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Received yesterday — 20 October 2026 ⏭

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

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


Today's links


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Hey look at this (permalink)


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

Object permanence (permalink)

#25yrsago Reenacting the Civil War with 44,000 ceramic cats in handmade uniforms https://web.archive.org/web/20011021022729/http://www.phillyburbs.com/intelligencerrecord/news/news_intell/1332513.htm

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Upcoming appearances (permalink)

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


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

Recent appearances (permalink)


A grid of my books with Will Stahle covers..

Latest books (permalink)


A cardboard book box with the Macmillan logo.

Upcoming books (permalink)

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

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

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

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


Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources:

Currently writing:

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

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

  • A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING

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

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ISSN: 3066-764X

Received — 3 October 2026 ⏭

We’re over restaurant slop

✇Salon.com
By: Ashlie D. Stevens
3 October 2026 at 12:30

Recently, between medical appointments, I ended up at a grain-bowl-and-salad place in a suburban strip mall, the kind of sleek fast-casual restaurant that looks a little like an Apple Store decided to start serving brown rice and green goddess dressing. There were a few customers in scrubs and two self-order kiosks, both broken. The menu wasn’t posted anywhere else, except via a QR code printed on the back of several glossy takeout menus behind the register, which the cashier repeatedly warned us not to take because they only had a few.

The bowls themselves were fine. Watching them come together was more memorable: the cashier held each plastic container practically at arm’s length as he scooped, two vapes clacking around in his apron pocket, with the air of someone completing a task wholly unrelated to food. What arrived cost about $14 and tasted perfectly acceptable. It was also, somehow, shockingly anonymous.

There’s a word for this feeling now: slop. 

It describes several overlapping anxieties about modern restaurant food, but its prehistory belongs, at least partly, to the ghost kitchen.

In March 2020, as dining rooms shut down, Chuck E. Cheese launched Pasqually’s Pizza & Wings, a delivery-only brand operating out of its existing kitchens. The name was technically an Easter egg: Pasqually P. Pieplate is the chef in Chuck E. Cheese’s animatronic house band. 

To anyone not conversant in Chuck E. Cheese lore, though, Pasqually’s looked on Grubhub like a new pizza-and-wings joint. CEC maintained that the pizza itself was different — thicker crust, more sauce — but plenty of customers still felt tricked when they realized the restaurant at the address they’d ordered from was, in fact, Chuck E. Cheese.

The revelation inspired a small genre of internet consumer detective work. “Now I look up the addresses of places on delivery apps before I try something ‘new,’” one Reddit user wrote after discovering that an apparent new Indian restaurant was another business operating under a second name. Elsewhere, someone warned that “Pasquale’s Pizza and Wings on delivery is just Chucky Cheese.” In the same thread, though, came the rebuttal: there were good ghost kitchens. You were simply ordering from the lousy ones.

That argument feels almost quaint now. Ghost kitchens asked diners to accept a peculiar new distance between the restaurant being advertised and the human reality of the meal. What diners surrendered wasn’t necessarily quality so much as a little hospitality, a little transparency and, increasingly, the expectation that a restaurant represented somebody’s particular idea of what a restaurant should be.

From there, the abstraction moved onto the plate.

The “slop bowl” became internet shorthand for the familiar fast-casual mash-up — grains, greens, globally inspired protein, sauce, perhaps an avocado surcharge — assembled with the logic of a cafeteria line and an over-$10 price. The joke has always contained some affection; people like these bowls because they are easy, reliable and customizable. But the name also catches their underlying sameness. There is a reason so much online energy is devoted to “hacking” them: swapping sauces, doubling proteins, gaming the system in hopes of coaxing a little more pleasure from something designed, above all, to be frictionless.

And now the same aesthetic has escaped the bowl. AI slop has begun appearing on restaurant menus, signs and advertisements, offering food imagery that looks optimized for appetite without necessarily resembling anything a person could cook. My digital feed is littered with truly uncanny generated sandwiches, but I’ve only encountered a few in the wild: outside a cafe, a poster for a coffee drink topped with marshmallow “pearls” so perfectly round and iridescent that they looked less edible than cultured in a lab; on the train, hamburger ads where the meat resembled slabs of smooth, steak-rippled marble. The images have the visual grammar of food photography without much evidence that food has ever been involved.

