Somewhere in your life, Gemini, there’s a graveyard of half-finished things. The language app you abandoned after a three-week streak. The novel with a killer first chapter and nothing after it. The group trip you were planning until something shinier came along. You’re brilliant at starting. Your brain catches fire over a new idea faster than anyone’s, and that spark has opened more doors for you than you can count. Finishing is another skill entirely, and this month, the sky puts it front and center. Mercury spends the first half of November retrograde in Scorpio, and it’s sending you back to pick up a few things you left lying around.

Retrogrades get a bad rap, and some of it is earned. Expect a few crossed wires through the 13th. Texts get misread, plans get rescheduled twice, and your phone picks the worst possible moment to update. Build in extra time and double-check anything with a deadline attached. The upside is that Mercury moving backward through Scorpio, a sign that never does anything halfway, is excellent for revisiting what you dropped. An old idea might start calling your name again. A friend you lost touch with mid-conversation could reach back out. You’ll find that a lot of what you walked away from still has life in it.

On the 4th, the Sun meets Mercury in the middle of its retrograde, and this is one of the most important days of your month. Astrologers treat this conjunction as a reset point, the moment when the retrograde’s purpose comes into focus. For you, that could look like an obvious answer to a question you’ve been circling for weeks. Which of your unfinished projects do you still care about? Which ones were just a fun way to pass a slow month? Write down whatever comes to you that day, even if it seems small. You process things by talking and writing, and you’ll want a record to come back to once Mercury starts moving forward again.

Take the first half of the month slowly, even if slow makes you itchy. You’re used to having six tabs open in your brain at all times, and Mercury in Scorpio asks you to close five of them. Pick one unfinished thing and give it your full attention for a week. Read the rest of the book. Return the call. Open the document you’ve been avoiding and write one paragraph. Scorpio energy loves focus, and you might surprise yourself with how much you enjoy going all the way into something and staying there awhile. Depth can be just as thrilling as variety when you give it a fair shot.

Mercury stations direct on the 13th, and the relief comes slowly at first, then all at once. Communication starts flowing again, and your head starts to feel like your own again. Contracts, launches, big conversations, and travel plans all get easier from here, although giving it a few days to settle before you sign anything major never hurts. Once you feel the green light, use it. Everything you sorted through during the retrograde now has a direction. Send the pitch. Book the trip. Tell the person what you meant to tell them in October. The ideas you revived are ready to go somewhere, and you finally have an open road to take them there.

The back half of November runs on a different kind of energy, so let yourself enjoy it. You’ll feel more like yourself, quick and curious and ready to talk to anyone who will listen. Just keep one hand on the work you recommitted to earlier in the month. Your instinct will be to celebrate the return of your mental speed by starting three new things, and you’re allowed to have a little fun with that. Make sure the projects you revived don’t slide back into the graveyard while you’re busy chasing the next exciting idea. Pace yourself so you get to see at least one of them through to the end.

The Full Moon lights up your sign on the 24th, and this one is all yours. Full Moons bring things to a head, and with this one rising in Gemini, the focus falls on you, your relationships, and the way you present yourself to the world. You might get recognition for something you’ve worked hard on, or a conversation could finally give you the closure you’ve wanted. Emotions run high under any Full Moon, and since you usually talk your way around big feelings, this is a chance to sit with them for a minute. You don’t have to crack a joke to make everyone comfortable. Let the moment be what it is.

Expect the Full Moon to show you how far you’ve come since the start of the month. The projects you picked back up may be finished or close to it. The relationships you repaired may feel stronger than they did before. Some loose ends will still be loose, and that’s fine. You don’t have to wrap up every single thing to call this month a win. If even one long-abandoned idea crosses the finish line, celebrate it properly. Tell people about it. Post about it. Treat yourself to something nice. You spent November learning that you can follow through, and that calls for a moment of acknowledgment before you’re off chasing the next thing.

People love to call you flaky, Gemini, and you’ve probably started believing them. This month offers some evidence to the contrary. Your curiosity has always been a strength, and it gets even stronger when you pair it with the willingness to stick around. You don’t have to finish every idea you’ve ever had. A lot of them were meant to be fun for a weekend and nothing more. The handful that keep pulling you back are the ones to protect. Go back for them, put in the hours, and see what happens when you give your best ideas the ending they’ve been waiting for. You might like who you are on the other side.

Thus concludes your monthly highlights. For more specific celestial analyses, make sure to read your daily and weekly horoscope as well. Good luck, Gemini! See you next month. 

The post Gemini, November 2026: Your Monthly Horoscope appeared first on VICE.

