LePartisan.info À propos Podcasts Fil web Écologie BLOGS Revues Médias
🖋 Cory DOCTOROW
Science fiction author, activist and journalist

PLURALISTIC


▸ les 10 dernières parutions

19.08.2025 à 16:01

Pluralistic: Charlie Jane Anders' "Lessons in Magic and Disaster." (19 Aug 2025)

Cory Doctorow

Texte intégral (3381 mots)


Today's links



The Tor Books cover for Charlie Jane Anders' 'Lessons in Magic and Disaster.'

Charlie Jane Anders' "Lessons in Magic and Disaster." (permalink)

Charlie Jane Anders' Lessons in Magic and Disaster drops today: it's a novel about queer academia, the wonder of thinking very hard about very old books, and the terror and joy of ambiguous magic. It's my kind of novel!

https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250867322/lessonsinmagicanddisaster/

There's a kind of magic I love to read about – the kind where it's not entirely clear whether the person purporting to do magic is acting entirely on instinct, and neither they nor we can be entirely sure whether anything magical has actually happened. This ambiguity just tickles something in me, the part of my brain that tries to bear down on traffic lights to make them turn green, or on board-game dice to get a good roll. It's the mode of Iain Banks's The Wasp Factory and Kelly Link's Book of Love. It's a mode that Anders does superbly, and has done since her 2016 debut novel, All the Birds in the Sky:

https://memex.craphound.com/2016/01/26/charlie-jane-anderss-all-the-birds-in-the-sky-smartass-soulful-novel/

That's the kind of magic at the heart of Magic and Disaster, which tells the story of Jamie, a doctoral candidate at a New England liberal arts college who is trying to hold it all together while she finishes her dissertation. For Jamie, holding it together is a tall order. Her relationship is on the rocks, her advisor is breathing down her neck, a smartass alt-right kid in her class keeps trolling her lectures, and to top it all off, her mother Sarina has withdrawn from society and is self-evidently preparing to lie down and die, out of grief and penance for the death of her wife, who died of cancer that everyone – her doctors and Sarina – downplayed until it was too late.

That would be an impossible lift, except for Jamie's gift for maybe-magic – magic that might or might not be real. Certain places ("liminal spaces") call to Jamie. These are abandoned, dirty, despoiled places, ruins and dumps and littered campsites. When Jamie finds one of these places, she can improvise a ritual, using the things in her pockets and school bag as talismans that might – or might not – conjure small bumps of luck and fortune into Jamie's path.

Jamie's never told anyone about the magic, but when she and Sarina have an especially bitter confrontation, it slips out. In desperation, Jamie gives her mother – a campaigning lawyer who has withdrawn from life and become a hermit – a demonstration of magic. Her mother approaches the demonstration with a lawyer's don't-bullshit-me skepticism, but something in her responds to the magic, and when Jamie leaves her, Sarina tries to bring back her dead wife, a forbidden conjuring that has disastrous consequences.

Jamie had hoped to give her mother something to live for, but catastrophic magical experimentation wasn't what she had in mind. Soon, Jamie is dragged into Sarina's life, to the detriment of her relationship with Ro, a fellow academic who is rightfully suspicious of Sarina and the effect she has on Jamie. When Ro finds out about the magic, the relationship breaks, and now Jamie has to face her problems alone.

Those problems keep mounting. Jamie is working on a dissertation about a 300 year old "ladies' novel" that promises to reveal some profound truth about the life of its author and her challenge to the role that she finds herself confined to as a woman, but it's slow going, and Jamie's advisor is at pains to remind her that there are dramatic changes in the offing to the university, and that Jamie had best get that thesis in soon. Meanwhile, the Men's Rights Activist bro in Jamie's class keeps upping the ante, mixing disruptive "just asking questions" behavior with thinly veiled transphobic digs (Jamie is trans, a fact that is woven around her relationship to her mother and to magic).

Anders tosses a lot of differently shaped objects into the air, and then juggles them, interspersing the main action with excerpts from imaginary 18th century novels (which themselves contain imaginary parables) that serve as both a prestige and a framing device. There's a lot of queer joy in here, a hell of a lot of media theory, and some very chewy ruminations on the far-right mediasphere. There's romance and heartbreak, danger and sacrifice, and most of all, there's that ambiguous magic, which gets realer and scarier as the action goes on.

This is a wonderful magic trick of a novel from a versatile author whose work includes YA space opera, hard sf adventure stories, and a wealth of brilliant short stories. It's a remarkably easy novel to read, given how much very difficult stuff Anders is doing in the writing, and it lingers long after you finish the last page.


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 US CD/DVD bootlegging is not run by organized crime https://memex.craphound.com/2005/08/18/us-cd-dvd-bootlegging-is-not-run-by-organized-crime/

#20yrsago Lem’s tensor algebra poem, annotated https://web.archive.org/web/20051107014429/http://cheesedip.com/2005/08/18/lem_love__tensor_algebra.php

#20yrsago Hunter S Thompson’s ashes to be sent high on fireworks https://www.nytimes.com/2005/08/22/us/ashestofireworks-sendoff-for-an-outlaw-writer.html

#20yrsago Southern Baptist guide to non-gay Disney movies https://web.archive.org/web/20050917042544/http://www.bpnews.net/bpnews.asp?ID=21416

#20yrsago ItPlaysDoom: catalog of devices capable of running Doom https://web.archive.org/web/20070226184902/http://www.itplaysdoom.com/

#10yrsago Women of the Haunted Mansion cosplayers at SDCC https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TJptS52CZIw

#10yrsago Gallery of deserted Chinese amusement parks https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/gallery/2015/aug/14/china-deserted-amusement-parks-stefano-cerio

#10yrsago New pornoscanners are also useless, cost $160 million https://www.politico.com/story/2015/08/airport-security-price-for-tsa-failed-body-scanners-160-million-121385.html

#10yrsago Gender and sf awards: who wins and for what http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2015/08/data-books-and-bias.html

#10yrsago The End of the Internet Dream: the speech that won Black Hat (and Defcon) https://web.archive.org/web/20150818104913/https://medium.com/backchannel/the-end-of-the-internet-dream-ba060b17da61

#10yrsago Piracy vs the MPAA: yet another box-office record smashed https://www.techdirt.com/2015/08/18/hollywood-keeps-breaking-box-office-records-while-still-insisting-that-internet-is-killing-movies/

#10yrsago Stephen Hawking’s speech synthesizer now free/open software https://www.wired.com/2015/08/stephen-hawking-software-open-source/

#10yrsago Defector from Kremlin’s outsourced troll army wins 1 rouble in damages https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-33972122

#10yrsago Chuck Wendig’s Zeroes: a hacker technothriller in the War Games lineage https://memex.craphound.com/2015/08/18/chuck-wendigs-zeroes-a-hacker-technothriller-in-the-war-games-lineage/

#10yrsago Dismaland: Banksy’s (?) swipe at Disneyland https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2015/aug/18/banksy-weston-super-mare-dismaland

#10yrsago Giant dump of data purports to be from Ashleymadison.com https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2015/08/data-from-hack-of-ashley-madison-cheater-site-purportedly-dumped-online/

#10yrsago Iran arms deal prosecution falls apart because of warrantless laptop search https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2015/08/warrantless-airport-laptop-search-dooms-iran-arms-sales-prosecution/

#10yrsago The (real) hard problem of AI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mukaRhQTMP8

#10yrsago Airport security confiscates three year old’s fart gun https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/toddler-has-his-minions-fart-gun-confiscated-at-dublin-airport-for-posing-security-threat-10457743.html

#5yrsago South Africa's copyright and human rights https://pluralistic.net/2020/08/18/fifth-pig/#3-steps

#5yrsago Upbeat surveillance marketing https://pluralistic.net/2020/08/18/fifth-pig/#hikvision

#5yrsago Fed cops substitute dollars for warrants https://pluralistic.net/2020/08/18/fifth-pig/#ppp

#5yrsago Deindustrialization is a market failure https://pluralistic.net/2020/08/18/fifth-pig/#deindustrialization

#5yrsago Mr Cook, Tear Down That Wall https://pluralistic.net/2020/08/18/fifth-pig/#no-true-scotsman

#5yrsago "Fuck the algorithm" https://pluralistic.net/2020/08/18/fifth-pig/#a-levels

#5yrsago The Fifth Pig https://pluralistic.net/2020/08/18/fifth-pig/#5th-pig


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)

  • "Canny Valley": A limited edition collection of the collages I create for Pluralistic, self-published, September 2025
  • "Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It," Farrar, Straus, Giroux, October 7 2025
    https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374619329/enshittification/

  • "Unauthorized Bread": a middle-grades graphic novel adapted from my novella about refugees, toasters and DRM, FirstSecond, 2026

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

  • "The Memex Method," Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2026

  • "The Reverse-Centaur's Guide to AI," a short book about being a better AI critic, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2026



Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources:

Currently writing:

  • "The Reverse Centaur's Guide to AI," a short book for Farrar, Straus and Giroux about being an effective AI critic. (1022 words yesterday, 36039 words total).
  • 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:

Blog (no ads, tracking, or data-collection):

Pluralistic.net

Newsletter (no ads, tracking, or data-collection):

https://pluralistic.net/plura-list

Mastodon (no ads, tracking, or data-collection):

https://mamot.fr/@pluralistic

Medium (no ads, paywalled):

https://doctorow.medium.com/

Twitter (mass-scale, unrestricted, third-party surveillance and advertising):

https://twitter.com/doctorow

Tumblr (mass-scale, unrestricted, third-party surveillance and advertising):

https://mostlysignssomeportents.tumblr.com/tagged/pluralistic

"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

PDF

18.08.2025 à 17:14

Pluralistic: Zuckermuskian solipsism (18 Aug 2025)

Cory Doctorow

Texte intégral (3575 mots)


Today's links



Mark Zuckerberg's metaverse avatar, perched on a legless nude Ken doll body; its eyes are psychedelic pinwheels. Behind the figure is a group shot of child laborer miners from the 1910s, glitched out, blue tinted, and covered with scan lines. The background is a psychedelic swirl of moody colors. They stand atop a filthy checkerboard floor that stretches off to infinity.

Zuckermuskian solipsism (permalink)

When Elon Musk disagrees with someone, he calls them an "NPC" (non-player character). In video-games, an NPC is a machine-puppeted sprite that engages in predictable movements (think of the ghosts in Pac-Man) and perhaps utters some scripted (or AI-generated) dialog:

https://futurism.com/elon-musk-interviewer-npc

Seeing people as automata is probably a side-effect of sitting in the command-center of a big online service, in which you primarily interact with users as statistical aggregates in an analytics dashboard. When you nudge the "buy" button a few pixels over and see how sales rise or fall, you're interacting with people as a mass. The dashboard tells you how "sales" respond to a change in the UI, but not how people are affected by that change.

The dashboard can't tell you whether the change meant that some people couldn't locate a buy-button and thus didn't get something they needed, nor can it tell you whether some people bought something they later regretted.

Analytics allow you to relate to people the way a Simcity player does, by making a zoning change and observing the population-scale outcomes: put a road through a residential block and watch the traffic numbers improve while the happiness of the sims in that block declines.

But there's another way in which people like Musk are inclined to view others as NPCs: the only way to become a billionaire is to hurt and exploit lots of people. You have to be willing to cheat your investors by lying about "full-self driving," you have to be willing to maim your workers, you have to be willing to rain space debris down on people near your launchpad. If you think of those people as truly real – as being just as capable as you are of experiencing stress, sorrow, fear and anxiety – you couldn't possibly set these crimes in motion. You have to view these people as NPCs, devoid of the rich interiority that you marinate in.

William Gibson described this mindset beautifully in Idoru, in a scene where a TV executive describes his audience:

Personally I like to imagine something the size of a baby hippo, the color of a week-old boiled potato, that lives by itself, in the dark, in a double-wide on the outskirts of Topeka. It's covered with eyes and it sweats constantly. The sweat runs into those eyes and makes them sting. It has no mouth, no genitals, and can only express its mute extremes of murderous rage and infantile desire by changing the channels on a universal remote. Or by voting in presidential elections.

(Not for nothing, Musk frequently pumps millions of dollars into elections in the hopes of influencing all those NPCs into voting for his favored candidates, irrespective of whether those candidates will make those voters better off:)

https://pbswisconsin.org/news-item/musks-plan-to-pull-back-from-politics-follows-flop-in-wisconsin-court-election/

On Twitter, Musk banned an account that reported on the movements of his private jet (that is, an account that republished public information), because he said that it made him feel unsafe. Musk also changed how Twitter's block button worked to make it easier for gang-stalkers, griefers, harassers, and trolls to attack their victims, who are disproportionately marginalized: women, queers, people of color:

https://www.msnbc.com/opinion/msnbc-opinion/elon-musk-block-x-blue-sky-rcna176130

Musk's fears are vivid and real to him, but the fears of millions of Twitter users are just scripted NPC behaviors. In some important sense, those people don't actually exist for Musk. Or, as Musk put it on Rogan:

The fundamental weakness of Western civilization is empathy.

https://www.npr.org/2025/03/22/nx-s1-5321299/how-empathy-came-to-be-seen-as-a-weakness-in-conservative-circles

Not for nothing: this is also how being in a K-hole feels. Under ketamine sedation, it's easy to feel like the whole world, your whole life to that moment, was a dream or a hallucination. The whole universe is just a figment of your imagination, and you are its god and creator. In a K-hole, other people aren't real.

Now, as it happens, there's a long moral tradition that condemns people who treat others as unreal, as means to an end, rather than as ends unto themselves. For Kant, this is so odious that he said it violated the "categorical imperative":

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/persons-means/

Or, as Terry Pratchett's Granny Weatherwax put it:

Sin is when you treat people like things. Including yourself. That's what sin is.

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

But when you are seeing like a billionaire, that's how people appear to you: as things. It's the mindset that leads to you offering your subordinate a thoroughbred horse in exchange for fucking you:

https://www.businessinsider.com/spacex-paid-250000-to-a-flight-attendant-who-accused-elon-musk-of-sexual-misconduct-2022-5

Seeing like a billionaire is when you view people as aggregated masses without any real interiority or will. Hence "high agency," the term that people who aspire to extreme wealth and power use to describe themselves. If the elite are high agency, then it follows that the masses are low agency. They have few desires or real feelings:

https://www.highagency.com/

It's not just Musk who views people this way. Mark Zuckerberg has been treating people as things for his entire life, ever since he started Facebook in his dorm-room so that he could nonconsensually rate the fuckability of his fellow Harvard undergrads. In Careless People, Sarah Wynn-Williams' whistleblower memoir of her time as a top FB exec, we get a picture of Zuck as someone who just doesn't think that other people are real enough to matter:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/04/23/zuckerstreisand/#zdgaf

It's no wonder that Zuck thinks that chatbots can replace our friends:

https://fortune.com/2025/06/26/mark-zuckerberg-ai-friends-hinge-ceo/

At some foundational level, he thinks we are all chatbots, automata driven by manipulable inputs that drive deterministic outcomes. This is a guy who claims to have invented a mind-control ray using warmed-over Skinnerian behavior mod techniques:

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

Sam Altman, another person who sees like a billionaire, and wants to replace our friends with chatbots, claims that humanity is nothing more than a "stochastic parrot" – a statistical autocompleting program that does not truly understand or think:

https://x.com/sama/status/1599471830255177728?lang=en

Billionaires have to be solopsists, or at least, selective solipsists, who don't really believe in the humanity of the people who create their wealth and whom they wield their power over. This has always been clear, but the idea that we can replace our social connections with chatbots erases any doubt.

Billionaires just don't think we're real.


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)

#20yrago PC disguised as a set of encyclopedia volumes https://www.mini-itx.com/projects/encyclomedia/

#20yrago Nobel economist on harm lurking in copyright monopolies https://web.archive.org/web/20060217023906/http://www.dailytimes.com.pk/default.asp?page=story_16-8-2005_pg5_12

#15yrsago Heinlein biography: LEARNING CURVE – the secret history of science fiction https://memex.craphound.com/2010/08/16/heinlein-memoir-learning-curve-the-secret-history-of-science-fiction/

#10yrago LAPD & Chicago bought “Stingrays on steroids” with asset-forfeiture & DHS money https://revealnews.org/article/chicago-and-los-angeles-have-used-dirt-box-surveillance-for-a-decade/

#10yrsago NSA kremlinology: spooks outsourced lawbreaking to AT&T https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2015/08/was-nsa-trying-outsource-responsibilty-its-fourth-amendment-violations

#10yrsago German chefs can claim copyright over the arrangement of food on plates https://www.techdirt.com/2015/08/17/germany-says-taking-photos-food-infringes-chefs-copyright/

#10yrsago Massive Star Wars lands coming to Disneyland and Walt Disney World https://web.archive.org/web/20150815230427/http://disneyparks.disney.go.com/blog/2015/08/star-wars-themed-lands-coming-to-walt-disney-world-and-disneyland-resorts/

#10yrsago America’s “worst voting machines” dropped in Virgina (at last) https://www.wired.com/2015/08/virginia-finally-drops-americas-worst-voting-machines/

#5yrsago No one wants an H1B visa https://pluralistic.net/2020/08/17/aura-of-benevolence/#crickets

#5yrsago Amazon bans podcasts that criticize Amazon #https://pluralistic.net/2020/08/16/combat-wheelchairs/#nondisparagement

