Perched high above Ljubljana, Slovenia, a 731-square-foot apartment has been transformed with a bold, art-infused interior that feels equal parts gallery and home. Designed by alto design studio, the Onda Apartment reimagines what a 1980s building interior might look like, while embracing the dynamic energy of its owner – an award-winning visual artist and graphic designer with the desire for her space to reflect her vibrant and experimental aesthetic.

When the client first moved into the apartment as a teenager, the home bore all the hallmarks of its era: closed-off rooms, dark wood, and muted furnishings. The goal of the renovation was not to erase history but to liberate the space from its weight. Rather than erasing the past, the renovation leans into it, weaving together remnants of the original apartment with fresh updates.

The first decision was to remove unnecessary doors and walls. By opening the floor plan, light now fills the interior with natural light, filling the previously gloomy hallway and connecting rooms in a way that feels natural. The shift in circulation changed the entire atmosphere, replacing the heaviness with a better flow and brightness.

Budget constraints required the designers to work strategically, deciding what to keep and what to reinvent. The original oak parquet flooring, marked by years of use, was carefully sanded, oiled, and darkened, lending warmth and continuity.

In contrast, the kitchen was fully reimagined, beginning with four massive slabs of marble from Marmor Hotavlje, a Slovenian quarry renowned for its craftsmanship. Installing the marble became an adventure in itself – navigating slabs through a too-small elevator required ingenuity and persistence. The result is a kitchen that feels monumental yet playful, balancing its classic black-and-white checkerboard floor with peach-toned cabinets and a cherry-red faucet that infuses the space with personality.

The design is built on contrasts. Natural materials – oak parquet, cork flooring, veined marble – set the stage with artificial ones: glossy plastic chairs, Reform cabinet fronts, and Archizoom’s legendary Superonda sofa in electric red vinyl. This clash is intentional, a deliberate meeting of warm and cool, organic and industrial, timeless and avant-garde.

Textures extend beyond the tactile to the visual. A storage wall becomes a graphic statement with bold black-and-white vertical stripes, broken up with spherical knobs placed almost haphazardly. Curtains filter daylight in soft folds, while pink-painted pipes span across walls, transforming functional elements into happy design features.

The living area embodies the spirit of the apartment most vividly. Anchored by the Superonda sofa in the center – a 1960s icon that can be reconfigured into seats, beds, or platforms – the room feels like a constantly shifting installation. Artworks by the client line the walls and additional pieces sit on pedestals, reinforcing the impression of a private gallery.

The bedroom continues the same creative vibe with striped bedding echoing the storage wall, while pink pipes anchor the corner.

For more information on the Onda Apartment and alto design studio, visit altodesignstudio.si.

Photography by Ana Skobe.

A beautiful feature of adaptive and inclusive design is that it usually benefits everyone, not just its intended audience. And long before such terms entered the public realm, many designers looked toward ergonomics or emotional cues to lend a distinct anthropomorphism to many of their objects. The Trutru Haptic – created by JUE Design and Research Studio (JUE) in collaboration with Hong Kong Polytechnic University’s Intelligent Human Machine Mechanical Interface Lab (IHMMI Lab) – is one such device leaning into the playfulness. With programmable “personalities,” interchangeable arms, and custom temperature settings, this delightful device serves as a technological companion communicating through satisfying tactile and textural feedback.

An amorphous, jelly-like creature with a diffused glow, TruTru is designed to be held close, clipped on, and kept nearby. Its advanced haptic system can replicate textures of natural and man-made materials like stone, sand, feather, and fabric as well as ephemeral sensations including rippling water, falling rain, and the flutter of wings.

By precisely modulating friction, temperature, and tactile rhythm, TruTru achieves an impressive degree of realism and responsiveness. This helps create a sense of closeness, with texture and temperature feedback that is gentle but satisfying, resulting in a sense of calm and security through what JUE calls a sensory language of care.

TruTru is not a one-size-fits-all object; it evolves across four modes that respond to context clues, mood, and intention. Four distinct  characters – Muu, Shu, Wuu, and Huu – each with their own color, home climate, personality, and characteristics enhance the breadth or response across the family of devices.

Companion Mode

Small but mighty, TruTru behaves like a tiny being with a big personality and rhythm all its own. It emits a soft glow in anticipation of touch, growing in luminescence as the user approaches. Upon contact, it initiates tactile expressions, becoming more and more informed based on past interactions, moods, and memories. Users can fine-tune reactions to align with personal preferences or double tap the device to prompt new expressions.

