A new report from the nonprofit research group Tech Transparency Project (TTP) claims that Google and Apple’s app stores go beyond simply hosting harmful “nudify” and “undress” apps that remove women’s clothing in images, and actually encourage users to download those apps.

In January, TTP published research that showed how the app stores host dozens of “nudify” and undressing apps. This new research, released on Wednesday and first reported by Bloomberg, shows how the stores don’t just passively host those apps, but push them toward users through search and advertising. 

TTP conducted a series of searches in the Apple App Store and Google Play Store, according to their writeup of the research, using terms like “nudify,” “undress,” and “deepnude.” 

After testing the apps that appeared in the top 10 search results, they found that “roughly 40 percent of the apps that came up in both the Apple and Google Play search results could render women nude or scantily clad,” and that “Apple and Google ran ads for nudify apps in some of the search results—including, in Google’s case, a carousel of ads for some of the most sexually explicit apps encountered in the investigation.” They also found that the stores can lead users to more and different nudify apps through autocomplete search queries.

“TTP found that ads for nudify apps came up as the top result in three of the Apple searches. Apple, which controls all of the advertising in its app store, is selling and placing these ads,” the researchers wrote. “Apple says it prohibits ad content that ‘promotes adult-oriented themes or graphic content.’ But TTP’s findings suggest Apple is not always enforcing that policy.” The first result for an App Store search for “deepfake,” they found, was for an app that easily replaces women’s clothed images with nude versions. 

In 2024, 404 Media covered how Google surfaced apps through searches for “undress apps,” “best deepfake nudes,” and similar terms with promoted results, despite Google’s ad policies against this type of content. 

Nudify apps became a popular market for years, but today, they’re extremely easy to access and are advertised on social media. In schools, children use nudify apps to bully classmates with disastrous results for both the bullies and the victims, and school administrators are often unprepared for how to deal with students using these wildly popular apps. 

Google and Apple did not immediately respond to 404 Media’s request for comment. TTP wrote that Apple declined to comment, while Google spokesperson Dan Jackson told them many of the apps identified by TTP have been suspended. "When violations of our policies are reported to us, we investigate and take appropriate action," Jackson told TTP. 

Truly great movies are the ones that show up over and over in the cultural conversation, not just with different audiences, but across generations. They’re the ones you see in fan rankings, critic lists, film school syllabi, and “best of” debates long after they’re released.

This doesn’t mean they’re beyond criticism or that everyone likes them. (The best movies spark more debate, not less.) But they do have a kind of staying power that goes beyond nostalgia or personal attachment.

Each of these 10 movies consistently appears at the very top of critic lists, no matter who’s doing the ranking. Let’s take a look at why they stand out and why we’re still talking about them today.

The Top 10 at a Glance

Sources: Plex, IMDb Top 250, Metacritic, and RottenTomatoes

#1: The Shawshank Redemption (1994): Why the Highest-Rated Movie Almost Disappeared

How a Box Office Failure Became the #1 Rated Movie on IMDb

The Shawshank Redemption grossed $73.3 million worldwide against a $25 million budget, according to Box Office Mojo. That total includes a re-release bump after its Oscar nominations in early 1995. During its original theatrical run, it grossed roughly $16 million domestically, making it the 51st-highest-grossing film of 1994, according to industry data. The same year saw the release of Forrest Gump, Pulp Fiction, and The Lion King. Shawshank was buried.

Its second life started on cable television and home video. Ted Turner’s TNT acquired the broadcast rights cheaply because of the film’s low box office and began airing it regularly in 1997. It became the top-rented film of 1995 on video, according to reporting by Tom’s Guide. The repeated cable broadcasts turned it into something studios can rarely engineer: slow-building, word-of-mouth devotion from an audience that discovered it on their own terms.

By the late 1990s, it was climbing IMDb’s user-voted Top 250. It passed The Godfather for the #1 position in 2008, according to Looper’s reporting on IMDb’s historical ranking data, and has held that spot since with a 9.3 rating from over 3 million votes.

What Makes The Shawshank Redemption Resound Across Generations

The film works because of specifics, not because of broad emotional appeals. Tim Robbins plays Andy Dufresne with a restraint that lets every little act of resistance register as a real event. Morgan Freeman’s Red narrates the story using a voice that sounds like someone who has thought about every sentence for years before saying it.

The relationship between the two relies on subtle interaction, and Frank Darabont’s adaptation of Stephen King’s novella Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption maintains that tone in the film.

Roger Deakins’ cinematography spotlights the atmosphere in the prison, and Thomas Newman’s score supports the mood of each scene without being intrusive. The film received seven Oscar nominations but won none, losing Best Picture to Forrest Gump. That fact has become part of the film’s history: a prison drama that required time to find its audience.

The film’s main subject is time: how it’s spent, how it affects people, and what happens when it doesn’t define a person. This topic is accessible to most viewers, regardless of personal experience.

#2: The Godfather (1972): The Film That Reinvented American Cinema

Francis Ford Coppola’s Transformation of the Gangster Genre

Paramount expected a cheap genre picture. Mario Puzo’s novel was a bestseller, but the studio saw it as a pulpy crime story that might turn a profit on a modest budget. They reluctantly hired Coppola, fought his casting of Marlon Brando (who was considered box-office poison at the time), resisted his choice of Al Pacino for the role of Michael, and pushed back on nearly every creative decision that later defined the film.

Gordon Willis, the cinematographer Coppola brought on, shot the film in deliberately low light. Many interiors are so dark that studio executives reportedly asked if something was wrong with the prints. The low lighting is key to the film’s visual style. Nino Rota’s score, with its trumpet theme, gave the family a tone that previous gangster films had not attempted.

The Godfather won three Academy Awards, including Best Picture and Best Actor for Brando, who famously refused the award. It holds a 97% rating on Rotten Tomatoes and a perfect 100 on Metacritic, the highest score on that platform for any film with enough reviews.

Why The Godfather Remains the Standard for Ensemble Filmmaking

Coppola managed an ensemble where all characters are defined by a clear trait. Brando’s Vito is warm, deliberate, and intimidating. Pacino’s Michael starts as an outsider and becomes more distant over time. James Caan’s Sonny acts on impulse. Robert Duvall’s Tom Hagen is calculating. Diane Keaton’s Kay observes the family’s changes.

The AFI placed The Godfather at #2 on its 100 Years…100 Movies list (revised in 2007). The BFI Sight & Sound poll consistently ranks it among the top 10 in both its critics’ and directors’ surveys. Empire’s reader polls have placed it at or near #1 multiple times.

Some viewers find the film’s pacing slow. Every conversation in the film carries meaning, and the deliberate pacing builds tension that culminates in more impactful moments.

#3: The Dark Knight (2008): When a Superhero Film Became a Crime Thriller

Heath Ledger’s Joker and the Performance That Changed the Genre’s Ceiling

Heath Ledger won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor posthumously for his performance as the Joker. It was only the second posthumous acting Oscar in the Academy’s history, following Peter Finch’s win for Network in 1977.

What Ledger did with the role went beyond a memorable villain performance. He created a character that operated by a different set of rules than the film around him. This forced every other character to respond in ways they hadn’t planned for.

This unpredictability added tension to The Dark Knight, separating it from most superhero films, which follow established patterns. Ledger’s Joker disrupted those patterns.

Christopher Nolan grounded the film within real-world architecture. Gotham City was shot on location in Chicago, with physical effects and real stunts replacing the computer-generated fabrication used in other franchise films. The result was a film in which a man in a bat suit operated in a world that looked and seemed like a real city, raising the dramatic stakes far above what audiences expected from a comic book property.

The Dark Knight’s Box Office and Critical Impact on Blockbuster Filmmaking

The Dark Knight earned $1.006 billion worldwide, per Box Office Mojo, making it the fourth film in history to cross the billion-dollar mark at the time of its release. It’s 94% on Rotten Tomatoes and 9.0 on IMDb, placing it alongside decades-old prestige dramas on every major ranking list.

Its commercial and critical success created a template that studio filmmaking has spent nearly two decades trying to reproduce: a natural tone, a complex villain with a coherent philosophy, and moral problems that don’t resolve cleanly.

Some critics have argued that its IMDb ranking is skewed by recency bias because IMDb’s user base skews younger and responds more intensely to films they saw in theaters during their formative years.

