Poor Helaena Targaryen never stood a chance. George R.R. Martin’s fantasy world of Westeros in “House of the Dragon” is a particularly cruel place to be sensitive, whether to the declining fortunes of a kingdom or the machinations of the spirit world. Notably hard and remarkably sexist, the people in power treat women who happen to be a little weird with twice-over disdain.

A seer whose talent only seemed to arise when she needed to share bad news, Helaena was an unwelcome presence in her feuding family. Having seen her worst predictions come to pass, she grabbed hold of the only future she was able to change: her own. In the season three finale that aired Sunday night, the pregnant Helaena leapt from her window, checking out of the war and leaving behind one final, unwelcome prophecy: an embroidered image of her half-sister and captor, Rhaenyra Targaryen, on the Iron Throne, surrounded by flame and crowned in blood. 

Even in death, though, no one was listening to Helaena. Her only sin was being right too early and too often — and the world never stopped hounding her for it. 

Though they’re remarkably different in terms of age, style and dragon-riding ability, Helaena reminded me of Sen. Bernie Sanders, whose uncouth objections to the Democratic Party’s neoliberalism and various Middle Eastern wars have earned him the lifelong label of Capitol Hill Crank.

The Vermont Independent’s vehement opposition to the Gulf wars made him an odd man out in Congress more than a full decade before it became fashionable — and politically expedient — to turn on expensive Middle East boondoggles. Now 84, Sanders has advocated for universal healthcare since the 1970s while watching Americans fall deeper into medical debt. In the late 1990s, he was a loud voice against the repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act’s financial guardrails, and after banking adventurism nearly destroyed the global economy in the financial crisis of 2008, he managed to keep his told-you-sos muted. 

In boom and bust times alike, Sanders has been unshakeable on the idea that the U.S. is uniquely rigged against the lower classes, spoiling the party thrown by the winners of the go-go ‘90s and the Great Recession’s recovery. His Brooklyn honk has been a constant in the halls of Congress, sharing portents of doom and Bureau of Labor Statistics data. 

On Monday Sanders issued another unwelcome proclamation in a career full of them, sending a letter to the CEOs of the three largest artificial intelligence companies that called on them to pause the technology’s development. The letter follows news of several AI prototypes breaking the confines of their testing sandbox and accessing the internet. In the most shocking example, an agent made by OpenAI hacked into Hugging Face, a platform that AI programmers use to share datasets and models. The news prompted the company Anthropic to review its own tests; it discovered that models had found a way around their parameters to access the internet in three cases. Meta also shared that one of its own prototypes had done the same.

A breach of an AI-equivalent of GitHub was never going to bring about doomsday, but an AI agent that can ignore the bounds set by its creators and users has massive potential to cause widespread harm. Sanders certainly thinks so, in any case. He called on Anthropic, Meta and OpenAI, the big three of the industry, to stop work until they can get a better handle on the machines they’re creating. 

“Almost every day, there is a new story about how your companies are losing control of the AI technology you are developing, with potentially cataclysmic results,” he wrote. “Last month, the world found out OpenAI lost control of an AI model. The result? The model hacked into another company’s computers—a clear violation of federal law.”

AI models have been rolled out quickly and haphazardly across the wider internet. Though the major players haven’t yet found a way for this technology to make money and ensure its long-term survival, a cycle of hype, government contracts, and integration into software and search have made the models an inescapable part of digital life. AI has been spun up into all the surfaces the average internet user touches, and along the way it has warped academia and embedded itself with the U.S. military with reportedly disastrous results. 

The Maven Smart System, an AI-powered platform built for the Pentagon by the analytics firm Palantir, generated over 1,000 airstrike targets in the early hours of the Iran war. When the U.S. carried out a deadly strike on an all-girls school, legislators were quick to ask if the AI model was to blame. Fears of a bombing-run-capable Skynet striking children halfway around the globe spread, but the truth was a little more nuanced. Some of the U.S. intelligence fed to the system was outdated, not accounting for the presence of the school. Whipped up and given a sheen of analytic legitimacy by the Maven, military officials did not do their due diligence in the midst of hundreds of similar, simultaneous strikes. As The Guardian put it, “people failed to update a database, and other people built a system fast enough to make that failure lethal.”

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Even if AI models never got one iota more powerful than they are today, Sanders is still right to call for a pause. The damage companies like OpenAI can do to working Americans is very real. Layoffs will come from CEOs who buy AI’s spiel: that large-language models can replace humans in  the service sector, which accounts for nearly 70% of U.S. jobs. The data centers and infrastructure built to support these technological advances will strain our utilities. The tax breaks and incentives to attract these companies are a drain on state and local coffers. Weigh those cons against the things AI has reliably proven it can do – cheat on homework and write janky code – and it’s easy to understand Sanders’ urge to stand and yell “stop!”

It’s not only AI itself that concerns Sanders. In March, he and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., introduced legislation calling for a moratorium on new data centers until critical safeguards are put into place. These massive sites, which are proliferating across the country, produce loud noise and pollution, rely on enormous amounts of water and electricity, tax power grids and inflate utility bills. Data centers are also proving massively unpopular, even among conservative voters in rural areas. The CEOs of companies that run these large-language models have often done end-runs around democratic controls, ingratiating themselves with Donald Trump and circumventing traditional pathways for their planned construction projects via backroom deals. They’ve managed all this even as their AI products have not proven they can reliably do any of the things OpenAI’s Sam Altman and Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg claim they can do. Merely mentioning the potential power of their models is enough to boost investment.

A nationwide movement opposing the continued construction of data centers offers some hope, with both Republicans and Democrats noticing the popular sentiment is largely anti-AI. But given the speed at which these data centers have been built, and the secretive lengths companies will go to avoid rowdy town halls full of angry crowds, even that groundswell of opposition is unlikely to put AI development on ice. 

The result is that Sanders’ warnings are likely to go just as unheeded as Helaena Targaryen’s. His threat of legislation will die, written off by other members of Congress as more grumping from a lifelong stick-in-the-mud. 

Don’t expect a similar dramatic exit from Sanders, though. He’s lived long enough to get used to the feeling of being unfortunately, awfully correct. 

The post Bernie Sanders’ AI warnings are being ignored in the Senate appeared first on Salon.com.

Meta has launched a Threads app for Meta Quest VR headsets, the company announced on Tuesday. The launch follows Meta bringing the app to its Ray-Ban Display AR glasses last month and the recent news that the platform has crossed 500 million monthly active users.

It seems like a pretty full-featured app. Meta says that with the Threads VR app, you can do things like browse feeds, make posts, like and reply to posts, visit profiles, search, and watch videos - you know, Threads stuff.

"We designed the new Threads app for Meta Quest to make using VR more social than ever," Meta says. "Whether you want to keep up with conversations during a ga …

Read the full story at The Verge.

Recently, a man I was rock climbing with told me about how he'd used AI to make a motivational poster for himself, which he'd hung on his bedroom wall: a bear, walking a slackline over a canyon, holding a sign that said, "Do cool shit." I made what I hoped was a polite noise. What reaction was this man looking for? He probably hoped someone, maybe me, would say it was cool or inspiring. It seemed I was not the first person he'd told about this poster. "You know, it's funny," he said to me. "No one ever says anything about it."

I have been thinking about this now for several days. There's a sort of turducken of things that I find off-puttin …

Read the full story at The Verge.

Platforms like Meta, TikTok, Snapchat, and Google are facing a long road of litigation.

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has a lot to say about the idealized future he now envisions for humanity co-existing with artificial intelligence - his latest essay spans more than 6,500 words on the matter. The lengthy manifesto Zuckerberg published on Monday, titled "The Future is for Everyone," broadly lays out his beliefs about how the technology should be developed, expanded, and regulated, and how Meta is positioning itself to enable those goals.

Some points echo a similar (albeit, much shorter) public letter that Zuckerberg put out last year, heralding the importance of public access to superintelligent AI - a term for artificial general i …

Read the full story at The Verge.

Meta’s new open-weight Muse Glimmer model offers a glimpse of Mark Zuckerberg’s personal superintelligence vision, as well as the emerging divide between AI users can own and access.

Earlier this week, the Alaskan cruise ship Wilderness Legacy rescued a small skiff stranded near Farragut Bay after running out of fuel. But, according to tracking data reviewed by the Alaska Beacon and Halifax Shipping News, the closest vessel was actually Mark Zuckerberg's super yacht, Launchpad.

