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Midjourney AI pivots to Theranos: Ultrasonic CT by David Gerard
Saturday June 20th, 2026 at 9:39 PM

Pivot to AI
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Midjourney is an AI image generator and copyright violation machine. What’s the weirdest and dumbest business pivot an image generator company could possibly make?

Yesterday, Midjourney CEO David Holz announced Midjourney Medical! No, they didn’t call it “Medjourney.” They’re going into medical imaging! Ultrasound full-body scanning! [Midjourney]

They call this “ultrasonic CT”. In Midjourney’s vision, you’ll be lowered into a pool of water. Ultrasonic sensors will scan your whole body over sixty seconds. The system will compute a 3-D scan of you. Midjourney describes the process in more flowery terms:

It starts by stepping into a shallow pool of golden light. You then begin to descend into the water. Your body passes through a ring of underwater sensors, each acting like a dolphin, using its echolocation.

Actual medical advances don’t talk about “golden light” or compare themselves to dolphins. At absolute best, Midjourney is selling a vibes-based “wellness” experience to rich new age suckers.

There seems to be a prototype scanner in existence — Holz says they’ve scanned maybe a dozen people.

But Midjourney has fabulous plans for the future! The “Midjourney Spa” will apparently open in San Francisco at the end of 2027: [Midjourney]

It will have hot tubs, saunas, cold plunges and 10 scanners with the capability to do more body scans a year than all MRI scanners on Earth combined.

Midjourney is careful in their wording. Their ultrasound scanner is not an MRI — they just compare it to MRI a whole lot. David Holz says “We’ve dreamed of something as powerful as MRI.”

Midjourney plans to deploy 50,000 scanners around the world in the next six years!

So there’s a few problems with Midjourney’s scanner idea.

Ultrasound scanning doesn’t penetrate the whole body. It doesn’t work through bone or air. And there’s a lot of both of those in your body. Ultrasound just doesn’t do full body. Ultrasound, CAT scans, and MRI are different scans that see different things.

And if you call something medical, there’s still actual regulations on that: [Verge]

various medical applications would require FDA clearances, but for now, Midjourney Medical says it’s working on “body composition maps” that don’t require the same level of clearance as diagnostic imaging.

The good news is, this thing does not use generative AI. Holz told the press conference: [Bloomberg]

We’re not even using any AI in this yet — just really cool hardware and software.

So you won’t be asking if it scanned six fingers or seven.

Is Midjourney’s scanner medically better than nothing? Well, not really — it barely exists. This scanner is not any sort of medical product, it’s a completely experimental toy.

None of this has been tested. None of the stuff Midjourney is talking up has been verified by anyone.

This is Theranos-level vaporware. Every radiographer who’s heard about this thing has called it out — because they’ve all heard this sorta napkin-scribble idea from idiots before.

There have been other AI medical startups reminiscent of this. Forward talked up plans for AI-powered CarePods — drop a patient in, do automatic checkups! The CarePods did not work — they didn’t do a single thing. Forward soaked up venture capital cash and finally went broke at the end of 2024. [Fierce]

Midjourney has not accepted venture funding in its history. This ultrasound plan makes me wonder if the AI copyright violation business isn’t going so great, and they’re about to start calling round the VCs.

Can Midjourney’s ultrasound scanner become a good and useful medical device in the future? It’s hard to prove nothing like it could ever happen.

But I think we can say that the guys selling you golden light and dolphins and a spa experience aren’t the hot favourites.

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Unreal Engine 6 goes AI — and wants to bring back NFTs by David Gerard
Saturday June 20th, 2026 at 9:35 PM

Pivot to AI
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Unreal Engine is a video game engine produced by Epic Games. It’s what Fortnite is written on top of.

Epic CEO Tim Sweeney is convinced the slop machine is the future. In November, he was claiming the Steam store — Epic’s direct competitor — should stop tagging games using AI, because “AI will be involved in nearly all future production.” Uh-huh. [Twitter, archive]

Sweeney is working to make his fabulous future vision a reality. Epic’s announced an early preview of Unreal Engine 6, the next version, coming in late 2027.

