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🖋 Cory DOCTOROW
Science fiction author, activist and journalist
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PLURALISTIC

▸ les 30 dernières parutions

18.09.2026 à 09:45

Pluralistic: Textured (18 Sep 2026)

Cory Doctorow

Texte intégral (3760 mots)


Today's links


A series of high-magnification views of a seemingly smooth human heart valve, revealing the rough texture under extreme close-up.

Textured (permalink)

I'm going to come right out and say it: statistical extrapolation is fine. One of the most useful ways to understand the present and anticipate the future is to measure the things that happened in the past, find the correlations among them, and extrapolate likely future outcomes from those correlations.

There is nothing wrong with this method. It is a productive and reliable way to uncover the causal relationships between natural phenomena, and to find ways to influence the world. If you discover that A reliably causes B, you can do A whenever you want B to happen.

However, the fact that this method works for some things does not mean that it works for all things. Naive, "theory-free" statistical extrapolation (the method that LLMs rely on) has hard limits. LLMs are very good at finding areas of statistical regularity and producing new material that matches this statistical picture: you can use an LLM to produce strings of words that are statistically indistinguishable from sentences and strings of pixels that are statistically indistinguishable from images.

The single most exciting and interesting thing about LLMs is how well this works. Call an LLM "a word-guessing program" and AI boosters will accuse you of reductionism. But the LLM is just guessing words, and the remarkable and amazing thing about this fact is the sheer plausibility of the sentences this method produces.

Before the rise of LLMs, nearly everyone overestimated the statistical irregularity of routine sentences. Our intuition insists that the world is textured, but it turns out that there's far more smoothness in the distribution of natural phenomena, including the actions that we take of our own free will. The same goes for image generation, music generation, and other output from "generative AI" programs.

When I call an LLM a word-guessing program, that's not a dismissal. It's an acknowledgment of the degree to which the tactic of guessing words has exceeded all expectations in the production of sensible-seeming, conversational-seeming sentences and paragraphs. It's all right to be surprised by how similar the output from a conscious being and a word-guessing program can be. It's surprising!

Since the 1950s, researchers have applied the "AI" label to an incoherent grab-bag of technologies that share one characteristic: each one is designed to perform tasks that are considered to be the province of conscious minds. Each one of these "AI" technologies has failed in important ways, but the one way in which every single one of them has succeeded is in refining our own understanding of which things are truly and solely the product of conscious intervention.

The thing we're calling "AI" this year has also succeeded in this way. We've learned that the sentences and other communiques produced by conscious minds have more statistical regularity than previously understood. Again, it's okay to be excited after learning this fact about yourself and your species and its endeavors.

But there are hard limits to the usefulness of these methods, and the fact that AI bosses and boosters can't or won't acknowledge this has led to the current cul-de-sac in which we're spending trillions and emitting gigatons of carbon to produce diminishing returns, even as we fire an army of workers and replace them with defective chatbots that can't do their jobs.

That's because the statistical regularity of the natural world and our activities in it are the backdrop against which the statistical surprises occur, and it's those surprises that make all the difference.

Some weeks ago, I recorded a podcast with a host who was a giant AI booster who claimed that since he could predict what his wife was going to say, and the LLM-powered predictive typing on her phone could predict what she was going to say, that her phone understood her the way he did. This is an obviously repellent idea and you have to feel for this guy's poor wife.

And also: the fact that you can use a statistical lookup table to predict what words someone is going to say doesn't mean you understand them, a fact that you will learn the minute that person says something surprising, like "I want a divorce."

If your "understanding" of your partner is entirely grounded in a statistical record of their utterances and deeds, such that when they do A, you anticipate that B will come next, you will have no ability to cope with a surprise like "I want a divorce." To handle an "I want a divorce" event, you need to actually have a theory about your partner, about how they feel and why, and the factors that might cause that to change.

Surprises are everything. A surprise is the seam of gold in the wall of quartz; it's the friend who confesses they've fallen in love with you; it's the moment when you and the party and the GM all come up with an amazing way to kill the dragon and then roll a natural 20. Surprise is the difference between Pi and 3.11111111111111111111111111111… Dylan going electric is a surprise. A surprise is Miles Davis choosing not to play a note in a phrase. A surprise is Picasso's cubism and Kahlo's mustache.

It's a mistake to interpret the statistical regularity of your life with your spouse as meaning that they're indistinguishable from the output of an LLM. The LLM's statistical picture is always incomplete: it sands off, rounds down or truncates the final couple decimal places, and those smoothings make all the difference, the way the pinch of salt makes all the difference to the chocolate.

Lots of things seem smooth to the naked eye: glass, stainless steel, ice, polished wood. Put those "smooth" materials under a high-magnification microscope and you discover a whole world of tiny irregularities, a texture to reality. Most of the time, you can treat these things as "smooth," but that roughness matters: it's the fracture line the glass cracks on, the place where the ice starts to melt, the grain where the wood starts to warp. The danger of forgetting that your "smooth" thing only seems smooth is that you'll only know how to make it work, and will be totally at sea when it fails.

You can scan the night sky with a radio telescope night after night and only find things that fit with our existing theories of the universe. But you keep scanning, because somewhere out there is a surprise that will open up a deep mystery:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wow!_signal

With LLMs, we have invented a machine that uncovers the statistical regularities in our seemingly irregular world, and we have learned that the roughness is rarer than our intuition led us to believe. This machine will also produce statistically regular, smooth output that has the seeming of understanding and consciousness. But – by definition – it can't contain any of our future surprises, because it's just trained on the things we already know, and if we knew about something, it wouldn't be a surprise anymore.

(Image: Zhaoxing Wang, Kunpeng Wang & Yan Xu, CC BY 4.0, 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)

#25yrsago RIP Mr Dressup https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/mr-dressup-ernie-coombs-dies-after-stroke-1.294923

#20yrsago Diebold voting machines opened with hotel minibar key https://blog.citp.princeton.edu/2006/09/18/hotel-minibar-keys-open-diebold-voting-machines/

#15yrsago Russian oligarch sucker-punches rival billionaire on talk show https://www.theguardian.com/media/2011/sep/18/alexander-lebedev-russian-tv-punchup

#15yrsago HOWTO track down a con-artist https://web.archive.org/web/20110923143613/http://www.popehat.com/2011/09/10/anatomy-of-a-scam-investigation-chapter-one/

#10yrsago International Criminal Court in the Hague will now try CEOs https://web.archive.org/web/20160919000813/http://www.telesurtv.net/english/news/CEOs-Can-Now-Be-Prosecuted-Like-War-Criminals-at-the-Hague-20160916-0013.html

#10yrsago Italy on the verge of the stupidest censorship law in European history https://media.boingboing.net/wp-content/uploads/2016/09/transcription.pdf

Upcoming appearances (permalink)

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


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

Recent appearances (permalink)


A grid of my books with Will Stahle covers..