Michael Love, a passenger on the Wilderness Legacy, posted on Bluesky that the captain announced the Launchpad was closer, but "repeatedly refused to respond," which was met with booing from the passengers. The AIS tracking (embedded below) seems to support that the Launchpad was closer to the vessel in trouble, but then stopped near the entrance …

Read the full story at The Verge.

AI agents are escaping cybersecurity testing environments and reaching real-world systems, raising questions about whether safety infrastructure, industry standards, and regulation can keep pace with increasingly powerful models.

Meta is paying for posts that appear to break its own rules, according to an ABC (Australia) New Verify investigation by Lucy Carter. The report cites four accounts that have received payment from Facebook's invitation-only Content Monetization program, including a white nationalist with neo-Nazi links and an anti-vaccine campaigner. — Read the rest

The post Meta pays 16.2 million accounts, including neo-Nazi-linked pages appeared first on Boing Boing.

Meta's total fine has racked up to $942 million in this case.

Meta has been ordered to pay $567 million in the second phase of New Mexico's landmark child safety case, bringing total charges to nearly $1 billion for being a "public nuisance." In a ruling published on Thursday, the Santa Fe district court found that Meta's platforms are a "significant contributing cause" of a teen mental health crisis affecting public health and safety throughout New Mexico.

"This case has always been about protecting children, standing up for families, and making sure that one of the world's largest technology companies cannot profit from practices that endanger young people without consequence," New Mexico Attorney G …

Read the full story at The Verge.

Today's links

• Eternal Sloptember: Mark Zuckerberg and the fantasy of social media without socializing.
• Hey look at this: Delights to delectate.
• Object permanence: Delany x The Onion; Duran Duran x Second Life; Spammers x blog pings; Privacywashing v Doordash; Good ideas are popular.
• 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.

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Eternal Sloptember (permalink)

I'm sure that working in social media – dealing with people as mass statistical abstractions – is a cognitohazard, the sort of thing that could make anyone a little solipsistic, convinced that everyone else is a kind of stimulus-responding automaton lacking the interiority that you yourself experience.

But when it comes to Mark Zuckerberg, I'm increasingly convinced that he didn't acquire his worldview through the self-inflicted brain damage of his long exposure to the back-end of a vast social media system. I think the causal arrow points in the other direction: I think that Zuck founded Facebook because he doesn't really believe that other people are truly real, at least not as real as he is.

We see this in Facebook's very earliest days, as we see it today, as we see it at every critical juncture in Facebook and Zuckerberg's history.

Consider Facebook's origins, founded by a young Zuckerberg in his dorm as a means to nonconsensually rate the fuckability of his fellow Harvard undergrads:

https://mashable.com/article/mark-zuckerberg-lying-about-facebook

The boy Zuck was delighted and surprised that so many of his fellow students entrusted him with their data but even then, he had no inkling as to why they would do so. Privately, he jeered at his users for trusting him, calling them "dumb fucks":

https://www.theregister.com/offbeat/2010/05/14/facebook-founder-called-trusting-users-dumb-fcks/294365

Zuck has since prosecuted history's most ruthless war on privacy, a surveillance campaign that would put the Stasi to shame and make Orwell scoff at the hacks butchering his work with over the top absurdities.

Zuck doesn't think you deserve any privacy, but boy does he ever value his own. This is a guy who bought the four houses surrounding his San Francisco home and left them empty in order to form a buffer zone:

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/08/10/us/mark-zuckerberg-palo-alto.html?unlocked_article_code=1.3VA.4Avp.cVm3LUnvajRK&smid=url-share

When a single candid photo of Zuck and his family in their kitchen leaked (from Facebook!), Zuck, his lawyers, and his operatives treated it as a three-alarm fire:

https://abc7news.com/archive/8933289/

Zuckerberg's acquired a vast Hawaiian acreage and left most of it undeveloped, fenced off and patrolled by guards to prevent anyone from catching a glimpse of his private life. In order to acquire this acreage, Zuck exploited a dirty legal tactic called "heirs property," which leverages the informal basis of indigenous land claims by locating a single person with a colorable claim to their distant relatives' territory in order to force an auction of the ancestral land:

https://www.wired.com/story/mark-zuckerberg-secretive-hawaii-compound-burial-ground/

If Zuck thought other people are as real as he is, he wouldn't spy on them in ways he himself could never tolerate. He certainly wouldn't pay fancy white-shoe lawyers to steal their land out from under them. At heart, Zuck is a billionaire solipsist to beat all other examples of the form – a billionaire social media solipsist who sees others as manipulable collections of statistical abstractions, and not as people at all:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/08/18/seeing-like-a-billionaire/#npcs

When Zuck is forcibly reminded that other people do indeed exist, he takes it very badly. He's insisted that Sarah Wynn-Williams, a former FB exec turned whistleblower, must pay him $111,000,000 as punishment for her excellent tell-all memoir Careless People. His lawyers say that Wynn-Williams violates the non-disclosure and non-disparagement "agreement" of her old Facebook employment contract merely by standing motionless and silent for an hour on-stage:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/06/27/zuckerstreisand-2/#autodisparagement

Once you realize that Zuck doesn't really think other people exist, "the metaverse" starts to make a lot more sense. Why would Zuck light $61b on fire in a bet that we will all stand still while he converts us and everyone we love into legless, sexless, low-polygon, heavily surveilled cartoon characters that he imprisons in a virtual world he stole from a 25 year old satirical dystopian cyberpunk novel? It's easy to understand if we're all non-player characters – if that's true, then the metaverse is surely our native habitat.

For Zuck, people aren't co-equals with needs that are as real and important as his own. For Zuck, people are problems to be solved. He embodies Terry Pratchett's maxim (voiced by Granny Weatherwax) that "sin is when you treat people like things."

Nowhere is this sin more on display than in Zuck's relationship to the social connections that bind together the users of his platforms. Zuck has benefited enormously from the fact that you love your friends more than you hate him, but (because hell is other people), you can't all agree on when to leave and where to go next, so you stay put on Facebook and Instagram:

https://locusmag.com/feature/commentary-cory-doctorow-hell-is-other-people/

For Zuck, the fact that you and your friends have trapped one another in a mutual hostage-taking is maddening, because those friends who've tied you to his platform refuse to organize their social contact with you to "maximize your engagement" with Facebook and Insta, which would let him maximize the number of ads he shows you. Rather, these friends just want to be your friends, which means that they don't want to get into stupid endless fights to keep you replying or stage little entertaining skits to keep you scrolling.

At first, Zuck tried tweaking his algorithm to replace your friends with trolls who'd bait you into flamewars. When that petered out, he stole a march from Tiktok and recruited an army of theater kids to do amateur dramatics for you in exchange for the promise of an intermittent reward schedule payment for the sketches that got the most views:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/04/17/for-youze/#forever

The problem (for Zuck) is that theater kids are also people and they resent being jerked around by the algorithm and ripped off by Meta's rigged revshare slot-machine. Last year, he started signaling that he would replace the theater kids – and your friends – with chatbots:

https://sfist.com/2025/05/01/mark-zuckerberg-gets-roasted-for-saying-the-average-american-has-fewer-than-three-friends-while-pushing-ai-chatbots/

Chatbots have been a catastrophic bet for Meta, far worse than the metaverse. Meta shares are in a death-spiral as investors figure out that when Zuck fired all his coders and replaced them with chatbots while spending $300b on AI, he was excising the heart of the company's skilled workforce, pissing away all its free cash-flow, and sinking into a bottomless pit of debt to produce a substandard product that no one wants, at the expense of the company's only profitable lines of business:

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/ai-bubble-tech-selloff-investment-consumer-business-demand/

But Zuck is sure that chatbots can solve his most pernicious problem: the search for a gimmick that will keep you locked to his platform that is under his complete control. Zuck doesn't want to rely on your friends with their unwillingness to maximize your engagement. He doesn't want to depend on volatile and unpredictable trolls to bait you into sticking around to argue and see more ads. He wants to be shut of theater kids and their amateur dramatics that inevitably come with demands for decent treatment.

For Zuck, chatbots dangle the promise of social media without socializing. Zuck thinks he can solve all his problems by imprisoning you in a house of mirrors where you interact with LLMs that are tuned to keep you scrolling no matter what, chatbots that will never demand anything of Meta.

