whole enterprise of making sense of AI needs to be framed in the context of the messiness of AI itself, and AI boosters' overwhelming, promiscuous and disjointed Gish Gallop.

Hey look at this (permalink)


A shelf of leatherbound history books with a gilt-stamped series title, 'The World's Famous Events.'

Object permanence (permalink)

#20yrsago UK Parliament report damns DRM, calls for limits https://web.archive.org/web/20060615115510/http://www.openrightsgroup.org/2006/06/05/launch-of-the-apig-report-on-drm/

#20yrsago Colbert’s Knox College commencement speech https://web.archive.org/web/20111228135413/http://departments.knox.edu/newsarchive/news_events/2006/x12547.html

#15yrsago Counterfeiting can be good for luxury goods sales https://web.archive.org/web/20110602061646/http://www.slate.com/id/2294927/

#15yrsago HOWTO make a Joule Thief and get all the power you’ve paid for https://www.instructables.com/Make-a-Joule-Thief/

#15yrsago School suspends student for refusing to remove personal animation from YouTube, threatens other students for petitioning on his behalf https://web.archive.org/web/20110603041200/https://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/national/toronto/student-cites-freedom-of-speech-after-suspension-for-online-videos/article2043954/

#5yrsago Recommendation engines and "lean-back" media https://pluralistic.net/2021/06/05/lean-back/#lean-forward

Upcoming appearances (permalink)

A photo of me onstage, giving a speech, pounding the podium.


A screenshot of me at my desk, doing a livecast.

Recent appearances (permalink)


A grid of my books with Will Stahle covers..

Latest books (permalink)


A cardboard book box with the Macmillan logo.

Upcoming 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/)

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

  • "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

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


Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources:

Currently writing: "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. Third draft completed. Submitted to editor.

  • "The Reverse Centaur's Guide to AI," a short book for Farrar, Straus and Giroux about being an effective AI critic. LEGAL REVIEW AND COPYEDIT COMPLETE.

  • "The Post-American Internet," a short book about internet policy in the age of Trumpism. PLANNING.

  • 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.

https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Quotations and images are not included in this license; they are included either under a limitation or exception to copyright, or on the basis of a separate license. Please exercise caution.

How to get Pluralistic:

Blog (no ads, tracking, or data-collection):

Pluralistic.net

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ISSN: 3066-764X

Received — 6 July 2023 ⏭ Activism

Is AI Art Real Art?

✇OneZero - Medium
By: Amelia Winger-Bearskin
19 April 2022 at 16:48

Millions of images generated with code have fueled the engine of a new economy. But modern art has been associated with a lot of shenanigans over the years — is AI art the dawn of a new era, or the art world’s latest prank?

an image generated by Midjourney, from a prompt written by the author, about turning computers into moss, 2023

Generative Art uses techniques from Machine Learning and Machine Vision to generate images. And it has produced a lot of headlines around the subject of what is and isn’t real art.

To me, the answer is clear: AI-generated art is art. Of course, it is. It follows a recipe and has inputs and outputs. Developing the recipe is art, and using the recipe to bring something new into the world is also art. They’re both art. Why is this controversial?

I imagine it’s because, when most people think of art, they’re picturing the little reproductions of famous paintings like you find on mugs– water lilies, sunflowers, the Mona Lisa. They’re remembering works they’ve seen as school children, on slideshows and in textbooks. Most people know far less about “modern art,” and the word has become a synonym for abrasive, nonsensical, ugly, or for some other reason, unlovable.

But you can draw a line from today’s generative art straight back to the very beginning of modern art: Marcel Duchamp. You may know him as “the guy who put a urinal in a gallery and called it art.” That is correct. He forced new ways of looking at the objects that are all around us– shovels, math textbooks, bicycle wheels, chimney ventilators– which he termed “ready-mades.”

In the early part of the twentieth century, many of these prefabricated items were new enough to feel unfamiliar and strange. At the same time, they were quickly becoming so ubiquitous as to be all but invisible.

Duchamp’s ready-made pieces brought these objects to view in a new way, and caused audiences to ask new questions, such as: Is this even art? What am I looking at? What did the artist actually do here? What is “a work of art” anyway? And should we not maybe restrict the definition a bit?

an image generated by Midjourney, prompt by the author around turning computers into moss, 2023

Artists have been probing these same questions for at least a century now. The consensus seems to be: we should not restrict the definition of art; we should expand it. Art doesn’t even need to have a physical form — it can be completely immaterial. What matters is the decisions the artist makes, how the public interacts with it, and what it means to the community and culture from which it springs.

In AI-generated art, it might seem like the computer is making all the decisions. It may be that the artist doesn’t understand everything the algorithm is doing. (The developers who coded it probably wouldn’t say they understand everything that happens inside these processes.) But nothing at all will happen without an input from someone. That’s the point where you’ll find the art– when a person calculates how to weight their ML models, or makes decisions about training data, or makes any other choices about how to initiate the process.

Some object that tools available to make this kind of work seem “to do all the work.” Their output is difficult to predict, and they seem to have minds of their own. Before an artist can make interesting decisions with such a tool, they’d have to spend years studying and gaining proficiency in a whole new technology. Critics, curators, and the art-going public, in general, would have to develop new ways of interacting with the work, and new criteria to look for in it. A new art form will form new art. When has it been any different?

To see more generative ‘art’ you can check out my portfolio at https://studioamelia.com or in the metaverse at https:/oncyber.io/studioamelia

Is AI Art Real Art? was originally published in OneZero on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

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