Latest books (permalink)


A cardboard book box with the Macmillan logo.

Upcoming books (permalink)

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

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

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

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


Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources:

Currently writing:

  • “Once Is Enemy Action,” a science fiction novel about the origins of modern technofascism. Today's words: 539 (16530 total).

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

  • A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING

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

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https://pluralistic.net/plura-list

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https://mamot.fr/@pluralistic

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https://bsky.app/profile/doctorow.pluralistic.net

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

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

ISSN: 3066-764X

PDF

17.09.2026 à 09:35

Pluralistic: On the sincerity of AI bosses (17 Sep 2026)

Cory Doctorow

Texte intégral (3872 mots)


Today's links


A robotic claw grips a bundle of arrows; in the background are the pink folds of a human brain.

On the sincerity of AI bosses (permalink)

The word "fascist" comes from the Latin fasces, a bundle of sticks; the symbology here is that a single twig is weak and brittle, but bundled together, many twigs are strong. It's a sound political theory, because in politics, coalitions are everything:

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

The problem with fascism isn't the idea of bundling together different groups: it's the incoherence of that bundle. The fascist coalition is a collection of people who want mutually incompatible things. When one part of the fascist coalition wins (say, if Nick Fuentes's neo-Nazis triumph), the other faction loses (Fuentes gets to murder Stephen Miller and turn his skin into a lampshade). The fascist coalition is a coalition of enemies who all hate each other and dream of exterminating one another, held in check by a strongman who uses flattery, favors and threats to keep a lid clamped tight on this pressure-cooker:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/07/29/bondi-and-domination/#superjove

In this regard, fascism is simply one end of the continuum of conservative movements, which are always about finding a way to "get turkeys to vote for Christmas." That's because, at root, conservativism is the belief that some minority (rich people, white people, bosses, men, etc) were born to rule and everyone else was born to be ruled over:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/07/08/wilhoitian/#human-rights-v-property-rights

By definition, "a minority that was born to rule" can't win an election, because they are a minority. Conservatives win electoral races by convincing people they intend to oppress, cheat and maim to vote for them through appeals to fear and hatred (racism, transphobia, sexism, anti-communism, etc):

https://pluralistic.net/2022/03/09/turkeys-voting-for-christmas/#culture-wars

Conservative political victories are always followed by economic misery for the conservative base, because the senior partners in the conservative coalition are the bosses who get richer by making workers poorer. Conservative rulers try to offset this with spectacular acts of cruelty against disfavored minorities, but this tactic only carries so far. Eventually, the electorate notices that despite terrorizing migrants and trans people, diesel is now $10/gallon and the guy responsible is now $1.4b richer than he was before the election:

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cvgmv98ez3zo

Workers and bosses aren't the only fracture line in the conservative coalition. Within conservativism, there are leaders who want mutually incompatible things and abhor one another: the white nationalists hate the Zionists; the misogynists hate the TERFs; the imperialists hate the isolationists:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/07/14/fracture-lines/#disassembly-manual

These fracture lines can be papered over while things are good, but they crack when things go wrong, and this is even more true of fascist movements than it is of other conservative coalitions.

This is true of all fascists, so it's true of technofascists, too. The best-ever reference work on technofascism was just published: Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor's End-Times Fascism, which unpacks the apocalyptic ideology that dominates Silicon Valley, especially the AI cultists:

https://naomiklein.org/end-times-fascism/

In a recent interview about the book with the QAA podcast, Astra Taylor explained how the contradictions of the technofascist movement are to be expected, because fascism is always an "incoherent bundle":

https://soundcloud.com/qanonanonymous/end-times-fascism-feat-naomi

Understanding technofascism's inherent incoherence is vital to making sense of the chaos roiling the AI cult at this moment, wherein you have AI people insisting that there must be a moratorium on AI development lest the word-guessing program awaken and devour the human race. This week on the Better Offline podcast, Ed Zitron discussed the outlandish, science-fiction inspired cult beliefs that dominate AI boardrooms with Adam Becker and Cal Newport:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0oVSnaINJ30

Becker is well-placed to discuss this. Like the hosts of the QAA podcast, he started paying close attention to the bizarre beliefs of conspiratorialists long before the rest of us realized that no matter how preposterous their certainty about the imminent machine intelligence Singularity was, these beliefs are sincerely held by some very wealthy and driven people. Becker's 2025 book More Everything Forever is a tremendous field guide to these delusions and their profound philosophical and technical deficits:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/04/22/vinges-bastards/#cyberpunk-is-a-warning-not-a-suggestion

In the interview, Newport dismisses the theory that the warnings about imminent AI apocalypse are self-serving criti-hype intended to serve as both marketing pitch and regulatory capture gambit, through which the hyperscalers get the government to step in to interrupt the beggar-thy-neighbor doom-loop:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/09/16/beggar-thy-neighbor/#red-queens-race

Rather, Newport says that these people sincerely believe that they are about to immanentize the eschaton and are pants-wettingly terrified about the AI god they will conjure forth any day now. He makes a good case for this, pointing to the long history of words and deeds on the part of various AI bosses that suggest that they are true believers who are genuinely high on their own supply.

I don't doubt that there are sincere believers in the AI technofascist coalition, but that does not preclude the possibility that they share their boardrooms and executive rows with cynics for whom this is all a shuck, a scare-story to convince the rubes that their modestly useful utility software is really a nascent "superintelligence" and thus capable of replacing all their workers, which means they should fire all those workers and start sending their salaries to AI companies.

This is an example of one of those "incoherent fascist bundles." Just as Mike Pence (a misogynist Christofascist) was happy to share the White House with Trump (a godless pedophile rapist), AI companies can and do thrive by filling their executive ranks with Singularity-crazed maniacs and sharp operators who are happy to spread this superstitious nonsense if it helps them pump up their stock swindle.

Each group thinks they're using the other one, and they are…up to a point. When it comes to the current AI nonsense, that point came when Nvidia's best customers started to demand that everyone stop buying Nvidia's products, whereupon Nvidia's CEO suddenly remembered that his chips weren't being used to make god, but rather, to power regular-degular "cloud software":

https://cxotoday.com/governance/nvidias-jensen-huang-crosses-swords-with-ai-labs-over-regulation/

When it comes to technofascists (and all fascists) this kind of division isn't an exception, it's the rule. The billionaires behind AI are split between solipsists who don't believe other people are any more real than bots; and cynics who think that bosses will be easy marks for a sales pitch that sees them replacing mouthy workers with pliable chatbots:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/08/03/andor/#either

To be a senior member of the fascist coalition, you must be capable of both sincere belief while not openly dismissing your fellow senior members' contradictory sincere beliefs. Behind closed doors, they may make fun of each other (or fantasize about murdering one another), and they may periodically erupt into plots to oust one another from the coalition. But every one of them must be able to go along to get along…

Most of the time.