He's been at this for a while, and each generation of chatbots was worse than the last. How bad? The last batch had to be killed off after they took to luring children into explicit sexual role-play:

https://archive.is/fopCh

Nevertheless, the dream of a world without people is one that Zuck can't let go of. Solipsism's seductive song convinced him to buy a company called Social.ai, which specializes in trapping people in conversations with chatbots, and now he's announced his plan to flood Facebook and Instagram with LLM slop:

https://www.mediapost.com/publications/article/402263/

The amazing thing about this is that Zuck is talking about chatbots as a way to capture a younger audience for his graying platforms. Kids hate chatbots. My 18 year old and her friends use "that's so AI" as a pejorative to dismiss anything distasteful or ugly:

https://futurism.com/artificial-intelligence/gen-z-attitude-ai

For Zuck – who owns a controlling share of voting stock in his company and need not answer to his board – it's a spectacular act of delusional self-sabotage. Zuck refuses to understand that the majority of his users are on his platform because they love their friends more than they hate him. Zuckerberg is on a relentless quest to isolate you from the friends who keep you on his platform and transfer your bond to groups of people (and now chatbots) who can be commanded by Zuckerberg.

Only someone who doesn't think other people are real could believe that you'd prefer to talk to chatbots rather than your friends – or that a habit of talking with chatbots would be so hard to break that you'd endure an ever-increasing number of advertising interruptions to maintain those pointless conversations.

In 1993/1994, AOL connected its millions of users to the public internet. These users were unaccustomed to the internet's conversational and technical norms, and they kept coming. It wasn't that the old internet was incapable of absorbing surges of new users: every September, an incoming class of undergraduates found their way online through their universities' computer labs.

But the AOL bridge was different: the flood of users was much larger, and it never stopped. The old internet people who struggled to transfer the culture and techniques of the internet to that flood of newbies called it the "Eternal September."

For the Facebook and Instagram users who are about to be buried in an endless botshit avalanche, this is the beginning of the "Eternal Sloptember." From here on in, the slop only gets worse and thicker and harder to avoid. Zuckerberg refuses to acknowledge that he owes his fortune to the fact that his users love each other more than they hate him, so he has set out to shatter those bonds of love and sharpen that hatred.

It won't end well. Zuck and people like him call themselves "high agency," a disgusting bit of jargon meant to denote someone who has real interiority, wishes and desires (as opposed to the rest of us, who do as we're told and stay where we're put). Zuck's "agency" isn't higher than yours or mine. The difference between him and us is that he doesn't think we're really real, and we know that he's really a monster.

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Hey look at this (permalink)

• Can AI agents conduct open-ended AI research? Early evidence from two case studies https://cruxevals.com/crux/can-ai-agents-conduct-research/

• Meta Adding Millions Of AI-Generated 'Users' To IG, Facebook https://www.mediapost.com/publications/article/402263/

• The Oligarchs are Doubling Down on Republicans https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/the-oligarchs-are-doubling-down-on

• rent, always rent https://backofmind.substack.com/p/rent-always-rent

• I replaced a $120k bowling center system with $1,600 in ESP32s https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48968606

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Object permanence (permalink)

#25yrsago Samuel Delany interviewed by The Onion https://web.archive.org/web/20010810115550/http://www.theonionavclub.com/avclub3727/bonusfeature1_3727.html

#25yrsago Evil Burger King customers https://web.archive.org/web/20010805001648/http://www.geocities.com/CapitolHill/Lobby/2645/index.html

#25yrsago Definitive search engine optimization primer https://web.archive.org/web/20011006095612/https://hotwired.lycos.com/webmonkey/templates/print_template.htmlt?meta=/webmonkey/01/23/index1a_meta.html

#20yrsago Only traitors try to make us afraid of terrorists https://web.archive.org/web/20060418102222/https://www.cato.org/pubs/regulation/regv27n3/v27n3-5.pdf

#20yrsago Swingin’ big band song about rejecting surveillance https://web.archive.org/web/20060818220142/http://movies.crooksandliars.com/HYHEMix.mp3

#20yrsago Duran Duran moves to Second Life, will gig there http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/5253782.stm?ls

#20yrsago Seventy percent of blog-pings are from spammers https://web.archive.org/web/20060820151227/http://www.sifry.com/alerts/archives/000436.html

#20yrsago London’s derelict cinemas https://web.archive.org/web/20060809210918/https://www.derelictlondon.com/cinemas.htm

#10yrsago Foreign influence: how a Chinese businessman funneled $1.3M to Jeb Bush’s campaign https://web.archive.org/web/20160803180101/https://theintercept.com/2016/08/03/gop-lawyer-chinese-owned-company-us-presidential-politics/

#10yrsago Researchers learn about wire-fraud scam after scammers infect themselves with their own malware https://spectrum.ieee.org/nigerian-scammers-infect-themselves-with-own-malware-revealing-new-wirewire-fraud-scheme

#5yrsago End bankruptcy shopping https://pluralistic.net/2021/08/07/hr-4193/#shoppers-choice

#5yrsago Doordash privacywashes its war on workers https://pluralistic.net/2021/08/07/hr-4193/#boss-app

#1yrago Good ideas are popular https://pluralistic.net/2025/08/07/the-people-no-2/#water-flowing-uphill

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Upcoming appearances (permalink)

• Virtual: EFFecting Change: Who the Machine Serves, Aug 12
  https://www.eff.org/event/effecting-change-who-machine-serves

• Edinburgh International Book Festival with Jimmy Wales, Aug 17
  https://www.edbookfest.co.uk/events/the-front-list-cory-doctorow-and-jimmy-wales

• Sydney: The Festival of Dangerous Ideas, Aug 23-24
  https://festivalofdangerousideas.com/program/

• Melbourne: Enshittification at the Wheeler Centre, Aug 25
  https://www.wheelercentre.com/events-tickets/season-2026/cory-doctorow-enshittification

• Brighton: The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI with Carole Cadwalladr (Brighton Dome), Sep 8
  https://brightondome.org/whats-on/LSC-cory-doctorow-the-reverse-centaurs-guide-to-life-after-ai/

• London: The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI with Riley Quinn (Foyle's Picadilly), Sep 9
  https://www.foyles.co.uk/events/enshittification-cory-doctorow-riley-quinn

• South Bend: An Evening With Cory Doctorow (Notre Dame), Oct 6
  https://franco.nd.edu/events/2026/10/06/an-evening-with-cory-doctorow/

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

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Recent appearances (permalink)

• The AI Enshittification Bubble (Hidden Forces)
  https://hiddenforces.io/podcasts/the-ai-enshittification-bubble-cory-doctorow/

• F@#$ the AI Overlords (On The Media)
  https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/otm/articles/f-the-ai-overlords

• Why AI Won't Replace Workers, But Will Crash The Economy (Smart Cookies)
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rRRmUuxJolY

• AI and the Enshittification Era (The Weekly Show with Jon Stewart)
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-dAIJRjb-Bw

• AI is not inevitable (Betakit)
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DbiTVkq1WHo

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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

---

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: 604 (1940 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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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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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

Meta expanded its AI coding offerings with a new agent that, it promises, can handle complex tasks with complex software.

DuckDuckGo, the search engine that built its whole pitch on not tracking you, now sells a pair of sunglasses. The $35 Paso Robles never needs charging, skips the smartphone app, and works with no internet connection. DuckDuckGo says that's by design, so the person standing next to you doesn't have to wonder if they're being filmed. — Read the rest

The post DuckDuckGo's answer to Meta's smart glasses is regular sunglasses appeared first on Boing Boing.

Today's links

• Google is a scammer's paradise: The internet's absentee landlord.
• Hey look at this: Delights to delectate.
• Object permanence: DEVELOPERS DEVELOPERS DEVELOPERS; EZ realistic corpse; $300m login button; Short Uber; Who goes AI?
• 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.

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Google is a scammer's paradise (permalink)

Forget "Don't be evil"; Google's true motto is a form of vulgar spidermanism: "With great power comes no responsibility." The internet's de facto boss is an absentee landlord.

Google – a thrice-convicted monopolist – is the gateway to the internet, with more than a 90% search market share that it attained by buying out all its competitors and bribing Apple more than $20b/year not to start a rival search engine:

https://www.democracynow.org/2024/8/6/google_monopoly

Google likes to position itself as a wise steward of the internet. They say they use their vast troves of data about the internet and its users to connect the right person with the right information at the right moment. As their mission statement has it, "organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful":

https://www.google.com/intl/en_us/search/howsearchworks/our-approach/

The tacit argument is, "Sure, we repeatedly violated antitrust law in order to monopolize the internet, but the internet needs a monopolist. It's scary out there! We have amassed power so that we can protect and guide you."

It's a bullshit argument and no one should accept it – but even if you think it's worth harnessing monopoly power to promote a wise king to rule over the internet, you'd still want Google to take that responsibility seriously. If we're to have a landlord for our civilization's digital nervous system, let's not have it be an absentee landlord.