Diners, meanwhile, are already expressing an aversion to the whole thing. Late last year, CNN’s Jordan Valinsky noted that Cava, Chipotle and Sweetgreen — “the big three slop slingers” — were all reporting softer business among younger customers, particularly those between 25 and 35. Some of that was straightforward economics. On Chipotle’s final earnings call of 2025, CEO Scott Boatwright said younger customers weren’t defecting to another chain so much as returning to the grocery store. “They feel the pinch,” he told analysts, “and we feel the pullback.”

Yet alongside that financial retreat, though, there is a more aesthetic refusal taking shape. In one food group I follow, posts about AI restaurant marketing increasingly read like miniature boycott pledges. “If you use AI to advertise your restaurant, market, or anything else,” one person wrote, “I will know that you don’t care about food or the planet and I will never ever patronize your business.” Another was more prescriptive: “Take pictures of your food. Spend a little time and effort to make your own flyer.” 

The complaint isn’t merely that the pictures are creepy. Diners are reading them as evidence: if a restaurant cannot be bothered to photograph its own food, hire an artist or make an ugly little flyer itself, what exactly is being communicated about the care happening elsewhere? 

That inference may not always be fair. Restaurant margins are brutal, and a generated image costs less than a photo shoot. But fairness is almost beside the point. Once diners begin treating evidence of human effort as part of the product, efficiency itself can start looking suspicious.

Which may explain the newest addition to the slop lexicon: PE, or private-equity, slop. The term is less a description of any particular food than a prediction about what happens when the people optimizing a restaurant become increasingly distant from the people cooking in it.

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Consider Los Tacos No. 1. The New York taco shop opened in 2013, earned a devoted following for its al pastor and handmade tortillas, and eventually grew to nine locations. As The Guardian reported, when it announced this September that it had taken an undisclosed investment from private-equity firm TSG Consumer to pursue what a press release called “thoughtful, founder-led growth,” customers immediately began writing its obituary. Social posts predicted “the beginning of the end,” along with smaller portions and worse food. The response became so intense that Los Tacos’ founders issued a reassurance that sounded almost like parody: “No, we’re not going to start charging extra for guac. We’re not switching to horse meat. And no, we’re definitely not messing with the tacos.”

The tacos had not, at that point, been messed with. That’s what makes the reaction interesting. “PE slop” names an anticipatory fear: that somewhere down the line, somebody who has never stood over the grill will notice that a particular ingredient costs slightly more, or a particular process takes slightly longer, and ask whether anyone would really notice if it disappeared.

My colleague Alex Galbraith recently argued that food may be where consumers most easily recognize the otherwise abstract mechanics of private equity. Newspapers can become thinner and health care more Byzantine in ways that are difficult to trace back to an investment firm. Lunch is more intimate. 

Galbraith points to a recent interview with comedian Stavros Halkias who summed it up like this: “Everybody understands that Wendy’s has gotten s**ttier. The spicy chicken sandwich now uses shredded lettuce. Right there, that is private equity. That is someone saying ‘We don’t want a fresh head of lettuce that costs more money. So, we’re going to give you bagged sh**ty lettuce. I know in the grand scheme of things it’s not a big deal, but people will notice.”

I don’t think all these things are “slop” because they’re necessarily bad. I think we’ve reached a point of saturation with food that feels devoid of human authorship. For years, restaurants have been encouraged to become frictionless, scalable, customizable and infinitely replicable. Now diners seem increasingly sensitive to the moment when all that optimization scrubs away specificity.

The opposite of slop isn’t necessarily handmade, independent, expensive or even particularly beautiful. A chain can have it; a bowl can have it; a restaurant backed by investors can have it. It’s simply the sense that something looks and tastes the way it does because somewhere along the line a person said, I like it this way, so I make it this way.

This isn’t an argument for turning every anonymous strip mall back into a village of idiosyncratic mom-and-pop shops. It’s something smaller, and probably more achievable. After years of food designed to work everywhere for everyone, diners may simply be hungry again for evidence that somebody meant it.

The post We’re over restaurant slop appeared first on Salon.com.

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