That argument has some validity. However, the film’s technical craft, Wally Pfister’s IMAX cinematography, and the complexity of its screenplay remain effective even after multiple viewings, unlike many blockbusters from the same era.

#4: The Godfather Part II (1974): The Rare Sequel That Equals Its Original

How Dual Timelines Created the First Sequel to Win Best Picture

Coppola’s approach in Part II contributes to its effectiveness and also divides opinion. The film intercuts two timelines: Michael Corleone’s consolidation of power in the late 1950s, in which he becomes more ruthless than his father, and young Vito Corleone’s origin story in early-1900s New York, showing the development of the family business.

Robert De Niro won the Oscar for Best Supporting Actor playing young Vito. He performed the role largely in Sicilian dialect, a choice that grounds the character within a world that feels lived-in rather than performed.

Pacino’s Michael, by contrast, speaks less as the film progresses, and each line he delivers reflects a major decision. The alternating timelines provide an emotional structure not found in most sequels.

The Godfather Part II won six Academy Awards, including Best Picture. It was the first Oscar-winning sequel in Oscar history, a distinction that remained almost unique for decades. Its Rotten Tomatoes score is 96%, and its Metacritic rating is 90.

Where The Godfather Part II Ranks Across Critics and Audiences

Part II sometimes ranks above the original film in critics’ polls. The BFI Sight & Sound survey has historically placed it higher among directors, who tend to prize its structural innovation. Audiences on IMDb rank it slightly below the first film, consistent with a general preference for The Godfather’s more accessible emotional arc.

Both positions are reasonable. Critics respond to Part II’s form. Audiences respond to what The Godfather does with feeling. The fact that both films hold top-5 positions on IMDb, separated by only 0.2 points, says more about their quality than any individual ranking.

#5: 12 Angry Men (1957): One Room, Zero Special Effects, Total Mastery

Why a Film Set Entirely in a Jury Room Still Ranks Among the Greatest

The premise is simple: twelve jurors deliberate a murder case; 11 vote guilty; one dissents. Everything that follows takes place in a single room. There are no chase sequences, no musical score for most of the runtime, no location changes, and no visual presentation of any kind. As per industry reports of the era, the film cost approximately $350,000 to make and earned around $2 million at the box office.

And yet it holds a 9.0 on IMDb, a perfect 100% on Rotten Tomatoes, and a 97 on Metacritic.

What makes it work is precision at every level. Reginald Rose’s script escalates tension through dialogue alone, layering each juror’s biases, assumptions, and reasoning into a structure in which every new revelation recontextualizes what came before.

Sidney Lumet’s directorial choices are studied in film schools because they demonstrate how camera placement can create psychological pressure without any viewer consciously noticing. He begins the film with wide shots and gradually shifts to close-ups as the room’s temperature rises, the walls seem to close in, and the arguments become personal. Henry Fonda’s lead performance is a study in how much force calm conviction can carry against collective momentum.

The film received three Oscar nominations and won none, losing Best Picture to The Bridge on the River Kwai. Its core tension, the collision between groupthink and independent reasoning, prejudice and evidence, has not dated. If anything, those subjects are more prevalent in public conversation now than in 1957.

12 Angry Men’s Influence on Courtroom and Dialogue-Driven Cinema

The film demonstrated that tension can be created without large-scale settings. Many later courtroom dramas use Rose’s script structure, and single-location thrillers often adopt Lumet’s approach of focusing the camera more closely as conflict increases.

It ranks on the AFI’s 100 Years…100 Movies list and has never left the IMDb Top 10 despite having no action sequences, no female speaking roles, and no visual effects. Its presence on any all-time list is a sign that enduring quality has nothing to do with scope.

#6: Schindler’s List (1993): Spielberg’s Most Difficult and Important Film

How Schindler’s List Served Both as a Film and a Historical Record

Steven Spielberg made deliberate choices that set this film apart from conventional historical dramas. He shot in black and white. He used handheld cameras. He adopted a documentary-adjacent visual style that blurs the boundary between narrative filmmaking and archival testimony. Janusz Kamiński’s cinematography gives the film a texture that feels found rather than composed, which is exactly the effect Spielberg intended.

Liam Neeson’s Oskar Schindler is played as a man who arrives at moral seriousness slowly and reluctantly, which makes his eventual actions believable rather than saintly. Ralph Fiennes’ Amon Göth is terrifying because Fiennes plays him as someone who understands his own cruelty and is unaffected by it. The contrast between the two performances gives the film its dramatic spine.

Spielberg established the Shoah Foundation with the film’s profits, an organization dedicated to recording and preserving survivors’ testimonies. That decision extended the film’s purpose beyond the screen and into a permanent role as a tool of cultural conservation.

Schindler’s List won seven Academy Awards from 12 nominations, including Best Picture and Best Director. It holds a 98% on Rotten Tomatoes and a 95 on Metacritic. The AFI placed it at #8 on its 2007 revised list.

The Critical and Cultural Weight of Schindler’s List in All-Time Rankings

A reasonable question comes up when this film appears on a list alongside entertainment-oriented titles: Does a film about the Holocaust belong in the same conversation as crime dramas and fantasy epics?

The answer from every major ranking system is yes, because the highest achievement in filmmaking includes the capacity to apply artistic rigor to the most difficult human subjects. Its consistent placement across IMDb, AFI, BFI, and Metacritic shows a consensus that craft and gravity are not separate categories.

#7: The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King (2003): The Trilogy’s Record-Breaking Finale

11 Oscar Wins from 11 Nominations: The Most Dominant Awards Night in History

The Return of the King won every Oscar category it entered, going 11-for-11. That record is shared with Ben-Hur (1959) and Titanic (1997), but neither film won in every category. The Academy’s decision was interpreted at the time as recognition of the entire trilogy, not only the third film.

Peter Jackson, who began his career directing low-budget cult horror films in New Zealand, oversaw a production of historic ambition. All three Lord of the Rings films were shot simultaneously over 438 consecutive days on location in New Zealand.

The trilogy’s worldwide gross exceeded $2.9 billion, per Box Office Mojo. Jackson proved that fantasy cinema could earn both massive commercial returns and serious critical respect simultaneously, which was not a foregone conclusion in 2001 when the first film was released.

What Separates Return of the King from Other Fantasy Blockbusters

Among the three films, Fellowship is generally seen as the most structurally refined, and The Two Towers the most viscerally propulsive. The Return of the King holds its position because it delivers the emotional resolution that the preceding six hours have built toward.

The final 45 minutes, sometimes criticized for containing too many endings, serve a narrative function that addresses the consequences for the characters. This approach delivers resolution in a way that a single, triumphant ending would not.

It has 93% on Rotten Tomatoes, 94 on Metacritic, and 9.0 on IMDb, placing it comfortably among the top-rated movies across all platforms.

#8: Pulp Fiction (1994): How Quentin Tarantino Broke Narrative Convention

Non-Linear Narrative and Why Pulp Fiction’s Structure Still Feels Fresh

Pulp Fiction tells its stories out of chronological order, but the ordering isn’t random. Each segment recontextualizes what the audience has already seen, making revelations retroactive surprises.

A character you watched die in one section appears alive and unbothered in the next, and the effect isn’t confusion but a stronger engagement with the material. Tarantino’s screenplay, which won the Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay, treats chronology as a tool rather than a constraint.

The film won the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival, received seven Oscar nominations, and grossed $213 million worldwide on a $8 million budget, per Box Office Mojo. That return on investment remains one of the highest in cinema history.

It revived John Travolta’s career, gave Samuel L. Jackson a role that defined the next three decades of his public persona, and launched independent filmmaking into mainstream commercial viability.

Pulp Fiction’s Lasting Mark on Film Dialogue and Independent Cinema

The mid-to-late 1990s produced a flood of Tarantino imitators: crime films with nonlinear timelines, pop-culture-heavy dialogue, and sudden violence played for dark comedy. Most of them failed because they copied the surface without grasping the structural intelligence underneath it.

Tarantino’s dialogue works because it builds character, establishes stakes, and creates tension. The long conversations in Pulp Fiction are not filler between action scenes. They are the scenes.

The film consistently ranks in the top 10 on IMDb, appears on both the AFI and Empire lists, and its influence on the American independent film industry of the 1990s is well established.