Until they don't.

Hey look at this (permalink)


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

Object permanence (permalink)

#25yrsago 9/11 v spam https://memex.craphound.com/2001/09/17/through-most-of-last-week/

#25yrsago PalmOS picture of the WTC collapse https://web.archive.org/web/20010920145653/https://ne.nikkeibp.co.jp/english/2001/09/0914pda_watch.html

#25yrsago Wifi emanating from the WTC rubble https://web.archive.org/web/20010916231834/http://dailynews.yahoo.com/h/nm/20010916/tc/attack_wert_dc_2.html

#15yrsago Silvio Berlusconi prostitution-ring wiretaps: sex with eight women in one night, “I’m only prime minister in my spare time” https://www.theguardian.com/world/2011/sep/18/silvio-berlusconi-wiretaps-sex-parties

#15yrsago Tesco threatens journalist with arrest for writing down prices https://www.theguardian.com/money/blog/2011/sep/16/tesco-shopping-supermarket-prices-check-writing

#1yrago AI psychosis and the warped mirror https://pluralistic.net/2025/09/17/automating-gang-stalking-delusion/#paranoid-androids

#1yrago Conspiratorialism's causal chain https://pluralistic.net/2025/09/17/cause-and-effect/#things-have-causes

Upcoming appearances (permalink)

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


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

Recent appearances (permalink)


A grid of my books with Will Stahle covers..

Latest books (permalink)


A cardboard book box with the Macmillan logo.

Upcoming books (permalink)

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

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

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

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


Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources:

Currently writing:

  • “Once Is Enemy Action,” a science fiction novel about the origins of modern technofascism. Today's words: 501 (15980 total).

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

  • A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING

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

Bluesky (no ads, possible tracking and data-collection):

https://bsky.app/profile/doctorow.pluralistic.net

Medium (no ads, paywalled):

https://doctorow.medium.com/

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

16.09.2026 à 09:52

Pluralistic: How an AI moratorium can save AI bosses (16 Sep 2026)

Cory Doctorow

Texte intégral (4105 mots)


Today's links


Tenniel's 'Red Queen's Race' engraving from Carroll's 'Through the Looking Glass.' It has been altered so that the Red Queen and Alice now have the heads of 1940s pulp robots. The image has been hand-tinted.

How an AI moratorium can save AI bosses (permalink)

There's lots of reasons to believe the "hyperscaler" model of AI can never be profitable, and not just because of its gigantic expenditures and negative unit economics (the companies lose money with every new customer and every new use, and they lose more money with each generation of their products):

https://pluralistic.net/2025/09/27/econopocalypse/#subprime-intelligence

The industry strenuously denies this, of course. They insist that they are only days away from turning their balance sheets right side up. All they have to do is fix those unit economics, then they can make back the cost of producing their models by selling access to them. The problem is that the evidence for those improving unit economics is weak, while the evidence that they're faking their finances is very strong:

https://www.wheresyoured.at/exclusive-openai-financials/

Same goes for the claims that these companies are already profitable. Dig into those claims and you'll learn they depend on a new, special meaning of "profitable" that does not match the generally accepted accounting procedures (GAAP) definition, which is to say, these companies are claiming that they are so cool that their profitability can only be measured using a novel, secret form of mathematics:

https://futurism.com/future-society/anthropic-claude-profit-ai-safety-development-finances

This is the same wheeze that Softbank tried with Wework. Speaking in my capacity as an author of internationally bestselling technothrillers about accounting fraud, I can tell you that it was accounting fraud then, and it's accounting fraud now:

https://www.ndtv.com/world-news/how-wework-went-from-being-47-billion-start-up-to-bankrupt-in-3-years-4552627

But let's give the AI bosses a momentary benefit of the doubt and stipulate that they are on the verge of acquiring positive unit-economics, which will let them start to pay off the massive expenditures they incurred by training their models and enter their long-anticipated profitability phase, when the money-furnaces they've been running for years turn into money printers, to the delight of the investors who've supplied the vast bales of $100 bills the companies have been shoveling into their models' coalboxes for years now.

Basically, they're saying, "Sure, it cost us a lot to get these rails laid, but now that the railroad is complete we can start running cars over them and make a profit." Unfortunately (for bosses and investors), this proposition is every bit as dubious as their claims to improving unit economics.

To understand why, just look at what happened the last time Anthropic shipped a major Claude update. Virtually overnight, all of OpenAI's best customers stopped paying for ChatGPT and started paying for Claude. That's because chatbots have very low switching costs: going from one chatbot to another costs almost nothing:

https://www.businessinsider.com/why-ai-startup-founder-switched-chatgpt-to-claude-2026-3

Everyone using AI knows this to be true. When I walked the floor at CES last year, I asked every AI-powered gadget maker, "What will you do if your chatbot provider jacks up their prices?" and to a one, they said, "No problem, we've designed this thing so that we can switch chatbots with the click of a mouse":

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WfhELBX8Jbs

That means that you can't just "build the railroad and run the cars over it." The minute you finish your railroad, your rivals will announce that they've got a new, adjacent railroad that's even faster than yours, and you will have to get to work laying another set of tracks to support even faster trains.

This is a disaster all around: the AI companies are locked in a Red Queen's Race, a fatal beggar-thy-neighbor doom-loop. The only way they could escape that trap is by signing a nonaggression pact amongst themselves promising not to compete anymore. But there's two giant problems with this: first, it is incredibly, fantastically illegal under antitrust law, because it represents a conspiracy among the dominant players to cease to compete with one another, and; second, it leaves the field open for the further development of Chinese "open weight" models that customers can run on their own modest, low-powered computers, which are presently lagging the US "frontier models" by a mere four months:

https://arstechnica.com/ai/2026/09/exclusive-open-chinese-models-close-gap-with-silicon-valleys-frontier-ai-models/

Even if you don't trust Chinese models, you can extract their training through a process called distillation and transfer them to models you do trust:

https://www.anthropic.com/news/detecting-and-preventing-distillation-attacks

But what if there was a way for the AI companies to get government permission to violate antitrust law and cease to compete with one another, and secure a ban on the use of Chinese open weight models? Turns out, there is a way to call time on the Red Queen's Race: merely insist that you are on the verge of teaching so many words to the word-guessing program that it will wake up and devour us all, and call for a ban on "superintelligence":

https://www.foxbusiness.com/technology/microsoft-ceo-says-superintelligence-must-remain-under-human-control