Guess what it’s got? AI! Even better, Tim’s still trying to make the Metaverse happen! Inside Unreal Engine!

Here’s the announcement, from dev lead Marcus Wassmer: [Epic]

We’re building development pipeline features such as an MCP with integrations for Claude, Gemini, and others.

Actual game developers — not the studio executives — are not tempted. The devs hate using AI and think it’s trash.

Austin Wood at Games Radar tried to do a both-sides piece on AI in gaming. He even tried to claim there were game developers — not just executives — who “do see value in AI.”  But he couldn’t produce a single one: [Games Radar]

Perhaps pro-AI developers didn’t want to talk to me or I just didn’t run into any during my survey, because I heard an overwhelmingly negative assessment of generative AI’s origins, capabilities, and risks. By the end, I’d heard dozens of developers make a case against using gen AI at all.

So what does Epic think the game devs will use the slop bot for?

as creativity and productivity multipliers so that teams can focus their efforts on the essential creative and technical tasks of development rather than time on time-consuming manual tasks.

That means the game assets. Images, backgrounds, sounds, and so on.

The problem is that’s not a disposable part. Games aren’t just a framework you drape arbitrary slop over. How it looks is part of how the game feels! It’s load bearing!

The paying customers sure think so. When Call of Duty: Black Ops 7 came out last November, it had a pile of returns — specifically because the sloppified game play looked so much worse than the non-AI trailers.

Unreal Engine 6 will itself be written with AI slop code. Should do wonders for reliability if you try to use it.

But it gets better. Remember, from 2021, the ridiculous promise from crypto bros that NFTs would mean you could swap hats and guns between unrelated games? Sweeney still wants this. From the announcement:

This means you’ll have the option to use a player’s entitled Fortnite Outfits in your own games, and you’ll get the tools to build Outfits for your own games that work inside Fortnite.

… We see this as the first step toward building a shared economy for smart assets: functional assets with logic and functionality that work across games

Epic wants to bring back NFTs!

Sweeney also wants to build a game chat network into Unreal Engine itself, I guess because Discord is getting money that he thinks he should be getting: [Inven Global]

the ‘cross-game social link’ feature we are trying to implement through UE6 will have tremendous business value. Users will be able to form parties via voice chatting with friends in Game B while connected to Game A, and encourage them to try a new game.

This network won’t be any equal sort of thing — it’ll be firmly gated by Epic. Sweeney wants you, the outside developer, to put Fortnite hats into your game so Fortnite can use them. The other way? Ehh, good luck with that.

Now, you might think the AI vendors are already running out of all the money in the world, and they’re putting up prices as far as they think they can get away with. I’m pretty sure 2027 will be hilarious for Unreal Engine with AI. And expensive.

In the meantime, start learning the Godot engine. Which doesn’t accept AI code. [Godot]

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SearchLeak: Prompt-inject enterprise Copilot with a search by David Gerard
Thursday June 18th, 2026 at 2:35 PM

Pivot to AI
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Chatbots are a security hole the moment you let them do real work — because you can always prompt-inject a chatbot.

And if Microsoft does this stupid thing, you can break in and get confidential company information.

This one comes from Varonis, who found the “reprompt” attack in January — where you hack Copilot by asking it twice.

Varonis’ new hole is called SearchLeak. It’s a one-click attack — the victim has to click on your link. But it’s stupidly simple: [Varonis]

  1. The attacker sends an email with a link in it.
  2. The link calls Copilot’s enterprise search with a search string that’s actually a prompt.
  3. The prompt tells Copilot to call a web address controlled by the attacker, with the victim’s data encoded in the address.

The web address is sent to the Bing search engine — which Copilot trusts. Bing calls the address! And your data is leaked.

This attack chains three small holes into an exploit:

  1. If you search in enterprise Copilot, the search string gets passed directly to Copilot as a prompt — it takes it as instructions.
  2. There’s a race condition — an image tag in the chatbot’s response loads before the output sanitiser can kick in.
  3. The bit where Bing calls the attacker’s web address (that image tag) for you.