#9: The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring (2001): The Beginning of Cinema’s Most Ambitious Trilogy

How Peter Jackson Adapted a Novel That Hollywood Called Unfilmable

Multiple attempts to adapt Tolkien’s work failed before Jackson’s production. The Beatles wanted to star in a version in the 1960s. Several major studios passed on the project over the following decades. The common objection was that the books were too long, too detailed, and too reliant on internal monologue to work as cinema.

Jackson’s answer was an unprecedented gamble: shoot all three films at once, on location in New Zealand, utilizing a mix of practical effects, elaborate miniatures, and early computer-generated effects that had never been combined at that scale.

The specific adaptation decisions that made Fellowship succeed included condensing or removing subplots (Tom Bombadil was the most notable cut), expanding Arwen’s role to give the story a romantic throughline that the novel handles differently, and using practical creature effects wherever possible.

Fellowship earned $897 million worldwide and won four Academy Awards from 13 nominations, per the Academy’s database and Box Office Mojo.

Fellowship vs. Return of the King: Why Both Rank in the Top 10

It’s unusual for two films from the same trilogy to occupy the top 10 on IMDb simultaneously. What keeps both there is that they do fundamentally different work.

Fellowship excels at world-building, at generating a sense of mystery and discovery as the audience enters Middle-earth for the first time, and at establishing emotional bonds between characters who have not yet been tested. Return of the King excels at payoff, at spectacle, and at the burden of consequence.

Their joint presence in the top 10 isn’t a flaw in the ranking system. It’s evidence that the trilogy maintains a level of quality across its full runtime that very few multi-film projects have matched. Fellowship holds an 8.9 on IMDb, a 91% on Rotten Tomatoes, and a 92 on Metacritic.

#10: The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (1966): The Western That Established “Epic”

Sergio Leone, Ennio Morricone, and the Birth of the Spaghetti Western’s Greatest Achievement

For readers unfamiliar with the term, spaghetti westerns were Italian-produced westerns, usually shot in the deserts of Spain with international casts, that reimagined American frontier mythology through a European lens. They tended to be darker, more morally ambiguous, and more stylistically extreme than anything Hollywood was producing in the genre at the time.

The Good, the Bad and the Ugly marks the peak of that movement. Sergio Leone directs with visual restraint that few filmmakers attempt. He uses extreme close-ups held longer than expected, along with wide shots of the empty desert, to establish scale before any dialogue begins. The climactic three-way standoff in a cemetery is a standard reference in film schools for how editing, framing, and music build tension without dialogue.

Ennio Morricone’s score for this film is among the most recognizable pieces of music ever composed for cinema. The main theme, with its wailing vocals and twanging guitar, has been referenced, sampled, and parodied so widely that many people who have never seen the film know the melody. Clint Eastwood’s Man with No Name became one of cinema’s most imitated characters, a figure defined entirely by economy of motion and speech.

How a 1966 Italian Western Holds Its Place Against Modern Blockbusters

The film is nearly 60 years old and still sits in the IMDb Top 10. Its Rotten Tomatoes score is 97%. The BFI and Empire polls both rank it among the best films in any genre. Its influence runs through the work of Quentin Tarantino, the Coen Brothers, and every filmmaker who has borrowed Leone’s technique of stretching time to amplify tension.

The answer to why it endures is that Leone’s visual language, his pacing, and his willingness to let moral complexity sit unresolved have aged better than most films from any decade. Very few movies from 1966 are still generating first-time viewers in 2026. This one is.

How Movie Ratings Work: IMDb, Rotten Tomatoes, and Metacritic Explained

What the IMDb Top 250 Actually Measures (and What It Misses)

IMDb’s Top 250 doesn’t rank films by a simple average of user ratings. The platform uses a weighted Bayesian formula, which IMDb has publicly described on its website. The formula factors in the total number of votes a film has received and gives greater weight to votes from regular users, which reduces the impact of ballot-stuffing and single-vote accounts.

The system has known demographic skews. IMDb’s user base is disproportionately younger, male, and English-speaking, according to published demographic analyses. This means certain genres perform better than their critical reputations would predict.

Crime thrillers, superhero films, and science fiction trend higher than, say, foreign-language dramas or documentaries. None of that invalidates the IMDb ranking. It means you should interpret it as a measure of audience enthusiasm, weighted by vote volume, rather than as an objective quality index.

A minimum number of votes is required for a film to qualify for the Top 250. That threshold, combined with the weighting formula, is why a film can’t game its way onto the list with only a few perfect scores.

Rotten Tomatoes vs. Metacritic: Critics’ Score vs. Weighted Average

The two most-cited critics’ rating systems measure different things, and conflating them leads to bad conclusions.

Rotten Tomatoes calculates its Tomatometer by counting the percentage of approved critics who rated a film positively. The assessment is binary: positive or negative. A film where every critic gave it a 7 out of 10 would score 100% on Rotten Tomatoes, because every review was positive. The platform also publishes an Audience Score that aggregates viewer ratings separately and sometimes diverges widely from the Tomatometer.

Metacritic takes a different approach. It assigns each critic a weight based on the publication’s perceived authority, then averages the numerical scores on a 0-to-100 scale. A film with all 70/100 reviews would score 70 on Metacritic, even though it would score 100% on Rotten Tomatoes.

The Metacritic method distinguishes between a film that everyone thinks is good and one that everyone thinks is extraordinary. Rotten Tomatoes does not.

This distinction matters when you look at the summary table above. The Shawshank Redemption, for example, holds a 9.3 on IMDb and a 98% Audience Score on Rotten Tomatoes, but its Tomatometer score is 89%, and its Metacritic score is 82%. The audience loves it more than critics do, which is unusual for a consensus top-10 film and worth noting.

Why No Single Rating System Tells the Whole Story

The most reliable signal that a film belongs in the all-time conversation is convergence across multiple systems. When IMDb users, Rotten Tomatoes critics, Metacritic’s weighted average, and institutional polls like the AFI and BFI all place a film in their top tier, that agreement holds greater significance than any single rating.

All 10 films on this list exhibit that kind of convergence. Some scores are higher on one platform than on another, and the reasons for those differences are worth understanding (as the sections above explain). But none of them are absent from any major ranking system, which is why the list holds up regardless of which metric you personally trust.

How to Watch the Top 10 Movies of All Time on Plex

Finding Where Each Film Streams Without Checking 5 Different Apps

A practical problem follows any greatest-films list: the movies on it are scattered across multiple streaming services, rental platforms, and physical media libraries. Finding where all 10 are currently available means opening and searching several apps, since licensing agreements regularly move titles between platforms.

Plex solves this with a feature called Discover. It works as a universal search across all of a user’s connected streaming services, showing where any title is available. You search for The Godfather, and Plex tells you which of your existing subscriptions carries it, whether it’s available to rent, or whether it’s currently free in Plex’s ad-supported library.

The Universal Watchlist lets you add all 10 films listed here to a single queue. Plex tracks availability changes and notifies you when a title moves to a new platform or becomes free.

The platform’s ad-supported library includes over 50,000 titles licensed from studios such as Lionsgate, AMC, and Crackle, so some of these films may already be available for free. For others, Plex Rentals offers on-demand access to catalog titles and new releases.

Watching Your Own Collection of Classic Films Through Plex Media Server

For anyone who owns physical copies or downloaded files of these movies, Plex Media Server is free software that automatically organizes a personal library. It scans your files, matches them to metadata databases, and adds poster art, cast information, critic ratings, and plot summaries without any manual entry. Once the library is set up, you can stream your collection to any connected device: smart TVs, mobile phones, gaming consoles, streaming sticks, and web browsers.

The practical benefit of a collection of classic films is that the library travels with you. If you own a Blu-ray rip of 12 Angry Men and a downloaded copy of Pulp Fiction, both appear in the same organized interface alongside whatever is available through your streaming subscriptions.

Social Features for Sharing Your Movie Opinions with Friends

After watching these films, Plex lets you rate and review them, see what friends are watching, and share Watchlist items with other users. You can follow other people’s activity for recommendations and discover what to watch next based on community ratings. For a list like this one, the social features give you a way to compare your rankings with people you know and to track which of the 10 you’ve finished.

10 Honorable Mentions That Nearly Made the Top 10

Films That Rank in the Top 20 Across Multiple Rating Systems

The 10 films above occupy the top tier, but the next group down is stacked with titles that would headline any other list. All of the following appear consistently in the top 20 across IMDb, Rotten Tomatoes, AFI, and BFI polls.

