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Received — 3 July 2026 ⏭

Pluralistic: CARDiac, syntax coloring, view source and vibe code (03 Jul 2026)

✇Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
By: Cory Doctorow
3 July 2026 at 11:00


Today's links


An insanely complex machine made up of many gears, troughs, water wheels, springs, screws, etc. It is housed in a brick building whose facade has been broken away. Three human figures labor to power the machine, turning cranks.

CARDiac, syntax coloring, view source and vibe code (permalink)

In the mid-1970s, my dad – then a budding computer scientist, subsequently a math teacher – brought home my first computer: the CARDiac, a Turing-complete, all-cardboard papercraft computer that you could write and execute programs on:

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

CARDiac stands for "CARDboard Illustrative Aid to Computation," and it was created in 1968 at Bell Labs as a way to teach high schoolers how computers worked. I wasn't anywhere near high school age (I think I was in third grade?) but the CARDiac was revelatory. The year before, I'd had access to a teletype terminal and acoustic coupler that let me operate a PDP machine at the University of Toronto, and I'd been endlessly fascinated with the possibilities. I wrote simple BASIC programs, chatted with ELIZA, and messaged other system users, one keystroke at a time, all on paper (the terminal didn't have a screen, just a printer, and we fed it 1,000' rolls of paper towels my mom brought home from her kindergarten classroom, which I then rolled back up so she could put them back in the bathroom for the kids to dry their hands on).

Interacting with a computer in real-time was captivating, but it wasn't until I assembled and used the CARDiac that it all snapped into place. With the CARDiac, you composed simple programs with pencil and paper, then followed instructions that directed you to move paper tokens in and out of various slots representing memory cells and an accumulator. All an electronic computer does is repeat these crude mechanical operations, millions of times per second, using microscopic transistors. None of that action can be observed with the naked eye, of course. If you had a very sensitive multimeter and a very good microscope, it's conceivable that you could indirectly watch this intricate dance, but only on very early processors, and only if you drastically slowed down their operations.

Much later, I learned a word for what I got from the CARDiac: legibility. Together, the CARDiac and I made a working digital computer, with me standing in for the physics that propels electrons down the endless labyrinth of a microchip, like a pinball triggering various blooping, beeping bumpers. Though the computing we performed was sub-trivial (adding one and one was a major undertaking!), the physical performance of that computing imbued me with Fingerspitzengefühl ("fingertip feeling"):

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fingerspitzengef%C3%BChl

This stood me in great stead in the years to come. To this day, when I think about my computer, I sometimes imagine those little cardboard tokens, shuffling in and out of the slits in my paper CARDiac. There's something very reassuring about this imagery. No matter how many levels of abstraction sit between me and the nanoscale transistors ranked in their billions beneath my fingertips, they are all undertaking those familiar operations I painstakingly performed on my child's desk all those years ago.

(This is one of the things that makes Science Comics Computers: How Digital Hardware Works such an amazing kids' book! By illustrating how a computer's operations are built up from simple boolean logic that can be represented as physical switches, the comic performs that same legibilizing magic that I got from the CARDiac:)

https://pluralistic.net/2025/11/05/xor-xand-xnor-nand-nor/#brawniac

Not long after my CARDiac experience, my dad brought home an Apple ][+, which came with a schematic that revealed the inner workings of the machine in ways that I found visually striking, if significantly less accessible than the CARDiac:

https://downloads.reactivemicro.com/Apple%20II%20Items/Hardware/II_&_II+/Schematic/Apple%20II%20Schematics.pdf

(For me, at least. For the legendary hardware hacker Andrew "bunnie" Huang, it was the start of a journey that turned him into one of the world's virtuoso reverse-engineers and science communicators):

https://pluralistic.net/2026/01/09/quantity-break/#so-many-chips

The Apple ][+ did very little when you took it out of the box. It came with a few floppies' worth of demo programs, and we bought a few more down at the local computer store, but most of the programs I ended up using with that machine were ones I typed in myself, from magazines I bought at the corner store (I spent half my magazine budget on Cracked, Mad and Crazy, the other half on computer magazines full of BASIC program listings).