Microsoft marked this a critical issue and patched it on 4 June. [Microsoft]

But using a chatbot for real work is unsecurable by its nature. As well as an extremely stupid thing to do. So I’d expect more of these.

 

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We found the missing AI apps! And nobody downloads them by David Gerard
Wednesday June 17th, 2026 at 10:31 PM

Pivot to AI
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Last September, programmer Mike Judge asked: if AI’s so good for coding, where are all the little AI apps? Where are the widgets someone just vibed? Where’s all the AI shovelware? He worked out the numbers — and there had been no uptick in apps going to the Apple or Google stores.

This year, the AI bros are finally pumping out the little apps! And guess what? Nobody wants them.

There’s a new paper from NBER: “Writing code vs. shipping code: Productivity effects across generations of AI coding tools”. [NBER, PDF]

Their thesis is that AI has led to tremendous “productivity gains” in coding — but not in the resulting apps being used.

Their idea of “productivity gains” is just lines of code. Churning out chatbot code is productivity now. They spend the first forty pages of the paper analysing the process of vibing more lines of code.

So that’s great, we have a garbage fountain, very productive. But — does anyone care? That question is covered quickly in the last nine pages of the paper:

Despite this expansion in supply, we find that total app usage within the first three months of launch has not increased in any of the four marketplaces.

… The share of new applications that fail to reach even a modest audience has risen across marketplaces, suggesting that the supply-side expansion is concentrated in applications with little to no user base.

That is: the users do not care about the flood of crappy AI spam apps. Why should they?

The paper doesn’t establish that the garbage flood is definitely AI-coded apps. But they think that’s the obvious source for the sudden increase in new apps, and I concur.

There’s a lot of wannabe developers who suddenly feel empowered by the vibe code. And the graphs in the paper show an uptick in new apps in what the authors call the “agentic-coding era.”

Why don’t the users care? The authors posit that the users just need to catch up and get with the programme:

the usage response may simply be slow, since discovery and adoption take time

Or maybe the users don’t care about trash apps.

If you look at the graphs on page 42, the number of apps is going up, up, up!

But the total usage of all apps is flat — or declining. Adding more apps does not mean more apps getting used.

And then there’s the ratings and downloads. Nobody rates or downloads the flood of vibe garbage. It’s spam and nobody cares.

The authors of the paper are AI boosters who seem really disappointed that nobody cares about all this slop code. They even misdescribe their own data in the paper’s abstract:

Large task-level AI productivity gains have therefore translated only partially into shipped and used software thus far.

If you call zero or negative a sort of “partially.” Because zero or negative is what their own graphs show.

The authors keep calling wheel-spinning busywork “productivity” — and not a complete waste of effort, money, and everyone’s time.

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Pluralistic: AI and amateurism (15 Jun 2026) Pluralistic: AI and amateurism (15 Jun 2026) by Cory Doctorow
Monday June 15th, 2026 at 4:38 PM

Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
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Today's links


A man's head made out of contorted bodies. Set into the middle of his brain is a Radio Shack 150-in-1 electronic experimentation kit.

AI and amateurism (permalink)

Over the weekend, I did an interview about my forthcoming book The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI (a book about being a better AI critic), and the interviewer said she was surprised that I wasn't an AI booster, based on my demographics and work history:

https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374621568/thereversecentaursguidetolifeafterai/

I could see where she was coming from. I encountered computers in the mid-seventies, as a small child. My first computer was a CARDIAC, a working, Turing-complete, mechanical computer made entirely of cardboard, that I spent endless hours with:

https://www.instructables.com/CARDIAC-CARDboard-Illustrative-Aid-to-Computation-/

Then I graduated to a teletype terminal and acoustic coupler connected to a minicomputer at the University of Toronto. My mom, a kindergarten teacher, used to smuggle home 1,000' rolls of paper towel from the kids' bathroom. I'd get 1,000' feet of computing up one side, then another 1,000' down the other side, then I'd carefully re-roll the paper towel so she could put it back in the bathroom for the kids to dry their hands on.

