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Received — 19 August 2026 ⏭

Pluralistic: The ordinariness of evil (19 Aug 2026)

✇Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
By: Cory Doctorow
19 August 2026 at 09:36


Today's links


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The ordinariness of evil (permalink)

Maybe it seems weird that AI bosses won't stop publicly rending their garments about the terrible potential of their products, from the jobspocalypse that will ensue when AI can do our jobs better than us, to the impending moment when the word-guessing programs learn too many words, wake up and turn us all into paperclips.

It seems weird that they won't stop fretting about this terrible potential – until you realize that every public pronouncement about this terrible potential is also a public boast about its potential, period.

That's very, very important, because all AI really has is potential. Actual, existing AI is useful at the margins, if you're already a skilled practitioner who can discern correct from incorrect outputs, and if you integrate AI judiciously so that it doesn't overwhelm your ability to pay attention to those outputs and apply your discernment to them:

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

In other words, AI is mostly a novelty, a heavily subsidized toy that produces little more than distraction. Where AI does produce value, that value is comparable to a plug-in, a new feature for your word processor or image/sound/video-editing package that might help you do your job somewhat better, or it might not.

That doesn't make AI useless, it just makes it a normal technology: useful for some, useless for others, capable of being abused and likely to waste a lot of time when used unwisely:

https://www.normaltech.ai/

Normal technologies are fine. But normal technologies do not warrant the massive economic and political commitments that have been bestowed upon AI: a trillion dollars in the past year alone, and the world's civil servants fired en masse and replaced with AI:

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

The people who have committed our society and its resources to an all-or-nothing bet on AI will tell you that AI is the everything machine, but when pressed, they will confess that AI is about to become the everything machine, for example, once AI starts doing AI research, a thing that AI cannot do:

https://www.normaltech.ai/p/ai-agents-cant-yet-do-open-ended

This is a civilizational act of Magic Underpants Gnomery, and every day that it goes on is a day when more economic, climate and political costs of AI are imposed on all of us. Scientific journals, open source repositories and even science fiction magazines are being overwhelmed by slop, whose perpetrators and apologists insist that soon, AI will realize its potential and the slop will be transformed into gold.

That's why AI bosses are so committed to talking up AI's destructive potential: because destructive potential is nonetheless potential. The moment we stop believing in that potential is the moment that we stop supplying AI companies with bales of cash to shovel into their money-furnaces so that they can afford to sell hundred dollar bills for a dollar each to Elon Musk cultists who want to generate child porn and pictures of Sonic the Hedgehog with giant boobs.

AI does have destructive potential. It has the potential to destroy the productive economy when an AI salesman convinces your boss to fire you and replace you with chatbots that can't do your job:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/03/18/asbestos-in-the-walls/#government-by-spicy-autocomplete

AI has destructive potential because bosses are trapped in a prisoner's dilemma where none of them can admit that the money they've spent – and the jobs they've destroyed – chasing AI has been wasted, and so other bosses bet even harder:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/08/01/dare-snot/#i-will-fucking-piledrive-you-if-you-mention-ai-again

AI has destructive potential because the data-center bubble has convinced credulous town officials to throw out environmental and planning review, seize people's home and farms, and carpet the countryside with giant data centers (many of which will never be built):

https://www.404media.co/people-hate-datacenters-survey-finds/

AI has destructive potential because it is consuming scarce water and energy and emitting gigatons of carbon:

https://www.404media.co/even-the-u-s-government-says-ai-requires-massive-amounts-of-water/

This is the destructive potential we need to be hammering at, because this isn't the kind of destructive potential that translates into productive potential that will someday make the AI bet pay off. Quite the opposite: this is all about the potential of AI to destroy the economy and consume your retirement savings:

https://www.thebulwark.com/p/congrats-youre-about-to-unwittingly-make-elon-musk-trillionaire-spacex-ipo-index-funds

Just as importantly: we have to stop amplifying tech bosses' chosen narratives about their products' destructive potential, because this helps them raise more money and do more terrible things. Bernie Sanders needs to stop insisting that the US government should own 50% of the money-losingest corporations the world has ever seen and start talking about how they will not get a government bailout when their investment bubble bursts. We need to stop talking about AI "haves" who will enjoy the awesome potential of AI, and AI "have-nots" who will fall behind.

We need to stop talking about "AI safety" and the possibility of "rogue AI" destroying the world. When an AI company's security tool "escapes containment" and hacks someone else's servers, we need to ask the company "Why do you suck so bad at building secure sandboxes for your hacking tools?" rather than "Why are your hacking tools so amazingly powerful?"