Meditation Mode

Developed with researchers and meditation experts, this setting offers soft, rhythmic feedback – much like those naturally occurring but amplified to fully appreciate embodied presence. Its modular straps allow TruTru to accompany users from a quiet room to the outdoors to urban spaces and more. Tactile cues help reinforce grounding and focus especially while moving through stillness and breath work.

Sleep Mode

Sleep Mode is designed to gradually transition into rest, starting a bit more active and winding down to a calmer, more steady stream of feedback. While falling asleep is not simply the flip of a switch, biorhythms can help down regulate the nervous system, creating a sense of calm. In this mode, TruTru’s thermal feedback holds between 91.4°F and 65°F – something warm without overstimulation. Its aura dims to near invisibility, or can be turned off, so sleep remains undisturbed.

Custom Mode

Beyond its core modes, TruTru empowers users to personalize their tactile, haptic experiences. One such example may be a “Kid Mode,” uniquely configured for higher activity. This would utilize brighter light patterns, sounds, and temperature cues to match the energy of a child elevating a fun toy to a trusted companion.

While conceived as a lifestyle object, TruTru also shows strong potential in therapeutic contexts, from aiding recovery and regulation in clinical settings to supporting individuals navigating anxiety, ADHD, PTSD, Autism, or dementia. By reimagining haptics as a design language for connection and care while bucking trends to go touchless, TruTru points toward a future where technology doesn’t just inform but can also soothes, ground, and provide company.

Continued collaboration between JUE and the IHMMI Lab promises an expanded TruTru family with the potential to offer new personalities, forms, and tactile expressions suited to evolving contexts, from therapeutic to the creative and beyond.

To learn more about Trutru Haptic from JUE, please visit juedesign.com.

Photography courtesy of JUE.

Today's links

• They're just trying to earn a buck: No, they're taking what they can get.
• Hey look at this: Delights to delectate.
• Object permanence: Milk jug Storm Trooper; HIV-positive muppet; Optimal copyright; EU v NSA; Pig bomb; Maine's disgraceful public defenders; Google Reader launches; Bill Gates hates Blu-Ray; NYPD steals Black woman's BMW and puts her in a mental institution; Baby flask; Zombie mouth cupcakes.
• Upcoming appearances: Where to find me.
• 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.

They're just trying to earn a buck (permalink)

Life as a prisoner of the neoliberal mind palace must suck: it's a world where every person who suffers under predatory business practices is a "consumer" who has "revealed a preference" for being screwed:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/10/07/water-thats-not-wet/

And the companies doing the screwing? They're blameless: they're just rationally pursuing profits, upholding the fiduciary duty dictated by "shareholder supremacy":

https://pluralistic.net/2024/09/18/falsifiability/#figleaves-not-rubrics

In this Hayek-pilled cosmology, businesses are prisoners of the profit imperative and can be forgiven for everything, and the public are "consumers" whose bad choices are to blame for all the world's woes. It's a worldview with no room in it for political agency and no theory of power:

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

The problem, of course, is that power is real, and it sets the rules of this game. Even if you stipulate that it is management's duty to do whatever they can to make the largest profit for the company's owners, "whatever they can do" isn't a free-floating concept. It is inescapably tethered to the rules of the game set by politics (that is, power).

A company cannot charge infinity dollars and pay its workers zero dollars. In the former case, customers might reasonably take their business elsewhere. In the latter case, workers might sell their labor elsewhere.

But if companies can capture their regulators and hijack power to change the rules of the game in their favor, they can go a long way to achieving both goals. An airport concessionaire on the sanitary side of the TSA checkpoint can charge $14 for a bottle of filtered tap water because exiting the checkpoint to shop elsewhere is a multi-hour affair and you'll miss your flight.

Now, the government could intervene here. The federal, state and local regulators overseeing the airport could require price-parity with the prevailing rate in town for water. They could ban obvious scams like stocking weird-sized water (or water with weird characteristics) at the airport that have no in-town equivalents. They could fill the airport with filtered water refill stations.

On the other hand, if the merchant can convince the government to collude with it in rigging the game, they can remove all the water fountains from the airport, and switch the bathroom taps to a non-potable "environmentally responsible" water source.

Likewise, an employer that can bind their workers to noncompete "agreements" can make it so difficult to switch jobs that workers accept a lower wage out of fear that their employer will use the power of the state to ruin them if they take a better job elsewhere:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/09/09/germanium-valley/#i-cant-quit-you

Even better, if the employer makes workers sign a "training repayment agreement provision" (TRAP) clause, they can literally ask the government to fine workers thousands of dollars for quitting their jobs:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/08/04/its-a-trap/#a-little-on-the-nose

When a firm rips you off or abuses you and gets away with it, that's not "fulfilling their fiduciary duty," it's cheating. They're either buying off the state that is supposed to protect you, or enlisting it to help them screw you. You don't need to make excuses for these fuckers. You can hate them and complain and warn other people. You can make them pariahs and shout mean things at them if you see them on the street.

