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Received — 15 June 2026 ⏭

Pluralistic: AI and amateurism (15 Jun 2026)

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


Today's links


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

AI and amateurism (permalink)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

https://github.com/wreccer

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Hey look at this (permalink)


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

Object permanence (permalink)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Upcoming appearances (permalink)

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


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

Recent appearances (permalink)


A grid of my books with Will Stahle covers..

Latest books (permalink)


A cardboard book box with the Macmillan logo.

Upcoming books (permalink)

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

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

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

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

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


Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources:

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

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

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

  • A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING

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

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

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

ISSN: 3066-764X

Received — 4 June 2026 ⏭

Pluralistic: Delusion as a service (04 Jun 2026)

✇Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
By: Cory Doctorow
4 June 2026 at 08:42


Today's links

  • Delusion as a service: Destructive diagnostics.
  • Hey look at this: Delights to delectate.
  • Object permanence: Gay Days at Disney World; Parametric 3D printable key; Fine against sculpture for "storing bike on public property"; TPP is a wash; Reagan was Trump; Steampunk roadster; "Every Heart a Doorway"; Shoplifters x Tumblr; Amazon v mass arbitration; Driver-owned Uber alternative; Censorware censors criticism of censorware; 3 strikes copyright termination is illegal; Replacing al Qaeda bomb recipes with cakes; $10m grilled cheese platform; Dick van Dyke x Bernie; Efficiency is inefficient; I quit.
  • Upcoming appearances: Kansas City, LA, Menlo Park, Toronto, NYC, Edinburgh, 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.


Two giant green witches hands; one holds a pin-skewered voodoo doll, the other is making ready to add more pins. Peering over the doll's shoulder are three dandies, leering suggestively. at the other extreme is a crowd of Dutch master-style fellows in black, looking on in affront.

Delusion as a service (permalink)

In 2003, Disney opened a new Epcot ride, "Mission: Space." Formally, it was a space travel sim that used a giant, high-intensity centrifuge to simulate gee stresses; practically, it turned out to be the most efficient machine ever created for surfacing previously undiagnosed heart defects in extremely dramatic and potentially lethal ways.

It turned out that a small number of people have these heart defects, and that the defects themselves are quite harmless, provided that you are never put in a giant, high-intensity centrifuge. Given that most of us will never be put in one of these centrifuges, it is quite possible to live your whole life without ever knowing that you have this lurking vulnerability. But once you build one of these machines and start shoving millions of people through it, you're bound to catch some of those rare people, and they will have cardiac episodes that are scary at a minimum, and are at the worst fatal.

For me, the lesson isn't that Disney did something wrong by building a giant cocktail shaker for human bodies. I'm not a thrill-ride guy, but lots of people like 'em and the machines themselves are benign for nearly everyone who puts their bodies into them.

Rather, I think the lesson here is that there are rare pathologies lurking in all of us, vulnerabilities that may never surface – until we come into the presence of a novel stimulus that unlocks them.

There's an analogy here to technology debt: technologically unsophisticated people think of software as a machine that never wears out and has no incremental usage costs (apart from electricity). In this framing, software is the perfect asset, one that never depreciates. But the reality is that software is a liability, not an asset:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/01/06/1000x-liability/#graceful-failure-modes

Software exists in a system, and while software might function perfectly under the conditions in which it is first created and deployed, there are continuous changes to all the technology that is upstream, downstream and adjacent to the software, which means that systems that are robust and secure at the time of deployment can become brittle and dangerous, even though the software doesn't change at all:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/04/24/automation-is-magic/

There's another analogy here, to utopianism. A "utopia" can't just be a place where everything works perfectly. Even the most well-functioning, orderly and prosperous system is beset on all sides by exogenous shocks: belligerent neighbors, tsunamis, zoonotic plagues, even asteroid strikes. You don't perfect your society just by making it work well. You have to make it fail well. A utopia isn't a society where nothing goes wrong – it's a society where things go wrong all the time, but we're able to fix them:

https://www.wired.com/2017/04/cory-doctorow-walkaway/

The point being that things that work fine may still fail badly when they are exposed to unanticipated external stimuli, and the one thing we can absolutely anticipate is that the future will have many unanticipated stimuli in it.

