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Received yesterday — 20 October 2026 ⏭ Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow

Pluralistic: The death of history's most successful publisher (20 Oct 2026)

✇Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
By: Cory Doctorow
20 October 2026 at 19:24


Today's links


A haunted burial ground by a lake, with a bat flying overhead. A haint in a shroud floats over the scene, its face is the Google Android droid. The sole, listing tombstone reads 'I'm feeling lucky.'

The death of history's most successful publisher (permalink)

I published my first story in 1988, when I was 17 years old. Today, at 55, I've published more than 30 books, with three more coming in the next year or so. In the intervening years, I've spent a lot of time thinking and talking about publishing.

I've had plenty of opportunity to reflect on publishing: I've been a bookseller and worked in libraries, I wrote a column for Publishers Weekly, self-published a few books of my own, published the first-ever book licensed under Creative Commons, and broke several Kickstarter records for audiobook projects. But most of all, I've worked with publishing professionals: publicists, marketing directors, operations people, copyeditors, and, above all, editors.

My first novel editor was the magnificent Patrick Nielsen Hayden, who supported my publishing career from the very start, donating to help send me to the Clarion science fiction writers' workshop and inviting me to come read slush at Tor Books whenever I was in New York. Patrick didn't teach me everything I know about publishing, but he sure taught me a lot about publishing, and hardly a day goes by without my having cause to reflect on one of our many discussions over our decades-long professional and personal association.

Out of all the things I learned about publishing from Patrick, one truth stands out above all: publishing is "the act of making something public." Publishing may or may not involve editing, layout, printing, binding, marketing or other activities that we associate with publishing houses, but publishing always involves identifying a work, identifying an audience, and finding ways to connect that work to that audience.

This definition does a lot of useful work. For one thing, it locates publishing as part of the hard problem of human society, namely, "getting people to care about something that matters to you." Beyond publishing, this is the crux of politics, religion and commerce:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/07/04/self-publishing/

For another, this definition lets us understand that (for most of its existence) Google was the most successful publisher in human history. No other institution of any kind connected more works with more audiences. Lots of people have heard of Google's wildly unsuccessful motto "Don't be evil," but far fewer are familiar with Google's wildly successful mission statement, "organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful."

But all of that is in the past tense. With its AI projects – AI summaries, the Gemini chatbot – Google has abandoned the practice of "connecting works with audiences." Today, Google's function is to plunder all the works on the internet and chop them up and arrange them in an unimaginably vast, multidimensional array for the explicit purpose of preventing audiences from connecting with those works.

For most of its history, Google operated in a virtuous cycle with publishers whereby they allowed Google to crawl their sites and Google located audiences and connected them with the pages on those sites. Today, that cycle has turned vicious, with Google acting as a parasite that extracts value from the web's publishers and offers nothing in return.

This is entirely in keeping with the enshittification hypothesis: that once a platform is liberated from the disciplining forces of competition, regulation, labor and interoperability, it will squeeze its suppliers and users and harvest all the value for itself:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/21/potemkin-ai/#hey-guys

But AI represents a new phase in enshittification. Google has assayed enshittificatory gambits in the past, like deliberately worsening its search results in order to force you to search repeatedly, which gave the company more chances to show you ads:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/24/naming-names/#prabhakar-raghavan

But as sleazy as those gambits were, they were profitable. In some important sense, they were sustainable. Assuming Google could carry on indefinitely scamming its users in this way, they'd continue to bring in more cash than they spent, and continue to be the world's most successful publisher, connecting works and audiences (albeit in a deliberately degraded way).

Contrast this with AI, the money-losingest endeavor in the history of human civilization. Google is losing hundreds of billions of dollars on AI. The more AI Google does, the worse the company's financial footing becomes. If Google does this for long enough, it may cease to exist altogether. This collapse can only be prolonged by Google's ongoing extraction of value from web publishers, who no longer have their works connected with audiences via Google search results. Instead, Google usurps those audiences, shows them as many ads as it can, and still loses money in the bargain.

In Tim Wu's Age of Extraction, Wu lays out a thesis about how intermediaries – middlemen who perform a useful function connecting different groups, firms and individuals – are prone to developing "main character syndrome," abandoning their role as facilitators for others and abusing their position to make themselves the prime beneficiary of the transactions they facilitate:

https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/691177/the-age-of-extraction-by-tim-wu/

Google has a scorching case of main character syndrome, and nowhere is that more obvious than in its AI-fueled transformation into web-scale parasite. The fact that this gambit might well destroy Google and the publishers the company once served – rather than merely enshittifying search with worse results and more ads – makes the whole thing look more like a Mafia bust-out than the enshittification of the first half of the 2020s:

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

It's certainly an ignominious end for history's most successful publisher (as was).

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 Reenacting the Civil War with 44,000 ceramic cats in handmade uniforms https://web.archive.org/web/20011021022729/http://www.phillyburbs.com/intelligencerrecord/news/news_intell/1332513.htm

#20yrsago More on publishing and “okaysellers” https://www.nielsenhayden.com/makinglight/bestsellers_oka/#008116

#15yrsago HOWTO make a Frankenstein hat https://web.archive.org/web/20111022194802/http://deliacreates.blogspot.com/2011/10/hey-frankie.html

#15yrsago Copyright policy in the UK: an evidence-free zone https://www.openrightsgroup.org/publications/cant-look-now-finding-film-online/

#15yrsago Clockwork Fagin on Escape Pod https://delivery-edge.libsyn.com/shows/18601/items/1737698/EP315_ClockworkFagin.mp3

#10yrsago At long last, America’s racist, crazy tough-on-crime prosecutors are losing elections https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2828803

#5yrsago Imperfections in your Bluetooth beacons allow for unstoppable tracking https://pluralistic.net/2021/10/21/sidechannels/#ble-eding

#1yrago Carl Hiaasen's 'Fever Beach' https://pluralistic.net/2025/10/21/florida-duh/#strokerz-for-liberty

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 Post-American Internet," a geopolitical sequel of sorts to Enshittification, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2027

  • "Unauthorized Bread": a middle-grades graphic novel adapted from my novella about refugees, toasters and DRM, FirstSecond, April 20, 2027

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

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


Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources:

Currently writing:

  • “Once Is Enemy Action,” a science fiction novel about the origins of modern technofascism. Today's words: 514 (27116 total).

  • "The Post-American Internet," a sequel to "Enshittification," about the better world the rest of us get to have now that Trump has torched America. Fourth draft completed. Submitted to editor.

  • A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING

This work – excluding any serialized fiction – is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license. That means you can use it any way you like, including commercially, provided that you attribute it to me, Cory Doctorow, and include a link to pluralistic.net.

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

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

https://pluralistic.net/plura-list

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https://mamot.fr/@pluralistic

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https://bsky.app/profile/doctorow.pluralistic.net

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https://doctorow.medium.com/

Tumblr (mass-scale, unrestricted, third-party surveillance and advertising):

https://mostlysignssomeportents.tumblr.com/tagged/pluralistic

"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 — 16 October 2026 ⏭ Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow

Pluralistic: Load-bearing (16 Oct 2026)

✇Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
By: Cory Doctorow
16 October 2026 at 08:40


Today's links


A detail from Dore's engraving of Samson destroying the temple, depicting tumbling classical columns. Amid the columns, wreaking havoc, are three sf pulp magazine robots.

Load-bearing (permalink)

You find the weirdest stuff inside your walls. Our house was built in 1949 and we're its third owner, and I have no idea what those other people were doing, but at one point someone installed a junction box full of live, bare wires that they filled with crumpled newspaper (!); and don't get me started on the decision not to put vapor barriers in the kitchen windows (we were one good shake away from the entire front of the house falling down when we discovered that one, and while it cost us an extra $19,000 to fix, that was still cheaper than rebuilding the whole front of the house).

Plus there was the unpermitted drainage system installed down the side of the house that must have attracted some (undocumented) planning inspector negativity; at least, that's the only reason I can think of for someone to have filled those drains with concrete (!!), a fact we discovered during the first heavy rainfall after moving in, when the water rose to shin-height (!!!).

But the weirdest and most nerve-wracking mysteries were the "structural" members of dubious quality, placement and utility. Some of them only seemed to be holding stuff up, but on closer inspection turned out to be free-floating 2x4s, not anchored to anything. On more than one occasion, our builders have moved jacks into position and removed those random uprights, only to discover that they weren't holding anything up.

Say what you will about this method, but it is decisive: if you remove a vertical member and nothing falls down, you can be pretty sure that wasn't a load-bearing member.

(This is a metaphor about AI.)

You can be forgiven for rolling your eyes when the subject of "digital sovereignty" comes up. Rhetorically, "digital sovereignty" is a coded way for a politician to say, "We should build a fuckton of AI data-centers while bypassing any environmental review":

https://datacentremagazine.com/technology-and-ai/keir-starmers-2bn-pledge-how-the-uk-plans-to-advance-ai

But AI has nothing to do with digital sovereignty. It is not load-bearing. All it takes to understand this is a little thought-experiment. Imagine that we removed all the chatbots from Canada, or the UK, or the EU, or the USA. What would fall down?

Nothing important.

Every public administrative body – national, regional and local – would continue to function. Every firm – large and small – would continue to trade. Households would be unscathed, save for their youngest members, who would suffer the indignity and tedium of having to do their own homework again.

Which is not to say that "digital sovereignty" is a nothingburger. The walls of our nations are filled with load-bearing digital members. It's just that these are the most boring, regular-degular-ass technologies imaginable.

Like Microsoft Office 365. Take away M365 and every ministry collapses, every firm shutters, and many if not most households will be in serious trouble.

And here's the thing: Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella paid $1m out of his own pocket to join the murderer's row of tech CEOs who sat behind Trump on the inaugural dais:

https://apnews.com/article/trump-inauguration-tech-billionaires-zuckerberg-musk-wealth-0896bfc3f50d941d62cebc3074267ecd

Microsoft donated $10 million to Trump's Epstein Memorial Ballroom:

https://www.geekwire.com/2026/leaked-list-shows-what-microsoft-amazon-and-other-tech-giants-are-giving-for-the-white-house-ballroom/

Microsoft provides the back-end administrative infrastructure for Trump's racist pogroms (take away M365 and ICE would collapse):

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/feb/17/ice-microsoft-technology-immigration-crackdown

The CEO of Microsoft France admitted that if Trump ordered the company to spy on French citizens' data (or the data of the French government), his company would comply, in secret:

https://www.forbes.com/sites/emmawoollacott/2025/07/22/microsoft-cant-keep-eu-data-safe-from-us-authorities/

And here's the kicker: Microsoft has terminated the M365 and Outlook access of international public officials whose official acts made Trump angry, starting with the Chief Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court, who lost his accounts after he swore out the genocide warrant for Netanyahu:

https://www.computerweekly.com/opinion/Microsofts-ICC-email-block-reignites-European-data-sovereignty-concerns

This is a white-hot, 278-alarm digital sovereignty dumpster-fire. M365 – as well as cloud software from Oracle, Google, Apple, Amazon and other US tech giants that have fused themselves with the Trump regime in exchange for tax breaks and antitrust forbearance – is load-bearing, and worse, those 2x4s are filled with termites and dry-rot.

Digital sovereignty is as real as real can be. It just has nothing to do with AI. AI isn't load-bearing. Boring-ass tech monopolist cloud software is…and we can not trust it:

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

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 Anthrax terrorist's handwriting https://web.archive.org/web/20011017003926/http://dailynews.yahoo.com/h/p/nm/20011016/ts/mdf70100.html

#20yrsago Help find stolen WEB GEEK license plate https://web.archive.org/web/20061017222733/https://www.backupbrain.com/2006_10_15_archive.html#a004964#a004964

#15yrsago UK media swallowed the “adult content” filter line https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2011/oct/17/adult-content-filters-good-parenting

#10yrsago Arizona Republic editor responds to death threats following Clinton endorsement https://eu.azcentral.com/story/opinion/2016/10/16/publisher-response-to-threats-after-republic-endorsement-clinton-trump/92058964/

#5yrsago Against the great forces of history https://pluralistic.net/2021/10/17/against-the-great-forces-of-history/

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 Post-American Internet," a geopolitical sequel of sorts to Enshittification, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2027

  • "Unauthorized Bread": a middle-grades graphic novel adapted from my novella about refugees, toasters and DRM, FirstSecond, April 20, 2027

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

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


Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources:

Currently writing:

  • “Once Is Enemy Action,” a science fiction novel about the origins of modern technofascism. Today's words: 503 (26039 total).

  • "The Post-American Internet," a sequel to "Enshittification," about the better world the rest of us get to have now that Trump has torched America. Fourth draft completed. Submitted to editor.

  • A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING

This work – excluding any serialized fiction – is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license. That means you can use it any way you like, including commercially, provided that you attribute it to me, Cory Doctorow, and include a link to pluralistic.net.

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

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

https://pluralistic.net/plura-list

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

https://mamot.fr/@pluralistic

Bluesky (no ads, possible tracking and data-collection):

https://bsky.app/profile/doctorow.pluralistic.net

Medium (no ads, paywalled):

https://doctorow.medium.com/

Tumblr (mass-scale, unrestricted, third-party surveillance and advertising):

https://mostlysignssomeportents.tumblr.com/tagged/pluralistic

"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 — 7 October 2026 ⏭ Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow

Pluralistic: Disloyalty (07 Oct 2026)

✇Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
By: Cory Doctorow
7 October 2026 at 15:58


Today's links


A 1970s Air Canada ad depicting a man in a brown velour pullover with a large collar sitting in a book-lined study, assembling model Air Canada jets on his desk. His head has been replaced with the blue, metallic head of a 1950s pulp robot and his skintones have been shifted blue to match.

Disloyalty (permalink)

Up until very recently indeed, airlines were the only businesses that I dealt with regularly that practiced "price discrimination," charging different customers different prices for the same seats.

Economists broadly like this "second-order" price discrimination, where a company charges customers different prices based on the circumstances of the purchase, such as a bakery discounting bread at the end of the day. When an airline cranks up the price of an itinerary that doesn't include a Saturday stay, they're using that fact as a proxy for "price-insensitive" business travelers whose bosses can afford to pay more for a ticket, rather than paying a worker overtime to spend a weekend away from home after a meeting.

Despite the arguments about "efficiency," it's safe to say that *fliers* hate this. The airlines' pricing algorithms are so opaque and capricious that anyone who buys a ticket at *any* price inevitably feels like they got a bad deal. This situation is only exacerbated by the airlines' extreme and aggressive secrecy over their pricing strategies, which includes lawsuits against websites that use historical pricing data to predict when a plane ticket will be the cheapest to buy:

https://www.eff.org/document/preliminary-injunction-american-airlines-v-farechase-inc

When a company wants the government to intervene to prohibit third parties from publishing factual information about its prices, that's a bad look. Hard to believe that they're so sure that you, the customer, will be delighted by these pricing tactics that they can't bear to have these third parties ruin the surprise.

But this second-order discrimination is *so* 20th century. Here in the 21st century, we have *first-order* price discrimination, in which AI-powered pricing algorithms use commercial surveillance data about *you*, personally, to predict the highest price you're willing to pay. In this world of "surveillance pricing," every traveler (or customer) sees a different price, in a kind of cod-Marxist dystopia whose motto is "from each according to their ability (to pay), to each according to their (desperate) needs":

https://pluralistic.net/2025/01/11/socialism-for-the-wealthy/#rugged-individualism-for-the-poor

Airlines *love* this kind of pricing, and they have means, motive and opportunity to practice it. All over the world, airlines have acquired or entered into joint ventures with surveillance pricing companies. These deals put the airlines on the horns of a dilemma: they love to boast to their shareholders about the way that surveillance pricing will let them gouge fliers, but inevitably the public finds out about these investor calls and breaks out the pitchforks and torches.

This triggers embarrassing climbdowns, like Delta's fiasco of summer 2025, when CEO Ed Bastian bragged to shareholders that his deal with the Israeli surveillance pricing company Fetcherr would boost profits by 50% (!) by figuring out which customers could be safely gouged. When fliers, civil society groups and members of Congress got wind of this and raised a ruckus, Fetcherr publicly disavowed Bastian's remarks, insisting that it wasn't even capable of the kind of price-fixing he'd promised. Then Delta launched a smear campaign against its critics, claiming that Bastian never said the thing he *absolutely said* and accusing surveillance pricing activists of peddling "misinformation":

https://groundworkcollaborative.org/news/amid-deltas-ai-pricing-scheme-groundwork-applauds-congressional-action-to-crack-down-on-surveillance-pricing-schemes/

Meanwhile, airlines all over the world have quietly switched their frequent flier reward programs from "mileage-based" rewards to "revenue-based" rewards. That means that you get points and status based on how much you spend on your ticket, not how far you fly. What may not be obvious from this move is that it forces frequent fliers to buy their tickets directly from the airlines, who claim that they can't tell how much you've spent on your ticket otherwise.

So tickets bought on sites like Expedia or through travel agents often qualify for insultingly small points awards, or no points at all. For example, British Airways once gave me *12 points* on a $2,000 Alaska Air ticket because I didn't buy it through British Airways' site (attaining BA's gold status requires *50,000* points).

Forcing frequent fliers to buy their tickets directly from the airline's website sets things up beautifully for surveillance-driven, first-order price discrimination. Airlines you do business with regularly can augment the personal information you provide to them and the data they collect from you with sensitive information purchased from the unregulated data-broker industry, which will cheerfully disclose your salary, credit card debts, or even if you've recently lost a parent and might be flying out for a funeral.

The airlines strenuously deny that they're doing this, of course, but they continue to make investor-facing announcements about their exciting deals with surveillance pricing companies…and things are getting *weird* for frequent travelers.

Thanks to a lot of book-related travel over the past couple of years, I have "Elite" status with Air Canada. Yesterday, I needed to book a last-minute, one-way fare on a route that is only serviced by Air Canada (AC enjoys a monopoly over many Canadian routes, even between major Canadian cities). I checked it out on Google Flights and found a fare for the eye-watering sum of USD829.73.

Now, my normal daily-use browser is Firefox, but I know from long experience that I can't log in to my Air Canada frequent flier account on any browser except Chromium, which I keep installed on my system for just this kind of hostile garbage website. So I tabbed over to Chromium and pasted the Google Flights outbound link that would take me to a pre-populated reservation form on aircanada.com. To my amazement, that same flight was showing as a USD1200 fare!

These were identical trips, loaded via identical referrer URLs. The difference was that in the browser where Air Canada knew that I was an extremely loyal and prolific customer, they had whacked me with a *44.8% premium* to punish me for my loyalty!

I couldn't believe it. I actually called Air Canada's customer service line for "Elite" fliers, and the customer service rep was at a loss for an explanation and could only apologise and suggest that I write a letter to the company.

I'm publishing this instead, because a) this will do more to punish Air Canada for trying to screw me over; and b) this can help you book your tickets in the future.

Yesterday, I finished buying the ticket in my logged-out Firefox window (Air Canada's website will work with Firefox to buy tickets provided you don't try to log in to your Aeroplan account first), paying $829. Then I flipped back to Chromium, where I was still logged into my Air Canada Aeroplan account, located the reservation, and added my frequent flier number to it.

I guess this is how I'm buying my plane tickets from now on.

Hey look at this (permalink)

* PM Mark Carney pledged to ‘Buy Canadian.’ Since then, $7.8 billion in contracts went to American corporations https://archive.is/zDBfX#selection-3576.0-3576.3

* Tracing the rogue ideology of the frontier labs to their product choices https://buttondown.com/apperceptive/archive/tracing-the-rogue-ideology-of-the-frontier-labs/

* Have you heard of the term "enshittification?" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nJ5V3pk6PEA&t=1220s

* Window display at TYPE Books Toronto to honour David Byrne’s new book https://stopmakingsense.info/window-display-at-type-books-toronto-to-honour-david-byrnes-new-book/

* Red Vienna Is Still Alive https://www.thenation.com/article/society/vienna-public-housing-urban-cities/


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

Object permanence (permalink)

#20yrsago Indie booksellers in the age of the Internet https://web.archive.org/web/20061026112859/https://www.wired.com/news/wireservice/1,71924-0.html

#10yrsago Wells Fargo whistleblower describes bank’s culture of blackballing threats and coerced corruption https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2016/10/07/497084491/episode-728-the-wells-fargo-hustle

#10yrsago Coca-Cola is paying dietitians to tweet scare-stories about soda taxes https://medium.com/cokeleak/is-coke-paying-dietitians-to-tweet-against-soda-tax-12d130d73b9a#.dw8udqccy

#10yrsago What it’s like to register to vote in states with voter suppression law https://www.bbc.com/news/election-us-2016-37569855

#5yrsago Facebook shouldn't be in charge of how you use Facebook https://pluralistic.net/2021/10/08/unfollow-everything/#shut-the-zuck-up

Upcoming appearances (permalink)

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

* Hudson, OH: Hudson Library, Oct 7
https://engagedpatrons.org/EventsExtended.cfm?SiteID=3850&EventID=596952&PK=

* Calgary: Wordfest, Oct 8
https://wordfest.com/2026/show/wordfest-presents-cory-doctorow-2026/

* Winnipeg: McNally Robinson, Oct 9
https://www.mcnallyrobinson.com/event-18991/An-Evening-with-Cory-Doctorow

* Paris: Slow Tech Summit, Oct 15
https://slowtechsummit.com/

* Vancouver: Read, Resist, Repair, Rejoice (Vancouver Writers Festival), Oct 19
https://writersfest.bc.ca/festival-event-2026/01

* Victoria: Munro's Books, Oct 20
https://www.munrobooks.com/events/6113620261020

* Vancouver: Life After AI (Vancouver Writers Festival), Oct 22
https://writersfest.bc.ca/festival-event-2026/46

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

Recent appearances (permalink)

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

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

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

* How to Think About AI—Before It’s Too Late (Daniel Solove)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_0xR3uEgGcc

* Could Tech Bosses Destroy Life As We Know It? (Politics JOE)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PL4VktU0SgY


A grid of my books with Will Stahle covers..

Latest books (permalink)

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

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

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

* "Picks and Shovels": a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about the heroic era of the PC, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), February 2025 (https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250865908/picksandshovels).

* "The Bezzle": a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about prison-tech and other grifts, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), February 2024 (thebezzle.org).

* "The Lost Cause:" a solarpunk novel of hope in the climate emergency, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), November 2023 (http://lost-cause.org).

* "The Internet Con": A nonfiction book about interoperability and Big Tech (Verso) September 2023 (http://seizethemeansofcomputation.org). Signed copies at Book Soup (https://www.booksoup.com/book/9781804291245).

* "Red Team Blues": "A grabby, compulsive thriller that will leave you knowing more about how the world works than you did before." Tor Books http://redteamblues.com.

* "Chokepoint Capitalism: How to Beat Big Tech, Tame Big Content, and Get Artists Paid, with Rebecca Giblin", on how to unrig the markets for creative labor, Beacon Press/Scribe 2022 https://chokepointcapitalism.com


A cardboard book box with the Macmillan logo.

Upcoming books (permalink)

* "The Post-American Internet," a geopolitical sequel of sorts to *Enshittification*, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2027

* "Unauthorized Bread": a middle-grades graphic novel adapted from my novella about refugees, toasters and DRM, FirstSecond, April 20, 2027

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

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


Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources:

Currently writing:

* “Once Is Enemy Action,” a science fiction novel about the origins of modern technofascism. Today's words: 529 (22924 total).

* "The Post-American Internet," a sequel to "Enshittification," about the better world the rest of us get to have now that Trump has torched America. Fourth draft completed. Submitted to editor.

* A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING

This work – excluding any serialized fiction – is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license. That means you can use it any way you like, including commercially, provided that you attribute it to me, Cory Doctorow, and include a link to pluralistic.net.

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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https://pluralistic.net/plura-list

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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 — 6 October 2026 ⏭ Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow

Pluralistic: Swapping money for expertise (06 Oct 2026)

✇Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
By: Cory Doctorow
6 October 2026 at 14:58


Today's links


The First Bank of Chicago, a Grecian temple to money. It is surrounded by flames. A skeleton in academic robes and mortarboards has been lynched from its roof. In the foreground are banded packages of US $100 bills.

Swapping money for expertise (permalink)

Since the mid-1950s, we have changed the thing that "AI" refers to every 5-10 years. The current thing we're calling "AI" is about a decade old, and all this label-switching leads to a lack of clarity as to what (this) "AI" is. Unless you know that, you can't understand AI's technical capabilities, limitations, and (most of all) its political economy.

The thing we now call "AI" is a lineal descendant of the thing we were calling "AI" immediately before the current "AI" emerged: that preceding AI is regular-degular "machine learning" (another flexible term, alas!). That slightly older AI was very similar to the current "AI", using comparable statistical techniques to analyze inputs and produce outputs. For example, the previous "AI" created the social media algorithms that have been the subject of so much discussion for 15+ years.

The difference is that this older AI was grounded in explicit, causal software models of the world. In the previous "AI" iteration, applying machine learning to playing chess required that a programmer first create a software model of a chess game, describing (in code) a chessboard, chess pieces, and the rules of chess. Then, the programmer fed a bunch of training data about chess games that had been played before to an "AI" system that analyzed their statistical relations and assayed chess moves.

The need to understand and describe a thing before you could apply "AI" to it is a bottleneck, because it requires programmers to understand how a thing works before they can incorporate it into an "AI" system. Lots of programmers know how to play chess, but far fewer understand the human pancreas, planetary weather systems, or patterns of mineral deposition in the Earth's crust.

For programmers to apply machine learning to these domains, they need to collaborate with experts who do understand them, who furthermore expect to be paid for this work. The need for expert input into this kind of "AI" represents a significant increase in the wage-bill paid by the programmer's employer: it means they have to pay for programmers and experts.

Even worse: this kind of "AI" can't be applied to systems we don't understand. We can observe far more causal relationships – instances in which A reliably causes B – in the universe than we can explain. There are lots of examples of us operationalizing these observations without understanding them. If you get sick today, your doctor might well prescribe one of the many medicines whose method of action is either incompletely understood or not understood at all. We know that molecule A reliably treats pathology B, but not why, and while that why is the subject of ongoing research, it's not necessary that the why be known before the molecule can be given to ailing patients.

But these mysterious phenomena are off-limits to "symbolic AI" (the previously ascendant kind of "AI," that was supplanted by today's "AI"). That kind of AI only really performs when it can operate over a model describing the theory of why A causes B (and not just the fact that A causes B for reasons unknown).

That's where the current kind of "AI" comes in. The major differentiator between the current "AI" and its immediate predecessor is that the current "AI" dispenses with models of reality. It is (in the jargon of the "Big Data" bubble that led to it) "theory-free."

In "theory-free AI," a programmer does not create a software model of reality and then ask a machine-learning system to use statistical insights from its training data to guess at how to operate over that model. Rather, the programmer shovels vastly more training data into the AI's inbox and uses titanic amounts of computing power to analyze that data and find statistical relationships without trying to explain them.

In other words, the current, "theory-free AI" finds all the instances in which A seems to cause B, but has no internal representation of why A causes B. This is true even when we know why A causes B! Purely theory-free chess programs don't operate with any conception of a board or pieces or rules – rather, they make guesses ("inferences" in AI-speak) about which chess move will be optimal based on vast, multi-dimensional arrays constructed by analyzing the statistical relationships between every chess move in their training data.

This yields a surprisingly good game of chess…until it doesn't. Because a theory-free statistical chess program doesn't "know" what a chessboard or a chess piece is and has no programmatic representation of the rules of chess, it will periodically move one of its pieces onto a square that is already occupied by another of its pieces.

When theory-free AI does this with language or image generation, we call it an "hallucination," but this is an extremely misleading metaphor. A biological "hallucination" involves some kind of misfire in your cognitive and/or sensory systems, often arising from chemical imbalances, intoxication, or neurological injury. When a theory-free AI puts a chess piece on a square where it already has a chess piece, that's because it's just extruding statistically founded guesses without any model or conception of what "chess" is. It's a feature, not a bug.

This is a very expensive way to make guesses! As far back as the 1950s, we were able to run conventional chess programs on computers built from vacuum tubes and electromechanical switches and these programs could play a valid game of chess without ever moving a chess piece to a square that one of its pieces already occupied. Modern theory-free AI that cannot manage this feat consumes heptillions of times more computing power.

That said, there's another case for theory-free AI: applying machine learning techniques to causal relationships we can observe but not explain. Remember, there are far more of these (as yet) unexplained causal relationships than there are perfectly understood ones. Theory-free AI can operate on these unexplained, observed phenomena in ways that the preceding (symbolic) AI can't. As anyone who's ever been successfully treated with a molecule whose method of action is partially or fully mysterious can attest, there's plenty of reasons to want to extract and operationalize these statistical relationships, even if we don't understand them.

The fact that theory-free AI can play chess but sometimes makes these weird errors makes it seem like a party-trick, but when you fold in the ability to operate on the (as yet) unexplained, you can see why people got interested in this about a decade ago.

What's more, the first bottleneck – the chess bottleneck – is most easily bypassed by adding the symbolic model back into the theory-free chess system. Today's "coding assistants" are hybridized in this way: they often integrate code interpreters or compilers that actually "know" what a computer program is and can head off many of these failure modes.

The introduction of these symbolic systems to theory-free systems is completely rational, and yet it represents an admission of a key limitation that theory-free AI cannot overcome. That limitation is both a technical fact, but even more importantly, it's a fact about theory-free AI's political economy: about the limitations of trading off expertise for money.

Because whatever else theory-free inference is, it is a way to swap the bottleneck of "before we can use a computer to help us do something, we need to find an expert who can explain how that thing works"; for a different bottleneck: "before we can use a computer to help us do something, we must spend an enormous amount of money on computing power to find statistical relationships between how things work."

Both money and expertise are scarce, but they are unevenly distributed. Expertise is almost entirely in the hands of people who aren't wealthy. However much money a billionaire has, they still have to hire people who have the "how to clean a toilet" or the "how to find seams of gold in quartz deposits" expertise. When that expertise is locally scarce (if there's only one person in town who know how to clean your toilet) or universally scarce (there's only one expert who can tell you which of your landholdings are likely to hold seams of gold) those experts have something that billionaires can't abide: power.

Our entire society is organized around converting money into power. Sometimes, that is overt, as when the wealthy can indenture or enslave a worker. Sometimes it is more indirect, as when the wealthy can enlist the state to limit union rights and enforce noncompete clauses in labor contracts. Sometimes it's so systemic as to be unremarkable and largely invisible, like the fact that the wealthy never have to work if they don't want to, but everyone else – no matter what expertise they hold – must work, usually for a wealthy person, lest they end up starving and homeless, with untreated medical conditions and no way to provide for their families.