After that, I got an Apple ][+ in 1979, and shortly thereafter acquired a modem, and that was it: I was hooked for life. I became an amateur programmer, then a professional programmer. I hosted forums on dial-up BBSes where I distributed software and offered support to strangers who wanted to connect their computers to the internet. I got a job as a gopher developer, then a web developer, then a CIO-for-hire, helping wire up small businesses and connect them to the net. Eventually, I co-founded a free/open source software startup, before transitioning to 25 years as a digital rights activist with the Electronic Frontier Foundation. And for most of that time, I was energetically writing science fiction, eventually becoming associated with a school sometimes called "post-cyberpunk":

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rewired:_The_Post-Cyberpunk_Anthology

The force that energized all this work was a dialectical one, the contradiction that powered cyberpunk literature itself. For all that cyberpunk was undeniably enamored with the coolness and combustibility of new technology, it was also terrified of how technology could be a force for oppression, surveillance and control. As William Gibson says, "cyberpunk was a warning, not a suggestion."

Gibson's more famous quote, of course, is "the street finds its own use for things." In Gibson's novels (and in my own life in technology) all the most interesting things happen when users of technology (often without formal training or credentials) find ways to adapt the technology they use to suit their needs:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/03/17/technopolitics/#original-sin

This is why I remain an ardent fan of Hypercard, Scratch and other meta-tools that are designed to allow non-programmers to write software that exactly conforms to their desires. Whatever the apps produced by these tools lack in sophistication and efficiency is more than offset by the fact that they give everyday people the power to directly control the tools they rely upon.

If "epistemic humility" means anything, it means acknowledging that no amount of "requirements gathering" can capture the needs of people totally unlike yourself as faithfully as those users can capture their own needs. Giving people the tools to produce their own software is always going to make tools – vernacular, idiosyncratic, homespun – that are more suited to their own hands and minds than anything a technologist working on their behalf could make.

The ancient dictum of "nothing about us without us" – born in 16th century Poland and taken up by the modern disability rights movement – asserts the right of people to control their own living conditions, and also the unique capacity of people to understand their own needs. You know what's even better than being consulted on the design of the technology you use? Having direct control over that technology!

This is why I was so suspicious of the iPad. The iPad's much-lauded "ease of use" was entirely about how easy it was to use an iPad to consume technology. But the iPad remains the single most user-innovation-hostile technology in modern history, a device designed to make it impossible to produce technology without permission from a remorseless multinational corporation. This is cyberpunk as a demand, not a warning:

https://memex.craphound.com/2010/04/01/why-i-wont-buy-an-ipad-and-think-you-shouldnt-either/

The technology I've championed all my life is technology that gives more control to its users. One of my immutable precepts is that people who are different from me know things I can't know, and the only way I can get the benefit of their unique knowledge and perspective is if they are free to make and share things that matter to them. As Dan Gillmor said, back when he was inventing the study of citizen journalism, "My readers know more than I do":

https://www.oreilly.com/openbook/wemedia/book/ch00.pdf

And while I am broadly very skeptical of AI, and deeply alarmed by the proliferation of "vibe coded" software in production environments, vibe coding for personal projects is a useful and exciting addition to the lineage of tools that let computer users decide how their computers will work. For people making personal projects, vibe coding extends the power of shell scripting, cron jobs, Applescript, and other desktop automation tools to a wider audience.

One of the journalists I spoke to last week about my book described how he had vibe coded an app that showed him an alert every time a plane flew over his house, giving the tail number and other details of the flight. This is information that I have no need for, no interest in, and that I'm therefore excited to learn about, because its very existence affirms that the world is full of people who are delightfully, irreducibly, amazingly different from me, and moreover, that their unique needs can be directly met using their imaginations and their personal computers.