Above all, we need to stop talking about AI as exceptional. AI is normal. A normal technology has some uses, but isn't useful for all things and all people. A normal technology isn't inevitable, it's something you decide whether you want to use or not.

Treating AI as unexceptional is the best way to halt the destructive march of AI companies and their impact on jobs, the climate and the economy. But treating AI as unexceptional requires that we stop talking about AI as if it were exceptionally evil. Yes, some people who use AI experience severe mental problems, but that's not because AI is a Lovecraftian horror that destroys your brain and your capacity for rational thought if you use it. It's not a basilisk. AI is like a carny ride that triggers cardiac events in riders who never knew they had a problem because they never experienced those particular g-stresses – it's not something that induces vulnerability, it's something that triggers vulnerability:

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

Using AI doesn't make you evil, nor does it risk your sanity – no more than doing any of the other dangerous, compromised, unsustainable things that constitute our daily lives in this fraught moment. The world will be better off when the AI companies are bankrupt and their servers are sold off at ten cents on the dollar – but using those servers to run open models in modest, careful ways won't infect you with their wickedness. They are not stained with communicable sin. They're just computers. They are unexceptional.

One way for a technology to be normal is for it to be produced and marketed by an awful corporation that wants to do terrible things. This isn't to say that "all technologies are dual use, and you have to take the good with the bad." That's the inevitabilist argument of vulgar Thatcherites who insist – as Margaret Thatcher did – that "there is no alternative," and we have to accept their abuse if we want to reap the benefits of the technology.

The normal way to deal with this is to reject vulgar Thatcherism in favor of heroic Gibsonism, thundering William Gibson's rallying cry, "the street finds its own use for things," as we seize the means of technology and use it in the ways that benefit us, while restricting, banning, or blocking the uses that harm us:

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

To treat AI as exceptionally evil is to elevate the mediocrities who run AI companies to super-villain status, a status in which they positively revel. A serial liar like Sam Altman will someday trip over his own dick and end up in a cell for securities fraud – unless we keep exalting his evil to Satanic scale, in which case he might make himself "too big to jail":

https://time.com/article/2026/05/26/sam-altman-ai-job-losses-openAI-/

Altman is a con-man and a stock swindler, not a super-genius. The more we describe his products as possessing a special kind of durable evil that will endure even after his company fails and he is condemned to history's ash-heap, the more we help Altman raise money for his chatbot Ponzi. Normal technology isn't a cursed artifact. That's something you find in a lich-king's tomb. We need to stop helping Altman burnish his reputation as a lich-king and stop treating AI like it's magic.

There's a technical term for the kind of tech criticism that inadvertently helps tech bros sell their swindle: "criti-hype," Lee Vinsel's term for "tak[ing] the sensational claims of boosters and entrepreneurs, flip[ping] them, and start talking about 'risks'":

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

In other words, to commit criti-hype is to repeat the marketing claims of people like Sam Altman and then add, "(and that's bad)" in parentheses at the end. These guys – these terrible, mediocre, boring-ass losers – are bullshit factories, ejecting fountains of nonsense about AI. The right way to criticize them is to point out that they're lying – not to repeat their lies as warnings.

Hey look at this (permalink)


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

Object permanence (permalink)

#25yrsago Dot-com crash toilet paper https://web.archive.org/web/20010822220826/http://news.cnet.com/news/0-1007-200-6908350.html

#25yrsago Associated Press says a single sentence excerpt is not fair use https://web.archive.org/web/20050717075914/http://www.infoanarchy.org/?op=displaystory;sid=2001/8/17/202249/240

#15yrsago German Pirate Party poised to win first federal election https://torrentfreak.com/german-pirate-party-on-course-to-election-win-110820/

#15yrsago Understanding the Nym Wars https://epeus.blogspot.com/2011/08/google-plus-must-stop-this-identity.html

#15yrsago Journalism school teaches students pre-digital newspaper production techniques https://journoterrorist.com/2011/08/02/paperball2/

#15yrsago 90 percent of US net users don’t know from crtl-F https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2011/08/crazy-90-percent-of-people-dont-know-how-to-use-ctrl-f/243840/

#15yrsago Bruce Sterling’s Augmented Reality project https://web.archive.org/web/20110827010512/https://www.wired.com/beyond_the_beyond/2011/08/augmented-reality-science-fiction-writer-becomes-augmented-reality-developer/

#10yrsago Woman sues cops because they destroyed her empty house, thinking a suspect was hiding in it https://www.techdirt.com/2016/08/19/woman-sues-after-police-destroy-her-home-during-10-hour-standoff-with-family-dog/

#10yrsago US Army committed $6.5 trillion in accounting fraud in one year https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-audit-army-idUSKCN10U1IG/

#10yrsago Candid Republican operators admit that voter ID laws are about disenfranchisement https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/research-reports/when-politicians-tell-truth-voting-restrictions

#1yrago Become unoptimizable https://pluralistic.net/2025/08/20/billionaireism/#surveillance-infantalism

Upcoming appearances (permalink)

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

Recent appearances (permalink)


A grid of my books with Will Stahle covers..