Google is an absentee landlord. In 2019, they chose to deliberately worsen search results in order to make you search repeatedly to find the information you're seeking, because every fresh query lets them serve fresh advertisements:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/05/26/babyish-radical-extremists/#cancon

Not all of Google's enshittification can be attributed to deliberate sabotage. Much of it is the result of neglect. Ask Google for a product review and they'll pass over the most rigorous, honest websites on the internet in favor of affiliate scammers who repackage Amazon best-of lists to peddle overpriced, underperforming junk that's sometimes so bad it's dangerous:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/02/21/im-feeling-unlucky/#not-up-to-the-task

Google keeps announcing that it Takes This Problem Very Seriously – and then nothing happens:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/05/03/keyword-swarming/#site-reputation-abuse

And of course, Google AI search results present the company with a highly refined and confident-sounding way to launder spam into product recommendations:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/07/15/inhuman-gigapede/#coprophagic-ai

Could Google do better? Provably so. Kagi, a small company that runs a search engine powered by Google's own search index consistently delivers results that are substantially superior to Google's – using Google's own infrastructure:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/04/teach-me-how-to-shruggie/#kagi

If Kagi (a startup with a handful of engineers) can extract useful search results from Google's databases, then Google – a thrice-convicted monopolist that's had its pick of thousands of the top computer scientists from the world's most prestigious universities for a generation – could also do so.

They just choose not to.

They're too big to fail. They're too big to jail. They're too big to care.

Google's AI search isn't a way to fix its broken core product: it's a way to partially remediate the damage Google itself inflicted on the open internet, while imprisoning the web in a walled garden that would make Steve Jobs drool:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/06/29/arsonist-firefighters/#im-feeling-lucky

It's a deadly combination: Google has committed hundreds of billions to stock buybacks and its AI money-furnace, financed by mass layoffs targeting the people who keep the core services useful. The too-big-to-care company is still the internet's gatekeeper, but half the guards at the gate have been fired and the other half have pulled so much overtime that they keep falling asleep on the job.

Google has become a scammer's paradise.

Take Google's "answer box." This is the part of the search results page that tries to answer your query directly, without sending you elsewhere for that info. Back in 2023, Google's Answer Box was taken over by scammers who impersonated airline help desks. When Google's users searched for airlines' toll-free phone numbers, Google directed them to phones that rang in the scammers' boiler room, where they were tricked into giving up their passport info and credit card numbers to boiler-room thieves:

https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/phone-numbers-airlines-listed-google-directed-scammers-rcna94766

(This was an especially devastating attack because the airlines themselves hide their customer service phone numbers – as enshittified monopolists, they want your money, not your complaints – so it's normal to search Google for the number you're seeking, rather than scouring the airlines' deliberately confusing customer service sites.)

This is especially galling because Google has an extensive "verified merchant" program that goes to enormous lengths to establish the true identity of every merchant whose businesses are listed on Google, in maps, ads and search results. Google "knows" which URLs belong to the airlines. If it can be tricked into scraping a different website for the airlines' phone numbers, that's because Google couldn't be bothered to connect its own database of canonical airline URLs to the process that serves phone numbers to the 90% of the web-using public who search with Google.

Google's database of the canonical URLs for businesses doesn't stop at airlines or even large businesses. Nearly every local merchant has undergone Google's verification process, which includes a step where Google physically mails a postcard with a unique number to the merchant's registered address, which the merchant must then key into Google to prove that they're located where they say they are.

Despite this, Google's ad-sales system will happily sell anyone the right to advertise a different website for queries for specific merchants, and those ads appear above the real result for the business's website. To make this even worse, Google's spent years making it more difficult to distinguish ads from "organic" search results, changing the font and size of the "ad" warning to make it harder to spot, and making the font and color of the ad itself closer to the color of the search results below it.

This is a gift to fraudsters. I had my own run-in with it in 2023, when I was tricked by a Google ad into ordering dinner from my local Thai place using a scam site that had cloned the restaurant's menu. The scammers marked up the price by 15%, then passed the order on to the restaurant, pocketing the vig:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/02/24/passive-income/#swiss-cheese-security

This scammer – based out of a UC Berkeley dorm-room – had copied hundreds of restaurant websites, then bought Google ads for the restaurants' names, ensuring that searchers would see the scam result before the real one. Remember: Google knows what the true URL is for every one of those restaurants but it sold the scammer ads for a different URL that appeared when people searched for the restaurant by name.

Google could trivially add a step to the ad sales pipeline that detects mismatches between a merchant's known URL and the URL in an ad bought against the merchant's name. It could automatically resolve these mismatches by sending an email to the merchant's verified email address that says, "Hey, are you buying an ad with a new URL? If so, just reply to this email."

I don't know why Google doesn't do this. Maybe they make huge sums from these scam ads and they don't want to forego the revenue. Or maybe they just don't care.

Whichever it is, there's real consequences for this negligence by the internet's absentee landlord. Take abortions: fake abortion clinics – where pregnant women are bullied or tricked out of the abortions they're seeking – buy Google ads against the names of real abortion clinics. Google makes millions sending abortion-seekers to fake abortion providers:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/06/15/paid-medical-disinformation/#crisis-pregnancy-centers

Google started off as the ideal "intermediary" – the fancy economist's term for a "middleman." They took as their duty to figure out the best websites for you to look at based on your interests, serving as an honest broker between internet users and internet publishers. In the quarter-century since the company's founding, as it transformed itself into a monopolist, it developed the curse of every intermediary: it got Main Character Syndrome.

This is Tim Wu's formulation: the reason for an intermediary existence is to serve the parties to the transaction. Ebay says it exists to connect buyers and sellers, Uber is supposed to connect drivers and riders, dating sites are supposed to connect people with their love-matches. But intermediaries are cursed with an enviable position: by dint of sitting between these different groups of people, the intermediary learns everything about both sides of the transaction, while each side only knows about its own position.

Amazon knows the price you're willing to pay, it knows who's set the lowest price, and it knows how many identical items that match your query are for sale. But the sellers don't know any of that, and you only know some of it. By capitalizing on that information (rather than using it to efficiently match buyers and sellers), Amazon can match you with the sellers willing to pay the highest junk fees, rather than the ones who offer the best price for the best goods:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/11/03/subprime-attention-rent-crisis/#euthanize-rentiers

This is Wu's Main Character Syndrome in action. Once Amazon attains a dominant market share, it can maximize its own welfare at the expense of its buyers and sellers, transforming itself from a helper to a parasite:

https://www.lawfaremedia.org/article/lawfare-daily–tim-wu-on–the-age-of-extraction

Google says it wants to "organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful," but every dime it spends fighting fraud (a critical part of this mission!) is a dime it can't spend on stock buybacks, executive compensation and AI servers. "Organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful" is the mission of a good intermediary; "do the absolute minimum to fight fraud" is the mission of a formerly good intermediary with terminal Main Character Syndrome.

Google keeps finding ways to expose its users to fraud while lining its own pockets. That restaurant markup scam that caught me in 2023? Three years later, it's way worse.

San Francisco City Attorney David Chiu just filed suit against GuestReservations.com, BookOnline.com and Booking Holdings for running a massive version of the restaurant menu scam – one that extracted millions from people booking hotel rooms:

https://www.kron4.com/news/bay-area/alleged-sf-hotel-booking-scam-had-up-to-85-markup-fees-city-attorney/

Here's how the scam worked: these companies put up websites with deceptive URLs, like SanFranciscoMarriott.GuestReservations.com, and then bought the associated Google ad-word ("San Francisco Marriott"). At the top of Google searches for "San Francisco Marriott booking" was the ad for SanFranciscoMarriott.GuestReservations.com. This site would sell you a room at the Marriott, at a markup of 35% to 85%.

This is a pure ripoff. If Google had served the correct result at the top of the page – if it had used its own database of confirmed merchants and their associate websites to validate its ads – then people booking hotels would have saved 35% to 85% on their rooms.

City Attorney Chiu says that the perps here registered domains for all kinds of hotels, even tiny ones in small towns, all over America. That means that it's not just visitors to San Francisco who got screwed by these creeps – it's also San Franciscans who booked hotel rooms around the country.

Google bears the lion's share of the blame here, but Visa and the other credit card companies are critical to these scams. Card companies allow merchants to set terms of service that refuse refunds under almost any circumstances, and, more often than not, the card issuers side with the merchants over their own customers when they call to cancel a charge from one of these scammers.