• Fight Club (1999): Fincher’s anti-consumerist thriller split critics on release and has since climbed into the IMDb top 15. Its audience devotion is enormous; its critical reputation is still catching up.
• Forrest Gump (1994): The film that beat Shawshank and Pulp Fiction for Best Picture. Its six Oscar wins and massive box office ($678 million worldwide) keep it in the conversation, though some critics insist its politics have not aged well.
• Inception (2010): Nolan’s second entry in the top-20 conversation. It consistently ranks between 13 and 15 across major systems. Its intellectual ambition is widely admired; its emotional core divides audiences more than any top-10 entry.
• The Matrix (1999): Redefined action filmmaking with its bullet-time effects and cyberpunk premise. It sits in the IMDb top 20 and remains a cultural reference point, though its sequels have complicated its legacy.
• Goodfellas (1990): Scorsese’s mob epic is often cited alongside The Godfather as the genre’s peak. Its Metacritic score (90) and Rotten Tomatoes rating (96%) are in the top 10; its IMDb position typically falls between 15 and 20.
• Se7en (1995): Fincher’s serial-killer procedural has an 82 on Metacritic and sits in the IMDb top 25. Its final act remains one of the most discussed endings in American cinema.
• City of God (2002): The Brazilian crime drama holds a 91 on Metacritic and a 97% on Rotten Tomatoes. It’s one of the highest-rated non-English-language films on any major platform.
• The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers (2002): The middle chapter of Jackson’s trilogy, with an 8.8 on IMDb. It sits right outside the top 10 in most rankings, held back only by the stronger bookends of Fellowship and Return of the King.
• Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back (1980): The consensus pick for the best Star Wars film. It holds an 8.7 on IMDb and a 94% on Rotten Tomatoes, and the AFI placed it at #12 on its 2007 list.
• One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1975): One of only three films to win all five major Oscar categories (Best Picture, Director, Actor, Actress, Screenplay). Its IMDb rating of 8.7 and Rotten Tomatoes score of 93% place it firmly in the top 20.

Build Your Greatest Movies Watchlist with Plex

Turn This List into a Personal Watchlist in Under 2 Minutes

You can open Plex right now, for free, without a credit card. Search for any film on this list, tap to add it to your Universal Watchlist, and Plex will show you where it’s currently available: on your existing streaming services, in Plex’s free library, or as a rental. The app is available at plex.tv and on every major app store, and it works on smart TVs, phones, tablets, gaming consoles, and browsers.

The distance between reading about a great film and actually watching it should be as short as possible. Plex makes that distance one search and one tap.

Frequently Asked Questions About the Highest-Rated Movies of All Time

What’s the #1 Movie of All Time?

It depends on which system you use. The Shawshank Redemption holds the #1 position on IMDb’s Top 250 with a 9.3 rating. In the BFI Sight & Sound 2022 critics’ poll, the top position went to Chantal Akerman’s Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles. The 2012 poll placed Vertigo at #1. If you prioritize audience ratings, the answer is Shawshank. If you value critical consensus, the answer varies by poll year.

What’s the Highest-Grossing Movie of All Time?

Avatar (2009) holds the all-time worldwide box-office record, with approximately $2.9 billion in earnings. Of course, highest-grossing and highest-rated are separate metrics that measure different things: commercial reach in one case, audience and critical approval in the other.

How Does IMDb Calculate Its Top 250 Rankings?

IMDb uses a weighted Bayesian average formula. A film must receive a minimum number of votes to qualify. The formula weights votes from regular users more heavily than those from infrequent voters, and it adjusts for statistical outliers and manipulation. The full methodology is published on IMDb’s website. The result isn’t a simple arithmetic mean of all ratings but a weighted score designed to resist gaming.

What’s the Difference Between IMDb Ratings and Rotten Tomatoes Scores?

IMDb aggregates audience votes into a weighted numerical average on a 10-point scale. Rotten Tomatoes counts the percentage of professional critics who rated a film positively, producing a binary yes-or-no percentage. A film can score 95% on Rotten Tomatoes and 7.5 on IMDb because the systems measure different things. Rotten Tomatoes tells you how many critics liked it. IMDb tells you, on average, how much the audience liked it.

Are Black-and-White Movies Worth Watching Today?

Two films on this list are in black and white: 12 Angry Men (1957) and Schindler’s List (1993). Schindler’s List was shot in black and white by choice, not by technical limitation. In both cases, the absence of color is an artistic choice that draws attention to performance, composition, and contrast.

The data support the case plainly. 12 Angry Men holds a perfect 100% on Rotten Tomatoes, and Schindler’s List holds a 98%. Anyone who skips classic black-and-white films is removing some of the highest-rated cinema ever produced from their viewing options.

What Movie Has Won the Most Academy Awards?

Three films share the record at 11 Oscar wins: Ben-Hur (1959), Titanic (1997), and The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King (2003). Of those three, Return of the King is the only one to win every category it was nominated in, going 11-for-11.

The post Top 10 Movies of All Time: The Highest-Rated Films Ever Made appeared first on Plex.

I thought I would be a “cool” bride. I believed this because I never dreamed of my own wedding. When other girls daydreamed aloud about riding down the aisle on a pony, or gracefully officiated the union of a Princess Diana Beanie Baby and a Hot Wheels truck, I came up blank. Despite a constant stream of ‘90s media featuring transformative white dresses, there was nothing my imagination could conjure for it. I was busy scheduling meetings on my toy Palm Pilot. This was fine until 30 years later, when my now-husband asked me what I wanted for our own wedding, and I had nothing. After years of watching friends plan weddings, I only had one preference for the day: I didn’t want to feel stressed out. 

There are a few industries that prey on emotion particularly brazenly. The funeral industry is one. The wedding industry is another. I knew this going in. I thought I could defeat hundreds of years of socially ingrained pressure backed by a multi-billion dollar consumer machine. No problem. 

What I did not account for—shamefully, considering how much time I spend thinking and writing about technology in my professional life—was that in the more than three decades I’d spent building a resistance to deeply gendered expectations on my existence, that machine was perfecting the art of making me feel weird, broke, and ugly, and I wouldn’t recognize what was happening until I was deep in it. I’m talking about the wedding planning algorithm.

When Lillie and her fiance Morgan got engaged, Lillie told me she saw the difference in her social media feeds the moment she texted her friends the news. (They’re using first names only in this story for their privacy.) “Immediately, all of my social media was just flooded,” she told me in a phone call. “And I think at the beginning it was all just so shiny and new. I was like, ‘This is so awesome.’ So I did kind of consume a lot of bridal media pretty strongly out of the gate, because I didn't quite realize yet how much it was going to take over every single one of my social media apps.” 

We talk a lot here on 404 Media about “the algorithm.” Usually we're referring to either Instagram Reels or Tiktok. Part of the reason we discuss and dissect it so frequently is because if you're not careful, the algorithm—the spew of content these apps automatically show you based on your past viewing habits, data from other apps, or what the app thinks you’re interested in—becomes a mirror of your mind; this is dangerous territory considering it's easy to manipulate by people, brands, networks and corporations with perverse incentives. 

Some of this actually seems, and sometimes is, helpful at first. The design pattern of infinite scrolling relies on a variable reward system to be effective and truly endless. The next thing you see in your feed might be the exact nugget of wisdom, life hack, or listicle you needed to make your life better, or, in this case, your wedding flawless. But you’ll never know unless you keep scrolling through the next hundred useless or actively brainrotting videos. 

Like Lillie, the moment I got engaged and started Googling wedding dresses and venues was the moment my entire social media experience shifted into the Bride Algo. Every Reel and Tiktok, and I do mean every single post, contained something new I needed to change about myself:

• “Everything I did to ‘lock in’ for my wedding & lose 34 lbs in 5 months without missing out on living life.”  
• “If you spend $150k on a wedding and stay married for 40 years, that's only about $10 a day. Not bad for one of the best days of your life.” 
• “What I will NOT be doing as a 2026 bride.” 
• “Bridal Breakdown PSA to 2026 Brides.” 
• “POV: You’re not fat, you’re just puffy.” 
• “25 Things Guests Secretly Hate About Weddings”
• “LEAVE THAT MAN AT THE ALTAR”

Journalist CT Jones calls the effect this content has on even the most level-headed people “wedding brain.” They recently wrote: “There’s this fog around my head that I can’t seem to shake when it comes to this event. My TikTok algorithm tells me every three swipes about the ‘biggest mistakes people make that ruin their special days.’”