Latest books (permalink)


A cardboard book box with the Macmillan logo.

Upcoming books (permalink)

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

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

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

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


Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources:

Currently writing:

  • “Once Is Enemy Action,” a science fiction novel about the origins of modern technofascism. Today's words: 531 (7157 total).

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

  • A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING

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Received — 27 July 2025 ⏭

ChatGPT is going to kill God

✇An und für sich
By: Adam Kotsko
27 July 2025 at 16:53

I hate generative AI. I hate how it’s destroying writing pedagogy and giving students even more excuses not to read (because they can just read a “summary”). I hate how whiny and defensive AI users are about the pathetic little ways they’ve integrated it into their lives. If I could push a button and permanently delete it from existence, I would. If I could go back in time and prevent it from being invented, I would.

The reason I hate it is not just that its output is mediocre bullshit. It’s that it is an active attack on everything I value — literacy, analysis, thought. I find the thought that I would use ChatGPT actively degrading and humiliating. I have never touched it, not even as a joke, not even to prove it sucks, not even — as Beatrice has been doing — to see what it’s showing my students. I admit that this is somewhat irresponsible of me, to indulge my revulsion in this way. This technology — which is unimaginably expensive and resource-intensive and which has not developed anything approaching a plausible profit model — is of course inevitable, “here to stay.” Nothing could interrupt the progress of a technology that requires hundreds of billions of dollars to be shovelled into the furnace year after year after year without returning anything. (Can you tell I’m angry? Can you tell I’m sick of hearing these thoughtless clichés?)

But one must eventually face it. One must eventually give it some thought. Beatrice has been helping, in her Substack posts and in our continual chat thread. She also pointed me to the work of Jan Mullen on AI as externalized attention, which takes the kind of insanely overambitious long view of AI that I find appealling as an aficionado of political theology-style genealogies. Mullen compares the rise of AI to the rise of literacy and notes that the latter was, for most of its history, primarily a tool of state control. In a wide-ranging interview, Mullen wonders aloud whether the form of control AI is creating will line up with our idea of “the state” — but is absolutely clear that the purpose of generative AI is to manipulate and control us, to take away our power and agency, the power and agency that humanity somehow managed to wring out of the technologies of literacy.

I was particularly interested in a moment where Mullen postulates that the new model of control “will be distinctly post-literate — and, as a result, post-legal.” This triggered my political theology instincts and I immediately asked: does that mean it will also be post-monotheistic? Long-time readers know I love Jan Assmann’s theory of monotheism. For Assmann, what monotheism does is not primarily or most importantly to reduce the number of gods, but to introduce a new kind of god — an exclusive God, one in relation to whom all other gods are false. A crucial technology for stabilizing the claims of this exclusive God is of course the written scriptural text, which remains a durable deposit even as day-to-day religious practice inevitably drifts away from the strict demands of the original revelation. The monotheistic God, in contrast to previous pantheons with their loosey-goosey translatability and porosity and their ever-shifting body of mythical tales, is a God of the letter because he is a God of law.

So if ChatGPT destroys literacy and law, then ChatGPT is going to kill God. By this I don’t mean that the bearded guy in the sky is going to be found dead of a gunshot wound to the chest, but that monotheistic religion as we have traditionally understood it will not be able to function in a post-literacy regime.

Note that I am not claiming that ChatGPT will take away people’s ability to read in the sense of deciphering letters — obviously its functioning depends on that. But it is killing the notion of a stable, permanent, authoritative text and undercutting the skills needed to engage with that kind of text. Note also that I am well aware that the vast majority of monotheistic believers throughout history were illiterate (in either the “can’t decipher letters” or “can’t make sense of a complex text” sense). But the elite leaders definitely were fully literate, and in fact that was the source of their authority. One cannot say the same of the type of religious leaders who are most thriving in the meme-ified, Trumpified bastard child of Christianity that sets the tone for American religious practice today. Compared to even a generation ago, literal knowledge of what the Bible says at all has been radically set aside. Some combination of personal charisma and “vibes” — above all, opposition to what they imagine progressivism to be — are the source of authority, leading to obvious absurdities like the rejection of compassion as a Christian virtue.