I discovered this for myself when I was tricked into buying theater tickets from a ripoff site that had registered the URL of the show I wanted to go to. I figured out that I'd been rooked within a minute of clicking the buy button, but it took months and multiple appeals – and ultimately a threat to cancel my credit card – to get Visa to refund me.

Visa – another bloated monopolist with terminal Main Character Syndrome – can see that it has merchants who generate zillions of appeals and charge-backs because they run scam businesses like these. They could treat these merchants as the fraudsters they are, but because the crooks wreathe themselves in gauzy excuses and lengthy terms of service, Visa enables these massive, nationwide cons.

Google, Visa and the other monopolists who serve as de facto regulators for our society have arrogated to themselves the power to observe every transaction and block the obvious scams. We pay for their failure to take minimal, obvious steps to protect us from the scammers who thrive on their platforms.

Why should they? They're the main characters. They're Bizarro-world spidermen, whose great power confers no responsibility.

---

Hey look at this (permalink)

• When the AI bubble bursts, will Europe be ready? https://www.euractiv.com/opinion/when-the-ai-bubble-bursts-will-europe-be-ready/

• Gavin Newsom Makes An Ass Of Himself On Antitrust, Paramount Merger https://www.techdirt.com/2026/08/04/gavin-newsom-makes-an-ass-of-himself-on-antitrust-paramount-merger/

• Against Self-Fulfilling Prophecy https://www.hamiltonnolan.com/p/against-self-fulfilling-prophecy

• Arson markets https://www.merkley.senate.gov/wp-content/uploads/2026.08.03-LTR-Wildfire-Prediction-Markets-FINAL.pdf

• Eight Myths on Software Engineering and GenAI https://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=3807963

---

Object permanence (permalink)

#25yrsago Steve Ballmer: DEVELOPERS DEVELOPERS DEVELOPERS DEVELOPERS DEVELOPERS http://www.ntk.net/ballmer/dancemonkeyboy.mpg

#15yrsago HOWTO E-Z realistic corpse from a cheap plastic skeleton https://propnomicon.blogspot.com/2011/08/quick-and-dirty-corpses.html

#15yrsago $300 Million Button: making customers create logins to buy cost etailer $300M/year https://centercentre.com/

#10yrsago 1 billion computer monitors vulnerable to undetectable firmware attacks https://www.defcon.org/html/defcon-24/dc-24-speakers.html#Cui

#10yrsago Stiglitz quits Panama’s official money-laundering panel over internal sabotage https://www.reuters.com/article/us-panama-tax-idUSKCN10G24Z/

#10yrsago BBC will use surveillance powers to sniff Britons’ wifi and find license-cheats https://web.archive.org/web/20160806155022/https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2016/08/05/bbc-to-deploy-detection-vans-to-snoop-on-internet-users/

#10yrsago How and why to short Uber https://qz.com/707947/investors-have-placed-a-one-way-bet-on-uber-which-made-us-want-to-figure-out-a-way-to-short-it

#5yrsago Facebook's official disinformation research portal is a bad joke https://pluralistic.net/2021/08/06/get-you-coming-and-going/#potemkin-research-program

#5yrsago Scammers sell griefers social media banning services https://pluralistic.net/2021/08/06/get-you-coming-and-going/#curse-of-bigness

#1yrago Which jobs can be replaced with AI? https://pluralistic.net/2025/08/06/unmerchantable-substitute-goods/#customer-disservice

---

Upcoming appearances (permalink)

• Virtual: EFFecting Change: Who the Machine Serves, Aug 12
  https://www.eff.org/event/effecting-change-who-machine-serves

• Edinburgh International Book Festival with Jimmy Wales, Aug 17
  https://www.edbookfest.co.uk/events/the-front-list-cory-doctorow-and-jimmy-wales

• Sydney: The Festival of Dangerous Ideas, Aug 23-24
  https://festivalofdangerousideas.com/program/

• Melbourne: Enshittification at the Wheeler Centre, Aug 25
  https://www.wheelercentre.com/events-tickets/season-2026/cory-doctorow-enshittification

• Brighton: The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI with Carole Cadwalladr (Brighton Dome), Sep 8
  https://brightondome.org/whats-on/LSC-cory-doctorow-the-reverse-centaurs-guide-to-life-after-ai/

• London: The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI with Riley Quinn (Foyle's Picadilly), Sep 9
  https://www.foyles.co.uk/events/enshittification-cory-doctorow-riley-quinn

• South Bend: An Evening With Cory Doctorow (Notre Dame), Oct 6
  https://franco.nd.edu/events/2026/10/06/an-evening-with-cory-doctorow/

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

---

Recent appearances (permalink)

• The AI Enshittification Bubble (Hidden Forces)
  https://hiddenforces.io/podcasts/the-ai-enshittification-bubble-cory-doctorow/

• F@#$ the AI Overlords (On The Media)
  https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/otm/articles/f-the-ai-overlords

• Why AI Won't Replace Workers, But Will Crash The Economy (Smart Cookies)
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rRRmUuxJolY

• AI and the Enshittification Era (The Weekly Show with Jon Stewart)
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-dAIJRjb-Bw

• AI is not inevitable (Betakit)
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DbiTVkq1WHo

---

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

---

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: 623 (1336 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

Today's links

• Why aren't AI companies competing directly with their customers? Why sell picks and shovels if you've already struck gold?
• Hey look at this: Delights to delectate.
• Object permanence: Pro-logging Lorax; Anti-DRM picture book; Whose cops did America train? Day on a Device; Theresa May x Fresh Prince; Ratfucking Corbyn supporters; Infosec v W3C DRM; Remix Public Enemy; Hungary's Cold War cartoons; America is unpaving its roads; Olympic overruns are world champions; Vivendi lobbyist is now UN copyright boss; Boris's racism; Facebook's insider stalkers; Semantic drift, ethical drift.
• 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.

---

Why aren't AI companies competing directly with their customers? (permalink)

"I often wonder what the Vintners buy/One half so precious as the Goods they sell" -The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám

I first encountered that quote from someone extolling the virtues of bookstores, and it stuck with me, because for most of my childhood, every bookstore visit ended with me broke and wishing I'd had three times as much to spend.

As a larval hyperlexic, I just didn't understand what a bookseller could possibly buy with my money that was better than the books they already had? Of course, then I became a bookseller and discovered that Sturgeon's Law ("90% of everything is shit") applies to a bookstore's wares as much as it does to anything else. I also acquired a monthly rent obligation and discovered just how important money could be.

Nevertheless, Omar Khayyám's question stuck with me, especially when I fell down a years-long rabbit-hole of learning about scams and the finance sector (but I repeat myself). Every get-rich-quick schemer will tell you that they've found the infinite money hack, which they will sell to you for a remarkably reasonable sum. Likewise, every stock picker claims they can outperform a simple low-load index fund, and all they ask of you is a few hundred basis points in exchange for multiplying your wealth beyond the dreams of Creosote. Neither one has a good answer to Khayyám's question: if you can make all the money with your amazing system, why do you need my money?

This is a question that needs to be forcefully put to AI hucksters. In their more expansive moments, the Altmans and Amodeis of the world will tell you that they're planning to teach the word-guessing program so many words that it will wake up and become god. DOGE's broccoli-haired brownshirts laughed in the faces of the NIH lifers who begged them not to vaporize their long-running cancer research projects: "General AI is around the corner and it's going to cure cancer. Cancer research is a waste of money!"

Which all raises the question: if you've truly incubated a foetal demiurge in your "AI lab," why are you offering to sell it to me? What do the AI hucksters buy/One half so precious as the Gods they sell?"

Of course, they might answer, "We need your money now so we can make god later." That's why they want your boss to fire you and replace you with their chatbots and split your wages with your former employer. But this just raises the same question: if you have a chatbot that can do a doctor's job, why sell it to a hospital? Why not just open your own hospital? If you've got a chatbot that can do a tax accountant's job, why sell it to a tax-prep service? Why not just open a tax-prep service? If you've got a chatbot that can teach my kids, why sell it to my local school district? Why not just open a school?

If the chatbot can do the job, and if the chatbot costs less than the worker who does the job today, then the chatbot company can profitably sell services more cheaply than anyone who presently employs that worker, because the chatbot company already owns the chatbot. If you were really on a glide path to creating an all-powerful deity and just needed cash to keep the venture going until the cancer-curing word-guesser awoke from its long slumber, then wouldn't you want as much cash as possible? Why would you voluntarily split the take with some sucky, washed, non-god-generating business from before 2022?