#5yrsago Combat Wheelchairs https://pluralistic.net/2020/08/16/combat-wheelchairs/#combat-wheelchairs

#5yrsago How to Argue With a Racist https://pluralistic.net/2020/08/16/combat-wheelchairs/#race-realism

#5yrsago Self-driving cars are bullshit https://pluralistic.net/2020/08/16/combat-wheelchairs/#car-wreck

#1yrago MIT libraries are thriving without Elsevier https://pluralistic.net/2024/08/16/the-public-sphere/#not-the-elsevier

#1yrago "Disenshittify or Die" https://pluralistic.net/2024/08/17/hack-the-planet/#how-about-a-nice-game-of-chess


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)

  • "Canny Valley": A limited edition collection of the collages I create for Pluralistic, self-published, September 2025
  • "Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It," Farrar, Straus, Giroux, October 7 2025
    https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374619329/enshittification/

  • "Unauthorized Bread": a middle-grades graphic novel adapted from my novella about refugees, toasters and DRM, FirstSecond, 2026

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

  • "The Memex Method," Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2026

  • "The Reverse-Centaur's Guide to AI," a short book about being a better AI critic, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2026



Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources:

Currently writing:

  • "The Reverse Centaur's Guide to AI," a short book for Farrar, Straus and Giroux about being an effective AI critic. (1000 words yesterday, 35029 words total).
  • 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:

Blog (no ads, tracking, or data-collection):

Pluralistic.net

Newsletter (no ads, tracking, or data-collection):

https://pluralistic.net/plura-list

Mastodon (no ads, tracking, or data-collection):

https://mamot.fr/@pluralistic

Medium (no ads, paywalled):

https://doctorow.medium.com/

Twitter (mass-scale, unrestricted, third-party surveillance and advertising):

https://twitter.com/doctorow

Tumblr (mass-scale, unrestricted, third-party surveillance and advertising):

https://mostlysignssomeportents.tumblr.com/tagged/pluralistic

"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

PDF

16.08.2025 à 16:42

Pluralistic: LLMs are slot-machines (16 Aug 2025)

Cory Doctorow

Texte intégral (2915 mots)


Today's links



LLMs are slot-machines (permalink)

When LLM users describe their experience with their chatbots, the results are so divergent that it can sound like they're describing two completely different products.

Previously, I've hypothesized that this is because there are two distinct groups of users: "centaurs" (people who are assisted by a machine – in this case, people who get to decide when, whether and how to integrate an LLM into their work) and "reverse-centaurs" (people conscripted into being an assistant to a machine – here, people whose bosses have fired their colleagues and ordered the survivors to oversee an LLM that badly approximates the work of those departed workers):

https://pluralistic.net/2025/08/04/bad-vibe-coding/#maximally-codelike-bugs

But yesterday, I read "The Futzing Fraction," an essay by Glyph, that advances a compatible, but very different hypothesis that I find extremely compelling:

https://blog.glyph.im/2025/08/futzing-fraction.html

Glyph proposes that many LLM-assisted programmers who speak highly of the reliability and value of AI tools are falling prey to two cognitive biases:

  1. The "availability heuristic" (striking things are easier to remember, which is why we remember the very rare instances of kids being kidnapped and killed, but rarely think about the relatively common phenomenon of kids dying in boring car-crashes); and
  2. The "salience heuristic" (big things are easier to remember, which is why we double-check that the oven is turned off and the smoke alarms are working after our neighbor's house burns down).

In the case of LLM coding assistants, this manifests as an unconscious overestimation of how often the LLM saves you time. That's because a coding program that produces a bug that you have to "futz with" for a while before it starts working is normal, and thus unmemorable, while a coding tool that turns a plain-language prompt into a working computer program is amazing, so it stands out in your memory.

Glyph likens this to a slot-machine: when you lose a dollar to a slot-machine, that is totally unremarkable, "the expected outcome." But when a slot pays out a jackpot, you remember that for the rest of your life. Walk through a casino floor on which a player hits a slot jackpot, and the ringing bells, flashing lights, and cheering crowd will stick with you, giving you an enduring perception that slot-machines are paying out all the time, even though no casino could stay in business if this were the case.

Glyph develops this analogy to describe why LLMs are worse than slot machines. He says that (non-pathological) gamblers set a budget for the amount of money they're prepared to lose to the slots, while a coder who's feeling warmly disposed to an LLM coding assistant may not put any explicit limits on how much time they'll spend futzing with LLM-generated code (I'll add here that part of the seductive joy of coding is that it can put its practitioners into a kind of autohyptnotic fugue state where they don't notice the passing of time, a state that is also a feature of pathological gambling).

Glyph poses a hypothetical: if you have a coding project that you ask a chatbot to write, and the resulting code initially doesn't work, but does work after ten minutes of futzing, that feels amazing and you will remember it forever as the time you saved 3:50 by using a chatbot. But it's possible that you repeated the "well, I'll just futz with this for ten minutes" step to get to that final success so many times that the whole affair took six hours, two hours longer than it would have taken had you just written the program from scratch. It's like winning a $1000 jackpot after "just putting a dollar in," except that that was the one-thousand-and-first dollar that you fed to the machine.

Glyph says that in other business activities, the "let's just try this for 10 minutes more" strategy usually pays off, but that LLMs produce an "an emotionally variable, intermittent reward schedule" that subverts your ability to wisely deploy that tactic.

But that's not the only way in which an LLM coding assistant is like a slot machine. Reg Braithwaite proposed that AI companies' business model is also like a casino's, because they charge every time you re-prompt the AI. He writes:

When you are paying by the "pull of the handle," the vendor's incentive is not to solve your problem with a single pull, but to give the appearance of progress towards solving your problem.

https://social.bau-ha.us/@raganwald/115033262770049100

Jpeck likens the use of an LLM coding assistant to "a dense intern" who has to be walked through each step and then have their work double-checked:

https://universeodon.com/@boscoandpeck/115033787721848290

But there's an important difference between an intern and an LLM. For a senior coder, helping an intern is an investment in nurturing a new generation of talented colleagues. For a reverse-centaur, refining an LLM is either an investment in fixing bugs in a product designed to put you on the breadline (if you believe AI companies' claims that their products will continue to improve until they don't need close supervision), or it's a wasted investment in a "dense intern" who is incapable of improving.

(Image: Frank Schwichtenberg, CC BY 4.0Cryteria, CC BY 3.0; modified)


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)

#20yrago PC disguised as a set of encyclopedia volumes https://www.mini-itx.com/projects/encyclomedia/

#20yrago Nobel economist on harm lurking in copyright monopolies https://web.archive.org/web/20060217023906/http://www.dailytimes.com.pk/default.asp?page=story_16-8-2005_pg5_12

#15yrsago Heinlein biography: LEARNING CURVE – the secret history of science fiction https://memex.craphound.com/2010/08/16/heinlein-memoir-learning-curve-the-secret-history-of-science-fiction/

#5yrsago Amazon bans podcasts that criticize Amazon #https://pluralistic.net/2020/08/16/combat-wheelchairs/#nondisparagement

#5yrsago Combat Wheelchairs https://pluralistic.net/2020/08/16/combat-wheelchairs/#combat-wheelchairs

#5yrsago How to Argue With a Racist https://pluralistic.net/2020/08/16/combat-wheelchairs/#race-realism

#5yrsago Self-driving cars are bullshit https://pluralistic.net/2020/08/16/combat-wheelchairs/#car-wreck

#1yrago MIT libraries are thriving without Elsevier https://pluralistic.net/2024/08/16/the-public-sphere/#not-the-elsevier


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)

  • Canny Valley: A limited edition collection of the collages I create for Pluralistic, self-published, September 2025
  • Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It, Farrar, Straus, Giroux, October 7 2025
    https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374619329/enshittification/

  • Unauthorized Bread: a middle-grades graphic novel adapted from my novella about refugees, toasters and DRM, FirstSecond, 2026

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

  • The Memex Method, Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2026

  • The Reverse-Centaur's Guide to AI, a short book about being a better AI critic, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2026



Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources:

Currently writing:

  • "The Reverse Centaur's Guide to AI," a short book for Farrar, Straus and Giroux about being an effective AI critic. (1022 words yesterday, 32968 words total).
  • 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:

Blog (no ads, tracking, or data-collection):

Pluralistic.net

Newsletter (no ads, tracking, or data-collection):

https://pluralistic.net/plura-list

Mastodon (no ads, tracking, or data-collection):

https://mamot.fr/@pluralistic

Medium (no ads, paywalled):

https://doctorow.medium.com/

Twitter (mass-scale, unrestricted, third-party surveillance and advertising):

https://twitter.com/doctorow

Tumblr (mass-scale, unrestricted, third-party surveillance and advertising):

https://mostlysignssomeportents.tumblr.com/tagged/pluralistic

"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

PDF

15.08.2025 à 21:55

Pluralistic: Bluesky creates the world's weirdest, hardest-to-understand binding arbitration clause (15 Aug 2025)

Cory Doctorow

Texte intégral (4316 mots)


Today's links



A painting of Ulysses tied to the mast, beset by flying sirens. The sirens' wings have been replaced with the Bluesky butterfly wing logo. On the deck of Ulysses' trireme is a giant poop emoji.