I am a harsh critic of the dumbed down “seeker-sensitive” model of Christianity I was raised in. But in comparison with what passes for Christian teaching today, it is intellectually sophisticated and morally demanding. This is not to say it was simply “better” (after all, it paved the way for what’s happening now) or that the answer is to get back to the Bible. It’s just to mark how far we’ve fallen. What seemed like a vacuous, popified version of Christianity at the time now seems like a robust theological ethos. The haphazard methods of “Bible study” now seem fit for a graduate seminar.

Speaking of the evangelical milieu, I’ve always resisted Luhrmann’s thesis (in When God Talks Back) that evangelicals cultivate an internal voice that they identify with God. When I was growing up, I didn’t know what people meant when they said that Jesus was their best friend or that God was telling them to do something — and I assumed they didn’t know either, that it was just a weird kind of in-group signalling. For my part, Jesus was not my best friend and God didn’t tell me even one single thing. I was all alone up there in my head, always, and I assumed that everyone else was, too. The thought that everyone I grew up around was suffering from a low-grade self-induced psychosis is difficult to cope with.

Now that people are turning to ChatGPT for spiritual insight, though, I wonder if I finally have to admit it. Obviously here again we are dealing with what seems like a quantitative change — people are using the machine to shuffle religious clichés, where previously they just half-consciously did it themselves. But the qualitative difference is that the insights of “Buddy Christ” could always be corrected against the unchanging text of Scripture. When there is no longer an external anchor like that, when the divine revelation is “customized” for each and every reader, something has changed. Again, this is not to say that what happens to be in the Bible is necessarily “better” than any given ChatGPT transcript — presumbly it’s often worse. But a point of leverage has been lost. Counterargument is no longer possible in the same way. And insofar as that point of leverage, that external source of authority, was how “God” functioned in traditional monotheism, that means God is dead.

The new regime appears to be broadly polytheistic. There is of course always the god of the uncriticizable self, who behaves with the same irritable intolerance as the monotheistic God in the face of even the faintest suggestion that one might consider behaving or thinking differently. But there are many other sites of veneration, an overlapping consensus of podcast hosts and memesters and conspiracists that each believer can mix and match to drive themselves insane in the most relevant and appealing way. Joe Rogan belongs to this pantheon, along with Jordan Peterson and any number of other luminaries whose endlessly prattling voices people love more than their own families. Donald Trump is of course a very powerful god in this polytheistic milieu, but as the boos to his vaccine advocacy and the pushback to his Epstein caginess show, he is not all-powerful, his word is not quite law. And the fact that Trump’s words lack all self-consistency means that there are many Trumps as well, that Trump can be whatever his follower imagines him to be.

I cannot see what the believers see when they look at Trump. All I can see is the most degenerate loser ever to live, the most despicable piece of shit imaginable. Maybe this is of a piece with my revulsion at ChatGPT — and indeed, my failure to develop a personal relationship with Jesus Christ. I’m too hung up on facts and reality and meaning and consistency. I’m too literal. That’s why I am unsuited to the emerging world, why I reject it more forcefully than it would ever even bother to reject me. I’m just too literal.

Received — 1 October 2024 ⏭

Self-involved grousing about social media: A memoir

✇An und für sich
By: Adam Kotsko
1 October 2024 at 19:44

A curious thing has been happening lately: I cannot use the popular left-leaning social networking site Bluesky for any length of time without becoming irritable and even angry. Every common trope annoys me. Most notably, if someone nitpicks a headline in the New York Times — one of the favorite forms of political activism over there — I jump down their throats. I get into pointless, hostile, endless back-and-forth exchanges where we both dig in more and more. Often one leads to the other. For instance, this morning I blocked a longtime mutual (and fellow academic) after a terrible fight about whether the NYT has appropriately used the word “mused” in a headline.

Clearly I’m part of the problem here! I could simply attempt to curate my experience more — set up lists, follow “starter packs,” and do all the many fun things that other users do to get things “just so” — but every time I do, the bullshit keeps coming back. My biggest success was blocking a major user who is obsessed with NYT nitpicking, and for a few weeks it seemed like he had been the only culprit. But it always comes back, just like the constant exhortations to block without mercy or hesitation keep coming back, just like everything keeps coming back. And that probably happens because Bluesky is, at the end of the day, a very small and insular site, whose culture of boastful hair-trigger blocking contributes to major groupthink.