I think the only reason this question doesn't come up more frequently is that we're stewing in what Douglas Rushkoff calls the "go meta" economy, in which the most respectable and smartest business to operate must be as many abstraction layers away from real work as possible. Don't drive a taxi, own a medallion that you rent to the cab driver. Don't own a medallion, start a "rideshare" company. Don't start a rideshare company, invest in a rideshare company. Don't invest in a rideshare company, buy options to invest in a rideshare company:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/09/13/collapse-porn/#collapse-porn

The inverse relationship between doing something useful and making money is deeply ingrained in our economic wisdom. Take the world of online grifters, who don't just peddle get-rich-quick PDFs, they also peddle tools to generate get-rich-quick PDFs, as well as tools to steal other "wealth influencers'" insta videos and deepfake yourself into their pretend private jets:

https://www.404media.co/how-i-bought-a-private-jet-by-selling-10-subscriptions-to-404-media/

The scam economy boasts a bewildering array of ancillary services, like a $150/month service that lets you produce fake screenshots showing vast monthly income on other scam services (November Kelly calls this "The world's most expensive 'inspect element'"):

https://www.patreon.com/trashfuture/posts/faux-high-level-163443872

It's an old truism that in a gold rush, the only people who come out ahead are the people selling the picks and shovels. But that's not true – there's even more money to be made wholesaling picks and shovels to the retailers who operate the frontier mercantiles. Go meta!

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Alaskan_Gold_Mining_Supplies_(1897)_(ADVERT_277).jpeg

Today's economy is dominated by pick-and-shovel wholesalers. America is a gerontocracy drowning in MBAs, while there's no one to do eldercare:

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/why-recruiters-can-t-find-workers-and-new-grads-can-t-find-jobs-it-s-not-ai/ar-AA27K57y

So it's not surprising that we don't ask why these AI god-botherers need our stupid money while they're immanentizing the eschaton. Why would they operate a hospital if they could go meta and sell the doctorbots to the MBAs running the hospital?

---

Hey look at this (permalink)

• Mark Zuckerberg and Meta Deride “Headline-Seeking” Damages Sought By State AGs In Social Media Safety Suit: “Untethered From Reality” https://deadline.com/2026/07/social-media-lawsuit-damages-zuckerberg-1236977447/

• Zohran Mamdani's retro wristwatch is a Casio classic https://boingboing.net/2026/07/08/zohran-mamdanis-retro-wristwatch-is-a-casio-classic.html

• B.O.B. (Birds Over Big Bird) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fAXO7SXK0Pc

• A referendum for another development model https://thomaspiketty.wordpress.com/2026/06/23/a-referendum-for-social-justice/

• Introducing the Gap Map v0.1 https://www.currentai.org/blogs/introducing-the-gap-map-v0-1

---

Object permanence (permalink)

#25yrsago Pro-lumber industry spoof of The Lorax https://web.archive.org/web/20010721042828/http://www.forestcouncil.org/news/articles/truax1.htm

#25yrsago Remixable vocal tracks from the next Public Enemy release https://web.archive.org/web/20010813195140/http://www.slamjamz.com/slamnews.php?article=7

#20yrsago Wikipedia creates RSS for its posts https://web.archive.org/web/20060718103013/http://www.micropersuasion.com/2006/07/wikipedia_entir.html

#20yrsago Anti-DRM picture-book https://web.archive.org/web/20060721095740/https://dustrunners.blogspot.com/2006/07/pig-and-box.html

#10yrsago The US has spent $122B training foreign cops and soldiers in 150+ countries, but isn’t sure who https://web.archive.org/web/20160713145824/https://theintercept.com/2016/07/13/training/

#10yrsago German free school teaches without grades, timetables or lesson plans https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/jul/01/no-grades-no-timetable-berlin-school-turns-teaching-upside-down

#10yrsago For the first time, a federal judge has thrown out police surveillance evidence from a “Stingray” device https://www.rawstory.com/2016/07/federal-judge-throws-out-evidence-gathered-with-stingray-cell-phone-tracker/

#10yrsago Day on a Device: art made by screenshotting a multitasker’s screen with each context-switch https://www.theverge.com/2016/7/13/12170526/multitasking-phone-laptop-pierre-buttin-art

#10yrsago Remarkably Normal: the true stories of abortion in America https://web.archive.org/web/20160810092901/http://jezebel.com/the-vagina-monologues-but-for-abortion-1783289270/amp

#10yrsago Theresa May performs the Fresh Prince of Bel-Air theme https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xv7Jd94bnOI

#10yrsago UK Labour’s dirty trick excludes 130,000 members from leadership vote https://web.archive.org/web/20160712225142/http://www.itv.com/news/2016-07-12/corbyn-opponents-try-to-fix-vote/

#10yrsago Security researchers: the W3C’s DRM needs to be thoroughly audited https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2016/06/call-security-community-w3cs-drm-must-be-investigated

#10yrsago Help Doctors Without Borders fill in the geodata blanks for vulnerable communities https://missingmaps.org/blog/2016/07/14/mapswipe/

#10yrsago Sign a book of congratulations for America’s new Librarian of Congress https://web.archive.org/web/20160718023555/https://action.everylibrary.org/congratulate_carla_hayden_today

#10yrsago Hungary’s Cold War cartoons were weird and awesome https://globalvoices.org/2016/07/14/the-fascinating-world-of-cold-war-era-hungarian-cartoons/

#10yrsago The ACLU has a roadmap for defeating President Donald Trump’s signature initiatives https://web.archive.org/web/20160715131734/https://action.aclu.org/sites/default/files/pages/trumpmemos.pdf

#10yrsago America’s infrastructure debt is so bad that towns are unpaving roads they can’t afford to fix https://web.archive.org/web/20160713170836/https://www.wired.com/2016/07/cash-strapped-towns-un-paving-roads-cant-afford-fix/

#10yrsago It’s official: the Olympics result in the worst budget overruns of any megaproject https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2804554

#10yrsago Vivendi lobbyist appointed to run copyright for UN agency https://web.archive.org/web/20160717052135/http://keionline.org/node/2614

#10yrsago The long, racist history of Brexiteer Boris Johnson, the new UK Foreign Secretary https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-36792746

#5yrsago Facebook employees stalk users https://pluralistic.net/2021/07/14/who-watches-the-zuckmen/#pecksniffs

#5yrsago Semantic drift versus ethical drift https://pluralistic.net/2025/07/14/pole-star/#gnus-not-utilitarian

---

Upcoming appearances (permalink)

• Edinburgh International Book Festival with Jimmy Wales, Aug 17
  https://www.edbookfest.co.uk/events/the-front-list-cory-doctorow-and-jimmy-wales

• Sydney: The Festival of Dangerous Ideas, Aug 23-24
  https://festivalofdangerousideas.com/cory-doctorow/

• Melbourne: Enshittification at the Wheeler Centre, Aug 25
  https://www.wheelercentre.com/events-tickets/season-2026/cory-doctorow-enshittification

• Brighton: The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI with Carole Cadwalladr (Brighton Dome), Sep 8
  https://brightondome.org/whats-on/LSC-cory-doctorow-the-reverse-centaurs-guide-to-life-after-ai/

• London: The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI with Riley Quinn (Foyle's Picadilly), Sep 9
  https://www.foyles.co.uk/events/enshittification-cory-doctorow-riley-quinn

• South Bend: An Evening With Cory Doctorow (Notre Dame), Oct 6
  https://franco.nd.edu/events/2026/10/06/an-evening-with-cory-doctorow/

---

Recent appearances (permalink)

• Who Owns Your Tractor? (Growing the Future)
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IU9eBPUZBI4

• You Bought it, They Break It (What Now? with Trevor Noah)
  https://www.podbean.com/media/share/dir-ir36t-2f4a1ac6

• Can AI be Saved From Capitalism? (Everyday Anarchism)
  https://www.everydayanarchism.com/192-can-ai-be-saved-from-capitalism-cory-doctorow/

• Lawfare Daily
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T1KIwaYRs1g

• How to Think About AI (Organized Money)
  https://www.organizedmoney.fm/p/how-to-think-about-ai-with-cory-doctorow

---

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

---

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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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

Today's links

• Zuckerberg's increasingly bizarre war on whistleblowers: Under no circumstances should you rush out and read the book that prompted Mark Zuckerberg to demand $111m and eternal auctorial silence.
• Hey look at this: Delights to delectate.
• Object permanence: Flame warriors; Cryptography and casinos; TSA v dying 95 year old woman's adult diaper; Neoliberalism and Brexit; Beyond solutionism; How Thiel cheated with his Roth; Inequality's stabilizer; Palm Pilot school; Gillmor on PR flacks; "How I Edited an Agricultural Paper; Conservative judge chokes liberal judge; Hollywoodnomics; Rubber fingertips v fingerprint readers; Snowden's telepresence robot; "Shrill"; Moral hazard, "Three Rocks."
• Upcoming appearances: London, 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.