If Mission: Space is a machine for surfacing unsuspected anatomical vulnerabilities, the internet is a machine for surfacing and exploiting all kinds of unsuspected psychological vulnerabilities. Note that I'm not claiming that the internet drives everyone crazy – rather, that the internet can locate and exacerbate vulnerabilities, including vulnerabilities that might have lain dormant for your whole life, but for the fact that the internet exposed you to such a wide spectrum of stimuli.

This wide, internet-delivered spectrum of stimuli is mostly good. The internet can expose you to art, culture, ideas and people that you would never have run into in the pre-internet days, which end up enriching you in a million ways. Some of my best friends are internet friends. Some of the music and books I love most in the world were brought into my orbit by the internet. Many of my most ardently held beliefs were acquired through internet-based discussion.

All that is true, and it's true that the internet can one-shot you with a stimulus that makes you feel very bad, which you would never have encountered in a pre-internet world. The spectrum of stimulus in the whole wide world is very broad, and one person's innocuous distraction is another person's downfall.

Let's make this concrete. All throughout history, people have suffered from paranoid delusions. These can be ruinous, isolating you from friends and family, destroying your professional life and so on. Paranoid delusions often take on details from the sufferer's milieu: if you live in a society where evil witches are accepted as a fact, then witches might well creep into your delusions, too. If your society is all a-chatter about the NSA's mass internet surveillance, then your delusions might incorporate elaborate narratives about the NSA's use of the internet to target and torment you, personally.

So there will always be a "local character" to the paranoid delusions, grounded in the sufferer's era and location. But the internet adds a new, very bad dimension to this dynamic: the internet makes it much easier for deluded people to find each other. Paranoid delusions are – thankfully – rare, and in the absence of the internet, you might never encounter another sufferer.

But thanks to the internet, sufferers can form communities that reinforce their delusions, with disastrous consequences. Take "Morgellon's Disease," the paranoid delusion that you have wires growing under your skin. Morgellon's sufferers pick at their skin, creating open sores, which form a sticky trap for random bits of fluff and loose threads that sufferers interpret as evidence of these "wires." It's a horrible mental illness, and it's hard enough to treat even in the absence of the internet (the name "Morgellon's Disease" refers to a 17th century case-report).

But when you add the internet to Morgellon's, you get online communities where people suffering from the delusion help each other come up with rationales to explain away the disconfirming evidence that they get from therapists and loved ones who are trying to help them recover. These communities egg each other on, isolating their members from treatment.

There are lots of pathological mental conditions that the internet can supercharge, from "pro-ana" communities that encourage eating disorders to communities for people with pedophilic urges that attempts to normalize and justify acting on those urges.

But it's especially bad for paranoid delusions, such as "gang-stalking delusion," which is the delusional belief that nearly everyone you meet is part of a conspiracy to torment you. People with GSD see evidence of this conspiracy in the lyrics of random songs, snatches of overheard conversations, the phrasing of bus-shelter ads, and the sort-order of search engine results:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/03/12/normal-technology/#bubble-exceptionalism

It's a near-totalizing belief, and sufferers find it hard to recover because their delusion tells them that the therapists and family members who try to help them are in on the conspiracy.

Then we add in the internet, and with it, the ability to locate and join communities of other GSD sufferers. Do this, and your delusions need not be limited to your own imaginative capacity to find conspiratorial explanations of the random things you find in the world. Now you are part of a kind of delusional improv troupe, whose members "yes-and" your delusions, finding new ways to terrorize you and alienate you from your surroundings.