The announcement came alongside parent company Alphabet's third-quarter earnings report, which saw revenue grow 25% year over year to $127.6 billion.

A new developer platform will let businesses bring their services to Google's AI experiences, potentially changing how consumers discover and use apps.

Google is bringing Gemini's Personal Intelligence feature to cars, allowing its AI assistant to draw on information from Gmail, Calendar, Maps, YouTube, and other Google services to deliver more personalized responses while driving.

Today's links

• Gemini is better than search because Google enshittified search: We're All Trying To Find The Guy Who Did This.
• Hey look at this: Delights to delectate.
• Object permanence: Microsoft antitrust overturned; Scammer carves C64; RIP Jim Baen; GOP rep to constituent's child: "drop dead" (literally); CCTVs jacked for botnet; Olympic profitability lie; Human factors in health infosec; Exfiltration via computer fans; Congress's summer schedule: 9 working days; Antitrust is political antigrav; Ted Chiang's 72 Letters; Microsoft antitrust appeal; Vinge on privacy; Breaking open the web; Bernie on Brexit; "The Perdition Score"; Intuit v Child Tax Credit.
• 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.

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Gemini is better than search because Google enshittified search (permalink)

Write a critical AI book, and you become everyone's confessor for their AI sins. People in my life keep telling me about their guilty AI pleasures, in search of an explanation, absolution or condemnation:

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

Their most common confession: "I only ever use Google's AI-generated search summaries these days. I no longer click those blue links beneath it, not even to verify the summary." People know that the summaries are full of "hallucinations" (that is, "defects" or "errors") but the summaries are right often enough that many people have come to rely on them, to the exclusion of actual websites, made by actual people, on the actual internet.

Everyone knows this isn't good. The reason there's a web for Google's Gemini AI to summarize is that Google – the thrice-convicted monopoly search company with a 90% market share – directs people to websites, and when you visit a website, you generate revenue for the site, which pays for its maintenance. Most commonly, you generate an "ad impression," but you might also buy a subscription, or generate an "affiliate fee" by purchasing a recommended product.

When Google strips all this away by harvesting an "answer" and displaying it at the top of the page, the bargain between Google and the open web breaks down. Google is extracting 100% of the value from the websites it summarizes, and giving nothing back in return.

This is a marked reversal from Google's founding ethos. In the old days, Google measured its success by how little time you spent on its site. The ideal Google outcome was for you to visit its page (or even better, just a search-box in your browser), type a few words, and get "ten blue links" back, the top one of which was the correct link to locate the information or resource you were seeking. The point of Google was to serve as a conduit, a trusted intermediary that neutrally adjudicated the relevance of every web page for every web user from moment to moment.

Everyone dunks on Google for its high-minded motto, "Don't be evil," but over the years, the company's mission was far more important: "Organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful." That was the pole star that googlers followed for the first couple decades of the company's history…until, that is, the company saturated its market and its growth stalled out.

That was when Google started to panic over its plateauing search revenue, this being an inescapable consequence of 90%+ market-share. The ensuing power struggle pitted googlers who were committed to technical excellence against the company's most ardent enshittifiers, who pointed out that by making search worse, they could increase revenues. After all, if you need to search two or three times to get the answers to your questions, that means the company can show you two or three times as many ads:

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

Where once Google measured its success by how quickly it could send you away from its site and out into the open internet, today's Google is a sticky-trap full of ways to keep you inside its walled garden.

A decade ago, tech had three major approaches:

I. Google's: let you do anything you want, but spy on you while you do it;

II. Apple's: strictly control what you can do, but leave you alone to do it in private; and

III. Facebook's: control everything you do, spy on you from asshole to appetite.

Today, tech is undergoing a form of carcinization, in which every company is turning into a Facebook-crab: maximally surveillant and maximally controlling.

Apple has added surveillance to its walled garden:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/11/14/luxury-surveillance/#liar-liar

While Google has turned its free-range, internet-wide surveillance system into a walled garden that tries to keep you away from the open internet as much as possible.

Now, in Google's defense, the "open internet" kind of sucks these days. Any piece of useful information you seek out on the open internet is liable to be buried under half a dozen pop-ups, pop-unders, and dickovers:

https://daringfireball.net/2026/05/what_is_a_dickover

Even after you clear these away, the actual information you're seeking is further buried in word-salads that anticipated insipid AI prose by half a decade. Think of all those omelet recipes that appear beneath 2,500 words of cod-Proustian remembrances of "the first time I ate an egg."