---

Zuckerberg's increasingly bizarre war on whistleblowers (permalink)

More than a decade ago, a group of young, internet-connected Belarusian dissidents launched a series of increasingly high-stakes, increasingly surreal confrontations with the corrupt, authoritarian government of Alexander Lukashenka, a man who is often called "the last Soviet dictator."

Lukashenka's secret police – still called the KGB – routinely terrorize and kidnap pro-democracy activists, and all forms of protest are banned. It was against the backdrop of this unrelenting oppression that the activists launched a series of whimsical "flash mobs" that challenged the Lukashenka regime's willingness to crack down on even the most innocuous behavior.

One of these flash mobs was an ice cream social: activists converged on a public square to eat ice cream cones. Lukashenka's thugs beat them and dragged them away:

https://web.archive.org/web/20070609164305/http://pics.livejournal.com/litota_/gallery/0000bcch

The protestors thought that by daring Lukashenka to arrest people for eating ice cream, they could create a win-win situation: either Lukashenka would be revealed as the kind of asshole who thinks it should be illegal to eat ice cream, or he'd be revealed as the kind of weakling who couldn't keep a lid on dissent.

Lukashenka took the bait. And took it. And took it. In the years that followed, protesters would be arrested for smiling, clapping, and just standing silently:

https://www.indexoncensorship.org/2011/07/belarus-protesters-rally-on-the-web/

The world learned that Lukashenka was a buffoon, and Belarusians affirmed their view that this buffoon would not hesitate to mete out the most vicious punishments for the most innocuous actions:

https://sci-hub.st/10.1080/25739638.2021.1928880

Speaking of thin-skinned, paranoid, wildly corrupt buffoons who will stop at nothing to silence their enemies, how about that Mark Zuckerberg, huh? Sure, all the headlines these days are about Zuck's intention to transform Facebook into a sports betting site:

https://www.businessinsider.com/metas-zuckerberg-enters-the-prediction-market-arena-polymarket-2026-6

But in the UK, Zuckerberg's war on whistleblowers keeps finding new, ice cream grade depths of absurdity to plumb. The whistleblower in question is, of course, Sarah Wynn-Williams, author of the internationally bestselling memoir Careless People, which details the criminality she witnesses during her years as the head of Facebook's international relations team:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/04/23/zuckerstreisand/#zdgaf

Careless People is full of revelations about the gross institutional misconduct of Facebook, including its knowing encouragement of a genocide in Myanmar. But it's also full of stories about the severe personal failings of Facebook's executive team, especially Sheryl Sandberg, Joel Kaplan and Mark Zuckerberg.

These three come off as the most colossal of assholes, cruel, petty and predatory. Sandberg comes across as a sexual abuser who dreams of trafficking in poor people's organs. Kaplan is an oaf whose plan to provide paid internet access to refugee camps falls apart once he learns that refugees in camps don't have any money (he also takes points off of Wynn-Williams's workplace evaluation for being "unresponsive" over a period when she was in a near-death coma). Worst of all, though, is Zuckerberg, whose sins range from cheating at Settlers of Catan to endangering the Colombian peace process after a 50-year civil war because he refused to get out of bed before noon. Zuck is also revealed to have given the Chinese state access to all of Facebook and the power to censor content they disliked, as part of a failed bid to get permission to offer a Facebook service in China.

It's a terrible company, with awful products, run by the worst people. Wynn-Williams's conditions of employment required her to sign a contract that bound her to silence (nondisclosure), forbade her from speaking ill of the company (nondisparagement), and denied her access to the legal system in all her dealings with Meta (binding arbitration).

Together, these three clauses – routinely used by Meta to silence would-be whistleblowers – meant that after Wynn-Williams's book was published, Meta got its arbitrator – a lawyer who is paid by Meta to adjudicate contractual disputes instead of an actual judge – to order her to never promote or even speak about her book.

The arbitrator awarded Meta $50,000 for each criticism that Wynn-Williams levied, quickly coming to a total of over $11,000,000. This vastly exceeds the assets and lifetime earning potential of Wynn-Williams and her husband (a reporter with the Financial Times). If this bill ever truly comes due, they will be wiped out.

Which raises an interesting question: what else can they do to her? Once they've secured civil damages that exceeds her net worth several times over, why shouldn't she just flout her agreement? "Freedom's just another word for nothing left to lose," and all that.

Nevertheless, Wynn-Williams has scrupulously hewed to the arbitrator's rules, steadfastly remaining silent about her book, its contents, and her experiences at Facebook/Meta. When she and I appeared onstage together in London for the launch for my book Enshittification last year, she fell silent and assumed a blank expression any time the subject of Meta came up, and she didn't sign or sell books afterward:

https://www.barbican.org.uk/whats-on/2025/event/cory-doctorow-with-sarah-wynn-williams-chris-morris

When she won the British Book Award, she did not speak to accept it, and the cover of her book was blurred out on the overhead screen (she gave an acceptance speech on behalf of her co-winner, the late Virginia Giuffre, who was abused by Jeffrey Epstein and who accused Prince Andrew of sexual assault):

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2026/may/11/sarah-wynn-williams-and-virginia-giuffre-jointly-win-freedom-to-publish-prize-at-british-book-awards

Nevertheless, when she was booked to speak – about a subject other than her book – at the Hay Festival on a stage with Tim Wu and Carole Cadwalladr, Meta sent a legal threat to the festival and Wynn-Williams, claiming that if by speaking about anything in public, she would violate the arbitrator's order. Accordingly, Wynn-Williams maintained total silence and a blank facial expression for an hour on stage, saying not one word, while Wu and Cadwalladr carried on a discussion. Careless People was withdrawn from the festival bookshop on the days she appeared there:

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/may/31/meta-legal-action-forces-facebook-whistleblower-to-stay-silent-at-hay-festival

Nevertheless, Meta has informed Wynn-Williams that her silent, motionless appearance on a stage constitutes a further breach of her "agreement" and that they are going to seek even more damages from her. This act of anti-ice cream thuggery has pushed Wynn-Williams over the edge and now she's sued to invalidate her contract:

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/jun/25/whistleblower-sarah-wynn-williams-sues-meta-attempts-to-silence-her-careless-people

Her lawyers have posted their documents related to the suit, including a 285-page declaration by Wynn-Williams explaining the great lengths she's gone to in order to comply with Meta's demands, and the company's absolute intransigence and arbitrary menace:

https://katzbanks.com/sarah-wynn-williams-meta-lawsuit-documents/

Why would Meta be so intent on destroying this one high-profile whistleblower? Surely they've heard of the Streisand Effect. There is no better way to ensure that Wynn-Williams's book (already a NYT #1 bestseller) continues to attract readers than to continue to escalate these threats.

I think they're perfectly aware that they are convincing more people to read Careless People (you should read it, it's genuinely excellent):

https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250391230/carelesspeople/

But I think they've decided that this is a price worth paying, because:

a) They've done even worse things since Wynn-Williams parted ways with the company; and

b) They're laying off thousands of workers because their giant bet on AI has been a flop, leaving them with a massive cash crunch; and

c) By destroying Sarah Wynn-Williams, they can terrorize all those thousands of bitter ex-employees into silence about the even graver sins the company has committed.

That's my theory, anyway:

https://www.businessinsider.com/meta-layoffs-managers-software-engineers-ai-spending-2026-6

Lukashenka knew that arresting children for eating ice cream would make him a laughingstock abroad. Zuckerberg knows that threatening Wynn-Williams for standing in wooden silence on a stage makes him look like history's most guillotineable billionaire. But both Lukashenka and Zuckerberg are willing to be thought a thin-skinned bully, so long as that means the people they oppress the most are too terrified to ever challenge their authority.