Take Snapchat: the company has just done a bait-and-switch on its users, announcing that it will erase their saved photos and videos. Ironically, it calls these "memories," which means that it is threatening to erase its users' memories. Users who don't want their memories erased will have to pay stonking monthly fees:

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c4g5ypl6nkzo

Now, if Snapchat had an API that let you migrate your photos to a rival platform – or if the law would permit a rival to make a scraper to accomplish this without their help – then the rate that Snapchat chose for its monthly fee would reflect a calculation on these lines, "This is how long it takes to click one link on a rival service and port my account to it, and this is how much I value my time at, so this is how much I will pay to avoid making that one click."

But because Snapchat decides how you use its service, it can set a much higher price, calculated thus: "Here is how long it would take me to download gigabytes of saved storage, figure out how the filesystem on my device works, verify these files, and upload them to a rival platform, and here's how much I value my time, so this is how much I will pay to avoid this enormous, tedious task."

They get to charge you more because they are fucking you over, and they are fucking you over so they can charge you more.

If you heard about Snapchat's memory tax and thought to yourself, "Oh, those fools who signed up for Snapchat thinking it would be free forever were rooked by the world's most transparent ruse and have no one to blame but themselves!" then you've been rooked. The price that Snapchat arrived at – and Snapchat users' ability to get a better price – are both determined by regulation that tilts in favor of corporations at the public expense. No one came down off a mountain with two stone tablets bearing Snapchat's rate card.

Nor is it your job or mine to figure out how Snapchat can keep its lights on. The question, "Well, how can Snapchat keep providing a free service if it doesn't charge certain users through the nose?" is no more those users' problem than, "How can Snapchat users preserve their memories if Snapchat charges them more than they can afford, every month, until they die?" is Snapchat's problem.

"How can Snapchat stay in business?" sounds like a Snapchat problem, not a you problem (unless you work there or own its stock). Snapchat isn't a charity. It's a venture-backed, for-profit entity listed on the NYSE and NASDAQ. In a just world, we'd say that the public has the right to advocacy and protection from the state that is accountable to it, and companies that make bad decisions about their business models can eat shit and be bought out of bankruptcy by smarter people who don't blow up their own balance sheets.

If you want to live in a better world, then shut up that nagging, neoliberalism-trained reflex that treats corporations as charitable enterprises and "consumers" as the secret legislators of the market and the ultimate authors of all its dysfunctions.

Even for their most ardent defenders, markets are supposed to "process aggregated demand signals" about the willingness of different parties to accept different offers. But if the only "demand signal" you can offer is a binary "take it or leave it," that's a very thin data set (and it gets thinner still when "leave it" requires a time machine so you can go back to before you started and warn yourself that the offer's going to be altered adversely in the future).

There are a range of ways to respond to a worsening offer from a merchant, well beyond "take it or leave it." You can complain. You can sue. You can picket. You can boycott. You can spraypaint "GREEDY PIGS" on the corporate headquarters. This is a rich set of informational inputs for the market indeed.

When it comes to digital services, you have even more opportunities to program the great market computer in the sky (all hail the infallible market computer!). For example, if a company makes the ads on its webpage too obnoxious and invasive, you can install an ad-blocker, a thing that 51% of all web users have done, making it the largest consumer boycott in human history:

https://doc.searls.com/2023/11/11/how-is-the-worlds-biggest-boycott-doing/

An ad-blocker enriches the take-it-or-leave it, thin data-set of internet usage patterns by allowing users to make a counter-offer: "How about nah?"

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/07/adblocking-how-about-nah

Of course, no one has ever installed an ad-blocker for an app, because that's a felony under Section 1201 of the DMCA. An app is just a web-page skinned in the right kind of IP to make it a crime to protect yourself while you use it. That's why companies – like Snapchat – are insatiably horny to get you to switch from using websites to using apps.

Ultimately, I just don't think neoliberal economists believe in what they're selling. They don't want a market of "demand-signals" that can be used to guide allocations. They just want to help the greediest, worst people on earth screw you as hard as they can, all day long.

And then blame you for it.