Once the government stipulates that "superintelligence risk" is an existential crisis, it must grant the hyperscalers a consent decree absolving them from any violations of antitrust law stemming from a conspiracy to halt direct competition with one another:

https://stephaniekelton.substack.com/p/brer-rabbit-and-ai-extinction

Freaking out about "superintelligence" is a canonical example of "criti-hype," where critics repeat boosters' claims but append, "(and that's bad)" to them:

https://peoples-things.ghost.io/youre-doing-it-wrong-notes-on-criticism-and-technology-hype/

Remember, the tech giants want to stop competing. Mark Zuckerberg and Sudar Pichai colluded to rig the ad-market with a secret program called "Jedi Blue":

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

Every year, Google sends Apple a bribe of more than $20b in exchange for Apple not entering the search market:

https://appleworld.today/2025/09/google-wont-be-barred-from-entering-into-search-agreements-with-companies-like-apple/

And the biggest tech companies in the world had a secret "no poach" agreement where they illegally promised not to try to hire one another's top engineers by offering them raises:

https://chicagounbound.uchicago.edu/law_and_economics/1033/

The only thing Peter Thiel hates more than the Antichrist (spoiler, he's just talking about Greta Thunberg) is "wasteful competition":

https://www.youtube.com/shorts/WmRC_NQh6aQ

When an industry that is eating itself alive through "hyperscaling" demands that the government bless a conspiracy to halt competition and ban open source alternatives, you should be suspicious. When that industry is pursuing a venture that has lost more money than any other venture in human history, you should be very suspicious, especially when its "rogue AI hacking" story turns out to be a story about how a hacking tool did exactly what it was designed to do:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/09/12/god-in-the-box/#llms-are-fake

Peter Thiel is right: AI is full of wasteful competition, but not because competition is a waste – rather, it's because the companies are competing to convince people to use their expensive products for the cheapest applications.

Elon Musk's SpaceX IPO depended on him losing billions of dollars by letting the world's stupidest chuds produce mountains of child porn and images of Sonic the Hedgehog with giant boobs. That is indeed wasteful (and reprehensible).

That doesn't mean we should allow the AI companies to get the government to bless their conspiracy in restraint of trade; rather, it militates for having the government investigate them for securities fraud, trafficking in child sex abuse material, election finance violations, and a long list of other crimes and misdemeanors.

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)

#25yrago Flash Worms: Thirty Seconds to Infect the Internet https://web.archive.org/web/20011024012950/http://www.silicondefense.com/flash/

#20yrsago This Film is Not Rated – must-see doc about MPAA ratings https://memex.craphound.com/2006/09/16/this-film-is-not-rated-must-see-doc-about-mpaa-ratings/

#15yrsago Chinese netizens angered by “princelings” — spoiled children of the rich and powerful https://edition.cnn.com/2011/09/16/world/asia/china-elite-children/index.html?iref=allsearch

#15yrsago LibDems get to vote on copyright reform, but who inserted the clause saying downloading should be a criminal act? https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2011/sep/16/libdems-vote-copyright-reform

#15yrsago Insurer: music-festival tragedy caused by illegal downloading https://twitpic.com/6l5ap2

#10yrsago US religion is worth $1.2T/year, more than America’s 10 biggest tech companies, combined https://web.archive.org/web/20161019095803/http://www.religjournal.com/pdf/ijrr12003.pdf

#10yrsago Geographically representative map of the London Underground https://web.archive.org/web/20240813111321/https://www.citymonitor.ai/analysis/map-londons-tube-shows-disused-stations-track-layout-and-more-2429/

#10yrsago Republican election officials block restrictions on foreign spending in US elections https://web.archive.org/web/20160916181403/https://theintercept.com/2016/09/16/fec-republicans-kill-attempt-to-block-foreign-money-in-u-s-elections/

#10yrsago Tommy Chong asks Obama to pardon him for his bullshit drug paraphernalia bust https://web.archive.org/web/20210720131834/https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/lifestyle/lifestyle-news/tommy-chong-seeks-obamas-pardon-928962/

#10yrsago Week two for the largest prison strike in US history https://web.archive.org/web/20160916143157/https://theintercept.com/2016/09/16/the-largest-prison-strike-in-u-s-history-enters-its-second-week/

#5yrsago Criminal entrepreneurship in Mexico’s high-tech drug cartels https://web.archive.org/web/20160917133449/https://motherboard.vice.com/read/how-drug-cartels-operate-like-silicon-valley-startups

#1yrago No such thing as selective censorship resistance https://pluralistic.net/2025/09/16/too-many-throats-to-choke/#pluralism-is-resiliency

Upcoming appearances (permalink)

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


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

Recent appearances (permalink)


A grid of my books with Will Stahle covers..

Latest books (permalink)


A cardboard book box with the Macmillan logo.

Upcoming books (permalink)

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

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

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

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


Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources:

Currently writing:

  • “Once Is Enemy Action,” a science fiction novel about the origins of modern technofascism. Today's words: 555 (15487 total).

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

  • A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING

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

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

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

ISSN: 3066-764X

PDF

15.09.2026 à 09:27

Pluralistic: Everybody pees (15 Sep 2026)

Cory Doctorow

Texte intégral (3613 mots)


Today's links

  • Everybody pees: Even Jeff Bezos.
  • Hey look at this: Delights to delectate.
  • Object permanence: Zune won't play Microsoft files; Papercraft 1:1 Mustang; Third gender for Aussie passports; France hacked Canada; EC v links; Welcome to Night Vale; University spends librarian's bequest on football scoreboard; Everything is always broken.
  • Upcoming appearances: Budapest, Edmonton, Boston, South Bend, Hudson, Calgary, Winnipeg, Vancouver, Victoria, Ottawa.
  • Recent appearances: Where I've been.
  • Latest books: You keep readin' em, I'll keep writin' 'em.
  • Upcoming books: Like I said, I'll keep writin' 'em.
  • Colophon: All the rest.


A mason jar of piss with Jeff Bezos's laughing head submerged in it.

Everybody pees (permalink)

Jeff Bezos and I are very different people. For one thing, he is a sociopathic billionaire who built his fortune by monopolizing bookselling while I am a penniless author of books. He was born in 1964 and is 62; I was born in 1971 and am 55.

We've met a few times and even corresponded some in Amazon's early years, though I haven't had contact with him in decades. Despite that very minor acquaintanceship and that long gap in our message history, I can tell you one thing I know for sure about Jeffrey Preston Bezos: he needs to pee all the time.

How do I know? Because peeing all the time is an inescapable feature of aging, and Bezos has eight years on me, and I have to pee all the time. Jeff Bezos, like all older people, must contend with a progressively weakening bladder. Honestly, it's a small price to pay in exchange for the everyday miracle of growing older (as opposed to perishing).