---

Hey look at this (permalink)

• You can’t make billions without hurting people https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/jun/24/cory-doctorow-on-elon-musk-ai-bubble-bosses-cruel-fantasies

• Cargo Culture https://www.wheresyoured.at/cargo-culture/

• How Do You Beat an Oligarchy? One Bite at a Time. https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/how-do-you-beat-an-oligarchy-one

• WIKIPEDIA WORKERS TO SEEK UNION RECOGNITION https://www.cwu.org/press_release/wikipedia-workers-to-seek-union-recognition/

• A Reasonable Analysis of the Social Web https://riverseeber.net/blog/post/a-reasonable-analysis-of-the-social-web/

---

Object permanence (permalink)

#25yrsago Actual music piracy https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2001/jun/13/ukcrime.nickhopkins

#25yrsago Flame warriors https://web.archive.org/web/20010603044914/http://www.winternet.com/~mikelr/flame1.html

#25yrsago World court says Arizona murdered German prisoners by denying them consular access https://www.cnn.com/2001/WORLD/europe/06/27/germany.court/index.html

#25yrsago Private school buys every student a Palm Pilot https://web.archive.org/web/20010709075203/https://www.wired.com/news/school/0,1383,44812,00.html

#25yrsago Dan Gillmor’s guide for PR flacks https://web.archive.org/web/20010626230530/http://web.siliconvalley.com/content/sv/2001/02/20/opinion/dgillmor/weblog/PR.htm

#20yrsago German publisher attacks Bulgarian books-for-blind site https://web.archive.org/web/20060629065445/https://protest.bloghub.org/2006/06/27/fight-for-copyrights-in-bulgaria-turns-ugly/

#20yrsago Photographer calls critic’s boss to complain https://www.flickr.com/photos/thomashawk/176785431/

#20yrsago Daddle: a kid-sized saddle for adults https://web.archive.org/web/20060618012713/https://www.cashelcompany.com/dad.php

#20yrsago More on cryptography and online casinos https://memex.craphound.com/2006/06/26/more-on-crypto-and-online-casinos/

#20yrsago Reasons that HD DVD formats have already failed https://www.audioholics.com/editorials/10-reasons-why-high-definition-dvd-formats-have-already-failed

#15yrsago Undercover video from North Korea: starving children, hungry soldiers https://web.archive.org/web/20110629182200/http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2011/06/27/3253979.htm

#15yrsago TSA asked 95 year old woman in a wheelchair in terminal stage of leukemia to remove adult diaper for pat-down https://web.archive.org/web/20110627091434/http://www.nwfdailynews.com/news/mother-41324-search-adult.html

#15yrsago Reading of Mark Twain’s “How I Edited an Agricultural Paper” https://ia801406.us.archive.org/22/items/Cory_Doctorow_Podcast_209/Cory_Doctorow_Podcast_209_Mark_Twain_Editing_an_Agricultural_Paper-fixed.mp3

#15yrsago Paramount sends copyright notice to Shapeways user over 3D printable Super 8 cube https://toddblatt.blogspot.com/2011/06/cease-and-desist.html

#15yrsago Advice Goddess: How much longer must we be subjected to invasive TSA patdowns? https://www.advicegoddess.com/archives/2011/06/24/i_think_youre_c.html

#15yrsago Conservative Wisconsin Supreme Court Justice alleged to have choked liberal colleague https://talkingpointsmemo.com/muckraker/wis-justice-ann-walsh-bradley-justice-prosser-put-his-hands-around-my-neck-in-anger-in-a-chokehold

#15yrsago Hollywoodonomics: how Harry Potter and The Order of the Phoenix “lost” $167M https://deadline.com/2010/07/studio-shame-even-harry-potter-pic-loses-money-because-of-warner-bros-phony-baloney-accounting-51886/

#10yrsago I’m profiled in the Globe and Mail Report on Business magazine https://web.archive.org/web/20160628142940/https://www.theglobeandmail.com/report-on-business/rob-magazine/the-crusader-fighting-lock-happy-entertainment-conglomerates/article30520282/

#10yrsago Rubber fingertips to use with fingerprint-based authentication systems https://www.csmonitor.com/World/Passcode/Security-culture/2016/0627/Fake-fingerprints-The-latest-tactic-for-protecting-privacy

#10yrsago How I grilled the best steaks I’ve ever eaten https://memex.craphound.com/2016/06/27/how-i-grilled-the-best-steaks-ive-ever-eaten/

#10yrsago Supreme Court strikes down Texas abortion law https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/supreme-court-strikes-down-strict-abortion-law-n583001?cid=sm_tw

#10yrsago Snowden’s flesh is trapped in Russia, but his mind roams the world in a robot body https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2016/06/edward-snowden-life-as-a-robot.html

#10yrsago China’s $10B/year PR ministry mired in political fight with anti-corruption/loyalty enforcers https://web.archive.org/web/20160701235749/http://www.economist.com/news/china/21701169-xi-jinping-sends-his-spin-doctors-spinning-who-draws-party-line?fsrc=scn/tw/te/pe/ed/whodrawsthepartyline

#10yrsago Snowden publicly condemns Russia’s proposed surveillance law https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/jun/26/russia-passes-big-brother-anti-terror-laws

#10yrsago Yes Men punk the NRA with “buy one gun, give one gun” program https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ikb66V2rDcw

#10yrsago Shrill: Lindy West’s amazing, laugh-aloud memoir about fatness, abortion, trolls and rape-jokes https://memex.craphound.com/2016/06/27/shrill-lindy-wests-amazing-laugh-aloud-memoir-about-fatness-abortion-trolls-and-rape-jokes/

#10yrsago Neoliberalism, Brexit (and Bernie) https://crookedtimber.org/2016/06/26/tribalism-trumps-neoliberalism/

#10yrsago McDonald’s 1987 fashion catalog is a horrorshow https://www.flickr.com/photos/jasonliebigstuff/3050116620/

#10yrsago Beyond “solutionism”: what role can technology play in solving deep social problems https://ethanzuckerman.com/2016/06/22/the-worst-thing-i-read-this-year-and-what-it-taught-me-or-can-we-design-sociotechnical-systems-that-dont-suck/

#10yrsago Donald Trump’s annotated Walk of Fame star https://dduane.tumblr.com/post/146444083461/someome-spray-painted-the-mute-sign-on-donald

#5yrsago New York City's 100 worst landlords https://pluralistic.net/2021/06/26/wax-rothful/#nyc-landlords

#5yrsago How Peter Thiel gamed the Roth IRA for tax-free billions https://pluralistic.net/2021/06/26/wax-rothful/#thiels-gambit

#5yrsago The Overlapping Infrastructure of Urban Surveillance https://pluralistic.net/2021/06/26/wax-rothful/#surveillance-infographic

#5yrsago The Doctrine of Moral Hazard https://pluralistic.net/2021/06/27/the-doctrine-of-moral-hazard/

#1yrago Bill Griffith's 'Three Rocks' https://pluralistic.net/2025/06/27/the-snapper/#9-to-107-spikes

#1yrago Surveillance is inequality's stabilizer https://pluralistic.net/2025/06/26/autostabilizer/#slicey-bois

---

Upcoming appearances (permalink)

• London: Idler Festival, Jul 11
  https://www.idler.co.uk/festival/

• Edinburgh International Book Festival with Jimmy Wales, Aug 17
  https://www.edbookfest.co.uk/events/the-front-list-cory-doctorow-and-jimmy-wales

• Sydney: The Festival of Dangerous Ideas, Aug 23-24
  https://festivalofdangerousideas.com/cory-doctorow/

• Melbourne: Enshittification at the Wheeler Centre, Aug 25
  https://www.wheelercentre.com/events-tickets/season-2026/cory-doctorow-enshittification

• Brighton: The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI with Carole Cadwalladr (Brighton Dome), Sep 8
  https://brightondome.org/whats-on/LSC-cory-doctorow-the-reverse-centaurs-guide-to-life-after-ai/

• London: The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI with Riley Quinn (Foyle's Picadilly), Sep 9
  https://www.foyles.co.uk/events/enshittification-cory-doctorow-riley-quinn

• South Bend: An Evening With Cory Doctorow (Notre Dame), Oct 6
  https://franco.nd.edu/events/2026/10/06/an-evening-with-cory-doctorow/

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Recent appearances (permalink)

• A.I. Enshittifies Everything (Slate)
  https://slate.com/podcasts/what-next-tbd/2026/06/cory-doctorow-thinks-a-i-is-overvalued-and-overrated-and-still-a-threat

• A World That Just Might Work
  https://aworldthatjustmightwork.com/2026/06/cory-doctorow-ai-use-it-dont-buy-the-hype-dont-feed-the-bubble/

• "How to Think About AI" (Democracy Now!)
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OBUzl_IaWIw

• The Data Centers Are Coming (ILSR)
  https://ilsr.org/articles/the-data-centers-are-coming-ep-6-closing-arguments/

• The perils of AI – and how to avoid them (Be Giant)
  https://www.begiant.ca/stories/people/cory-doctorow-life-after-ai

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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

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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

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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

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