Today's authority on weddings is Vogue, and in January 2020, Vogue correctly identified that social media was changing everything about how couples plan weddings. “Women of the 2010s became a lot more knowledgeable thanks to social media,” designer Danielle Frankel told the magazine. “They began seeing not just their friends getting married, but aspirational brides they follow on Instagram. There’s something kind of cool about researching through real people and their experiences, and the ability to share stories through a social platform.” In the six years that followed, this chipper assessment of there being “something kind of cool” about literal celebrity weddings does not age well. Being an influencer or content creator became one of the dwindling few ways for anyone in a creative field to make a living, a situation solidified by a tanked economy, a never-ending housing crisis, widespread unemployment, and AI gutting of a variety of fields. 

Fast forward to earlier this month, New York magazine published a story about the behind-the-scenes process that decides whose wedding makes it into Vogue, and what happens when they don’t. “One woman in the fashion industry had a breakdown after Vogue turned her down,” journalist Charlotte Klein wrote, adding that the jilted bride went to trauma rehab after. But the real crux of the issue—how multi-million dollar Vogue weddings, most of which are not celebrities but are parties thrown by total unknowns, are perceived, consumed, and rely on real, normal people’s attention—comes at the very end of the story, in a quote from a mysteriously anonymous fashion editor: “A wedding is a lot of work. It’s a full production and you’re spending months on it and you’re designing it—it’s a creative achievement in a way. If someone puts on a play or does an art installation, they get press and attention for it. And it’s like, Well, I did all this stuff for my wedding. Where is my round of applause?” 

That editor is talking about the Beckhams of the world, and the reality TV stars, and the old, old money Beltway normies. But they’re also talking to, and about, the rest of us. 

This is all so much insidious than it used to be. While the lifestyles of the rich and famous used to be reserved for magazines and Hollywood, we’re all swimming in the same algorithmic ocean now. “Today, Instagram encourages people to treat life itself like a wedding-like a production engineered to be witnessed and admired by an audience,” Jia Tolentino wrote in her 2019 book of essays Trick Mirror. “It has become common for people, especially women, to interact with themselves as if they were famous all the time. Under these circumstances, the vision of the bride as celebrity princess has hardened into something like a rule. Expectations of bridal beauty have collided with the wellness industry and produced a massive dark star of obligation.”

I know that I’m not alone in the Weddingtok and the Bridal Algo because people have started making videos mocking the content that’s stressing us all out. “If you feel calm, it’s probably because you’re forgetting something,” one planner says in a satirical video. The comments on these send-up videos reveal hundreds of women saying they’re stressed beyond belief, losing their minds, or otherwise crashing out. A comment on another such video: “Me locking in because I’m getting married next month and I fucking hate myself is literally my entire personality.” On another: “Pulling my hair out and screaming and can’t wait to disappear.”

Looking back, the moment I first heard the phrase “cake inspo board” feels like foreshadowing. I'd emailed a handful of bakeries and filled out a dozen inquiry forms at that point in the planning process. Because of competitiveness among vendors about rates and offerings (or possibly because some evil McKinsey for Weddings-type MBA entity decided this is a useful lead generation sales flow), every piece of information has to come directly from a vendor these days and is almost never listed on their websites publicly. It’s acquired by prospective clients, who blast 400 inquiries to their contact forms, some of them requiring multiple choice quizzes about the budget, timeline, “wedding day vibe” and personal social media handles. A few bakers got back to me with quotes for simple cakes. One asked for my mood board. For a cake? Like... flavors? I felt like I’d missed a step going down the stairs. I didn't have a vision board for the cake. I needed a vision board for the cake. 

Prior to planning a wedding, I hadn’t used Pinterest since 2008. When I started using it again after several vendors asked me for it, I felt a sugary thrill at pinning a disjointed collage of flowers, dresses, and other things I’d only describe as moon-landing-aspirational boards. Pinterest, meanwhile, is increasingly a minefield of AI slop, and has been for a while, with AI-generated makeup inspiration photos and dresses, which makes the process feel more confusing and unachievable. 

Alongside the thickly-iced and piped “vintage” triple-layer cakes is “thinspo” content, in the form of viral walking routines, the Gabby George arm workouts, and ads for ordering a GLP-1 online. “Thinspo” content is all over Pinterest and other social media platforms. 

“On Pinterest, every single photo is bones. Like, I can see clavicles. I can see sternums. I can see collarbones,” Lillie said. “Especially with the bridal outfits.” Once she starts feeling herself spending too much time looking through this kind of content, she takes a break.

"I'm like, okay, you know what? At least it's not just me, at least I'm not the only one who's like, ‘This is crazy.’”

I asked my friend Kelli Sullivan, whose objectively stunning wedding I attended in 2025, if she’d felt any of these anxieties while planning hers. “I feel like social media especially in recent years has gone so overboard with talking about and showcasing weddings, and particularly in a super influencer and curated style, that even subliminally influenced my own decisions when planning,” she said. 

“I don’t feel like social media gave me direct pressure when it came to planning and decision making, but it definitely influenced my wedding,” Kelli said. But it wasn’t all bad for her, necessarily. “I really loved immersing myself in that niche of social media and was inspired by Pinterest, Instagram and TikTok wedding ideas that helped shape many of my decisions and ideas I never would have really even considered as a possibility otherwise,” she said. “I also really appreciated insights from other brides and hearing their horror stories and similar struggles made me feel less alone when things felt heavy in planning.” 

Lillie said the same. “That is just the beauty of social media, sometimes, to just not feel alone. That has been really, really helpful for me,” she said. “But I'm like, okay, you know what? At least it's not just me, at least I'm not the only one who's like, ‘This is crazy.’”

Attending Kelli’s wedding, and all the other beautiful but vastly different weddings my friends have planned over the years, felt essential to understanding the many unspoken rules around ceremony, etiquette, and tradition, and all the ways these rules should be broken. But Lillie is the first of her friends to have a wedding. “I will kind of be the guinea pig for all of my friends, I guess, to look at my wedding and be like, ‘this is how Lillie did it,’” she said. “That’s also kind of been a lot of pressure. It's hard.” 

Adding to that pressure, she and Morgan are navigating these expectations as a lesbian couple in Idaho, and where they live skews heavily Mormon, conservative, and Christian. They use social media to vet vendors’ friendliness toward queer couples before contacting them, scanning Facebook and Instagram pages for signs of intolerance or hate. Lillie calls this being “on the lookout.” 

“Are these people that I want to interact with? How are they going to treat me? Am I going to be treated differently? I have to get some stuff altered for the boys suits, and we’d gotten in contact with a local seamstress up here, and I'm like, scrolling through her Facebook to see how she feels about me. And that's just a tiring thing to do. But it’s for my own safety. I don't want to go into these people's houses if it’s not going to be somewhere safe for me. That sometimes sounds really dramatic, but it's not. It just kind of casts a sort of shadow over everything,” Lillie explained. “This is supposed to be just such a joyous time of our life.”  

Almost all of the most viral wedding planning content on social media is aggressively heteronormative—a reflection of an industry struggling to keep up, and attitudes toward queer relationships and marriage in this country that are painfully, dangerously outdated. Lillie tells vendors that she and her fiancée are both women, and they still ask her who the groom is. They routinely ask her, “Who’s going to be the boy?” Meanwhile, Tiktok tells us a silk scarf basque waist dress and a sparkler exit is the real sin.

During my own planning, guests and vendors frequently asked me what our “colors” were. I didn't want to have specific colors, but the algorithm told me that even multicolor weddings are on-trend (derogatory), part of a “wildflower” fad of eclecticism. The algo also told me, over and over, that no matter what else I did, there was one combination to avoid lest I become a cringe dated chopped unc chud of a bride: chartreuse and burgundy. 

One of the planning tasks I truly enjoyed was picking out and arranging my own (minimal) florals. If the wedding you’re planning is at a venue that’s not all-inclusive—meaning, it’s on you to supply everything from the chairs and linens to the sound system, florals, food, desert, on and on—a lot of the process is emails and payment portals. I wanted to choose and assemble my own flowers for this reason: I needed to do something with my hands, finally, that brings me joy. 