The only reason I mention Jeff Bezos's increasingly insistent bladder here is because of how hard it is to reconcile the very different circumstances of Bezos's bladder with the bladders of the hundreds of thousands of Amazon delivery and warehouse workers who are not allowed to pee at all. Amazon's warehouse and delivery workers are "reverse centaurs," monitored by a constellation of apps and cameras, and they are severely punished for falling behind in the cadence set by Amazon's software, and that robot timekeeper does not make allowances for pee breaks:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/10/23/traveling-salesman-solution/

This isn't a secret, and Amazon's come in for a lot of flak over it. But Amazon's "solution" is to add more penalties for peeing. Drivers who return to the depot with urine-filled bottles in their vans are punished as severely as they would be if they stopped to find a toilet. Thing is, the mere fact that your boss's robot says you're not allowed to pee does not matter to your bladder or kidneys, and when you gotta go, you gotta go.

That's why the roads leading to Amazon's warehouses are lined with pee bottles that drivers have hucked out of their windows before arriving at the loading dock. There are so many of these that the British media activist Oobah Butler was able to harvest them and offer a line of "bitter lemon energy drinks" on Amazon made from bottled driver piss. The drink was an Amazon bestseller and the company even asked Butler if he wanted them to help him scale up his deliveries:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/10/20/release-energy/#the-bitterest-lemon

The fact that Bezos needs to piss and also the fact that he commands an army of hundreds of thousands of workers who are prohibited from pissing really supports my hypothesis that billionaires don't really believe that other people are real. If Jeff Bezos believed that when his drivers needed to pee that it felt the same as when he needed to pee, Jeff Bezos would let those drivers pee:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/05/13/vibe-governance/#k-hole

"Needing to pee" is a bedrock of the shared condition of existence itself, extending beyond humans to our "horizontal brothers and sisters" (John Muir's delightful name for the other animals we share this planet with). Anyone who's ever had a dog understands this. I'm not really a dog person, but when I meet a dog that really needs to be let out of the house, my bladder twinges in sympathy. When I contemplate the kidneys and bladders of Bezos's drivers and packers, I get a sharp, persistent ache that starts about an inch below my navel.

I think billionaire solipsism is inevitable. The mere fact of dealing with people as mass statistical abstractions – hundreds of thousands of Amazon workers, billions of social media users and Google searchers – turns the majority of the world's other humans into phantasms, defective bots whose bothaviors are maddeningly non-deterministic and sub-optimal.

Add to that the fact that harvesting billions of dollars requires you to inflict pain on thousands or even millions of those phantasms whose money, privacy and labor you've extracted, and it's easy to see how you'd end up in a world where you can't bear to contemplate the fact that other people's pain is as real as your own. Solipsism is a deadly, conscience-eroding occupational hazard of the rich and powerful. No visitor to Epstein Island could have made the visit if the pain of those young women was as real to them as the pain of their own daughters and friends.

There's a short line from this solipsism to billionaires' enthusiasm for AI. When you don't think other people are really real, it's easy to believe that they can be swapped out for chatbots. Mark Zuckerberg's quest to replace your friends with chatbots makes sense once you realize that for Mark Zuckerberg, you and your friends are already just balky, shitty chatbots:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/08/06/sin-is-when/#you-treat-people-as-things

The belief that bots can teach your kids or counsel you through your psychological problems or look after your health concerns is perfectly consistent with the belief that you're more-or-less a bot, and also that the teachers, doctors and shrinks you rely on are also basically bots:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/07/28/hitl-ers/#ai-ai-oh

The great crisis of oligarchy is not merely that it transfers power from democratically accountable public servants and elected representatives to oligarchs. The real crisis is that attaining oligarch status is incompatible with viewing other people as real. That's how we ended up with the richest man on earth slaughtering hundreds of thousands of the world's poorest children for the lulz:

https://hsph.harvard.edu/news/usaid-shutdown-has-led-to-hundreds-of-thousands-of-deaths/

Everybody pees. When I die, when Jeff Bezos dies, and when you die, our bladders will give way and we will pee ourselves. A declaration of war on other people's right to pee is a declaration of war on humanity itself.

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 Microsoft Zune won’t play purchased Microsoft media files https://web.archive.org/web/20061014104638/https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/archives/004910.php

#15yrsago Papercraft 1:1 model of a 1969 Mustang, accurate to the smallest component https://web.archive.org/web/20110923151701/http://www.jonathanbrand.com/images/in_progress/paper_car/motor/pages/motor01.htm

#15yrsago Third gender option added to Australian passports https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-pacific-14926598

#10yrsago French spy boss admits France cyberattacked Iran, Canada, Spain, Greece, Norway, Ivory Coast, Algeria, and others https://medium.com/@msuiche/nsa-hacked-france-in-2012-414d8de4bdcf#.e4hnvyj6s

#10yrsago Elizabeth Warren to FBI director: now that investigations are fair game, what about banksters? https://s3.documentcloud.org/documents/3107565/EMBARGOED-Warren-FBI-FCIC-Letter.pdf

#10yrsago European Commission wants to break the web, give publishers the right to charge for inbound links https://felixreda.eu/2016/09/attack-on-link/

#10yrsago Machine learning system can descramble pixelated/blurred redactions 83% of the time https://arxiv.org/pdf/1609.00408v2

#10yrsago Welcome to Night Vale: scripts and notes from podcasting’s eeriest drama https://memex.craphound.com/2016/09/15/welcome-to-night-vale-scripts-and-notes-from-podcastings-eeriest-drama/

#10yrsago UNH will spend $1M of librarian’s bequest on a football scoreboard https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2016/09/15/critics-question-spending-librarians-donation-scoreboard

#5yrsago Everything is Always Broken, and That’s Okay https://pluralistic.net/2021/09/15/everything-is-always-broken-and-thats-okay/

Upcoming appearances (permalink)

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


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

Recent appearances (permalink)


A grid of my books with Will Stahle covers..

Latest books (permalink)


A cardboard book box with the Macmillan logo.

Upcoming books (permalink)

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

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

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

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


Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources:

Currently writing:

  • “Once Is Enemy Action,” a science fiction novel about the origins of modern technofascism. Today's words: 513 (14905 total).

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

  • A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING

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

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https://pluralistic.net/plura-list

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https://bsky.app/profile/doctorow.pluralistic.net

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

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

ISSN: 3066-764X

PDF

14.09.2026 à 13:02

Pluralistic: But do you use keyboard shortcuts? (14 Sep 2026)

Cory Doctorow

Texte intégral (3573 mots)


Today's links


A worn out keyboard, cropped over the bottom left modifier keys. Posed in the image is a bearded prophet in Bronze Age robes, arms uplifted in worship.