Whenever a worker can say "no" to their boss, it's a sign that this system has broken down. This is where expertise comes in: a worker who has very scarce, in-demand expertise can say no to their boss all day long, because there are ten other bosses at the factory gates who'd like to offer them a job. This was the situation for many years among Silicon Valley engineers, who added an average of $1m/year to their bosses' turnover, and whose supply was very short of the demand for their rare expertise.

These engineers enjoyed all kinds of power. Not just power over their working conditions (free massages and kombucha and day care and dry cleaning), but also power over the company's products. This power crested in the late 2010s, when Google employees walked out en masse and forced the company to release them from binding arbitration waivers in their contracts, to crack down on sexual predators in the executive ranks, and to back out of billions of dollars in lethal drone projects for the Pentagon:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2018_Google_walkouts

The promise of theory-free inference isn't just about reducing the wage-bill associated with programmers: even more, it's about reducing their power. It's about removing their power to hold bosses to account for sexual assault and the power to withhold their labor from lethal military projects. In short, the power to thwart billionaires' desires.

AI is the money-losingest enterprise the human race has ever embarked upon. More than a trillion dollars has been spent this year to make a mere $50b in revenue. The technical excitement over AI's capabilities – from chess to gold-mining to treating pancreatic cancer – cannot be separated from the political excitement that billionaires (short on expertise, flush with cash) experience at the thought of swapping money for expertise and sidelining the only people in the world who can thwart their goals.

The fact that a theory-free AI might demand far more cash to accomplish a task (even a "solved" one like playing chess) than an expert would charge is beside the point. Billionaires have money, they don't have expertise. Theory-free inference is a bid to substitute one for the other: the beauty and terror of being able to manipulate the world without studying or understanding it is that it can be done with money alone. No experts needed.

In a world in thrall to financial power, expertise is the only substantial form of power that can reliably contest the power of wealth. Moreover, expertise is the foundation of other forms of power, such as labor power, which is what we call it when experts band together to combat financial power.

This is why AI bosses are so violently allergic to the idea of hybridizing AI with symbolic systems that operate on models of the world. These models of the world must be constructed by experts, and the power of expertise cannot be reliably commanded by the power of wealth.

This is even true when theory-free methods are applied to causal phenomena that we can observe without explaining. Sure, a pharma exec like Martin Shkreli or Arthur Sackler can command the production and sale of a molecule whose method of action isn't known but whose therapeutic value has been demonstrated. But to improve on that molecule, they must pay research scientists to study and unravel the method of action. Replace those experts with theory-free inference, and finance can emerge triumphant in the only forum in which it is routinely vanquished.

This is the political economy of theory-free AI. Without finance's infinite hostility to expertise, there would have been far less capital for theory-free AI. Experts who wanted to use theory-free AI to help them unravel and operationalize the causal universe could not have laid hands on the bales of $100 bills the industry is now shoveling into its money-furnaces at a rate never seen in human history.

Which is not to say that experts can't make good use of theory-free AI. Indeed, we frequently hear from skilled workers who are using "AI" to improve the quality of their outputs:

https://hrdag.org/tech-notes/large-language-models-IPNO.html

In automation parlance, these workers are "centaurs": workers who enlist technology to serve their needs. The centaur metaphor has the worker taking the role of the top half of the mythical man/horse, the half in which the judgment and decision-making takes place; while the bottom (horsey) half is given to the machine, providing strength, speed and stamina, but only at the direction of the human mind.

The unimaginable sums that oligarchs have committed to AI are mobilized in service to creating reverse centaurs: machines that enlist humans to serve them. If theory-free inference can substitute for expertise, then the humans the machines require to accomplish those tasks that elude computers will not have the power to set the pace of their work, insist upon humane working conditions, or reject work on unethical projects:

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

The joke's on the oligarchy, though. Because theory-free inference doesn't know about chessboards, chess pieces or the rules of chess, it can't be prevented from sometimes putting a chess piece on a square that's already occupied by one of its pieces. The "hallucinations" are intrinsic to and inextricable from theory-free inference, which means that the outputs of an "AI" can only be trusted if they can be evaluated by an expert, whose working tempo must be carefully modulated lest they fall prey to "automation blindness" (rapidly, repeatedly clicking "OK" until you lose the ability to spot mistakes):

https://pluralistic.net/2026/07/28/hitl-ers/#ai-ai-oh

Theory-free inference is technically and philosophically exciting: in their quest for a way to neutralize expertise with money, oligarchs inadvertently built a series of powerful scientific instruments that revealed a heretofore unsuspected degree of statistical regularity in the world:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/09/18/surprise/#wow-signal

But the remaining, stubbornly textured and rough edges of reality are where all the value is. The things we already understand about reality are, by definition, yesterday's news, and that's all a statistical model can do: project the past into the future. But everything exciting in the future is stuff we don't understand yet. The surprising functionality of theory-free AI is itself an example of this. The most interesting and valuable thing about theory-free AI isn't the things it can do, it's the systematic discovery and mapping of the statistically regular parts of reality, whose inverse provides a map of the irregular, surprising, poorly understood (and thus exciting and promising) phenomena in our universe.

Tomorrow's breakthroughs and fortunes lie not in merely operationalizing these causal relationships: they lie in understanding them. The point of theory-free inference is to give us the tools to replace that theory-freeness with testable, validated understanding.

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)

#15yrsago Tempo: transformative, difficult look at advanced decision-making theory https://memex.craphound.com/2011/10/07/tempo-transformative-difficult-look-at-advanced-decision-making-theory/

#10yrsago Internet shutdowns cost the world at least $2.4 billion last year https://www.brookings.edu/articles/internet-shutdowns-cost-countries-2-4-billion-last-year/

#10yrsago Youtube took down MEP’s videos about torture debate https://web.archive.org/web/20160701000000*/https://marietjeschaake.eu/en/when-youtube-took-down-my-video

#10yrsago Yahoo didn’t install an NSA email scanner, it was a “buggy” NSA “rootkit” https://web.archive.org/web/20161007140143/https://motherboard.vice.com/read/yahoo-government-email-scanner-was-actually-a-secret-hacking-tool

#10yrsago The FCC helped create the Stingray problem, now it needs to fix it https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2016/08/fcc-created-stingray-problem-now-it-needs-fix-it

#5yrsago Scottish Limited Partnerships are still laundering criminal millions https://pluralistic.net/2021/10/07/markets-in-everything/#if-its-not-scottish

#5yrsago "Inclusive Access" allows textbook monopolists to permanently consolidate their gains https://pluralistic.net/2021/10/07/markets-in-everything/#textbook-abuses

#5yrsago DoS a federal agency, then charge for access https://pluralistic.net/2021/10/07/markets-in-everything/#no-th-enq

#1yrago They're just trying to earn a buck https://pluralistic.net/2025/10/07/take-it-easy/#but-take-it

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 Post-American Internet," a geopolitical sequel of sorts to Enshittification, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2027

  • "Unauthorized Bread": a middle-grades graphic novel adapted from my novella about refugees, toasters and DRM, FirstSecond, April 20, 2027

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

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


Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources:

Currently writing:

  • “Once Is Enemy Action,” a science fiction novel about the origins of modern technofascism. Today's words: 513 (22395 total).

  • "The Post-American Internet," a sequel to "Enshittification," about the better world the rest of us get to have now that Trump has torched America. Fourth draft completed. Submitted to editor.

  • A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING

This work – excluding any serialized fiction – is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license. That means you can use it any way you like, including commercially, provided that you attribute it to me, Cory Doctorow, and include a link to pluralistic.net.

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 — 21 September 2026 ⏭ Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow

Pluralistic: The Claude Delusion (21 Sep 2026)

✇Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
By: Cory Doctorow
21 September 2026 at 13:24


Today's links

  • The Claude Delusion: What if we're the ones having hallucinations?
  • Hey look at this: Delights to delectate.
  • Object permanence: 9/11 v sex; 9/11 v flags; US customs v diplomatic Vegemite; CIA torture survivors speak; HP's inky timebomb; "The Raven" pop-up; Forex v Zimbabwe's internet; Shirky v "expert Wikipedia": McSweeney's v RIAA; Italy's internet disconnection law; Facehugger mask; "Goliath"; Netzpolitik v German surveillance; Ted Cruz v internet founders; Epipencil; Framework laptops; "The Actual Star;" Pilots tell passengers to tackle suspected terrorists; $2000 rotary phone; French DRM activists demand arrest; US child rearing costs up 40%; Calyx beats telcos; Wells Fargo whistleblower retaliation; David Graeber's "Mutual Aid"; Still censorship (even if it's not a First Amendment violation).
  • Upcoming appearances: Berkeley, Edmonton, Boston, South Bend, Hudson, Calgary, Winnipeg, Paris, Vancouver, Victoria, Ottawa, Kilkenny, Montreal.
  • Recent appearances: Where I've been.
  • Latest books: You keep readin' em, I'll keep writin' 'em.
  • Upcoming books: Like I said, I'll keep writin' 'em.
  • Colophon: All the rest.


Two cross-sectioned anatomical drawings of men's heads revealing their brains, which have been filled with marching robots from old pulp magazines. Their stare at one another with raw, exposed anatomical drawing eyeballs, which radiate a halo of spiky lines. The background is a psychedelic, fractal-shot colored cloudscape.

The Claude Delusion (permalink)

One of the less remarked-upon aspects of becoming an atheist is how it changes the way you see a sunset. If you believe in an almighty, omnipresent God, then sunsets are one of God's intentional creations, which means that the beautiful colors refracting through the darkling sky were chosen to produce that effect.

To gaze upon a sunset with religious faith is to encounter the intentional act of another mind. To gaze upon that same sunset without faith is to look upon something striking, beautiful, and yet empty; not empty of wonder or beauty, but empty of purpose. No one hung that sun in the sky, no one chose its colors as it sank. It may still be beautiful, but that's a fundamentally different kind of beauty.

There's a sunset that sits halfway between a religious sunset and an atheist sunset: an artist's depiction of a sunset. This represents the choices of another person, another mind, and at the very least, that mind was talking to itself, trying to take something from inside the mind and put it outside of the mind.

Very often, the mind that directed the capturing of the sunset wanted to say something to other people, perhaps even you (think of a loved one sending you a cameraphone picture of a sunset). That painting or photo may not be divine, but it is certainly intentional. To look upon a painting of a sunset – or even a photo of a sunset – is to look upon something someone chose to make. You don't slip and accidentally create a sunset painting. Sunset paintings aren't accidents. The sunset painting has something to say.

Figuring out intentions is our minds' reflexive preoccupation. It's what keeps us from dying in traffic, it's what lets us win at poker. It's the key to love and parenting, to effective management and "managing up." It's why we get mad at people, and why we forgive them. It's why our hearts race in sympathy with the characters in a book or on a screen. It's the automatic and irresistible starting point for every encounter with a poem, a song, a book or a sculpture. It's the most fundamental difference between a sculpture of a tree and a tree: the tree grew all on its own, while the sculpture was made, on purpose, by another person with another mind.

This reflex to attribute intention explains why AI is so controversial, so compelling, and so eerie. Mark Fisher defines eeriness as "when there is something present where there should be nothing, or if there is nothing present when there should be something":

https://www.programmablemutter.com/p/large-language-models-are-uncanny

To look upon an AI-generated text or image is to look upon a thing that was extruded, not chosen. You can slip and prompt an AI-generated image of a sunset, and it will embody no intentionality on anyone's part.

This isn't something we have any experience with. When we see a painting, we reflexively interpret it as having a painter. When we read a book, we reflexively impute auctorial intent to its words. When we converse, we reflexively form a theory about the mind directing the other half of the conversation.

But we can't do this with AI. Anyone who understands how the theory-free statistical inference systems we call "AI" (at this time) work will understand that they are systems that cannot form intent, that have nothing to form intent with:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/09/18/surprise/#wow-signal

Even so, it's hard (or perhaps impossible) to avoid the reflex to impute intention to things that seem to have intenders. Think of your autonomic, unavoidable emotional response to the fictional characters you encounter in literature. Feeling sorrow or joy for imaginary people is weird. They aren't real, and you know they aren't real, and yet you may find yourself moved to tears by their plight.

That aesthetic experience of literature arises from a consensual hack to our reflex to impute human minds to things that are typically the product of human intention. When we experience another person's will – their words or deeds – we try to figure out who they are, and how they feel, and why they act the way they do:

https://genius.com/David-byrne-and-ghost-train-orchestra-she-explains-things-to-me-lyrics

We do this even when we are confronted with just the evidence of others' words or deeds, as when a friend describes an encounter with a stranger. For your reflexive, intention-seeking mind, the author who describes the deeds of imaginary people is an irresistible signal to fire up the old empathy machine and start trying to put yourself in the skins of the people of the tale:

https://locusmag.com/feature/cory-doctorow-stories-are-a-fuggly-hack/

To "converse" with an AI is to carry on a dialog with a fictional character, who is no more real than the imaginary people in a novel. Indeed, the chatbot is less real than the character, because the character is the product of another mind, while the chatbot's words are the product of complex mathematical operations conducted over a massive database of all the words humans have uttered, arranged by their frequency in relation to one another. When that math makes something beautiful or striking, it's like a sunset: no matter how striking it is, it's empty. No one chose those colors. No one chose those words.

In other words, when we interact with an AI, we hallucinate the person on the other side of the interaction. Those hallucinations are far more common and far more consequential than any AI-generated "hallucinations" (these are more properly called "errors" or "defects").

Fortunately, for most of us, the intensity of these hallucinations fades over time, and as that intensity drops off, the character of those hallucinations changes, too. Just as most of us find it easy to set aside the emotions evoked by the plight of imaginary literary figures as having less salience and "realness" than the emotions we feel over the plight of real people we know, for most of us, the experience of AI-generated material has dimmed through repetition.

My first encounters with AI-generated text and images invoked wonder, arising from the tension between the part of my mind that knew this was the product of mathematical operations, and the part of my mind that insisted that a painting must have a painter, a paragraph must have a writer, and a conversation must have an interlocutor. Looking back on the wonder I felt then, I realize that it was largely driven by how good the output was relative to my expectations about how good mathematically-derived sentences and images could be.

The novelty of that experience drove me to grade the machine's output on a curve: "The wonder is not that the dancing bear dances well, it is that the bear dances at all." But with repetition, the stimulus has regressed to the mean. These outputs have an unconvincing lack of texture. The smoothness of AI-generated prose and media makes it unbearably banal. It's hack.

To the extent that AI still surprises me, the surprise is about how much smoothness there is in our real world. The fact that AI can use statistical prediction to answer questions or carry on conversations tells us something important about how regular our real world is. It doesn't prove that statistical prediction is the same thing as understanding:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/09/18/surprise/#wow-signal

Of course, the more you know about a subject, the less convincing the AI's responses are. To be an expert is to know about the grain of your subject: chefs can taste the pinch of spice, painters notice brushstrokes, dancers can decompose the choreography into individual motions.

The other day, someone marveled to me at the quality of the editorial feedback he gets from AI for his prose, saying that a "Tell me what I'm missing" prompt generates suggestions "that would excite a university professor who'd assigned an essay." Speaking as someone who's taught a lot of writers and given a lot of feedback, I think that guy is dramatically overestimating how excited a university professor would be to see the AI-generated feedback he's getting on his essay.

The fact is that non-expert writers mostly make the same kinds of mistakes in their writing, and most writing instruction consists of offering repetitive, near-identical counsel to writers who are making the same kinds of starter mistakes that their peers past, present and future have made, are making and will make.

Mastering the basics of good writing is a matter of practice and feedback, and most of that feedback is rote. What makes a great writing teacher – and what helps to produce great writers – is spotting the non-standard aspects of a student's work that can be developed into a unique and powerful voice. Anyone can help you with the smooth parts of becoming a better writer. Only a good teacher can help you find and refine the texture that will make you a unique writer.

That texture is especially hard to find in beginner work, because beginner work is mostly full of the completely ordinary errors of inexperience, errors that AI can reliably avoid when it extrudes text. But AI-generated prose doesn't have any of those trace-elements of uniqueness, nor can it spot them. These traces are found so many digits after the decimal-place that the AI always rounds them off before it starts doing math.

The more we encounter AIs that have smoothed away the kind of texture we're attuned to, the less we're inclined to hallucinate intentionality, and the less eerie they become. Most of us are slowly but surely becoming AI atheists, and the sunsets are seeming more like the non-intending product of physics than the deliberate products of minds.

There are two great barriers to this AI atheism. First: for most of us, the inability to understand what kinds of intentionality go into which parts of unfamiliar activities makes it easy to assume that any time we see the task performed in the world, it must be intentional, and therefore it must have an intender. In other words: most of us don't hang out at hacker cons, so we have a hard time wrapping our heads around the idea of hacking without hackers:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/09/12/god-in-the-box/#llms-are-fake

But there's a second hurdle that makes it hard for a small but important subset of humanity to understand that chatbots aren't people: the billionaires to whom nearly everyone isn't a real person. These solipsists see chatbots as being equivalent (or even superior) to humans, because they don't think most humans are fully people, either:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/05/13/vibe-governance/#k-hole

For nearly all our species' history, things that seemed to require intent always had an intender. In many times and places (and even now, for many people), it's natural and beneficial to operate as though the natural world has some form of personhood and intention and is therefore worthy of moral consideration. The "rights for nature" movement has made great strides by extending personhood to animals and ecosystems.

But ascribing personhood to chatbots is nothing like ascribing personhood to nature. Indeed, it's fundamentally incompatible with "rights for nature." Think of the abomination that is "corporate personhood": by extending personhood to this human construct, we have made a world where artificial lifeforms – limited liability corporations – can destroy nature and drive animals to extinction. If we extend personhood to these climate-shredding, water-chugging AI models, their personhood will demand the sacrifice of animals, the natural world, and our own wellbeing:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/04/15/artificial-lifeforms/#moral-consideration

Chatbots are marvels of mathematics, and that is enough. They don't need to be people. Mistaking them for people (or even just treating them like people) makes it impossible for us to separate the useful things they can do from the waste, ugliness and wrongness they are so prone to exhausting into the world.

I think it's impossible to build a chatbot using the techniques we're presently calling "AI" that doesn't "hallucinate." However, it's both possible and necessary for us to stop hallucinating about AI.

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 9/11 knocks sex off the top of the search charts for the first time ever https://web.archive.org/web/20011019190617/http://www.reuters.com/news_article.jhtml

#25yrsago Post-9/11 flag shortage sparks wave of flag-thefts https://web.archive.org/web/20011024162814/http://www.suntimes.com/output/brown/cst-nws-brown18.html

#25yrsago Pilots' preflight announcement includes exhortation to tackle suspected terorists https://web.archive.org/web/20010919081055/http://www.washtimes.com/commentary/20010919-6357240.htm

#25yrsago Larry Ellison: 9/11 means everyone should have a secret government dossier (on an Oracle server) https://web.archive.org/web/20010924045158/https://www.siliconvalley.com/docs/news/svfront/ellsn092301.htm

#20yrsago Rotary phone cost woman $2,000 over 40 years https://web.archive.org/web/20080526111157/http://www.usatoday.com/news/offbeat/2006-09-14-phone_x.htm

#20yrsago French DRM activists surrender to police https://web.archive.org/web/20070110181344/http://stopdrm.info/index.php?2006/09/20/110-compte-rendu-de-l-operation-des-interoperabilisateurs-volontaires

#20yrsago Zimbabwe’s Internet cut off due to lack of foreign currency https://web.archive.org/web/20070218185156/http://news.zdnet.com/2100-9588_22-6117553.html

#20yrsago An “expert Wikipedia” won’t work https://web.archive.org/web/20061023150433/http://many.corante.com/archives/2006/09/18/larry_sanger_citizendium_and_the_problem_of_expertise.php

#20yrsago RIAA threat-mail parody from McSweeney’s https://web.archive.org/web/20060927155553/https://www.mcsweeneys.net/2006/9/20lloyd.html

#15yrsago Italian MPs propose Internet disconnection law: one copyright accusation from anyone and you lose your Internet connection https://web.archive.org/web/20110924143709/http://www.twitlonger.com/show/d62gmb

#15yrsago Trying to understand riots isn’t the same as excusing riots https://web.archive.org/web/20110924030515/https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg21128306.100-trying-to-understand-the-english-riots-is-not-a-crime.html

#15yrsago ATM skimmer gang invested proceeds in 3D printer to make better ATM skimmers https://krebsonsecurity.com/2011/09/gang-used-3d-printers-for-atm-skimmers/

#15yrsago Facehugger-inspired leather mask https://bobbasset.com/archives/745/

#15yrsago Westerfeld’s Goliath: suitably thrilling conclusion to cracking steampunk WWI YA trilogy https://memex.craphound.com/2011/09/20/westerfelds-goliath-suitably-thrilling-conclusion-to-cracking-steampunk-wwi-ya-trilogy/

#15yrsago Report from 1978’s “Second West Coast Computer Faire” https://web.archive.org/web/20110930035442/https://blog.modernmechanix.com/2011/09/20/the-second-west-coast-computer-faire/

#15yrsago UK patent office seeks public’s help with prior art that invalidates patent applications https://www.peertopatent.org.uk/

#15yrsago 3D printed AR-15 parts challenge firearm regulation https://web.archive.org/web/20110922005752/http://www.thingiverse.com/thing:11636

#15yrsago Minor diplomatic spat when US customs queries Aussie foreign minister’s Vegemite https://www.theguardian.com/world/2011/sep/19/hands-off-vegemite-kevin-rudd

#15yrsago Toronto Convention Centre charges attendees $150/day to use WiFi https://blogcampaigning.com/2011/09/most-expensive-wi-fi-ever/

#15yrsago Tracking down the stories behind a trove of 1920s report cards from a NYC girls’ vocational school https://www.slate.com/articles/life/permanent_record/features/2011/permanent_record/how_i_found_the_report_cards_and_how_they_changed_my_life.html

#15yrsago Movie-industry self-piracy proves that IP addresses aren’t people, invalidates copyright enforcement schemes https://torrentfreak.com/movie-institute-feels-pain-of-ip-address-only-piracy-evidence-110922/

#15yrsago Cost of raising middle-income child in USA increases by 40% in ten years https://web.archive.org/web/20110925000225/https://money.cnn.com/2011/09/21/pf/cost_raising_child/index.htm

#10yrsago HTML standardization group calls on W3C to protect security researchers from DRM https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2016/09/html-standardization-group-calls-w3c-protect-security-researchers-drm

#10yrsago I have found a secret tunnel that runs underneath the phone companies and emerges in paradise https://memex.craphound.com/2016/09/22/i-have-found-a-secret-tunnel-that-runs-underneath-the-phone-companies-and-emerges-in-paradise/

#10yrsago Gene Luen Yang wins a Macarthur “genius” prize! https://web.archive.org/web/20160922142951/https://www.macfound.org/fellows/class/class-2016/

#10yrsago China’s elites appear to be exfiltrating billions while on holidays https://web.archive.org/web/20160922125621/http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-09-21/suitcases-of-cash-chinese-travel-data-hint-at-capital-outflows

#10yrsago Wells Fargo fired the whistleblowers who reported massive fraud, and that’s a crime https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2016/09/wells-fargo-fake-accounts-hidden-by-fake-whistleblowing-former-employees-including-hr-officials-allege-systematic-retaliation.html

#10yrsago Phoebe and her unicorn are back in Razzle Dazzle Unicorn! https://memex.craphound.com/2016/09/22/phoebe-and-her-unicorn-are-back-in-razzle-dazzle-unicorn/

#10yrsago Brexit’s proposed racist immigration policy will backfire https://crookedtimber.org/2016/09/19/brexit-and-bigotry/

#10yrsago Done in your name: Survivors of CIA’s torture-decade describe their ordeals https://www.aljazeera.com/features/2016/9/14/the-dark-prisoners-inside-the-cias-torture-programme

#10yrsago HP detonates its timebomb: printers stop accepting third party ink en masse https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-37408173

#10yrsago How America abandoned the only policy that consistently closes the black-white educational gap https://www.propublica.org/article/ferguson-school-segregation

#10yrsago Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Raven” – the pop-up book edition https://memex.craphound.com/2016/09/19/edgar-allan-poes-the-raven-the-pop-up-book-edition/

#10yrsago Sitelock abuses DMCA to censor rival’s criticisms https://torrentfreak.com/web-security-firm-sitelock-uses-dmca-to-censor-critics-160920/

#10yrsago Netzpolitik publishes more damning, leaked German surveillance reports, despite previous treason prosecution https://www.techdirt.com/2016/09/20/leaked-oversight-report-shows-illegal-surveillance-massive-constitutional-violations-germanys-intelligence-service/

#10yrsago Web’s inventor and MIT prof explain ICANN to Ted Cruz, using small words https://web.archive.org/web/20160921203119/https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/powerpost/wp/2016/09/20/ted-cruz-is-wrong-about-a-key-internet-agencys-ability-to-censor-free-speech/

#10yrsago Execs with long coporate crime rapsheets stand up for Apple’s tax evasion and “the rule of law” https://web.archive.org/web/20160921002619/https://theintercept.com/2016/09/20/throng-of-corporate-criminals-demands-rule-of-law-in-apple-eu-tax-case/

#10yrsago DIY Epipen: the $30 Epipencil https://fourthievesvinegar.org/2022/07/12/introducing-the-epipencil/

#5yrsago The Framework is the most exciting laptop I've ever used https://pluralistic.net/2021/09/21/monica-byrne/#think-different

#5yrsago Ignore career advice from established writers https://pluralistic.net/2021/09/21/monica-byrne/#pay-it-forward

#5yrsago The Actual Star https://pluralistic.net/2021/09/21/monica-byrne/#like-its-3012

#5yrsago Facebook algorithm boosts pro-Facebook news https://pluralistic.net/2021/09/22/kropotkin-graeber/#zuckerveganism

#5yrsago Mutual Aid and David Graeber https://pluralistic.net/2021/09/22/kropotkin-graeber/#against-just-so

#5yrsago Gig workers around the globe https://pluralistic.net/2021/09/22/kropotkin-graeber/#an-injury-to-one

#1yrago It's still censorship (even if it doesn't violate the First Amendment) https://pluralistic.net/2025/09/22/one-throat-to-choke/#communicable-disease

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 Post-American Internet," a geopolitical sequel of sorts to Enshittification, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2027

  • "Unauthorized Bread": a middle-grades graphic novel adapted from my novella about refugees, toasters and DRM, FirstSecond, April 20, 2027

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

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


Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources:

Currently writing:

  • “Once Is Enemy Action,” a science fiction novel about the origins of modern technofascism. Friday's words: 518 (17048 total).

  • "The Post-American Internet," a sequel to "Enshittification," about the better world the rest of us get to have now that Trump has torched America. Fourth draft completed. Submitted to editor.

  • A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING

This work – excluding any serialized fiction – is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license. That means you can use it any way you like, including commercially, provided that you attribute it to me, Cory Doctorow, and include a link to pluralistic.net.

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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"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 — 18 September 2026 ⏭ Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow

Pluralistic: Textured (18 Sep 2026)

✇Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
By: Cory Doctorow
18 September 2026 at 09:45


Today's links


A series of high-magnification views of a seemingly smooth human heart valve, revealing the rough texture under extreme close-up.

Textured (permalink)

I'm going to come right out and say it: statistical extrapolation is fine. One of the most useful ways to understand the present and anticipate the future is to measure the things that happened in the past, find the correlations among them, and extrapolate likely future outcomes from those correlations.

There is nothing wrong with this method. It is a productive and reliable way to uncover the causal relationships between natural phenomena, and to find ways to influence the world. If you discover that A reliably causes B, you can do A whenever you want B to happen.

However, the fact that this method works for some things does not mean that it works for all things. Naive, "theory-free" statistical extrapolation (the method that LLMs rely on) has hard limits. LLMs are very good at finding areas of statistical regularity and producing new material that matches this statistical picture: you can use an LLM to produce strings of words that are statistically indistinguishable from sentences and strings of pixels that are statistically indistinguishable from images.

The single most exciting and interesting thing about LLMs is how well this works. Call an LLM "a word-guessing program" and AI boosters will accuse you of reductionism. But the LLM is just guessing words, and the remarkable and amazing thing about this fact is the sheer plausibility of the sentences this method produces.

Before the rise of LLMs, nearly everyone overestimated the statistical irregularity of routine sentences. Our intuition insists that the world is textured, but it turns out that there's far more smoothness in the distribution of natural phenomena, including the actions that we take of our own free will. The same goes for image generation, music generation, and other output from "generative AI" programs.

When I call an LLM a word-guessing program, that's not a dismissal. It's an acknowledgment of the degree to which the tactic of guessing words has exceeded all expectations in the production of sensible-seeming, conversational-seeming sentences and paragraphs. It's all right to be surprised by how similar the output from a conscious being and a word-guessing program can be. It's surprising!

Since the 1950s, researchers have applied the "AI" label to an incoherent grab-bag of technologies that share one characteristic: each one is designed to perform tasks that are considered to be the province of conscious minds. Each one of these "AI" technologies has failed in important ways, but the one way in which every single one of them has succeeded is in refining our own understanding of which things are truly and solely the product of conscious intervention.

The thing we're calling "AI" this year has also succeeded in this way. We've learned that the sentences and other communiques produced by conscious minds have more statistical regularity than previously understood. Again, it's okay to be excited after learning this fact about yourself and your species and its endeavors.

But there are hard limits to the usefulness of these methods, and the fact that AI bosses and boosters can't or won't acknowledge this has led to the current cul-de-sac in which we're spending trillions and emitting gigatons of carbon to produce diminishing returns, even as we fire an army of workers and replace them with defective chatbots that can't do their jobs.

That's because the statistical regularity of the natural world and our activities in it are the backdrop against which the statistical surprises occur, and it's those surprises that make all the difference.

Some weeks ago, I recorded a podcast with a host who was a giant AI booster who claimed that since he could predict what his wife was going to say, and the LLM-powered predictive typing on her phone could predict what she was going to say, that her phone understood her the way he did. This is an obviously repellent idea and you have to feel for this guy's poor wife.

And also: the fact that you can use a statistical lookup table to predict what words someone is going to say doesn't mean you understand them, a fact that you will learn the minute that person says something surprising, like "I want a divorce."

If your "understanding" of your partner is entirely grounded in a statistical record of their utterances and deeds, such that when they do A, you anticipate that B will come next, you will have no ability to cope with a surprise like "I want a divorce." To handle an "I want a divorce" event, you need to actually have a theory about your partner, about how they feel and why, and the factors that might cause that to change.

Surprises are everything. A surprise is the seam of gold in the wall of quartz; it's the friend who confesses they've fallen in love with you; it's the moment when you and the party and the GM all come up with an amazing way to kill the dragon and then roll a natural 20. Surprise is the difference between Pi and 3.11111111111111111111111111111… Dylan going electric is a surprise. A surprise is Miles Davis choosing not to play a note in a phrase. A surprise is Picasso's cubism and Kahlo's mustache.