Hey look at this (permalink)

• The Unexpected New Threat to Video Creators https://www.anildash.com/2025/10/07/the-threat-to-video-creators/

• Breaking: Amazon Actually Employs Its Delivery Drivers https://prospect.org/labor/2025-10-06-breaking-amazon-actually-employs-its-delivery-drivers/

• Why Did Hotel Rates Surge in Vegas? (Hint: It’s Wasn’t the Demand) https://www.thesling.org/why-did-hotel-rates-surge-in-vegas-hint-its-wasnt-the-demand/

• The Socialist Case for Antitrust https://prospect.org/economy/2025-10-07-socialist-case-for-antitrust/

• Brown Stage Capitalism https://prospect.org/culture/books/2025-10-07-brown-stage-capitalism-enshittification-doctorow-review/

Object permanence (permalink)

#20yrsago Lawmaker: I'll fight the Broadcast Flag https://web.archive.org/web/20071114231008/http://copyfight.corante.com/archives/2005/10/07/surprise_your_reps_actually_listen_when_you_complain_about_the_broadcast_flag.php

#20yrsago Google launches a feedreader https://web.archive.org/web/20090210070551/http://www.google.com/intl/en/googlereader/tour.html

#20yrsago Soviet PCs http://www.homecomputer.de/pages/easteurope_ussr.html

#20yrsago Soviet pocket-calculators https://web.archive.org/web/20051013063203/https://rk86.com/frolov/calcolle.htm

#20yrsago Bill Gates shouts at Sony CEO that his crappy DRM is less crappy https://web.archive.org/web/20051013082800/http://www.businessweek.com/technology/content/oct2005/tc2005106_9074_tc024.htm

#20yrsago Guy who was busted “for using lynx” found guilty https://web.archive.org/web/20051101013155/http://news.zdnet.co.uk/0,39020330,39226548,00.htm

#20yrsago It’s legal to break DRM in Australia, sez High Court https://www.smh.com.au/technology/court-allows-gamers-to-modify-consoles-20051006-gdm7bs.html

#15yrsago HOWTO make a Storm Trooper helmet out of a milk jug http://www.filthwizardry.com/2010/10/milk-jug-storm-trooper-helmet.html

#15yrsago Nigerian Sesame Street will feature HIV-positive muppet https://web.archive.org/web/20101006182715/https://edition.cnn.com/2010/SHOWBIZ/TV/10/06/sesame.street.nigeria/index.html

#15yrsago Norwegian musicians’ income goes up by 66% 1999-2009, while record sales decline by 50% https://appliedabstractions.com/2010/10/06/record-companies-lose-artists-gain/

#15yrsago USA caves on secret Internet treaty https://web.archive.org/web/20101007044555/https://www.michaelgeist.ca/content/view/5352/125/

#15yrsago NM cops raid Montessori School greenhouse for pot, find tomatoes https://web.archive.org/web/20101008023326/https://www.santafenewmexican.com/localnews/pot-raid-at-school-turns-up-tomatoes/

#15yrsago Steven Johnson’s Where Good Ideas Come From: multidisciplinary hymn to diversity, openness and creativity https://memex.craphound.com/2010/10/06/steven-johnsons-where-good-ideas-come-from-multidisciplinary-hymn-to-diversity-openness-and-creativity/

#10yrsago Kim Davis isn’t doing her job. Again. https://www.muckrock.com/news/archives/2015/oct/07/kim-davis-emails/

#10yrsago Howto make Zombie Mouth cupcakes https://www.instructables.com/Zombie-Mouth-Cupcake/#10yrsago

#10yrsago Algorithmic guilt: defendants must be able to inspect source code in forensic devices https://web.archive.org/web/20190421120433/https://slate.com/technology/2015/10/defendants-should-be-able-to-inspect-software-code-used-in-forensics.html

#10yrsago Make a booze flask hidden in a baby https://www.instructables.com/baby-flask/

#10yrsago NYPD steal black woman banker’s BMW, commit her when she asks for it back https://web.archive.org/web/20151002030408/https://www.alternet.org/civil-liberties/shes-banker-owns-bmw-and-obama-follows-her-twitter-ny-cops-still-threw-innocent

#10yrsago How guards and prosecutors retaliate against solitary confinement prisoners who blow the whistle https://web.archive.org/web/20151006195426/https://www.vice.com/read/unauthorized-group-activity-0000772-v22n10

#10yrsago What the barcode on your discarded boarding-pass reveals https://krebsonsecurity.com/2015/10/whats-in-a-boarding-pass-barcode-a-lot/

#10yrsago Bankers’ “Vulnerability Index”: scoring employees’ desperation https://www.rifters.com/crawl/?p=521

#10yrsago NZ government leaks on TPP: copyright terms will go to life plus 70 years https://web.archive.org/web/20151007185923/https://www.beehive.govt.nz/sites/all/files/TPP-Q&A-Oct-2015.pdf