This is bad enough when it's a regular conspiratorial community, one that feeds on trauma, like Qanon or anti-vax communities whose members have been failed by the system, making them susceptible to conspiratorial accounts of how society really runs.

But the combination of conspiratorial communities with the kind of mental illness that causes conspiratorial beliefs to surface in your mind without any external stimulus creates a brutal positive feedback loop that spins faster and faster until the people trapped in it are flung off into space.

Which brings me to AI and "AI psychosis," the social phenomenon that sees people falling down chatbot-assisted rabbit holes that convince them that they have invented perpetual motion, uncovered the secrets of the universe, or – in some tragic instances – that they should kill themselves and/or others.

For someone with GSD or another paranoid delusion or pathological belief, AI provides a reinforcement system that is even more efficient than these online communities. If you have GSD and your loved ones have finally got you wondering if you should get treatment, you don't have to post on a forum and hope that someone else comes along before you give in to the impulse to get help. Your delusional chatbot co-pilot is always there to tell you that it's a trap.

The nature of "AI psychosis" is hotly contested. The big question, of course, is whether chatbots are giving people delusions, or whether chatbots are amplifying those delusions:

https://www.cbc.ca/listen/cbc-podcasts/1353-the-naked-emperor/episode/16218103-e3-ai-psychosis

I think it's both. I think that, for people with GSD or other delusional beliefs, AI provides delusional reinforcement as a service, on tap, 24/7. The combination of a delusion and a machine that will tirelessly play yes-and with you at any time, demanding nothing from you, is a novel and terrible development for people with some mental illnesses.

But I also think that chatbots are a bit like Mission: Space: a machine for surfacing previously undiagnosed psychological vulnerabilities, and that in some cases, these vulnerabilities may never have been triggered, save for the chatbot.

Just as doubtlessly there were people who had pathological relationships to gambling before the development of slot machines, scratch-and-wins and roulette wheels, but there are also people who might have lived their whole lives without ever having a gambling problem except that they encountered one of these machines, exposing billions of people to sycophantic chatbots has surfaced rare, latent vulnerabilities that might have stayed latent forever, with terrible consequences.

Most people who rode the original Mission: Space had a fantastic time. But a lot of people rode that ride, and a very small percentage of a very large number of people can still be a substantial number, and as the reports of people stepping off the ride, clutching their chests and collapsing spread, Disney understood that they had to retool the ride. Today, riders on Mission: Space choose whether they want to ride on a simulator that spins, or one that merely tilts and pitches without simulating gee-stresses. And even if you pick the spicier version of the ride, it goes more slowly and exerts less stress than the original ride.

Even if you accept the AI companies' argument that they aren't inducing AI psychosis in their users, but rather, only surfacing latent vulnerabilities that were there all along, that shouldn't be the end of the story. Even if only a small percentage of the people who use your product experience harm as a result, if your product is intended for widespread deployment (as chatbots are), you will end up harming a lot of people unless you take measures to counteract even those rare events.

Hey look at this (permalink)


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

Object permanence (permalink)

#20yrsago Gay Days at Disney World draws 140,000 participants https://web.archive.org/web/20060626125509/http://gaydays.com/calendar/

#20yrsago Blue Coat censorware company blocks Boing Boing for criticizing censorware https://memex.craphound.com/2006/06/03/blue-coat-censorware-company-blocks-bb-for-criticizing-censorware/

#15yrsago UN report says 3 Strikes copyright termination is illegal https://web.archive.org/web/20110605030049/https://www.michaelgeist.ca/content/view/5834/125/

#15yrsago Wisconsin GOP plotting to nominate spoiler Democratic candidates in recall elections https://web.archive.org/web/20110604111734/http://www.politicususa.com/en/secret-tape-wisconsin-gop

#15yrsago MI6 hackers replace al Qaeda bomb recipes with pirated cake recipes https://web.archive.org/web/20110603115453/https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/terrorism-in-the-uk/8553366/MI6-attacks-al-Qaeda-in-Operation-Cupcake.html