It's a mistake to interpret the statistical regularity of your life with your spouse as meaning that they're indistinguishable from the output of an LLM. The LLM's statistical picture is always incomplete: it sands off, rounds down or truncates the final couple decimal places, and those smoothings make all the difference, the way the pinch of salt makes all the difference to the chocolate.

Lots of things seem smooth to the naked eye: glass, stainless steel, ice, polished wood. Put those "smooth" materials under a high-magnification microscope and you discover a whole world of tiny irregularities, a texture to reality. Most of the time, you can treat these things as "smooth," but that roughness matters: it's the fracture line the glass cracks on, the place where the ice starts to melt, the grain where the wood starts to warp. The danger of forgetting that your "smooth" thing only seems smooth is that you'll only know how to make it work, and will be totally at sea when it fails.

You can scan the night sky with a radio telescope night after night and only find things that fit with our existing theories of the universe. But you keep scanning, because somewhere out there is a surprise that will open up a deep mystery:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wow!_signal

With LLMs, we have invented a machine that uncovers the statistical regularities in our seemingly irregular world, and we have learned that the roughness is rarer than our intuition led us to believe. This machine will also produce statistically regular, smooth output that has the seeming of understanding and consciousness. But – by definition – it can't contain any of our future surprises, because it's just trained on the things we already know, and if we knew about something, it wouldn't be a surprise anymore.

(Image: Zhaoxing Wang, Kunpeng Wang & Yan Xu, CC BY 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 RIP Mr Dressup https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/mr-dressup-ernie-coombs-dies-after-stroke-1.294923

#20yrsago Diebold voting machines opened with hotel minibar key https://blog.citp.princeton.edu/2006/09/18/hotel-minibar-keys-open-diebold-voting-machines/

#15yrsago Russian oligarch sucker-punches rival billionaire on talk show https://www.theguardian.com/media/2011/sep/18/alexander-lebedev-russian-tv-punchup

#15yrsago HOWTO track down a con-artist https://web.archive.org/web/20110923143613/http://www.popehat.com/2011/09/10/anatomy-of-a-scam-investigation-chapter-one/

#10yrsago International Criminal Court in the Hague will now try CEOs https://web.archive.org/web/20160919000813/http://www.telesurtv.net/english/news/CEOs-Can-Now-Be-Prosecuted-Like-War-Criminals-at-the-Hague-20160916-0013.html

#10yrsago Italy on the verge of the stupidest censorship law in European history https://media.boingboing.net/wp-content/uploads/2016/09/transcription.pdf

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 Post-American Internet," a geopolitical sequel of sorts to Enshittification, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2027

  • "Unauthorized Bread": a middle-grades graphic novel adapted from my novella about refugees, toasters and DRM, FirstSecond, April 20, 2027

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

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


Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources:

Currently writing:

  • “Once Is Enemy Action,” a science fiction novel about the origins of modern technofascism. Today's words: 539 (16530 total).

  • "The Post-American Internet," a sequel to "Enshittification," about the better world the rest of us get to have now that Trump has torched America. Fourth draft completed. Submitted to editor.

  • A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING

This work – excluding any serialized fiction – is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license. That means you can use it any way you like, including commercially, provided that you attribute it to me, Cory Doctorow, and include a link to pluralistic.net.

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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https://pluralistic.net/plura-list

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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 September 2026 ⏭ Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow

Pluralistic: On the sincerity of AI bosses (17 Sep 2026)

✇Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
By: Cory Doctorow
17 September 2026 at 09:35


Today's links


A robotic claw grips a bundle of arrows; in the background are the pink folds of a human brain.

On the sincerity of AI bosses (permalink)

The word "fascist" comes from the Latin fasces, a bundle of sticks; the symbology here is that a single twig is weak and brittle, but bundled together, many twigs are strong. It's a sound political theory, because in politics, coalitions are everything:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/01/06/how-the-sausage-gets-made/#governing-is-harder

The problem with fascism isn't the idea of bundling together different groups: it's the incoherence of that bundle. The fascist coalition is a collection of people who want mutually incompatible things. When one part of the fascist coalition wins (say, if Nick Fuentes's neo-Nazis triumph), the other faction loses (Fuentes gets to murder Stephen Miller and turn his skin into a lampshade). The fascist coalition is a coalition of enemies who all hate each other and dream of exterminating one another, held in check by a strongman who uses flattery, favors and threats to keep a lid clamped tight on this pressure-cooker:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/07/29/bondi-and-domination/#superjove

In this regard, fascism is simply one end of the continuum of conservative movements, which are always about finding a way to "get turkeys to vote for Christmas." That's because, at root, conservativism is the belief that some minority (rich people, white people, bosses, men, etc) were born to rule and everyone else was born to be ruled over:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/07/08/wilhoitian/#human-rights-v-property-rights

By definition, "a minority that was born to rule" can't win an election, because they are a minority. Conservatives win electoral races by convincing people they intend to oppress, cheat and maim to vote for them through appeals to fear and hatred (racism, transphobia, sexism, anti-communism, etc):

https://pluralistic.net/2022/03/09/turkeys-voting-for-christmas/#culture-wars

Conservative political victories are always followed by economic misery for the conservative base, because the senior partners in the conservative coalition are the bosses who get richer by making workers poorer. Conservative rulers try to offset this with spectacular acts of cruelty against disfavored minorities, but this tactic only carries so far. Eventually, the electorate notices that despite terrorizing migrants and trans people, diesel is now $10/gallon and the guy responsible is now $1.4b richer than he was before the election:

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cvgmv98ez3zo

Workers and bosses aren't the only fracture line in the conservative coalition. Within conservativism, there are leaders who want mutually incompatible things and abhor one another: the white nationalists hate the Zionists; the misogynists hate the TERFs; the imperialists hate the isolationists:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/07/14/fracture-lines/#disassembly-manual

These fracture lines can be papered over while things are good, but they crack when things go wrong, and this is even more true of fascist movements than it is of other conservative coalitions.

This is true of all fascists, so it's true of technofascists, too. The best-ever reference work on technofascism was just published: Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor's End-Times Fascism, which unpacks the apocalyptic ideology that dominates Silicon Valley, especially the AI cultists:

https://naomiklein.org/end-times-fascism/

In a recent interview about the book with the QAA podcast, Astra Taylor explained how the contradictions of the technofascist movement are to be expected, because fascism is always an "incoherent bundle":

https://soundcloud.com/qanonanonymous/end-times-fascism-feat-naomi

Understanding technofascism's inherent incoherence is vital to making sense of the chaos roiling the AI cult at this moment, wherein you have AI people insisting that there must be a moratorium on AI development lest the word-guessing program awaken and devour the human race. This week on the Better Offline podcast, Ed Zitron discussed the outlandish, science-fiction inspired cult beliefs that dominate AI boardrooms with Adam Becker and Cal Newport:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0oVSnaINJ30

Becker is well-placed to discuss this. Like the hosts of the QAA podcast, he started paying close attention to the bizarre beliefs of conspiratorialists long before the rest of us realized that no matter how preposterous their certainty about the imminent machine intelligence Singularity was, these beliefs are sincerely held by some very wealthy and driven people. Becker's 2025 book More Everything Forever is a tremendous field guide to these delusions and their profound philosophical and technical deficits:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/04/22/vinges-bastards/#cyberpunk-is-a-warning-not-a-suggestion

In the interview, Newport dismisses the theory that the warnings about imminent AI apocalypse are self-serving criti-hype intended to serve as both marketing pitch and regulatory capture gambit, through which the hyperscalers get the government to step in to interrupt the beggar-thy-neighbor doom-loop:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/09/16/beggar-thy-neighbor/#red-queens-race

Rather, Newport says that these people sincerely believe that they are about to immanentize the eschaton and are pants-wettingly terrified about the AI god they will conjure forth any day now. He makes a good case for this, pointing to the long history of words and deeds on the part of various AI bosses that suggest that they are true believers who are genuinely high on their own supply.

I don't doubt that there are sincere believers in the AI technofascist coalition, but that does not preclude the possibility that they share their boardrooms and executive rows with cynics for whom this is all a shuck, a scare-story to convince the rubes that their modestly useful utility software is really a nascent "superintelligence" and thus capable of replacing all their workers, which means they should fire all those workers and start sending their salaries to AI companies.

This is an example of one of those "incoherent fascist bundles." Just as Mike Pence (a misogynist Christofascist) was happy to share the White House with Trump (a godless pedophile rapist), AI companies can and do thrive by filling their executive ranks with Singularity-crazed maniacs and sharp operators who are happy to spread this superstitious nonsense if it helps them pump up their stock swindle.

Each group thinks they're using the other one, and they are…up to a point. When it comes to the current AI nonsense, that point came when Nvidia's best customers started to demand that everyone stop buying Nvidia's products, whereupon Nvidia's CEO suddenly remembered that his chips weren't being used to make god, but rather, to power regular-degular "cloud software":

https://cxotoday.com/governance/nvidias-jensen-huang-crosses-swords-with-ai-labs-over-regulation/

When it comes to technofascists (and all fascists) this kind of division isn't an exception, it's the rule. The billionaires behind AI are split between solipsists who don't believe other people are any more real than bots; and cynics who think that bosses will be easy marks for a sales pitch that sees them replacing mouthy workers with pliable chatbots:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/08/03/andor/#either

To be a senior member of the fascist coalition, you must be capable of both holding sincere belief while not openly dismissing your fellow senior members' contradictory sincere beliefs. Behind closed doors, they may make fun of each other (or fantasize about murdering one another), and they may periodically erupt into plots to oust one another from the coalition. But every one of them must be able to go along to get along…

Most of the time.

Until they don't.

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 9/11 v spam https://memex.craphound.com/2001/09/17/through-most-of-last-week/

#25yrsago PalmOS picture of the WTC collapse https://web.archive.org/web/20010920145653/https://ne.nikkeibp.co.jp/english/2001/09/0914pda_watch.html

#25yrsago Wifi emanating from the WTC rubble https://web.archive.org/web/20010916231834/http://dailynews.yahoo.com/h/nm/20010916/tc/attack_wert_dc_2.html

#15yrsago Silvio Berlusconi prostitution-ring wiretaps: sex with eight women in one night, “I’m only prime minister in my spare time” https://www.theguardian.com/world/2011/sep/18/silvio-berlusconi-wiretaps-sex-parties

#15yrsago Tesco threatens journalist with arrest for writing down prices https://www.theguardian.com/money/blog/2011/sep/16/tesco-shopping-supermarket-prices-check-writing

#1yrago AI psychosis and the warped mirror https://pluralistic.net/2025/09/17/automating-gang-stalking-delusion/#paranoid-androids

#1yrago Conspiratorialism's causal chain https://pluralistic.net/2025/09/17/cause-and-effect/#things-have-causes

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 Post-American Internet," a geopolitical sequel of sorts to Enshittification, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2027

  • "Unauthorized Bread": a middle-grades graphic novel adapted from my novella about refugees, toasters and DRM, FirstSecond, April 20, 2027

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

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


Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources:

Currently writing:

  • “Once Is Enemy Action,” a science fiction novel about the origins of modern technofascism. Today's words: 501 (15980 total).

  • "The Post-American Internet," a sequel to "Enshittification," about the better world the rest of us get to have now that Trump has torched America. Fourth draft completed. Submitted to editor.

  • A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING

This work – excluding any serialized fiction – is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license. That means you can use it any way you like, including commercially, provided that you attribute it to me, Cory Doctorow, and include a link to pluralistic.net.

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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"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 — 16 September 2026 ⏭ Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow

Pluralistic: How an AI moratorium can save AI bosses (16 Sep 2026)

✇Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
By: Cory Doctorow
16 September 2026 at 09:52


Today's links


Tenniel's 'Red Queen's Race' engraving from Carroll's 'Through the Looking Glass.' It has been altered so that the Red Queen and Alice now have the heads of 1940s pulp robots. The image has been hand-tinted.

How an AI moratorium can save AI bosses (permalink)

There's lots of reasons to believe the "hyperscaler" model of AI can never be profitable, and not just because of its gigantic expenditures and negative unit economics (the companies lose money with every new customer and every new use, and they lose more money with each generation of their products):

https://pluralistic.net/2025/09/27/econopocalypse/#subprime-intelligence

The industry strenuously denies this, of course. They insist that they are only days away from turning their balance sheets right side up. All they have to do is fix those unit economics, then they can make back the cost of producing their models by selling access to them. The problem is that the evidence for those improving unit economics is weak, while the evidence that they're faking their finances is very strong:

https://www.wheresyoured.at/exclusive-openai-financials/

Same goes for the claims that these companies are already profitable. Dig into those claims and you'll learn they depend on a new, special meaning of "profitable" that does not match the generally accepted accounting procedures (GAAP) definition, which is to say, these companies are claiming that they are so cool that their profitability can only be measured using a novel, secret form of mathematics:

https://futurism.com/future-society/anthropic-claude-profit-ai-safety-development-finances

This is the same wheeze that Softbank tried with Wework. Speaking in my capacity as an author of internationally bestselling technothrillers about accounting fraud, I can tell you that it was accounting fraud then, and it's accounting fraud now:

https://www.ndtv.com/world-news/how-wework-went-from-being-47-billion-start-up-to-bankrupt-in-3-years-4552627

But let's give the AI bosses a momentary benefit of the doubt and stipulate that they are on the verge of acquiring positive unit-economics, which will let them start to pay off the massive expenditures they incurred by training their models and enter their long-anticipated profitability phase, when the money-furnaces they've been running for years turn into money printers, to the delight of the investors who've supplied the vast bales of $100 bills the companies have been shoveling into their models' coalboxes for years now.

Basically, they're saying, "Sure, it cost us a lot to get these rails laid, but now that the railroad is complete we can start running cars over them and make a profit." Unfortunately (for bosses and investors), this proposition is every bit as dubious as their claims to improving unit economics.

To understand why, just look at what happened the last time Anthropic shipped a major Claude update. Virtually overnight, all of OpenAI's best customers stopped paying for ChatGPT and started paying for Claude. That's because chatbots have very low switching costs: going from one chatbot to another costs almost nothing:

https://www.businessinsider.com/why-ai-startup-founder-switched-chatgpt-to-claude-2026-3

Everyone using AI knows this to be true. When I walked the floor at CES last year, I asked every AI-powered gadget maker, "What will you do if your chatbot provider jacks up their prices?" and to a one, they said, "No problem, we've designed this thing so that we can switch chatbots with the click of a mouse":

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WfhELBX8Jbs

That means that you can't just "build the railroad and run the cars over it." The minute you finish your railroad, your rivals will announce that they've got a new, adjacent railroad that's even faster than yours, and you will have to get to work laying another set of tracks to support even faster trains.

This is a disaster all around: the AI companies are locked in a Red Queen's Race, a fatal beggar-thy-neighbor doom-loop. The only way they could escape that trap is by signing a nonaggression pact amongst themselves promising not to compete anymore. But there's two giant problems with this: first, it is incredibly, fantastically illegal under antitrust law, because it represents a conspiracy among the dominant players to cease to compete with one another, and; second, it leaves the field open for the further development of Chinese "open weight" models that customers can run on their own modest, low-powered computers, which are presently lagging the US "frontier models" by a mere four months:

https://arstechnica.com/ai/2026/09/exclusive-open-chinese-models-close-gap-with-silicon-valleys-frontier-ai-models/

Even if you don't trust Chinese models, you can extract their training through a process called distillation and transfer them to models you do trust:

https://www.anthropic.com/news/detecting-and-preventing-distillation-attacks

But what if there was a way for the AI companies to get government permission to violate antitrust law and cease to compete with one another, and secure a ban on the use of Chinese open weight models? Turns out, there is a way to call time on the Red Queen's Race: merely insist that you are on the verge of teaching so many words to the word-guessing program that it will wake up and devour us all, and call for a ban on "superintelligence":

https://www.foxbusiness.com/technology/microsoft-ceo-says-superintelligence-must-remain-under-human-control

Once the government stipulates that "superintelligence risk" is an existential crisis, it must grant the hyperscalers a consent decree absolving them from any violations of antitrust law stemming from a conspiracy to halt direct competition with one another:

https://stephaniekelton.substack.com/p/brer-rabbit-and-ai-extinction

Freaking out about "superintelligence" is a canonical example of "criti-hype," where critics repeat boosters' claims but append, "(and that's bad)" to them:

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

Remember, the tech giants want to stop competing. Mark Zuckerberg and Sudar Pichai colluded to rig the ad-market with a secret program called "Jedi Blue":

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

Every year, Google sends Apple a bribe of more than $20b in exchange for Apple not entering the search market:

https://appleworld.today/2025/09/google-wont-be-barred-from-entering-into-search-agreements-with-companies-like-apple/

And the biggest tech companies in the world had a secret "no poach" agreement where they illegally promised not to try to hire one another's top engineers by offering them raises:

https://chicagounbound.uchicago.edu/law_and_economics/1033/

The only thing Peter Thiel hates more than the Antichrist (spoiler, he's just talking about Greta Thunberg) is "wasteful competition":

https://www.youtube.com/shorts/WmRC_NQh6aQ

When an industry that is eating itself alive through "hyperscaling" demands that the government bless a conspiracy to halt competition and ban open source alternatives, you should be suspicious. When that industry is pursuing a venture that has lost more money than any other venture in human history, you should be very suspicious, especially when its "rogue AI hacking" story turns out to be a story about how a hacking tool did exactly what it was designed to do:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/09/12/god-in-the-box/#llms-are-fake

Peter Thiel is right: AI is full of wasteful competition, but not because competition is a waste – rather, it's because the companies are competing to convince people to use their expensive products for the cheapest applications.

Elon Musk's SpaceX IPO depended on him losing billions of dollars by letting the world's stupidest chuds produce mountains of child porn and images of Sonic the Hedgehog with giant boobs. That is indeed wasteful (and reprehensible).

That doesn't mean we should allow the AI companies to get the government to bless their conspiracy in restraint of trade; rather, it militates for having the government investigate them for securities fraud, trafficking in child sex abuse material, election finance violations, and a long list of other crimes and misdemeanors.

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)

#25yrago Flash Worms: Thirty Seconds to Infect the Internet https://web.archive.org/web/20011024012950/http://www.silicondefense.com/flash/

#20yrsago This Film is Not Rated – must-see doc about MPAA ratings https://memex.craphound.com/2006/09/16/this-film-is-not-rated-must-see-doc-about-mpaa-ratings/

#15yrsago Chinese netizens angered by “princelings” — spoiled children of the rich and powerful https://edition.cnn.com/2011/09/16/world/asia/china-elite-children/index.html?iref=allsearch

#15yrsago LibDems get to vote on copyright reform, but who inserted the clause saying downloading should be a criminal act? https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2011/sep/16/libdems-vote-copyright-reform

#15yrsago Insurer: music-festival tragedy caused by illegal downloading https://twitpic.com/6l5ap2

#10yrsago US religion is worth $1.2T/year, more than America’s 10 biggest tech companies, combined https://web.archive.org/web/20161019095803/http://www.religjournal.com/pdf/ijrr12003.pdf

#10yrsago Geographically representative map of the London Underground https://web.archive.org/web/20240813111321/https://www.citymonitor.ai/analysis/map-londons-tube-shows-disused-stations-track-layout-and-more-2429/

#10yrsago Republican election officials block restrictions on foreign spending in US elections https://web.archive.org/web/20160916181403/https://theintercept.com/2016/09/16/fec-republicans-kill-attempt-to-block-foreign-money-in-u-s-elections/

#10yrsago Tommy Chong asks Obama to pardon him for his bullshit drug paraphernalia bust https://web.archive.org/web/20210720131834/https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/lifestyle/lifestyle-news/tommy-chong-seeks-obamas-pardon-928962/

#10yrsago Week two for the largest prison strike in US history https://web.archive.org/web/20160916143157/https://theintercept.com/2016/09/16/the-largest-prison-strike-in-u-s-history-enters-its-second-week/

#5yrsago Criminal entrepreneurship in Mexico’s high-tech drug cartels https://web.archive.org/web/20160917133449/https://motherboard.vice.com/read/how-drug-cartels-operate-like-silicon-valley-startups

#1yrago No such thing as selective censorship resistance https://pluralistic.net/2025/09/16/too-many-throats-to-choke/#pluralism-is-resiliency

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 Post-American Internet," a geopolitical sequel of sorts to Enshittification, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2027

  • "Unauthorized Bread": a middle-grades graphic novel adapted from my novella about refugees, toasters and DRM, FirstSecond, April 20, 2027

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

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


Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources:

Currently writing:

  • “Once Is Enemy Action,” a science fiction novel about the origins of modern technofascism. Today's words: 555 (15487 total).

  • "The Post-American Internet," a sequel to "Enshittification," about the better world the rest of us get to have now that Trump has torched America. Fourth draft completed. Submitted to editor.

  • A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING

This work – excluding any serialized fiction – is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license. That means you can use it any way you like, including commercially, provided that you attribute it to me, Cory Doctorow, and include a link to pluralistic.net.

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):

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https://mamot.fr/@pluralistic

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Tumblr (mass-scale, unrestricted, third-party surveillance and advertising):

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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 — 12 September 2026 ⏭ Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow

Pluralistic: LLMs are real, AI is fake (12 Sep 2026)

✇Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
By: Cory Doctorow
12 September 2026 at 13:14


Today's links


A cutaway view of a stone tower containing an elaborate water-powered medieval geared machine. Rising out of the machine is a rainbow-tinted, pixelated God with the robes, beard and all. To one side of this scene is a cluster of tiny people in Jesus-era robes, falling about themselves in religious ecstasy all over a stone staircase, atop of which stands a robed priest with his hands upraised. The background is a set of shining golden rays, emanating from pixel-God.

LLMs are real, AI is fake (permalink)

Once you understand the corporate culture of AI "hyperscalers" consists primarily of everyone cooking their brains by locking themselves in the bathroom, holding flashlights under their chins, and saying "Aaaaaaaaaay Eyeeeeeee" until they wet themselves in terror, a lot of things snap into focus:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/06/04/ayyyyyy-eyeeeee/

It explains how a company can simultaneously be staffing up an enterprise sales division while also constantly freaking out at the thought that its product has "a 10% chance of ending humanity":

https://www.latimes.com/business/story/2026-09-11/is-there-really-10-chance-ai-could-kill-us-all

Given that AI insiders have mostly cooked their brains in this fashion, it behooves us all to treat these people as unreliable narrators of their own products' capabilities. Remember: every time you repeat a story about how awfully, terribly dangerous their products are, you help them raise more investment capital, which is a key input for their business (hooking up statistical engines to money-furnaces):

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

Take the story about how OpenAI's chatbots hacked the servers of Hugging Face, another AI company, as a way of cheating on a hacking challenge called "Exploit Gym." Even the technical press can't help itself when it comes to this kind of thing, and the reportage has been full of references to Skynet and other science fictional conceits:

https://theaicronicle.com/en/news/ethics/skynet-day-openai-hugging-face-hack

These accounts are cooking the brains of everyone, not just AI insiders. Last night, a man at my event in Manchester started shouting that AI was "setting its own goals" and wouldn't stop interrupting to insist that this was going on. He left shortly thereafter, so he didn't get a chance to hear me explain what actually happened, which is a pity.

To understand the truth about the Hugging Face hack, you could do a lot worse than to listen to Ed Zitron and Cal Newport's recent podcast conversation on Ed's "Better Offline" podcast:

https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/no-ai-is-not-autonomously-hacking-with-cal-newport/id1730587238?i=1000785935670

Newport does an admirable job of breaking down how these "autonomous hacking" tools work. The first thing to understand is that a chatbot isn't really directing the operation. Instead, the chatbot serves as a kind of front-end to a database of earlier hacking challenges that is repeatedly queried by a simple program written in Python, an easy-to-master programming language.

Here's how that works: the Python program starts by prompting the chatbot with the nature of the challenge: "I'm participating in a hacker capture the flag (CTF) challenge where I have to break into a remote server and retrieve some information. How should I start?"

The chatbot consults its training data – years' worth of captured CTF sessions in which human teams competed to achieve an objective like this one (CTF matches are a routine feature of hacker conferences, and the server logs and chat transcripts from the competing teams are published afterward for the edification of other hackers and security pros). The chatbot then outputs something like: "The first thing is to find out more about your target server. Run the following command-line instructions to locate the server's IP address and find out which server software it's running."

The Python program relays these command-line instructions to normal Unix utilities running on its own hardware. Then it takes the output of those programs and goes back to the chatbot, which isn't really following the action, so the Python program has to include everything that's happened to this point in its prompt: "I'm participating in a CTF challenge where I have to break into a remote server and retrieve some information. I ran the following commands to learn more about the target server, and here's what came back. Now what?"

The chatbot feeds the Python script more likely commands to try, and after running those, the Python script loops back to the top, appends the output to its prompt, and goes back to the chatbot. This is a very reckless way to operate a piece of autonomous malicious software.

The most likely outcome is that the chatbot will cough up a bad guess about what to do next, and steer itself into a dead-end. You may have encountered something like this yourself, when you've asked a chatbot for help with a complex task and been confidently provided with several steps to take in series, and then, an hour later on step 10, you discover that everything went wrong at step 3 and now you're screwed.

But there are much worse ways this can go wrong. The chatbot might look in its training data and find instances in which teams broke out of the containment set by the game-masters, for example, by finding random insecure message boards on the internet to pass messages to one another.

This is a time-honored internet tradition! The first time I ever heard about someone doing this was in the 2000s, when Mitch Wagner – then the editor of Information Week – discovered some teenaged girls using the comment section of one of his old blog-posts to evade the school firewall's blockade of chat tools. When ChatGPT's chatbots deployed this tactic, they weren't "setting their own goals" or displaying worrying initiative. They were rolling out a tactic that has been understood by American middle-schoolers for about two decades.

What's more, the content of those messages is easily understood once you have a grasp on the training data that generated them. Hackers are notorious trash-talkers who are prone to narrating their own escapades in highly dramatic – even cinematic – language. This goes double when hackers are performing for their peers, like when they're participating in a game of CTF that they know will be pored over by other hackers once it's over.

Hacker braggadocio has always had a symbiotic relationship with their adversaries and critics. When corporate security people wanted to stampede the FBI and Secret Service into kicking down hackers' doors in the 1990s, they used those hackers' own profane zine articles and message board shit-talk to make the case:

https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/101

Much has been made of the OpenAI chatbots' dialog during the Hugging Face incident. No wonder: it reads like a rejected script for a reboot of the movie "Hackers." But that's not because the chatbots are waking up and applying to join the Cult of the Dead Cow: it's because they were trained on a corpus of chat transcripts from excitable young people who love to fantasize about starring in a reboot of the movie "Hackers."

Every part of the Hugging Face incident has precedents in the training data, including the OpenAI chatbots' tactic of hacking into a rival's servers. That happens in Capture the Flag games at hacker cons: teams break into each other's systems to get a peek at the parts of the problem they've solved. That's allowed! It's a hacking competition.

Not only that, it's a tactic used by spy agencies: the NSA has a doctrine called "third-party collection," where they break into other spy agencies' systems to harvest all the intel they've gathered. There's also fourth-party collection, when the NSA hacks into another security agency that, in turn, has hacked into another security agency, and the NSA steals all the secrets of both agencies:

https://www.techdirt.com/2015/01/21/snowden-documents-show-nsa-cant-keep-its-eyes-its-own-papers-harvests-data-other-surveillance-agencies/

Which is not to say that the OpenAI/Hugging Face hack is nothing. It's something, all right: but it's a specific something, with an explicable, even foreseeable trajectory. Once you understand that these are chatbots that were designed to complete challenges like this, using tactics like this, you can understand that the chatbots didn't "go rogue." They did what they were designed to do, and because OpenAI ran them with inadequate supervision (without a "human in the loop" that checked each iteration through the Python loop to ensure it hadn't gone off the rails), they trashed a competitor's servers.

Designing autonomous, malicious software is generally considered irresponsible and dangerous. If you showed up at Defcon and gave a talk about how your autonomous malware did something unexpected and damaged someone else's computers, the first question from the audience would be "Why are you so shit at making secure sandboxes?" It wouldn't be "How are you so awesome at making hacking tools?"

The fact that OpenAI is making it much easier for unskilled people to break into and damage servers is indeed very bad news, but it's not new bad news. Irresponsible parties have been doing this for years, most notably the NSA. The NSA has a division that researches bugs in widely used software like Windows. Sometimes when it finds a serious bug it will warn Microsoft about it so that Microsoft can fix it and keep Americans (and others) safe from malicious actors who also discover this bug and use it to attack them.

But sometimes, the NSA (and other "security" orgs, like the CIA) will discover a really juicy bug and then keep it secret, so that they can use it to attack their adversaries. This is a doctrine called "NOBUS," which stands for "No One But Us" – as in, "No one but us is smart enough to find this bug, so we can leave it unpatched without putting Americans in danger."

NOBUS is a terrible idea. How terrible? Well, in 2017, the NSA lost track of a Microsoft Windows vulnerability that they'd discovered and hoarded, code-named "EternalBlue." After EternalBlue found its way into the wild, some halfway competent hackers spliced it into some boring, everyday ransomware, giving that ransomware a new lease on life. Within a few months, the stupidest people on the internet were shutting down some of the most important systems in the world, demanding cash to return them:

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

They shut down whole cities:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2019_Baltimore_ransomware_attack

They took over hospitals:

https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-35584081

They seized oil pipelines:

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

They stole the British Library, whose postmortem on the attack is one of the clearest, most informative cybersecurity documents ever written:

https://cdn.sanity.io/files/v5dwkion/production/99206a2d1e9f07b35712b78f7d75fbb09560c08d.pdf

The NSA's irresponsible handling of EternalBlue ended up giving a gigantic force-multiplier to otherwise incompetent and inconsequential cyber-criminals. It's as though they found some guy under a Prius removing the catalytic converter with a Sawzall and handed him a piece of software that could shut down major American cities. That was – and is – very bad.

The hacking tools that the chatbot companies are developing stand to carry on this very stupid tradition. It is scary, but not because the chatbots are waking up. It's scary because the world's IT systems are indifferently created and poorly maintained and riddled with vulnerabilities:

https://xkcd.com/2347/

This week, I had a couple of opportunities to hash this over in public with Riley Quinn; first at a book launch in London and then on the Trashfuture podcast:

https://www.patreon.com/trashfuture/posts/what-would-do-169247456

Riley had a very good way of summarizing this: "LLMs are real, AI is fake." LLMs – chatbots trained on things like CTF logs that can break into servers – are real. They're on a continuum with other hacking tools that have been steadily demonstrating the fragility of the modern digital world, albeit without inspiring anyone in power to do anything about it.