Bluesky creates the world's weirdest, hardest-to-understand binding arbitration clause (permalink)

I can't wait to use Bluesky, but I will not be joining Bluesky. As much as I trust and respect the Bluesky executives and board members I am acquainted with, I believe the service itself is insufficiently enshittification-resistant to trust:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/12/14/fire-exits/#graceful-failure-modes

I've met Bluesky's CEO Jay Graber on a few occasions and heard her speak several times and I'm hugely impressed with her documented commitment to make "enshittification-resistant" social media:

https://www.wired.com/story/bluesky-ceo-jay-graber-wont-enshittify-ads/

Some of Bluesky's most innovative and well-developed features are extremely enshittification-resistant, like "composable moderation," which gives users an extraordinary degree of control over their feeds, which means that the service's owners can't readily dial down the amount of desirable information in those feeds in order to create space for ads or posts that someone has paid to boost (or, as is the case with Twitter, the personal maunderings of the service's boss and whichever esoteric fascist crony talked to him last):

https://bsky.social/about/blog/4-13-2023-moderation

What's more, this composable moderation, along with an open API for clients, allows Bluesky (the company) to adhere to its legal obligations to block content, while allowing Bluesky users to sidestep those blocks. For example, Bluesky has a labeling service that flags content that has to be blocked under Turkey's system of authoritarian censorship, and, by default, the Bluesky client blocks anything with that flag for Turkish users. But users can turn off that block, and/or use an alternative Bluesky client that doesn't pay attention to the blocked-in-Turkey flag.

Same goes for the new British system of mass censorship under the Online Safety Act: Bluesky the company will do an age-verification process with users of its official client (like all age verification, this system is janky and it sucks), but UK users who choose a different client (one that isn't worried about being sanctioned by the UK government) can access all of Bluesky without any age verification.

But the key anti-enshittification measure – federation – has lagged on Bluesky. For most of Bluesky's history, it's been impossible to participate in the Bluesky service without being a Bluesky user, because the most critical parts of the Bluesky network were incredibly expensive to operate (tens of millions of dollars per year), and lacked any tooling to make it easy to create independent, federated servers.

Without the ability to participate on the Bluesky network without having to create an account with Bluesky (the company), users would have to subject themselves to Bluesky's terms of service, and could have their access to the Bluesky network unilaterally terminated by Bluesky (the company).

Now, I happen to think pretty highly of the management of Bluesky (the company) at the moment. But Bluesky has outside investors – the distressingly stupid- and sinister-sounding Blockchain Capital – and if these people get it into their heads to enshittify Bluesky, then can force good actors off the board of directors, fire the management, and replace them with standard-issue corporate sociopaths.

What's more, the fact that users are hostage to Bluesky – that they have no way to part ways with the company without parting ways with the people they value on the service – means that new management can torment Bluesky users with impunity, so long as these torments are kept to a level such that Bluesky users hate the company less than they love one another.

By contrast, with federation – the ability to part ways with the Bluesky company without losing access to the service – investors might understand that if they turn the screws on users, those users will find it trivial to leave the company's servers, because doing so won't cost them access to the service. And if the investors don't understand this, well, users can leave – without enduring any switching costs.

The good news here is that Bluesky has made enormous progress in true federation. The cost of operating a full Bluesky stack has fallen from tens of millions of dollars per year to tens of dollars per month:

https://whtwnd.com/bnewbold.net/3lo7a2a4qxg2l

This is an extremely welcome development and it goes a long way toward enshittification-proofing the Bluesky service, and some way to enshittification-proofing Bluesky, the company.

But Bluesky, the company, still needs serious work.

As things stand, Bluesky has very bad terms of service that every user who creates an account has to subject themselves to. In particular, Bluesky's ToS contain a "binding arbitration" waiver that forces users to surrender the right to sue Bluesky no matter how the company harms them. This is so pro-enshittificatory, it's like a landing strip for the sole use of Enshittification Airlines, which can land a 747 full of enshittfying nonsense on Bluesky's users every 10 minutes, around the clock, without worrying about any legal repercussions.

Binding arbitration used to be illegal. Sure, two entities of similar size and power could elect to streamline their disputes by seeing an arbitrator instead of going to court, but you couldn't take away people's right to sue just by cramming 40,000 words of legalese down their throat as they passed over your threshold. It took the absolute fuckery of an Antonin Scalia to unleash the plague of binding arbitration waivers on the world, with the result that these days, everyone from dentists to solar installers to ride-hailing companies force you to permanently waive your right to sue, even if they are so negligent or malicious that you are permanently maimed or killed:

https://brooklynworks.brooklaw.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1443&context=blr

These days, binding arbitration is everywhere, allowing corporations to proceed with total legal impunity. When a woman died of allergens in her Disney World meal (after being told it was allergen-free), Disney told her widower that he couldn't sue because he'd clicked through a binding arbitration waiver when he signed up for a free trial of the Disney Plus streaming service:

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2024/08/disney-stops-claiming-disney-terms-require-arbitration-in-allergy-death-case/

Binding arbitration has been creeping into every corner of the internet, to the extent that lawyers will tell you that you must put it in your ToS "just to be safe." Those lawyers are either ignorant, or assholes (or, you know, ignorant assholes), but they're everywhere. Earlier this summer, Mastodon almost launched a new ToS (which would have been the default for every Masto instance) with binding arbitration, because their lawyers told them they needed it:

https://en.chuso.net/mastodon-tos-july-2025.html

Bluesky has just announced a new ToS, through which they claim they are improving on the binding arbitration waiver:

https://bsky.social/about/support/tos#governing-law

But what they've come up with is utterly baffling and nonsensical. I have re-read it at least a dozen times, and – despite having followed and written about binding arbitration for more than a decade – I have no idea what it means.

The new waiver says that you don't have to arbitrate for "claims that fraud, criminal misconduct, or gross negligence by Bluesky caused death or personal injury." That sounds good! It also sounds like everything that someone might sue Bluesky for, leaving me to wonder what Bluesky will make you arbitrate for.

What's more, if the point of a binding arbitration waiver is to reduce nuisance suits and threats, this completely nullifies that tactic, because all a nuisance litigant has to do is claim that they are suing because of "fraud, criminal misconduct, or gross negligence," and Bluesky is back in court.

All I can assume is that the point of this clause is to intimidate people with grievances against Bluesky out of seeking legal redress because they can't figure out if their claim is covered by this baffling, nonsensical clause.

There are other, gigantic red flags in the arbitration waiver, like a prohibition on class actions. Here's why that's especially bad in an arbitration waiver.

By default, arbitration is a) confidential and b) nonprecedential. That means that if a corporation injures a ton of people through negligence, fraud or malice, each victim of the company has to individually go before an arbitrator and prove their case, but they're not allowed to know how other victims argued their case, and the arbitrator is not required to judge two identical cases in the same way (earlier cases are not a precedent).

One way around this is mass arbitration, like the Uber drivers engaged in when Uber stole tens of millions of dollars worth of tips from them, a tactic successfully deployed by other corporate victims:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/06/02/arbitrary-arbitration/#petard

Class actions are the only way that corporations can be held to account for actions that victimize vast numbers of people in relatively small ways. If you've been injured to the tune of less than, say, $500, you probably won't hire a lawyer to get it back. Bluesky has 36 million users, meaning – thanks to the ban on class actions – it could steal about $18 billion from them all without having to worry about a gigantic, business-destroying lawsuit.

This is not how you enshittification-proof your service.

To be fair, the carve-out in the arbitration clause might help keep the company from committing this kind of fraud, but only if anyone could figure out what the hell it means. And also to be fair, the new arbitration clause provides for three arbitrators, one chosen by Bluesky, one by you, and a third, mutually agreed upon one.

This does inject more fairness into an unacceptably unfair process, and also does not make it acceptably unfair. Especially since Bluesky retains the right to consolidate arbitration claims into a mass arbitration, but does not let potential victims form a class if such a move would be disadvantageous to Bluesky.

If Bluesky wants to protect itself from legal liability, let it do what every company did until just a couple years ago: a) don't break the law on purpose, and; b) buy insurance

These new ToS are an absolute dog's breakfast. I wouldn't click through them.

And luckily, I don't have to! Because, to Bluesky's eternal credit, they have shipped the technical components needed to create a Bluesky server that is a full, first-class participant in the Bluesky service, without its users having to sign up to these Terms of Service (unfortunately, if you're already a Bluesky user, it's too late, because its ToS says you're still bound to mandatory arbitration even if you delete your account).