Typing in a program, keystroke by keystroke, was another Fingerspitzengefühl-generating exercise. I wasn't much of a typist, so it was slow going, and of course I made a lot of typos. What's more, BASIC had already fragmented into several dialects by this point, so even a correctly typed program could fail to run until it had been adapted for the BASIC that shipped with the computer. Getting a program to run on my computer required me to hone my typing skills, but even more so, my problem solving skills.

After months of this, I (re-)invented the debugger, from first principles, coming up with lots of little tricks and gimmicks (many of them horribly inefficient) for identifying and solving my programs' errors. In later years, I had lots of opportunity to work with real debuggers, created and maintained by trained programmers who'd forgotten more than I would ever know about writing code, and my own cack-handed efforts to build my own version of their tools conferred a confidence and intuitive understanding that I could not have achieved otherwise. Figuring out the need for a debugger and then rolling my own (crude, inefficient) one made all debuggers more legible to me.

I think that "legibility" is an underrated trait. If a system is legible to you, then you have a superior basis for understanding it, improving it, and making it work again when it breaks down.

There's an old joke that goes, "physics is applied math; chemistry is applied physics, and biology is applied chemistry" (I've also heard versions that start with "math is applied philosophy" and carry on to "sociology is applied biology," etc). While this isn't entirely true, there's something profound in it: we understand and manipulate our complex reality by wrapping it in abstractions that package up a writhing, shuffling, vibrating machine inside a smooth, serene membrane with a sturdy and easily grasped handle. You could do chemistry using the tools of physics, but it would take hours to perform the kind of calculations a chemist does in seconds (just as it takes an eternity to add one and one with a CARDiac).

Nevertheless, there are times when it is useful for a biologist to think about chemical processes, and for a chemist to think about interactions at the level of physics, and for a physicist to do math. The membrane and the handle are essential, but sometimes you have to decap the sealed package and inspect and manipulate its internals directly. Problem solving, improvement and maintenance all require the ability to move up and down the stack of abstractions to figure out where to stick your probes and stage your interventions.

This is where legibility comes in. Interacting with physical processes improves your mental model. In Broad Band (a magisterial history of women in computing), Claire Evans talks about how the first programmers were women who did the "unskilled" labor of physically cabling components together, developing powerful Fingerspitzengefühl, with such high-fidelity, trans-abstraction mental models of the machines' operations that they became the world's best programmers and debuggers:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/02/13/data-protection-without-monopoly/#broad-band

My early adventures in programming were so powerful and instructive because nearly all the programs I interacted with on my Apple ][+ were written in BASIC (not just the ones I keyed in, but also the demo software and much of the packaged software we bought). That meant that I could get a listing of any program I was using, peeling open the membrane to look at the machinery underneath. I could even laboriously trace the operations of that program using my toy debugger. This, too, was legibility: the ability to flip between the effects of the running code, and the instructions themselves (and then to mentally map those instructions onto the movement of cardboard tokens in my CARDiac).

This affordance was repeated later on the early web, thanks to the "View Source" function that came built into every browser, acting as a velcro tab for the membrane that separated rendered web pages from their underlying instructions. In my early years as a web developer, I copied, pasted, adapted, probed and traced HTML in ways that would have been instantly recognizable to the younger me, keying in those BASIC programs and ripping apart the commercial software on my computer.

I read somewhere that the Bell Labs scientists who created the CARDiac were worried that, thanks to transistorization, the next generation of programmers wouldn't understand the physical, material processes that unfolded when their programs ran, and that this would mean a loss of legibility and intuition and Fingerspitzengefühl. I can't track down the reference now, but it stuck with me, because the CARDiac is such a perfect way of preserving those virtues.

Modern computer science curriculum includes some chip design for just this reason (just as chemists study physics and biologists study chemistry). But there are plenty of programmers – better programmers than I ever was or will be – who taught themselves and never had a CARDiac or gave much thought to chip design. They work at different layers of abstraction and in different ways to solve different problems. Maybe they could improve their art by tinkering with FPGAs, but there's always something even the most skilled artisan can do to round out and incrementally improve their craft.