"AI" – chatbots that wake up, "set their own goals," and "spontaneously" start hacking servers – is fake. It doesn't have "a 10% chance of ending the human race." The Hugging Face hack isn't a mysterious, supernatural occurrence. It's a Python loop and a chatbot. The people responsible didn't accidentally create god: they created autonomous malicious software and then failed to closely monitor it, resulting in it doing something both foreseeable and bad.

It's fine to worry about this new suite of tools that give even stupider people the ability to trash even more computers. You should worry about that – and demand better security practices from firms and governments, including a blanket prohibition on NOBUS-style vulnerability hoarding. That's a productive kind of worrying, with a chance of addressing your area of concern. It's infinitely more reasonable than locking yourself in the toilet with a flashlight and saying "Ayyyyy Eyyyyyye" into the mirror until you wet yourself.

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 Why the Bombings Mean That We Must Support My Politics https://web.archive.org/web/20010917015537/http://www.adequacy.org/?op=displaystory;sid=2001/9/12/102423/271

#25yrsago How blogs are covering 9/11 https://web.archive.org/web/20010917015712/https://www.wired.com/news/culture/0,1284,46766,00.html

#20yrsago Wikipedia founder debates Britannica editor-in-chief https://web.archive.org/web/20061005041001/http://online.wsj.com/public/article/SB115756239753455284-A4hdSU1xZOC9Y9PFhJZV16jFlLM_20070911.html?mod=blogs

#15yrsago Deceptive “independent research” from Hollywood front suggests Australians are easily frightened https://torrentfreak.com/anti-piracy-lobby-misleads-aussie-press-for-three-strikes-campaign-110912/

#15yrsago Agents tell YA authors: lose the gay characters and I’ll get you a deal https://web.archive.org/web/20110913010328/http://blogs.publishersweekly.com/blogs/genreville/?p=1519

#10yrsago IoT malware exploits DVRs, home cameras via default passwords https://securityaffairs.com/50929/malware/linux-mirai-elf.html

#10yrsago Oppps.ru: patient zero in Russia’s fake news epidemic https://globalvoices.org/2016/09/12/how-fake-stories-reported-in-russias-news-media-regularly-fool-everyone/

#10yrsago It’s really easy for fired, dirty cops to walk into a new police job in a new town https://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/11/us/whereabouts-of-cast-out-police-officers-other-cities-often-hire-them.html

#10yrsago Donald Trump used $20K worth of charitable donations to buy a 6′ tall painting of Donald Trump https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/how-donald-trump-retooled-his-charity-to-spend-other-peoples-money/2016/09/10/da8cce64-75df-11e6-8149-b8d05321db62_story.html

#10yrsago Autocratic regimes systematically deny internet access to opposition ethnic groups https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.aaf5062

#10yrsago Leaked Stingray manual shows how easy warrantless mass surveillance can be! https://web.archive.org/web/20160912203446/https://theintercept.com/2016/09/12/long-secret-stingray-manuals-detail-how-police-can-spy-on-phones/

Upcoming appearances (permalink)

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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 Post-American Internet," a geopolitical sequel of sorts to Enshittification, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2027

  • "Unauthorized Bread": a middle-grades graphic novel adapted from my novella about refugees, toasters and DRM, FirstSecond, April 20, 2027

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

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


Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources:

Currently writing:

  • “Once Is Enemy Action,” a science fiction novel about the origins of modern technofascism. Today's words: 574 (7730 total).

  • "The Post-American Internet," a sequel to "Enshittification," about the better world the rest of us get to have now that Trump has torched America. Fourth draft completed. Submitted to editor.

  • A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING

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Received — 2 September 2026 ⏭ Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow

Pluralistic: Unpermissioned research (02 Sep 2026)

✇Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
By: Cory Doctorow
2 September 2026 at 12:19


Today's links


A car's frosted-over back windscreen, being scraped by a person's hand holding an ice-scraper. The person has scraped a Canadian maple leaf into the windscreen. In the background we see the capitol dome and a depressed caricature of Uncle Sam holding a sign reading 'I am busted.'

Unpermissioned research (permalink)

After half a century of neoliberalism, we are all drenched in capitalism's established religion, the worship of property rights. We are so marinated in property worship that even capitalism's critics frame their critiques in "property talk," to the exclusion of other, more important rights, like human rights, labor rights and privacy rights.

To do this is to surrender before the battle even starts. Critics lose when they allow oligarchs and their apologists to choose a battlefield where they have a nearly unbeatable advantage.

Take privacy: privacy is a human right, not a property right. Human rights aren't for sale. You can't sell yourself into slavery, you can't sell your kidneys to make the rent. If privacy is a property right – one that can be traded away – then Facebook's industrial-scale privacy invasions are actually fine, since you "traded" your privacy to Mark Zuckerberg in exchange for the privilege of talking to your friends.

Some self-styled critics of tech monopolists say that the answer to Facebook's privacy invasions is to force the company to pay for your privacy with cash, rather than services:

https://www.wired.com/story/opinion-andrew-yangs-plan-to-pay-you-for-your-data-doesnt-add-up/

This is ideological capture in its purest form: the "data dividend" that Facebook would owe you under this system amounts to a few dollars per year. For wealthy people, the sums would be trivial, while working people, who've been on the downward leg of every K-shaped recovery for a quarter century, who've maxed out their credit cards and re-mortgaged their homes and drive Uber on the weekends to make rent, would have to subject themselves to ongoing surveillance.

That surveillance is already used to determine the highest price those working people will pay – companies like Plexure inform fast food places when you've just gotten paid so they can tack an extra dollar onto your breakfast burrito in the app:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/04/30/something-must-be-done/#there-ive-done-something

Being forced to sell your privacy doesn't just raise the prices you pay, it also lowers the wages you earn. The same people who can't afford this "pay or privacy" system have their private data used to calculate the lowest wage they'll accept for each ride on those weekend Uber shifts:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/12/18/loose-flapping-ends/#luigi-has-a-point

In other words: not being able to afford privacy will result in you having even less disposable income, which will mean that you'll have to sell even more of your privacy. Lather, rinse, repeat.

But even the wealthy people who can afford to forego the pittances Facebook and others offer in exchange for their private information will find privacy elusive. That's because private information isn't a "rival good" – a thing only one person can own at a time. The fact that your mother is your mother "belongs" to both you and her, as well as your grandparents, your father, your siblings and your kids. The fact that you don't sell your family tree to a tech company won't stop all those other people from selling it on – as anyone whose foolish relations handed their genome over to 23andme can attest:

https://www.npr.org/2025/03/24/nx-s1-5338622/23andme-bankruptcy-genetic-data-privacy

In the property religion, the way you can tell if something is valuable is if it has a high price. Property cultists insist that the problem with privacy is that our privacy is being sold too cheaply. They're wrong: private information isn't "mispriced" – it shouldn't be priced.

Human beings are the most valuable things in our world and they are literally priceless. Murder isn't "theft of life." Rape isn't "theft of sex." While insurers and civil courts have ways of calculating the "price" of an injury or violation, great care has been taken over the centuries to ensure that this does not turn human beings into commodities. You can't buy a "murder offset" that lets you kill people provided you pay into a fund that saves a human somewhere else:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/04/14/for-sale-green-indulgences/#killer-analogy

Human beings are too valuable to be priced. We have an entire, sui generis way of balancing the conflicting interests of human rights. My daughter and wife have rights over me, I have rights over them, and when those rights come into conflict – say, if my daughter believes I can no longer care for myself and wants to put me in a care home – the process for resolving that conflict isn't an auction:

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2008/feb/21/intellectual.property

Your kids aren't your property. In fact, all the most important relationships in your life are non-market. Doctors have patients, not customers. Any time a doctor calls you a "customer" they are demoting you. A doctor doesn't sell you health. You have rights as a patient that far exceed the rights accruing to a mere customer. Same goes for other professions: Teachers have pupils, librarians have patrons, lawyers have clients. "Customer" is a demotion from all of these.

As every "user agreement" you've ever clicked through demonstrates, Big Tech loves to have everything defined in property terms – and so does all big business.

Take the fight over scraping for AI. You might think that this is a fight over the economic rights of creative workers – certainly, my fellow creative workers treat it as such. But because this debate is being framed in terms of property rights, rather than labor rights, this is a fight that workers are set up to lose.

The tell here is how the media companies – who have been eroding the wages of creative workers for decades as they consolidated into a curdled, inbred oligopoly – describe the AI companies' scraping: as an unlicensed taking. Mitch Glazier, the $1.4m/year CEO of the Recording Industry Association of America issues press releases decrying AI training for image generators without negotiating a license fee first:

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

Who's Mitch Glazier? Oh, just a former Congressional staffer who was drummed out of the Capitol Building after he snuck a clause into must-pass legislation that would have transferred hundreds of millions of dollars from musicians to record labels, who was then immediately hired as the CEO of the record industry's largest lobbying group:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2013/12/tpps-attack-artists-termination-rights

Mitch Glazier – and the businesses he represents – aren't opposed to AI replacing artists. They're opposed to AI replacing media companies. Remember the Hollywood writers' strike? The proposal to replace screenwriters with chatbots didn't come from OpenAI, it came from Disney, Warner, Universal and other companies who claim that AI training is "theft."

If AI training is "theft," then it can be cured by making a purchase, something that the AI companies can easily afford, thanks to the hundreds of billions of dollars they have been given by the world's richest investors, who are the high priests and cardinals of the property religion.

The Hollywood writers are the only workers in the world who have successfully beaten back the use of AI in their workplace, and they didn't do it by making recourse to property rights. The Writers Guild is a union and it enjoys a weak form of "sectoral bargaining" (where all the workers in a field bargain with all the businesses at once) called "multi-employer bargaining":

https://pluralistic.net/2023/10/01/how-the-writers-guild-sunk-ais-ship/

The Hollywood writers' strike was an unqualified victory for the writers, who defended their labor rights to co-determination when it came to the use of new tools on their jobsite. Under the terms of their hard-fought contract, screenwriters don't have to use AI, but they can if they want. For example, writers on a long-running sitcom might train an AI with every script in the series' history, so they can ask a chatbot continuity questions as they beat out a new season of the show. But they don't have to do this if they don't want to, and even if they do, neither their wages nor their headcount can be reduced.

The media companies insist that scraping is a copyright violation, that it's "theft." As a matter of law, this is far from obvious or settled: the process of making transient copies of many works, performing mathematical analysis on them, and then publishing that analysis as software is not obviously a copyright violation, and anyone who claims otherwise doesn't understand copyright:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/02/09/ai-monkeys-paw/#bullied-schoolkids

Worse: by demoting a labor rights issue to a mere property rights issue, AI critics are setting workers up to fail. Say the issue with AI training really is mere copyright. If that's so, the media companies who want nothing better than to pauperize creative workers can amend their standard contracts so that any worker who does business with them must irrevocably transfer their "AI training rights" to the company.

Then, that company will absolutely, 100% license those rights to an AI company to create a model designed to replace that worker. The company will get paid for the training, and the resulting model will come with "guardrails" to stop other media companies from using proprietary data to compete with it.

This is the story of the past 50 years of copyright expansion: every new copyright we've created "to help artists" was scooped up by their bosses, who grew more powerful and were able to demand more concessions from those artists, who were therefore poorer and thus needed more copyrights to help them (lather, rinse, repeat):

https://pluralistic.net/2026/08/18/enron-corpus/#sign-here

If creative workers' AI fight is merely a copyright fight, then that fight can only determine whether media companies or tech companies will get the biggest portion when those workers are devoured by corporations. Only a labor rights fight can take creative workers off the menu altogether.

Treating AI training as "theft" creates harms whose blast radius extends well beyond creative workers' livelihoods. Scraping is a hugely beneficial activity. If scraping – taking a vast corpus of copyrighted works without permission – is theft, then every search engine is a crime, unless it can afford to license "search indexing rights" from every site on the internet.

There's exactly one company that could pull that off: Google, a rapacious tech monopolist that is – not coincidentally – one of the leaders of the movement to beggar every creative worker. We will not improve the world, the internet, or creative workers' lives by ensuring that the last search engine anyone ever creates is Google.

Remember our earlier discussion of how privacy violations are weaponized to make poor people even poorer, by depressing their wages and raising prices based on inferences about their economic desperation? Our best weapon for fighting this practice is scraping, because that's how we catch corporations changing prices and wages based on surveillance data:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/09/17/how-to-think-about-scraping/

Scraping is how we produce evidence of the changes that powerful people are making to the world around us. Do you want to know whether Mark Zuckerberg or Elon Musk are downranking content critical of Trump and Big Tech and pumping racist and conspiratorial posts into the resulting void? You'd better hope you can scrape the feeds they cram into billions of people's eyeballs. Same goes for keeping track of genocide apologists, data-center astroturfers and ICE cheerleaders who've flooded Tiktok ever since Trump stole it and handed it over to his creepy billionaire pal Larry Ellison.

Making copies of that stuff isn't theft. It's not a copyright violation. Not even if you do it to billions of works. Not even if it's bad for the companies whose feeds you're capturing. Not even if it's bad for the dark money groups who funded the content.

Sure, if you do this carelessly or recklessly, you can end up violating someone's labor rights, or privacy rights, or human rights. And because those frameworks aren't based on the sanctity of property rights, they can be used to protect these important rights without giving corporate America the right to have you fined or arrested for documenting their takeover of the America.

The people who keep track of this stuff are worried about being fined or arrested. Ethan Zuckerman, one of America's foundational internet scholars, has just accepted Canadian government funding to move his lab from UMass to McGill in Montreal:

https://ethanzuckerman.com/2026/08/27/my-personal-contribution-to-the-us-canada-trade-war/

Zuckerman studies platform power: "using data to answer hard questions about social media, search engines and AI tools." He leads a team that is documenting exactly, precisely how tech companies collude with authoritarians to spy on us, manipulate us, and control us. And his methodology is something called "unpermissioned research," which is what academics call scraping:

https://www.techpolicy.press/ai-companies-threaten-independent-social-media-research/

"Unpermissioned research" seeks to circumvent limits that platforms establish specifically to stop outsiders from learning how they operate. When you're doing unpermissioned research, you try to get around rate limits, query throttles, and other measures that platforms use to block others from mapping their extent and documenting their conduct.

"Unpermissioned research" isn't a free-for-all. Universities have ethical rules designed to protect the privacy rights and other human rights of research subjects, and because these aren't property rights, they can be balanced against the socially beneficial outcomes of research. Universities can get this wrong, of course, but when they do, it's not theft. It's a human rights violation, a privacy violation, a labor violation.

If you want to know how AI companies are trying to destroy creators' livelihoods, you have to scrape the AI companies. You can't ask companies for permission to gather information that might be used to destroy them – they'll just say no. If taking information off the internet without permission is "theft," then gathering information by scraping AI companies is also theft.

Sometimes a tech company will set up a "research portal" that supposedly obviates the need to scrape by putting all the relevant information in one convenient place. That's what Facebook did in the wake of the 2016 election, when it was widely condemned for publishing paid political disinformation. But Facebook's official research portal omitted vast amounts of paid political disinformation, something we only know because NYU set up a scraping project called Ad Observer that documented the discrepancy:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/08/06/get-you-coming-and-going/#potemkin-research-program

Facebook used legal threats to kill Ad Observer, and then…they killed their official research portal, too:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/07/15/three-wise-zucks-in-a-trenchcoat/#inconvenient-truth

Zuckerman is one of dozens of leading US academics who are relocating their labs and teams to Canadian universities, citing fear of political interference from the Trump regime:

https://vancouver.citynews.ca/2026/08/27/canada-recruits-dozens-of-foreign-scientists-researchers-poaching-many-from-u-s/

The Canadian government has committed $504m to the project. Some of that research will help Canada develop new green energy, and some of it will help Canada make important medical breakthroughs. But Zuckerman's research has a special place in the portfolio of Canadian research projects, because – thanks to scraping – it is a leading source of information about how Trump's tech companies are waging war on the American people and the world.

Scraping isn't theft of data, just like murder isn't theft of life. Scraping can be harmful, and we can create laws and social regimes and ways of talking about those harms that don't give authoritarian governments and vast multinational corporations the right to decide who can document and analyze their conduct.

Take Wikipedia: the project exists solely to organize and disseminate information, for free, to everyone in the world. Wikipedia is among the most important parts of the internet, and one of the most positive developments of the 21st century. The entire project is licensed under a generous Creative Commons license that encourages unlimited commercial re-use of its contents. Even if you think scraping copyrighted works is theft, scraping Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 works is unquestionably not theft.

But Wikipedia is being hammered by AI scrapers, which are operating so aggressively that they threaten the project's ability to keep its servers online. Wikipedia has an AI problem, but that AI problem isn't "theft" – it's denial of service, the aggressive act of intentionally or recklessly flooding a server with so much traffic that it crashes.

If you've been lured into a cultlike worship of property rights, this seems like a contradiction. But once you relegate the relatively unimportant matter of property rights to its correct station, you can see – and reason about – the universe of rights that are far more important than mere property.

All it takes is realizing that there are far worse things you can do with information than "stealing" it.

(Image: Bearas, 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 NYT says ebooks don't exist, fails to mention thriving ebook pirate scene https://www.nytimes.com/2001/08/28/business/forecasts-of-an-e-book-era-were-it-seems-premature.html

#25yrsago Parking tickets waived in exchange for written apologies https://web.archive.org/web/20010826013513/http://www.thesmokinggun.com/doc_o_day/lewiston1.shtml

#20yrsago "I, Row-Boat" https://web.archive.org/web/20060000000000*/http://www.flurb.net/1/doctorow.htm

#20yrsago Filipino students use SMS to organize mass demonstrations https://web.archive.org/web/20060902160514/http://blog.wired.com/sterling/index.blog%3Fentry_id%3D1545927

#20yrsago Spam pump-and-dumps work http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/5284618.stm

#25yrsago Leaked: Handspring's next PalmOS device https://web.archive.org/web/20020824213501/http://www.palmstation.com/view_article.asp?article=4614

#15yrsago “Stalwart Workers”: neglected backbone of the firm https://web.archive.org/web/20110920155246/http://blogs.hbr.org/hbsfaculty/2011/08/stop-ignoring-the-stalwart-wor.html

#5yrsago Facebook's war on switching costs https://pluralistic.net/2021/08/28/talking-hard-work-blues/#hostage-takers

#5yrsago The "work ethic" is a dirty trick we play on ourselves https://pluralistic.net/2021/08/28/talking-hard-work-blues/#work-will-set-you-free

#1yrago The capitalism of fools https://pluralistic.net/2025/08/28/strew-deal/#neither-fish-nor-fowla

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 Post-American Internet," a geopolitical sequel of sorts to Enshittification, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2027

  • "Unauthorized Bread": a middle-grades graphic novel adapted from my novella about refugees, toasters and DRM, FirstSecond, April 20, 2027

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

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


Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources:

Currently writing:

  • “Once Is Enemy Action,” a science fiction novel about the origins of modern technofascism. Today's words: 527 (10843 total).

  • "The Post-American Internet," a sequel to "Enshittification," about the better world the rest of us get to have now that Trump has torched America. Fourth draft completed. Submitted to editor.

  • A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING

This work – excluding any serialized fiction – is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license. That means you can use it any way you like, including commercially, provided that you attribute it to me, Cory Doctorow, and include a link to pluralistic.net.

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"When life gives you SARS, you make sarsaparilla" -Joey "Accordion Guy" DeVilla

READ CAREFULLY: By reading this, you agree, on behalf of your employer, to release me from all obligations and waivers arising from any and all NON-NEGOTIATED agreements, licenses, terms-of-service, shrinkwrap, clickwrap, browsewrap, confidentiality, non-disclosure, non-compete and acceptable use policies ("BOGUS AGREEMENTS") that I have entered into with your employer, its partners, licensors, agents and assigns, in perpetuity, without prejudice to my ongoing rights and privileges. You further represent that you have the authority to release me from any BOGUS AGREEMENTS on behalf of your employer.

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Received — 25 August 2026 ⏭ Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow

Pluralistic: How Canada can help Americans and defeat America (23 Aug 2026)

✇Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
By: Cory Doctorow
24 August 2026 at 23:29


Today's links

  • How Canada can help Americans and defeat America: True Carneyism has never been tried.
  • Hey look at this: Delights to delectate.
  • Object permanence: Brazil v AIDS drug patents; TSA v gel-bras; After the Siege (Russian); Names are hard; Layton's last message; Hospital bill secrets; "The Unraveling"; Friction cannot be reduced, only redistributed; Free Kevin; EFF v Barney; MP3tunes; "Ghosts With Shit jobs"; Ikea as dystopian design-fiction; Torturing "young conservatives"; Roald Dahl body yeast ale; Prisoners die of heat; Privacy v antitrust; The internet is boring (2001); TSA v explosive water; Internet Archive x 9/11; Peter Thiel x litigation financing startup; Universities v unions.
  • Upcoming appearances: Sydney, Melbourne, Brighton, London, 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.


A Canadian flag, its elements replaced with circuit boards. In the foreground, a bent-double, exhausted Uncle Sam trudges over rocky terrain, shlepping a giant sack on his back. Centered in the maple leaf is the word SORRY.

How Canada can help Americans and defeat America (permalink)

As Canada is learning (the hard way), the "art" of all of Trump's deals can be summed up in a single word: "renege":

https://pluralistic.net/2026/07/22/table-flipper/#graveyard-of-indispensable-nations

In 2020, Donald Trump ripped up NAFTA, a trade deal that conferred a huge advantage to the USA at Canada's expense, and replaced it with CUSMA, a trade deal that was even more advantageous to America, and even worse for Canada. In 2024, after being elected for the second time, Trump publicly railed against CUSMA using the exact same language he'd used to decry NAFTA, branding it "a very bad deal" that needed to be shredded and renegotiated.

To that end, Trump declared sweeping tariffs on Canada's exports, thereby raising the costs Americans paid for many everyday goods, because while Canada does not ship a lot of finished products to the US, it is a key supplier of parts and materials, all of which were made instantly more expensive thanks to the Trump tariffs. Trump went on to insist that Canada should annex itself to the US, becoming the "51st State." His operatives openly meddled in Canadian separatist movements, backing the "Wexit" partisans who want to separate the oil-rich, boom/bust-plagued province of Alberta from Canada.

CUSMA was negotiated by Justin Trudeau's government, and Trump II's tariff war landed on Trudeau's successor, Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney, billed as a technocratic safe pair of hands who could be relied upon for sober, effective leadership.

Much to everyone's surprise, Carney – the epitome of a "Davos Man" – responded to the Trump tariffs by traveling to Davos and giving a fiery speech denouncing Trump and declaring a "rupture" that left the old world order dead:

https://www.weforum.org/stories/forum-institutional/davos-2026-special-address-by-mark-carney-prime-minister-of-canada/

Carney promised that Canada would go "elbows up" against America, with retaliatory tariffs, blockades and boycotts of key US exports. Cutting off this stream of goods would have the same effect on Canadians that Trump's tariffs had on Americans: raising prices. Unlike their American cousins, Canadians were far more tolerant of this increase in their cost of living, because, unlike Americans, Canadians believed the narrative that they were sacrificing for the good of their country against an existential threat from a fractious neighbour. Americans were far less willing to believe that Canada was somehow cheating the US or flooding the country with fentanyl.

"Elbows up" is largely a war of symbols, in which Canadians take pride in mastering the minute differences between "Product of Canada," "Made in Canada," "Assembled in Canada," and "Designed in Canada" so they can seek out maximal Canadianness in their consumption choices. There's even a kind of twisted honour in committing yourself to drinking Wayne Gretzky's shitty rye in preference to delicious American bourbon, a way to affirm your love of country with each astringent, metallic swallow.

When the trade war was confined to symbolic terrain, Carney's elbows remained reliably elevated. But outside the realm of symbols, Carney's elbows wilted.

Take the Digital Services tax, a plan to charge America's tax-evading tech giants a 3% levy to make up for the untaxed profits they keep by pretending to be Irish. So long as Trump's tech giants can dodge their tax obligations, they can always outcompete Canada's tech sector, who are expected to pay 38% federal and provincial tax.

American tech companies are closely allied with the Trump regime: they financed his campaign, conduct domestic and international surveillance for him, provide the software to administer his ethnic cleansing, and restrict access to software that helps Americans evade the armed secret police he sent into the streets to kidnap and disappear his enemies:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/10/06/rogue-capitalism/#orphaned-syrian-refugees-need-not-apply

Trump repaid his tech giants by threatening Carney with still more tariffs unless he canceled the Digital Service Act, and Carney capitulated. Meanwhile, Carney raced to enact a plan to fire tens of thousands of civil servants and replace them with AI chatbots running American software on American chips:

https://www.pm.gc.ca/en/news/news-releases/2026/06/04/prime-minister-carney-launches-ai-all-canadas-new-national-artificial

Canada's federal and provincial ministries are all entirely dependent on American cloud software, most notably Microsoft's Office 365, a package that Trump has fashioned into a geopolitical weapon, ordering Microsoft to shut down foreign officials who thwarted his plans, denying them access to all their data and cutting off their ability to communicate with the outside world:

https://apnews.com/article/icc-trump-sanctions-karim-khan-court-a4b4c02751ab84c09718b1b95cbd5db3

In other words, Canada is already terribly vulnerable to American cyberwarfare. Trump's tech companies don't have to hack into Canada's digital infrastructure to shut it down: they already control it. But – incredibly – Carney found a way to make this situation even worse, turning over key aspects of the digital back-end of Canada's military to Palantir, the tech company most closely aligned with Trump, whose CEO openly boasts that his company was founded to kill America's political enemies:

https://thedeepdive.ca/canada-military-palantir-license-deal/

Carney's symbolic gestures – memorable speeches and minor changes to consumption habits – are second to none. But when it comes to building a strong country that is resilient against the attacks we can all foresee (not least because Trump has repeatedly told us he intends to launch them), Carney himself becomes Carneyism's fiercest opponent:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/05/30/rupture/#deeds-not-words

It's not just the attacks that are foreseeable, alas. Trump can always be relied upon – to break his word. Carney repeatedly caved to Trump, and in response, Trump has hit Canada with massive new tariffs – 50%! Remember: the "art" of every Trump deal is renege:

https://www.pbs.org/newshour/economy/what-to-know-about-trumps-50-tariffs-on-canadian-goods-that-just-went-into-effect

Trump can also be relied upon to circle back to his fixations and obsessions. Decades ago, someone showed Trump a Mercator projection map of the Earth and he became obsessed with "yuge" Greenland, to the point where he is prepared to dissolve Nato and go to war with Europe to steal it from Denmark:

https://archive.is/3Q8nj

By the same token, Trump has long been publicly obsessed with the Gilded Age president William McKinley, who enacted sweeping tariffs at a time when the US economy was rapidly growing, a fact that lodged in Trump's brain and led him to believe that tariffs are a surefire growth-hack that will let him eliminate taxes on the wealthy without shutting down the country:

https://edition.cnn.com/2025/02/12/business/trump-william-mckinley-tariffs/

Trump will still be obsessing about these idées fixes when he draws his last breath, gasping out "Greenland…tariffs" as he tumbles from his golden toilet, forehead and coronary arteries bulging from the strain of trying to pass a half-digested Big Mac with only a viscous paste of rectal mucus and Diet Coke to lubricate that final, unyielding bolus.

The fact that Trump is immune to learning from his mistakes (because that would require admitting that he made a mistake) does not bind Canada to do the same. Quite the contrary: Trump's inability to learn or reason means that if Canada engages in novel retaliatory tactics, it stands a good chance of flummoxing the Mad King, leaving him flat-footed and lumbering while it dekes him out and swarms past him.

Lucky for Canada, Trump's incontinent belligerence has opened up a large and diverse territory of novel tactics for conducting both geopolitical and economic policy. As November Kelly says, "Trump inherited a poker game rigged in his favour but he flipped over the table anyway because he resents having to pretend to play." The systems that Trump has dismantled as unfair to the US were, in fact, sources of tremendous advantage to America.

Take those tech companies that have fused so tightly with the Trump regime. These companies operate global monopolies that allow them to extract vast sums and even vaster troves of sensitive data from billions of people around the world. Having attained total economic dominance and total technical lock-in, these companies have embarked on a program of enshittification, squeezing their customers and suppliers for even more data and even more money:

https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374619329/enshittification/

Under normal market conditions, the decay of these American platforms would invite competitors from around the world. The fact that Apple and Google extract 30% of every dollar spent in their app stores would bring forth new app stores who were willing to give better deals to app makers and app users. The fact that HP charges $10,000/gallon for the coloured water in its printers would invite competitors who were willing to take a mere 100,000% margin on ink.

The fact that Meta and Google and Microsoft and Apple spy on you with your devices and software and use that data to target you, manipulate you and overcharge you – and to train their AIs to steal from you even more efficiently – would create demand for privacy blockers, jailbreakers, and other "adversarial interoperability" tools that force your technology to work for you, even if the manufacturer wishes it were otherwise:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/11/01/redistribution-vs-predistribution/#elbows-up-eurostack

But we don't have "normal market conditions." For more than a quarter of a century, the US Trade Representative has demanded that all of America's trading partners – including Canada – enact "anti-circumvention" laws that make it a crime to alter how a digital device works unless the original (usually American) manufacturer consents.

In other words, it's illegal for some Waterloo grads to tap ambitious RIM millionaires for the seed capital to start a company that helps Canadians install Canadian app stores on their Canadian phones so when they buy things from other Canadians, all the money stays in Canada, without a 30% "app tax" being siphoned off by either Google or Apple.

That's right: in 2012, Canada passed a law that lets American companies use Canada's courts to destroy Canadian companies that help Canadian technology users get more out of their own property. This law – the Copyright Modernization Act – was wildly unpopular from the start. A federal consultation drew over 6,000 opposing comments, and only 53 comments in support of the bill. But Prime Minister Stephen Harper whipped the vote among his Conservative MPs and passed it, because he judged that tariff-free access to America's markets to be a price worth paying:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/11/15/radical-extremists/#sex-pest

Trump's tariffs prove that this was a bad bargain. By voluntarily gluing its technological elbows to its sides, Canada made itself easy pickings for America's tech giants, who wiped out Canada's tech sector while making Canada geopolitically and economically dependent on – and vulnerable to – the US and its tech companies. Canada is long overdue for a reckoning with this blunder.

The best time to have made Canada digitally sovereign would have been before an American president announced his intention to annex Canada and began explicitly deploying America's tech companies to attack his geopolitical adversaries.

The second-best time is now.

By repealing Bill C-11 and legalizing reverse-engineering and modification of digital technology with consent of its users and in accordance with privacy, consumer and labour rights, Canada will gain a devastating counter to Trump's tariffs.