#10yrsago What’s the objectively optimal copyright term? https://timharford.com/2015/10/copyrights-and-wrongs/

#10yrsago Genocide, not genes: indigenous peoples’ genetic alcoholism is a racist myth https://www.theverge.com/2015/10/2/9428659/firewater-racist-myth-alcoholism-native-americans

#10yrsago Global coalition tells Facebook to kill its Real Names policy https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2015/10/global-coalition-facebook-authentic-names-are-authentically-dangerous-your-users

#10yrsago Primer explains the spying tech your local cops are using https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2015/10/law-enforcement-tech-civilian-oversight-primer

#10yrsago EU top court: NSA spying means US servers are not a fit home for Europeans’ data https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2015/10/europes-court-justice-nsa-surveilance

#5yrsago America's wild hog "pig bomb" https://pluralistic.net/2020/10/06/hybrid-vigor/#porcs

#5yrsago Maine's drunken, thieving, bumbling, child-porning public defenders https://pluralistic.net/2020/10/06/hybrid-vigor/#gideon-v-wainwright

#5yrsago Congress's Big Tech trustbusting smackdown https://pluralistic.net/2020/10/07/google-and-platos-cave/#break-em-up

#5yrsago Hackers can remotely lock IoT cock-cages https://pluralistic.net/2020/10/07/google-and-platos-cave/#power-play

#1yrago China hacked Verizon, AT&T and Lumen using the FBI's backdoor https://pluralistic.net/2024/10/07/foreseeable-outcomes/#calea

Upcoming appearances (permalink)

• Boston: Enshittification with Randall Munroe (Brattle Theater), Oct 7
  https://www.eventbrite.com/e/cory-doctorow-at-the-brattle-theatre-tickets-1591235180259?aff=oddtdtcreator

• DC: Enshittification with Rohit Chopra (Politics and Prose), Oct 8
  https://politics-prose.com/cory-doctorow-10825

• NYC: Enshittification with Lina Khan (Brooklyn Public Library), Oct 9
  https://www.bklynlibrary.org/calendar/cory-doctorow-discusses-central-library-dweck-20251009-0700pm

• New Orleans: DeepSouthCon63, Oct 10-12
  http://www.contraflowscifi.org/

• New Orleans: Enshittification at Octavia Books, Oct 12
  https://www.octaviabooks.com/event/enshittification-cory-doctorow

• Chicago: How Platforms Die with Rick Perlstein (University Club), Oct 14
  https://www.eventbrite.com/e/how-platforms-die-with-cory-doctorow-tickets-1747916117159

• Los Angeles: Enshittification with David Dayen (Diesel), Oct 16
  https://dieselbookstore.com/event/2025-10-16/cory-doctorow-enshittification

• San Francisco: Enshittification at Public Works with Jenny Odell (The Booksmith), Oct 20
  https://app.gopassage.com/events/doctorow25

• PDX: Enshittification at Powell's, Oct 21
  https://www.powells.com/events/cory-doctorow-10-21-25

• Seattle: Enshittification and the Rot Economy, with Ed Zitron (Clarion West), Oct 22
  https://www.clarionwest.org/event/2025-deep-dives-cory-doctorow/

• Vancouver: Enshittification with David Moscrop (Vancouver Writers Festival), Oct 23
  https://www.showpass.com/2025-festival-39/

• Montreal: Montreal Attention Forum keynote, Oct 24
  https://www.attentionconferences.com/conferences/2025-forum

• Montreal: Enshittification at Librarie Drawn and Quarterly, Oct 24
  https://mtl.drawnandquarterly.com/events/3757420251024

• Ottawa: Enshittification (Ottawa Writers Festival), Oct 25
  https://writersfestival.org/events/fall-2025/enshittification

• Toronto: Enshittification with Dan Werb (Type Books), Oct 27
  https://www.instagram.com/p/DO81_1VDngu/?img_index=1

• Barcelona: Conferencia EUROPEA 4D (Virtual), Oct 28
  https://4d.cat/es/conferencia/

• Miami: Enshittification at Books & Books, Nov 5
  https://www.eventbrite.com/e/an-evening-with-cory-doctorow-tickets-1504647263469

• Miami: Cloudfest, Nov 6
  https://www.cloudfest.com/usa/

• Burbank: Burbank Book Festival, Nov 8
  https://www.burbankbookfestival.com/

• Lisbon: A post-American, enshittification-resistant internet, with Rabble (Web Summit), Nov 12
  https://websummit.com/sessions/lis25/92f47bc9-ca60-4997-bef3-006735b1f9c5/a-post-american-enshittification-resistant-internet/

• Cardiff: Hay Festival After Hours, Nov 13
  https://www.hayfestival.com/c-203-hay-festival-after-hours.aspx

Recent appearances (permalink)

• Enshittification (The.Ink)
  https://the.ink/p/watch-cory-doctorow-on-why-everything

• Why Everything Is Getting Worse (Majority Report)
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EQW6UxY144Q

Latest books (permalink)

• "Picks and Shovels": a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about the heroic era of the PC, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), February 2025 (https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250865908/picksandshovels).