I recently sat down with my colleague Naomi Novik, a brilliant author who also co-founded Archive of Our Own. Naomi demoed her followup to AO3 for me: Wreccer, a system to help you find small groups of people with taste similar to your own, in order to facilitate media recommendations within that group – a kind of personal, relationship-driven alternative to massive, centralized, monolithic algorithmic recommendation systems:

https://github.com/wreccer

Naomi told me that Wreccer was being built using the same design ethos that the original Twitter embraced. When Twitter launched, it was an API first, and the official Twitter front end was built on that API – but anyone could build their own front end for Twitter that worked in the way they wanted it to. Now, the word "anyone" is doing a lot of work in that sentence, because most people don't even know what an API is, and of the people who do, most of them were not capable of writing their own software front end for Twitter.

But Wreccer is being designed for the age of vibe coding, and the API will really allow anyone who uses the service to design their own interface to the system, one that elevates and centers the features they find useful and tucks away the ones they're not interested in. Your personal, custom front end could also bring in other data-sources – pulling in your Mastodon messages, for example, or even showing you an alert with the tail-number of any plane flying over your home.

This is the part of vibe coding that I'm quite excited about, but it's not the part the industry focuses on. Instead of hearing about how personal, homemade software utilities can be an end unto themselves, we hear about vibe coded projects as prototypes for commercial production code. We hear about clueless bosses vibe coding software products and services that run fine for one user on a siloed desktop computer, and then demanding to know why it takes 50 engineers a year to make the same thing work for millions of users on the public internet. We hear about people who vibe code and submit patches to free/open-source software projects with millions of users, overwhelming project maintainers with slop code that is riddled with security vulnerabilities.

Of course, there's an obvious reason why the industry wants to focus on the potential for vibe coded software to replace production code. The AI bubble has burned up $1.4t to date, while bringing in mere tens of billions of dollars per year, even as its unit economics grow steadily worse:

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2026/06/04/ai-is-the-greatest-money-wasting-scheme-humanity-has-ever-i/

To keep the bubble inflated, AI hucksters must promise massive economic returns to the technology. They want investors to believe that vibe code is about to replace working programmers, who are skilled, high-waged, high-demand workers. Their pitch is that for every million dollars' worth of programmers that an AI salesman and a boss conspire to fire, half a million dollars will go to the AI company whose bots shit out that vibe code.

That's par for the course with the AI bubble, whose focus is entirely on how AI can centralize, control and homogenize our lives. Whereas early desktop publishing, web publishing and social media gave us a glorious higgledy-piggledy of chaotic, weird and transgressive hobbyist media and retina-searing designs, AI art and design are instantly recognizable at a thousand yards, and it all looks the same, boring, and washed:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/07/20/ransom-note-force-field/#antilibraries

AI companies have released open weight/open source models that can run on your own computer, but these are treated as side-shows and toys and demos. The real action, we're told, is in "frontier models," which is industry-speak for "a piece of software whose running costs exceed the GDP of most countries":

https://pluralistic.net/2026/02/19/now-we-are-six/#stock-buyback

Perhaps this is why the dynamics of AI are so different from the early dynamics of the web. Early web users were workers, who demanded that their bosses allow them to use the web and so devolve more power to people doing their jobs. By contrast, today's most ardent AI boosters are bosses, who threaten workers who don't use AI enough in the course of their duties:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/05/26/the-ai-will-continue/#until-morale-improves

Where we do see idiosyncrasy emerging from AI usage, it's often terrible. AI can help you create a folie-a-un in which you and a chatbot team up to reinforce your delusions and drive you deeper into a world of dangerous mirage:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/06/03/mission-space/#gsd

There's a (false) story that's told about people who championed the early internet: that we were blithely certain that technology could only be a force for good, and negligently disinterested in the possibility that technology could control, extract and harm. That's demonstrably untrue: recall cyberpunk's dualism of "the street finds its own use for things" and "cyberpunk is a warning, not a suggestion."