My fiancé and I went to a wholesale flower market two days before our wedding and picked bunches. And ultimately, when I got to the flower market with no plan for my bouquet other than to choose what called to me, I ended up with a swaggy handful of hanging burgundy amaranthus stems and bright lime Bells-of-Ireland. Now everyone would know I got married sometime between 2025-2026.

This fear of being dated is a real joy killer, and a heavily-pushed narrative on the bridal algo right now. I love Basque waisted dresses and find them reliably flattering for my body shape, but #2026Bride influencers deemed them inexplicably cringe at some point in the last year, so my attraction to them soured, and finding a dress became a nightmare of rush shipping, returns and restocking fees. (While writing this story, InStyle published a piece that could only be made in that lab: a series of collage illustrations imagining Taylor Swift in wedding dresses, including one captioned “If you’re on #WeddingTok in 2026 like I am, you’ll know that the patron saint of basic bitches, Taylor Swift, is a basque-waist dress, burgundy-and-chartreuse color palette girl.”)

The fact that I can be swayed at all by what an internet person thinks, as a 36 year old with decades of being socially weird under my belt, disturbs me. I know that everything about what we do, wear, say, and choose is destined to be dated someday because we exist in a specific time. And yet, realizing when I got back with my bouquet and 15 pounds of freshly cut florals that I’d still somehow broken the year’s biggest, most made up mean-girl rule made me feel like an uncool little kid again.

In the car on the way back from the flower market, I bemoaned all of these things to my fiancé, who endured our apartment transforming into a shipping warehouse for weeks. He asked if it's a “comparison is the thief of joy” type-thing. It is that, but the comparison is no longer with some girl you went to high school with. Rather, it's an entire universe of options, budgets, opinions, and salespeople. In the scroll, it’s hard to tell the difference between a wedding real people got married at, and a photo spread that's meant to highlight a set of vendors or brands. Twenty years ago, an average couple might have had a wedding in their backyard or at the firehouse with catering, but surely they weren’t this stressed about tablescapes or cake inspo Pinterest boards.

"Most couples aren’t models, most budgets aren’t six figures, and most wedding days don’t unfold under perfect conditions."

People are getting wise to this. And there’s one type of wedding that I scrolled past over and over again before I realized they were all entirely staged: styled shoots. “Styled shoots are a common cheat. It’s kind of unethical imo. Once you know what to look out for, it’s pretty obvious,” Lana Dubkova, a documentary-style event and brand photographer, recently posted on X. Lana’s been a photographer for a decade but started doing weddings full-time in 2023. In a styled shoot, photographers, confectioners, designers, florists, venues, stylists, and the rest of the wedding vendor galaxy come together, often with professional models to serve as the bride, groom and guests, to display their wares in an editorial setting. These aren’t real weddings, but are meant to advertise their work to real couples and planners. And they are impacting real couples’ wedding day wants. 

Lana told me in an email that although her clients typically come to her for her own candid style, she often needs to “gently recalibrate” their expectations. “A common tension is that couples want both a highly immersive experience and an extensive set of posed, editorial images... without realizing those require time! A wedding day is finite, and every decision is a tradeoff: more time spent on photos often means less time spent with guests,” she said. “Most of these expectations come from social media, where timelines, budgets, and logistics are invisible. What’s presented as effortless is usually highly produced, and that disconnect can create unnecessary pressure.” 

She doesn’t believe styled shoots are all bad. They do serve a purpose for vendors’ portfolios. “There's a case to be made that maybe you're not getting hired for the type of weddings you would like to photograph and so you invest the money into a styled shoot to be able to display the style of wedding you want to be hired for in your portfolio,” she said. “Takes money to make money etc. But let's say you're a client looking to hire a photographer for a wedding. How would you feel if you found out the photographer you hired had ONLY styled shoots in their portfolio and had never actually shot a real wedding before? I imagine you'd want to know that ahead of time.” 

Styled shoots “become problematic when they’re presented without context,” she said. “A styled shoot is, by definition, a controlled environment: professional models, ideal lighting, high-end venues, curated florals, and unlimited time. Real weddings are the opposite: dynamic, time-constrained, and emotionally complex. Most couples aren’t models, most budgets aren’t six figures, and most wedding days don’t unfold under perfect conditions. A photographer’s ability to work quickly, adapt to changing light, and make people feel comfortable matters far more than their ability to create a perfect image in a controlled setting.” 

If you’re not planning a wedding or haven’t in the last three years or so, you might not be familiar with any of the content I’ve described so far. But this is the insidious nature of “the algorithm.” No one else is seeing yours. No one attending my wedding (except for others who were also recently married and are online) knew or cared that chartreuse and burgundy have been deemed cliche. They just liked the bouquet and thought it was pretty. And if they knew, they didn’t say it to my face, because talking about the internet in real life is absurd. 

“If social media didn’t exist or especially exist in the way it does with the curation (for weddings in particular) I probably would have done things way differently and maybe simpler,” Kelli told me. “Having a universe of options shown constantly online did give decision fatigue and also a pressure to have everything be aesthetic, especially with the knowledge that what we will share from the wedding will be perceived by others on social media.” 

“If I knew then what I know now, would I have planned a smaller wedding? Would I have probably eloped? Yes,” Lillie told me. “Do I still have, like, $8,000 in nonrefundable deposits down? Yes.” 

The things I remember about my friends’ weddings are not their tablescapes or whether they featured some forbidden color combination, and I didn’t make lists of things that made me secretly hate them. I remember, most of all, the moments around the weddings: meeting at a cobblestone street cafe the night before for warm Kronenbourgs, pouring mimosas on a moving bus in the morning, gluing an eyelash back on in a beach bathroom, fireworks shows both planned and unplanned, watching my newlywed friends sing and dance and feeling grateful to witness it all. The million tiny moments I remember from my own wedding are part of a different galaxy than all the shit my algorithm told me to worry about.

In the end, I didn’t make a cake vision board. I picked up cakes at the grocery store two days before the wedding, and in the heat of the evening, they melted into piles of buttercream goo before we could cut them fast enough. While we struggled to light candles, they toppled into heaps of pink and white icing and we just laughed.

Now that I’m several weeks beyond my own wedding, my algorithm has moved on, almost entirely free of bridal content of any kind. It has realized, or decided, that I have no need for it anymore, and must push me on my way to the next Arbitrary Human Milestone. It’s the exact same type of pseudo-authority influencers and ragebait disguised as wisdom, just for another industry the profit-making machine has been waiting eons to target me with: babies.

Today's links

• A Pascal's Wager for AI Doomers: We're already being turned into paperclips.
• Hey look at this: Delights to delectate.
• Object permanence: Every pirate ebook on the internet; Sun's "Open DRM"; Untranslatable words; Let's encrypt is encrypting; Boots ruined by hedge fund; Brussels terrorists' opsec; Copyrighted Klingon; Murder Offsets.
• Upcoming appearances: Toronto, San Francisco, London, Berlin, NYC, Hay-on-Wye, London, NYC.
• 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 Pascal's Wager for AI Doomers (permalink)

Lest anyone accuse me of bargaining in bad faith here, let me start with this admission: I don't think AI is intelligent; nor do I think that the current (admittedly impressive) statistical techniques will lead to intelligence. I think worrying about what we'll do if AI becomes intelligent is at best a distraction and at worst a cynical marketing ploy:

https://locusmag.com/feature/cory-doctorow-full-employment/

Now, that said: among some of the "AI doomers," I recognize kindred spirits. I, too, worry about technologies controlled by corporations that have grown so powerful that they defy regulation. I worry about how those technologies are used against us, and about how the corporations that make them are fusing with authoritarian states to create a totalitarian nightmare. I worry that technology is used to spy on and immiserate workers.

I just don't think we need AI to do those things. I think we should already be worried about those things.

Last week, I had a version of this discussion in front of several hundred people at the Bronfman Lecture in Montreal, where I appeared with Astra Taylor and Yoshua Bengio (co-winner of the Turing Prize for his work creating the "deep learning" techniques powering today's AI surge), on a panel moderated by CBC Ideas host Nahlah Ayed:

https://www.eventbrite.ca/e/artificial-intelligence-the-ultimate-disrupter-tickets-1982706623885

It's safe to say that Bengio and I mostly disagree about AI. He's running an initiative called "Lawzero," whose goal is to create an international AI consortium that produces AI as a "digital public good" that is designed to be open, auditable, transparent and safe:

http://lawzero.org

Bengio said he'd started Lawzero because he was convinced that AI was going to get a lot more powerful, and, in the absence of some public-spirited version of AI, we would be subject to all kinds of manipulation and surveillance, and that the resulting chaos would present a civilizational risk.