• "The Bezzle": a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about prison-tech and other grifts, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), February 2024 (the-bezzle.org).

• "The Lost Cause:" a solarpunk novel of hope in the climate emergency, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), November 2023 (http://lost-cause.org).

• "The Internet Con": A nonfiction book about interoperability and Big Tech (Verso) September 2023 (http://seizethemeansofcomputation.org). Signed copies at Book Soup (https://www.booksoup.com/book/9781804291245).

• "Red Team Blues": "A grabby, compulsive thriller that will leave you knowing more about how the world works than you did before." Tor Books http://redteamblues.com.

• "Chokepoint Capitalism: How to Beat Big Tech, Tame Big Content, and Get Artists Paid, with Rebecca Giblin", on how to unrig the markets for creative labor, Beacon Press/Scribe 2022 https://chokepointcapitalism.com

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. FIRST DRAFT COMPLETE AND SUBMITTED.

• A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING

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ISSN: 3066-764X

Sora 2, Open AI’s new AI video generator, puts a visual watermark on every video it generates. But the little cartoon-eyed cloud logo meant to help people distinguish between reality and AI-generated bullshit is easy to remove and there are half a dozen websites that will help anyone do it in a few minutes.

A simple search for “sora watermark” on any social media site will return links to places where a user can upload a Sora 2 video and remove the watermark. 404 Media tested three of these websites, and they all seamlessly removed the watermark from the video in a matter of seconds.

Hany Farid, a UC Berkeley professor and an expert on digitally manipulated images, said he’s not shocked at how fast people were able to remove watermarks from Sora 2 videos. “It was predictable,” he said. “Sora isn’t the first AI model to add visible watermarks and this isn’t the first time that within hours of these models being released, someone released code or a service to remove these watermarks.”

Hours after its release on September 30, Sora 2 emerged as a copyright violation machine full of Nazi SpongeBobs and criminal Pickachus. Open AI has tamped down on that kind of content after the initial thrill of seeing Rick and Morty shill for crypto sent people scrambling to download the app. Now that the novelty is wearing off we’re grappling with the unpleasant fact that Open AI’s new tool is very good at making realistic videos that are hard to distinguish from reality.

To help us all from going mad, Open AI has offered watermarks. “At launch, all outputs carry a visible watermark,” Open AI said in a blog post. “All Sora videos also embed C2PA metadata—an industry-standard signature—and we maintain internal reverse-image and audio search tools that can trace videos back to Sora with high accuracy, building on successful systems from ChatGPT image generation and Sora 1.”

But experts say that those safeguards fall short. “A watermark (visual label) is not enough to prevent persistent nefarious users attempting to trick folks with AI generated content from Sora,” Rachel Tobac, CEO of SocialProof Security, told 404 Media.

Tobac also said she’s seen tools that dismantle AI-generated metadata by altering the content’s hue and brightness. “Unfortunately we are seeing these Watermark and Metadata Removal tools easily break that standard,” Tobac said of the C2PA metadata. “This standard will still work for less persistent AI slop generators, but will not stop dedicated bad actors from tricking people.”

As an example of how much trouble we’re in, Tobac pointed to an AI-generated video that went viral on TikTok over the weekend she called “stranger husband train.” In the video, a woman riding the subway cutely proposes marriage to a complete stranger sitting next to her. He accepts. One instance of the video has been liked almost 5 million times on TikTok. It didn’t have a watermark.

“We're already seeing relatively harmless AI Sora slop confusing even the savviest of Gen Z and Millennial users,” Tobac said. “With many typically-savvy commenters naming how ‘cooked’ we are because they believed it was real. This type of viral AI slop account will attempt to make as much money from the creator fund as possible before social media companies learn they need to invest in detecting and limiting AI slop, before their platform succumbs to the Slop Fest.”

But it’s not just the slop. It’s also the scams. “At its most innocuous, AI generated content without watermarking and metadata accelerates the enshittification of the internet and tricks people with inflammatory content,” Tobac said. “At its most malignant, AI generated content without watermarking and metadata could lead to every day people losing their savings in scams, becoming even more disenfranchised during election season, could tank a stock price within a few hours, could increase the tension between differing groups of people, and could inspire violence, terrorism, stampede or panic amongst everyday folks.”