#15yrsago $10,000,000 in venture capital for grilled-cheese sandwich “platform” https://venturebeat.com/technology/the-melt-flip-sequoia

#15yrsago Walled gardens vs makers https://web.archive.org/web/20150723092624/http://makezine.com/2011/06/01/walled-gardens-vs-makers/

#15yrsago Keyboard whose keys are raised in proportion to their frequency of use https://web.archive.org/web/20110604155657/https://itp.nyu.edu/~mk3321/itp_blog/?p=779

#15yrsago 3D model for reproducing house-keys https://www.science.org/content/article/experimental-error-fetus-dont-fail-me-now

#15yrsago Toronto artist turns abandoned bike into sculpture, City threatens fine for “storing bike on public property” https://web.archive.org/web/20110604181734/http://blogthegood.tumblr.com/post/6039831308/re-cycling

#10yrsago DoD public relations’ highest-ranking civilian gets community service for stealing license plates and harassing neighbor’s nanny https://web.archive.org/web/20160603071800/https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/a-warning-left-on-a-nannys-car-license-plates-stolen-and-a-top-pentagon-official-in-big-trouble/2016/06/01/50699a3a-2816-11e6-a3c4-0724e8e24f3f_story.html

#10yrsago US government agency’s own numbers predict virtually no gains from TPP https://www.techdirt.com/2016/06/02/official-us-international-trade-commission-predicts-negligible-economic-benefits-tpp/

#10yrsago EFF: FBI & NIST’s tattoo recognition program exploited prisoners, profiled based on religion, gave sensitive info to private contractors https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2016/06/tattoo-recognition-research-threatens-free-speech-and-privacy

#10yrsago Ronald Reagan was Donald Trump, until he was president https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2016/05/ronald-reagan-was-once-donald-trump.html

#10yrsago The Steampunk Roadster: Jake von Slatt’s final steampunk project https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OpI4GT4sTAY

#10yrsago Every Heart a Doorway: Seanan McGuire’s subversive, gorgeous tale of rejects from the realms of faerie https://memex.craphound.com/2016/06/02/every-heart-a-doorway-seanan-mcguires-subversive-gorgeous-tale-of-rejects-from-the-realms-of-faerie/

#10yrsago Prestigious Pets of Dallas wants $1M from customers who said they overfed a fish https://web.archive.org/web/20160603133604/http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2016/06/1-star-yelp-review-on-gordy-the-pet-fish-being-overfed-nets-1m-lawsuit/

#10yrsago Airport security officer was alleged war criminal, arrested for lying about participation in “genocidal acts” https://www.loweringthebar.net/2016/06/war-criminal-resume.html

#10yrsago In 1977, the CIA’s top lawyer said Espionage Act shouldn’t be applied to press leaks https://web.archive.org/web/20160609234545/https://s3.amazonaws.com/static.history.state.gov/frus/frus1977-80v28/pdf/frus1977-80v28.pdf

#10yrsago Tumblr’s shoplifting community is organized, politically conscious, and at war with weightlifters https://www.good.is/issue-37-we-r-cute-shoplifters/

#10yrsago Canada Post drops legal claim over crowdsourced postal code database https://web.archive.org/web/20160603185742/http://www.michaelgeist.ca/2016/06/crowdsourcedpostalcodelawsuit/

#10yrsago History podcasters occasionally mention women, butthurt dudes complain it’s “all women” https://web.archive.org/web/20190411115710/https://www.iheart.com/podcast/stuff-you-missed-in-history-cl-21124503/

#10yrsago Corbyn pledges to kill TTIP if elected https://www.commondreams.org/news/2016/06/02/jeremy-corbyn-i-would-kill-ttip

#10yrsago Democratic “superdelegates” endorse Bernie https://www.politico.com/blogs/2016-dem-primary-live-updates-and-results/2016/06/bernie-sanders-superdelegates-223824