Legacy social media is in trouble. Facebook and Twitter are thrashing around, using AI finance-theater in a bid to convince investors not to panic-sell their stock because they no longer have any growth left.

A new, federated, independent, web is being born before our eyes, running on Activitypub (Mastodon) and Atproto (Bluesky). This web does not have to fall prey to the enshittifying norms of the zuckermuskian web. If the people building this new web are wise, they will take irrevocable action that will limit their ability (and the ability of their successors) to fall prey to the siren song of enshittification in the future. This is called a "Ulysses pact" – when you tie yourself to the mast so that you don't yield to future temptation.

Putting binding arbitration in your ToS is the opposite of a Ulysses pact: it's ensuring that you – and whoever you are replaced with when your investors decide it's time for a service-level heel turn – always retain the ability to enshittify, should the mood take you.

We can demand something better – and, if you run your own Bluesky server, you can.

My sysadmin, Ken, just took delivery of some new server hardware at his colo, and he's gonna be setting me up my own Mastodon and Bluesky servers in the coming weeks. I'm really looking forward to using the Bluesky service, especially since I can do so without clicking through the Bluesky terms of service or making myself vulnerable to the enshittificatory gambits that future management might assay, because those terms have given them the leeway to do so.


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 Babies on the no-fly list https://web.archive.org/web/20050910182032/https://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/n/a/2005/08/15/national/w115806D06.DTL&type=printable

#10yrsago AT&T was the NSA’s enthusiastic top surveillance partner https://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/16/us/politics/att-helped-nsa-spy-on-an-array-of-internet-traffic.html

#10yrsao Stephen Harper will use 12-18 year old junior rangers to fight the Russians https://web.archive.org/web/20150818192810/https://northumberlandview.ca/index.php?module=news&type=user&func=display&sid=36144

#10yrsago Miami police union smears woman who posted video of cop beating handcuffed suspect in police cruiserhttps://www.miaminewtimes.com/news/police-union-smears-woman-who-posted-video-of-police-beating-on-facebook-7823262

#10yrago Pre-crime: DHS admits that it puts people on the no-fly list based on “predictive assessment” https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/aug/10/us-no-fly-list-predictive-assessments

#5yrsago AI, 1A and Citizens United https://pluralistic.net/2020/08/15/wish-youd-share/#clearview-1a

#1yrago Apple vs the "free market" https://pluralistic.net/2024/08/15/private-law/#thirty-percent-vig


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)

  • Canny Valley: A limited edition collection of the collages I create for Pluralistic, self-published, September 2025
  • Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It, Farrar, Straus, Giroux, October 7 2025
    https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374619329/enshittification/

  • Unauthorized Bread: a middle-grades graphic novel adapted from my novella about refugees, toasters and DRM, FirstSecond, 2026

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

  • The Memex Method, Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2026

  • The Reverse-Centaur's Guide to AI, a short book about being a better AI critic, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2026



Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources:

Currently writing:

  • "The Reverse Centaur's Guide to AI," a short book for Farrar, Straus and Giroux about being an effective AI critic. (1053 words yesterday, 32026 words total).
  • 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:

Blog (no ads, tracking, or data-collection):

Pluralistic.net

Newsletter (no ads, tracking, or data-collection):

https://pluralistic.net/plura-list

Mastodon (no ads, tracking, or data-collection):

https://mamot.fr/@pluralistic

Medium (no ads, paywalled):

https://doctorow.medium.com/

Twitter (mass-scale, unrestricted, third-party surveillance and advertising):

https://twitter.com/doctorow

Tumblr (mass-scale, unrestricted, third-party surveillance and advertising):

https://mostlysignssomeportents.tumblr.com/tagged/pluralistic

"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

PDF

14.08.2025 à 18:34

Pluralistic: "Privacy preserving age verification" is bullshit (14 Aug 2025)

Cory Doctorow

Texte intégral (4807 mots)


Today's links



Three kids in a trenchcoat, atop one another's shoulders. They stand before a hellishly complex midcentury computing control room.

"Privacy preserving age verification" is bullshit (permalink)

I don't think that it's impossible for politicians, even nontechnical politicians, to make good tech policy. After all, the fact that no one in Congress is a microbiologist doesn't stop federal standards from delivering potable water (and it doesn't excuse the ghastly failures, such as Flint, MI):

https://pluralistic.net/2024/11/21/policy-based-evidence/

For politicians to make good policy, they don't need to be technical experts: they need to have solid, independent, well-resourced expert agencies. Those would be the very agencies that Trump and Musk have DOGEd into oblivion, which is pretty ominous, since the work of expert agencies is how you avoid dying of food poisoning, water poisoning, air poisoning, collapsing buildings, faulty antilock brakes, train explosions and plane-crashes.

But when it comes to tech policy, politicians get it all so goddamned wrong. Partly that's because the cartel of tech companies lies to them like crazy, even under oath, leading to a kind of nihilistic refusal to believe any expert input. Mark Zuckerberg wants you to think that's it's inconceivable for you to have a social life without him eavesdropping on it, and any rule demanding this is a farce, like a demand to make water that's not wet:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/11/08/divisibility/#technognosticism

Big Tech's highly resourced bullshit machine convinces some politicians that technical expertise is not to be trusted, and gives other, more cynical politicians cover for ignoring experts by saying, "Oh you people are always telling us that this or that is impossible."

For example, since the Clinton era, politicians all over the world demanded a kind of impossible encryption: encryption that works perfectly when it's doing something legitimate, like keeping hackers from pushing malware to your pacemaker or stealing your life's savings or listening in on you through your phone's microphone, but also they require that this encryption offer no protection to criminals, drug dealers, terrorists, child abusers, and other miscreants.

This really is like water that's not wet. We can make encryption that works. It's hard to get right, but when we do, it offers a wondrous level of protection from interception and eavesdropping, scrambling our data so thoroughly that you would have to consume multiple universes worth of time and space to build all the computers necessary to guess the descrambling key. We can also make encryption that doesn't work. People do this by accident all the time. Sometimes, the NSA does it on purpose (and doesn't mention that fact to the people who rely on it for their safety and integrity):

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

But what we absolutely, positively, totally cannot make is encryption that both works and does not work, depending on whose secrets it is protecting. That's impossible.

But when technologists tell policymakers this, they tell us that they have every confidence in our ingenuity, and also, they can't be certain we're not telling a Zuck-style fable about how the stuff we merely disprefer is actually impossible. They tell us to NERD HARDER!

NERD HARDER! is the answer every time a politician gets a technological idée-fixe about how to solve a social problem by creating a technology that can't exist. It's the answer that EU politicians who backed the catastrophic proposal to require copyright filters for all user-generated content came up with, when faced with objections that these filters would block billions of legitimate acts of speech:

https://memex.craphound.com/2019/04/03/after-months-of-insisting-that-article13-doesnt-require-filters-top-eu-commissioner-says-article-13-requires-filters/

When politicians seize on a technological impossibility as a technological necessity, they flail about and desperately latch onto scholarly work that they can brandish as evidence that their idea could be accomplished.

For example, back in 2019, Trump's Bureau of Land Management tried to impose a ton of absolutely bizarre, environmentally devastating requirements on Burning Man's land-use permit. One of these requirements was to effectively ban LED lights at night (!), on the basis that these were so bright at altitude that they could disrupt nocturnal birds.

In support of this measure, the BLM cited a PhD dissertation from a physicist who developed a method for estimating light pollution. That physicist turns out to be a burner, who filed comments in the docket describing how the BLM had misapplied his work, making crude mathematical errors that led them to grossly overstate the amount of light pollution at altitude (I've just spent an hour trying to find this comment and I came up craps – if you can find it, please let me know, as it was delicious).

That kind of Annie Hall/Marshall McLuhan/"You know nothing of my work" moment is always fantastic, and especially so when politicians are demanding that technologists NERD HARDER! to realize their cherished impossibilities.

That's just happened, and in relation to one of the scariest, most destructive NERD HARDER! tech policies ever to be assayed (a stiff competition). I'm talking about the UK Online Safety Act, which imposes a duty on websites to verify the age of people they communicate with before serving them anything that could be construed as child-inappropriate (a category that includes, e.g., much of Wikipedia):

https://wikimediafoundation.org/news/2025/08/11/wikimedia-foundation-challenges-uk-online-safety-act-regulations/

The Starmer government has, incredibly, developed a passion for internet regulations that are even stupider than Tony Blair's and David Cameron's. Requiring people to identify themselves (generally, via their credit cards) in order to look at porn will create a giant database of every kink and fetish of every person in the UK, which will inevitably leak and provide criminals and foreign spies with a kompromat system they can sort by net worth of the people contained within.