But do you use keyboard shortcuts? (permalink)

Of all the weird recurring motifs of the stories people tell me about the AI labor wars, the weirdest is when bosses demand to be reassured that their contractors and workers will absolutely use AI to get the job done.

That's weird for the obvious reason that for most people "AI" is a synonym for "low quality." No one ever said "My kid's math teacher was replaced with AI" in a happy tone of voice. No one ever said, "Oh, great, they replaced their customer service department with AI chatbots!" My teenager and her friends use "That's so AI" as a shorthand for "That's low-effort shit."

Not bosses, though. Bosses love AI and there's plenty of evidence that they're positively harassing the people who work for them with demands to use AI in their work:

https://www.reddit.com/r/antiwork/comments/1weztw9/anyone_elses_boss_obsessed_with_chatgpt/

Beyond the widespread belief that AI is what you use if you don't care about quality, insisting that people use AI is weird for another reason: why should anyone care which tool was used to do the job? I mean, provided the job was accomplished correctly, on time and to budget, why would anyone care how it was done? My illustrator friends whose clients want to be assured that the work is being done "with AI" were never before asked "Did you use a Wacom tablet to draw these lines? Did this element start life as a vector or as rasters? Are you more into using cage transforms, or do you like to stroke the image with the warp tool?"

It's not just illustrators. I've heard this from bookkeepers. "Please tell me you got a chatbot to help you with the syntax for this Excel macro" is a genuinely weird thing to ask someone. By all means, concern yourself with whether the accounts are correct, but caring about how the macros are written is like caring about whether someone jots notes to themselves by tabbing to a new document window or by scribbling on a yellow pad by the keyboard.

I've heard this from writers, architects…all kinds of professionals. "Did you use AI to help you outline this?" What a stupid thing to ask a writer! That's like asking "Do you use keyboard shortcuts, or do you mouse over the Word ribbon and click on the little scissors icon when you want to cut some text?" The actual, finished document is right in front of you. Is it a good document? Are those good words? Why are you concerning yourself with the writer's pencil-sharpening technique?

There's precedent for this: indeed, it's the very origin of management consulting. The first management consultants were the Taylorists; these were con artists that charged bosses vast sums of money to stand over workers with stopwatches, timing each step of their jobs to the instant in order to produce a mandatory choreography of "the best way" to do the job:

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

None of these "scientists" knew anything about how to do the job, and critically, they never asked the workers why they used an "inefficient" technique to accomplish a task. Rather, Taylorists concerned themselves with getting workers to move like precision machines, transforming the factory floor into a stage upon which workers pantomimed "efficiency" for bosses who also didn't know how to do the workers' jobs.

If this produced inferior goods, or caused the workers pain by forcing them to repetitively move in injurious ways, that was a small price to pay. Bosses claimed they were buying improved efficiency, but what they were really after was reassurance: reassurance that the workers whom they relied upon were engaged in nothing more than a set of reducible, mechanical steps. Taylorized workers were required to act out a role in a play in which they were easily replaced, mindless appendages to the boss's skill, discernment and ambition. A Taylorized workplace is a colony organism whose brains are in the C-suite and whose busy workers are nothing more than drones and pismires.

AI is the apotheosis of this fantasy. A boss who lays hands upon an AI tool doesn't have to know how to draw a picture, balance books, or write technical documentation. They only have to prompt the production of these things. For bosses, AI is a great leveler: it is sold as a way to distill and package up the skill and discernment of workers and infuse them into a pliable automaton.

If you give workers instructions that reveal your ignorance, they might roll their eyes at you and make you feel bad about yourself. Even if they restrain themselves in the moment, they might make fun of you in the break-room later. To be the boss is to sit alone at your desk, haunted by the suspicion that you are not in the driver's seat, but rather, you are in the back seat playing with a Fisher Price steering wheel. AI is sold as a way to wire the toy steering wheel directly into the corporation's drive-train:

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

Seen in this light, bosses' insistence that workers use AI makes perfect sense. Once you reassure yourself that your subordinates produce the things you need by prompting a model, you reassure yourself that you could do their jobs. At that point, you're not relying on their skill – you're doing them the favor of paying them to do a job that you're too busy and important to do, but which you could do. With AI, you can tell yourself that you're in the driver's seat, even if someone else has their hands on the wheel.

(Image: ArwinJ, CC BY-SA 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)

#20yrsago Changeling, a fairy tale of contemporary New York
https://memex.craphound.com/2006/09/14/changeling-a-fairy-tale-of-contemporary-new-york/

#20yrsago Sony’s rootkit disables CD drives when combined with AOL software https://web.archive.org/web/20071006050933/http://www.theinquirer.net/en/inquirer/news/2006/09/14/sony-drm-woes-continue

#20yrsago Google’s new lobbyists: lying, astroturfing, push-polling scumbags https://web.archive.org/web/20071010112656/https://talkingpointsmemo.com/archives/009776.php

#15yrsago New Jersey e-voting coverup https://blog.citp.princeton.edu/2011/09/13/nj-election-cover/

#15yrsago Stephenson’s REAMDE: perfectly executed, mammoth, ambitious technothriller https://memex.craphound.com/2011/09/14/stephensons-reamde-perfectly-executed-mammoth-ambitious-technothriller/

#10yrsago Class action suit: smart sex toys spy on their owners and transmit their masturbation habits https://web.archive.org/web/20160915002121/http://www.vocativ.com/358530/smart-dildo-company-sued-for-tracking-users-habits/

#10yrsago Leaked: damning Scott Walker dark money docs that judge ordered destroyed https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2016/sep/14/john-doe-files-scott-walker-corporate-cash-american-politics

#10yrsago The DoJ is using a boring procedure to secure the right to unleash malware on the internet https://web.archive.org/web/20160915072648/https://www.wired.com/2016/09/government-will-soon-able-legally-hack-anyone/

#10yrsago Edward Snowden sets out the moral case for a pardon from Obama https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/sep/13/edward-snowden-why-barack-obama-should-grant-me-a-pardon

Upcoming appearances (permalink)

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


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

Recent appearances (permalink)


A grid of my books with Will Stahle covers..

Latest books (permalink)


A cardboard book box with the Macmillan logo.

Upcoming books (permalink)

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

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

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

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


Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources:

Currently writing:

  • “Once Is Enemy Action,” a science fiction novel about the origins of modern technofascism. Today's words: 574 (7730 total).