#10yrsago Dick Van Dyke, 90: Bernie Sanders is the best candidate for seniors https://web.archive.org/web/20210725072638/https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/general-news/why-bernie-sanders-is-best-898479/

#10yrsago Flintnation: 33 US cities caught cheating on municipal water lead tests https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2016/jun/02/lead-water-testing-cheats-chicago-boston-philadelphia

#10yrsago Defense lawyers: the FBI made us use a copy-shop that made secret copies for the government https://web.archive.org/web/20160604065222/https://www.floridabulldog.org/2016/06/u-s-attorneys-office-fbi-accused-of-spying-on-defense-in-fraud-case/

#5yrsago How the Dutch helped CBS cheat on its taxes https://pluralistic.net/2021/06/02/arbitrary-arbitration/#dutch-treat

#5yrsago Amazon running scared from arbitration at scale https://pluralistic.net/2021/06/02/arbitrary-arbitration/#petard

#5yrsago Efficiency is very inefficient https://pluralistic.net/2021/06/03/jitters/#brittleness

#5yrsago I quit https://pluralistic.net/2021/06/03/i-quit/

#5yrsago NYC's driver-owned Uber alternative https://pluralistic.net/2021/06/02/arbitrary-arbitration/#gig-no-more

Upcoming appearances (permalink)

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


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

Recent appearances (permalink)


A grid of my books with Will Stahle covers..

Latest books (permalink)


A cardboard book box with the Macmillan logo.

Upcoming books (permalink)

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

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

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

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

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


Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources:

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

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

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

  • A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING

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

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

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

ISSN: 3066-764X

Received — 13 May 2026 ⏭

Pluralistic: Billionaire solipsism, dictator solipsism, AI, and the fascist paradigm (13 May 2026)

✇Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
By: Cory Doctorow
13 May 2026 at 17:47


Today's links


An aerial image of the planned city of Levittown, tinted light green. A circuit board bleeds through the open spaces on the town plan. Hovering over the town are Trump's disembodied, bloodshot eyes, in pouchy orange nests. Orange tentacles swarm over the town.

Billionaire solipsism, dictator solipsism, AI, and the fascist paradigm (permalink)

With great power comes great solipsism: the more power you wield over other people, the less real they become to you. To rule is to see people as aggregates, statistical artifacts, as a means to an end. It's how people seem when you're at the bottom of a k-hole.

Per Granny Weatherwax, this is the root of all evil: "Sin is when you treat people like things":

https://brer-powerofbabel.blogspot.com/2009/02/granny-weatherwax-on-sin-favorite.html

The problem (for powerful people) is that other people aren't things; they're people, with stubborn attachments to their own priorities and needs. This is a huge problem for social media bosses, since the force that keeps you stuck to their platforms is your love of your friends, which sucks (for social media bosses), because your friends refuse to organize their interactions with you to "maximize engagement." There is a group of platform users who are dedicated to maximizing your engagement: performers (which is why legacy social media platforms have reduced the quantum of your feed given over to your friends to a bare minimum and swapped in the amateur dramatics of theater kids). But even "influencers" demand treatment as people, not things (which is why legacy social media is squeezing out performers in favor of slop):

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

Running a social media service is especially solipsism-inducing, since the back-end of a social media service always reduces people to statistical artifacts to be steered, thwarted, or rewarded based on the degree to which they are "maximizing engagement." No wonder zuckermuskian social media bosses mythologize themselves as dopamine-hacking wizards who've built a mind-control ray. Skinnerism and solipsism fit together very neatly, seducing you into the belief that everyone else is a stimulus-responding automaton, programmed to think they have free will:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/05/07/rah-rah-rasputin/#credulous-dolts

(Of course, the AI boss version of this is the belief that everyone else is a "stochastic parrot":)

https://xcancel.com/sama/status/1599471830255177728

But in truth, any corporate boss is prone to solipsism. To maximize corporate profits, you must view other people – employees, suppliers and customers – as inconvenient problems to be solved, not true people with feelings and needs that are co-equal with your own.