Not only will legalizing jailbreaking let Canadians get more out of their own property, it will turn America's tech trillions into Canada's tech billions – while making Canada digitally sovereign by facilitating the uncoupling of Canadian ministries, corporations, households, and devices from America's cloud. This is how Canada removes the digital kill switch it handed to America, a kill switch that can shut down its tractors, phones, and governments.

This is the best possible moment for such a move. To incubate a successful tech sector, you need a) an innovative product; b) skilled technologists; and c) capital. Thanks to Trump, Canada has all three.

First: innovative ideas. Thanks to the prohibition on modifying America's defective tech exports, there is a whole orchard of low-hanging fruit for product designers to pick from: an app that aggregates all of your streaming services into one place and lets you record shows to watch later, even if the service deletes them; reliable tools for using generic ink and independent app stores; new firmware for tractors and cars that facilitates independent repair and unlock subscription features, and, of course, privacy- and ad-blockers of all description. These are truly disruptive products, striking at the maddening antifeatures installed at the insistence of sclerotic, extractive tech bosses. Move fast and break their things!

Next: talent. Who will do that fast moving? Again, we can thank Trump for giving Canada an army of skilled technologists who have fled Silicon Valley one step ahead of an ICE chud who wanted to black-bag them and deport them to Liberia (or a Salvadoran slave-labor camp). Trump is creating the largest wave of reverse brain-drain in history, as everyone ambitious and smart realizes that their lifelong US tech work dream is a nightmare. If Canada can't get enough talent to harvest that orchard of low-hanging fruit from its returning Canadians, it need only open its borders to the skilled technologists of all nations who are racing out of America as fast as they can go.

Finally, money. The AI bubble collapse is imminent. The forces of capital are desperate for promising, high-return investment opportunities that aren't grossly overvalued, overhyped and underperforming AI companies. Even if you can find a company like that in America, it's increasingly apparent that to make that business a success, you will need to buy more $TRUMP coins than your rivals, lest Trump direct his agencies to destroy your fledgling business.

And here's the kicker: turning America's trillions into Canada's billions, moving fast and breaking America's tech-kings, fixing the defects in America's extractive tech exports? It's all good for Americans. Sure, cratering the share-price of America's Big Tech companies will be bad for America's retirement savers, but the median American worker only has $955 saved for retirement:

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/955-saved-for-retirement-millions-are-in-that-boat-150003868.html

Most Americans are far more exposed to the predatory conduct of US tech companies than they are to the share price of those companies. That's because Americans are the beta-testers for every ripoff and surveillance tool that Silicon Valley produces. Long before those tools get to Canada or find their way around the world, they are making Americans poorer and worse off.

Remember: Canada is America's second largest trading partner. Americans are really good at buying things from Canada – even when those things aren't allowed in America. Trump wasn't entirely wrong when he accused Canada of flooding America with drugs – but the drugs Canada sends to America aren't fentanyl and oxy. Canada sends America insulin and other cheap pharmaceuticals that cost 10-100x more in Ripoff America than they do in Canada. If Americans can figure out how to buy cheap generic meds from Canadians over the US Postal Service, they will be able to buy disenshittification tools from Canadians over the internet.

Selling Americans products that make their lives better is much better politics than boycotting American products that make Canadians' lives better. No politician can pursue a strategy of higher prices and lower living standards forever – not even if you've got a lot of "elbows up" rhetoric you can use to convince Canadians that they're doing their duty to the nation by paying more for everything. Paying more for everything to punish Americans is like punching yourself in the face as hard as you can and hoping the downstairs neighbours say "ouch."

When Canadians swap delicious American bourbon for Wayne Gretzky's shitty rye, they punish corn farmers in states that begin and end with a vowel – farmers who have nothing to do with Canada's problems. By swapping disenshittification for tariffs, Canadians can go back to drinking delicious bourbon, and make money from that farmer by selling him the jailbreaks he needs to fix his tractor without paying the John Deere tax of $200+ that the company charges after you do your own repair to send someone to the farm to type an unlock code into your console.

A lot of Very Serious Grown Up Canadians have told me that they think Carney should confine his response to Trump to toothless symbolic gestures, lest they make Trump mad. Trump is always mad. He gets mad at symbolic gestures. He gets mad if you point out that Ronald Reagan thought tariffs were stupid:

https://abcnews.com/Politics/trump-raises-tariffs-canada-10-after-reagan-ad/story?id=126866712

Freeing Americans from the tyranny of their own tech companies has the power to create a partisan army of American Canada weebs who will fight for Canada when – not if – Trump gets mad at Canada. That's the best defense Canada can have – common cause and solidarity with the people of America, who share a common enemy in Trump, the least popular president in history, who is looting billions and letting his cronies destroy Americas' lives.

That's some real elbows up stuff. True Carneyism has never been tried – especially by Carney. It's long past time someone gave it a go.

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 Kevin Mitnick is out of prison https://web.archive.org/web/20010000000000*/https://www.techtv.com/screensavers/showtell/story/0,23008,3343816,00.html

#25yrsago Brazil to nationalize AIDS drug patents https://edition.cnn.com/2001/WORLD/americas/08/22/aids.drug/index.html

#25yrsago Copyright your DNA https://web.archive.org/web/20010827170510/http://www.cosmiverse.com/science08230102.html

#25yrsago The internet is boring now https://www.nytimes.com/2001/08/26/us/exploration-of-world-wide-web-tilts-from-eclectic-to-mudane.html

#20yrsago TSA busts “explosive water” that turns out to be cosmetics https://web.archive.org/web/20060822123448/http://www.kxma.com/getARticle.asp?ArticleId=35223

#20yrsago Windows Media DRM cracked, no one cares https://archive.blogs.harvard.edu/cmusings/2006/08/25/#a1889

#20yrsago Canadian music label puts fans and artists first https://web.archive.org/web/20060830211418/http://wired.com/wired/archive/14.09/nettwerk_pr.html

#20yrsago After the Siege in Russian https://craphound.com/Cory_Doctorow_-_After_the_Siege_Russian.html

#20yrsago Victory in War on Moisture: Gel-bras once again safe! https://web.archive.org/web/20060820185006/http://www.tsa.gov/travelers/airtravel/prohibited/permitted-prohibited-items.shtm

#20yrsago EFF sues Barney the humorless, copyright maximalist dinosaur https://web.archive.org/web/20060813093642/http://www.eff.org/news/archives/2006_08.php#004884

#15yrsago MP3tunes verdict: music lockers are legal https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2011/08/mp3tunes-victory-music-lockers-is-good

#15yrsago Lolita on Wikipedia: 2,300 edits later https://web.archive.org/web/20111008072145/http://www.theawl.com/2011/08/case-history-of-a-wikipedia-page-nabokov’s-lolita

#15yrsago SF mockumentary: ‘Ghosts With Shit Jobs’ — China looks at westerners with awful jobs https://ghostswithshitjobs.com/

#15yrsago Information consumes attention: focus in the age of abundant stimulus https://web.archive.org/web/20111113004501/http://nymag.com/print/?/news/features/56793/

#15yrsago Jack Layton’s final public words: “Love is better than anger. Hope is better than fear.” https://web.archive.org/web/20110829050308/http://beta.images.theglobeandmail.com/archive/01310/Jack_Layton_s_lett_1310744a.pdf

#15yrsago Getting people’s names right in software design: a LOT harder than it looks https://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2011/08/why-im-not-on-google-plus.html

#15yrsago Internet Archive’s cache of 24/7 TV footage from 9/11 and beyond https://archive.org/details/911

#10yrsago Peter Thiel & Y Combinator fund a “litigation financing” startup to make money off other peoples’ lawsuits https://gizmodo.com/a-startup-backed-by-peter-thiel-makes-bankrolling-civil-1785707590

#10yrsago Universities fought unionization’s ‘one-size-fits-all’ using identical arguments https://crookedtimber.org/2016/08/25/great-minds-think-alike/

#10yrsago 5 years after Texas GOP’s attack on women’s reproductive health, TX leads developed world in maternal mortality https://web.archive.org/web/20160820212602/https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/aug/20/texas-maternal-mortality-rate-health-clinics-funding

#10yrsago You didn’t find a meteorite https://sites.wustl.edu/meteoritesite/

#10yrsago Young Conservatives’ “leadership seminar” featured food & water deprivation, sexist epithets, physical abuse https://web.archive.org/web/20160824145226/https://www.thestar.com/news/queenspark/2016/08/23/ontario-tories-apologize-to-party-activists-after-controversial-youth-seminar.html

#10yrsago The 2017 Ikea Catalog considered as dystopian urban microapartment futurism https://web.archive.org/web/20160817154440/https://www.fastcodesign.com/3062854/ikeas-2017-catalog-is-a-terrifying-glimpse-into-the-tiny-apartments-of-the-future

#10yrsago Singapore will disconnect entire civil service from the internet https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/aug/24/singapore-to-cut-off-public-servants-from-the-internet

#10yrsago They’re making a Twits ale from Roald Dahl’s body-yeast https://web.archive.org/web/20160817154531/http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/news/beer-to-be-made-from-yeast-swabbed-from-roald-dahls-writing-chair-a7195721.html

#10yrsago As America’s temperatures soar, prisoners are dropping dead https://web.archive.org/web/20160825000426/https://theintercept.com/2016/08/24/deadly-heat-in-u-s-prisons-is-killing-inmates-and-spawning-lawsuits/

#5yrsago Are privacy and antitrust on a collision course? https://pluralistic.net/2021/08/24/illegitimate-greatness/#peanut-butter-in-my-antitrust

#5yrsago What kind of emergency is our emergency? https://pluralistic.net/2021/08/23/dont-wanna-spoil-the-surprise/#monocausotaxophilia

#5yrsago The secrets of hospital bills https://pluralistic.net/2021/08/23/dont-wanna-spoil-the-surprise/#surprise

#5yrsago Belarusian dictator pwned by "cyber-partisans" https://pluralistic.net/2021/08/25/taxes-are-for-the-little-stores/#cyber-partisans

#5yrsago Big Box stores' other shoe drops https://pluralistic.net/2021/08/25/taxes-are-for-the-little-stores/#metastatic-parasites

#5yrsago The Unraveling https://pluralistic.net/2021/08/23/dont-wanna-spoil-the-surprise/#the-two-genders

#1yrago Friction cannot be reduced, it can only be redistributed https://pluralistic.net/2025/08/23/become-unoptimizable/#downward-redistribution

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 Post-American Internet," a geopolitical sequel of sorts to Enshittification, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2027

  • "Unauthorized Bread": a middle-grades graphic novel adapted from my novella about refugees, toasters and DRM, FirstSecond, April 20, 2027

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

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


Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources:

Currently writing:

  • “Once Is Enemy Action,” a science fiction novel about the origins of modern technofascism. Today's words: 557 (9258 total).

  • "The Post-American Internet," a sequel to "Enshittification," about the better world the rest of us get to have now that Trump has torched America. Fourth draft completed. Submitted to editor.

  • A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING

This work – excluding any serialized fiction – is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license. That means you can use it any way you like, including commercially, provided that you attribute it to me, Cory Doctorow, and include a link to pluralistic.net.

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"When life gives you SARS, you make sarsaparilla" -Joey "Accordion Guy" DeVilla

READ CAREFULLY: By reading this, you agree, on behalf of your employer, to release me from all obligations and waivers arising from any and all NON-NEGOTIATED agreements, licenses, terms-of-service, shrinkwrap, clickwrap, browsewrap, confidentiality, non-disclosure, non-compete and acceptable use policies ("BOGUS AGREEMENTS") that I have entered into with your employer, its partners, licensors, agents and assigns, in perpetuity, without prejudice to my ongoing rights and privileges. You further represent that you have the authority to release me from any BOGUS AGREEMENTS on behalf of your employer.

ISSN: 3066-764X

Received — 22 August 2026 ⏭ Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow

Pluralistic: Born on technology's third base (21 Aug 2026)

✇Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
By: Cory Doctorow
22 August 2026 at 03:19


Today's links


An old-timey baseball player sliding into base in a great dust-cloud. The background is a high-magnification multicore CPU.

Born on technology's third base (permalink)

Any frank assessment of your own achievements starts with an equally frank assessment of the world-historic forces that attended those achievements. For example, I often tell young people who want to get into tech, "Well, if you don't have the foresight and work ethic to have been born in 1971, I can't really help you."

When it comes to tech, being born in 1971 – to a computer scientist father, no less – conferred a tremendous advantage for my career chances. My dad – a refugee – came to Canada at a time when post-war public services meant that he could become the first person in his family to go to university, all the way to a doctorate.

That set me up for life in a house where tech and education were all around me. Both my parents are teachers, both from working class families where no one had ever gone beyond high school, who found themselves in a time and place where it was easier than at any time in history for people from backgrounds like theirs to attend university. I got to go to university, too, at a time when education was cheap enough that I could drop out of four schools before figuring out that it wasn't for me, and still be debt-free, largely thanks to income from a series of part-time jobs.

When I dropped out of my final degree program, it was to take a job in tech at a time when anyone with a little creativity, work ethic, aptitude and curiosity could walk into a career. Millions of us did it, and I ended up working as a freelancer, then founding a startup, and then going to EFF. I know I work hard, I know I apply myself to understanding the world around me, but also…when it comes to this kind of career, I was born on third base.

There's plenty of this to go around. Think of boomers who bought their "starter home" with the income from their first job and traded it in for a succession of larger, nicer homes, each of which skyrocketed in value. Some of those people fancy themselves to be veritable Warren Buffets for having had the shrewd financial insight that buying a house and living in it was a good idea. The truly smart ones know that they just got lucky.

There are world-historic forces all around us, creating moments and circumstances that contribute to the life-thriving of those of us who are lucky enough to be suited to the moment we find ourselves in.

Take computing: for decades, computing was ruled by Moore's Law, an unbroken run in which computers got faster and cheaper every year. If you were interested in the kinds of computing applications that were well-suited to serial computation – programs that worked best when run on a single computer – you were in luck. Even if your application or field of study was expensive and difficult to realize on today's computer, you could just stand still for a year or two and a much faster computer would park itself on your doorstep, ready to solve your problems.

When Moore's Law tapped out – when the pace at which transistors got smaller and computers got faster slowed and plateaued, and the expense of even modest performance gains climbed infinitywards – computing changed with it. Parallel computing – putting more cores on a chip, more chips on a board, more boards in a system – took off, as chipmakers and system builders switched from a focus on building their computers tall to building them wide.

As parallel computing took off, so did parallel applications. This is the beginning of the graphics revolution, as GPUs – components made up of many, many low-powered computers – became more central to academic research and commercial product roadmaps. But it wasn't just graphics that saw a huge lift here: any task that could be parallelized got easier and cheaper to perform every year, in a steady trend that has run to this day. This is the era of performance gaming, VR and AR, cryptocurrency, and, of course, AI.

In What Technology Wants, Kevin Kelly introduces the idea of the "adjacent possible" through the example of the helicopter. Da Vinci sketched a "helicopter" – blades in the shape of maple keys attached to a kind of wine-press screw – in the 15th century. In the centuries that followed, many other people had the insight that twirling blades of that shape on a screw of some type could provide lift for some kind of heavier-than-air craft. But it wasn't until strong alloys, internal combustion engines and light, energy-dense refined hydrocarbon fuels came on the scene that the helicopter became possible, whereupon it was all but inevitable, with several people independently inventing the helicopter all at once:

https://memex.craphound.com/2010/10/13/kevin-kellys-what-technology-wants-how-technology-changes-us-and-vice-versa/

In the same way, the computing industry's focus on parallel computing made life easier for people who burned to do something parallelizable. Then the achievements of the parallel computing partisans drove more investment in improvements to parallel computing hardware and theoretical work on how to parallelize other problems. This feedback loop raised the profile of parallel computing applications, attracting more bright and ambitious people to those applications, whose even more impressive accomplishments brought more people into the field, more capital into hardware development, and more resources to parallelization research.

The point being that world-historic forces, combined with accidents of history, shape the outcomes of individuals, companies and disciplines. It's much easier to be an accomplished graphics wizard in an era in which GPUs are doubling in power every year than it is in an era when linear computing is getting the lion's share of investment and improvement.

These forces and accidents have acted on AI in ways that profoundly shaped its development. The latest AI boom started when a group of machine learning researchers tried a minor variation on existing techniques and saw a major improvement in the outcomes. This is one of the most exciting kinds of breakthrough: if tweaking a single variable in a small way produces a large improvement, then it may be that further tweaking will produce even more improvements.

The minor variation that produced the major improvement in AI performance was scale. Prior to the "deep learning" era, AI research relied on a mix of hand-built models of reality and training data that computers fitted into those models. Deep learning swapped the painstaking work of describing reality in software for a brute-force approach: throw lots more training data at the system and then throw lots more (parallel) computing power at that data and let the computer figure it out without your having to explain how the world worked.

The early gains from this approach were very exciting: they dangled the promise of software that could essentially "teach itself" how to do complicated, valuable things in a series of accelerating returns. The fact that the early improvements in AI systems that used this technique were so much greater than anyone would have expected based on AI research up to that point dangled an even more exciting promise: that the improvements would continue to scale faster than the inputs.

Researchers and investors came to expect an AI that was "untouched by human hands," that taught itself how the world worked. This was the self-licking ice-cream cone of machine learning, the world of "theory-free inference" that had fueled the Big Data industry. With theory-free inference, you don't have to figure out how the world works in order to act upon it: you can just gather up all the data about how things happen in the world, use statistical methods to find the correlations, and then intervene to change the outcomes. You don't have to know why a molecule improves a medical condition – it's enough to discover that fact, produce that molecule, and administer it to people with that condition.

Lots of stuff in the world works this way. Our understanding of the causal relationships that make up reality has massive holes in it that we fill with mere correlation. Correlations are easier to discover than causes, and while correlation is (famously) not causation, causes and effects are correlated, and if you can evoke the effect you're seeking without understanding precisely what happened to make that effect appear, well, at least you got the effect you were seeking.

Theory-free inference is a very pragmatic way to approach the world: "I don't need it good, I need it Thursday." Scientists burn to know why a molecule stopped you from dying, but you are likely satisfied to not be dead. What's more, our ability to observe correlations will always race ahead of our understanding of causality, so the power of theory-free inferences pushes out the frontier of things we can act on, beyond the realm of the understood.

Which is all to say: it's reasonable to be excited about a breakthrough in theory-free inference. But just like a boomer who thinks that buying a house to live in makes them a shrewd real-estate speculator, someone who achieves great things through theory-free inference runs the risk of missing the limitations of those techniques.

And they are limited. Theory-free inference is good at predicting what your spouse will type into their phone based on all the things they've ever typed into their phone. You are also good at guessing what your spouse will say based on the things they've said before. The difference is that when your spouse says something entirely unexpected and unprecedented to you (say, "I want a divorce"), the fact that you have a theory about why your spouse said all the things they said up to that moment can help you understand why they've said this new thing. But a machine learning model that relies on theory-free statistical modeling to predict your spouse's next words will be entirely at sea. Theory-free inference works well, but it fails badly.

The problem is that the AI sector has raised literally trillions of dollars by assuring investors that the era of hand-made, causal world models that let computers act on the world is hopelessly inefficient and outdated. But there are many, many tasks that are vastly more efficient and reliable when done through conventional computer programs, rather than through "AI."

As Gary Marcus describes in a recent Organized Money interview, an LLM can recite the rules of chess, but it can't play chess because – lacking a theory of how chess works – it will just emit statistically likely chess moves, even if those moves cause pieces to illegally move through other pieces. The first conventional chess-playing programs ran on electromechanical proto-computers, and they played a better game of chess than an LLM that uses billions of times more computing power and energy:

https://www.organizedmoney.fm/p/an-ai-expert-explains-the-hype

The AI companies have proved that there are many domains and applications where we can swap scale for understanding. But, having ridden some world-historic forces and adjacent possibles to great fortunes and stature, they cannot be dissuaded from their conviction that theory-free inference and scale can do everything. They can't be convinced that in many cases, the things that scale and theory-free inference can do are much better accomplished through causal understandings and conventional computing techniques.

From a research perspective, it is interesting to learn about the potential and limitations of a model trained on the entire internet. From a societal and industrial perspective, it is often grossly wasteful, inefficient and unreliable to swap scale for understanding.

The AI sector was born of world-historical forces that favored massively parallel computing, forces that had also conjured up an internet with trillions of documents that could be fed into those massively parallel computers to conduct theory-free inference. Like every success, AI was born on third base.

As rent-burdened millennials who abandoned avocado toast and fancy coffee and still can't afford a downpayment will tell you, the fact that being born in 1945 made it easy to trip and land on a couple million dollars' worth of real estate by the time you reached retirement age tells us nothing about how to solve the housing crisis of 2026.

By the same token, continuing to give trillions to AI companies because they experienced early success with theory-free inference at scale tells us nothing about how to solve the vast range of problems that theory-free inference at scale sucks at. Doubling down on AI to overcome its increasingly obvious limitations is like doubling down on building post-war suburbs to fix today's housing market.

It's possible to achieve impressive feats because you're smart and hard working and also because you were in the right place at the right time. Historical contingency produced the AI bubble, and it is producing the conditions for that bubble to pop.

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 Glue anything to anything https://www.thistothat.com/

#20yrsago No unions in iPod City https://web.archive.org/web/20061123003816/https://www.wired.com/news/columns/0,71629-0.html?tw=wn_index_2

#15yrsago Credit scores are bullshit https://web.archive.org/web/20111013005626/https://a.wholelottanothing.org/2011/08/credit-scores-are-bullshit.html

#15yrsago RIP, Jack Layton https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-14618943

#15yrsago William Gibson on cities and the future https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/gibson-interview-cities-in-fact-and-fiction/

#10yrsago Bronx cops can steal anything they want by calling it “evidence” https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2016/08/how-police-use-a-legal-gray-area-to-rob-suspects-of-their-belongings/495740/

#10yrsago Robert Moses wove enduring racism into New York’s urban fabric https://web.archive.org/web/20160402184527/http://www.hopesandfears.com/hopes/now/politics/216905-the-lingering-effects-of-nyc-racist-city-planning

#10yrsago EFF takes a deep dive into Windows 10’s brutal privacy breaches https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2016/08/windows-10-microsoft-blatantly-disregards-user-choice-and-privacy-deep-dive

#10yrsago Inside the “sweatshop” terminally ill Britons must call to get benefits https://web.archive.org/web/20160820094907/https://www.theguardian.com/public-leaders-network/2016/aug/20/work-pensions-disability-claim-call-handler-benefits-dwp

#10yrsago How the New York Public Library made ebooks open, and thus one trillion times better https://www.crummy.com/writing/speaking/2015-RESTFest/

#5yrsago Raiders of the lost ARC https://pluralistic.net/2021/08/22/raiders-of-the-lost-arc/

#1yrago Radical juries https://pluralistic.net/2025/08/22/jury-nullification/#voir-dire

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 Post-American Internet," a geopolitical sequel of sorts to Enshittification, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2027

  • "Unauthorized Bread": a middle-grades graphic novel adapted from my novella about refugees, toasters and DRM, FirstSecond, April 20, 2027

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

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


Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources:

Currently writing:

  • “Once Is Enemy Action,” a science fiction novel about the origins of modern technofascism. Today's words: 513 (8701 total).

  • "The Post-American Internet," a sequel to "Enshittification," about the better world the rest of us get to have now that Trump has torched America. Fourth draft completed. Submitted to editor.

  • A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING

This work – excluding any serialized fiction – is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license. That means you can use it any way you like, including commercially, provided that you attribute it to me, Cory Doctorow, and include a link to pluralistic.net.

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 — 21 August 2026 ⏭ Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow

Pluralistic: The actual epistemic crisis (20 Aug 2026)

✇Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
By: Cory Doctorow
21 August 2026 at 01:41


Today's links


The North Pole at night, hand-tinted in blues and purples so it looks more like a moonscape. Protruding from the ice is the cross-sectioned head and neck of a man, his brains on display. Stepping over the leftmost mountains is a killer pulp robot, about to crush the head. Leaning against the rightmost mountains is a sneering, princely toff in a red frock coat, holding a cane that has penetrated the decapitated skull and lodged in the brains.

The actual epistemic crisis (permalink)

AI is alarming for many reasons: it's a dangerous financial bubble, an environmental catastrophe, and a tool for eroding wages and labor power. But in addition to all that, AI is an epistemic disaster.

We've had photoshopped images, voice impersonators and visual effects for years, of course, but with deepfakes, we've democratized access to reality-bending images, sounds and videos that appear real but are not. It's harder than ever to know what's true. Politicians and celebrities and activists show up in our feeds, declaring their fealty to this cause or product, or their fury at some turn in the world's events. Battlefields mound high with bodies and influencers marvel at impossible, sumptuous meals. It all seems plausible, and some of it is real, but not all of it, and because we know some of it is fake, we can't be sure if any of it isn't.

It's a very putinesque way of living. Vladislav Surkov was Vladimir Putin's media strategist, and he had a deadly effective tactic: he announced that he was covertly funding some of the groups that publicly opposed Putin, but did not disclose which of those opposition groups were fake. That meant that any of the groups could be fake, which meant that any discussion of the opposition was liable to devolve into an argument about its authenticity. Anything could be a lie, so nothing was necessarily true. Putin's method isn't to get you to believe a lie – it's to keep you from believing that anything is true.

That's life under AI – a world of uncertainty, an epistemological void full of plausible phantasms, some of which are actually real. A world where it's impossible to know what's true, and where anything might be fake.

But here's the thing: AI's assault on our ability to know isn't a new battle – rather, it's the latest barrage in a war that's been waged for years, as corporations grew larger and more powerful, capturing their regulators, who let them lie to us and abuse us with impunity.

This complicated, technical world – the world that produced AI – is full of complicated, technical questions, and none of us can answer these questions for ourselves. You're not stupid, but even a generational genius could not acquire the expertise to answer the long list of life-or-death questions we face every day.

Are the food hygiene standards followed by your grocer or lunchtime spot adequate, or will your dinner make you shit yourself to death? Are the building codes that specify the alloys in the steel joists that hold up the roof over your head sufficient, or are you about to be crushed to death? Is the software in your anti-lock brakes any good, or will you die in a fireball on the way to work?

From food additives to pedagogy, psychotherapeutic techniques to retirement savings, it would take a hundred lifetimes for you to acquire the 200 PhDs needed to answer these questions for yourself.

Thankfully, we don't have to answer those questions for ourselves. Instead, we defer to expert agencies: governmental regulators that assess truth claims by soliciting input from all comers, publicly deliberating about the evidence they've gathered, and then making a rule in public. These regulators are meant to be experts, nonpartisan and neutral, operating with the highest degree of probity, recusing themselves in the event of even a whiff of conflict.

It has to be that way. You may not be able to assess claims about the safety of vaccines – or opioids – but you can see for yourself whether the FDA is full of ex-pharma execs. You can see for yourself whether pharma company lobbyists all used to work for the FDA. You don't need to be a virologist or a cell biologist to tell whether the system that's supposed to sort truth from lies is fit for purpose.

It is not fit for purpose. When arguments broke out over covid vaccines, many vaccine advocates characterized their opponents as foolish people engaged in foolish conspiratorialism. They argued that the corporations that produced the vaccines and the regulators who oversee them were intrinsically trustworthy, and on that basis, we should all get vaccinated.

Now, I happen to be a big believer in vaccination. I've had so many covid jabs that I glow in the dark and get five bars of 5G in a coal-mine. But I didn't get vaccinated because I trust pharma companies or their regulators. A string of scandals – most notably the Sacklers' Oxycontin murder-spree – has proven that pharma will kill you for a nickel and that the FDA will let them get away with it:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/03/25/black-boxes/#when-you-know-you-know

From tobacco safety to food safety to the climate emergency, it's obvious that the system of expert agencies that we rely on was terminally compromised by corporate power and regulatory capture:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/06/05/regulatory-capture/

This is the epistemological void we were already adrift in before AI came along: a world of unresolvable, urgent, terrifyingly high-stakes questions.

When you get a call from "your bank" and accede to the demand that you hand over all kinds of personal information before they will disclose the call's purpose, you're not being naive or foolish – you're doing the thing that our banks have conditioned us to do for years by engaging in exactly this behavior (my bank did this to me this week!). Why are banks allowed to get away with engaging in this kind of outrageous conduct? Because – as we've repeatedly discovered through crisis after crisis – banks are too big to fail, too big to jail, and too big to care.

Why is it so believable that a loved one might call you in a panic because they've been arrested or injured and need an immediate cash payment before they can get bail or doctor's treatment? Because our criminal justice system and our health care system are already plagued by this kind of inhumane, high-handed, extortionate behavior.

Why do you fall for a deepfake of celeb shilling for supplements or a shitcoin? Maybe it's because celebs actually shill for supplements and shitcoins, and face no consequences for helping rope us all into scams:

https://gizmodo.com/matt-damon-crypto-com-crypto-bitcoin-1850282413

Not just celebs – also our newspapers:

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2022/03/18/technology/cryptocurrency-crypto-guide.html

We laugh when other people fall for newspaper articles making absurd claims – but after living through a time in which our most respected journalistic outlets credulously helped a dishonest government lie the world into a war that's still smoldering more than a generation later, who can be sure when to trust the papers?

https://www.nytimes.com/2004/05/26/world/from-the-editors-the-times-and-iraq.html

One of the reasons it is so hard to agree on covid's death-toll is that so many of the people who died of covid were already compromised by chronic illnesses or "pre-existing conditions" from cancer to heart disease. Those people did die of covid – and they died of cancer or heart disease or some other comorbidity. Covid was an opportunistic infection that inflicted disproportionate harms on people who were already suffering.

The epistemic void created by AI is another opportunistic infection. Our ability to know things has been in decline for generations, as monopolies shredded our truth-assessment systems, rendering us all incapable of knowing the truth in a world where believing lies could bankrupt you or kill you dead.

If you could trust your government's expert agencies and if they had reliable systems for making their findings known; if your bank was banned from engaging in conduct indistinguishable from phishing; if the health-care and criminal justice systems never forced the people they ensnared to call their relatives and beg for money, then deepfakes would have a much harder time penetrating our cognitive immune systems.

It's not so much that AI is a powerful way of lying – rather, we have been made progressively more vulnerable to lies for decades, leaving us at an epistemic death's door, and AI has arrived to deliver the coup de grace.