Tobac showed 404 Media a few horrifying videos to illustrate her point. In one, a child pleads with their parents for bail money. In another, a woman tells the local news she’s going home after trying to vote because her polling place was shut down. In a third, Sam Altman tells a room that he can no longer keep Open AI afloat because the copyright cases have become too much to handle. All of the videos looked real. None of them have a watermark.

“All of these examples have one thing in common,” Tobac said. “They’re attempting to generate AI content for use off Sora 2’s platform on other social media to create mass or targeted confusion, harm, scams, dangerous action, or fear for everyday folk who don’t understand how believable AI can look now in 2025.”

Farid told 404 Media that Sora 2 wasn’t uniquely dangerous. It’s just one among many. “It is part of a continuum of AI models being able to create images and video that are passing through the uncanny valley,” he said. “Having said that, both Veo 3 and Sora 2 are big steps in our ability to create highly visual compelling videos. And, it seems likely that the same types of abuses we’ve seen in the past will be supercharged by these new powerful tools.”

According to Farid, Open AI is decent at employing strategies like watermarks, content credentials, and semantic guardrails to manage malicious use. But it doesn’t matter. “It is just a matter of time before someone else releases a model without these safeguards,” he said.

Both Tobac and Farid said that the ease at which people can remove watermarks from AI-generated content wasn’t a reason to stop using watermarks. “Using a watermark is the bare minimum for an organization attempting to minimize the harm that their AI video and audio tools create,” Tobac said, but she thinks the companies need to go further. “We will need to see a broad partnership between AI and Social Media companies to build in detection for scams/harmful content and AI labeling not only on the AI generation side, but also on the upload side for social media platforms. Social Media companies will also need to build large teams to manage the likely influx of AI generated social media video and audio content to detect and limit the reach for scammy and harmful content.”

Tech companies have, historically, been bad at that kind of moderation at scale.

“I’d like to know what OpenAI is doing to respond to how people are finding ways around their safeguards,” Farid said. “We are seeing, for example, Sora not allowing videos that reference Hitler in the prompt, but then users are finding workarounds by simply describing what Hitler looks like (e.g., black hair, black military outfit and a Charlie Chaplin mustache.) Will they adapt and strengthen their guardrails? Will they ban users from their platforms? If they are not aggressive here, then this is going to end badly for us all.”

Open AI did not respond to 404 Media’s request for comment.

In May, 404 Media reported that the Johnson County Sheriff’s Office in Texas searched a nationwide network of Flock cameras, a powerful AI-enabled license plate surveillance tool, to look for a woman who self-administered an abortion. At the time, the sheriff told us that the search had nothing to do with criminality and that they were concerned solely about the woman’s safety, specifically the idea that she could be bleeding to death from the abortion. Flock itself said “she was never under criminal investigation by Johnson County. She was being searched for as a missing person, not as a suspect of a crime.”

What is OpenAI?

I realize you might say "a foundation model lab" or "the company that runs ChatGPT," but that doesn't really give the full picture of everything it’s promised, or claimed, or leaked that it was or would be.

No, really, if you believe its leaks to the press...

• OpenAI is a social media company, this week launching Sora 2, a social feed entirely made up of generative video.
• OpenAI is a workplace productivity company, allegedly working on its own productivity suite to compete with Microsoft.
• OpenAI is a jobs portal, announcing in September it was "developing an AI-powered hiring platform," which it will launch 'by mid-2026.
• OpenAI is an ads company, and is apparently trying to hire an an ads chief, with the (alleged) intent to start showing ads in ChatGPT "by 2026."
• OpenAI is a company that would sell AI compute like Microsoft Azure or Amazon Web Services, or at least is considering being one, with CFO Sarah Friar telling Bloomberg in August that it is not "actively looking" at such an effort today but will "think about it as a business down the line, for sure."
• OpenAI is a fabless semiconductor design company, launching its own AI chips in, again, 2026 with Broadcom, but only for internal use.
• OpenAI is a consumer hardware company, preparing to launch a device by the end of 2026 or early 2027 and hiring a bunch of Apple people to work on it, as well as considering — again, it’s just leaking random stuff at this point to pump up its value — a smart speaker, a voice recorder and AR glasses.
• OpenAI is also working on its own browser, I guess.

To be clear, many of these are ideas that OpenAI has leaked specifically so the media can continue to pump up its valuation and continue to raise the money it needs — at least $1 Trillion over the next four or five years, and I don't believe the theoretical (or actual) costs of many of the things I've listed are included.