This hasn't deterred Starmer, who insists that if we just NERD HARDER!, we can use things like "zero-knowledge proofs" to create "privacy-preserving" age verification system, whereby a service can assure itself that it is communicating with an adult without ever being able to determine who it is communicating with.

In support of this idea, Starmer and co like to cite some genuinely exciting and cool cryptographic work on privacy-preserving credential schemes. Now, one of the principal authors of the key papers on these credential schemes, Steve Bellovin, has published a paper that is pithily summed up via its title, "Privacy-Preserving Age Verification—and Its Limitations":

https://www.cs.columbia.edu/~smb/papers/age-verify.pdf

The tldr of this paper is that Starmer's idea will not work and cannot work. The research he relies on to defend the technological feasibility of his cherished plan does not support his conclusion.

Bellovin starts off by looking at the different approaches various players have mooted for verifying their users' age. For example, Google says it can deploy a "behavioral" system that relies on Google surveillance dossiers to make guesses about your age. Google refuses to explain how this would work, but Bellovin sums up several of the well-understood behavioral age estimation techniques and explains why they won't work. It's one thing to screw up age estimation when deciding which ad to show you; it's another thing altogether to do this when deciding whether you can access the internet.

Others say they can estimate your age by using AI to analyze a picture of your face. This is a stupid idea for many reasons, not least of which is that biometric age estimation is notoriously unreliable when it comes to distinguishing, say, 16 or 17 year olds from 18 year olds. Nevertheless, there are sitting US Congressmen who not only think this would work – they labor under the misapprehension that this is already going on:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/04/09/how-to-make-a-child-safe-tiktok/

So that just leaves the privacy-preserving credential schemes, especially the Camenisch-Lysyanskaya protocol. This involves an Identity Provider (IDP) that establishes a user's identity and characteristics using careful document checks and other procedures. The IDP then hands the user a "primary credential" that can attest to everything the IDP knows about the user, and any number of "subcredentials" that only attest to specific facts about that user (such as their age).

These are used in zero-knowledge proofs (ZKP) – a way for two parties to validate that one of them asserts a fact without learning what that fact is in the process (this is super cool stuff). Users can send their subcredentials to a third party, who can use a ZKP to validate them without learning anything else about the user – so you could prove your age (or even just prove that you are over 18 without disclosing your age at all) without disclosing your identity.

There's some good news for implementing CL on the web: rather than developing a transcendentally expensive and complex new system for these credential exchanges and checks, CL can piggyback on the existing Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) that powers your browser's ability to have secure sessions when you visit a website with https:// in front of the address (instead of just http://).

However, doing so poses several difficulties, which Bellovin enumerates under a usefully frank section header: "INSURMOUNTABLE OBSTACLES."

The most insurmountable of these obstacles is getting set up with an IDP in the first place – that is, proving who you are to some agency, but only one such agency (so you can't create two primary credentials and share one of them with someone underage). Bellovin cites Supreme Court cases about voter ID laws and the burdens they impose on people who are poor, old, young, disabled, rural, etc.

Fundamentally, it can be insurmountably hard for a lot of people to get, say, a driver's license, or any other singular piece of ID that they can provide to an IDP in order to get set up on the system.

The usual answer for this is for IDPs to allow multiple kinds of ID. This does ease the burden on users, but at the expense of creating fatal weaknesses in the system: if you can set up an identity with multiple kinds of ID, you can visit different IDPs and set up an ID with each (just as many Americans today have drivers licenses from more than one state).

The next obstacle is "user challenges," like the problem of households with shared computers, or computers in libraries, hotels, community centers and other public places. The only effective way to do this is to create (expensive) online credential stores, which are likely to be out of reach of the poor and disadvantaged people who disproportionately rely on public or shared computers.

Next are the "economic issues": this stuff is expensive to set up and maintain, and someone's gotta pay for it. We could ask websites that offer kid-inappropriate content to pay for it, but that sets up an irreconcilable conflict of interest. These websites are going to want to minimize their costs, and everything they can do to reduce costs will make the system unacceptably worse. For example, they could choose only to set up accounts with IDPs that are local to the company that operates the server, meaning that anyone who lives somewhere else and wants to access that website is going to have to somehow get certified copies of e.g. their birth certificate and driver's license to IDPs on the other side of the planet. The alternative to having websites foot the bill for this is asking users to pay for it – meaning that, once again, we exclude poor people from the internet.

Finally, there's "governance": who runs this thing? In practice, the security and privacy guarantees of the CL protocol require two different kinds of wholly independent institutions: identity providers (who verify your documents), and certificate authorities (who issue cryptographic certificates based on those documents). If these two functions take place under one roof, the privacy guarantees of the system immediately evaporate.

An IDP's most important role is verifying documents and associating them with a specific person. But not all IDPs will be created equal, and people who wish to cheat the system will gravitate to the worst IDPs. However, lots of people who have no nefarious intent will also use these IDPs, merely because they are close by, or popular, or were selected at random. A decision to strike off an IDP and rescind its verifications will force lots of people – potentially millions of people – to start over with the whole business of identifying themselves, during which time they will be unable to access much of the web. There's no practical way for the average person to judge whether an IDP they choose is likely to be found wanting in the future.

So we can regulate IDPs, but who will do the regulation? Age verification laws affect people outside of a government's national territory – anyone seeking to access content on a webserver falls under age verification's remit. Remember, IDPs handle all kinds of sensitive data: do you want Russia, say, to have a say in deciding who can be an IDP and what disclosure rules you will have to follow?

To regulate IDPs (and certificate authorities), these entities will have to keep logs, which further compromises the privacy guarantees of the CL protocol.

Looming all of this is a problem with the CL protocol as being built on regulated entities, which is that CL is envisioned as a way to do all kinds of business, from opening a bank account to proving your vaccination status or your right to work or receive welfare. Authoritarian governments who order primary credential revocations of their political opponents could thoroughly and terrifyingly "unperson" them at the stroke of a pen.

The paper's conclusions provide a highly readable summary of these issues, which constitute a stinging rebuke to anyone contemplating age-verification schemes. These go well beyond the UK, and are in the works in Canada, Australia, the EU, Texas and Louisiana.

Age verification is an impossibility, and an impossibly terrible idea with impossibly vast consequences for privacy and the open web, as my EFF colleague Jason Kelley explained on the Malwarebytes podcast:

https://www.malwarebytes.com/blog/podcast/2025/08/the-worst-thing-for-online-rights-an-age-restricted-grey-web-lock-and-code-s06e16

Politicians – even nontechnical ones – can make good tech policy, provided they take expert feedback seriously (and distinguish it from self-interested industry lobbying).

When it comes to tech policy, wanting it badly is not enough. The fact that it would be really cool if we could get technology to do something has no bearing on whether we can actually get technology to do that thing. NERD HARDER! isn't a policy, it's a wish.

Wish in one hand and shit in the other and see which one will be full first:

https://www.reddit.com/r/etymology/comments/oqiic7/studying_the_origins_of_the_phrase_wish_in_one/


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 Lloyds of London to offer insurance for corporate open source users https://www.theregister.com/2005/08/12/opensource_indemnification/

#20yrsago Vampire novel as a work of first-rate science fiction https://memex.craphound.com/2005/08/14/vampire-novel-as-a-work-of-first-rate-science-fiction/

#10yrsago Chinese theme-park queue-jumping techniques http://www.capndesign.com/archives/2015/08/the_art_of_queue_jumping.php

#10yrsago Even when you turn on Win 10’s “privacy” flags, it still spies on you https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2015/08/even-when-told-not-to-windows-10-just-cant-stop-talking-to-microsoft/

#10yrsago Trickle-down kids’ TV: Sesame Street will air on HBO 9 months before PBS https://memex.craphound.com/2015/08/14/trickle-down-kids-tv-sesame-street-will-air-on-hbo-9-months-before-pbs/

#10yrsago Transgenic mouse company pays academics who cite them in papers https://www.badscience.net/2015/08/so-this-company-cyagen-is-paying-authors-for-citations-in-academic-papers/

#10yrsago Australian court hands copyright trolls their own asses https://torrentfreak.com/dallas-buyers-club-ruling-devastates-copyright-trolling-down-under-150814/

#10yrsago Student suspended for tweeting two words will get to sue his school, police chief https://www.techdirt.com/2015/08/14/school-police-chief-must-face-lawsuit-brought-student-suspended-10-days-tweeting-actually-yes/

#5yrsago Maidan in Belarus https://pluralistic.net/2020/08/14/shock-doctrine/#walkaway

#5yrsago NYC Street View, WPA edition https://pluralistic.net/2020/08/14/shock-doctrine/#wpa-nyc

#5yrsago NYC homeless lose bathroom access https://pluralistic.net/2020/08/14/shock-doctrine/#everybody-poops

#5yrsago The CARES Shock Doctrine https://pluralistic.net/2020/08/14/shock-doctrine/#shock-doctrine