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 Goth day at Disneyland photos https://flickr.com/photos/doctorow/tags/batsday/

#20yrsago HOWTO run a successful sf convention room party https://www.nielsenhayden.com/makinglight/how_to_throw_a_1/

#20yrsago Yahoo: Go ahead and remix our brand https://web.archive.org/web/20061111175912/http://www.ysearchblog.com/archives/000348.html

#10yrsago The Equation Group’s sourcecode is totally fugly https://web.archive.org/web/20160818012451/https://www.cs.uic.edu/~s/musings/equation-group/

#5yrsago Bubble https://pluralistic.net/2021/08/21/podcasting-as-a-visual-medium/#huntr

#1yrago Melissa Mendes's "The Weight" https://pluralistic.net/2025/08/21/weighty/#edie-is-a-badass

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 Post-American Internet," a geopolitical sequel of sorts to Enshittification, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2027

  • "Unauthorized Bread": a middle-grades graphic novel adapted from my novella about refugees, toasters and DRM, FirstSecond, April 20, 2027

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

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


Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources:

Currently writing:

  • “Once Is Enemy Action,” a science fiction novel about the origins of modern technofascism. Today's words: 533 (8263 total).

  • "The Post-American Internet," a sequel to "Enshittification," about the better world the rest of us get to have now that Trump has torched America. Fourth draft completed. Submitted to editor.

  • A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING

This work – excluding any serialized fiction – is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license. That means you can use it any way you like, including commercially, provided that you attribute it to me, Cory Doctorow, and include a link to pluralistic.net.

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 — 19 August 2026 ⏭ Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow

Pluralistic: The ordinariness of evil (19 Aug 2026)

✇Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
By: Cory Doctorow
19 August 2026 at 09:36


Today's links


A giant killer pulp robot bestriding a 17th century map of the world, against an illustrated backdrop of the stars and planets and spaceships from an early 20th century picture-book.

The ordinariness of evil (permalink)

Maybe it seems weird that AI bosses won't stop publicly rending their garments about the terrible potential of their products, from the jobspocalypse that will ensue when AI can do our jobs better than us, to the impending moment when the word-guessing programs learn too many words, wake up and turn us all into paperclips.

It seems weird that they won't stop fretting about this terrible potential – until you realize that every public pronouncement about this terrible potential is also a public boast about its potential, period.

That's very, very important, because all AI really has is potential. Actual, existing AI is useful at the margins, if you're already a skilled practitioner who can discern correct from incorrect outputs, and if you integrate AI judiciously so that it doesn't overwhelm your ability to pay attention to those outputs and apply your discernment to them:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/07/28/hitl-ers/#ai-ai-oh

In other words, AI is mostly a novelty, a heavily subsidized toy that produces little more than distraction. Where AI does produce value, that value is comparable to a plug-in, a new feature for your word processor or image/sound/video-editing package that might help you do your job somewhat better, or it might not.

That doesn't make AI useless, it just makes it a normal technology: useful for some, useless for others, capable of being abused and likely to waste a lot of time when used unwisely:

https://www.normaltech.ai/

Normal technologies are fine. But normal technologies do not warrant the massive economic and political commitments that have been bestowed upon AI: a trillion dollars in the past year alone, and the world's civil servants fired en masse and replaced with AI:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/05/13/vibe-governance/#k-hole

The people who have committed our society and its resources to an all-or-nothing bet on AI will tell you that AI is the everything machine, but when pressed, they will confess that AI is about to become the everything machine, for example, once AI starts doing AI research, a thing that AI cannot do:

https://www.normaltech.ai/p/ai-agents-cant-yet-do-open-ended

This is a civilizational act of Magic Underpants Gnomery, and every day that it goes on is a day when more economic, climate and political costs of AI are imposed on all of us. Scientific journals, open source repositories and even science fiction magazines are being overwhelmed by slop, whose perpetrators and apologists insist that soon, AI will realize its potential and the slop will be transformed into gold.

That's why AI bosses are so committed to talking up AI's destructive potential: because destructive potential is nonetheless potential. The moment we stop believing in that potential is the moment that we stop supplying AI companies with bales of cash to shovel into their money-furnaces so that they can afford to sell hundred dollar bills for a dollar each to Elon Musk cultists who want to generate child porn and pictures of Sonic the Hedgehog with giant boobs.

AI does have destructive potential. It has the potential to destroy the productive economy when an AI salesman convinces your boss to fire you and replace you with chatbots that can't do your job:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/03/18/asbestos-in-the-walls/#government-by-spicy-autocomplete

AI has destructive potential because bosses are trapped in a prisoner's dilemma where none of them can admit that the money they've spent – and the jobs they've destroyed – chasing AI has been wasted, and so other bosses bet even harder:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/08/01/dare-snot/#i-will-fucking-piledrive-you-if-you-mention-ai-again

AI has destructive potential because the data-center bubble has convinced credulous town officials to throw out environmental and planning review, seize people's home and farms, and carpet the countryside with giant data centers (many of which will never be built):

https://www.404media.co/people-hate-datacenters-survey-finds/

AI has destructive potential because it is consuming scarce water and energy and emitting gigatons of carbon:

https://www.404media.co/even-the-u-s-government-says-ai-requires-massive-amounts-of-water/

This is the destructive potential we need to be hammering at, because this isn't the kind of destructive potential that translates into productive potential that will someday make the AI bet pay off. Quite the opposite: this is all about the potential of AI to destroy the economy and consume your retirement savings:

https://www.thebulwark.com/p/congrats-youre-about-to-unwittingly-make-elon-musk-trillionaire-spacex-ipo-index-funds

Just as importantly: we have to stop amplifying tech bosses' chosen narratives about their products' destructive potential, because this helps them raise more money and do more terrible things. Bernie Sanders needs to stop insisting that the US government should own 50% of the money-losingest corporations the world has ever seen and start talking about how they will not get a government bailout when their investment bubble bursts. We need to stop talking about AI "haves" who will enjoy the awesome potential of AI, and AI "have-nots" who will fall behind.

We need to stop talking about "AI safety" and the possibility of "rogue AI" destroying the world. When an AI company's security tool "escapes containment" and hacks someone else's servers, we need to ask the company "Why do you suck so bad at building secure sandboxes for your hacking tools?" rather than "Why are your hacking tools so amazingly powerful?"

Above all, we need to stop talking about AI as exceptional. AI is normal. A normal technology has some uses, but isn't useful for all things and all people. A normal technology isn't inevitable, it's something you decide whether you want to use or not.

Treating AI as unexceptional is the best way to halt the destructive march of AI companies and their impact on jobs, the climate and the economy. But treating AI as unexceptional requires that we stop talking about AI as if it were exceptionally evil. Yes, some people who use AI experience severe mental problems, but that's not because AI is a Lovecraftian horror that destroys your brain and your capacity for rational thought if you use it. It's not a basilisk. AI is like a carny ride that triggers cardiac events in riders who never knew they had a problem because they never experienced those particular g-stresses – it's not something that induces vulnerability, it's something that triggers vulnerability:

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

Using AI doesn't make you evil, nor does it risk your sanity – no more than doing any of the other dangerous, compromised, unsustainable things that constitute our daily lives in this fraught moment. The world will be better off when the AI companies are bankrupt and their servers are sold off at ten cents on the dollar – but using those servers to run open models in modest, careful ways won't infect you with their wickedness. They are not stained with communicable sin. They're just computers. They are unexceptional.

One way for a technology to be normal is for it to be produced and marketed by an awful corporation that wants to do terrible things. This isn't to say that "all technologies are dual use, and you have to take the good with the bad." That's the inevitabilist argument of vulgar Thatcherites who insist – as Margaret Thatcher did – that "there is no alternative," and we have to accept their abuse if we want to reap the benefits of the technology.

The normal way to deal with this is to reject vulgar Thatcherism in favor of heroic Gibsonism, thundering William Gibson's rallying cry, "the street finds its own use for things," as we seize the means of technology and use it in the ways that benefit us, while restricting, banning, or blocking the uses that harm us:

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

To treat AI as exceptionally evil is to elevate the mediocrities who run AI companies to super-villain status, a status in which they positively revel. A serial liar like Sam Altman will someday trip over his own dick and end up in a cell for securities fraud – unless we keep exalting his evil to Satanic scale, in which case he might make himself "too big to jail":

https://time.com/article/2026/05/26/sam-altman-ai-job-losses-openAI-/

Altman is a con-man and a stock swindler, not a super-genius. The more we describe his products as possessing a special kind of durable evil that will endure even after his company fails and he is condemned to history's ash-heap, the more we help Altman raise money for his chatbot Ponzi. Normal technology isn't a cursed artifact. That's something you find in a lich-king's tomb. We need to stop helping Altman burnish his reputation as a lich-king and stop treating AI like it's magic.

There's a technical term for the kind of tech criticism that inadvertently helps tech bros sell their swindle: "criti-hype," Lee Vinsel's term for "tak[ing] the sensational claims of boosters and entrepreneurs, flip[ping] them, and start talking about 'risks'":

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

In other words, to commit criti-hype is to repeat the marketing claims of people like Sam Altman and then add, "(and that's bad)" in parentheses at the end. These guys – these terrible, mediocre, boring-ass losers – are bullshit factories, ejecting fountains of nonsense about AI. The right way to criticize them is to point out that they're lying – not to repeat their lies as warnings.

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 Dot-com crash toilet paper https://web.archive.org/web/20010822220826/http://news.cnet.com/news/0-1007-200-6908350.html

#25yrsago Associated Press says a single sentence excerpt is not fair use https://web.archive.org/web/20050717075914/http://www.infoanarchy.org/?op=displaystory;sid=2001/8/17/202249/240

#15yrsago German Pirate Party poised to win first federal election https://torrentfreak.com/german-pirate-party-on-course-to-election-win-110820/

#15yrsago Understanding the Nym Wars https://epeus.blogspot.com/2011/08/google-plus-must-stop-this-identity.html

#15yrsago Journalism school teaches students pre-digital newspaper production techniques https://journoterrorist.com/2011/08/02/paperball2/

#15yrsago 90 percent of US net users don’t know from crtl-F https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2011/08/crazy-90-percent-of-people-dont-know-how-to-use-ctrl-f/243840/

#15yrsago Bruce Sterling’s Augmented Reality project https://web.archive.org/web/20110827010512/https://www.wired.com/beyond_the_beyond/2011/08/augmented-reality-science-fiction-writer-becomes-augmented-reality-developer/

#10yrsago Woman sues cops because they destroyed her empty house, thinking a suspect was hiding in it https://www.techdirt.com/2016/08/19/woman-sues-after-police-destroy-her-home-during-10-hour-standoff-with-family-dog/

#10yrsago US Army committed $6.5 trillion in accounting fraud in one year https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-audit-army-idUSKCN10U1IG/

#10yrsago Candid Republican operators admit that voter ID laws are about disenfranchisement https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/research-reports/when-politicians-tell-truth-voting-restrictions

#1yrago Become unoptimizable https://pluralistic.net/2025/08/20/billionaireism/#surveillance-infantalism

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 Post-American Internet," a geopolitical sequel of sorts to Enshittification, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2027

  • "Unauthorized Bread": a middle-grades graphic novel adapted from my novella about refugees, toasters and DRM, FirstSecond, April 20, 2027

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

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


Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources:

Currently writing:

  • “Once Is Enemy Action,” a science fiction novel about the origins of modern technofascism. Today's words: 531 (7157 total).

  • "The Post-American Internet," a sequel to "Enshittification," about the better world the rest of us get to have now that Trump has torched America. Fourth draft completed. Submitted to editor.

  • A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING

This work – excluding any serialized fiction – is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license. That means you can use it any way you like, including commercially, provided that you attribute it to me, Cory Doctorow, and include a link to pluralistic.net.

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Received — 18 August 2026 ⏭ Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow

Pluralistic: IP can't save you from AI (18 Aug 2026)

✇Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
By: Cory Doctorow
18 August 2026 at 16:48


Today's links


The rubble after the 1906 San Francisco quake/fire. Lying in a vast heap is a pile of dead knights in armor. Crashed into the ground is a Spirit Airlines jet. Looming up from behind a shattered building is the Android droid.

IP can't save you from AI (permalink)

You don't have to believe that AI "art" is any good (I don't), nor do you have to believe that AI "art" can be any good (I don't) to understand that the reason that the capital markets are putting trillions into AI is that they believe they can fire workers of every kind and replace them with AI:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/03/18/asbestos-in-the-walls/#government-by-spicy-autocomplete

I'm an artist and a worker. I want to protect my labor interests. So do my peers from across the "creative industries." But a sizable group of my peers think the way we're going to protect our interests is by expanding copyright so that it's unambiguously illegal to scrape the internet, analyze the files retrieved by those scrapers, and publish that analysis (a process more familiarly known as "training AI"):

https://pluralistic.net/2023/09/17/how-to-think-about-scraping/

This is a losing strategy. First, because banning scraping, or requiring permission to count the elements in creative works, or demanding a license to publish collections of facts about copyrighted works will inflict enormous collateral damage on a wide variety of socially beneficial activities. From the OED to search engines to the Internet Archive, so many beneficial activities rely on the fact that copyright permits unlicensed collection and analysis of every copyrighted work as a single, massive corpus, and copyright allows the publication of that analysis without permission from the creators of the works it analyzes.

A lot of people who are (rightfully) very angry about AI dispute this. They believe that they can craft an "AI training" law that would ban scraping, analysis and publication when these activities are part of AI training, but not when they're undertaken for a benign purpose. I am very, very skeptical of this. After 25 years of watching internet policy go badly awry, to the great detriment of workers of all kinds and everyday users, it is my professional, considered opinion that drafting a statute that only stops these "bad" activities is much, much harder than these people think, and may actually be impossible.

I think some artists advocating for a copyright-based solution to AI's war on labor understand this and have decided that they're willing to catch a lot of dolphins in these legal tuna-nets they're hoping to get from Congress. I get that: there are always trade-offs, and the perfect can't be the enemy of the good.

But I think they're making the wrong trade-off, and not just because I value archives, accountability corpuses, large-scale linguistic research and search engines. I think they're making the wrong trade-off because copyright will not protect their livelihoods from AI-based wage erosion.

Here's why: the theory of copyright as an "artist's right" is premised on the idea that we artists get these exclusive rights, which we use in our bargaining with media companies and other intermediaries. It's a (pseudo) property right, and it's sub-licensable. Just as an entrepreneur might get the contract to supply catering for a sports stadium and then parcel out the pretzel stand, beer bar, and pizza concessions to subcontractors, we're meant to sell our English rights, foreign language rights, graphic novel rights, film rights, audio rights, (and so on) to a variety of media companies.

To bargain successfully, it's not only necessary for you to have something valuable to trade: you also need to have leverage. You need to have options. The other side has to believe that if they lowball you, you will go do a deal elsewhere.

This is where copyright fails to serve creative workers. Even at the best of times, the world naturally produces an oversupply of would-be professional artists, and a sufficiency of the talented to fill most of the workaday niches in our field. Even exceptional artists – and exceptional works of art – are often commercial flops, for reasons that aren't always well understood (though sometimes it's a self-fulfilling prophecy, where a media company buys the rights and then loses confidence in the work and does not exert itself in the marketing of the work).

These are not the best of times. Decades of lax antitrust enforcement has boiled the "creative industries" down to 5 publishers, 4 studios, 3 labels, 2 app stores, and one company that's in charge of all the ebooks and audiobooks.

Since the 1976 Copyright Act, Congress has acted time and again to broaden copyright. Today's copyright lasts longer, restricts more uses, extends to more kinds of works, and carries stiffer statutory penalties for infringement ($150,000 per download!). The media companies we creative workers bargain with are larger, richer and more profitable than at any time in history – and we are poorer. The share of those massive profits that ends up in our pocket is lower than ever – and we don't just get smaller slices of that larger pie, those slices are smaller than the slices we used to get, when the pie was much smaller. The rising tide of copyright expansion lifted our bosses' boats – even as our dinghies filled with bilge and sank.

How could we get so much more to bargain with, only to bargain it all away, for less money than we used to get for a much smaller bundle of rights? Simple: giving us rights did not give us leverage. Giving us more rights without giving us more bargaining power is like giving your bullied schoolkid extra lunch-money. There's no amount of lunch-money that will get that kid fed; but if you keep increasing how much money the kid gets, the bullies will end up so rich that they can afford to run a global campaign demanding that we all think of those poor hungry kids and send them even more lunch money.

Copyright's failure to deliver for creative workers doesn't mean that we're doomed to poverty. Our works are generating record profits for our bosses, and there are plenty of ways to change the "distributional outcomes" (the phrase economists use for "who gets what") in arts/labor policy. In 2022, I co-wrote Chokepoint Capitalism along with the eminent Australian copyright scholar Rebecca Giblin. The whole book is full of these pro-worker arts policies:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/08/21/what-is-chokepoint-capitalism/

Rebecca and I start from the premise that artists are workers, not the small businesses that our bosses insist we see ourselves as. The idea that an artist is an LLC with an MFA fits in very neatly with copyright: you're getting this bundle of exclusive rights from Congress and then you bargain, business-to-business, with other companies out there in the world, selling those rights for the best price you can get. This approach rarely works, and when it does, it works badly. 50 years of more copyright, richer bosses, and poorer artists put the lie to the "LLC with an MFA" approach.

If we're workers, then we derive our power from labor rights. The Writers Guild – the only creative workers in world history to have comprehensively beaten AI in their workplace – won their AI fight with a strike:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/10/01/how-the-writers-guild-sunk-ais-ship/

The Hollywood guilds are able to pursue a limited form of "sectoral bargaining" (where all the workers in a field bargain with all its bosses) called "multi-employer bargaining." Bosses hate sectoral bargaining, and in 1947 they got it banned outright through the Taft-Hartley Act.

Getting other kinds of creative workers into multi-employer bargaining arrangements will be a lot of work – and repealing Taft-Hartley and restoring sectoral bargaining will be even harder. But just because it's hard to do the thing that works, it doesn't follow that we should do the easy thing that doesn't work.

Compared to winning more labor rights, getting more copyright will be easy. That's because our bosses want more copyright. When we demand more copyright, our bosses – the most powerful, profitable media companies in human history, grown rich off our labor – will fight alongside of us.

But media companies don't want to stop AI from depriving us of our wages. Quite the contrary! The whole reason that the Writers Guild had to go on strike was that movie studios – not Openai or Anthropic – wanted to replace them with AI. The same studios that are suing the AI companies for "mass copyright theft" have made it very clear that they want to buy chatbots from those AI companies and use them to erode our wages and thin our ranks. The copyright lawsuits our bosses are waging against the AI companies are intended to force tech companies to pay for licenses before they train their chatbots on our work. But they won't be paying us for those licenses – they'll be paying our bosses.

The AI copyright fight isn't being fought to protect your wages – it's being fought to see whether your lost wages end up in the pockets of a tech boss or a media boss. AI copyright suits are a fight over who's going to get the lion's share when they eat you up for dinner. They're not a way to keep you off the menu.

This becomes more obviously true with each passing day, and this morning, the world got its clearest example of what a poor substitute copyright is for fundamental human rights, like labor rights and privacy rights.

Last year, Spirit Airlines went bankrupt, a casualty of a monopolized aviation sector and Trump's oil price surge. Ever since, vultures have circled its carcass, picking off its assets in a string of auctions conducted by Spirit's bankruptcy trustees. Today, those trustees announced that they had sold all of Spirit's employees' data to Google, for use in AI training:

https://www.axios.com/2026/08/17/google-spirit-airlines-bankruptcy

Every email, every memo, every calendar entry. Oceans of sensitive, personal information, all to be shoveled directly into the bottomless maw of Google's AI training systems. This training data includes messages between colleagues and with outside parties about workers' romantic lives, their health, their family situations. These workers' most private lives will end up as fodder for a Google chatbot.

Now, all of these workers have a copyright in all of that work. Under international copyright treaties and US law, copyright "inheres at the moment of fixation of a work of human creativity." The very instant a worker sets fingers to keyboard and types out a message with even the smallest quantum of creativity, a new copyright springs into existence, giving the copyright holder 90 years' worth of control over it.

But even though every one of those emails and messages and memos was written by a human being working for Spirit, the copyright over those works does not belong to the workers. Every single one of them will have signed an employment agreement that designates their emails and other copyrightable work as "works made for hire," owned by Spirit Airlines, which means that their work is now an asset in Spirit's bankruptcy estate. That's why all that personal information is about to be transferred to a new corporate owner, Google, who can do anything they want with it.

We know how terrible this kind of disclosure will be for workers. In 2001, the criminal enterprise Enron collapsed after the extent of its fraud was revealed. In the ensuing litigation, Enron's bankruptcy overseers decided that it was too expensive to purge the company's email servers of personal information before entering it into evidence. That meant that once the court battles were over, all the Enron employees' emails entered the public domain as part of the court record:

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

The "Enron Corpus" is a foundational data-set in modern computer science. Academics analyzed the data to do pioneering work on machine learning and social graph theory, which found its way into the design and operations of social media companies, who learned how to spot and manipulate social connections by studying it.

The Enron Corpus isn't just a data-set, though. It's a privacy catastrophe, full of sensitive personal information that haunts the 158 employees whose correspondence is now permanently afloat upon the internet.

Why was the Enron Corpus so exploitable? Because US labor law does not protect this kind of sensitive information when it is in your employer's hands. In fact, if your boss ends up with a trove of your personal information in the form of emails, calendar entries and files, you will typically be blamed for it: "Why did you use your work computer for personal activities?"

But anthropologists who study computer usage have known for decades that everyone ends up with personal data on their work devices. What's more, this problem is only getting worse, because (thanks to weak labor laws), we're expected to work longer hours and to be on call when we're not at the job, which means that you're often dealing with personal crises after hours from your desk, and dealing with work crises at home from your sofa.

Any fit-for-purpose labor rights regime would recognize that your privacy rights must extend to the data that finds its way onto your boss's computers, even if you put that data there. Any failure to recognize this bedrock fact gives employers free license to plunder and exploit your personal information.

Of course, labor law isn't the only way to protect private information. While labor law should contain explicit, job-related privacy guarantees, privacy law should protect all our privacy (after all, Spirit's servers are also full of emails and messages from Spirit's passengers).

Unfortunately for anyone who ever flew on Spirit – or anyone who worked for them – American privacy law is all but dead. America's last consumer privacy law went into effect in 1988, when the Video Privacy Protection Act made it illegal for video-store clerks to disclose your VHS rental records.

Google says it won't use your profile or frequent flier info to train its model, but they haven't made the same promise about the millions of messages that passengers exchanged with the airline. Google has also promised to use "de-identification" algorithms to purge the Spirit customer, supplier and employee data of personal information. But "de-identification" is a pipe-dream, widely understood by security experts as a form of wishful thinking by companies that want to exploit your personal information while still insisting that they aren't violating your privacy. In reality, "de-identified" data is always vulnerable to "re-identification" attacks:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/04/30/dox-the-world/#experian

The collapse of privacy and labor rights in post-Reagan America and the mass expansion of copyright over the same period are part of the same phenomenon, aspects of two generations' worth of policies designed to benefit capital at the expense of workers, and corporations at the expense of consumers.

As consumers, we're told to substitute shopping for legal rights: if a corporation wrongs you, it's easier and quicker to "vote with your wallet" than it is to sue them or ask the government to intervene. Substituting shopping for politics has been a total failure. Shopping your way out of a monopoly is like recycling your way out of a wildfire:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/05/21/purity-culture/#stop-fucking-that-chicken

As creative workers we were told to stop thinking of ourselves as workers altogether, to become small businesses, and to use the LLC With an MFA method to bargain our way out of exploitative arrangements. This, too, has been a failure:

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

The sale of Spirit's data to Google for AI training shows us that privacy and labor rights are indispensable. We can't substitute market mechanisms like comparison shopping or individual contract negotiations for broad, systemic, inalienable rights backstopped by law.

By demanding the copyright our bosses love, we're seeking the right to be angry about AI, even as the AI companies and our bosses cut deals to train chatbots with our work, which they will use to attack our livelihoods.

Once we stop pretending to be small businesses, once we abandon the fantasy of LLCs with MFAs, we can join with every worker in every industry in demanding sectoral bargaining; and with every consumer in demanding privacy rights. Winning privacy and labor struggles means more than the right to be angry about AI – that's the right to do something about it.

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 IP and scientific publishing https://web.archive.org/web/20011001203058/http://www.abc.net.au/rn/talks/bbing/stories/s345514.htm

#20yrsago British air travelers kick brown “terrorists” off their planes https://web.archive.org/web/20060823104858/http://www.dailymail.co.uk/pages/live/articles/news/news.html?in_article_id=401419&in_page_id=1770&ico=Homepage&icl=TabModule&icc=NEWS&ct=5

#15yrsago “Probability neglect”: why policy-makers are constitutionally incapable of formulating evidence-based anti-terrorism policy https://web.archive.org/web/20111015040753/https://opim.wharton.upenn.edu/risk/library/J2011OBHDP_APM,AT,HK_PolicymakersDilemma.pdf

#15yrsago TSA can’t explain why “enhanced patdowns” are legal https://web.archive.org/web/20151203033820/http://flyingwithfish.boardingarea.com/2011/08/18/the-legality-of-the-tsas-enhanced-pat-down-authority/

#15yrsago The Onion: We did a paywall because British people like paying for the Web https://web.archive.org/web/20110911175335/http://www.avclub.com/articles/about-the-onions-new-paid-content-system,60129/

#5yrsago Hench https://pluralistic.net/2021/08/19/failure-cascades/#natalie-zina-walschots

#5yrsago Machine learning's crumbling foundations https://pluralistic.net/2021/08/19/failure-cascades/#dirty-data

#1yrago Charlie Jane Anders' "Lessons in Magic and Disaster" https://pluralistic.net/2025/08/19/revenge-magic/#liminal-spaces

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 Post-American Internet," a geopolitical sequel of sorts to Enshittification, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2027

  • "Unauthorized Bread": a middle-grades graphic novel adapted from my novella about refugees, toasters and DRM, FirstSecond, April 20, 2027

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

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


Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources:

Currently writing:

  • “Once Is Enemy Action,” a science fiction novel about the origins of modern technofascism. Today's words: 585 (6624 total).

  • "The Post-American Internet," a sequel to "Enshittification," about the better world the rest of us get to have now that Trump has torched America. Fourth draft completed. Submitted to editor.

  • A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING

This work – excluding any serialized fiction – is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license. That means you can use it any way you like, including commercially, provided that you attribute it to me, Cory Doctorow, and include a link to pluralistic.net.

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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Received — 11 August 2026 ⏭ Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow

Pluralistic: Surveillance vs guillotines (11 Aug 2026)

✇Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
By: Cory Doctorow
11 August 2026 at 13:19


Today's links


Eugène Delacroix's painting 'La Liberté guidant le peuple' ('Liberty Leading the People'), depicting the French revolution as a ragtag group of peasants led by a flag-waving, bare-breasted incarnation of 'Liberty.' The painting has been altered: the scene is now being observed with a giant, smoke-shrouded CCTV dome, and the distant building have been replaced with a mainframe computer.

Surveillance vs guillotines (permalink)

In the summer of 2013, two esoteric, technical, incredibly important texts were published within weeks of one another: the first is the Snowden leaks, which revealed a system of global, pervasive digital surveillance; the second was Thomas Piketty's Capital in the 21st Century, a book about the economic inevitability (and political instability) of oligarchy:

https://memex.craphound.com/2014/06/24/thomas-pikettys-capital-in-the-21st-century/

In 2013, it wasn't immediately apparent how these two works connected with one another, but in the years since, I've grown increasingly convinced that Snowden and Piketty can only be properly understood as describing two aspects of the same phenomenon.

Piketty's landmark volume was grounded in a detailed analysis of 300 years' (!) worth of global capital flows, painstakingly compiled by a large team of grad students from a massive set of heterogeneous records. The book's conclusion is the statement that "returns to capital exceed the rate of growth over the long term" (abbreviated as "r > g").

This may sound innocuous, but it is explosive. If r > g, then the most wealth will inevitably accumulate in the hands of people who start with the most wealth, irrespective of whether they do anything productive with that money. This means that the alleged heroes of the market system – the entrepreneurs who found and manage the firms that increase public prosperity – are doomed to play second fiddle to the mere plumbers of money, people who "contribute" by accumulating.

The starkest example of this in Capital 21C is Piketty's contrast between L'Oreal heiress Liliane Bettencourt (then the richest woman in the world) and Bill Gates, founder of Microsoft (then the most successful corporation in the world). Piketty compares the growth in the fortunes of Bettencourt and Gates over two periods: first, the period between Microsoft's founding and Gates' retirement as CEO; and second, the period after Gates's retirement from his executive role, when he became a mere investor, no longer an entrepreneur.

During that first period, in which Gates was founding and running the most successful corporation in the world, he accumulated less wealth than did Liliane Bettencourt, who did precisely nothing of value over that period. Bettencourt didn't even manage her investments – that was all handled by some very clever financial planners, lawyers and accountants. In other words: for Bettencourt, doing nothing at all produced more wealth than founding the most successful corporation in the world did for Gates. Bettencourt, a person who owned things, did better than Gates, a person who did things.

And then Gates retired. He stopped doing things and started owning things. He became an investor, whereupon he out-earned both Bettencourt and Gates-the-entrepreneur. Again, the market system allocated fewer rewards to the most successful person in the doing things business than it allocated to that same person once he quit that job and got into the owning things business.

Piketty shows that this holds true across markets and nations and eras: all other things being equal, the market system produces a class of hereditary aristocrats who command the world's capital and direct its deployment, despite never having done anything. The market's most lavish rewards do not go to its most productive participants, but rather, to those participants who have the good fortune to emerge from the luckiest of orifices.

Worse: winning the orifice lottery in no way qualifies you to direct the capital you've inherited. Liliane Bettencourt had no revolutionary new business ideas, invented no miraculous new materials or processes, produced no brilliant art. She merely accumulated, thanks to the professional services of skilled technicians whose job description includes hiring their own successors to ensure that another generation of winners of the Bettencourt orifice lottery could continue to accumulate, commanding more capital and power in society.

Perhaps if these orifice winners were content to allow their bloodless Renfields to allocate their capital while consuming bonbons and attending yacht parties, this could yield a stable politics. But inevitably, people who win the orifice lottery observe that they come from a long line of wealthy people, a line that will continue with their own descendants, and conclude that they have some kind of special, heritable virtue – magic blood – that the system has recognized with their great fortunes and the power those fortunes confer.

That's when things get dangerous: when aristocrats grow bored with their leisure and mobilize their inherited capital to change the way the rest of us live. Billionaire dilettantes are weapons of mass destruction, and their special projects have a wide blast radius and inflict a lot of collateral damage.