More true is to say that early internet champions were alive to the importance of the internet, and therefore both excited about the possibilities of the internet to deliver a world of connection, idiosyncrasy, love and solidarity; and about the danger of the internet as a dystopian system of surveillance and manipulation:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/02/13/digital-rights/#are-human-rights

History isn't finished. Long after the AI bubble pops, there will be local models and people vibe coding homemade software that respond directly to their needs. The stuff we make on our own computers, for ourselves, is deplatformed from its inception. It's part of the life we can build in technology's "shadowy corners" that we used to just call "technology." The fact that this stuff is utterly unsuited to be production code makes it inherently unmonetizable. It's how the street finds its own use for things:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/02/23/goodharts-lawbreaker/#no-metrics-no-targets

Hey look at this (permalink)


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

Object permanence (permalink)

#25yrsago Disney characters win right to clean underwear https://web.archive.org/web/20010707023727/https://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/news/archive/2001/06/07/state1339EDT0171.DTL

#20yrsago Lampooning the American dismissal of Gitmo suicides https://fafblog.blogspot.com/2006/06/610-changed-everything-run-for-your.html

#20yrsago LA’s South Central Farm under police siege right now https://web.archive.org/web/20060616085732/http://www.southcentralfarmers.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=160&Itemid=2

#15yrsago Transparent Pontiac for sale https://web.archive.org/web/20110610113919/http://blog.hemmings.com/index.php/2011/06/07/the-tin-indian-that-wasnt-rm-to-offer-see-through-pontiac/

#15yrsago Pulp Fiction edited down to just the cussing https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5PcAQbhnGNs

#15yrsago New York State to pet cemeteries: no pet owners’ ashes allowed https://web.archive.org/web/20110614133359/https://www.foxnews.com/us/2011/06/11/new-york-tells-pet-cemeteries-to-stop-taking-in-humans/#ixzz1PAZoGS6l

#15yrsago A dog with persistence-of-vision LEDs in her shirt writes my novel Makers in the park at night https://web.archive.org/web/20110618011346/https://i.document.m05.de/?p=970

#15yrsago Head of UN copyright agency says fair use is a “negative agenda,” wants to get rid of discussions on rights for blind people and go back to giving privileges to giant companies https://memex.craphound.com/2011/06/14/head-of-un-copyright-agency-says-fair-use-is-a-negative-agenda-wants-to-get-rid-of-discussions-on-rights-for-blind-people-and-go-back-to-giving-privileges-to-giant-companies/

#10yrsago Air Force loses access to database tracking fraud investigations to 2004 https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2016/06/database-corruption-erases-100000-air-force-investigation-records/

#10yrsago Peter Thiel’s lawyer threatens Gawker for talking about Donald Trump’s “hair” https://web.archive.org/web/20160615022004/https://gawker.com/now-peter-thiels-lawyer-wants-to-silence-reporting-on-t-1781918385

#10yrsago Samantha Bee on Orlando shooting: angry and uncompromising https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t88X1pYQu-I

#10yrsago Goldman Sachs bribed Libyan officials with sex workers, private jet rides, then lost all their money https://www.theguardian.com/business/2016/jun/13/goldman-sachs-hired-prostitutes-to-win-libyan-business-court-told

#10yrsago Net Neutrality Wins: Federal Court Upholds FCC Open Internet Rules https://www.techdirt.com/2016/06/14/cable-industry-proclaims-more-competition-hurts-consumers-damages-economic-efficiency/

#10yrsago Microsoft will buy Linkedin for $26.2B https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2016/06/microsoft-will-acquire-linkedin-for-18-5b/

#10yrsago Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Tony Awards sonnet for the Orlando shooting victims https://www.rollingstone.com/tv-movies/tv-movie-news/see-lin-manuel-mirandas-stirring-tribute-to-orlando-victims-103131/

#10yrsago China’s online astroturf is mostly produced by government workers as “extra duty” https://web.archive.org/web/20160613194153/http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2016/06/red-astroturf-chinese-government-makes-millions-of-fake-social-media-posts/

#10yrsago Rio: your quadrennial reminder that the Olympics colonize host-states with Orwellian surveillance and human rights abuses https://web.archive.org/web/20160614122124/https://motherboard.vice.com/read/the-olympics-are-turning-rio-into-a-military-state

#5yrsago A Monopoly Isn’t the Same as Legitimate Greatness https://pluralistic.net/2021/06/13/a-monopoly-isnt-the-same-as-legitimate-greatness/

Upcoming appearances (permalink)

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 Reverse-Centaur's Guide to AI," a short book about being a better AI critic, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, June 2026 (https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374621568/thereversecentaursguidetolifeafterai/)

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

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

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

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


Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources:

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

  • "The Reverse Centaur's Guide to AI," a short book for Farrar, Straus and Giroux about being an effective AI critic. LEGAL REVIEW AND COPYEDIT COMPLETE.