#1yrago The one weird monopoly trick that gave us Walmart and Amazon and killed Main Street https://pluralistic.net/2024/08/14/the-price-is-wright/#enforcement-priorities


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)

  • Canny Valley: A limited edition collection of the collages I create for Pluralistic, self-published, September 2025
  • Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It, Farrar, Straus, Giroux, October 7 2025
    https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374619329/enshittification/

  • Unauthorized Bread: a middle-grades graphic novel adapted from my novella about refugees, toasters and DRM, FirstSecond, 2026

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

  • The Memex Method, Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2026

  • The Reverse-Centaur's Guide to AI, a short book about being a better AI critic, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2026



Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources:

Currently writing:

  • "The Reverse Centaur's Guide to AI," a short book for Farrar, Straus and Giroux about being an effective AI critic. (1049 words yesterday, 30960 words total).
  • 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:

Blog (no ads, tracking, or data-collection):

Pluralistic.net

Newsletter (no ads, tracking, or data-collection):

https://pluralistic.net/plura-list

Mastodon (no ads, tracking, or data-collection):

https://mamot.fr/@pluralistic

Medium (no ads, paywalled):

https://doctorow.medium.com/

Twitter (mass-scale, unrestricted, third-party surveillance and advertising):

https://twitter.com/doctorow

Tumblr (mass-scale, unrestricted, third-party surveillance and advertising):

https://mostlysignssomeportents.tumblr.com/tagged/pluralistic

"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

PDF

13.08.2025 à 19:14

Pluralistic: Maga's boss class think they are immune to American carnage (13 Aug 2025)

Cory Doctorow

Texte intégral (4594 mots)


Today's links



A red, angry mushroom cloud. Sitting atop it, surrounded by blue skies and fluffy clouds, is a smirking business-suited man reclining in an armchair. He wears a MAGA hat and reads a magazine turned to a page showing Donald Trump's face.

Maga's boss class think they are immune to American carnage (permalink)

It's not just that Texas DA Gocha Ramirez charged a woman with murder for having an abortion (something he wasn't allowed to do, even under Texas law); it's that Ramirez paid for his mistress's own abortion, after he impregnated her while having an affair with her and her sister:

https://archive.is/20250812192203/https://www.houstonchronicle.com/news/houston-texas/texas/article/abortion-murder-charge-district-attorney-20812966.php

This is perfect Magaism, as captured by Wilhoit's Law:

Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition, to wit: There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect.

https://crookedtimber.org/2018/03/21/liberals-against-progressives/#comment-729288

Maga is a coalition of turkeys voting for Christmas, and ax-sharpening farmers planning to make a meal out of them. The Maga base wants a bunch of stuff that the Maga elites would never tolerate, but that's OK, because the Maga elites are pretty sure they will never have to suffer under the laws they pass for others. Peter Thiel is happy to support a political movement whose dominant factions would like to put him – and every other gay man – in a concentration camp, because he's pretty sure that only applies to the poor gays, not the billionaire gays.

Financiers who back Trump know that they can afford to transport their daughters, wives, mistresses and the housekeepers, babysitters and teenagers they impregnate across state lines (or national borders) to get an abortion should the need arise. Their participation in Maga was a bet that after victory was attained, the base could be made to settle for performative cruelty against people other than them:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/01/06/how-the-sausage-gets-made/#governing-is-harder

The finance sector is the critical faction in Maga, because the financialized ideal is to accumulate wealth and power without exposure to any real-world risks. As Doug Rushkoff writes in Survival of the Richest, the finance move is to "go meta" – don't drive a taxi, buy a medallion and rent it to a taxi driver. Don't buy a medallion, start a rideshare company. Don't start a rideshare company, invest in a rideshare company. Don't invest in a rideshare company, buy options to invest in a rideshare company:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/09/13/collapse-porn/#collapse-porn

Crypto is as meta as it gets, so no wonder crypto bros are all-in on Trump, and no wonder Trump is all-in on crypto. As Hamilton Nolan writes:

Crypto coins… are pure speculative baubles, endowed with value only to the extent that you can convince another person to pay you more for them than you paid. They are a claim on nothing. They are the grandest embodiment of Greater Fool Theory ever invented by mankind.

https://www.hamiltonnolan.com/p/scams-and-bribery-are-becoming-the

Trump's tariffs are blowing up the economy and wiping out the agricultural sector. All those rural, Christmas-voting turkeys are getting it in the neck:

https://kdwalmsley.substack.com/p/tariffs-wiping-out-american-farmers

Trump's answer to this is to fire the government statisticians and replace them with work-for-hire fiction hacks who'll publish whatever numbers he tells them to:

https://prospect.org/blogs-and-newsletters/tap/2025-08-13-cooking-inflation-jobs-numbers-trump-bls/

You'd think that this would worry the finance sector, but fake numbers are actually good for finance, provided you're on the right side of them. Plenty of people got dynastically rich off of the fake numbers that propped up the pre-2008 housing bubble and the pre-2001 dotcom bubble. Those same people – and their ideological heirs – are now all-in on AI. It's impossible to overstate how structurally important AI is to the US economy. AI bubble companies now account for the value of 35% of the US stock market:

https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-haters-gui/

The instant that bubble pops, the US economy gets a 35% amputation. It's no surprise that, under Trump, the FTC and DoJ have brought the Biden administration's antitrust enforcement against Big Tech to a screeching halt:

https://www.citizen.org/article/deleting-enforcement-trump-big-tech-billion-report/

Nothing would be worse for the AI bubble than antitrust and securities-law enforcement. Companies that cook their balance sheets and suck up hundreds of billions in investment capital cannot function in a world with an orderly market system overseen by publicly accountable referees charged with keeping everyday people from having their life's savings stolen.

And indeed, Trump's enforcers are running away from their duties, as fast as they can. The latest wheeze is to change the rules so that you can "invest" your retirement savings in cryptocurrency and private equity funds (two tired old swindles whose ropers are scraping the barrel looking for new marks):

https://prospect.org/power/2025-06-13-retirement-crisis-401k-private-equity-scrambled/

Not that AI is much better. AI is hemorrhaging money and bringing in pennies:

https://www.wheresyoured.at/ai-is-a-money-trap/

And things are looking grimmer for AI by the day. It's not just that Openai's latest, "fifth-generation" model was such a spectacular flop that they've been forced to bring back the old version. Far more important is the utter uselessness of AI as a way of realizing cost-savings for the companies that try it:

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/08/13/business/ai-business-payoff-lags.html?unlocked_article_code=1.d08.Re3i.TDnOyE2FgyNJ&smid=url-share

After all, AI is implicitly a bet on firing workers. The hundreds of billions in investment, the trillions in valuation – these can't be realized by merely making workers' jobs easier or more satisfying. AI isn't a bet on making radiologists better at diagnosing solid-mass lung tumors: it's a bet on firing nearly all the radiologists and using the remainder to be "humans in the loop" for AI, in order to absorb the blame when you die of cancer. There are plenty of radiologists who might welcome AI as a tool they use alongside their traditional workflow – but their bosses aren't about to hand over vast fortunes just to make those workers happier.

This is why AI users often sound like they're using totally different technologies. Workers who get to decide whether and how to incorporate AI into their jobs are doubtless finding lots of utility and delight from the new tool. These workers are "centaurs" – people assisted by machines.

The workers who describe their on-the-job AI as a hellish monstrosity are being ordered to use AI, in workplaces where mass firings have terrified the survivors, who are told they must use the AI to make up for their jobless former colleagues. They are reverse-centaurs: machines assisted by human workers:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/05/27/rancid-vibe-coding/#class-war

There is no way that AI can be worth 35% of the economy if all it does is produce some happy centaurs. The only way that 35% bet pays off is if half the workers get fired and replaced by AI, which is a thing that AI pitchmen are promising, to the letter (a letter that is credulously repeated by the dutiful stenographers of the press):

https://www.marketingaiinstitute.com/blog/dario-amodei-ai-entry-level-jobs

The problem is that when businesses fire a bunch of workers and replace them with AI, they don't get the promised savings. Instead, they end up with a system that's so broken that all the wage savings are incinerated by the cost of making good on the AI's failures.

But for Maga's finance wing, this is all OK. They're going meta. Don't hire workers, hire AI. Don't hire AI, make AI. Don't make AI, invest in AI. So long as the number keeps going up, finance wins, even if that's only because every structurally important firm in America is being thimblerigged into filling their walls with AI-powered, immortal asbestos that is destined to transform their firms into Superfund sites.

They're betting that when the bubble finally bursts, that they will have become too big to fail, and will thus be in for the bailouts that rescued the finance sector in 2008. They think that so long as they curry favor with Trump, he'll make sure they're all OK, because they are the people the law protects, but does not bind.