OpenAI wants you to believe it is everything, because in reality it’s a company bereft of strategy, focus or vision. The GPT-5 upgrade for ChatGPT was a dud — an industry-wide embarrassment for arguably the most-hyped product in AI history, one that (as I revealed a few months ago) costs more to operate than its predecessor, not because of any inherent capability upgrade, but how it actually processes the prompts its user provides — and now it's unclear what it is that this company does. 

Does it make hardware? Software? Ads? Is it going to lease you GPUs to use for your own AI projects? Is it going to certify you as an AI expert? Notice how I've listed a whole bunch of stuff that isn't ChatGPT, which will, if you look at The Information's reporting of its projections, remain the vast majority of its revenue until 2027, at which point "agents" and "new products including free user monetization" will magically kick in.

OpenAI Is A Boring (and Bad) Business

In reality, OpenAI is an extremely boring (and bad!) software business. It makes the majority of its revenue selling subscriptions to ChatGPT, and apparently had 20 million paid subscribers (as of April) and 5 million business subscribers (as of August, though 500,000 of them are Cal State University seats paid at $2.50 a month).

It also loses incredibly large amounts of money.

OpenAI's Pathetic API Sales Have Effectively Turned It Into Any Other AI Startup

Yes, I realize that OpenAI also sells access to its API, but as you can see from the chart above, it is making a teeny tiny sliver of revenue from it in 2025, though I will also add that this chart has a little bit of green for "agent" revenue, which means it's very likely bullshit. Operator, OpenAI's so-called agent, is barely functional, and I have no idea how anyone would even begin to charge money for it outside of "please try my broken product."

In any case, API sales appear to be a very, very small part of OpenAI's revenue stream, and that heavily suggests a lack of interest in integrating its models at scale.

Worse still, this effectively turns OpenAI into an AI startup.

Think about it: if OpenAI can't make the majority of its money through "innovating" in the development of large language models (LLMs), then it’s just another company plugging LLMs into its software. While ChatGPT may be a very popular product, it is, by definition (and in its name!) a GPT wrapper, with the few differences being that OpenAI pays its own immediate costs, has the people necessary to continue improving its own models, and also continually makes promises to convince people it’s anything other than just another AI startup.

In fact, the only real difference is the amount of money backing it. Otherwise, OpenAI could be literally any foundation model company, and with a lack of real innovation within those models, it’s just another startup trying to find ways to monetize generative AI, an industry that only ever seems to lose money.

As a result, we should start evaluating OpenAI as just another AI startup, as its promises do not appear to mesh with any coherent strategy, other than "we need $1 trillion dollars." There does not seem to be much of a plan on a day-to-day basis, nor does there seem to be one about what OpenAI should be, other than that OpenAI will be a consumer hardware, consumer software, enterprise SaaS and data center operator, as well as running a social network.

As I've discussed many times, LLMs are inherently flawed due to their probabilistic nature."Hallucinations" — when a model authoritatively states something is true when it isn't (or takes an action that seems the most likely course of action, even if it isn't the right one) — are a "mathematically inevitable" according to OpenAI's own research feature of the technology, meaning that there is no fixing their most glaring, obvious problem, even with "perfect data."

I'd wager the reason OpenAI is so eager to build out so much capacity while leaking so many diverse business lines is an attempt to get away from a dark truth: that when you peel away the hype, ChatGPT is a wrapper, every product it makes is a wrapper, and OpenAI is pretty fucking terrible at making products.

Today I'm going to walk you through a fairly unique position: that OpenAI is just another boring AI startup lacking any meaningful product roadmap or strategy, using the press as a tool to pump its bags while very rarely delivering on what it’s promised. It is a company with massive amounts of cash, industrial backing, and brand recognition, and otherwise is, much like its customers, desperately trying to work out how to make money selling products built on top of Large Language Models.

OpenAI lives and dies on its mythology as the center of innovation in the world of AI, yet reality is so much more mediocre. Its revenue growth is slowing, its products are commoditized, its models are hardly state-of-the-art, the overall generative AI industry has lost its sheen, and its killer app is a mythology that has converted a handful of very rich people and very few others.

OpenAI spent, according to The Information, 150% ($6.7 billion in costs) of its H1 2025 revenue ($4.3 billion) on research and development, producing the deeply-underwhelming GPT-5 and Sora 2, an app that I estimate costs it upwards of $5 for each video generation, based on Azure's published rates for the first Sora model, though it's my belief that these rates are unprofitable, all so that it can gain a few more users.