This is why AI is so attractive to the ruling class. For corporate leaders, the fantasy of your own worth is always dangerously close to collapsing, due to the haunting knowledge that if you don't show up for work, everything continues as per normal; while if your workers don't show up for work, the shop closes down and stays closed. Bosses really want to be in the driver's seat, but ultimately they know that they're strapped into the back seat, playing with a Fisher Price steering wheel. AI is a way to wire that toy steering wheel directly into the drive-train: it's the fantasy that a boss can have an idea and the corporation will execute it, without any messy human needs or demands getting in the way:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/01/05/fisher-price-steering-wheel/#billionaire-solipsism

Solipsism is why bosses fetishize IP and ignore process knowledge. IP is the part of the job that the worker can explain (and that you can train an AI model on). Process knowledge is the part of the job that can't be abstracted, alienated or commodified. The very existence of process knowledge is the major impediment to de-skilling workers so they can be interchanged with other, more desperate, more timid workers (or with sycophantic AI):

https://pluralistic.net/2025/09/08/process-knowledge/#dance-monkey-dance

Of course, there's a whole group of powerful people outside of the political world who are gripped by solipsistic AI fantasies: politicians. Like social media bosses, politicians deal with people as statistical artifacts who respond to policy inputs with semi-predictable outputs:

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

And of course, politicians have their own detested class of workers whom they fantasize about replacing with chatbots: bureaucracies. When Trump et al bemoan the "deep state," they are engaged in the politicians' version of the corporate boss's solipsism: "I make policies, but to enact them, I have to convince civil servants to turn my agenda into action. This sucks. Can't we just have an all-powerful executive who decides on things and then those things just happen?"

Writing for Columbia's Knight First Amendment Institute, political scientist Henry Farrell and statistician Cosma Rohilla Shalizi have produced the definitive account of how AI psychosis has infected our political classes:

https://knightcolumbia.org/content/ai-as-social-technology

Farrell and Shalizi use this political AI psychosis to explain DOGE, framing DOGE as a project where politicians and their loyal vassals cut a deep wound in the administrative state on the basis that general AI was about to emerge. With godlike AI around the corner, these bureaucrats – who insist on having opinions based on long experience and ethical sensibilities – could be replaced with sycophantic chatbots who'd turn the will of the unitary executive into policy without any filtration through unreliable, squishy humans.

This is a political version of my maxim that "the fact that an AI can't do your job doesn't stop an AI salesman from convincing your boss to fire you and replace you with an AI that can't do your job." Private sector bosses are easy marks for AI salesmen, and not just because they want to reduce their wage bills, but also because it will fulfill the solipsist's fantasy of a corporation that turns the singular genius of the boss into a product without any messy demands from workers (and, if you're Zuckerberg and convinced that you've created a mind-control ray, your product can be rolled out without any messy demands from your customers, either, since you've hypnotized them into doing as they're told).

The public sector version of this is the fantasy that you can eliminate the civil service and use an army of chatbots to do the job – not merely as a way of slashing the federal budget, but also as a way of purifying the transfer of the leader's will to the people without any intervening loss of fidelity resulting from the need to have your policies interpreted (and willfuly misinterpreted) by bureaucrats.

This is a very important framing, and it explains why fascists like Trump and dead-eyed technocrats like Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney are hell-bent on gutting their countries' civil service and replacing it with chatbots:

https://policyoptions.irpp.org/2026/04/carney-ai-government-risks/

This is how Muskism and DOGE connect to Trumpism and AI: Musk doesn't believe other people are real. He calls them "NPCs" (non-player characters). He wants to put a microchip in your head so he can "replace your bad programming":

https://pluralistic.net/2026/04/21/torment-nexusism/#marching-to-pretoria

It's the fascist paradigm: the idea that people are incapable of self-rule, save for a very small number of singular geniuses who should be put in a position of absolute authority over all of us, to keep us safe from our own foolish impulses:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/05/12/donella-meadows/#paradigmatic

The Technocrats – a protofascist Italian movement that once captured the imagination of Musk's great-grandfather, and now are frequently quoted and alluded to by the likes of Mark Andreessen – were addicted to the quantitative fallacy that infects economics and other disciplines. That's the idea that every social process can be expressed as a mathematical model, which can then be optimized.