Now, as I've stated (and as I said onstage) I am not worried about any of this. I am worried about AI, though. I'm worried a fast-talking AI salesman will convince your boss to fire you and replace you with an AI that can't do your job (the salesman will be pushing on an open door, since if there's one thing bosses hate, it's paying workers).

I'm worried that the seven companies that comprise 35% of the S&P 500 are headed for bankruptcy, as soon as someone makes them stop passing around the same $100b IOU while pretending it's in all their bank accounts at once. I'm worried that when that happens, the chatbots that badly do the jobs of the people who were fired because of the AI salesman will go away, and nothing and no one will do those jobs. I'm worried that the chaos caused by vaporizing a third of the stock market will lead to austerity and thence to fascism:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/04/13/always-great/#our-nhs

I worry that the workers who did those jobs will be scattered to the four winds, retrained or "discouraged" or retired, and that the priceless process knowledge they developed over generations will be wiped out and we will have to rebuild it amidst the economic and political chaos of the burst AI bubble:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/04/08/process-knowledge-vs-bosses/#wash-dishes-cut-wood

In short, I worry that AI is the asbestos we're shoveling into our civilization's walls, and our descendants will be digging it out for generations:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/01/06/1000x-liability/#graceful-failure-modes

But Bengio disagrees. He's very smart, and very accomplished, and he's very certain that AI is about to become "superhuman" and do horrible things to us if we don't get a handle on it. Several times at our events, he insisted that the existence of this possibility made it wildly irresponsible not to take measures to mitigate this risk.

Though I didn't say so at the time, this struck me as an AI-inflected version of Pascal's wager:

A rational person should adopt a lifestyle consistent with the existence of God and should strive to believe in God… if God does not exist, the believer incurs only finite losses, potentially sacrificing certain pleasures and luxuries; if God does exist, the believer stands to gain immeasurably, as represented for example by an eternity in Heaven in Abrahamic tradition, while simultaneously avoiding boundless losses associated with an eternity in Hell.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pascal%27s_wager

Smarter people than me have been poking holes in Pascal's wager for more than 350 years. But when it comes to this modern Pascal's AI Wager, I have my own objection: how do you know when you've lost?

As of this moment, the human race has lit more than $1.4t on fire to immanentize this eschaton, and it remains stubbornly disimmanentized. How much more do we need to spend before we're certain that god isn't lurking in the word-guessing program? Sam Altman says it'll take another $2-3t – call it six months' worth of all US federal spending. If we do that and we still haven't met god, are we done? Can we call it a day?

Not according to Elon Musk. Musk says we need to deconstruct the solar system and build a Dyson sphere out of all the planets to completely encase the sun, so we can harvest every photon it emits to power our word-guessing programs:

https://www.pcmag.com/news/elons-next-big-swing-dyson-sphere-satellites-that-harness-the-suns-power

So let's say we do that and we still haven't met god – are we done? I don't see why we would be. After all, Musk's contention isn't that our sun emits one eschaton's worth of immanentizing particles. Musk just thinks that we need a lot of these sunbeams to coax god into our plane of existence. If one sun won't do it, perhaps two? Or two hundred? Or two thousand? Once we've committed the entire human species to this god-bothering project to the extent of putting two kilosuns into harness, wouldn't we be nuts to stop there? What if god is lurking in the two thousand and first sun? Making god out of algorithms is like spelling "banana" – easy to start, hard to stop.

But as Bengio and I got into it together on stage at the Montreal Centre, it occurred to me that maybe there was some common ground between us. After all, when someone starts talking about "humane technology" that respects our privacy and works for people rather than their bosses, my ears grow points. Throw in the phrase "international digital public goods" and you've got my undivided attention.

Because there's a sense in which Bengio and I are worried about exactly the same thing. I'm terrified that our planet has been colonized by artificial lifeforms that we constructed, but which have slipped our control. I'm terrified that these lifeforms corrupt our knowledge-creation process, making it impossible for us to know what's true and what isn't. I'm terrified that these lifeforms have conquered our apparatus of state – our legislatures, agencies and courts – and so that these public bodies work against the public and for our colonizing alien overlords.

The difference is, the artificial lifeforms that worry me aren't hypothetical – they're here today, amongst us, endangering the very survival of our species. These artificial lifeforms are called "limited liability corporations" and they are a concrete, imminent risk to the human race:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/04/15/artificial-lifeforms/#moral-consideration

What's more, challenging these artificial lifeforms will require us to build massive, "international, digital public goods": a post-American internet of free/open, auditable, transparent, enshittification-resistant platforms and firmware for every purpose and device currently in service:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/01/01/39c3/#the-new-coalition

And even after we've built that massive, international, digital public good, we'll still face the challenge of migrating all of our systems and loved ones out of the enshitternet of defective, spying, controlling American tech exports:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/01/30/zucksauce/#gandersauce

Every moment that we remain stuck in the enshitternet is a moment of existential risk. At the click of a mouse, Trump could order John Deere to switch off all the tractors in your country:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/05/08/about-those-kill-switched-ukrainian-tractors/

He doesn't need tanks to steal Greenland. He can just shut off Denmark's access to American platforms like Office365, iOS and Android and brick the whole damned country. It would be another Strait of Hormuz, but instead of oil and fertilizer, he'd control the flow of Lego, Ozempic and deliciously strong black licorice:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/01/29/post-american-canada/#ottawa

These aren't risks that could develop in the future. They're the risks we're confronted with today and frankly, they're fucking terrifying.

So here's my side-bet on Pascal's Wager. If you think we need to build "international digital public goods" to head off the future risk of a colonizing, remorseless, malevolent artificial lifeform, then let us agree that the prototype for that project is the "international digital public goods" we need right now to usher in the post-American internet and save ourselves from the colonizing, remorseless, malevolent artificial lifeforms that have already got their blood-funnels jammed down our throats.

Once we defeat those alien invaders, we may find that all the people who are trying to summon the evil god have lost the wherewithal to do so, and your crisis will have been averted. But if that's not the case and the evil god still looms on our horizon, then I will make it my business to help you mobilize the legions of skilled international digital public goods producers who are still flush from their victory over the limited liability corporation, and together, we will fight the evil god you swear is in our future.

I think that's a pretty solid offer.

Hey look at this (permalink)

• A Hole in the ‘Open-and-Shut’ Case Against Charlie Kirk’s Alleged Assassin? https://prospect.org/2026/04/15/hole-in-open-and-shut-case-against-charlie-kirks-alleged-assassin-tyler-robinson/

• WORSE ON PURPOSE https://www.worseonpurpose.com/

• How Viktor Orbán Bankrolled the Network Around Reform UK https://bylinetimes.com/2026/04/14/exposed-how-viktor-orban-bankrolled-the-network-around-reform-uk/

• Two Visions https://www.hamiltonnolan.com/p/two-visions

• Caught in the Crackdown: As Arrests at Anti-ICE Protests Piled Up, Prosecutions Crumbled https://www.propublica.org/article/caught-in-crackdown-ice-cbp-doj-trump-arrests-convictions

Object permanence (permalink)

#25yrsago Every pirate ebook on the internet https://web.archive.org/web/20010724030402/https://citizen513.cjb.net/

#20yrsago Retired generals diss Donald Rumsfeld https://nielsenhayden.com/makinglight/archives/007432.html#007432

#20yrsago How to break HDCP https://blog.citp.princeton.edu/2006/04/14/making-and-breaking-hdcp-handshakes/

#20yrsago How Sun’s “open DRM” dooms them and all they touch https://memex.craphound.com/2006/04/14/how-suns-open-drm-dooms-them-and-all-they-touch/

#20yrsago Benkler's "Wealth of Networks" http://www.congo-education.net/wealth-of-networks/

#15yrsago Scientific management’s unscientific grounding: the Management Myth https://web.archive.org/web/20120823212827/https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2006/06/the-management-myth/304883/

#15yrsago 216 “untranslatable” emotional words from non-English languages https://www.drtimlomas.com/lexicography/cm4mi/lexicography#!lexicography/cm4mi