The major advantage of AI search summaries is in shielding you from all this nonsense. But where did all that nonsense come from in the first place?

It turns out that this is largely Google's fault.

Google and Facebook monopolized the display advertising market, entering into an illegal, collusive arrangement to rig the bidding so that advertisers paid more and publishers received less:

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

The Google/Meta duopoly sucks up 51% of display advertising revenue – more than triple the historic take for advertising intermediaries (buyers, brokers, agencies, etc). As ad revenues for web publishers cratered, the "ad load" on web pages went up. This set up a vicious cycle: increasing the number of ads decreases the number of readers, driving publishers to increase the ad-load even more to make up for the losses.

The major brake on this is ad-blocking. In a world with ad-blockers in it, publishers contemplating an increase in ad-load have to confront the possibility that they will induce ad-overload in their readers, who will install a blocker that stops them from seeing any ads:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/07/adblocking-how-about-nah

Google has been looking to kill ad-blocking for a decade, and now they're on the verge of making it happen in Chrome, the dominant web browser they use to reinforce their search monopoly:

https://protonprivacy.substack.com/p/google-is-finally-killing-ublock

Google long ago did away with ad-blocking on mobile devices (reverse engineering an app is a felony, which means an app is just a web-page skinned with the right kind of IP to make it a crime to protect your privacy while you use it). Part of Google's argument for killing ad-blocking for the web is that this puts the web on an even footing with apps – which is a very weird way to describe a race to the absolute bottom:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/06/12/compelled-speech/#quishing

To top it all off, this decade has seen Google make a series of changes to its search prioritization that favored low-value shovelware sites over carefully researched, reliable alternatives. Search for product reviews and you're apt to get a "site reputation abuse" result from a once-reliable outlet like Forbes filled with useless and even dangerous reviews, which are ranked far above independently maintained, rigorous competitors:

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

This has only gotten worse with AI search, which preferentially draws from spam sites to produce decontextualized, highly confident recommendations for substandard, overpriced junk, at the expense of recommendations for good products:

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

It's not like Google doesn't have the ability to sort the good from the bad. Kagi.com is a $10/month paid search engine whose results are vastly superior to Google's. But Kagi doesn't have its own search index: instead, they rent access to Google's index, but apply their own (much smaller and less resourced) team's algorithm to rank the results for your queries. In other words, Google could deliver good search results, they just choose not to:

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

Gresham's Law holds that "bad money drives out good." It refers to a counterfeit coin crisis in Tudor England, where people preferentially spent counterfeit money in order to make it someone else's problem; meanwhile, everyone hoarded their good coins. Soon, virtually all the money in circulation was bogus.

By downranking quality material in favor of low-effort spam, Google set up a web-wide version of Gresham's Law, where bad webpages drive out good ones, and since so many of those webpages contain product recommendations, they're greshaming the world of real products, too, so the bad is driving out the good there, too.

This is the problem that Gemini search summaries solve: in its role as the web's most important gatekeeper, Google remade it as an ad-festooned cesspit of garbage text and cynical shovelware sites. Now Google proposes to wipe out the publishers whose content they stripmined by breaking the web's bargain: that search engines are symbiotic with publishers. Google has turned fully parasitic, sucking the last drops of juice out of the open web before discarding its husk.

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Hey look at this (permalink)

• Anti-Monopoly Bill Hits Make-or-Break Moment in California https://prospect.org/2026/06/29/anti-monopoly-bill-hits-make-or-break-moment-in-california/

• Om Malik, 1966-2026 https://om.co/2026/06/24/1966-2026/

• Why Carbon Capture Can’t Conceivably Solve Climate Change https://projects.propublica.org/why-carbon-capture-cant-solve-climate-change/

• The KIDS Act Would Require Age Checks To Get Online https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2026/06/kids-act-would-require-age-checks-get-online

• AI Implementation Bingo Card Generator https://www.workersdecide.tech/bingo/

---

Object permanence (permalink)

#25yrsago Appeals court strikes down Microsoft antitrust ruling https://www.nytimes.com/2001/06/28/business/us-appeals-court-overturns-microsoft-antitrust-ruling.html

#25yrsago Ted Chiang's 72 Letters https://web.archive.org/web/20010720192340/http://www.tor.com/72ltrs.html

#25yrsago Concept handheld devices https://web.archive.org/web/20010620115437/https://www.infosync.no/en/news/n/419.asp

#25yrsago Analyzing Microsoft's successful antitrust appeal https://web.archive.org/web/20010703085656/https://www.salon.com/tech/feature/2001/06/28/appeals_reaction/index.html