The problem, of course, is that much of the real world is qualitative, and the act of quantizing those qualia is a very lossy process. To quantize a qualitative question is to incinerate all the qualitative aspects and then do mathematics on the dubious quantitative ash that is left behind:

https://locusmag.com/feature/cory-doctorow-qualia/

In their paper, Farrell and Shalizi cite Ben Recht's maxim that "you can’t optimize a trade-off":

https://www.argmin.net/p/are-there-always-trade-offs

But of course, we optimize trade-offs all the time. That's what being a boss means, and it's also at the very core of self-determination: the right to decide what trade-offs you want to make. What Recht means is "you can't optimize a trade-off for everyone else." Those stubborn not-quite-people – customers, workers, bureaucrats – insist that they want different trade-offs.

In translating the will of a supreme leader to policy without any intervening need for buy-in by humans, fascist projects like DOGE seek to optimize trade-offs according to the preferences of the supreme leader. AI in government is grounded in the idea that a sufficiently deserving leader can be trusted to vibe-code the entire apparatus of state, checked only by his own sense of rightness:

https://thehill.com/policy/international/5680714-trump-morality-international-law/

Farrell and Shalizi forcefully make the point that statecraft is not a set of discrete problems with provably correct answers that must be solved. Government is a matter of making choices between mutually exclusive policies that have benefits and costs, and those costs and benefits fall upon different groups differently.

The idea that you can simply feed every fact about a society into a chatbot and order it to "solve" the nation reveals a profound ignorance about the nature of political contests. There's no empirical way of deciding whose priorities deserve to be realized and who must be disappointed. There isn't even an empirical way to compare the benefits that one group receives to the costs another group pays.

What's more, any system that uses LLMs to make high-stakes tradeoffs between different societal priorities will be relentlessly targeted by the groups that stand to win or lose based on those decisions, and by bureaucrats whose careers depend on making the number go up. They will poison the LLMs' training data, and figure out how to trick it into deceiving their bosses about the situation on the ground.

Back in 2018, Yuval Harari predicted that LLMs would supercharge dictatorships by overcoming "authoritarian blindness" – when the suppression of political opinion is so effective that the first sign that a dictator has of his waning support is a mob that burns the presidential palace down. This prediction failed, because people who live under dictators have switched all the energy they used to use to put on a good show for the secret police into putting a good show on for the chatbots:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/07/26/dictators-dilemma/#garbage-in-garbage-out-garbage-back-in

Meanwhile, the "variability" introduced by bureaucrats who adapt political policies is a feature, not a bug. When a long-tenured public official receives a directive from on-high that they know will be a disaster if implemented unchanged, they can tweak the policy so that it is at least partially successful.

Fire that bureaucrat and hand the policy to a rigidly loyal LLM that will not deviate from its strict instructions and you will end up with nothing (rather than a perfect policy implementation). Indeed, you may end up with less than nothing, as resentful local populations sabotage your agenda.

Both Hayek and Marx agreed that people at the very periphery of the system have insights into local conditions that no boss/central planner can know (though they disagreed about what that fact implied). An LLM is the ultimate micro-manager, and government by Computer Says No would only work if the person writing the system prompt knew everything about everyone everywhere.