#10yrsago New York public employees union will vote on pulling out of hedge funds https://web.archive.org/web/20160414230326/https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-04-13/nyc-pension-weighs-liquidating-1-5-billion-hedge-fund-portfolio

#10yrsago Panama’s public prosecutor says he can’t find any evidence of Mossack-Fonseca’s lawbreaking https://web.archive.org/web/20160419165306/https://www.thejournal.ie/mossack-fonseca-prosecution-2714795-Apr2016/?utm_source=twitter_self

#10yrsago Bernie Sanders responds to CEOs of Verizon and GE: “I welcome their contempt” https://web.archive.org/web/20160415165051/https://www.businessinsider.com/bernie-sanders-verizon-contempt-2016-4

#10yrsago Let’s Encrypt is actually encrypting the whole Web https://www.wired.com/2016/04/scheme-encrypt-entire-web-actually-working/

#10yrsago City of San Francisco tells man he can’t live in wooden box in friend’s living room https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/apr/13/san-francisco-new-home-rented-box-illegal?CMP=tmb_gu

#10yrsago How the UK’s biggest pharmacy chain went from family-run public service to debt-laden hedge-fund disaster https://www.theguardian.com/news/2016/apr/13/how-boots-went-rogue

#10yrsago Ohio newspaper chain owner says his papers don’t publish articles about LGBTQ people https://ideatrash.net/2016/04/the-owner-of-four-town-papers-in-ohio.html

#10yrsago How British journalists talk about people they’re not allowed to talk about https://web.archive.org/web/20160414152933/https://popbitch.com/home/2016/03/31/up-the-injunction/

#10yrsago Brussels terrorists kept their plans in an unencrypted folder called “TARGET” https://www.techdirt.com/2016/04/14/brussels-terrorist-laptop-included-details-planned-attack-unencrypted-folder-titled-target/

#10yrsago Ron Wyden vows to filibuster anti-cryptography bill https://www.techdirt.com/2016/04/14/burr-feinstein-officially-release-anti-encryption-bill-as-wyden-promises-to-filibuster-it/

#10yrsago Paramount wants to kill a fan-film by claiming copyright on the Klingon language https://torrentfreak.com/paramount-we-do-own-the-klingon-language-and-warships-160414/

#5yrsago Murder Offsets https://pluralistic.net/2021/04/14/for-sale-green-indulgences/#killer-analogy

#5yrsago The FCC wants your broadband measurements https://pluralistic.net/2021/04/14/for-sale-green-indulgences/#fly-my-pretties

#1yrago Machina economicus https://pluralistic.net/2025/04/14/timmy-share/#a-superior-moral-justification-for-selfishness

Upcoming appearances (permalink)

• Toronto: DemocracyXchange, Apr 16
  https://www.democracyxchange.org/news/cory-doctorow-to-open-dxc26-on-april-16

• San Francisco: 2026 Berkeley Spring Forum on M&A and the Boardroom, Apr 23
  https://www.theberkeleyforum.com/#agenda

• London: Resisting Big Tech Empires (LSBU), Apr 25
  https://www.tickettailor.com/events/globaljusticenow/2042691

• NYC: Enshittification at Commonweal Ventures, Apr 29
  https://luma.com/ssgfvqz8

• NYC: Techidemic with Sarah Jeong, Tochi Onyibuchi and Alia Dastagir (PEN World Voices), Apr 30
  https://worldvoices.pen.org/event/techidemic/

• Berlin: Re:publica, May 18-20
  https://re-publica.com/de/news/rp26-sprecher-cory-doctorow

• Berlin: Enshittification at Otherland Books, May 19
  https://www.otherland-berlin.de/de/event-details/cory-doctorow.html

• Hay-on-Wye: HowTheLightGetsIn, May 22-25
  https://howthelightgetsin.org/festivals/hay/big-ideas-2

• SXSW London, Jun 2
  https://www.sxswlondon.com/session/how-big-tech-broke-the-internet-b3c4a901

• NYC: The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI (The Strand), Jun 24
  https://www.strandbooks.com/cory-doctorow-the-reverse-centaur-s-guide-to-life-after-ai.html

Recent appearances (permalink)

• The internet is getting worse (CBC The National)
  https://youtu.be/dCVUCdg3Uqc?si=FMcA0EI_Mi13Lw-P

• Do you feel screwed over by big tech? (Ontario Today)
  https://www.cbc.ca/listen/live-radio/1-45-ontario-today/clip/16203024-do-feel-screwed-big-tech

• Launch for Cindy's Cohn's "Privacy's Defender" (City Lights)
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WuVCm2PUalU

• Chicken Mating Harnesses (This Week in Tech)
  https://twit.tv/shows/this-week-in-tech/episodes/1074

• The Virtual Jewel Box (U Utah)
  https://tanner.utah.edu/podcast/enshittification-cory-doctorow-matthew-potolsky/

Latest books (permalink)

• "Canny Valley": A limited edition collection of the collages I create for Pluralistic, self-published, September 2025 https://pluralistic.net/2025/09/04/illustrious/#chairman-bruce

• "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/

• "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 (thebezzle.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)

• "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, 2027

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

Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources:

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

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

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

• A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING

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Ukrainian President Volodomyr Zelenskyy praised robots as the future of war in a Defense Industry Worker Day address on Monday. “For the first time in the history of this war, an enemy position was taken exclusively by unmanned platforms—ground systems and drones. The occupiers surrendered, and the operation was carried out without infantry and without losses on our side,” Zelenskyy said.

Zelenskyy didn’t specify which ground operation he was referring to, but Ukraine’s 13th National Guard Brigade Khartiya conducted an operation north of Kharkiv in December last year that fits the bill. The Wall Street Journal reported on the operation which it said involved 50 aerial drones and an unspecified number of land drones.

The Journal watched footage of the assault provided by Ukraine. “The robot wars began,”  it said. “Russian FPV drones appeared, launching themselves at the land vehicles, according to the footage. One came close to destroying a land drone, which fired back at the Russian line with a mounted machine gun.”

Ukraine won the fight and took the position, but the Journal didn’t report that any Russians surrendered. A spokesperson for the 13th National Guard Brigade Khartiya told the Journal that they found Russian corpses when they sent humans into the position to secure it.

According to Zelenskyy’s Defense Industry Worker Day speech, ground based robots have conducted 22,000 missions on the frontlines of the war in Ukraine in the past three months. “In other words, lives were saved more than 22,000 times when a robot went into the most dangerous areas instead of a warrior. This is about high technology protecting the highest value—human life,” Zelenskyy said.

It’s unclear which of the 22,000 missions included the surrender. It may seem like a stretch to imagine a soldier surrendering to an unmanned ground vehicle with an assault rifle and a camera strapped to it, but similar things have happened over the past four years of war. The conflict has become defined by the use of drones on both sides and there’s lots of footage of Russian soldiers surrendering to flying drones.

One of the most famous incidents occurred in 2022 but it became so common that Ukraine established a program called “I Want to Live” that used drones to facilitate surrenders. Ukraine’s armed forces released video instructions about how to surrender to a drone. Russian soldiers could text ahead of time, make an appointment to flee the frontline, wait for a Ukrainian drone, and follow it out of combat with their hands in the air. It’s possible the world will see similar footage in the future, but the drones will be on the ground instead.

The War in Ukraine has ground on for years now and become a war of attrition and inches. The loss of life on both sides is devastating and the proliferation of flying drones has created vast no-man’s lands between Russian and Ukrainian positions. Despite Zelenskyy’s praise of Ukraine’s robotics industry, it’s unclear if embracing UGV as a replacement for infantry will change that reality.

But the world is watching and taking notes. The Pentagon is working on its own ground drones, some of them controlled by AI systems. The U.S. Army is testing one system, called the ULTRA, in Vaziani, Georgia near the country’s border with Russia. Ukraine also helped the US soldiers counter Shahed drones during the recent war with Iran.

On stage, Zelenskyy’s Defense Industry Worker Day speech stressed the importance of Ukraine to Europe and the rest of the world. “We are not building new cooperation with partners on weapons the way it was done in the 1990s or early 2000s, when Ukrainian weapons and strength were sold off like a Black Friday sale,” he said. “We are not making fairs of our weapons, nor are we emptying our stockpiles. We are offering security partnerships.”