#20yrsago Bengali science fiction of the 1880s https://www.lehigh.edu/~amsp/2006/05/early-bengali-science-fiction.html

#20yrsago Vernor Vinge on computers, freedom and privacy https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2006/jun/29/guardianweeklytechnologysection5

#20yrsago Scammer convinced to carve replica Commodore 64 https://www.419eater.com/html/john_boko.php

#20yrsago Jim Baen, sf publisher, has passed away https://web.archive.org/web/20060703024337/http://david-drake.com/baen.html

#15yrsago YouTube listens to fraudulent NyanCat takedown notice, drags heels on put-back from creator https://web.archive.org/web/20110628132607/http://www.prguitarman.com/index.php?id=369

#15yrsago Wyoming’s corporation mills manufacture privileged artificial “people” to order https://www.reuters.com/article/2011/06/28/us-usa-shell-companies-idUSTRE75R20Z20110628/

#15yrsago Publishing in the Internet era: connecting audiences and works https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2011/jun/30/publishers-internet-changing-role?utm_source=twitterfeed&utm_medium=twitter

#15yrsago Why writers should have their own domains https://whatever.scalzi.com/2011/06/29/mastering-ones-own-domain-an-no-this-is-not-a-seinfeld-reference/

#15yrsago Copyright troll’s biggest fan commits terminal irony https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2011/06/righthaven-cheerleader-wanted-irony-police

#10yrsago Mississippi state rep tells distraught mom to buy kid’s lifesaving meds ‘with money she earns’ https://www.sunherald.com/news/local/counties/jackson-county/article86416087.html

#10yrsago Always-on CCTVs with no effective security harnessed into massive, unstoppable botnet https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2016/06/large-botnet-of-cctv-devices-knock-the-snot-out-of-jewelry-website/

#10yrsago Gun-waving cop who attacked black teenaged girl in her bathing suit faces no charges https://web.archive.org/web/20160624103549/http://dfw.cbslocal.com/2016/06/23/grand-jury-no-bills-former-mckinney-pool-party-cop/

#10yrsago The Olympics are profitable for every host city (that lies about the numbers) https://timharford.com/2016/06/how-do-you-make-the-olympics-pay-fudge-the-figures/

#10yrsago Healthcare workers prioritize helping people over information security (disaster ensues) https://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/~sws/pubs/ksbk15-draft.pdf

#10yrsago Fansmitter: malware that exfiltrates data from airgapped computers by varying the sound of their fans https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3GCHCVpndaM

#10yrsago Labour’s knives come out for Corbyn, but he’s guaranteed a spot on the ballot https://www.politico.eu/article/inside-account-of-labour-mps-attacks-on-jeremy-corbyn-shadow-cabinet-resignations-brexit/

#10yrsago Hope Larson’s “Compass South”: swashbuckling YA graphic novel https://memex.craphound.com/2016/06/28/hope-larsons-compass-south-swashbuckling-ya-graphic-novel/

#10yrsago How to Break Open the Web: a report on the first Decentralized Web Summit https://www.fastcompany.com/3061357/the-web-decentralized-distributed-open

#10yrsago Californians will get to vote on legal recreational weed https://web.archive.org/web/20160629130245/http://abcnews.go.com/US/wireStory/voters-decide-legalize-recreational-marijuana-40206739

#10yrsago Bernie Sanders on Brexit: urgent lessons for the Democrats https://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/29/opinion/campaign-stops/bernie-sanders-democrats-need-to-wake-up.html

#10yrsago Electoral fraud: Trump sends fundraiser emails to foreign politicians https://www.cnet.com/culture/trump-spams-foreign-politicians-with-fundraising-emails/#ftag=CAD590a51e

#10yrsago The Perdition Score: Sandman Slim vs the One Percent https://memex.craphound.com/2016/06/29/the-perdition-score-sandman-slim-vs-the-one-percent/

#5yrsago Intuit sabotages the Child Tax Credit https://pluralistic.net/2021/06/29/three-times-is-enemy-action/#ctc

#5yrsago SCOTUS to wrongfully accused terrorists: "drop dead" https://pluralistic.net/2021/06/29/three-times-is-enemy-action/#transunion

#5yrsago Lazy Congress only schedules 9 days' work this summer https://pluralistic.net/2021/06/28/dubious-quant-residue/#back-to-work-you

#1yrago Antitrust defies politics' law of gravity https://pluralistic.net/2025/06/28/mamdani/#trustbusting

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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)

• Breaking Points
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VJmUbkRqXeE

• 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/

---

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

---

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

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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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