This is a pretty good bet. Trump's a gangster capitalist, and fascists love a "dual state" – a system where the law is followed to the letter, except when it suits someone with the protection of the ruling clique to wipe their ass with it:

https://archive.ph/8T8of

And bailouts for finance crooks are a bipartisan consensus. Remember, it was Obama, not Bush, who took his Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner's advice to allow the bailed-out banks to steal their borrowers homes and trigger the foreclosure crisis, because this would "foam the runways" for the crashing banks:

https://www.salon.com/2014/05/14/this_man_made_millions_suffer_tim_geithners_sorry_legacy_on_housing/

The Obama wing of the party insists that they're the responsible adults in the room, the ones that will govern wisely and hold their gigadonors to account when they wreck the economy. They tell us Zohran Mamdani is – despite all evidence to the contrary – too unpopular to win an election:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/06/28/mamdani/#trustbusting

They ratfucked Katie Porter, one of finance's most savage and talented opponents, teaming up with the crypto-bros who are Maga's bagmen. Joke's on them, because it looks like Porter is gonna be California's next governor:

https://prospect.org/politics/2025-08-13-establishment-struggles-control-california-governors-race/

(I donated $100 I can't afford to her campaign; maybe you will donate, too?)

https://secure.actblue.com/donate/kpg_web

Maga's finance wing are convinced that the game is rigged in their favor – heads they win and the law protects them, tails we lose and the law binds us. But if there's one thing we know about gangster capitalism, it's that the capo isn't shy about seizing the fortunes of his various underbosses when the mood suits him. One day he's demanding that you quit your job as CEO, the next day he imposes a 15% tax on your products:

https://www.firstpost.com/world/trump-meets-intel-chief-calls-him-a-success-days-after-demanding-his-resignation-13923838.html

You can bet your ass that if it looks like Trump is gonna lose his grip on power, they'll come sleazing over the Democrats, demanding the defenstration of Mamdani, Porter, and anyone who wants a habitable and just world, rather than a system designed to convert the planet's resources to something that can be sequestered in a luxury bunker or on a private island.

Because for all that they moan about "wokeness," they wouldn't want their kids to have to tolerate a shitty boss; they wouldn't want their kids to carry an unwanted pregnancy to term. They wanna live out their cuckold fantasies in peace:

https://www.snopes.com/news/2025/06/02/stephen-miller-wife-musk/

They don't have any problem with living in a world where there's lip service to social values and Pricewaterhousecooper has a cringe Pride parade float. They'll happily save a couple bucks on the nanny's abortion by going down to the corner Planned Parenthood rather than flying her to Toronto on the private jet. All that performative cruelty was just a shuck to get some of the dumber surviving turkeys to pull the lever for Christmas. So long as they can live in a world where the law protects them, but does not bind them, they're happy as pigs in shit.


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)

#15yrsago Kenk: graphic novel humanizes Toronto’s most notorious bike-thief without apologising for him https://memex.craphound.com/2010/08/13/kenk-graphic-novel-humanizes-torontos-most-notorious-bike-thief-without-apologising-for-him/

#10yrsago Lenovo preloaded laptops with reformat-resistant perpetual crapware https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2015/08/lenovo-used-windows-anti-theft-feature-to-install-persistent-crapware/

#10yrsago Hilariously terrifying talk about security https://vimeo.com/135347162

#10yrsago Income inequality turns “neglected tropic diseases” into American diseases of “the poor living among the wealthy” https://web.archive.org/web/20150820045551/http://mosaicscience.com/story/america-tropical-disease

#10yrsago Rightscorp teams up with lawyers to mass-sue people who ignore blackmail letters https://torrentfreak.com/rightscorp-deal-turns-dmca-notices-into-piracy-lawsuits-150812/

#10yrsago Inside the Machine: a visual history of electronics, technology and art https://meganprelinger.com/book/inside-the-machine-art-and-invention-in-the-electronic-age/

#10yrsago Twitter snoop-requests from UK cops/gov’t more than double in 2015 https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-33882688

#10yrsago The failed writer who became NSA’s in-house “philosopher” https://theintercept.com/2015/08/11/surveillance-philosopher-nsa/

#10yrsago Internet filters considered harmful https://web.archive.org/web/20150809023346/http://knowledgequest.aasl.org/latest-internet-filtering-ala/

#10yrsago FBI opened a file on George Carlin for telling “bad taste” Hoover jokeshttps://www.muckrock.com/news/archives/2015/aug/13/george-carlins-fbi-file/

#10yrsago Caveman Science Fiction https://dresdencodak.com/2009/09/22/caveman-science-fiction/

#5yrsago Florida sheriff bans masks https://pluralistic.net/2020/08/13/better-to-have-loved/#death-cult

#5yrsago "Less lethal" is a euphemism, too https://pluralistic.net/2020/08/13/better-to-have-loved/#less-lethals

#5yrsago My origin story https://pluralistic.net/2020/08/13/better-to-have-loved/#neofuturians

#5yrsago Trump's Solicitor General says bribery is legal https://pluralistic.net/2020/08/12/failed-state/#backhanders-r-us

#5yrsago Payday lenders are CFPB's pandemic aid https://pluralistic.net/2020/08/12/failed-state/#cfpb-quislings

#5yrsago Sorting machines snatched from post offices https://pluralistic.net/2020/08/12/failed-state/#machine-breakers

#5yrsago Marvel's $0.10 mini-comics https://pluralistic.net/2020/08/12/failed-state/#tiny-heroes

#5yrsago Failed State https://pluralistic.net/2020/08/12/failed-state/#chris-brown

#5yrsago Mexico's terrible copyright is in trouble https://pluralistic.net/2020/08/12/failed-state/#viva-mexico

#1yrago The paradox of choice screens https://pluralistic.net/2024/08/12/defaults-matter/#make-up-your-mind-already

#1yrago Madeline Ashby's 'Glass Houses' https://pluralistic.net/2024/08/13/influencers/#affective-computing


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)

  • Canny Valley: A limited edition collection of the collages I create for Pluralistic, self-published, September 2025
  • Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It, Farrar, Straus, Giroux, October 7 2025
    https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374619329/enshittification/

  • Unauthorized Bread: a middle-grades graphic novel adapted from my novella about refugees, toasters and DRM, FirstSecond, 2026

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

  • The Memex Method, Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2026

  • The Reverse-Centaur's Guide to AI, a short book about being a better AI critic, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2026



Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources: Alice Taylor, Naked Capitalism (https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/).

Currently writing:

  • "The Reverse Centaur's Guide to AI," a short book for Farrar, Straus and Giroux about being an effective AI critic. (1086 words yesterday, 29915 words total).
  • 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:

Blog (no ads, tracking, or data-collection):

Pluralistic.net

Newsletter (no ads, tracking, or data-collection):

https://pluralistic.net/plura-list

Mastodon (no ads, tracking, or data-collection):

https://mamot.fr/@pluralistic

Medium (no ads, paywalled):

https://doctorow.medium.com/

Twitter (mass-scale, unrestricted, third-party surveillance and advertising):

https://twitter.com/doctorow

Tumblr (mass-scale, unrestricted, third-party surveillance and advertising):

https://mostlysignssomeportents.tumblr.com/tagged/pluralistic

"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

PDF
6 / 10
 Persos A à L
Carmine
Mona CHOLLET
Anna COLIN-LEBEDEV
Julien DEVAUREIX
Cory DOCTOROW
Lionel DRICOT (PLOUM)
EDUC.POP.FR
Marc ENDEWELD
Michel GOYA
Hubert GUILLAUD
Gérard FILOCHE
Alain GRANDJEAN
Hacking-Social
Samuel HAYAT
Dana HILLIOT
François HOUSTE
Tagrawla INEQQIQI
Infiltrés (les)
Clément JEANNEAU
Paul JORION
Michel LEPESANT
Frédéric LORDON
 
 Persos M à Z
Henri MALER
Christophe MASUTTI
Jean-Luc MÉLENCHON
Romain MIELCAREK
MONDE DIPLO (Blogs persos)
Richard MONVOISIN
Corinne MOREL-DARLEUX
Timothée PARRIQUE
Thomas PIKETTY
VisionsCarto
Yannis YOULOUNTAS
Michaël ZEMMOUR
LePartisan.info
 
  Numérique
Christophe DESCHAMPS
Louis DERRAC
Olivier ERTZSCHEID
Olivier EZRATY
Framablog
Tristan NITOT
Francis PISANI
Pixel de Tracking
Irénée RÉGNAULD
Nicolas VIVANT
 
  Collectifs
Arguments
Bondy Blog
Dérivation
Dissidences
Mr Mondialisation
Palim Psao
Paris-Luttes.info
ROJAVA Info
 
  Créatifs / Art / Fiction
Nicole ESTEROLLE
Julien HERVIEUX
Alessandro PIGNOCCHI
XKCD
🌓