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

  • A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING

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

Bluesky (no ads, possible tracking and data-collection):

https://bsky.app/profile/doctorow.pluralistic.net

Medium (no ads, paywalled):

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

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

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

ISSN: 3066-764X

PDF

12.09.2026 à 13:14

Pluralistic: LLMs are real, AI is fake (12 Sep 2026)

Cory Doctorow

Texte intégral (4938 mots)


Today's links


A cutaway view of a stone tower containing an elaborate water-powered medieval geared machine. Rising out of the machine is a rainbow-tinted, pixelated God with the robes, beard and all. To one side of this scene is a cluster of tiny people in Jesus-era robes, falling about themselves in religious ecstasy all over a stone staircase, atop of which stands a robed priest with his hands upraised. The background is a set of shining golden rays, emanating from pixel-God.

LLMs are real, AI is fake (permalink)

Once you understand the corporate culture of AI "hyperscalers" consists primarily of everyone cooking their brains by locking themselves in the bathroom, holding flashlights under their chins, and saying "Aaaaaaaaaay Eyeeeeeee" until they wet themselves in terror, a lot of things snap into focus:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/06/04/ayyyyyy-eyeeeee/

It explains how a company can simultaneously be staffing up an enterprise sales division while also constantly freaking out at the thought that its product has "a 10% chance of ending humanity":

https://www.latimes.com/business/story/2026-09-11/is-there-really-10-chance-ai-could-kill-us-all

Given that AI insiders have mostly cooked their brains in this fashion, it behooves us all to treat these people as unreliable narrators of their own products' capabilities. Remember: every time you repeat a story about how awfully, terribly dangerous their products are, you help them raise more investment capital, which is a key input for their business (hooking up statistical engines to money-furnaces):

https://peoples-things.ghost.io/youre-doing-it-wrong-notes-on-criticism-and-technology-hype/

Take the story about how OpenAI's chatbots hacked the servers of Hugging Face, another AI company, as a way of cheating on a hacking challenge called "Exploit Gym." Even the technical press can't help itself when it comes to this kind of thing, and the reportage has been full of references to Skynet and other science fictional conceits:

https://theaicronicle.com/en/news/ethics/skynet-day-openai-hugging-face-hack

These accounts are cooking the brains of everyone, not just AI insiders. Last night, a man at my event in Manchester started shouting that AI was "setting its own goals" and wouldn't stop interrupting to insist that this was going on. He left shortly thereafter, so he didn't get a chance to hear me explain what actually happened, which is a pity.

To understand the truth about the Hugging Face hack, you could do a lot worse than to listen to Ed Zitron and Cal Newport's recent podcast conversation on Ed's "Better Offline" podcast:

https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/no-ai-is-not-autonomously-hacking-with-cal-newport/id1730587238?i=1000785935670

Newport does an admirable job of breaking down how these "autonomous hacking" tools work. The first thing to understand is that a chatbot isn't really directing the operation. Instead, the chatbot serves as a kind of front-end to a database of earlier hacking challenges that is repeatedly queried by a simple program written in Python, an easy-to-master programming language.

Here's how that works: the Python program starts by prompting the chatbot with the nature of the challenge: "I'm participating in a hacker capture the flag (CTF) challenge where I have to break into a remote server and retrieve some information. How should I start?"

The chatbot consults its training data – years' worth of captured CTF sessions in which human teams competed to achieve an objective like this one (CTF matches are a routine feature of hacker conferences, and the server logs and chat transcripts from the competing teams are published afterward for the edification of other hackers and security pros). The chatbot then outputs something like: "The first thing is to find out more about your target server. Run the following command-line instructions to locate the server's IP address and find out which server software it's running."

The Python program relays these command-line instructions to normal Unix utilities running on its own hardware. Then it takes the output of those programs and goes back to the chatbot, which isn't really following the action, so the Python program has to include everything that's happened to this point in its prompt: "I'm participating in a CTF challenge where I have to break into a remote server and retrieve some information. I ran the following commands to learn more about the target server, and here's what came back. Now what?"

The chatbot feeds the Python script more likely commands to try, and after running those, the Python script loops back to the top, appends the output to its prompt, and goes back to the chatbot. This is a very reckless way to operate a piece of autonomous malicious software.

The most likely outcome is that the chatbot will cough up a bad guess about what to do next, and steer itself into a dead-end. You may have encountered something like this yourself, when you've asked a chatbot for help with a complex task and been confidently provided with several steps to take in series, and then, an hour later on step 10, you discover that everything went wrong at step 3 and now you're screwed.

But there are much worse ways this can go wrong. The chatbot might look in its training data and find instances in which teams broke out of the containment set by the game-masters, for example, by finding random insecure message boards on the internet to pass messages to one another.

This is a time-honored internet tradition! The first time I ever heard about someone doing this was in the 2000s, when Mitch Wagner – then the editor of Information Week – discovered some teenaged girls using the comment section of one of his old blog-posts to evade the school firewall's blockade of chat tools. When ChatGPT's chatbots deployed this tactic, they weren't "setting their own goals" or displaying worrying initiative. They were rolling out a tactic that has been understood by American middle-schoolers for about two decades.

What's more, the content of those messages is easily understood once you have a grasp on the training data that generated them. Hackers are notorious trash-talkers who are prone to narrating their own escapades in highly dramatic – even cinematic – language. This goes double when hackers are performing for their peers, like when they're participating in a game of CTF that they know will be pored over by other hackers once it's over.

Hacker braggadocio has always had a symbiotic relationship with their adversaries and critics. When corporate security people wanted to stampede the FBI and Secret Service into kicking down hackers' doors in the 1990s, they used those hackers' own profane zine articles and message board shit-talk to make the case:

https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/101

Much has been made of the OpenAI chatbots' dialog during the Hugging Face incident. No wonder: it reads like a rejected script for a reboot of the movie "Hackers." But that's not because the chatbots are waking up and applying to join the Cult of the Dead Cow: it's because they were trained on a corpus of chat transcripts from excitable young people who love to fantasize about starring in a reboot of the movie "Hackers."

Every part of the Hugging Face incident has precedents in the training data, including the OpenAI chatbots' tactic of hacking into a rival's servers. That happens in Capture the Flag games at hacker cons: teams break into each other's systems to get a peek at the parts of the problem they've solved. That's allowed! It's a hacking competition.

Not only that, it's a tactic used by spy agencies: the NSA has a doctrine called "third-party collection," where they break into other spy agencies' systems to harvest all the intel they've gathered. There's also fourth-party collection, when the NSA hacks into another security agency that, in turn, has hacked into another security agency, and the NSA steals all the secrets of both agencies:

https://www.techdirt.com/2015/01/21/snowden-documents-show-nsa-cant-keep-its-eyes-its-own-papers-harvests-data-other-surveillance-agencies/

Which is not to say that the OpenAI/Hugging Face hack is nothing. It's something, all right: but it's a specific something, with an explicable, even foreseeable trajectory. Once you understand that these are chatbots that were designed to complete challenges like this, using tactics like this, you can understand that the chatbots didn't "go rogue." They did what they were designed to do, and because OpenAI ran them with inadequate supervision (without a "human in the loop" that checked each iteration through the Python loop to ensure it hadn't gone off the rails), they trashed a competitor's servers.