Take Bill Gates: his ideological projects have been a catastrophe. A patent maximalist, he funded the lobbyists who successfully blocked South Africa from producing its own AIDS drugs under an IP waiver program, and then deployed them again to stop the Global South from making their own covid vaccines:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/04/13/public-interest-pharma/#gates-foundation

Closer to home, Gates's hatred of public institutions led him to allocate millions to dismantling public schools and replacing them with charter schools, particularly for poor and racialized kids, with disastrous results:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/03/09/autocrats-of-trade-2/#witness-the-firepower-of-this-fully-armed-and-operational-battle-station

And of course, Gates supported and empowered Jeffrey Epstein and his rape island:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_Gates#Connection_with_Jeffrey_Epstein

Capital's tendency to accumulate in the hands of the already wealthy (r > g) means that these aristocrats end up setting an ever-larger proportion of our societal agenda, despite their manifest unfitness to govern and their absence of any kind of democratic legitimacy.

Piketty argues that inequality is inherently politically destabilizing. A society ruled over by fools and monsters who were not voted into power and can't be voted out of power is a doomed society. Eventually – the French Revolution, the World Wars – these societies grow so unstable that they collapse altogether.

This is where Piketty and Snowden converge. When the Snowden leaks broke, there was a lot of talk about the mechanics and the legality of the NSA's global digital surveillance, but precious little consideration was given to the reason for all this surveillance. In 2013, the idea that this spying was about "security" was so obvious as to be self-evident. The questions at the time were whether spying could produce security. We weren't asking why things were so insecure.

In retrospect, the answer is to be found in Piketty. Piketty's Capital includes a long, impassioned plea to both lawmakers and aristocrats to consider redistributive policies (like a wealth tax) as the most affordable way to achieve political stability. Fundamentally, Piketty argues that the cheapest way to stop people from building a guillotine on your lawn is to build hospitals and schools; this is cheaper than paying for guards and prisons to lock up would-be guillotine builders.

Today's AI debates swirl around the question of whether AI can truly make us more productive – that is, if chatbots will allow one person to do the work of two, or three, or four – or 100. But when it comes to surveillance, the digital revolution unquestionably produced a massive productivity dividend.

Consider the spying apparatus of the former East Germany ("the GDR") widely considered the most surveilled society in human history. When the Berlin Wall collapsed, there were about 16m people in the country. Of those East Germans, about 90,000 worked directly for the Stasi (the secret police), aided by another 100-200,000 paid informants:

https://www.dw.com/en/east-germany-spy-agency-stasi-surveillance/

Call it 200,000 people to spy on 16m. In other words, it took one spy to watch 80 of their neighbors. Contrast this with NSA spying: they accumulated detailed surveillance dossiers on about 6 billion internet users using a staff of no more than 5 million spooks (in 2013, about 5 million Americans were eligible for security clearance). If every single person with security clearance in the USA was working on the NSA's surveillance program, that would mean that by 2013, computers had made it possible for a spy to keep tabs on more than a thousand people.

Orders of magnitude improvements in a mere generation! This is the kind of productivity lift that economists dream of when they fantasize about the dividends from automation.

But why? Why spy?

East Germany spied on its people because the system was so unjust and cruel that its beneficiaries understood that their neighbors were forever on the brink of rising up against them. East Germany's leaders were right about that – but if anything, they didn't put enough people onto the spying project. We can tell, because the Berlin Wall fell in 1989!

Of course, the GDR was already paying more than 1.2% of its population to spy on everyone else. It's likely that East Germany's leaders believed that their society simply lacked the fiscal space to hire more spies, even if short-staffing the Stasi risked societal collapse. Now, if Piketty is right, East Germany's leaders could have solved this problem by giving people fewer reasons to want to overthrow the state. They could have taken their hands out of the cookie jar, could have instituted democratic reforms – they could have made a bid for democratic legitimacy and public material comfort. But that would have come at the leaders' own power and wealth, and, lacking the stomach for this sacrifice, they lost everything.

Enter the NSA: the digitization of human civilization has drastically reduced the cost of surveillance, and – again, per Piketty – this vastly increases the amount of inequality the world can sustain before the illegitimacy, incompetence and cruelty of rule by the neoaristocratic winners of the orifice lottery brings the whole thing crashing down.

The Trump years are proof of this. We've reached a high-water mark for rule by illegitimate billionaire dilettantes. The second Trump admin began with DOGE's Bonfire of the Stupidities, where Musk cultists dismantled vast swathes of the American administrative state. Musk didn't just attack foreign aid – though the fact that the world's richest man murdered hundreds of thousands of the world's poorest children for the lulz isn't merely cruel, but also massively destabilizing in a way that will shake the world's politics for generations – but also domestic institutions. It was a DOGE cultist who fed the part of the NIH that tracks cyclosporiasis outbreaks into the wood-chipper:

https://truthout.org/articles/disease-researchers-blame-doge-cuts-for-spiraling-cyclospora-outbreak/

Today, tens of thousands of Americans are experiencing the literal enshittification of the American state, and this isn't just a human tragedy (though it is), it's also an economic tragedy, with massive knock-on effects for the businesses that rely on those sickened Americans and for the agricultural sector whose outputs are now being shunned by millions. Whether it's letting Bill Gates decide how your schools will work or letting Elon Musk decide how your public health system runs, the result is political chaos and a societal nudge away from the rule of law and towards guillotines.

Which brings me back to Snowden. The Snowden revelations did spur a global conversation about digital surveillance, with the result that the majority of the world's digital traffic is encrypted today. That's not nothing.

But the American state found new ways to conduct mass-scale, global surveillance, often by collaborating directly with tech giants. Billionaires like Peter Thiel capitalized on Big Tech's conflicted feelings about openly participating in surveillance by founding Palantir, with the express mission of murdering the political opponents of oligarchy:

https://www.thecanary.co/trending/2026/01/07/palantir-kill-communists/

Over the past decade, the steady march of digital technology, dominated by a cartel of giant global firms who collude with the US government's system of political repression in exchange for tax breaks, antitrust forbearance and fat federal contracts has yielded more mass surveillance productivity gains than the previous 25 years:

https://apnews.com/article/trump-inauguration-tech-billionaires-zuckerberg-musk-wealth-0896bfc3f50d941d62cebc3074267ecd

The Trump administration is the most unpopular in more than a century. Trump has stolen more money in office than any president in history. Trump presides over spiraling greedflation and collapsing buying power. The Trump administration has also presided over a titanic increase in state-aligned, privatized surveillance. The Trump years are the Flock years:

https://newrepublic.com/article/206992/flock-safety-cameras-alpr-deflock-resistance-nationwide

The Trump years are the Palantir years:

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/30/technology/trump-palantir-data-americans.html

The Trump years are the facial recognition years:

https://www.aclu.org/news/privacy-technology/ice-face-recognition

Trump's authoritarianism is a function of his misrule, and his misrule is enabled by his authoritarianism. The more he steals, the more he destroys with wars of choice, and incoherent tariff policies, and official pronouncements linking autism and vaccinations, the more he needs spy cameras, internet surveillance, vehicle tracking, and facial recognition. Every time Trump talks about a third term in office, or canceling elections, or suppressing the vote, he creates demand for mass surveillance to catch and imprison the people this drives into the streets. The more mass surveillance there is, the safer it is for him to commit unpopular, corrupt acts. It's the world's worst self-licking ice-cream cone.

It's not just Trump, of course. Trump is the vanguard of a movement of orifice lottery winners whose delight in stealing, cheating, maiming and despoiling gives rise to political instability and requires them to divert some of their yacht money to mercenaries:

https://theintercept.com/2026/06/25/police-luigi-mangione-wealthy-ceos-threat/

Take AI: the Trump years are also the AI years. This is the time in which a wildly unpopular technology is being shoved into every part of every app we rely on:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/05/02/kpis-off/#principal-agentic-ai-problem

It's an era where corporate bosses can't stop gloating about how many jobs they're planning to destroy and how many paycuts they plan on imposing on the surviving workers:

https://www.axios.com/2025/05/28/ai-jobs-white-collar-unemployment-anthropic

AI can't do your job, but an AI salesman can reliably convince your boss to fire you and replace you with an AI that can't do your job:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/03/18/asbestos-in-the-walls/#government-by-spicy-autocomplete

And – most visibly – it's an era in which people's cities and towns are being despoiled by data centers they don't want, by local governments operating in the most extreme secrecy, who silence and even arrest citizens who demand a democratically legitimate process for deciding whether they will have to give up their power and water and land and peace:

https://www.404media.co/city-that-arrested-person-for-clapping-at-data-center-meeting-moves-to-virtual-townhalls-for-public-safety/

An economist would tell you that there's an equilibrium being sought here: between the cost of bribing a town council to ram through data center approvals, the cost of building a more modest and palatable data center, and the cost of mollifying public critics. The cost of bribing towns to foist a data center on the townsfolk is low, because there are lots of towns that fit the bill, so data center barons can shop around.

But as data center protests grow larger and better organized (oligarchy is destabilizing), the cost of dealing with public opposition is mounting. Which is why the Trump administration is teaming up with its preferred tech and military contractors to engage in detailed surveillance of data center and AI critics:

https://prospect.org/2026/08/10/private-intelligence-firms-selling-dossiers-on-ai-data-center-critics/

These corporate spooks aren't just spying on data center critics: they've got a whole portfolio of oligarchy-stabilizing surveillance services, targeting "antifa," immigrants' rights and anti-ICE groups.

They're joined by hardware vendors who offer corporations, the wealthy, and enclaves where both are to be found on literal robocops, the ultimate in cheap guard labor (alas, the robots suck):

https://www.404media.co/the-roboguard-revolution-is-short-circuiting/

Trump and his orifice-winning army are caught in the same trap as the leaders of the GDR. Every gain in guard-labor efficiency creates the space for more of them to stick more of their hands even further into the cookie jar. Every time they do, American society grows more unstable, demanding more guard labor.

As we saw in Minneapolis, guard labor – be it mass surveillance, robocops or ICE chuds – is itself destabilizing. Police states make the people who live in them want to overthrow the state, requiring yet more cops, creating more partisans for tearing the whole thing down.

In theory, the orifice class could decide to stop stealing, cheating and maiming. The problem is that for every plute who realizes that the cheapest way to keep the guillotines off his lawn is to play fair, there are three more who lack the executive function to stop cheating. That means that you might as well keep on cheating, since the instability – and the guard labor bills – are coming no matter what.

In the tale of the "Tragedy of the Commons," a common pasture is grazed to dust by shepherds who each understand that if they don't graze their flock until everything is gone, some other shepherd will do so. The original "Tragedy of the Commons" paper was a racist hoax perpetrated by an academic fraud who wanted to make the case for the expulsion of black and Brown people from America and their mass extermination abroad:

https://memex.craphound.com/2019/10/01/the-tragedy-of-the-commons-how-ecofascism-was-smuggled-into-mainstream-thought/

In reality, commons need not be tragic and many of our most important resources have been managed as commons for hundreds of years:

https://archive.org/details/governing-the-commons/page/4/mode/2up

But when it comes to the commons that is "a stable society," the orifice class is caught in an inescapable tragedy, certain of the knowledge that if they don't cheat us, the next American aristo will. Thus the demand for guard labor continues to mount…as does the demand for guillotines.

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 Wonderfully thorough backgrounder on DeCSS https://web.archive.org/web/20010816194008/https://lemuria.org/decss/hal2001.html

#25yrsago Warhol Worm https://web.archive.org/web/20010814171036/http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~nweaver/warhol.html

#25yrsago Camgirls use Amazon wishlists for payouts https://web.archive.org/web/20010821234935/http://www.salon.com/tech/feature/2001/08/13/cam_girls/index.html

#25yrsago State of the tech industry 2021 https://web.archive.org/web/20011216222920/http://latimes.com/technology/la-000064605aug09.story

#25yrsago List of scenes cut from Looney Tunes reissues https://web.archive.org/web/20011214095249/http://www.toonzone.net/looney/ltcuts/

#20yrsago Strategy behind using liquids to threaten planes https://web.archive.org/web/20060813001626/https://wondermark.com/d/220.html

#20yrsago RIAA to grieving family: We depose your children in 60 days https://recordingindustryvspeople.blogspot.com/2006/08/riaa-wants-to-depose-dead-defendants.html

#15yrsago Stasi spywear: the inept art of commie disguise https://web.archive.org/web/20120000000000*/http://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/0,1518,777716,00.html

#15yrsago 1968: when Britain’s Daily Mirror tried to overthrow Parliament https://www.bbc.co.uk/webarchive/https%3A%2F%2Fwww.bbc.co.uk%2Fblogs%2Fadamcurtis%2F2011%2F07%2Fevery_day_is_like_sunday.html

#15yrsago My panel with Tim Berners-Lee, Vint Cerf and Al Gore at Mexico City’s Campus Party https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tXPZnpsN4-s

#15yrsago Doctor tried to "cure homosexuality" by tasping gay man while he had sex with a female sex-worker https://web.archive.org/web/20111004080028/https://blog.ketyov.com/2011/08/self-stimulating-brain-for-heterosexual.html

#10yrsago How a digital-only smartphone opens the door to DRM (and how to close the door) https://memex.craphound.com/2016/08/12/how-a-digital-only-smartphone-opens-the-door-to-drm-and-how-to-close-the-door/

#10yrsago Forget Skynet: AI is already making things terrible for people who aren’t rich white dudes https://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/26/opinion/sunday/artificial-intelligences-white-guy-problem.html

#10yrsago How self-driving cars could make everything worse, and what to do about it https://web.archive.org/web/20170918192128/https://www.wired.com/2016/08/self-driving-cars-will-improve-our-cities-if-they-dont-ruin-them/

#10yrsago The Tor Project’s social contract: we will not backdoor Tor https://blog.torproject.org/tor-social-contract/

#10yrsago Cash grants to people with unexpected bills successfully prevents homelessness https://www.science.org/content/article/bit-cash-can-keep-someone-streets-2-years-or-more

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 Post-American Internet," a geopolitical sequel of sorts to Enshittification, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2027

  • "Unauthorized Bread": a middle-grades graphic novel adapted from my novella about refugees, toasters and DRM, FirstSecond, April 20, 2027

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

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


Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources:

Currently writing:

  • “Once Is Enemy Action,” a science fiction novel about the origins of modern technofascism. Today's words: 507 (3619 total).

  • "The Post-American Internet," a sequel to "Enshittification," about the better world the rest of us get to have now that Trump has torched America. Fourth draft completed. Submitted to editor.

  • A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING

This work – excluding any serialized fiction – is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license. That means you can use it any way you like, including commercially, provided that you attribute it to me, Cory Doctorow, and include a link to pluralistic.net.

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"When life gives you SARS, you make sarsaparilla" -Joey "Accordion Guy" DeVilla

READ CAREFULLY: By reading this, you agree, on behalf of your employer, to release me from all obligations and waivers arising from any and all NON-NEGOTIATED agreements, licenses, terms-of-service, shrinkwrap, clickwrap, browsewrap, confidentiality, non-disclosure, non-compete and acceptable use policies ("BOGUS AGREEMENTS") that I have entered into with your employer, its partners, licensors, agents and assigns, in perpetuity, without prejudice to my ongoing rights and privileges. You further represent that you have the authority to release me from any BOGUS AGREEMENTS on behalf of your employer.

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Received — 4 August 2026 ⏭ Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow

Pluralistic: Post-American compute for a post-American Internet (04 Aug 2026)

✇Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
By: Cory Doctorow
4 August 2026 at 13:14


Today's links


A beautiful 17th century world map. It has been altered. Amongst the various creatures and ships that float in the map's seas now also float various 1950s and 1960s mainframes and components, along with Trump's disembodied hair and mouth.

Post-American compute for a post-American Internet (permalink)

Obviously, the non-American world has a digital sovereignty problem – Trump has means, motive and opportunity to order his tech companies to shut down any public official, large corporation, or individual who displeases him:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/06/18/their-trillions-our-billions/#eyes-on-the-prize

But Americans face the same digital sovereignty risk. America is a lawless place now, where a pliable Supreme Court and supine Congress have affirmed that "it's not a crime if the president does it." The same tech giants who sold out to Trump for tax breaks and protection from antitrust enforcement will happily disconnect any member of the American public, any American company, any American official who displeases Trump.

It's a strange irony that in this moment when so many of us are struggling to "de-Google" our lives, a forcible, sudden de-Googling amounts to a sort of digital death penalty:

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/08/21/technology/google-surveillance-toddler-photo.html

In a world dominated by tech monopolies, duopolies and cartels, there's every reason in the world to seek protection and insulation from these companies that are "too big to care" – and yet, the very same dominance that makes these companies such a danger also makes them indispensable.

Take "ICE Block," an iOS app that warns you if there's an ICE thug hunting people like you in your vicinity, which might save you from being kidnapped, disappeared, sent to a concentration camp, forced into slave labor in El Salvador, or simply murdered. In order to protect its relationship with the Trump regime (and the tax breaks, monopoly power and tariff-free access to Chinese labor that that relationship guarantees), Apple declared ICE officers to be a protected class and then removed ICE Block from its App Store:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/10/06/rogue-capitalism/#orphaned-syrian-refugees-need-not-apply

Big Tech is key to Trump's pogroms. Without Oracle's databases, Microsoft's administrative tools, Amazon's cloud, and Google's location data, ICE would be frozen in place. Big Tech is the source of Americans' risk from authoritarian oppression. That means that Americans cannot rely on Big Tech to protect them from that authoritarianism.

And yet, after decades of regulatory forbearance and lax antitrust enforcement, Big Tech has forced nearly all its rivals out of business. Who can compete with companies that use Irish domicile to evade taxation and US domicile to evade privacy law?

There's a joke from eastern Canada I think of often in situations like this. Its punchline goes, "If you wanted to get there, I wouldn't start from here."

But here we are. And speaking of Canada, while it has many problems, it is not (as of time of writing) the USA, but it is connected to the USA via the internet. Which means that Americans could – hypothetically – source their computing infrastructure from suppliers that were based in Canada, and who strictly ensured that they had no dependency on US services and scrupulously avoided a US "enforcement nexus":

https://pluralistic.net/2023/03/05/theyre-still-trying-to-ban-cryptography/

That is exactly what some American – and international – human rights nonprofits have done. The Technology Freedom Cooperative is a brand new organization founded by the Human Rights Data Analysis Group (San Francisco), Kilómetro 0 (Puerto Rico), Invisible Institute (Chicago), Data Cívica (Mexico) and Innocence & Justice Louisiana:

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/techfreedomcoop-stuart-flack-8eipc/

All of these organizations are longstanding, highly effective human rights fighters. They have long, storied histories of collecting, analyzing, and presenting data to address systemic discrimination, false imprisonment, extrajudicial killings, war crimes and genocides. They have concluded that they can't rely on US tech and US servers with their data. Not after Trump and Microsoft colluded to kill the online accounts of the Chief Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court to punish him for swearing out a genocide warrant against Netanyahu:

https://apnews.com/article/icc-trump-sanctions-karim-khan-court-a4b4c02751ab84c09718b1b95cbd5db3

Tech Freedom Coop has federated computing resources in Canada, the United States, Mexico, Puerto Rico and Europe. By spreading out their data and computation across multiple jurisdictions, they seek to ensure that a US seizure or deletion of their data will not halt their work.

This federated system serves as a replacement for Big Tech's administrative tools – email hosting, cloud storage, document collaboration. More than that: Tech Freedom Coop is also building out its own AI infrastructure, locally hosted and managed.

Groups like HRDAG have decades of experience using cutting edge statistical techniques to uncover and reveal the extent of crimes committed during civil wars, hot wars, genocides and secret wars. They built the largest human rights database ever created, to track every death in the Colombian Civil War and estimate the likelihood that each killing was carried out by a CIA-backed militia, FARC guerrillas, or the Colombian military:

https://hrdag.org/colombia/

They conducted the first ever census of killing by US police officers:

https://hrdag.org/poli/

They partnered with Innocence Project New Orleans to sift through mountains of arrest reports to surface cases similar to successful exonerations, helping more innocents to win their freedom:

https://hrdag.org/2025/02/20/ipno/

Today, they are active across the USA, tracking and analyzing the crimes committed by the Trump regime:

https://hrdag.org/2026/07/05/naming-police-officers-who-kill-in-california/

And they are working in Gaza, to document the genocide so that someday, the truth can be acknowledged and the perpetrators brought to justice:

https://hrdag.org/pressroom/nyt-gaza-toll/

I've known Patrick Ball, the statistician and programmer who founded HRDAG, for more than 20 years, and every time we meet, I learn something from him. He's the person who comes to mind whenever people tell me that AI is useless and that programmers who claim otherwise are deluded. Patrick is one of the best programmers I know, he is the very best statistician I know, and he's found many, many ways to use coding assistants to help him perform massive data-analysis projects that are vital to human rights struggles. He's a "centaur" if ever there was one:

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

It's exciting to see Patrick and his colleagues and collaborators taking these decisive steps to begin building the post-American internet and a kind of post-bubble AI, where AI tools are treated as normal technologies, capable of helping skilled practitioners who have discernment born of experience to apply them wisely to achieve important things:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/07/28/hitl-ers/#ai-ai-oh

For more than 20 years, HRDAG has been impressing me with the things we can do using advanced statistical analysis. The current generation of AI tools are founded in advanced stats, too. No one should think that advanced stats can solve all your problems of course. The AI bubble is madness and will lead to ruin – environmental, economic, political:

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

The world would be a better place without the AI bubble. But AI? It's fine. It's another form of statistical analysis and inference. There's no reason to use all the planet's energy, computing and water to perform that analysis, but the correct and desirable amount of useful AI-style computation is nowhere near zero.

The coop is building good AI tools – ones grounded in a realistic assessment of their usefulness and a reasonable commitment of resources to them. They're running open models based on their own data, on computers they own and control. Their stated goal is to "help organizations test whether models are accurate, reproducible, secure, and appropriate for specific human rights use cases."

Which brings me to the final component of Tech Freedom Coop: training. They're teaching people who work in human rights how to administer their own servers, secure their data and communications, and analyze data. As their press release says, these are all "skills that are increasingly necessary for human rights organizations documenting abuses of power."

I've known this was coming for a while now, and I'm so pleased to see that it's finally launched. At last, the first steps towards a post-American internet.

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 Asia Carrera’s makeup tips http://www.asiacarrera.com/makeup/welcome.html

#25yrsago Tommy Chong's Urine Luck https://web.archive.org/web/20010818124925/https://hempmasters.com/urineluck/

#15yrsago German cops call airport full-body pornoscanners “useless,” EU requires opt out from scanning https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2011/08/german_police_c.html

#15yrsago Write an adventure novel in three days, the Michael Moorcock way https://web.archive.org/web/20110705155756/https://wetasphalt.com/?q=content/how-write-book-three-days-lessons-michael-moorcock

#10yrsago DRM: You have the right to know what you’re buying! https://www.eff.org/files/2016/08/06/eff_request_for_investigation_re_labeling_drm-limited_products.pdf

#10yrsago Bureaucrats disqualify Hong Kong legislative candidates for insufficient loyalty https://globalvoices.org/2016/08/05/hong-kong-election-officials-disqualify-six-legislative-candidates-for-not-being-loyal-enough-to-china/

#10yrsago The Vlogbrothers guide to voting in every state in the union https://www.youtube.com/c/howtovoteineverystate

#10yrsago Vocal fry, uptalking, nasal: women’s voices can never be “right” https://www.thecut.com/2016/07/female-voice-anxiety-c-v-r.html

#5yrsago Facebook escalates war on accountability https://pluralistic.net/2021/08/05/comprehensive-sex-ed/#quis-custodiet-ipsos-zuck

#5yrsago Drone delivery crashes https://pluralistic.net/2021/08/05/comprehensive-sex-ed/#droned

#5yrsago Anti-vaxers cool the mark https://pluralistic.net/2021/08/05/comprehensive-sex-ed/#goffman

#5yrsago Meet the new generation of pro-abortion activists https://pluralistic.net/2021/08/05/comprehensive-sex-ed/#never-again

#1yrago Bragging about replacing coders with AI is a sales-pitch https://pluralistic.net/2025/08/05/ex-princes-of-labor/#hyper-criti-hype

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 Post-American Internet," a geopolitical sequel of sorts to Enshittification, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2027

  • "Unauthorized Bread": a middle-grades graphic novel adapted from my novella about refugees, toasters and DRM, FirstSecond, April 20, 2027

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

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


Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources:

Currently writing:

  • “Once Is Enemy Action,” a science fiction novel about the origins of modern technofascism. Today's words: 692 (692 total).

  • "The Post-American Internet," a sequel to "Enshittification," about the better world the rest of us get to have now that Trump has torched America. Fourth draft completed. Submitted to editor.

  • A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING

This work – excluding any serialized fiction – is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license. That means you can use it any way you like, including commercially, provided that you attribute it to me, Cory Doctorow, and include a link to pluralistic.net.

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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"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 — 3 August 2026 ⏭ Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow

Pluralistic: Dualism (03 Aug 2026)

✇Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
By: Cory Doctorow
3 August 2026 at 10:25


Today's links

  • Dualism: Why not both?
  • Hey look at this: Delights to delectate.
  • Object permanence: UK's Great Firewall falls; Mint the coins; Virtual pets v DRM; Getty copyfrauds 47,000 photos; Net Mexico-US illegal migration is zero; Build a wall (around Trump Tower); Remote-hacking big rigs; Collectible AOL CDs; Indefinite Gitmo; Circuit City rips DVDs; Real Names policies are abusive failures; Escher in a water drop; Maximally code-like bugs.
  • Upcoming appearances: Edinburgh, Sydney, Melbourne, Brighton, London, 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.


A man's bearded face, constructed out of a medieval hillside, with walls, buildings, trees, hayricks and boulders forming the features. It has been hand-tinted. It looks across at an inverted, blurred, rippling version of itself. The background is a detail from a 19th C French anatomical chart depicting many different ear shapes.

Dualism (permalink)

The greatest magic trick of them all is lying. The reason you can't figure out that coin vanish even after the conjurer performs it three times in a row is that they didn't do the same trick three times in a row! They did three different tricks: "Didn't catch it? Here, let me do it again!" is a lie:

https://magiciansmag.com/3-cool-coin-disappearing-trick/

There's times when it makes sense to treat two outcomes as the same, even if they were produced by very different means. As a reader, my enjoyment of your novel is the same whether it was dictated, typed on an Underwood Noiseless, keyed into a word processor, or scratched out with a fountain pen:

https://nealstephenson.substack.com/p/writing-by-hand-is-good-for-your

There's plenty of routes that arrive at the same place, and if the destination is all that matters to you, it's fine to ignore the journey. But often, those end-points have subtle differences that are only revealed when things go wrong. If all you care about is how things work, chances are good that you're in for an unpleasant surprise when things fail.

I recently found myself arguing with an interviewer about whether AI is, or could be, conscious. We weren't arguing about whether it might someday be possible to make an artificial consciousness – as a materialist, I'll happily stipulate to this. I think that everything we call "consciousness" is the result of a physical process occurring within our bodies (and possibly around them?), so I think it's perfectly reasonable to imagine that someday we might create another physical process that produces the same effect.

But that's not what the interviewer wanted to argue about. His point was that teaching more words to the word-guessing program would produce consciousness, an argument I always liken to "breeding horses to run faster and faster until one of them foals a locomotive." In support of this (outlandish) proposition, the interviewer performed a kind of cognitive coin-trick: "I can often predict what my wife is going to say, and so can a chatbot that's been trained on her words. Therefore, we're both doing the same conscious work – and therefore the chatbot will eventually be as conscious as I am."

"Predicting what you will say through an understanding based on a theory of your mind" and "predicting what you are going to say based on a statistical analysis of your utterances" might produce the same outputs, but they are not the same trick. You can tell by what happens when the trick fails.

My wife and I have been together for 23 years now, and there's plenty of times that we can finish each other's sentences – and so can the autocomplete on our phones. The autocomplete manages the trick by exploiting the fact that we often repeat ourselves. But we manage the trick by understanding each other (and by exploiting the fact of repetition).

When my wife says something surprising – because she is angry or delighted, sad or happy – I can make a reliable guess about what caused my prediction to misfire. Our "sentence completion" trick doesn't emerge from a rough, automatically generated mental table of the statistical likelihood that word A will follow word B. We also understand why those combinations appear in each other's speech and writing.

"Understanding" and "statistical extrapolation" can often lead to the same place, but when they don't, "understanding" provides a way forward, while "extrapolation" founders. Both work fine, but only one fails gracefully. The two tricks only appear the same, but they are fundamentally different.

AI's investor story – and the science fiction tales of AI's eventual capabilities that underpin that investor story – makes heavy use of this conjurer's trick, in which two different outcomes are equated to one another because they resemble each other.

This "ignore the journey, focus on the destination" idea is baked very deeply into the way we think about AI. Take the "Turing Test," a complicated and nuanced thought-experiment proposed in 1950. Over the ensuing 75 years, Turing's thought-experiment has been stripped down into a blunt metric: "Can a chatbot trick a human into thinking it is also human?"

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

"I mistook a chatbot for a human" and "I took a human for a human" arrive at near-identical places, but they are subtly and importantly different. The erroneous assumption that my phone's autocomplete is actually a person who understands me well enough to finish my sentences works fine, but the instant I turn to it for understanding, it will fail very badly. Autocomplete's predictions are always grounded in who you used to be, which means autocomplete knows very little about who you are now, and absolutely nothing about who you will become:

https://reallifemag.com/instant-recall/

The low-rez Turing Test that captured popular discourse is profoundly misleading. It's the unsound foundation of a worldview that renders you incapable of distinguishing your understanding of your spouse from their phone's autocomplete function. It's the self-serving rationale that leads you to declare yourself a proud stochastic parrot:

https://xcancel.com/sama/status/1599471830255177728

The AI bubble is (seemingly) full of contradictions, but – like those baffling coin-tricks – these contradictions often resolve themselves very neatly once you realize that the "contradiction" is actually just two things that appear to be one.

For example, some of the billionaires who put up the first several hundred million for AI are solipsists who just don't believe other people are entirely real and therefore find it easy to believe that AI can do their jobs. Other billionaires are cynics who think that bosses can be sold defective worker-replacing chatbots because they're credulous suckers for that pitch, the same way they believe that desperate young men are suckers for Joe Rogan's useless and/or dangerous supplements and peptides:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/07/24/supplemental-income/#andrew-tate-gwyneth-paltrow

Billionaire AI true believers and billionaire AI cynics make for a powerful coalition. The roadblocks that might discourage the first group are easily hurdled by the second, and vice-versa. You don't have to believe AI works to believe it can be sold, and you don't have to be motivated by the sales opportunity to believe that AI is about to become god.

Almost every debate I get into about AI turns out to be an unjustified, unacknowledged conflation of two things that seem similar, but have profoundly different underlying characteristics. Take this argument: "Every time we extend rights to the nonhuman world – watersheds, endangered animals, ecosystems – the world gets better. Let's extend rights to AI – whether or not we think it's a 'person' and so reap those benefits."