The beginning of my more sustained frustration came early last week, when the entire site was aghast at a Financial Times column that said Bluesky was an echo chamber. I have been using a print subscription to the Financial Times as part of my efforts to wean myself off social media and have come to deeply respect it as a news source. Everyone was outraged at the FT’s “attack” on the site, and some journalists and editors even popped up on Bluesky to try to mediate the conflict. Multiple major accounts advocated blocking all the supposed “gaslighters” from what is, in all honesty, probably the best English-language news source on Earth.

I was aghast. I don’t much care for the columnist, nor did I think the column was a work of art. But everyone seemed to be mischaracterizing its point — which boiled down to “I get why liberals like Bluesky, but I miss the broader perspective Twitter had before Musk ruined it.” Again, not brilliant, but hardly a war crime. In fact, I’m pretty sure that most Bluesky users, deep in their hearts, would agree. And for “defending” the column (i.e., attempting to accurately summarize it), I was insulted and targetted for blocking. One person mused that I was trying to suck up to the columnist so I could hobknob with her wealthy friends. Another thought my response was par for the course for a “tank-adjacent contrarian.” The notion that I sincerely thought everyone was overreacting based on inaccurate information was not considered.

A big part of the problem is that we are all, of course, recovering from the trauma of late-stage Twitter. We are taking habits honed in an environment overrun by open Nazis and applying it to people whose politics are, at the end of the day, all within one standard deviation of each other. And that’s fine! There is definitely a place for people with similar politics to meet. That’s what I try to cultivate on Facebook especially, and I certainly didn’t seek out conservatives on the old Twitter. The problem is that no one is willing to admit that it’s an echo chamber. They want to imagine it’s an miscellaneous audience, that their critiques of NYT headlines can reach some reachable moderate, or that their exhortations that no one should blame North Carolina and Tennessee for the hurricane damage just because they’re red states could be heard by someone who may indeed be tempted to blame them. It’s like a “seeker-sensitive” church, always looking to convert outsiders who mostly aren’t interested and meanwhile providing nothing of substance to those who are showing up consistently.

I’ll admit that the old Twitter was often annoying in the same way. It did periodically bring out an unattractive combativeness in me. And sometimes it seemed like it could become actually life-threatening, as in my multiple waves of systematic right-wing harassment. But it had other rewards. There was much more genuine intellectual diversity among left-wing posters. There was much greater chance of stumbling across interesting links and articles or hearing about something cool. And it was funny — funny like nothing else. There was just something about the meme culture of Twitter at its prime, with its multiple layers of referentiality and irony, its nihilistic love of the absurd. Even in the late days of Twitter people were becoming more literal and less receptive to that kind of humor, but on Bluesky it’s entirely dead. The absurdist poster “dril” made a big show of switching to Bluesky and people took his nonsensical posts deadly seriously, sometimes even going so far as to report him for harmful content. I myself get a very literal response to almost every joke I post. It’s heartbreaking.

It’s as though everyone decided to take my article Jury Duty, where I said that the purpose of social media is primarily to pass judgment on each other, as an instruction manual for building out the new culture of Bluesky. The constant reminders that everyone is on a hair trigger to block every stranger exacerbate the effect, to the point where it feels like the first social network whose primary purpose is actually to cut off social contact.

When I ask myself why I let it get to me, it is probably because I am still grieving for what Twitter was. It didn’t always bring out the best in me, but it was rewarding on net, because it was so often surprising. That’s what’s so frustrating to me about the endless repetition of a handful of moves — it’s so predictable. I get angry at the NYT headline nitpickers because they’re boring, and because they’ve convinced themselves that it’s politically necessary for them to be boring. In reality, though, the recipients for the messages they insist on sending out so repetitiously are not here. I am. Or at least I was. I know I was annoying, I know I had my hangups, I know I often disagreed with the site consensus — but I am a human being, I am genuinely open to discussion, and I admit when I’m wrong much more often than anyone else I’ve ever seen online. All I wanted out of the site was some kind of halfway interesting discussions and links and jokes. I don’t think that was too much to ask.

Whether I will return again remains to be seen. As a long-time Twitter addict, I’m likely to relapse. I publicly pledged myself to take a week off, just to make it embarrassing to come back sooner. But what makes it less likely is the sense that no one will miss me. I pop into Twitter every week or so to check my replies and see if I have any DMs, and every so often I see someone saying that they miss me and wish they would return. By contrast, Bluesky has felt hostile and unwelcoming from the very start. I know that hurt people, hurt people. I’m guilty of that as well. I just wish we could all work through it and try to build something that can be more informative, more challenging, and more fun — and I’m increasingly convinced that will never happen.

Received — 6 July 2023 ⏭
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