In the same way, there are plenty of programmers – better ones than I ever was or will be – whose journey started at higher abstraction layers than a teletype terminal or a CARDiac. Maybe they started with a browser's View Source, teasing apart other people's Javascript to create weird Myspace customizations. Maybe they tweaked a programmable block in Minecraft. Maybe they modded a Scratch game. Or maybe they recorded macros using Applescript or Hypercard or Visual Basic to automate a routine task, only to later open up the source code generated by the macro recorder to make fine adjustments.

Whether you're pasting source from Stack Overflow or recording a macro in Excel, you are just one operation away from unwrapping the membrane and exposing the code beneath it. And with the modern internet, with Wikipedia, with endless tutorial videos, you are one further operation from penetrating the high level code to get at the code beneath it, and the code beneath that, and the code beneath that, all the way down to the bare metal.

Which brings me to vibe coding. As I've written, there's a world of difference between writing code for production and writing "personal software" that solves a problem you have. Whatever deficits that code has (due to the fact that you're not a skilled programmer) are offset by the fact that you're the one making the tool (which means your needs aren't lossily filtered through a programmer's understanding of those needs):

https://pluralistic.net/2026/06/15/vernacular/#hypercardian

There's nothing wrong with code that solves your problem, even if you don't know how that code works, even if it breaks in a couple of years, even if no one else could maintain, extend or debug that code. Personal software is fundamentally different from software made to be used and maintained by others:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/07/02/canonization/#operate-iterate-improve

Higher-level abstractions are necessary. Moving tokens between the slits in a CARDiac is a powerful exercise, but eventually you want to do something more substantial than adding one and one, and so you need to package up the mechanics of computing inside a membrane with an easily grasped handle (knowing that you can always open the membrane if need be).

The more automated code you generate – macros, pasted Javascript, Minecraft blocks – the greater the likelihood that you will be failed by a readymade, prefab component. At that point, you have means, motive and opportunity to open the membrane and start tinkering with the internals, and every time you do, you have a better chance of making a realization that improves your grasp on the whole system.

Automated code – whether from an LLM, View Source, Stack Overflow, or a macro recorder – is the top of a funnel. Many – most – of the people who enter the funnel won't slip further down the abstraction chute. They'll solve their problem (a virtue unto itself!) and move on. But the more people we put at the top of the funnel, the more chances our civilization gets to produce another skilled artisan who understands and can improve, iterate and repair the code the rest of us use.

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 What real elections can learn from reality TV voting https://henryjenkins.org/2006/07/democracy_big_brother_style_1.html

#20yrsago Veteran print journo on neglected demographics http://citmedia.org/blog/2006/07/03/guest-posting-is-media-performance-democracys-critical-issue/

#10yrsago One of the copyright’s scummiest trolls loses his law license https://fightcopyrighttrolls.com/2016/07/03/prendas-hansmeier-stipulates-to-suspension-of-his-law-license/

#10yrsago Macedonia’s Colorful Revolutionaries defy the state by splashing paint on government buildings and monuments https://globalvoices.org/2016/07/03/defying-police-harassment-the-macedonian-colorful-revolutionaries-continue-to-chant-freedom/

#10yrsago Trump and Brexit are like lotto tickets: the more unrealistic, the better https://www.irishtimes.com/news/world/europe/fintan-o-toole-brexit-and-the-politics-of-the-fake-orgasm-1.2707398

#10yrsago Low income US households get $0.08/month in Fed housing subsidy; 0.1%ers get $1,236 https://web.archive.org/web/20160702151008/https://www.thenation.com/article/who-benefits-most-from-housing-subsidies-the-wealthy/

#5yrsago The future is symmetrical https://pluralistic.net/2021/07/03/beautiful-symmetry/#fibrous-growth

#1yrago Trump's not gonna protect workers from forced labor https://pluralistic.net/2025/07/03/states-rights-trumps-wrongs/#mamdani

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

  • A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING

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Received — 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)

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

Recent appearances (permalink)


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Latest books (permalink)


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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

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