  • "The Post-American Internet," a short book about internet policy in the age of Trumpism. PLANNING.

  • A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING

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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Aeron Gets an Upgrade in Style and System by Aria Lee
Monday June 15th, 2026 at 11:35 AM

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Aeron Gets an Upgrade in Style and System

What comes to mind when we think of sustainability in action? Is it in manufacturing, proximity, materiality, or a combination of the three? In terms of holistic design, every part of the process must be considered with tact, understanding the nuances of the world we exist within. Almost synonymous with the term ‘office chair’, the Aeron Chair from Herman Miller has been a symbol of peak American office design, long regarded as a well-earned gift for a job well done.

A black ergonomic office chair is positioned in front of black cabinets and shelves filled with books, binders, and wire baskets in a well-lit office space.

A stately way to take the load off of desk worker’s long-suffering backs, each metric on the Aeron Chair can be customized to fit your exact specifications, creating less strain on the body and therefore on the mind as well. Coming in four standardized sizes, each piece is designed with the human body in mind, creating a more harmonious relationship with the tasks at hand.

Three mesh-backed chairs, one green and two black, are partially illuminated by sunlight against a dark background.

Three empty mesh office chairs in green, brown, and blue are partially illuminated by light, set against a dark background.

In this newer iteration, not only are there new colors to choose from, but systemic upgrades as well. Since 2022, Herman Miller has achieved carbon savings of over 7,000 metric tons, equivalent to taking nearly 6,000 cars off the road for a year. With no compromise on durability or performance, the Herman Miller team also reduced the material in Aeron’s aluminum base by 1.85lbs/0.84 kg. At scale, this translates to enough aluminum saved annually to exceed the weight of 16 adult elephants. These equivalencies clearly demonstrate how small changes can meaningfully reduce impact. Even stronger, they can back these numbers up with third-party studies, an inspiring turn toward transparency in a time of increased obfuscation.

Close-up of the armrest and adjustment mechanism of an office chair, showing its smooth, dark green metallic finish.

Close-up of a mesh office chair backrest with an adjustable lumbar support knob and a green frame.

 

Close-up of a modern ergonomic office chair with a mesh backrest and armrests, shown in a dimly lit indoor setting.

A modern ergonomic office chair with a mesh back is positioned in front of a wooden desk with drawers and neatly arranged items.

A modern home office setup with a wooden desk, ergonomic chair, table lamp, decorative jar, and framed artwork, situated near a staircase and large window.

A modern home office with a black ergonomic chair, a black desk with a lamp and books, wooden floors, and an abstract painting on the wall.

A black ergonomic office chair with mesh back and seat is positioned at the corner of a wooden desk in an office setting.

An ergonomic office chair with a mesh backrest sits near a wooden desk in a modern office with large windows and natural light.

In keeping with the values that spur the type of innovation Herman Miller is known for, they invest heavily in the type of information gathering that is not only good for them internally, but good for all of us here on earth. The more we can understand distinct parts of the product cycle, the more we can make powerful and impactful decisions that will eventually shape our future. When a design is so ubiquitous, born of ergonomic ingenuity and meticulously designed, it begs the question: could improvements be made upon a system that inherently changes slowly? With the Aeron Chair, the answer has to be yes.

Close-up of a black mesh office chair backrest next to a wooden table in a carpeted room with natural light.

To learn more about Aeron from Herman Miller, visit hermanmiller.com.

Photography by Pippa Drummond, courtesy of Herman Miller.

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