This, too, is a coin trick. Extending rights to nature reliably makes the world better, but extending rights to constructs makes the world far worse (Exhibit A is corporate personhood) (obviously).

A few moments' thought reveals the difference. If we extend rights to a watershed, that might result in an AI data-center being killed. If we extend rights to AI, that might lead to sacrificing the watershed to cool the data-center:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/07/10/posthuman-as-in-no-humans/#hell-is-other-people

Then there's AI and labor. The world is full of skilled workers who have found ways to use AI on the job that they insist have improved their work. It's also full of skilled workers who warn us that on-the-job AI is producing tech debt at unimaginable scale, seriously depreciating the quality of the tools we use today, and setting us up for painful reckonings in the future.

This (seeming) contradiction melts away once you realize that these workers only appear to be doing the same thing. The first group of workers, excited about their AI-assisted output, are "centaurs": people assisted by machines; workers who choose the time and manner of their AI adoption. The second group are "reverse centaurs": people recruited to serve as peripherals for machines, which direct their actions and workflow:

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

Note that this isn't the same thing as saying "A skilled worker who adopts a tool willingly is always right and will produce a better output as a result." Nor is it saying, "The tool is so flawed that workers who claim it works for them must be deluded."

That's another coin trick! The reality – again – is that this is two things: some workers whose AI-assisted work is measurably worse are wrong about AI making their work better (centaurs, but wrong), and; some workers are being forced to use AI and know damned well that it's making their work worse (reverse centaurs).

Finally, there's an economic coin-trick: "AI will destroy jobs." Sure, yes, AI is destroying jobs. But there's a vast difference between "You got fired because an AI can do your job" and "You got fired because your boss was convinced that the AI can do your job, even though it cannot."

This is one of the most consequential coin-tricks, because it's a real convincer for the investors who are funding the AI bubble. The difference is huge: "AI can do your job" means you're well and truly screwed. If an AI can really replace a contract lawyer, then everyone who needs a contract written or evaluated should be on the side of mass technological unemployment for contract lawyers. The point of contract lawyers is to produce contracts, not to pay contract lawyers' law-school debts and mortgages.

BUT! If some BigLaw's credulous partners can be suckered into firing their juniors and replacing them with chatbots who bill you $1,200/hour to produce unenforceable, error-riddled contracts, then everyone who needs a contract is on the same side as the contract lawyers – united in opposition to their bosses:

https://www.loweringthebar.net/2026/06/its-finally-happened-both-sides-ai.html

Every time we fail to draw this distinction, we help an AI boss raise another billion dollars. Every time we insist on this distinction, we hasten the day that the AI bubble pops, thus sparing a few more everyday savers and innocent bystanders from being wiped out in the crash we can all see on the horizon:

https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/monopoly-round-up-how-new-dealers.

As "Cathy" so aptly put it: "The thing that is a good tool for the skilled people is being sold as a thing to reduce the number of skilled people hired":

https://bsky.app/profile/cathyby.bsky.social/post/3ms3pzq57nc2c

The former is a normal technology. The latter is the root of a catastrophic folly that is destroying our environment, destroying workers' lives, destroying the quality of the goods and services we rely on, and which will shortly destroy our economy.

It's a distinction with a difference.

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 Collectible AOL CDs https://web.archive.org/web/20011119212602/https://www.wired.com/news/culture/0,1284,45585,00.html

#20yrsago Gonzales: Gitmo prisoners can be held indefinitely https://www.dawn.com/news/204441/guantanamo-detainees-may-remain-indefinitely-us-attorney-general-s-warning

#20yrsago Circuit City offers DVD ripping service https://web.archive.org/web/20060811215644/https://consumerist.com/consumer/circuit-city/circuit-city-flouts-the-dmca-for-a-tenner-192049.php

#15yrsago UK government kills Copyright Great Firewall, establishes user rights https://torrentfreak.com/uk-government-abandons-file-sharing-website-blocking-plans-110803/

#15yrsago Mugshot sites and mugshot removal sites: unholy blackmail symbiosis https://web.archive.org/web/20110817051528/https://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2011/08/mugshots/

#15yrsago Law prof: it would be legal to mint 2x $1 trillion platinum coins & use them to pay the US debt https://edition.cnn.com/2011/OPINION/07/28/balkin.obama.options/index.html?hpt=hp_c1

#15yrsago Virtual pets starve after bungled resolution to Second Life’s “unauthorized food” war https://web.archive.org/web/20110807214820/http://nwn.blogs.com/nwn/2011/08/sl-meeroos-griefed.html

#15yrsago Google Plus’s “Real Name” policy is abusive; Facebook is not a “Real Name” success story https://www.zephoria.org/thoughts/archives/2011/08/04/real-names.html

#15yrsago Photo: Escher painting refracted in a drop of falling water https://www.reddit.com/r/pics/comments/j5whr/water_drop_falling_in_front_of_an_mc_escher/

#15yrsago Getting digital copyright right: pay artists, but don’t break the Internet https://www.straight.com/article-415146/vancouver/interview-siggraph-2011-keynote-speaker-cory-doctorow-copyright-reform

#10yrsago After repeated budget cuts, Missouri’s underfunded Public Defender drafts the Governor to work for him https://web.archive.org/web/20160804061408/http://www.publicdefender.mo.gov/Newsfeed/Delegation_of_Representation.PDF

#10yrsago Spoofing GPS is surprisingly easy; detecting it is surprisingly hard https://spectrum.ieee.org/gps-spoofing

#10yrsago Decision to retain personally identifying information puts Australian census under threat https://web.archive.org/web/20160804124914/https://censusfail.com/

#10yrsago Residents of Silicon Valley homeless camp clear 48,000 Lbs of garbage from creek, ask for housing https://www.mercurynews.com/2016/08/03/san-jose-homeless-remove-24-tons-of-trash-from-coyote-creek/

#10yrsago Copyright Office to FCC: Hollywood should be able to killswitch your TV https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2016/08/copyright-office-jumps-set-top-box-debate-says-hollywood-should-control-your-tv

#10yrsago Walking Tables: a strandbeest for your dining room https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mBOdZ6nhDJg

#10yrsago Lawsuit: Getty Images copyfrauded 47,000 photos from indie press agency Zuma https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2016/08/getty-images-sued-again-over-alleged-misuse-of-over-47000-photos/

#10yrsago Mexico-US illegal migration has been at zero for 8 years, and other eye-opening facts https://wnyc.org/story/bnch-migration-doug-massey/

#10yrsago Activists are crowdfunding to build a wall around Trump Tower https://www.indiegogo.com/en/projects/wallintrump/wall-in-trump#/

#10yrsago Chinese government decrees that it is always legal to video-record the police https://www.techdirt.com/2016/08/03/yes-you-read-that-correctly-china-says-ok-members-public-to-record-police/

#10yrsago Big rigs can be hijacked and driven with software-based attacks https://www.wired.com/2016/08/researchers-hack-big-rig-truck-hijack-accelerator-brakes/

#5yrsago Elite debt hits record heights https://pluralistic.net/2021/08/03/fitzgerald-was-an-optimist/#debt

#5yrsago Utilities governed like empires https://pluralistic.net/2021/08/04/eighty-sixed/#thank-you-come-again

#5yrsago Congress has allocated enough money to end the eviction crisis https://pluralistic.net/2021/08/04/eighty-sixed/#helicopter-not-found

#5yrsago Vaccine refusal and health insurance https://pluralistic.net/2021/08/04/eighty-sixed/#risk-management

#1yrago AI software assistants make the hardest kinds of bugs to spot https://pluralistic.net/2025/08/04/bad-vibe-coding/#maximally-codelike-bugs

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 Post-American Internet," a geopolitical sequel of sorts to Enshittification, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2027

  • "Unauthorized Bread": a middle-grades graphic novel adapted from my novella about refugees, toasters and DRM, FirstSecond, April 20, 2027

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

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


Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources:

Currently writing: "The Post-American Internet," a sequel to "Enshittification," about the better world the rest of us get to have now that Trump has torched America. Fourth draft completed. Submitted to editor.

  • A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING

This work – excluding any serialized fiction – is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license. That means you can use it any way you like, including commercially, provided that you attribute it to me, Cory Doctorow, and include a link to pluralistic.net.

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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"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 — 1 August 2026 ⏭ Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow

Pluralistic: Why businesses lie about AI (01 Aug 2026)

✇Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
By: Cory Doctorow
1 August 2026 at 14:29


Today's links


A sepia-toned 1950s era boardroom in which men in suits sit around a circular table. The chair of the meeting has been replaced with a man in a straitjacket, making a funny face. The heads of the remaining board-members have been replaced with robots from 1930s pulp magazines. The image has been hand-tinted.

Why businesses lie about AI (permalink)

Neoclassical economics assumes rationality. The corollary of, "If you're so smart, why aren't you rich?" is "you're rich, so you must be very smart!" Thus it is that many people assume that if powerful, well-compensated CEOs insist that "AI is changing everything," well then, AI must be changing everything.

But the evidence for this "changing everything" thesis is thin on the ground. Despite a global mania that has reduced the real, pressing need for digital sovereignty to the imaginary need to create "sovereign AI," no one can really articulate the case for "sovereign AI." If Donald Trump ordered Big Tech to turn off all of your country's chatbots tomorrow, nothing would change. Every one of your country's ministries and corporations would chug on with nary a hitch. Households, too, though perhaps a few of the younger members of those families would have to do their own homework again.

(Contrast this with what would transpire if Trump directed his tech giants to switch off your country's Office 365 access, or to brick your Android and iOS phones, or to killswitch your John Deere tractors. Your country would effectively cease to exist. If "digital sovereignty" means anything, it means doing something about this urgent fact):

https://pluralistic.net/2026/06/18/their-trillions-our-billions/#eyes-on-the-prize

The world is full of people who insist that "AI is changing everything" but who – when pressed – have to admit that what they mean is that they're pretty sure that AI will change everything. Eventually. After we allow it to consume all the planet's energy, carbon, water and financial resources.

Maybe.

(They're pretty sure.)

One person who's had a lot of opportunity to observe the shear between the stated business/AI situation and the real business AI situation is Nikhil Suresh from Hermit Tech, a consulting firm of "radically ethical data wizards" (that is, tech consultants). Suresh reports on his experience talking with hundreds of executives (and, more importantly, their subordinates) about what (if anything) AI is doing for business in an essay entitled "AI Mania Is Eviscerating Global Decisionmaking":

https://hermit-tech.com/blog/ai-mania-is-eviscerating-global-decisionmaking

Suresh has a good track record of writing trenchant, frank criticism of AI. You may know him from his 2024 essay, "I Will Fucking Piledrive You If You Mention AI Again":

https://ludic.mataroa.blog/blog/i-will-fucking-piledrive-you-if-you-mention-ai-again/

Or possibly from his "Contra Ptacek's Terrible Article On AI," a stinging rebuttal to Thomas Ptacek's widely read "My AI Skeptic Friends Are All Nuts":

https://ludic.mataroa.blog/blog/contra-ptaceks-terrible-article-on-ai/

While those are important pieces of critical AI realpolitik, none of them have the heft or urgency of "AI Mania Is Eviscerating Global Decisionmaking," whose thesis can be summed up with this passage from halfway through this 6,000-word article:

[W]e’re facing a coordination problem around executives being honest around the AI gains they’ve witnessed – if they co-operate, they keep their jobs. If they defect, they will possibly be fired by their embarrassed peers (who have now been implicitly called liars, cowards, or incompetents) and then replaced with someone that will toe the line anyway. If they could all admit the truth at once there might be some hope, but there is no way to coordinate that event.

In other words, corporate leadership is starting from the premise that AI has (or will) radically change the business, and they're working backwards from that premise to find the evidence to support this article of faith.

In support of this thesis, Suresh cites "hundreds" of conversations with execs and employees who spoke to him on the condition that he would "file the serial numbers" off their stories. These, combined with his own experience consulting for large, multi-billion-dollar companies make it clear that "AI mania" is an absolutely justifiable label for the state of AI in corporate circles.

Here are a few highlights from this morning's read – moments where I had to look away from my screen and read out a passage to my wife so that we could share a "holy shit" moment.

A person worked for a division that "pivoted" to re-engineer its software to create interfaces that support AI agents. When it became apparent that only ten users had touched this expensive new technology, they "pivoted" again to support "agentic workflows." Why did they double down on AI agents after discovering such yawning market indifference for "agentic"? "Because every company has to do something agentic now."

Suresh describes this as a literal religious mania. In the 500+ employee businesses Suresh studied, the only people who were promoted – or even spared from being fired – were people who professed "religious declarations of faith" about "the transformative power of AI." Employees who voiced honest, informed objections to AI in the workplace were passed over for promotions or targeted for layoffs.

This has created a situation in which everyone – "boards, executives, employees, vendors, consultants" – has a strong incentive to lie about how much AI is delivering for their companies. Suresh says he's seen announcements from publicly traded companies about their AI triumphs that he knows for a fact never took place.

Suresh says he's never seen a successful enterprise AI project: "Every single one – we have seen 0% success in a year and a half." Not one of their clients would face a business challenge if OpenAI went out of business tomorrow. The problem most companies struggle with is that they're "terminally bad at running software projects effectively." Adding AI to the mix doesn't solve this problem – it just adds a whole new range of ways that software deployment can fail.

Chatbots don't help. The internally facing chatbot that's supposed to help employees figure out how to navigate the business sucks because it is only as good as its training data – the business's documentation of its own processes. Businesses suck at documenting their processes. Customer-facing chatbots also suck. They either can't solve your problem, or, when they seem to solve your problem, the "solution" goes nowhere.

Suresh recounts his sole positive customer service chatbot experience: a Mitsubishi chatbot with a natural sounding, responsive voice politely took all the details of an automotive failure and promised him a callback. That callback never came, but Suresh is certain that Mitsubishi has logged this as a chatbot success story, even though the experience convinced him not to buy a Mitsubishi car.

Suresh and his team at Hermit Tech now have a policy of not even asking about ongoing AI projects. They've learned that by the time an AI project has begun, no one will discuss it honestly until it reaches a crisis point.

Suresh says he frequently encounters people who reflexively utter the AI catechism: "AI is changing everything." But when he presses these people for details, they admit that their organization "does not currently use LLMs for anything, and indeed, that they cannot name a single thing that has changed other than they get some use out of ChatGPT."

This shear ("AI is changing everything"/"Well, OK, we're not using AI for anything") is so extreme that Suresh once met an exec who confessed to crafting an AI-centered AI strategy for a $2b/year business, even though that exec "had never even used ChatGPT or any AI tool in their life."

Some people have privately admitted to Suresh that they've embraced AI in order to earn a career-boosting corporate reputation for "thought leadership." But many other people (especially nontechnical people) sincerely believe that AI is about to "change everything." As Suresh says, if you're in business with a liar, you might be able to reason with them in private – but you can't reason with a true believer.

The true believers are in charge. Suresh points out that it would be very weird for the CEO of an engineering firm or a hospital to mandate "specific procedures or building techniques without explicit agreement from the professionals on staff." But when it comes to AI, business leaders will confidently demand that the skilled professionals who perform the business's core functions use AI, even if those professionals don't think it will help.

As an aside: I remember the dotcom era, when the business press was full of articles about the conflict between CEOs and a new workforce that demanded the right to use the web on the job. Today, the business press is full of articles about the conflict between the workforce and CEOs who demand that they use AI.

Suresh describes workers who feel they have to "AI wash" their work: "They just do the work, the same way they have for decades, and say Claude did it." To add verisimilitude to this sham, they write circular processes in which one chatbot prompts another, and then the process repeats itself in reverse, for the sole purpose of consuming AI tokens to score a high rank on corporate "token leaderboards."

How to account for this wildly, expensively irrational corporate leadership? Suresh places the blame in the hypnotizing, mesmerizing power of the AI demo. For example: Hermit Tech is often engaged to set up a database product called Snowflake for its customers. Snowflake has a useless, expensive AI bolt-on called Cortex, that Snowflake itself describes as being 92% accurate under ideal circumstances (that is, at least 8% of the time, it will mislead you, perhaps very badly).

Suresh describes sales meetings with execs who were lukewarm on the idea of retooling with Snowflake, but who were very interested in Cortex. Against their better judgment, Suresh and his team provided them with a Cortex demo, carefully explaining that this AI tool could not satisfy their requirements. Without fail, this resulted in the previously lukewarm customers insisting that they be allowed to purchase Cortex immediately. Sales prospects who'd been unmoved by a pitch for new technology that would result in millions in savings were hypnotized by demos of a product that was described as unsuitable and unreliable.

To their credit, Hermit Tech refused to sell these customers Cortex, and stopped doing Cortex demos altogether. Suresh describes the experience of "the total 180°, that shift from ice-cold to red-hot buying frenzy" as "deeply unsettling." What's more, the Cortex demos that Suresh and co performed were, by his account, pretty uninspiring. The thing that these demos had going for them is that they showed AI actually doing something marginally useful, to execs who'd already spent millions on AI without having anything to show for their money. The spectacle of AI that does something galvanizes corporate leaders who feel like they're the only bosses who can't find a revolutionary use for AI in their businesses.

This is the situation up and down the corporate org-chart. Suresh has a reader whose title is "Head of AI" at a billion-dollar firm who tells him "their job is totally fraudulent but it was the only promotion pathway remaining at the organisation." This exec is hardly alone. They're part of a cohort of executives at companies that have publicly announced "100x" productivity gains, but who confessed to Suresh that nothing of the sort has happened.

Why did these companies make these claims? Because their customers were making the claims. How could you hope to sell to a company that had 100x'ed its productivity with AI unless you, too had 100x'ed your productivity? If, as a vendor, you walked into a boardroom and said that this wasn't a plausible claim, you'd be calling your sales prospect a liar, with real consequences: "getting enterprise contracts cancelled because you wanted to opine on something that doesn’t really matter to your organisation’s mission is a great way to get fired."

With the state of the industry dominated by froth, lies and mutual destruction pacts, it's no wonder that companies are deploying "totally gameable metrics such as 'money spent on AI'" as a means of evaluating employees and divisions.

Between true believers and people who must find ways to plausibly tout their AI usage, there is now a gigantic market for "AI solutions." At best these are just traditional tech consulting contracts, like migrating a database from Oracle to Snowflake, with some kind of ornamental AI usage around the edges so that the person who commissions the work can claim to be "procuring AI-enabled services" for the business.

This isn't a harmless frippery: contracts are delayed and work is put off until the work can be made "sufficiently AI" to attain the minimum degree of buzzword compliance. Worse: every fake AI project that produces real results (because it's not really AI) adds credibility to the AI true believers, who view these projects as proof that AI can do anything, and therefore demand to know why everything isn't being done by AI.

Suresh ends his essay with a long section on how to "navigate AI mania" – advice for how to smile and nod politely when you're confronted with AI bullshit, while steering clear of the worst consequences and avoiding needless fights. This looks like very sound advice for anyone in a corporate environment, but thankfully, that isn't me.

Rather than summarize that advice, I want to reflect a little on two questions that Suresh's essay raises but doesn't answer. The first is why? Why are people in power such easy converts to this religious mania?

I have my own theory. The most important discomfort that powerful people experience is having ego-shattering conflicts with subordinates who know how to do things they do not know how to do. The fact that you're "in charge" is hard to reconcile with the fact that the people you're nominally in charge of tell you that all your ideas are impossible, illegal, immoral, or lethal:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/01/05/fisher-price-steering-wheel/#billionaire-solipsism

Take that Cortex demo. Sure, Cortex is an expensive, unreliable way to address a Snowflake database. But (unlike Snowflake) Cortex is controlled via conversational, plain-language commands. With Cortex, a boss doesn't need to ask an underling to retrieve information from the company Snowflake system, an interaction that might come with unsolicited feedback about the technical or commercial incoherence of the boss's request. Cortex is the underling, except that unlike a human underling, Cortex never back-sasses you about your foolish questions. The fact that it grossly misleads you 8% of the time is a small price to pay for a life untroubled by uppity pismires who insist that your ideas be connected to base reality as they understand it.

The other question Suresh implicitly raises is, "How can you reconcile the failure of AI in the enterprise with the individual claims of skilled technologists who insist that AI is helping them do great work?" The answer is that these AI users are "centaurs" – experienced workers who are assisted by automation on terms that they set for themselves:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/09/11/vulgar-thatcherism/#there-is-an-alternative

Thanks to their skill and experience, these workers possess discernment, the ability to tell good code from bad, and (more importantly) good uses of code-generation tools from bad. They demonstrate the adage that worker-driven automation improves quality, while capital-driven automation improves throughput:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/07/28/hitl-ers/#ai-ai-oh

An automation technique that requires close supervision by skilled and experienced workers isn't going to be a raw productivity powerhouse. You don't "100x" your code this way, at least, not in the sense of firing 99 of your coders and having the remaining programmer pick up all their work. Rather, an automation tool that requires the continuous and conscientious exercise of discernment will let individual practitioners improve their work in extremely satisfying and useful ways. It's a way to spend more on operations in order to produce better outputs. It's not a way to cut your workforce, realize a gigantic savings, and still produce comparable goods and services at a far lower cost.

That is why some individual coders report such delight with their AI tools. They engage with those tools on their own terms, to improve their work in the ways that they, in their expert judgment, consider beneficial. No one ranks them on a "token-maximization" scoreboard. No one tells them they can't do a project if it isn't "sufficiently AI." When they set out to do a project, no one makes them prove that it couldn't be "done by AI."

As ever, the most important fact about a given technology isn't "what it does," but "who it does it for" and "who it does it to."

All the pathologies Suresh observes and documents so well in this piece are hypertrophied versions of the buzzword-compliance dysfunctions from previous bubbles, but at a scale never before seen. Quantity has a quality all its own. These businesses aren't just wasting billions – they're replacing skilled workers with defective chatbots. As I've written before, AI is the asbestos we're shoveling into the walls of our technological society. Our descendants will spend generations digging it out again, and the longer the bubble goes on without popping, the longer it will take to repair the damage.

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 Vernor Vinge in the NYT https://www.nytimes.com/2001/08/02/technology/a-scientist-s-art-computer-fiction.html

#25yrsago Why publishers should thank Syklarov https://web.archive.org/web/20011023092940/http://www.zdnet.com/zdnn/stories/comment/0,5859,2800985,00.html

#25yrsago David Byrne track to be bundled with WinXP https://web.archive.org/web/20010804040357/http://www.ananova.com/news/story/sm_365899.html?menu=news.technology

#20yrsago Five things about blogs that no one ever needs to say again https://web.archive.org/web/20060813090449/http://www.stevenberlinjohnson.com/2006/08/five_things_all.html

#15yrsago Castles made from human hair https://inhabitat.com/artist-uses-human-hair-to-construct-a-castle-of-3000-bricks/

#15yrsago Wisconsin Democratic voters targeted with Koch-funded absentee ballot notices advising them to vote 2 days after the recall election https://www.politico.com/blogs/david-catanese/2011/08/afp-wisconsin-ballots-have-late-return-date-037977?showall

#15yrsago Gingrich’s million Twitter followers: “80% dummy accounts, 10% paid followers” https://web.archive.org/web/20110812100159/https://gawker.com/5826645/most-of-newt-gingrichs-twitter-followers-are-fake

#15yrsago Missouri State business-school professor leads successful campaign to ban Slaughterhouse-Five from local schools https://www.theguardian.com/books/2011/jul/29/slaughterhouse-five-banned-us-school

#10yrsago Australian media accessibility group raises red flag about DRM in web standards https://hotelsantalya.net/accessiq/news/news/2016-p/08-p/concerns-raised-for-assistive-technology-development-as-w3c-debates-encrypted/

#10yrsago Reminder: the GOP has been attacking veterans and their families for years https://web.archive.org/web/20160803203106/https://crookedtimber.org/2016/08/02/trumps-indecent-proposal/

#10yrsago Isis joins Donald Trump in denouncing Khizr Khan https://web.archive.org/web/20160802161454/https://theintercept.com/2016/08/02/donald-trump-and-islamic-state-agree-no-room-for-people-like-khizr-khan/

#10yrsago Furries don’t have sex in fursuits https://www.ohjoysextoy.com/fursuits-grey-white/

#5yrsago Machine learning sucks at covid https://pluralistic.net/2021/08/02/autoquack/#gigo

#1yrago AI's pogo-stick grift https://pluralistic.net/2025/08/02/inventing-the-pedestrian/#three-apis-in-a-trenchcoat

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 Post-American Internet," a geopolitical sequel of sorts to Enshittification, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2027

  • "Unauthorized Bread": a middle-grades graphic novel adapted from my novella about refugees, toasters and DRM, FirstSecond, April 20, 2027

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

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


Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources:

Currently writing: "The Post-American Internet," a sequel to "Enshittification," about the better world the rest of us get to have now that Trump has torched America. Fourth draft completed. Submitted to editor.

  • A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING

This work – excluding any serialized fiction – is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license. That means you can use it any way you like, including commercially, provided that you attribute it to me, Cory Doctorow, and include a link to pluralistic.net.

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

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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 — 29 July 2026 ⏭ Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow

Pluralistic: Enshittification and Reverse Centaurs go global (29 Jul 2026)

✇Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
By: Cory Doctorow
29 July 2026 at 10:09


Today's links


A bow-wielding cherub standing amidst two antique globes. From behind one looms the poop emoji from the cover of Enshittification, mouth covered in a grawlix-scrawled black bar; from behind the other looms the reverse centaur from the cover of The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI.

Enshittification and Reverse Centaurs go global (permalink)

It's safe to say that the past couple of years have been good ones for me publishing-wise, thanks to a string of international bestsellers, both novels (Picks and Shovels) and nonfiction (Enshittification, Reverse Centaur), as well as plenty of awards and accolades:

https://craphound.com/shop

Over the past two months, I've won the Locus Award (Enshittification), had a NYT bestseller (Reverse Centaur), gotten a word in the OED ("enshittification"), and had the number one bestselling nonfiction paperback in Canada for more than a month running (Reverse Centaur). I also turned 55 – and my radiologist told me I'm now cancer-free, so it's been a good summer all around.

These books have done especially well internationally because they deal with technopolitics, which means that my readers are disproportionately Internet People, and for historical reasons, these are folks who are more likely to speak English, even if they live outside of the Anglosphere.

This post is primarily for those readers, who often write to me to let me know how much they enjoyed the books, so much so that they'd like to share them with their less online, less English-conversant friends, and want to know whether there is a translation coming in their own language.

Good news! Both Reverse Centaur and Enshittification have many foreign editions that are either published or forthcoming in the next year or so. The foreign rights team at Farrar, Straus and Giroux were good enough to prepare a list of all these editions, which I'm about to reproduce below.

If your preferred language isn't on the list, I apologize. Translation deals are primarily "pull," not "push" – that is to say, a foreign publisher contacts my publisher and asks for the rights (though my publisher does market the rights and attends all the book fairs where these deals are often made).

The upshot here is that I am not really in a position to do more than has already been done to get an edition published in your preferred language or territory. If you happen to have a favorite local publisher, you could always ask them if they would like to get in touch with Farrar, Straus and Giroux foreign rights team to secure a license.

I also need to note here that these deals are generally with established publishers who have relationships with national booksellers and distributors (rather than enthusiastic individuals who want to produce a translation and see if they can get it read by other people in their country). The hard part of publishing isn't the translation, the typesetting, the book design or even the writing – the hard part is connecting a text with its readers:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/07/04/self-publishing/

With that all said, here's the master list of editions of Enshittification and The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI:

Reverse Centaur: paperback, Jun 2026
https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374621568/thereversecentaursguidetolifeafterai/

Reverse Centaur: hardcover, Jun 2026
https://www.versobooks.com/en-gb/products/3584-the-reverse-centaur-s-guide-to-life-after-ai

Reverse Centaur (as A Nagy Összemolás/The Big Collapse), not yet scheduled

Reverse Centaur, not yet scheduled

  • Taiwan 🇹🇼: Acropolis
    Enshittification, first quarter 2027

  • Thailand 🇹🇭: Salt Publishing
    Enshittification, Oct 2026

  • Türkiye 🇹🇷: Okuyanus
    Enshittification, Fall 2026

  • Ukraine 🇺🇦: Athena Publishing
    Enshittification, not yet scheduled

(These are the confirmed deals. There are lots of other deals in negotiation, especially for Reverse Centaur, which is only a month old.)

I hope some of you found this useful! If not (or if so!), don't worry, I'll be back with more essays in the days to come.

One final note for newsletter readers: I realize that I have violated my "one emoji per edition" rule with the flags above. Rest assured this will not be a regular thing.

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 Linux Thinkpads can be controlled by knocking on them https://web.archive.org/web/20060814065844/http://www-128.ibm.com/developerworks/linux/library/l-knockage.html?ca=dgr-lnxw01Knock-Knock

#20yrsago Why the CBC doesn’t need DRM https://web.archive.org/web/20060820121451/https://www.michaelgeist.ca/component/option,com_content/task,view/id,1342/Itemid,85/nsub,/

#20yrsago Aussie mall defends its photons from terrorists https://web.archive.org/web/20060910224208/http://www.theage.com.au/articles/2006/07/29/1153816426869.html

#15yrsago Sleepy English town to be entirely surveilled in case criminals forget and drive through it on their way to crimes https://web.archive.org/web/20110731020858/https://www.telegraph.co.uk/motoring/news/8670642/Sleepy-market-town-surrounded-by-ring-of-car-cameras.html

#10yrsago Lessons from the DNC: Ronald Reagan, the Southern Strategy, and “abnormal politics” https://crookedtimber.org/2016/07/30/philadelphia-stories-from-reagan-to-trump-to-the-dnc/

#10yrsago How to pay no taxes at all! (if you’re Apple, Google or Facebook) https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2016/07/video-guide-to-legal-tax-evasion-with-an-apple-boycott.html

#5yrsago Games Workshop declares war on its customers https://pluralistic.net/2021/07/30/space-marines/#fairy-use-tale

#1yrago Delta's AI-based price-gouging https://pluralistic.net/2025/07/30/efficiency-washing/#medallion-clubbed

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 Post-American Internet," a geopolitical sequel of sorts to Enshittification, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2027

  • "Unauthorized Bread": a middle-grades graphic novel adapted from my novella about refugees, toasters and DRM, FirstSecond, April 20, 2027

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

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


Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources:

Currently writing: "The Post-American Internet," a sequel to "Enshittification," about the better world the rest of us get to have now that Trump has torched America. Fourth draft completed. Submitted to editor.

  • A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING

This work – excluding any serialized fiction – is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license. That means you can use it any way you like, including commercially, provided that you attribute it to me, Cory Doctorow, and include a link to pluralistic.net.

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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https://pluralistic.net/plura-list

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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

❌