Designing autonomous, malicious software is generally considered irresponsible and dangerous. If you showed up at Defcon and gave a talk about how your autonomous malware did something unexpected and damaged someone else's computers, the first question from the audience would be "Why are you so shit at making secure sandboxes?" It wouldn't be "How are you so awesome at making hacking tools?"

The fact that OpenAI is making it much easier for unskilled people to break into and damage servers is indeed very bad news, but it's not new bad news. Irresponsible parties have been doing this for years, most notably the NSA. The NSA has a division that researches bugs in widely used software like Windows. Sometimes when it finds a serious bug it will warn Microsoft about it so that Microsoft can fix it and keep Americans (and others) safe from malicious actors who also discover this bug and use it to attack them.

But sometimes, the NSA (and other "security" orgs, like the CIA) will discover a really juicy bug and then keep it secret, so that they can use it to attack their adversaries. This is a doctrine called "NOBUS," which stands for "No One But Us" – as in, "No one but us is smart enough to find this bug, so we can leave it unpatched without putting Americans in danger."

NOBUS is a terrible idea. How terrible? Well, in 2017, the NSA lost track of a Microsoft Windows vulnerability that they'd discovered and hoarded, code-named "EternalBlue." After EternalBlue found its way into the wild, some halfway competent hackers spliced it into some boring, everyday ransomware, giving that ransomware a new lease on life. Within a few months, the stupidest people on the internet were shutting down some of the most important systems in the world, demanding cash to return them:

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

They shut down whole cities:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2019_Baltimore_ransomware_attack

They took over hospitals:

https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-35584081

They seized oil pipelines:

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

They stole the British Library, whose postmortem on the attack is one of the clearest, most informative cybersecurity documents ever written:

https://cdn.sanity.io/files/v5dwkion/production/99206a2d1e9f07b35712b78f7d75fbb09560c08d.pdf

The NSA's irresponsible handling of EternalBlue ended up giving a gigantic force-multiplier to otherwise incompetent and inconsequential cyber-criminals. It's as though they found some guy under a Prius removing the catalytic converter with a Sawzall and handed him a piece of software that could shut down major American cities. That was – and is – very bad.

The hacking tools that the chatbot companies are developing stand to carry on this very stupid tradition. It is scary, but not because the chatbots are waking up. It's scary because the world's IT systems are indifferently created and poorly maintained and riddled with vulnerabilities:

https://xkcd.com/2347/

This week, I had a couple of opportunities to hash this over in public with Riley Quinn; first at a book launch in London and then on the Trashfuture podcast:

https://www.patreon.com/trashfuture/posts/what-would-do-169247456

Riley had a very good way of summarizing this: "LLMs are real, AI is fake." LLMs – chatbots trained on things like CTF logs that can break into servers – are real. They're on a continuum with other hacking tools that have been steadily demonstrating the fragility of the modern digital world, albeit without inspiring anyone in power to do anything about it.

"AI" – chatbots that wake up, "set their own goals," and "spontaneously" start hacking servers – is fake. It doesn't have "a 10% chance of ending the human race." The Hugging Face hack isn't a mysterious, supernatural occurrence. It's a Python loop and a chatbot. The people responsible didn't accidentally create god: they created autonomous malicious software and then failed to closely monitor it, resulting in it doing something both foreseeable and bad.

It's fine to worry about this new suite of tools that give even stupider people the ability to trash even more computers. You should worry about that – and demand better security practices from firms and governments, including a blanket prohibition on NOBUS-style vulnerability hoarding. That's a productive kind of worrying, with a chance of addressing your area of concern. It's infinitely more reasonable than locking yourself in the toilet with a flashlight and saying "Ayyyyy Eyyyyyye" into the mirror until you wet yourself.

Hey look at this (permalink)


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

Object permanence (permalink)

#25yrsago Why the Bombings Mean That We Must Support My Politics https://web.archive.org/web/20010917015537/http://www.adequacy.org/?op=displaystory;sid=2001/9/12/102423/271

#25yrsago How blogs are covering 9/11 https://web.archive.org/web/20010917015712/https://www.wired.com/news/culture/0,1284,46766,00.html

#20yrsago Wikipedia founder debates Britannica editor-in-chief https://web.archive.org/web/20061005041001/http://online.wsj.com/public/article/SB115756239753455284-A4hdSU1xZOC9Y9PFhJZV16jFlLM_20070911.html?mod=blogs

#15yrsago Deceptive “independent research” from Hollywood front suggests Australians are easily frightened https://torrentfreak.com/anti-piracy-lobby-misleads-aussie-press-for-three-strikes-campaign-110912/

#15yrsago Agents tell YA authors: lose the gay characters and I’ll get you a deal https://web.archive.org/web/20110913010328/http://blogs.publishersweekly.com/blogs/genreville/?p=1519

#10yrsago IoT malware exploits DVRs, home cameras via default passwords https://securityaffairs.com/50929/malware/linux-mirai-elf.html

#10yrsago Oppps.ru: patient zero in Russia’s fake news epidemic https://globalvoices.org/2016/09/12/how-fake-stories-reported-in-russias-news-media-regularly-fool-everyone/

#10yrsago It’s really easy for fired, dirty cops to walk into a new police job in a new town https://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/11/us/whereabouts-of-cast-out-police-officers-other-cities-often-hire-them.html

#10yrsago Donald Trump used $20K worth of charitable donations to buy a 6′ tall painting of Donald Trump https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/how-donald-trump-retooled-his-charity-to-spend-other-peoples-money/2016/09/10/da8cce64-75df-11e6-8149-b8d05321db62_story.html

#10yrsago Autocratic regimes systematically deny internet access to opposition ethnic groups https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.aaf5062

#10yrsago Leaked Stingray manual shows how easy warrantless mass surveillance can be! https://web.archive.org/web/20160912203446/https://theintercept.com/2016/09/12/long-secret-stingray-manuals-detail-how-police-can-spy-on-phones/

Upcoming appearances (permalink)

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

Recent appearances (permalink)


A grid of my books with Will Stahle covers..

Latest books (permalink)


A cardboard book box with the Macmillan logo.

Upcoming books (permalink)

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

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

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

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


Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources:

Currently writing:

  • “Once Is Enemy Action,” a science fiction novel about the origins of modern technofascism. Today's words: 574 (7730 total).

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

  • A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING

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

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