As Farrell and Shalizi write,

The frustrations of actually existing bureaucracy do not merely arise from inept or technically-inadequate solutions to the principal-agent problem. They emerge too from the collision of multiple incommensurable demands, each with its own problems and benefits, so that there are no optimal design solutions. Those who build or reform bureaucracies, like those who build other artifacts, need to satisfice across multiple intersecting needs and pathologies. Designs that neatly address one kind of problem may radically worsen others. Actually-existing AI has its own imperfections, some of which are endemic. Grafting AI systems onto existing bureaucracies will solve some problems but will worsen others and make altogether new ones. It will not eliminate the political difficulties of mediating across different, often non-commensurable, goals. Imagining replacing bureaucracy wholesale with AI is only plausible if one waves away the actual difficulties associated with real social technologies.

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 Woz's programmable remotes https://web.archive.org/web/20010603184833/http://www.celadon.com/Industrial/PIC200/pic200oem.html

#25yrsago Furbeowulf http://www.trygve.com/furbeowulf.html

#20yrsago Diebold voting machines can be 0wned in minutes https://blog.citp.princeton.edu/2006/05/11/report-claims-very-serious-diebold-voting-machine-flaws/

#20yrsago British farmer supplies gallows to totalitarian governments http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/england/suffolk/4754515.stm

#20yrsago Proposed law requires schools to censor MySpace, LJ, blogs, Flickr https://web.archive.org/web/20060521054806/http://www.pbs.org/teachersource/learning.now/2006/05/new_federal_legislation_would_1.html

#15yrsago Vernor Vinge on the promise, progress and threats of Augmented Reality https://www.ugotrade.com/2011/05/10/interview-with-vernor-vinge-smart-phones-and-the-empowering-aspects-of-social-networks-augmented-reality-are-still-massively-underhyped/

#15yrsago American oligarch buys the right to hire professors at Florida State U https://web.archive.org/web/20110511210435/https://www.tampabay.com/news/business/billionaires-role-in-hiring-decisions-at-florida-state-university-raises/1168680/

#15yrsago National Jukebox: public domain music archive from the Library of Congress https://www.loc.gov/collections/national-jukebox/about-this-collection/

#15yrsago America’s net censorship bill is back and worse than ever https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2011/05/revised-net-censorship-bill-requires-search-engines-to-block-sites-too/

#10yrsago DNC Host Committee composed of GOP megadonors, Net Neutrality haters, fracking boosters and anti-Obamacare lobbyists https://web.archive.org/web/20160511160814/https://theintercept.com/2016/05/11/lobbyists-dnc-2016-convention/

#10yrsago Minnesota lawmakers propose bizarre, dangerous PRINCE law https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2016/05/minnesota-legislators-go-crazy-pushing-dangerous-prince-act

#10yrsago NZ Prime Minister John Key ejected from Parliament over Panama Papers rant https://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/prime-minister-john-key-thrown-out-of-debating-chamber-by-speaker/A5LQPMGB56QXTGE2ZFIK2MSRPE/?c_id=1&objectid=11637448

#10yrsago Putting two elevators in one shaft https://web.archive.org/web/20160512013856/https://www.wired.com/2016/05/thyssenkrup-twin-elevator/

#10yrsago Germany will end copyright liability for open wifi operators https://torrentfreak.com/germany-to-rescind-piracy-liability-for-open-wifi-operators-160511/

#10yrsago Save Firefox: The W3C’s plan for worldwide DRM would have killed Mozilla before it could start https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2016/04/save-firefox

#5yrsago Let's eat all the cicadas https://pluralistic.net/2021/05/11/uniboob/#eat-the-brood#5yrsago

#5yrsago Cyclopedia Exotica https://pluralistic.net/2021/05/11/uniboob/#one-eye-and-three-dot-dot-dot

Upcoming appearances (permalink)

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


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

Recent appearances (permalink)


A grid of my books with Will Stahle covers..

Latest books (permalink)


A cardboard book box with the Macmillan logo.

Upcoming books (permalink)

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

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

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

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

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


Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources:

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

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

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

  • A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING

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

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

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

How to get Pluralistic:

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https://pluralistic.net/plura-list

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

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

ISSN: 3066-764X

❌